The Tragic Deaths of Young Celebrities - 15

The stars were trickling in, and Johnny would have been happy to use the camera on any of them. Many of them were the prepackaged teen stars continually produced by the House of Mouse, generally generic and possessing the right amount of meager talent and non threatening teen beauty to appeal to the right demographic.

Every time one of them walked down the red carpet, the roar from the crowd reached levels that felt like an elephant sitting on Johnny’s chest. It was everything he could do to stop from throwing up at the orgy of artificial fame. But he kept a smile on his face and the camera on the stars, and managed to not pull the trigger on them. He kept waiting for the big show.

The roar when the Singer stepped out of his custom limo was incredible. Johnny felt like his head was going to explode. He could feel the noise, like a physical thing. The Singer was even smaller and slighter in person than he looked in pictures. He was seventeen, but he was barely child sized. Johnny squinted. The Singer was wearing lifts. Even with them, he was maybe five feet tall.

Johnny’s throat went dry. He still wasn’t nervous. He could see how it was all going to happen. The Singer would come up to him, all smiles, a big grin for the camera. His head would explode like a ripe tomato. At this distance, Johnny would probably get him by some of the blood. He saw everyone dropping, panicking, giving him time to run away. He thought maybe he would go bigger, go after one of the fame factories like the House of Mouse.

He knew that he would never be forgotten. Everyone was going to know about him, they would see what he’d done and realize why he’d done it. He knew that there would be others to follow. He was the first, but he wouldn’t be the last. He was going to be a hero.

But not just yet. It seemed to take forever for the Singer to make his was down the line. He stopped at every camera, smiled and leaned in for them to ask questions. There was no way that either the Singer or the alledged journalists that he was talking to could hear a damn thing, but they went through the pantomime anyway.

Johnny felt his heart pounding in his ears. He was pretty sure that he hadn’t been this excited the night he lost his virginity. The reporter was saying something to him, her mouth moving but no sound could reach him. He wondered idly if he could have heard her even if there weren’t thousands tweens trying to bust his eardrums with their vocal cords.

It seemed to take forever for the Singer to get there. He was only a couple of steps away now, pausing frequently to wave to the girls. This actually caused them to get louder, which Johnny would have had trouble believing was even possible. The Singer was close enough that Johnny could have done the job from there, but he waited. He would only get one shot at this.

Johnny took a deep breath, blew it out slowly. The Singer stepped forward, flanked by some security standing discretely out of camera range and a woman Johnny assumed was a publicist, keeping the train moving. Johnny wondered if he could get her, too. She was, after all, a crucial part in the fame machine that kept the Singer running. The Singer was right in front of him now, elfin, well within range. It was time. Johnny took a deep breath and let it out.

The roar of the crowd went away. He couldn’t hear anything. He watched his reporter buddy shouting something, saw the publicist shouting back. He pulled the camera in tight to his shoulder. He held his breath, felt his heart slowing down. Felt everyone slowing down.

He pointed the camera at the Singer. Johnny Getz smiled, and the Singer smiled back. He was so fucking stupid, grinning like the vacant idiot he was, completely unaware that his fame, his fucking life was about to end. Johnny met his eyes and pressed the button. The shotgun shells roared and then everything went straight to hell.

Johnny couldn’t hear a fucking thing. That was a problem. The reporter that had attached herself to him was evidently asking something that the publicist objected to. How she knew what the reporter was asking was a mystery for the ages, but she did what a good publicist was supposed to do. She put herself between her client and the media. She also put herself in front of the shotgun blast.

Johnny was right. He did get splattered with blood. The publicist’s head turned into a red mist, and the air was still pink as the security team moved forward. Johnny saw the Singer gaping, for a split second. He staggered back, blood splattering his face, but he wasn’t hurt. The publicist took most of the blast. The reporter was holding up where her hand used to be, blood fountaining into the air. Johnny had gotten her microphone hand at the same time that he hit the publicist.

The security team hit the Singer hard, shielding him with their bodies. Johnny didn’t know what to do, what to try. He felt something he thought was probably his heart breaking. He’d failed. He dropped the camera and started to turn, running on automatic. He could still escape. There could still be another chance to get it right.

He’d thought that the barricades holding back the crowds weren’t enough, and he was right. He didn’t think they’d been able to hear the gunshot, but they could see that the security team was swarming the Singer. They could see he was covered in blood. They surged forward and the barricades and security members were swept along like sand in the tide.

