/pen/ - A Place to Create and Critique

The bike messenger parked his bike on the busy sidewalk outside a small office building and walked inside, a fat manila envelope in his hand. Ballcap pulled low and mirrored aviators covering his eyes, his only real distinguishing facial feature was the jet black beard he'd grown.

He smiled at the receptionist and flirted with her for a moment before holding up the envelope and asking which office it needed to be delivered to. She informed him it was the small law firm upstairs to his left and he smiled again, thanked her, and went upstairs to drop it through their mail slot.

Then he stepped into the bathroom at the end of the hall, went into the large handicapped stall at the end, and opened the window. It was a privacy window, allowing light but no means of seeing inside, and the last time he'd been in the building, he'd used a knife and a screw driver to make it capable of opening since it had been screwed shut and painted over years ago.

Now it opened easily, and he swung it open it open and looked outside. Perfect, just the way he'd remembered it. He studied the movement of the flag on the pole across the street and checked the wind speed and direction on his smart phone's weather app and nodded.

Then he slid off his unobtrusive looking backpack, set it on the back of the toilet, unzipped it, and went to work.

The Nemesis Arms Vanquish is a sniper-grade .308-caliber rifle that breaks down and fits into a backpack without losing its zero, or point of aim. He pulled out the rifle, extended the collapsible stock, snapped the bipod into place, then attached the barrel and screwed on the securing collar. Next, he threaded the silencer he'd made from a Mag-lite flashlight onto the end of the barrel, inserted a magazine, and worked the bolt, chambering a round.

Now he just had to wait fifteen more minutes.

Twelve minutes later, his target rolled up to the courthouse across the street and stepped out of his old Crown Vic. The man was a judge who typically handled divorce and custody cases, and he was full-blown feminists and social justice warrior who used his gavel and the power of the court to fuck men over every single time. He'd recently been in the news for giving sole custody of two children to their mother, who was an unemployed crackhead, and arbitrary denying the father any right to even see his own children, despite having to pay both child support and alimony. When the 'bike messenger' had read that in the paper, he'd chosen the judge for his first target and began studying when he showed up to the courthouse and where the best location for a sniper's nest would be.

He rested the bipod on the edge of the window, silencer sticking out the window, and sighted in; he knew you were supposed to never expose your rifle outside of your hiding place and stay back from the window or hole you were shooting through, but he wasn't a professional (though he did have the money for a fancy sniper rifle and a training course at a tactical school in Virginia) and he was shooting while standing up in a public restroom.

He settled the crosshairs between the judge's shoulder blades as the man walked up the steps of the court house, drifted slightly to the right to compensate for the wind, released the safety, and slooooowly squeezed…

POP.

The judge flopped to the ground and the man immediately removed the magazine from his rifle, ejected the spent brass and dropped both into the backpack, then hurriedly disassembled his rifle, stowed it, shut the window, and walked down the stairs and out the lobby, pausing to give a cheerful goodbye to the receptionist.

Once outside, he brushed past the pedestrians who were starting to notice something odd was happening across the street at the court house, got on his bike, and rode away down paths no police car could have followed if he'd been pursued.

Once he was six blocks away, he ditched the cheap bike he'd bought at a flea market in some bushes, took the side entrance into a coffee shop (avoiding the camera pointed at the register and front door), and ducked into their bathroom. He hurriedly washed the temporary black dye from his beard, revealing his natural sandy blonde appearance, swapped out the ballcap and windbreaker for a denim jacket and tillie hat, removed the shades and his gloves, and walked back outside to his waiting car and drove away.

Sirens wailed in the distance as he casually waited at the light and he turned on the radio.

"Countin' flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all. Playin' solitaire till dawn, with a deck of 51. Smokin' cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo…"

Today was a good day.