Текст книги "Joe Victim"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 32 страниц)

Chapter Twenty-Four

I remember I used to believe in Santa Claus. My parents would always make a big deal about it. I’d wake up in the morning and the cookies and milk would be gone, there’d be soot around the base of the fireplace, and Dad would always tell me he’d heard Santa up on the roof and glimpsed a reindeer. I was always excited he’d been, but disappointed I’d missed him. Christmas Eve I’d always try my best to stay awake, and not know I’d failed until I woke up around seven in the morning with the sun breaking through my curtains. Santa had a way of sneaking into your house without anybody knowing he was there at the time. It’s something we have in common.

The Christmas that really stands out for me was when I was eight years old. At that stage the belief in Santa was over—though years later I would come to believe in people like Santa Kenny. Back then my mother was a different person. My father was too. I’m not really sure what my father was. He was different in a way even now I wouldn’t be able to identify. Whatever it was, I think my mother knew it too. It was a problem between them, and when there were problems Dad would always hang out with William—or Uncle Bill, as we called him. Uncle Billy wasn’t really my uncle, but Dad’s best friend, though a few years after that Christmas Uncle Billy didn’t come around anymore, as him and Dad and Mom had some kind of falling out. I think a lot of the time the problem between Mom and Dad was Uncle Billy.

I gave my mother a kitten for Christmas. It was a black-and-white, seven-week-old kitten I’d gotten from a friend at school whose pet cat had dropped a litter of them. I swapped a magazine for the cat. The kid didn’t tell his parents and I didn’t tell my dad, and if we had then it all would have gone very differently. The look on Mom’s face when she saw the little kitten is a look that has stayed with me forever. Her Christmas look. It’s where her lips peel back in a violent sneer and her teeth come forward like a shark. Her eyes open so wide it seems there is nothing left to hold them in. It’s the kind of expression where she has just looked deep into her worst nightmares only to find that every one of them is coming true. My mom never liked the kitten. At first I thought that made her a mean lady, a coldhearted lady, because everybody loved kittens. Everybody.

It turned out not to be so much that my mother wasn’t a kitten person. It was more that she wasn’t a dead-kitten person. She didn’t like them after they’d been sealed inside a wrapped cardboard box with a ribbon around it for five days. At eight years old I wasn’t a mind reader. All these years later and I’m still not.

I tell Ali and Ali takes notes. The prison chair is uncomfortable and I’m handcuffed to it, which is perhaps the only reason Ali is in here all alone with me. She either has trust issues or is well aware that the last twelve months have been lonely for me and that in ten minutes’ time, when they’d be mopping her up off the floor, I’d be telling the guards I’d had another memory lapse.

“Did you know the cat was going to die?”

“I never thought about it,” I say, and it’s true. I didn’t. I just thought it would be one nice thing I could do for my mother. It turned out it wasn’t. Turns out I’ve never done any nice things for my mother. Except get arrested. Her life really seems to be running smoothly now for her and Walt.

“You didn’t check on it? Or think it’d need food?”

“It had a name,” I say, and the words are out of my mouth before even thinking about it. “His name was John.”

“You named the cat John?”

“It was dead, like my Grandfather John, who’d died earlier that year.”

“So you named the cat after it died? After your grandfather?”

“Who wouldn’t name a cat?” I ask.

She scribbles more down on her pad. “How did you feel when she opened the package and you saw it was dead?”

“I don’t know. Sad, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Wouldn’t anybody feel sad?”

“Sad or angry. But you’re only guessing, aren’t you, Joe. You don’t know what you felt.”

I shrug like it doesn’t matter. Maybe it does. I don’t know. It feels like she is trying to trap me somehow, and I don’t know in which way. Is this woman trying to help me? The answer comes to me a moment later. This isn’t about me. It’s about her. It’s about her career and the next step she will take along it once all of this is over for her. Maybe I’ll be the topic of a medical paper in her future.

“Joe? What are you thinking about?”

“The cat.”

“Tell me, honestly, were you sad?”

“Of course,” I tell her.

“Because the cat died? Or because your mom was angry at you?”

Because I’d swapped one of my favorite magazines for something that was now useless. That was the real truth. “Both. I guess.”

“You have to stop guessing, Joe. What about your father? What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“When he saw the cat. What did he do?”