Johnny saw them coming and didn’t have time to do anything. He screamed something, tried to explain, but his words were lost in the noise. He held out his arms but they hit him like a Mack truck. He felt his back hit the fence behind him, and the girls crushed against him. The metal fence might as well have not been there at all, and Johnny fell down, tripping over it.

As soon as he went down, it was all over. The few girls that saw him, that tried to move around him were pushed forward by the crush. One stepped on him. Two. A thousand. He curled into a ball, but it didn’t matter. Johnny Getz closed his eyes and they just kept coming around him and over him and everything he was and ever would be faded to black.

The Singer’s security team was good, and they managed to get him to safety before the girls got to him. It would be two years before he made another public appearance, but his next album would go onto break every sales record. He went from being popstar and turned into a legend.

Twenty seven people were killed in the crush, and countless more were injured. The publicist and the reporter that blocked the shot were trampled, and it was never entirely clear to the authorities what had happened. The official conclusion was that there was an attempt on the Singer’s life. The would - be killer was never identified.

Johnny Getz’s remains were never claimed, and he was buried in an unmarked grave.

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There were a handful of live performances by The Singer himself, as well as some interaction with the fans. Questions and answers, although presumably “why is a no talent with a bad haircut a popstar?” wouldn’t be one of them. The tickets were ridiculously expensive, and there was lots of hugely priced venue only merchandise as well. Naturally, the entire tour was already sold out.

He was almost in awe at the way that the whole thing was designed to separate the fans from their money. It was, of course, what they deserved for making the Singer famous to begin, but even Vegas could learn a little about fleecing their marks from the machine running the Singer.

The first one was also going to have an area where the fans could watch the Singer go into the venue, and while it wasn’t precise a red carpet event, he was also going to go through a fairly crowded press gauntlet. This was going to be Johnny’s shot at the Singer. No pun intended.

Johnny wasn’t nervous. Not at all. It wasn’t like the Starlet. He felt filled with purpose. He knew that he was doing the right thing, and he could feel the universe aligning around him. He imagined, as he waited there in the cattle pen with the camera on his shoulder, a world where people were actually famous for something. He was going to be an example, an icon.

But first he had to do it. He was pressed up against the metal gate that separated the press from the popular, right next to an exceptionally chatty woman from some website he’d never heard of. She kept talking to him, and he kept nodding, but he couldn’t hear a damn thing she said.

The Singer had, as yet, not appeared, but the noise from the crowd of girls behind him was already enough that he couldn’t hear himself think. He turned around, like he was shooting B roll with the camera, and at looked at a sea of teenage hormones. He wasn’t sure that he’d ever seen that many people in one place. He was absolutely sure he’d never seen that many teenagers in one place, or that much raw emotion. He pitied them.

The mass was kept at bay by a bunch of fearsome looking security and some barriers behind the press cordon. Looking at it now, in person, in front of thousands upon thousands of people, it didn’t look like nearly enough. Johnny wasn’t sure if they were expecting this many people, or if this was anywhere near enough to keep them from mobbing the Singer.

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Of course, that was before he nearly blew out a damn ear drum. What he’d done was take the firing pin assembly and part of the barrel from the shot gun and put it inside the camera. The camera didn’t work at all, of course, but he was able to press a button and fire a shot.

Shotguns are loud, which Johnny knew and still managed to not consider when he put the monster on his shoulder and fired. He was worried that the whole thing might explode and he’d end up a corpse out here in the desert, never to be found. He was focused on the wrong thing, though, and the sound beside his head nearly dropped him. He did drop the camera gun, which actually caused the camera gun to go off, resulting in no particular harm to Johnny but did result in the tragic death of a nearby cactus.

The camera was not a particularly elegant weapon, but Johnny was able to hit what he aimed at with a little bit of practice. He tweaked the designed, and the final version actually fired two shells at once. It didn’t have any particular range on it, and he’d only get one shot, but both of those were okay, because at the range he would be at, he wouldn’t need anything else.

Johnny actually felt pretty clever about the simplicity of the thing. It was loud, but that absolutely would not matter; at a public event the screaming of young girls was so intense that you couldn’t have heard a jet going off. Likewise the muzzle flash, such as it was, would be mostly invisible in the daylight.

As far as he was concerned, the camera was further proof that he was doing the right thing. The Singer was sufficiently stupid that he couldn’t tell you that Germans spoke German, and yet he was a millionaire. Johnny could build something that would allow him to penetrate security and kill The Singer and walk away, and nobody knew his name.

