A dim and cloud-locked sky held the sun hostage, my mood too grim for desire. All nonsense aside I was still a hitman with a job to finish, so I wolfed down a proper English breakfast to begin my day with and started making preparations to ensure that Aleanna Clark was dead by the end of it.
Taking a life is usually an easier affair than giving it. Yet finding the right method of doing so if you want to get away with it can be a tricky business. The simplest and cleanest way to drop someone quick is to shoot them. But guns are loud and leave their individual signatures on the bullet. Stabbing someone to death can be a laborious exercise, unless you know where to aim for. But even then, the heart and the brain are well protected and cutting the throat is messy as hell.
Sipping my coffee I looked up to the gloomy sky for inspiration. I had decided on the approach days ago. The question that remained lay far beyond the horizon of technicalities. No matter how many people you put to death, after each time you kill someone sooner or later its weight catches up with you. You can escape the police, you can escape the judges, you can escape the friends and family. The only person you can never really escape is yourself. Time will come, often when you least expect it, when your mind wanders, desperate for redemption. Looking for someone to say that it was fine, that there was no other way, that anyone would have done the same in your place. That it was necessary. Fail to deal with this properly and it can see you wandering into the nearest police station, a mental hospital or even into an early grave following swiftly in your victim's footsteps.
I had my own professional answers to the problem, firm nails anchoring the odd angles of my mindset, solutions that had been working for me for decades. They worked because they always resonated the same answer. And because in never a million years did I expect to find the question to be changing.
Following my usual careful preparations of waxing, shaving, trimming, nail clipping in order to make sure I wouldn't leave any fibres for the SOCOs, - scene of crime officers -, to play with, and washing my forehead what felt like the hundredth times I packed a pair of gloves, a rope, a pack of strong sleeping pills and took a bus toward Angel.
