The Murder Channel Read Online Free Page B

commercials. You wept and screamed and were titillated.
    At the end of one hour or four, you pressed a button on your remote.
    You talk about the horror. You dial the phone. You surf the Internet seeking chat. Whether you examine crimes of fiction or crimes of fact, everyone has an opinion, none of them humble, and all of you miss the point.
    Those who gaze into the eyes of God continue to kneel before the altar. No one has turned away from the Lord and become licentious, lustful, homicidal. Each of us holds our seeds of destruction, and each of us decides whether to tend the garden.
    I expect my crop to flourish. I am honest. You are not.
    Why do some of us prowl the city carrying instruments of death, while others sit at home watching the evening news? Why do some become accountants, and others pilots?
    You take great pride in conquering disease, then
new maladies come along, strains of virus that are resistant to all medication.
    You piss into the wind and saturate your shirt.
    If my weapon of choice is a firearm, you blame the gun, and petition to disarm the nation. You install metal detectors in public buildings and call it prevention, mindless that the fertilizer and diesel fuel that shattered Oklahoma City contained no metal parts and were not brought into the federal building.
    After Columbine High School the President ordered an investigation of how violence is sold to children, as if a phantom industry makes its profits by enticing kids to engage in repetitive acts of destruction. The President’s wife asked, “What kind of values are we promoting when a child can walk into a store and find video games where you win based on how many people you can kill or how many places you can blow up?”
    Thousands of years ago a monkey threw a rock at another monkey and war was born. War games quickly followed.
    This country and this world are defined by wars. We killed Native Americans. Perhaps the graphics were not as good as they are today, but John Wayne killed Indians with impunity. The President played his virtual games with real cruise missiles that whispered into Baghdad, and bombs that dropped silently on Belgrade.
    You believe that slapping tablets of the Ten
Commandments in your schools and other public buildings will stop the killing that happens there. If I had stepped from my house on that hot August morning fifteen years ago and seen Thou Shalt Not Kill writ large in neon across the heavens, it would not have deterred me. I might have taken a moment to enjoy the color, so out of place in the dismal Boston sky, but I would have hesitated no longer than that.
    You search for the reasons behind violence, when what you seek is inside, in your soul, in the essence of your being.
    You are religious, but you are not spiritual.
    You are a strange people.
    When I killed, I was young and impatient. I tried to consummate my drama in a single afternoon. There was no terror, no sense of impending doom, no commercial message, and I left my mission undone. Nearly everyone had forgotten me.
    I know that what I will do is wrong, so I have passed the first test of sanity. I am not driven by an irresistible impulse. I could conform my behavior to the requirements of the law.
    I choose not to.
    The county van swerved violently to the left, then the right.
    O’Brien drove. Finneran cursed.
    The van heeled wildly and landed on its side, sliding, metal crunching metal, glass shattering. I hit the back wall, the floor, settled on a side wall, and
watched my blood drip onto the chipped black paint.
    The doors sprung open in the collision. I rolled to my knees and scrambled to the rear through billowing black smoke. I crawled through the opening onto the snow, where flames licked at the vehicle’s chassis.
    I crawled through the snow in my shackles. At the front of the overturned vehicle, I pulled myself up and slid to the passenger-side door. It was jammed. I spun around to a sitting position, raised my legs, and brought them down