Forgive me, Leonard Peacock

TWENTY-FOUR

I open my birthday present in the woods behind Asher Beal’s house—feel the familiar cold heaviness of the P-38 in my hand—and then wait for my target[52] to come home.

I’ve been doing reconnaissance for a few weeks now, so I know that on Thursdays my target arrives home around 5:43 from wrestling practice, and then usually goes into his first-floor bedroom for an hour before dinner.

The target usually surfs the Internet while waiting for feeding time, at which point the target will relocate to the kitchen.

The glow of the laptop screen lights up the target’s face and makes him look like an alien or a demon or a fish in a lit tank, and watching the target’s dead expression illuminated by the screen has also made it easier to visualize killing him—the weird lighting really dehumanizes the target.

I’ve practiced shooting my target from the tree line, using my hand as a gun.

But today I’m going to creep up to the window, shoot the target through the pane at point-blank range, stick my arm through the jagged glass teeth and pop the target six more times—mixing head shots with chest shots—to ensure the target has been eliminated, and then I’ll escape into the woods, where I will off my second target with the last bullet in the magazine before the local cops and maybe even the FBI arrive.

That’s my plan.

All I have to do is wait for my target to flick on his bedroom light, which will be the first falling domino to set the chain of events in motion.