BUD
into his shot glass, his hand unsteady, some of the amber liquid sloshing over the side. Leaning over unsteadily, he slammed the half-empty bottle into a pile of magazines on his living room coffee table. Then he threw back the shot. The alcohol burned down his throat, setting every muscle fiber on fire.
He stared into the TV and the sitcom showing stupid people living stupid lives. When the audience laughed, he raged. What was so funny? What was so funny? Why were they laughing at him? The faces on the screen morphed into the faces of his past. Pointing. Laughing. Calling him names. He was too fat. Too ugly. Too dumb. Too klutzy. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Cold rage poured through his veins. He flexed his fingers. Instead of cold glass, he felt the cold skin of his first victim.
She was so tiny. So innocent. Amelia Beacon. What had possessed him? The need to make someone else feel the numb, cold hurt that he felt. The desire had been there for so long. He was done tamping the rage down. Keeping it bottled up.
He hadn’t meant to kill her. But the girl’s screams had turned to sobs, and then her sobs had gone cold quiet. He had the chance to stop, and he didn’t. He just kept going. He remembered looking down at the cold, dead body and feeling the icy cold fear of knowing he was a murderer. He’d ditched her body. He’d run. He’d hid. He’d waited. And after months and months went by without a single tail put on him, he felt the confident, cold certainty that no one would ever catch him. That he was invincible.
That he could kill whenever he wanted.
And kill, he did. Again and again and again…
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “No one kills a killer,” he muttered to the idiots on the TV screen. “No one puts a hit on the hit man.”