Healing (Part Six)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

I suffered a further several months of ups and downs after my glorious rebirth before I started to obsess about wreaking revenge. Even when I started to feel good about myself again I was still sick in the head, only in a different way. My mind had been fucked up by my depression and the damage was irreparable, I feared. I grew sick and tired of the humiliation of having my every thought picked over by a series of mental health specialists, though, so I learned to hide my angst pretty convincingly.

Eventually I found a new job, just a poorly paid factory job in a powder coating plant called Bosworths, but it was better than nothing – it was certainly better than staring at four walls all day trying not to dwell on the events that dragged me down to rock bottom. The tremendous feat of finding gainful employment repaired one of the major issues that niggled inexorably at me while I was ill. I was convinced that I would never work again, that no one would trust me because of the allegations that had been made against me, but I was wrong. I suppose I could have lied through my teeth and claimed that I left Banbury View of my own free will because I couldn't face wiping shitty arses any longer and hope that some lax employer wouldn't bother checking up on me, but I chose to be honest, because honesty is the best policy, my mother always told me.

“I couldn't give a toss about that,” Paul Dowling, the factory manager said at my interview after I poured out a condensed account of the disturbing details surrounding my dismissal and my subsequent illness. “Even if you're guilty of the allegations, which I don't think you are, people sometimes change – they sometimes learn their lesson. It's understandable that the incident made you ill because shit usually sticks, but it's often aimed unjustly so I'm prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.....

I have three ex burglars and a couple of rather naughtier former criminals working for me, and as long as they don't steal from the company or cause trouble in any other way I don't give a damn about their past, and so far there haven't been any problems. We also have a rather wonderful, caring individual working here who had a completely spotless reputation before he was accused of rape and served five months of his sentence before the bitch that accused him tried the same trick on another poor fucker and he was acquitted – and I've only told you about that because I am that man. You're hired, Richard; can you start on Monday?”

My good fortune didn't end there. I had been working for Bosworths for a few months when I won a few thousand quid on the lottery. It wasn't a monstrous, life changing amount, but it was more than enough to finance the costly schemes that infested my mind. A few weeks later I received a solicitor's letter informing me that one of my junior school teachers called Angela Highway (a woman that I barely remembered, but she obviously remembered me) had died, leaving me just over a quarter of a million pounds in her will. I was rich, rich, do you hear? Or at least comfortably well off, which meant that I could plot vengeance to my heart's content.

*************************

Not long after I was dismissed from Banbury View I deleted all of my former colleagues from my Facebook account, at least the ones that didn't delete me first, because I didn't know who I could trust, excepting, funnily enough, one that I couldn't trust as far as I could throw her. To this very day I have no idea why I failed to make a clean sweep and delete Keera Pratt. Maybe at the back of my mind I thought that hanging onto her might be useful for future reference, or maybe I simply thought 'as in name as in nature' - she was obviously a prat, otherwise she wouldn't have fed me explicit details of the accusations she planned to make against me, and because she was a prat, it naturally followed, apart from the damage she'd already done she couldn't hurt me any further. I was privy to the public conversations that Keera had with her buddies on Facebook, information that proved very useful indeed.

One evening I discovered from nosing through Keera's Facebook profile that Donna Cooke was going to see an obscure heavy rock band with her husband at the County hall in Aston, a suburb of of Birmingham, a week on Saturday. I had been to a few concerts there in the past, and I remembered that directly opposite was a large, wooded park, an excellent place to spy on the comings and goings. All sorts of bloody scenarios rushed through my mind at once, but only one lingered and almost immediately I decided upon the ways and means of Donna's punishment.

“Live life to the full, you devious whore,” I said as I stroked Cheesy, my fat ginger tomcat, “because you haven't got much of it left to live. I sincerely wish I could tell you that to your face, you bony arsed cocksucker. I wish we could have a nice lengthy chat, I wish I could question you about your lies and get to the bottom of this sorry situation, because it still doesn't make a fat lot of sense to me. I wish I could look into your big, blue-green, innocent looking eyes and tell you exactly what I think of you before I snuff you out, but sadly that won't be possible. Maybe I should cut you a new fuck hole and slowly shaft you to death whilst casually sawing your head off, but I wouldn't dirty my cock on you. Maybe I should hang you upside down and skin you alive tootsies first; maybe I should stretch your flayed skin over mine and look at your raw body through your own eye-holes and show you the mess you're in in a floor length mirror before I allow you the sweet release of death, but it isn't really my style, I wouldn't be able to handle the risk of catching something contagious from your dirty carcass. As you're the first verminous bug on my list to be squished I have to be extra cautious, I have to wipe you out with the least possible risk to myself, an act that'll build up my confidence so that I can annihilate the other scum-bags involved in this conspiracy a little more creatively.”

