The Murder Channel Read Online Free Page A

The deputy was right.
    “Tac get the shooter?” he asked.
    I nodded, placing Bolton’s .38 on the floor and cutting open the deputy’s pant leg to examine his wound. There was little bleeding.
    “Somebody has to radio the van,” he said. “Turn them around. Send them back to the hospital.”
    Bolton aproached from behind. “Already took care of it, Robbie. How you doing?”
    “I’ll live,” he said, straining to view the scene. “Jesus Christ, Ray. It’s bad.”
    The courtroom filled with emergency medical teams and cops.
    “Who’s the shooter?” I asked.
    “He’s a member of Vigil, a militia group that has no use for the courts. The only rules they follow are their own. This one’s got the V tattoo on his forearm. We expected trouble, but nothing like this. The kind of media interest we’ve had in this case brings the bugs out of the woodwork.”
    I was less than twenty-four hours away from the relative sanity of Lake Albert. I knew little aboutpolitical extremists of any stripe, gun-or bomb-toting terrorists, the reality-challenged true believers who make the world a crapshoot for the rest of us. For a quarter century I described personality and behavioral characteristics and hunted the predators who matched the profiles. They are the loners among us who use their anonymity as a tool to track, torture, and cut down their prey. They approach the moment of murder with an excitement that is equaled only by our revulsion when we read about their nocturnal exploits in the morning paper. As a rule, they don’t travel in packs, and they don’t invade public buildings.
    I sat cross-legged on the floor, inhaling the acrid stench of cordite, listening to the rescue workers’ semichaotic shouting, patting Robbie’s arm, and telling him he would be fine.
    The deputy knew he would be fine. Maybe I was telling myself that we would all survive, while thinking what a strange and violent people we are.

… ran up the courthouse steps waving an automatic weapon. It was absolute chaos, Lisa. We dropped over the wall. Demonstrators, reporters from other networks, and local residents who were here out of curiosity all dove for cover. We heard automatic weapon fire. We heard return fire, and we heard what we think were four explosions. We know that a sheriff’s deputy is dead. A second deputy has been injured. Ted Blais, a Vietnam veteran from Charlestown, tells us that the explosions we heard were grenades. He heard plenty of those in Quang Tri Province in the late sixties. We’re going to move back from the wall, Lisa….

THE VAN ROCKED AND SKIDDED ON WHAT I assumed was Storrow Drive. Dirt coated the single rear window and I had no view. I did not want one.
    Outside in the world everything has been thought and said. There is nothing new, except perhaps the shifting, ragged skyline.
    Language evolves, and creates the illusion of a metamorphosis. We acquire nouns or change nouns into verbs, and the world seems marvelously new, brightly colored, glistening with opportunity. I know this because I saw it on TV. We have become advertisements for ourselves. The most intimate relationships unfold in a room brightly illuminated by a cathode ray tube.
    I am a killer. I have no other identity. My formal education ended after grade eight. There will be no careers for me in web site design, investments, land development.
    I have no illusions about freedom. When it arrives, I expect the experience to be fleeting—a few days, a week. I want no more time than that.
    I have business that I must attend to, an ending to write. I do not want to be among you any longer than is necessary.
    You watch TV and become enraged. You have lost any ability you might have had to know that this is entertainment. Hundreds were blown to pieces in Oklahoma. Schoolkids were massacred in Colorado. Pipe bombs exploded in Georgia. You were riveted to the images. You refused to pull yourself from the colors and sounds of slaughter or soft drink