His execution of the Starlet wasn’t just helpful because it gave him the money he needed for the Singer; it also helped him to be able to get to the Singer. He’d made enough connections that he was able to get press credentials to the live premier of a special concert and movie combination.

Johnny, at some level, had to admire the ingenuity of the concept. The movie, essentially the biography of some who hadn’t actually had a life, had been released in 3D. Now, there was no particular reason for it to be released in 3D, except that there was a surcharge for the 3D.

When the movie started to lose sales at its regular rate, they put it out again with bonus footage added. Now that those sales were starting to decline, they were putting on arena shows where the movie was shown, and various people, like the Singer’s alarmingly young mother, would come out and add what was essentially DVD commentary.

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What he needed was something that could be concealed, preferably both before and after it was used. He could stand being caught, but it wasn’t the preferred outcome. It would be tricky, but he had an idea. One that no one had tried before, but one he thought he could manage. One he thought could work. The very idea put a smile on his face. These false idols worshipped the camera, so the idea of using one to kill them was something that he couldn’t resist.

He decided that a shotgun was the way to go. At close range, it was hard to miss, and he would most definitely be close. He’d hunted squirrels with a twelve gauge, and The Singer looked an awful lot like a squirrel. As a bonus, they weren’t particularly regulated, especially compared to handguns. This was important, because he was actually going to need a bunch of them.

He ended up buying more than a dozen of them. Not all at one place, mind you, with would look more than slightly suspicious. He wasn’t actually planning on using that many on The Singer, as satisfying as that might have been. He needed them for the experimental phase.

He also needed cameras. Specifically, he needed broadcast quality video cameras, or at least their bodies. He was able to find a bunch of broken ones on the cheap by scouring eBay and Craigslist, of all things. He ended up getting five, and he hoped that was enough. Every time he bought one he was creating an electronic trail back to himself. It wouldn’t matter until after he did what he was going to do, but it was still something he had some concerns about.

It took him a few weeks to get everything ready, and he ruined four of them shotguns before he even got to the point where he was ready to test. That was frustrating, but it wasn’t like there were blueprints for this sort of thing. But he finally got something he liked, and he couldn’t help smiling as he drove out into the desert.

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The tricky part was the weapon. The days when you could whip a pistol out of your coat and expect a successful assassination were pretty much gone. Too much security, too many people. The Singer would be easier to get to in a public place than most other available targets, but that didn’t mean there was no security. In fact, there was lots of security. Johnny was pretty sure he had a way to get around it, but he was going to need to work out a few kinks first.

He was kind of amused that the money he got for pictures of The Starlet were what funded this next venture. He didn’t even want to think about the amount of money and time he spent getting it right. There was no particular time table on this one, but pop star fame could be a mercurial thing, and The Singer had already jeopardized it by getting a new haircut. There were also worrying signs that he was starting to go through puberty, which if left unchecked could ruin the androgynous appeal he had for young girls. Johnny decided to move on it as fast as he could.

One thing that actually did work in Johnny’s favor was that he had always been good with his hands. His grandfather had called this being mechanically inclined, and had always seemed disappointed that Johnny opted to go to college rather becoming a mechanic or, even better, a heavy equipment operator. Johnny wondered what his grandfather would think about Johnny using his mechanical talents for this. He thought he’d be proud of him. Any sane person would.

It had to be a gun. Mechanical inclination notwithstanding, Johnny didn’t think that he could get any bomb he could make close enough, let alone have a reasonably guaranteed kill. Johnny could have probably killed The Singer with his bare hands, what with the star being the size of a child and having all the apparent muscle tone of a rubber band, but The Singer was constantly surrounded by bodyguards who could probably pop Johnny’s skull like and overripe melon. So he needed something with some range. He needed a gun.

What kind of gun was the initial question. He considered a pistol, but that had a couple of problems. First, while he was willing to risk death or prison for the greater good, Johnny would prefer neither. A pistol was obvious, and was for close up work, and the chances of him dumping a clip into The Singer and walking away weren’t good. Which might have been acceptable, were it not for the second issue, which was that any good security team would see him drawing the gun and swarm the Singer. The little pop superstar might not give much though to his position, but he was a billion dollar asset for people who were very smart. Security would be tight. Handguns were out.

The next option, of course, was the assassin’s standby, a high powered rifle. This was something that Johnny gave some serious consideration to. He’d done a lot of hunting when he was younger, and he was a decent shot. If he had hunting rifle with a scope, he could definitely take out The Singer.

