Masks. My son disappeared on Halloween. I’d thought I’d lost him. But a month later he was rescued off a tiny atoll up the Hawaiian Island chain. The man who’d been hired to kill him had a change of heart. For whatever reason, he let Dave live. And for that, I’m forever thankful.
I know I could never be successful as a hired killer. I’m pretty sure. Killing a man, it’s a hard thing to do. For most of us, it’s the kind of thing that we can rarely think ourselves capable of doing. We may enjoy watching the bad guys get their just desserts in the movies, but in real life, we shudder to think that we might even witness a shooting let alone participate in one.
A police officer, even one who serves thirty of forty years on the force, may draw his weapon, some more than others, but in the rarest of cases where he fires it, and even rarer with the intent to kill another human being. We are not doing the job we do to take lives. We are sworn to try to save lives when necessary. We are paid, in part, to put our own lives in harm’s way should the public be threatened. We take the bullet.
Statistics show that most officers, no matter how long their careers, never fire a shot. And in the ideal world that’s the way it should be. In a perfect world where everything is good, and everyone works together for a common good, there are no shots fired in the line of duty.
I have fired my weapon. Too many times. And I have killed human beings. It takes something significant to work a man up to that point. And I’ve reached that point and passed beyond it. I know very well when it’s coming, I recognize its onset, and I’ve experienced the finality of its full-blown arrival on the scene.
It’s a frightening sensation. It’s as if you are no longer yourself. You’re transformed into something foreign to whatever you believed you were in terms of the sanctity of human life. It’s almost an out-of-body experience. Certainly an out-of-mind one. At that moment before you pull the trigger, you are no longer you. You’ve become something that may have been hidden away somewhere deep and dark inside of you. Something, perhaps, that’s been kept in check. The civilized you, the social contract you, has been the circus performer with your whip and chair, taming the lion within that wants to strike out. Someone you probably never dreamed you might become.
Losing my wife to cancer brought unbearable sorrow. But I can imagine how much more horrible it would have been had she been murdered. I can feel how much Sean Daniel must have wanted revenge for that. Why he would want to jump back into the hunt for her killers. How he would want to shoot the man, or woman, responsible. Watch that person die at his own hands. Oh yes, the satisfaction. Yeah, I know that feeling. I’ve lived it. And I have lost irrecoverable pieces of the person I would have been had I become that amiable high school English teacher instead of a sworn public guardian carrying this badge and this gun.
But will Sean Daniel find the revenge he hopes for? That is the question. And, sadly, I believe I know the answer now.
Lanning Lee 