It was supposed to go like this: she was called Linda Dollahan and she had to die. Why, they did not need to know. As for the how, they were handed a comprehensive schedule of her time on the 24th, which left little in the way of surprises. They found the time at which she was to be home alone, daddy doing a night shift, the kids spending the week at granny’s house, located the next town over.

Some crassier hooligans would have enjoyed a little foreplay with the well-off target before the kill, but Andy disliked crass. A head shot at gunpoint with a silencer, a few steps into the house to avoid messy witnesses. A clean death. A fast one, too: targets did not have much time to fear. No need to stress the meat.

Early in the evening, they parked a few houses away and watched for signs of unexpected activity. Humans do tend to go off-schedule, even on their best-planned days. No car in the alley, no lights at sundown: they were satisfied and drove off to get pizza. Andy took a 5-Cheese Extra-Large combo while Spanky went for a basic ham and cheese. He did not have much of a stomach on kill days.

The drove back, found a nice spot to wait for the lady to come home, pushed back the seats for comfort. The warm day was still radiating from the pavement, and the street quiet. Andy wanted to get her soon after she got back, because things had a tendency to get harder the later you went at people: they took a bath, fell asleep on the couch or were simply too lazy to open the door. Like this kidnapping story Spanky had heard, failed completely because the guy would not answer the damn phone…

Soon the brown S.U.V passed them by and stopped in the concrete driveway. Andy waited a few minutes so she could grab and sort the bags she had brought, then left the car and leisurely strolled his way up to the entrance. Spanky stopped eating, setting back his seat in a driving position and getting ready for potential trouble.

Andy came up the steps and rang the door. He heard slippers shuffling, along with a small clicking sound — and he knew something was off. The intercom lit up and a female voice asked “Who is it?” in a tense voice. Some way or another, she knew.

That’s where Andy would have reasonably given up any other day of the year. You do not go after a potentially armed target who knows you are coming after her. You think, regroup, maybe try another angle and give hell to the people that gave something away, sending this nice opportunity to the dogs. But something bugged Andy more than he admitted. Talks behind his back. Andy was getting old. Shouldn’t he retire? Was his aim still good as of late? What about his running speed?

So Andy steeled himself and said his piece about the usual flat tire and out-of-battery phone. And Linda opened the door.

She was not carrying: her husband was. The doing a night-shift husband. What the hell was going on? A few steps behind her, Mark Dollahan was panicked, unsteady. If he was tentatively aiming at Andy’s chest with a hunter’s rifle, there was no telling if he would be able to shoot him when provoked or if he would shoot himself in the foot first. His presence also meant he had seen Andy and connected the dots to the threat on his wife’s life. They had another body on the list.

“If the kids enter the hallway wielding slingshots, I’m gonna blow the whole house up”, thought Andy, suddenly very tired. So much for subtlety.

He hesitated a second on a convincing bluff, then resorted to evening the threat by grabbing the wife and putting his own piece to her head. “Let’s not do something rash”, he said.

Sadly, the sudden move was more than the nerve-wrecked husband could bear, and the shot caught Linda Dollahan across the chest. She limped in Andy’s arms with a faint sight. The rifle fell on the ground, and the room was silent.

For Andy, who could barely believe his bad luck, the loud rifle shot was more than enough publicity, and he was not about to let the man get his bearings. He raised his weapon. In a fit, Mark rolled away, grabbing the rifle. “Would you stay still for a second”, thought Andy, who was not about to let his own shooting marks on the wall. The crazed husband finally got up, his weapon pointing towards his own throat.

“You’re not getting me! You’re not getting anyone in this home”, he cried. He was waiting for an argument of some kind, and almost lost composure when Andy simply gestured with his hand, saying:

“Go ahead, don’t mind me.”

If Spanky had been alarmed by the first shot, the second one got him to start up the car with the lights off and hover to the driveway. To his relief, Andy was coming down the steps. “We only take the girl”, he said. Spanky would not get a better explanation until they were a few kilometers away.

Then he dared to ask. Andy answered in an exhausted voice and Spanky got his story, up to the moment where Mark Dollahan, targeted by a gun, took himself hostage.

There was a long silence. Then Spanky, shaking his head in disbelief, said: “People are dumb.”

And that was their epitaph.