But again, there were limitations on its effectiveness as an assassination tool. If The Singer were a politician, security would check all the buildings with a line of site. That didn’t seem likely to be the case here, but all of the buildings around all of the venues were the singer would be out in public were private. Which meant that either they would be occupied or they would be alarmed. It was hard to wander around with a rifle and not be looked at with a certain degree of suspicion by the police. Getting chucked in the clink before he managed to kill The Singer wouldn’t work. Truth be told, he didn’t want to be far away when he did it. He wanted to be there. He wanted to feel it.

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There were problems with that. The big one, from Johnny’s perspective, was that he didn’t know anything about bombs. Sure, he was pretty smart in the usual sense, and a freaking genius compared to the usual LA candy, but building a bomb actually took a lot of specific knowledge.

Or, at least, it did if you wanted to make an effective bomb and not blow yourself up. You could pack black powder and nails in a piece of pipe, sire, but he didn’t want to scare people. Even if he did know how to build a bomb, which he didn’t, he had no idea how to get all that stuff without taking a surprise vacation to Guantanamo.

Which was how Johnny decided that the next person had to be the singer. Actors were too private; not only were they generally hard to get to, there wasn’t much chance of him being able to get his message across. Reality television stars, of course, were easier, but they weren’t big enough. He needed someone with true fame, someone who he could destroy in front of an audience. Someone who was famous for their hair.

Well, to be fair, that last part really wasn’t a requirement, but it was what ended up being the final straw fro Johnny. The Singer was just a kid, really, a tiny androgynous boy who looked a lot more like a tiny lesbian than a pop star. He was seventeen years old, and in the last two years he’d become one of the most famous people in the entire world. Last year, he was said to have made more than 100 millions dollars.

All because he was aping a hairdo that the Beatles made popular fifty years ago. They, at least, had talent. The Singer had approximately the same amount of talent that autotune could give anyone who could afford autotuning. Unlike most female popstars, he couldn’t even dance.

What actually sealed the bowlcut midget’s face was his movie. Johnny didn’t have any particular opinion on documentaries that were essentially informercials for his albums, aside from a sort of general contempt. No, what stoked his rage to point where he knew The Singer had to be the one was the ad campaign.

The trailers for the movie focused on The Singer having to have overcome rejection and struggled on to become a star. He was seventeen. He became famous at fifteen. He started trying at twelve. Charitably, he might have struggled a whopping two years before he became a household name and made enough money for fifty people to retire on. Johnny was not what you would call especially sympathetic to this heartwarming story of overcoming adversity.

The Singer was a different sort of animal than the Starlet, and he was going to require a different sort of strategy. He wasn’t into drugs, he was too young to go to clubs, and he was generally surrounded by screaming teenage girls, all of which meant that he was going to have to be more direct. Besides, he wanted The Singer’s death to be dramatic, to be something big, he wanted it to be something that nobody could ignore. Fortunately, Johnny Getz had a plan.

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But he’d paid with cash, and there was no reason for them to sort him out from the other customers. He didn’t think anything would come from it, and nothing did. The media kept up on the murder mystery, and they even interviewed Polly. He did feel a little bad about that.

It wasn’t just that with the Starlet dead that Polly was out of a job, although there was that. The police might not have been able to link the instant karma to him, but Polly was a prime suspect. She didn’t end up getting arrested, but it ruined her. Johnny felt something like guilt when they found her body. She didn’t need to kill herself, but being that close to the fame and spotlight was too much for some people, he figured.

He thought that taking out the Starlet would be different. He didn’t feel any different. He wasn’t happier. He wasn’t satisfied. The machine went on, and if anything she was even more popular than before. Three months after Johnny Getz killed the Starlet, she was more famous than ever, Polly had been forgotten and nobody knew who the fuck Johnny Getz was.

He decided that he needed to go bigger next time. He needed to do something that couldn’t be ignored. He considered his choices carefully. It wasn’t like he lacked for potential targets. Celebrity had become a cheap commodity, and a thousand different reality shows, tabloids and blogs churned out meaningless stars on what seemed like a daily basis.

The problem with the Starlet was that while it was clearly murder, having her killed by drugs was too close to her normal behavior. There were a lot of theories about why she died, ranging from her family having her killed so that they could reap the profits from increased sales of her older movies to her getting dosed by accident. Nobody ever considered that she died because she was famous and didn’t deserve to be.

That was an outside of context idea for the mediamakers. Fame was the ocean they lived in, and they could never consider that you could drown someone for it. Johnny didn’t think himself as a man with a message, but the more he thought about it, the more he knew they needed to know. He had to choose someone where they couldn’t deny the reasons behind it.