“Well, Mom had dropped the box on the floor in front of her. It had tipped on its side and the cat had spilled out. It didn’t look anywhere near the same as when I had put it in there, plus now that the box was open it stank. My dad used the lid to scoop it back into the box and carried it outside and he buried it.”

“I mean what did he do to you, Joe?”

“Nothing.”

“Did he hit you?”

“Yeah, he hit me. Is that what you wanted to hear? He slapped me across the face so hard it bruised. It was the only time he ever touched me. He came into my room later that day and he hugged me, and he told me he was sorry, and he never hit me again. It was all so sudden I didn’t know what was going on. For a day I thought he was angry that I hadn’t given him a dead cat too.”

Amy doesn’t answer. I smile a little. “That was a joke,” I say. “The last part.”

She smiles a little, and she’s thinking that her PCJ—Prince Charming Joe—has just arrived. Only problem, as far as she can see, is I’m in prison for multiple rape/homicides. She knows, like we all do, that love does find a way. She’s thrilled because PCJ has a sense of humor—and that’s a plus. Women always bullshit about humor being the most important thing. They say it’s more important than looks. Hopefully it’s more important than history too. Women also dig scars, but my scar twists one side of my face into a Halloween mask, and sometimes I can still feel the heat of my skin burning from where the bullet tore the flesh open. I start to smile, but whatever moment is developing between us is suddenly lost when my eyelid becomes jammed when I blink and it looks like I’m winking. She frowns a little.

“It gets stuck,” I say. “Since the accident.” I reach up and tug it down and it stings a little bit and then starts working again.

“You call it an accident?”

I shrug. “What else would I call it? I didn’t intend any of this.”

“Then by that logic, people who get cancer could call that an accident.”

“But I don’t have cancer,” I tell her.

“Okay, Joe,” she says. “If you didn’t intend it, and if you really can’t remember what you did, why were you carrying Detective Calhoun’s gun, and why did you try to turn it on yourself?”

It’s a good question. An annoying question that has been put to me a few times now. Thankfully it’s one that comes with an easy answer. “I don’t remember that either,” I tell her.

“Joe—”

“It’s true,” I tell her, and I touch my free hand back up to my eye. The doctor warned me it would catch occasionally for the rest of my life. I don’t know why or on what, and he didn’t seem in a real information-offering mood. He seemed more interested in who he was treating, and how he was going to tell the boys about it that night at the bar.

Her expression relaxes a little. “Does it hurt?”

“Only when I’m awake.”

“Let’s move on,” she says. “Did you ever try giving your mother another pet?”

I scoff at the thought. “No. She wouldn’t have appreciated it.”

“I meant an alive pet, Joe.”

“Oh. Well, no, the same thing applies.”

“Did you ever kill any more animals?”

“You’re implying I killed John,” I tell her.

“You did kill John.”

“No, the cardboard box and lack of air killed John. Me being eight years old is what killed John. It was an accident.”

“Like your scar is an accident.”

“Exactly,” I say, pleased she’s beginning to understand.

“You still haven’t told me, Joe, whether you killed any other animals?”

“Why would I?” I ask, but yes, I have killed other animals—I’ve done it to get what I want from people.

“Okay. I think we’re pretty much done for today,” she says, and she starts to shuffle her pad back into her briefcase. It’s a similar model to the one I used to carry my lunch and my knives and my gun around in, and for a moment—for a brief second—I wonder if it’s actually mine.

“Why?”

“Because you’re not being forthcoming, that’s why.”

“What?”

“The animals. I asked you twice and twice you avoided the question. That suggests you don’t really want my help.”

“Wait,” I say, and I try to stand up, but the handcuffs keep me down.

“I’ll think about coming back tomorrow,” she says.

“What does that mean? That you might not come back?”

“I have to decide whether or not you’re faking everything you’re saying. Whether you’re telling me what you think I want to hear. Not remembering what you did to these women, I don’t know, it might be a little hard for me to buy. I’ve seen it before. I could be seeing it now. Problem with the insanity plea is you seem very aware of what you’re saying.”

I say nothing. It seems saying nothing works better for me.

She moves to the door and bangs on it.

“Wait,” I tell her.

“What for?”

“Please. Please, this is my life we’re talking about here. I’m scared. There are people in here who want to kill me. I have no idea what the fuck I’ve done over the last few years, I’m lost and I’m scared and please, please, don’t go. Not yet. Even if you don’t believe me, I just need somebody to talk to.”

