Aim to Kill by Allison Brennan Page A

presence instead of what’s important.
    “And what’s important now is finding this killer before another child dies.”
     
    Brian Hall stared at his reflection in the filthy, scratched mirror of his pathetic apartment. The bitches next door were going at it again, screaming at each other, using language Brian had learned only after being in prison. Bitch One, the chick who looked like a dyke, had lost her job as a busboy—busgirl?—and Bitch Two, the druggie, wanted money for her fix.
    The mirror shook when something metal hit the common wall, and Brian wanted to go over there and pummel the two bitches into silence.
    How could he think? How could he plan with the two of them going at it all the fucking time? At least in prison there was silence. Anything above normal conversation could get you dinged. Yeah, there were fights that broke out time and again, but at night—like now—it was usually quiet. Peaceful.
    Brian put his hands on the wobbly dresser and peered closer at his face. He was old. His life was over. His face looked tired, his blue eyes too pale. Bloodshot, too, because he hadn’t been sleeping so good. He ran a hand over his buzz cut. He’d gone down and paid ten bucks to the barber—ten bucks!—for the cut. He had to. His hairline was receding and the shorter his hair, the less he noticed how little he had. In prison he hadn’t cared.
    His mouth had turned into a perpetual scowl. He tried to smile at his reflection, but it was no more than a sneer.
    He had no life. No one would hire him, except as a busboy in some greasy restaurant where the slop people actually paid for was worse than prison food.
    No one gave him the time of day. It didn’t matter that he’d been proven innocent. He’d been in the joint for three decades. No one really believed he was innocent.
    He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he stared at the top of the scuffed dresser. The dull blued steel of the .38 glinted at him in the artificial lamplight. He’d bought it off the street behind his god-awful dive apartment. He was shocked at how easy the deal went.
    He picked up the gun with shaky hands and stared down the barrel. “My life is over,” he said, his voice hollow and tinny.
    He put the gun in his mouth, the metallic taste making him cringe. Tears streamed down his face. His entire body shook as his right hand curved around the gun in order for his index finger to reach the trigger. It felt awkward. Wrong.
    But slowly he depressed the trigger. He felt the hammer pull back as the trigger reached the halfway point. It resisted, as if the gun itself told him wait, don’t do it, and then . . .
    Click.
    The gun was empty; he hadn’t loaded it. Sinking to the floor, he sobbed.
    His mother was scared of him, but he blamed that on his cousin Toby. He had no home, no friends. Nothing was as it had been when he went to prison.
    Angry, he wiped the tears from his face. Look what that bitch had turned him into! A whiny, sniveling old man.
    “Stupid cunt , I’ll kill you!” Another piece of furniture hit the wall next door as the bitches continued to rant.
    Pathetic. He was pathetic, sitting on the threadbare carpet that might have been beige years before, but was now brown from years of pathetic losers like him living in this pathetic flat.
    Retribution. He had to do something to the people who’d destroyed his life. But what? What could he do to pay them back for the life they’d stolen from him?
    He slowly stood and shuffled over to the lopsided Formica-topped table in the corner that passed for a kitchen with a pitiful refrigerator that didn’t keep beer cold and a two-burner stove top. A journal rested on the table, a ninety-nine-cent spiral-bound pad he’d picked up at the supermarket. Ninety-nine cents for this little piece-of-crap notebook with forty pages in it.
    He sat at the solitary chair and placed the gun carefully in front of him. Turning the page, he stared at the names of the people who had framed