He considered, in passing, blowing up one of the mass auditions for that karaoke contest that passed for the most popular show on television. True, there would be some genuinely talented people there who could hurt or even killed, but the majority of them wanted to be famous to be famous, not because they had any real respect for music. Something that a quick listen to their “singing” would have told anybody.

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He also wasn’t worried, which actually did concern him a little. He didn’t figure it was likely that the cigarettes could be traced back to him. He’d been mildly disguised when he bought them, wore gloves when he was prepping them and he had zero criminal record anyway, so there was minimal exposure.

But the fact was, the police weren’t complete idiots, and this would definitely be recognized as foul play, and with a case this public, they would be looking hard. It was stupid to not be worried, and yet, he wasn’t. He knew that was dumb, and he knew that was the sort of shit that got people caught.

Johnny didn’t stop doing the paparazzi thing, either. Partly because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself by a sudden disappearance, and partly because it made him feel like he was part of the whole scene. All the others paps were talking about the Stralet’s death, and knowing what he knew about it, knowing that he had done it and they didn’t know anything.

Her tragic death was pretty much all that was discussed the week she died, which was impressive when you considered that at least half of the countries in the middle east were actually developing democracy and half the states in the mid west were losing it. But no, a former child star who hadn’t had anything vaguely resembling a hit movie in at least five years and hadn’t been anything but a public joke for two or three was big news. Maybe Johnny needed to get into the revolution business.

It was bad enough when it looked like she’d just managed to OD, although there were rumors the next day that her death was foul play, but shit went batshit crazy when the toxicology report confirmed that somebody had rat poisoned her. Johnny had vague memories of the original OJ trial and how it was everywhere and you couldn’t avoid hearing about it even if you wanted to.

But nobody ever linked it back to Johnny. The truth about crimes, despite what CSI would have you believe, was that most crimes were either obvious, committed by the deeply stupid, or were solved by somebody ratting the culprit out. All that forensic stuff, where they were able to track you down because you left a crumb of croissant two blocks away from the crime.

What Johnny did, a crime where the victim had no obvious connection to the person who killed them, that was tough to solve. Johnny wasn’t a stalker, he didn’t send her letters, and he had no obvious contact with her.

One thing that did surprise him was that cigarette shop actually did have a security camera. Now, given that the shop was at least in part a front for a drug dealer, he expected that they wouldn’t want to have that kind of thing on camera. What he heard from one of the photographers who had a police connection was that it was because insurance demanded it. This still sound nuts to Johnny, and it meant that they had him on tape.

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Johnny followed Polly a couple of times before he got his nerves under control. He’d practice what he was going to do, tried to get it down into the muscle memory, but there was nothing like the real thing. There were a thousand thousand things that could go wrong.

It was a sunny Wednesday when he decided to go for it. He waited at a coffee shop for her to come out of the cigarette shop. He saw her coming out, in a hurry, not watching where she was going. He’d picked the coffee shop because it was in between Polly and the SUV she drove.

“Oh, Jesus, I’m so sorry!” he said, as he crashed into her. He wasn’t a particularly big man, but Polly was a tiny woman and he almost knocked her down. All the things she carried went sprawling, and his coffee splashed over her designer tee shirt.

“Shit! Ow! Ow! Ow!” she said, fanning the shirt away from skin, trying to keep the coffee away. He kept apologize and stooped quickly to help pick up her stuff. While she was distracted, he switched the box of cigarettes in her handbag with his special mix. Polly didn’t see a thing.

“Are you okay?” he said. He handed her bag to her.

“I’m fine.”

“I’m really sorry. Are you sure you’re okay?”

She flashed him a smile, something that he didn’t see very often from her. It was amazing, and he actually felt a vague flutter in his chest.

“It’s okay,” she said, “I’m a total klutz, so this is just karma.”

“I don’t think that’s true, but I’m still sorry.”

“No blood, no foul.”

He laughed. She laughed, and he gave her another apology before she walked away. She pulled into traffic and disappeared into the LA traffic. He watched her go, let out a long slow breath, then ran to the nearest alley and threw up.

Johnny didn’t watch the news that night, didn’t get online. He sat alone in a small apartment with the lights turned off and stared at the ceiling. He felt…he didn’t know how he felt. He wasn’t sure that he felt anything at all. He wasn’t even anxious to find out whether or not it worked. He just felt empty and he wasn’t sure why.