The guard opens the door. Ali stands there staring at me and the guard stands there staring at her.

“Ma’am?” he says.

She looks at the guard. “False alarm,” she says, and she moves back to the table. The guard manages to multitask a shrug with an eye-roll while closing the door.

“Do you want to see more of me or not, Joe?”

Ideally, I’d like to see as much of her as I can. If it weren’t for the handcuffs and the guard outside I would make the effort to see every inch of her.

“Of course.”

“Then play it straight with me, okay?” She sits back down. She leans forward in her chair and to her credit she doesn’t interlock her fingers—at least not immediately, not until after she asks “Are you going to stop playing games with me, Joe?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go back to your childhood.”

“There isn’t much to tell. My mom and dad were normal.”

“Your father killed himself,” she says. “That’s not normal, Joe.”

“I know that. I meant, you know, the family dynamic was normal. Dad would go to work and mom would stay at home and I would go to school. The only thing that changed was we all got older.”

“How’d you feel about him killing himself?”

I shake my head. This isn’t a subject I really want to talk about. “Are you serious? How do you think I felt?”

“Are you checking for answers, Joe?”

“No. Of course not. I was angry. Upset. Confused. I mean, the guy was my dad. He was always supposed to be there. He was meant to protect me. And he just, you know, just thought fuck it and ended things. It was pretty selfish.”

“Did you get any counseling at the time?”

“Why would I get counseling?”

“Did your father leave a note?”

“No.”

“Do you know why he did it?”

“Not really,” I say, but that’s not entirely true. I have this dream sometimes, which, sometimes, I think might actually be a memory rather than a dream. It was the Uncle Billy factor. I came home to find Dad and Uncle Billy in the shower together nine years ago. I don’t know if my father would have killed himself if I’d given him the time to really think about it. I think he would have. Better that than living with mom’s anger. His suicide was less a suicide and more of his only son nudging him a little closer to heaven. I think that’s where he wanted to go since I heard him saying oh God, oh God over and over before I opened the bathroom door. It was the less painful solution for everybody involved. And not painful for me at all. Of course, that might just be a dream. . . .

“You sure? You look like you’re remembering something.”

“I’m just remembering my dad. I miss him. I always miss him.”

“Some professionals would call what your father did a trigger.”

“What?”

“A trigger. It means an act that forces you to behave differently. A triggering event.”

“Oh. I understand,” I say, not so sure I do. I didn’t shoot him. I tied him up and stuffed him into his car and put a hose running from the exhaust and through a gap in the window. At least that’s what Dream Joe does sometimes.

“I want to talk more about your childhood.”

“Because you think there are more triggers?”

“Possibly. Your story about the kitten—”

“John,” I interrupt.

“John,” she says. “Your story about John makes me think there are going to be other triggers. Tell me, Joe, do you like women?”

“Joe likes everybody,” I say.

She looks at me for a few seconds, saying nothing, and I’m sure she’s about to tell me off for referring to myself in the third person. I used to do that when I was a janitor and it worked well. Here, I’m not so sure.

“What’s your earliest traumatic memory?” she asks.

“I don’t have any.”

“Something to do with women,” she says. “Your mother, possibly. Or an aunt. A neighbor. Tell me something.”

“Why? Because that’s what the psychiatric textbooks say?” I say, a little too quickly, but I say it that way to stop my mind from traveling back to when I was a teenager.

“Yes, Joe. That’s why. I know what I need to hear from you, and I get the strong impression you also know what you need to say. I’m going to give you sixty seconds to tell me something that happened to you when you were young. Trust me, I’ll know if you’re making it up. But something happened and I want to know what.”

“There’s nothing,” I say, leaning back. I start drumming my fingers on the table.

“Then we’re done here,” she says, and she starts to put the tape recorder back into her bag.

“Fine,” I tell her.

She finishes packing up. “I won’t be back,” she says.

“Whatever,” I tell her.

She makes it to the door. Then she turns back. “I know it’s hard, Joe, but if you want me to help you, you have to tell me.”

“There’s nothing.”

“There’s obviously something.”

“Nope. Nothing,” I tell her.

She knocks on the door. The guard opens it up. She doesn’t look back. She takes one step, then another step, and then I call out to her. “Wait,” I tell her.