I bought a suitable weapon and a box of ammo from a contact in a local pub who had been selling illegal firearms for many years, and it cost me a fair bit more than I anticipated. It was an old but extremely accurate Israeli Jaguar 38 calibre sniper's rifle that had been used for a number of contract killings in the past, the vendor told me. If I returned it in good condition he would give me a fair price for it, but even if I had to abandon it at the scene he said it was unlikely to be linked to me if I didn't panic and I remembered to wipe off my prints. I was no fool, though, and I knew I couldn't afford for the weapon to get into the hands of the police because the forensics team would find a trace of my DNA on it no matter how thoroughly I strove to remove it, just a few molecules was enough. The rifle had been professionally modified at some point in its existence, and the stock and the twenty inch barrel were removable in seconds. The vendor threw in a Nikon 2.5 x 50 telescopic sight and a silencer that I was assured was the best on the market. The whole kit fit comfortably in a briefcase or similar sized bag, so at least I wouldn't have to traipse though a built up area carrying what any fool would recognise as a rifle case.

I spent a couple of hours every evening for the next few days sighting in the rifle well away from nosey Parkers until I was completely satisfied with its accuracy. The vendor wasn't bullshitting about the silencer, because apart from a sharp hiss of escaping gas when the weapon was discharged it was practically silent. Though I'm not the best marksman in the world I'm good enough. I know what I'm doing with guns of all descriptions because I spent the latter years of my childhood on a farm. After a little practise I could hit a two inch wide bullseye at a hundred and fifty yards seven times out of ten and narrowly miss it the other three. I visited the scene of the proposed crime just a couple of days before take off to check out the lie of the land and tarry it with the maps I had studied. It didn't take me long to locate a raised patch of ground with a dense clump of beech trees at its summit about seventy yards from the perimeter, and after selecting an appropriate spot in a tree that was piss-easy to climb and trimming off a few branches to clear my line of fire I was happy.

The long anticipated evening of the concert soon arrived, and the butterflies in my stomach flapped like hell. I sat near the main entrance to County hall in a borrowed BMW for over an hour before the concert started so I wouldn't miss Donna's arrival. The bitch had livid ginger hair so I guessed she wouldn't take much spotting in a crowd, and when she came into sight arm in arm with her ferrety looking husband I noted that she was wearing a shocking pink t shirt with some indiscernible scrawl across her almost non-existent tits and an electric blue biker's jacket. To top it she walked right past me without even a glance..... 'This is going to be easier than I thought,' I mused. As soon as they entered the venue I drove off and left the car in a quiet cul-de-sac I had selected a few days previously. I made my way into the park with a black Adidas bag over my shoulder an hour before the whistle sounded to announce that the gates were about to be locked for the night, but by then I was safely hiding in the undergrowth sipping scalding coffee from my flask.

The floodlights came on outside County hall at 11.45, much later than I anticipated, and at first the crowd trickled out in little clusters rather than pouring out in a confusing throng. My buttocks ached like fuck although I had only been perching with the pigeons for just over an hour, but I could cope with that – I was prepared to put up with any amount of discomfort as long as I had my moment of triumph to look forward to.

I had brought along a pair of powerful binoculars, but the view through the scope was more than adequate. The flow of people increased over the next fifteen minutes, but there was no sign of my target and her pet ferret. My butterflies were getting unbearably agitated, but at long last I spotted Donna's distinct ginger hair and garish, mutton dressed as lamb clothing. For a moment the silly cow stood perfectly still with her back to me on the uppermost steps of the County hall leaning slightly forwards as her man lit her cigarette – she couldn't have posed for a better shot if I'd sent specific instructions or hired a choreographer, so I rested my wrist on a sturdy branch, steadied my aim and held my breath for a moment as I gently squeezed the trigger.

Shooting someone in the skull with a high velocity rifle, even from quite a distance, is nothing like it's depicted in the movies. The white hot chunk of lead must have hit the back of Donna's head more or less slap bang in the middle because her cranium exploded all over her hubbie, showering his white sweatshirt with blood and brains and shards of bone as he lit his own ciggy. Donna went down like a ton of bricks, and I could clearly hear the screaming as the crowd fled like distressed wildebeest. The ferret looked surprised as he probed his chest with his fingers for a second or two, and he clearly didn't like what he found because he waved his arms in the air for a second or two like a hefty bird trying to take wing, and then he crumpled on top of his spouse. “Two with one shot!” I cried. “Back of the fucking net!”

I dismantled the rifle, climbed carefully to the ground and hurried away through the darkness. I climbed over a fence backing onto the park that I had marked with chalk during my last visit, sneaked through someone's back garden and a minute later I was climbing into the BMW. I dropped off my bag and its incriminating contents at a friend's flat about a mile away for safekeeping, dodging a rushing ambulance and several police cars on the way, and in another half an hour I pulled onto the drive of my then girlfriend, Natalie. It was absolute bliss to pull off my sweaty clothes and jump into the shower. Natalie knew nothing of my escapade, but I was confident that she would have given me with a firm alibi for the evening if I needed one, and she provided plenty of hot loving without me having to ask.