It was all over the news the next morning. The Starlet was dead, after valiant attempts by the staff at Cedar Sinai to revive her. There were two other people, quasi celebrities that even Johnny wasn’t familiar with, who were in critical condition. Collateral damage.

Johnny wondered if he should feel bad about that, but he decided that anyone that was hanging out with the Starlet was just trying to catch a little of their reflected glory. He decided that he didn’t feel bad at all.

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There were other risks, too. He didn’t know specifically what particular mood altering substance she was going to be asking for, so there was an issue of discovery there, too. Ultimately, he figured that she’d use whatever she apparently got. If she didn’t, well, that was just how it was going to be.

He took some care in what he was going to give her. His first thought was that he was going to try and give her an overdose, so that it would like an accidental death. Pretty everyone on Hollywood expected her to go that way anyhow, so the odds were good no one would ever know there was a murder, much less track it back to him.

There were two problems with that, though, one practical and the other more…philosophical. The practical aspect was that there’s no particularly good way to guarantee some is going to OD unless you’re there to actually give them way more of their drug of choice than they were intending to take. He wouldn’t be, so that was out.

But even more than with the practical considerations, Johnny found that he didn’t want this to go down as just another tragic drug related death. He wanted people to know what had happened, to know that she was dead not because she did something foolish to herself, but because someone had decided that she needed to die. He wanted people to know and understand. He needed it.

What he ultimately decided on was rat poison. There were, he discovered, a whole range of rat poisons available, with a range of effects. The most common versions, he found, were actually anticoagulants that caused death by internal bleeding.

Rats are, as small vermin go, pretty sharp. They will sample something to see if it tastes bad or makes them sick before going on to eat the rest of it. Because of this, rat poison needed to be tasteless and odorless which, as it happened, was perfect for what Johnny had in mind.

Johnny knew that the Starlet tended towards coke, and she often did it while she was out dancing at the clubs. He was a doctor and had never played one on television, but he suspected that a large dose of rat poison plus a nice heart racing stimulant like cocaine plus physical activity gave him a better than average chance of killing her.

He had to carry the pack of spiked cigarettes around with him for a few days, and he was acutely aware of the weight of it. It felt like he had a brick in his pocket, and he had to try and keep his hands from shaking. He told himself he didn’t have a reason to worry, but he did anyway. He couldn’t tell if it was nerves or excitement. Probably both.

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While this was an opportunity for Johnny, it created certain problems, too. The Starlet had been on nearly perpetual probation for the last few years, which meant that she was subject to random piss tests. She had somehow managed to pass them so far, which Johnny was pretty sure involved some kind of urine swapping, but he couldn’t count on that forever.

He was able to follow Polly, the assistant, by putting away the camera and taking off the baseball cap and sunglasses. Out of context, with his completely non descript features, she never realized he was behind her. He found that charming, somehow. She was always worried about being followed but incapable of realizing when she actually was.

The actual handover of the drugs was pretty clever as well, at least from Johnny’s point of view. What Polly appeared to be doing was buying a specific kind of very high end cigarette from a specialty shop. Nothing suspicious about that; cigarettes were way, way down on the list, somewhere after trysts with strangely androgynous DJs.

Johnny wasn’t sure what was actually in those cigarettes, but it certainly wasn’t tobacco. Johnny was sporting the baseball cap and sunglasses again when he went to the shop and ordered a pack of the cigarettes for himself.

He was actually surprised when the man at the counter actually sold him a pack, although they were ludicrously, ridiculously expensive, something that actually made his disgust for the Starlet flare a little more.

The cigarettes came in a plain black box, and the cigarettes themselves were a shiny black. He had to admit, they looked cool. Not enough to justify the price he paid for them, but cool nonetheless. They were not, as far as Johnny could tell, filled with tobacco.

They weren’t filled with drugs, either, but some kind of clove mixture. Johnny smoked one with a certain amount of trepidation, hoping like hell that he wasn’t smoking crystal meth or enough coke to kill an elephant on Quaaludes. He coughed a bit, but his heart kept beating and he didn’t feel like he was high or going to die. Which was a relief. He was a fan of tragic death of young celebrities, but he wasn’t a celeb and would prefer to avoid dying a young unknown.

His big problem was that he didn’t know exactly how the drugs were packaged within the cigarette box, and for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out a way to get that information. It was possible that there was just a baggie of whatever stuck in the box, and no cigarettes at all.

