The old man subscribed to Sports Illustrated. Read that magazine since he was a little boy, since back in the day when professional athletes had jobs selling cars and insurance in the off-season.
Back when everybody knew steak was best for a pre-game meal. And you shouldn’t have sex – whatever that was – for two weeks before the big fight. You could teach yourself to read and write with a subscription to Sports Illustrated. When he’d been on the run, the old man had worried they’d finally find him at the local library, catching up on back issues he’d missed. And he had a thing for librarians, but right now he was reading of the newest darling of mixed-martial arts. An eighteen-to-one underdog, she had knocked out the queen. How was she going to deal with the crown? “Living a comfortable life doesn’t usually result in something big,” is what she said.
What if you think living a comfortable life is itself something big, the old man puzzled.
Killing Bubba Roy may seem a big thing to some people. Maybe the first step to a comfortable life for the old man. And the neighborhood. Yeah, that’s it, just think of me as the Association’s Beautification Committee, the old man thought that kinda funny. A little demented, sure, but amusing nonetheless. Plant a body, feed a tree.
Normally, the old man had a routine. A routine so routine, he didn’t even know he had it himself. Both comfortable and comforting. That’s what scared him. Because he was hiding in plain sight and he had thought he had stopped running. But sometimes the old man just had to smack himself. So he took different roads back home from the gym, never walked the dog the same route. He waved friendly-like at everybody and sometimes used a different name. Hagrid was his first choice. Rarely recognized as a nod to Harry Potter.
The old man bunched his tasks, so if you saw him just the right couple of times a day, he looked like a real go-getter. But he cobbled together those chores like a song, one note after another. One floated into the next. Just efficient. Because once you got him started, he was hard to stop. The problem was getting him started.
Bubba Roy had been on the old man’s list since day one. The kind of guy you wouldn’t let throw water on your house if it was burning. Just looking at him you could tell that. Made the old man’s missus uneasy. And he couldn’t seem to stay the fuck away from them.
Another time there’s a knock on the door. Bubba Roy and his mother want to get a dog and they wondered if the old man could tell them what kind of dog they should get. Some kind of scientist. One that doesn’t bark came to mind. Is it too soon to call Animal Welfare, he wondered.
Why don’t you go to the Wal-Mart parking lot and get a free kitten, the old man suggested. Helpfully.
Good idea, Bubba Roy exclaimed. Why didn’t I think of that.
If you killed everybody who pissed you off, where would you put all the bodies? That’s why killing total strangers is so smart; you can leave them how you leave them. Nothing links back to you.
Neighbors on the other hand have to look like they checked out on their own.