The shooter stared at the darkened computer monitor in the basement of his two-bedroom ranch, only semi-aware of his reflection. The house totaled less than a thousand square feet of living space, but it was plenty big enough for him. He lived alone since leaving his parents’ home what now seemed a lifetime ago. That was when he’d run off and enlisted in the army. He had actually wanted to serve his country in a war people would later say should never have been fought. Looking back that was a dumb, even tragic, move. He might have been a little off when he and the other men in his company deplaned and walked into that wall of heat for the first time, but he was certifiably messed up by the time they sent him home. But how could he have known any better? He was a kid when he’d signed on to preserve and protect the American way of life. Then, like now, all he’d wanted to do was step up and be a man…to do the right thing. He thought maybe he had it right this time. He wasn’t as fit as he’d been when he set off to fight all those years ago, but he was a helluva lot smarter.
He stretched his legs out under the counter his old tube-type monitor perched on. A thin veneer of blue indoor-outdoor carpeting covered the cement floor under his feet. The carpet had a blotchy green and blue pattern the guy at the store years ago had told him would hide dust and dirt. He turned his gaze down at the carpet and figured it would camouflage the mess pretty well if he hurled on it, too.
It turned out he didn’t need to hide dirt. He kept the carpet and every inch of his little house meticulously clean. He liked things orderly and neat. Maybe that’s why he was still alone this far into his life. The shooter had lady friends along the way, as his mother would have called them. But he got uncomfortable when things moved past friendship or companionship and moved on toward something akin to intimacy. It made him feel claustrophobic. He was far more comfortable alone, even if it meant being lonely. It was safer. He often thought about children, and how he would’ve liked some of his own…maybe teach his boys how to hunt and fish like he’d learned from his father before his dad turned hard and mean. He hadn’t really lied when he’d emailed that reporter that he wanted a wife and children. He just knew it wasn’t in the cards for him. If that tidbit helped the Feds think their guy was a bit younger that was okay, too.
Mulling it over, he thought he was kidding both himself and the reporter. Over the years when kids got too close or clingy it made him anxious. It set him on edge as much, even if a bit differently, than when a woman did. He’d thought long and hard about his situation over the years, and had come to the conclusion that he revered women and children too much to allow himself to be a meaningful part of their lives. He put them on a pedestal, and he didn’t feel worthy of them. He loved them unconditionally, even if from a distance. He was better off, and better able to protect them, he reasoned, if he was unencumbered.
The shooter shook himself from his stupor and sat up straight. He took a deep, settling breath and concentrated again. He shuffled through the stack of papers in front of him that represented his research on who was performing abortions, where they performed them, and where they lived. It wasn’t easy to gather the information these days, but he’d found out a lot via the Internet when he first began planning this mission a month ago. He’d done his research in different cities, using computers available at public libraries or places like FedEx Office Stores. If the Feds had tracers on the sites he’d visited, they would have a difficult time following the breadcrumbs back to him.
Twenty years ago it would have been a snap to get the information he had worked hard on the sly to collect. Back in the late 1990s, a group of righteous lifers published a website called the Nuremberg Files. The site described abortion doctors as war criminals and called them out for their crimes against humanity. It ran photographs of the physicians along with their names, home addresses, and phone numbers. It would have made the shooter’s job easier and he could have begun implementing his plan sooner. The site might still be available if it hadn’t begun highlighting the names of abortion doctors who’d been wounded and striking out those who’d been killed. At that point, a U.S. Appeals Court decided the Nuremberg Files website was nothing more than a hit list. It ruled that the right to life and liberty trumped the first amendment and shut the site down in 2002.
His own typed hit list contained ten names, all arranged smartly on one page, starting at the top with Charles Smith, and continuing down, almost jumping off the white page in their bold 18-pt. Arial font. The Charles Smith entry had a hand-drawn pencil line through it. William Martin was in the number two slot. The Appleton, Wisconsin abortion provider had been pushed up on the shooter’s list because a lefty pro-choice rag had recently included him in its listing of the “10 Best Abortion Doctors in America.”
As he planned Dr. Martin’s demise, the shooter shook his head and wondered aloud, “They’re ranking these scumbags now? What’s the world coming to?”