His other option was that the drugs were actually contained in the cigarettes, the shiny black shell just a front. What he needed to do was decided which was more likely, and he needed to do it before she got herself thrown in jail again, where she’d be safe from a ell deserved karmic death, or at least a well deserved karmic death at his hands. He held up one of the cigarettes and stared at it. He decided.

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Unfortunately, this was a whole different animal than the so called celebrity of the reality girl. The starlet was legitimately famous, and her every move was watched by the paparazzi, not to mention her own security staff. The chances of him being able to get her on a rooftop and push her over the edge were probably pretty slim.

The upshot was that following her was pretty easy. She was used to being followed by photographers, and the photographers themselves switched and changed from day to day. He didn’t have a lot of time to track her, not as much as he wanted, but all it took was a camera and a baseball cap.

The surveillance actually made him all the more certain about what he was going to do. She was continually rude and abrasive towards the photographers that were the main engine of her fame, and at least half the time, possibly more, she was high on something. He was disgusted by her in the abstract, but he was repulsed by her in the flesh. He had to fight the urge to push her into traffic.

The problem was that he wanted to kill her, he needed to kill her, but he had no intention of going to prison to do it. He had a calling, and he wasn’t going to be able to answer it if he went to jail. This meant that if he was going to kill her, he needed to be able to do it in a way that couldn’t obviously be connected to him.

This was not as easy as a thousand mystery novels and police procedural shows would make you think, but Johnny was patient. He even actually managed to make some money when the Starlet spit water directly into his camera. So it wasn’t all bad.

It took about six months for Johnny to find his opening, and it was the absolutely perfect opening. Hypothetically, the Starlet was clean and sober after her fourth, maybe fifth trip through rehab. The key word there was hypothetically. In reality, she’d started using a whole range of drugs again, at all times of day.

Now, the Starlet being, well, a starlet, she didn’t hit some shmo on the corner to get her stuff. It took Johnny a while to figure it out, but what she did was send some sort of message from iPhone to her dealer, and then her assistant went and met the guy somewhere and actually made the hand off.

Following the assistant, a pretty girl who couldn’t have been out of her teens yet, was a little trickier than following the Starlet. She was always nervous when she went on these runs, and while this made it easy to figure out when she was going on these runs, it made it harder for him to follow her. She was jumpy and constantly on the look out for someone behind her.

You’d think, given how often she had to do it, she’d have gotten used to it, but she never did. Johnny, truth be told, felt sorry for her. He understood why she did it, why she kept the job, but he could see the stress it was putting on her. The Stralet, of course, was completely oblivious. Just another reason.

The Tragic Deaths of Young Celebrities - 3

He expected to be recognized and questioned. He spent the days after the tragic death, as the news was calling it, thinking that every phonecall was going to be the police. Every knock at the door was nearly enough to give him a heart attack.

But nothing happened. He watched the news, read the website and heard about it on Twitter and Facebook, but none of it involved him. There was some talk of the mystery man that was with her right before she died, but the pictures people at the club had taken were vague at best. Johnny’s generically handsome looks were enough to keep him safe.

After a couple of weeks, this worked on his nerves. He didn’t think that there was any chance of him being arrested for it. There was nobody up there except them, no cameras, no witnesses, and it really had been an accident. But nobody knew but him, and that started to work on him.

Part of it was the constant attention on the girl. She had died a terrible stupid death, which was appropriate for a terrible, stupid girl, but from the media coverage of the “tragedy” you would have thought it was the second death of Mother Theresa. There were wall to wall interview with friends and castmates and in death, she was more popular and famous than she had been in life. Probably by a factor of magnitude. Whereas Johnny, who’d been the one who actually killed her was still no one.

Which was why he decided to do it again. He wasn’t sure, exactly, when he decided. There was no sudden moment of malevolent inspiration, no devil on his shoulder. He was simply watching the news, months after the first killing, where they were covering the last fuck up by a starlet who was more famous for her drug use and her constant trips in and out of jail than she was for any of the movies she’d done.

If anything, she actually pissed Johnny off more than the reality television show star. The starlet actually had talent, and she’d probably should and could be famous for something other than being a mess. She’d had every opportunity in the world and she pissed them all down the drain.

Actually, as Johnny thought about it, it was worse than that. She had just squandered her talent. That would probably be bad enough. But this one, she’d had chance after chance to get her shit together. She was still out hitting the clubs, driving around in cars that would cost more than Johnny would make in five years doing shit work. Instead, she got more and more famous for things that would leave most people in the gutters. Every time Johnny thought about it, he got angrier and angrier.

