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As long as he was watching me, I was pretty sure there was no way I could escape.
The Orchid Strangler I
Iwouldneverhurt an animal. I have never hurt an animal.
Animals don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know right from wrong, they cannot learn, not really. They can be trained, sure, using rote memory, using skills they can get better at but never really hone.
When I was younger, I thought that people could be taught. I was naive. I waited for my father to change, then my mother, then my brother, and then I didn’t wait anymore. I knew people didn’t change.
I tried my best. I tried community outreach, policing in the way activists want you to police. I did crisis management, talked people off ledges–literally and figuratively–but none of that mattered.
There was no way for me to reach them. I tried to teach them to be good, kind, loving. I was hardly a blip on their radar, though, and the years went by without any significant change.
They all blamed the system. Even thesystemblamed the system, but I’d been part of the system, and I was an upstanding, contributing member of society. Most of the people I met, I was sure they had the chance to be that, too.
It made me realize that, no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to help. People didn’t need to be gently guided; they needed to be taught a lesson, to be shown the error of their ways.
That’s when I stopped helping and started hunting.
He was arrested, released. Arrested, released. He always came back to the same street corner, always looking worse for wear, always ready to inflict more damage on the people around him.
There were nice people in that neighborhood. People that didn’t need to be bothered by someone like him, with the ever-worsening limp and the toothless smile. My partner and I always stopped to take him to the drunk tank, but that didn’t seem to matter much.
He was back.
Every single fucking time.
I went back to the corner by myself, in the middle of the night, in my own vehicle. I waited for him to approach me, and he did, though I didn’t give him a chance to speak. He leaned his head down and I reached out to grab him by the scruff of his shirt, pulling him against the car hard enough to daze him. I threw my car door open, stepped out and pushed him inside the backseat.
He didn’t fight me. He must’ve been too drunk.
I got into the car with him, pulling my weapon out of its holster. I pressed it against his temple. He whimpered, begged, said something I couldn’t hear.
The cold metal of my gun left an imprint on his temple. Every bullet, every time the trigger was pulled, every time I handled my gun was meticulously, painfully accounted for.
There was no way for him to know that I wouldn’t use it.
”Please,” he said, his voice quivering. ”I’ll do anything you want. Anything.”
I knew he wouldn’t. I had asked him to get lost countless times, taken him to jail, given him the name of the best social worker I knew.
I was a good person.
I wanted to help.
But when people refused help…they didn’t deserve mercy.
It was strikingly simple: he didn’t want to change, and I didn’t want to see him around anymore.
Other than my gun, I didn’t have any weapons on me. But he was small, weak, even weaker now, and his breath reeked of booze.
I just wanted it to end. I wanted his rancid breath to stop filling the car, to stop taking up space and energy. So I put my hands around his throat and squeezed until I crushed his windpipe.
I didn’t mean to kill him like that. I didn’t derive pleasure from it. Even now that I’m well-practiced, I don’t derive pleasure from it.
I’m not a pervert.
But it is, I have to admit, much tidier than using a gun.