She turns back. “What for?”

“Just wait.” I close my eyes and tilt my head back and rub my hand over my face for a second, then put my hand in my lap and look at her. The guard looks more pissed off this time than the last time when Ali moves back to her chair. He closes the door again.

“It happened when I was sixteen,” I say, and I start to tell her my story.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Raphael wakes up feeling like a new man. He feels ten years younger. No, twenty. Hell, he feels like he is twenty, even if his muscles do ache like he’s fifty-five. Which he is. He rubs at his shoulders as he climbs out of bed. He opens the curtains. He went to sleep in rain, but he’s waking in sun. It still looks cold out there, but it’s blue skies and no wind and that makes what they have to do this morning so much better. He showers and stares at himself in the mirror for a minute afterward, wondering what he always wonders these days—which is what happened to his body, his face, to the years that have gone by. He thinks about Stella, Stella who is broken on the inside, Stella who is going to help fix him.

He has time for a good breakfast. These days he doesn’t tend to eat much. It’s pretty obvious when he has his shirt off. Having no appetite combined with being too lazy is the reason. And work—not that he’s really working much these days. But today he’s going to make the effort. Today he’s celebrating. He makes waffles. Mixes up the batter and pours it into the waffle maker, one after the other, more time-consuming than he thought it’d be, but waffles always catch you like that. He eats them with maple syrup and strips of bacon. He drinks a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice. God he feels good. For the first time in over a year he doesn’t feel numb inside, doesn’t feel hollow. For the first time in over a year the anger is stomping around his body looking for an outlet. He even had a name for the anger back then. The Red Rage. The Red Rage would keep him awake at night, trying to figure out a way to get revenge for his daughter, only he never could. He didn’t know who had killed her. He wasn’t a cop. He couldn’t figure it out. And then Joe was caught and the Red Rage had to deal with the fact there would be no revenge here because Joe was in jail, so the Red Rage went into hibernation.

Raphael never thought he’d see it again.

He reverses out of the garage. The morning isn’t quite as cold as he thought it was going to be when looking out his bedroom window. The plan he has with Stella relies on good weather, and the forecast suggests that’s what’s on the menu. The roads are dry, but the lawns and gardens are still wet. It’s forty-five degrees and might climb another one or two, but not much more. Traffic is thin. Raphael has the radio on. It’s talk radio. Raphael is obsessed by it. Has been for the last few months. He keeps thinking he ought to make a call. Others are. They’re sharing their opinion about the death penalty, those who are calling all having an extreme position on it.

His position is extreme too.

He drives to the same coffee shop he went to last night with Stella. It’s an independent store that goes by the name Dregs, and has old movie posters stuck across every spare inch of wall, even one of the windows is blotted out by movie cards. He doesn’t go in this time. Instead Stella is waiting in her car in the parking lot out back that services a dozen stores, including a few hairdressers and a novelty sex shop. He pulls over next to her and pops the trunk. He helps her load the stuff from her car into his car. She isn’t wearing the pregnancy suit.

Then they’re driving together. Talkback radio still on. People still ringing in.

“I honestly don’t know what people are thinking,” Raphael says to her. “How can anybody be against it? How can anybody look at a monster like Joe Middleton, and say he has rights? People are getting confused. They see putting criminals down as murder, but it’s not murder. How can it be, when the people being executed aren’t human?”

“I agree,” she says, and of course she agrees—they wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t see eye to eye on all of this.

They get stuck behind a truck on the motorway, a lorry two trailers long and full of sheep, the ones on the edges staring between the wooden slats of the walls out at the scenery racing by, not knowing their lives are flashing in front of their eyes just as quickly as the view, not knowing that trucks full of sheep tend to head to places where they take the live out of livestock. That would be murder too, according to the people against the death penalty.

But not Stella.

She was a good find. Eager. Angry. Capable. And, truth be told, a little scary. And since he’s admitting things to himself—quite the stunner. Last night he was hollow inside—the trial coming up, his protest starting on Monday. But what was that, really? He and others like him hanging outside the courthouse in the cold, holding up signs, and none of it was going to bring his daughter back. He was doing it because it was something to do—they were motions to go through, motions that were putting off what he really wanted to do to himself while he lounged around inside his house wearing his pajamas for entire days at a time, stains forming on the sleeves where he’d spill tomato sauce or whiskey on them. Last night Stella came into his life. He bought the coffees and she shared the plan. It was a great plan. Good coffees, but a great plan.