So, clearly, she had to die.

The Tragic Deaths of Young Celebrities - 2

It almost worked. They snuck away from the crowd and slid through an exit door. The door should have had an alarm on it, but one of the bartenders at this particular club had told him that the door to the roof had the alarm switched off so that the staff could go up there and smoke whatever smokable substances they happened to have on hand. When the strobe lights went off, they went up the stairs.

Honestly, it was easier than he thought it would be.

“Did you ever fuck a star?” she said. Always classy.

“No,’ he said, and pulled her shirt over her head, “and I’m not about to start now.”

She tried to focus on him, eyes bleary and almost rotating in opposite directions. Johnny wasn’t sure that he had ever seen anyone that drunk and still standing. He hoped there weren’t any sparks, because he was pretty sure the alcohol on her breath would go up easy.

He had a moment then, when he almost stopped. She was standing there, naked on a rooftop, her vagina tattooed with flames, something he didn’t know from seeing her on television. He thought she was just about the saddest thing he’d ever seen, and she looked like a little girl.

“So are you going to fuck me or what, asshole?” she said, which broke the spell. He smiled at her and picked up her clothes.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m going to fuck you.”

That was where it all went wrong or, as Johnny would come to think of it, where it all went right. She realized, despite her alcoholic haze, what he was doing as he chucked her stuff over the side. Even then, if he hadn’t grabbed her shoes, things would have went a lot differently.

“Not the Jimmy Choo’s!” she screamed, as the high priced shoes went over the edge. She dived for them, grabbing, and went right over the edge. Johnny tried to grab her, but she was over the edge and falling. As she fell, their eyes met and Johnny was pretty sure that she didn’t understand what was happening to her even as it happened to her.

The fall was four stories, and it might have been survivable in other circumstances. She landed on top of one of her Jimmy Choo shoes, the stiletto heel going right through her skull, and that was the end of that and the beginning of Johnny Getz’ true calling in life.

The Tragic Deaths of Young Celebrities

The first time Johnny Getz killed a celebrity, it was a complete accident. She was, as famous people go, not all that famous. She was one of the dubious stars of a reality show devoted to young people being obnoxious drunks, but she wasn’t one that would necessarily get recognized out of that context. Without the cameras following her around she was indistinguishable from any other over tanned, under dressed twentysomething. Even on her own show, she was mostly there as filler.

She wasn’t as pretty in person. This was the first thing that Johnny thought when he recognized her at the bar. On television, she wasn’t his type, he didn’t go in for the fake and bake look, but she was definitely attractive. In person she still was, but close up you could see the bad skin from too much make up and the way that night after night of corporate sponsored binge drinking had given her a kind of bloat, like her flesh wasn’t really attached to her bones.

Of course, the fact that she was throwing up in a potted plant at the back of the bar when he first spotted her wasn’t really doing her any favors either. Johnny had no intention, when he saw her there wiping vomit from her hair, of killing her. What he was after then was a lot simpler than that. Humiliation.

Johnny Getz was twenty three at the time, medium tall, medium build and medium good looking. He was well liked by his friends, had done well at school and had developed a fairly significant hatred for the concept of celebrity. Aside from the hate, he was almost entirely unremarkable, which was, in fact, exactly where the hate had come from.

He was seven months out of college when he saw her, and he hadn’t been able to find a job in his field. He probably shouldn’t have been out at the bar, considering that his jobs at a used bookstore and as a bartender didn’t really pay the bills all that well. But here was this girl, whose only discernable talent was a complete and total lack of shame, making ten times what he would even if he were able to get a damn job, which he couldn’t.

She was rich, she was famous, and she had done exactly nothing to earn it. He decided then, as she stood up and made sure her boobs were almost but not entirely secure in her shirt, that something needed to be done about it.

You would think that her being semifamous would make getting to her more difficult, but Johnny found that, in fact, just the opposite was true. She was too drunk and too dissipated looking for most of the men that didn’t know who she was, and her general level of notoriety made it so that most of the men who did recognize her didn’t make a play. The rest of them, well, they didn’t quite have the motivation that Johnny did.

The plan was simple enough that it would be debatable whether or not you could even call it a plan. Basically, he intended to get her on the roof, get her naked, and chuck her clothes off of the roof. And then leave.

Now, granted, this was a girl who let herself be filmed taking a piss behind a bar because the bathroom was too far away, but he was hoping that doing a buck ass naked walk of fame would be enough to at least trigger whatever vestigial shame instinct she had.