The Amateur

On Monday, I got ready to go to work.

In the original plan, I was supposed to make Murphy shoot me. But the new me didn't want to die. I wasn't afraid to die, and it was still most likely Murphy's plan that I would die soon after doing his personal business. But living on the edge of catastrophe was addictive. It was like some law of physics, energy is conserved; you are never as alive as when you know you are going to die around the next corner.

Nothing could make me afraid anymore. The worst that could happen was that I would die, and that was the plan anyway. The knowledge let me kill without fear, and without shame.

It also prepared me to go to work. What had once been intolerable, a task beyond my abilities, always fearful that someone would find out that I had been promoted into incompetence, was now a piece of cake. The Monday staff meeting was going to be much different from meetings past.

The computer in the den still had the maps of Murphy's target on the screen. It was a jungle of old high-rise apartments, no clear shots from a distance, no easy exits. Worse, it didn't fit the pattern. Wrong part of town, no churches, no treatment center, no 666 in the address.

Murphy had given me three days to get the job done.