The sheep truck turns off. The motorway carries on. For all the conversation they made last night, this morning it’s different. He’s ready to explode with excitement, but he’s too afraid of saying the wrong thing, too afraid that Stella won’t turn out to be as capable as he first thought. At the same time he doesn’t want to disappoint her.

This is going to happen, he keeps telling himself. It’s going to happen and Joe is going to die, and Raphael is going to be the one to pull the trigger. It won’t bring Angela back, but it sure as hell beats protesting. It will bring peace to his life. Perhaps a destiny too. There are others who need his help. Others from the group. This feels like it could really be the beginning of something.

Of course he has to be careful not to get ahead of himself.

“We’re nearly there,” he tells her.

“When was the last time you were out here?” she asks.

Out here is thirty minutes north of the city.

“A long time,” he says, only it wasn’t a long time ago, it was last year. “My parents used to own a getaway nearby,” he tells her, “but it burned down years ago. I used to bring my wife and Angela out here for picnics during the summers, but not in a long time now. Not in almost twenty years.”

He takes a side road from the motorway, through farm country for another five minutes, and then another turnoff—this time onto a shingle road that after two hundred yards becomes compacted dirt as the scenery changes from open fields to forest. The road is bumpy, but the four-wheel drive manages it easily enough. He goes slow. There aren’t many twists and turns, but the back wheels occasionally skid off large tree roots as they round the few corners there are. It’s almost untouched New Zealand scenery. It’s why people come here, film movies here, farm sheep, and raise children. Snowy mountains in the near distance, clear rivers, massive trees.

He pulls into a clearing. It’s just like he told her. Nobody around for miles.

“It’s scenic,” Stella says.

“Easy to fall in love with,” he says.

They climb out of the car. The air is completely still. And quiet. The only thing Raphael can hear is the engine pinging from the SUV, and Stella moving about. No birds, no signs of life—they could be the last two people in the world. He walks around to the back of the SUV and pulls out the gun case. Stella starts messing around with a rucksack, reorganizing the order of things inside it before throwing it over her shoulder. His wife used to do the same thing with her handbag. Their feet sink a little into the dirt as they move beyond the car, through the trees, and toward another clearing, toward where the getaway used to be until one day somebody thought it would be fun to set fire to it.

“I can’t believe I’ve never fired a gun,” he says, and he really can’t believe it. What kind of guy gets to fifty-five years old without ever having fired one? “It’s always something I wanted to do,” he says, and he wishes he hadn’t said it. All he’s doing is confirming he might not be the right guy for this. And nothing could be further from the truth. Just ask the Red Rage.

Stella doesn’t answer him. He knows she’s fired one. It’s one of the reasons she’s come to him. She told him she’s a terrible shot. She told him that if he is a terrible shot too, then this mission is over. Only she didn’t call it a mission. He wonders if the police would call it a movement.

She opens the rucksack and starts taking out some tin cans. They’re all empty. Baby-food tins, spaghetti tins, soup tins. She starts lining them up a few feet from each other. She leaves some in full view, others slightly hidden behind roots, others she pins in between branches at different heights. After a few minutes they have a shooting gallery and some very ugly tree decorations.

They move thirty yards into the clearing. They’re now two hundred yards from the car with a belt of trees between them, trees that will stop any stray bullets from hitting the SUV. Another hundred yards away are the foundations of the cabin, but they’re covered in long grass, as if the scorched earth made the ground more fertile. “This is a good distance,” she says.

Raphael drops to his knees. Immediately moisture seeps out of the ground and into his pants. He rests the case on the ground and pops the lid. It’s the first time he’s seen the gun and he whistles quietly at it. It just happens instinctively—maybe the same way people whistle at nice-looking women or sports cars. There’s no instruction booklet. “Wow,” he says. And then again, “Wow. I hope you know how it goes together?”

“I was given a lesson,” she says.

“From the gun store?” he asks, and he’s fishing for information, and it’s obvious he’s fishing for information, and obvious he’s not going to get it.

“Exactly,” she says.

