Sorry, Jamie, tonight’s the night.
The young couple had entered Angelo’s Pizza Pit to join a crowd in the event room. Now, all he had to do was wait until they walked back out again.
The boy and girl on Jamie’s hit list couldn’t have picked a better spot. The road on which Vince parked ran through the burgeoning development to the highway on the opposite side of the property. The view from the edge of the forest shot clean across the road to the front of the restaurant. They’d even parked on the portion of the parking lot closest to the road, so all he had to do was wait until they returned to their car and pick them off, one-two.
As a bonus, from what he could tell from peering through the eatery’s window, they seemed to be meeting with other people. Chances were good there’d be other people milling around when he pulled the trigger.
They’d be key in keeping him out of trouble with Jamie.
She’d told him to make the hit look like an accident, but accidents weren’t his thing. He didn’t know how to poison someone and make it look like a heart attack. He didn’t know how to plan elaborate traps like Jamie did.
“I shoot people,” he muttered to himself.
Unfortunately, bullet holes tended to look like bullet holes. Heck, often, the bullets themselves were pretty easy to find, too. They had to land somewhere. And even if he shot someone and then dug the bullet out of their head, the death wouldn’t look like an accident. People’s skulls don’t spontaneously explode.
Not only did Jamie want an accident, she wanted two people dead. Is she crazy? How do you kill two people and make it look like an accident?
Cars seemed the only possibility. He’d considered pretending to be a cab driver, picking them up and crashing the car, but the plan made no sense. First, two people who owned cars would have to call for a car to pick them up. He’d have to intercept the call, kill the real driver and take his place. Then, he’d have to figure out how to crash a car in such a way he lived and they died. Was he supposed to reverse into a tree? Even then, they’d probably just bang their heads on the back of the headrests. The worst thing to come out of the whole ordeal would be the couple giving the dead driver he’d stuffed in the trunk a one-star review.
Rigging a car bomb wouldn’t work. Cars don’t explode as often as action movies make it seem. He could maybe shoot a gas tank with a tracer round, but the odds were in favor of one or both of his targets escaping before any resulting fire engulfed them and, again, once the accident was investigated—bullet hole.
No, he needed to use his rifle and kill them the way he knew how. He couldn’t make it look like an accident.
Once he’d accepted that simple truth, the solution to his problem had appeared.
He couldn’t make their death look like an accident, but he could make it look not like a hit.
His neighbor, Don, inspired the idea. The jerk was out back screaming on the phone about what losers his bosses were. He’d been fired, which Vince didn’t find surprising. The man was a raving drunk. His wife had already left him. He’d been in a spiral for a few months—the kind of guy who could snap at any moment.
And there was Vince’s answer.
He spent half the day researching manifestos online. He printed out the craziest ones and then copy-pasted them into a document he could edit to make it sound like the ravings of his neighbor. He doctored two manifestos. One, he’d brought with him to the forest. It contained plenty of references to lead cops to his neighbor. The other he hid under the neighbor’s car seat, as if it were a discarded early draft. While planting that, he stole his neighbor’s travel coffee mug and a sock, which he intended to leave in the forest. If the references in the manifesto didn’t put the stupid cops on the right trail, the fingerprints on the coffee mug would.
The cops would find his victims in the parking lot, trace the bullet trajectories back to the forest’s edge, find the items his neighbor left behind, and conclude Don was a lunatic who’d snapped and shot up a bunch of people at the restaurant.
Vince would take out the couple, maybe pop one or two other people to make it less obvious who the real targets were, and then get out of there. He’d go home, leave his unlicensed rifle under the neighbor’s back porch, and then sit back and wait for the cops to show up.
Chuckling to himself, he clomped into the forest, happy he’d thought to wear long sleeves, long pants and a ton of bug spray. He could hear the bloodthirsty mosquitos buzzing around his head.
Bastards.
Vince found a fallen tree log perfect for steadying his shot. He set down the coffee thermos still half-full of the coffee his neighbor brewed the day he lost his job, and lowered himself onto his belly. Resting the rifle on the log, he peered through the scope, Declan Bingham’s silver Jeep clear as if it were parked a few feet in front of him.
Perfect.
The traffic wasn’t busy. It wouldn’t be hard to avoid hitting a passing car.
All he had to do now was wait.
What sounded like a twig snapped in the forest behind him and Vince glanced over his shoulder, holding his breath.
Were people walking through the woods