He picks up the barrel. It’s black and solid and feels dangerous and is a little lighter than he thought it would have been. He puts it back into the case. He’s itching to try slotting things together, but instead he waits. It’s her show—and he doesn’t want to risk breaking something. That’d be a real mood killer. It takes her a few minutes, the pieces snapping together with firm clicking sounds. He stands up to watch her doing it; kneeling down over the case was hurting his back a little. She pulls a box of ammunition out from her rucksack and loads it into the magazine. It takes twenty bullets, and there are twenty-four in the case. He can tell from the way she goes about it that she wasn’t kidding when she said she’s not good with guns.

“How many boxes?” he asks.

“Three,” she says. “We can practice with them all. We just need to keep two rounds, plus our special round.” She reaches back into the rucksack. “Here,” she says, and she hands him a set of earmuffs. Then she starts looking back through the bag.

“Lost something?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I know they’re . . . Oh, wait, I took them out back at the car.”

“Took what out?”

“My earmuffs.”

“I’ll get them,” Raphael says.

“It’s okay,” she says, “I’ll go. Here, set this up,” she says, and hands him a blanket from the rucksack before walking off in the direction of the car, taking the rucksack with her.

He spreads the blanket out. It’s big enough for two people to lie on without feet or hands overlapping onto the grass. It’s thick too, but it’ll only be a matter of time before it starts soaking up the rain from the damp ground, especially once they lie on it. It reminds him of when he used to picnic here. Janice, his wife, and Angela, his little girl. Janice still lives in the city and Raphael talks with her, but not often—there is too much sadness there, it was a downward spiral neither of them could break. Best to focus on the good times. Like coming out here with a picnic blanket and a fishing rod. They’d hit the river half a mile away, but in all the years never did they catch a single fish, which was a relief, really, because he wouldn’t have known what to do with it. Of course those were summer days. He has never been here in the winter.

Stella comes back. She’s carrying her earmuffs. His are orange and hers are blue, but other than that they look identical. She holds them up and gives him an apologetic smile before putting them on. He smiles back, then puts his on too. The sounds both he and Stella are making are dulled dramatically. She lies down and takes hold of the gun. He stands a little behind her, watching the curves of her body, watching the gun, watching the targets up ahead. She stabilizes her elbows into the ground. She shrugs her shoulders around a little, twists her head back and forth, and finds a comfortable position. This time yesterday he was watching morning TV and eating toast that he’d been too lazy to put butter on. He’d been hanging out in his underwear with the heaters on full so he wouldn’t have to get dressed. He’d been wondering what the hell to do that day before the counseling session, and had ended up continuing to do what he’d started doing that morning.

Stella reaches up and brushes her hair back over her ears to keep it away from the scope. She adjusts herself one more time, then reaches for the trigger. Her finger settles on it. Raphael holds his breath.

The gun kicks up as the bullet explodes from the barrel. It sounds like a thunderclap. It’s so loud for a moment he thinks the earmuffs are there just to hold the blood that’s going to run from his ears. Only there is no blood. There would be, he’s sure of it, if it weren’t for the muffs. He can’t tell which tin she was aiming at because none of them have moved.

“Wow,” Raphael says, the word sounding like it’s coming from deep underground.

She lines up the tin again. Takes her time. He watches her breathe in. Breathe out. He can’t wait to have a turn. He can feel his heart racing. She pulls the trigger. The same explosion. This time he sees a divot appear in the ground about a foot from a tin. She wasn’t kidding about being a bad shot.

“Third time’s the charm,” Raphael says, though he doesn’t know if she can hear him. It turns out third time isn’t the charm. Nor is the fourth. Nor fifth. She lays the gun down on the blanket and rolls off to the side and takes off her earmuffs. She gives him a small I tried my best shrug, and he gives her a small Don’t worry about it smile.

“See what you think,” she says.

Raphael nods. He feels like a kid at Christmas.

He squats down, his knees hurting a little, the left one popping, and he feels a little embarrassed, he feels old. Stella puts her earmuffs back into place. He lies in the same position she was in. The gun feels like a natural extension of his arms. It makes him feel powerful. He likes feeling that way. He puts his eye up to the scope. It’s incredibly clear. So clear he doesn’t see how anybody could miss with something like this. Of course people miss because the conditions change. Wind. Rain. Glare from the sun. Other people around. All sorts of stuff. Shooting a tin can is different from shooting a man. The cans are still. There is no sense of urgency, no sense of panic, no sense of hitting the wrong can and ruining the lives of other cans who loved it.