6th Floor Shooter || #Wattys2017

VII

// 23 November 1963 // 08:56 // 3903 Leath Street // Eagle Ford Neighbourhood // Dallas, Texas //

"It had to be some silly little Communist."

Ed's drive home was completely and utterly silent. No radio, no outside voices... nothing to settle his erratic nerves. Even the streets themselves shunned him, their vacant expanse like a ghost town stretching down the freeway as far as he could see either direction. Of course, no one would be travelling on a day like today, they would be fixated on their goddamn television sets, trying to make sense of the chaos. But here he was, inching through the narrow residential streets surrounding his residence.

It was his first return home since he had left almost 24 hours before. On that journey, with the rifle cocooned with a sheet, he had left with no concept of just how monumentally impactful his actions would become. It was his shots that had levelled the confidence of an entire nation. He had watched as not only the city, but the entire world had collapsed around him, like a fragile bubble.

Despite the irreversible shock radiating through across the globe, his neighborhood was still visibly unchanged. The next-door neighbor, the same young Latino woman, dressed in the same stained lily-patterned slip, continued to stare down the street with a diaper-clad toddler toted on her hip. The child's rusted wagon rested on the patchy lawn, perched asymmetrically on caved-in axels. Across the street, juvenile tracings of a lopsided hopscotch game remained etched onto the crumbling sidewalk, exactly how it had been when he left the day before.

His door was unlocked when he stumbled across the non-existent lawn perimeter of his property. In a shitty neighborhood like this, I got nothing but trash, he thought, if som'un was gonna steal som'thin', I ain't gon' miss it. He chuckled to himself as the peeling door swung open without so much as a turn of the knob. Inside, just like out, was frozen in a moment in which the President was still alive. Perhaps in that calm and alluring fantasy, he was settling down in Austin, preparing to eat breakfast with his wife... or talking to his children on the phone, sending good morning wishes to Washington.

Instead, his sightless eyes and lifeless body lay arranged on a hostile mortuary table somewhere in Maryland.

His return presence did nothing but make the latter shockingly obvious. He groped at the exposed wiring of the light switch protruding from a flaking wall. A flickering glow wavered from the fixture suspended from the ceiling, but only for a moment before sizzling out. Damn lightbulb...

Cowboy boots freed themselves from his feet as he slammed the door behind him; it flung shut with such force that paintings and photographs unluckily dangling from the wall quivered within their frames. His first steps, like a routine, brought him over to the rabbit-eared television set beside his barren mattress. Like the mattress, it was laid directly on the aging hardwood. Ordinarily, he would make a decision between the two channels he got consistently, but today was no such day. He knew with every ounce of certainty that either one would suffice. 

The set powered on, a dull glow filling the screen, before gradually lightening into the greyscale silhouettes of solemn faces. Even without volume, their pained and exasperated expressions carried more weight than their words ever could. But oh, how he wished he could hear them. How he could dissect the public façade of lies and deception, revealing what had truly happened. As the television set warmed up like a cat waking up from an afternoon nap, the volume returned. His fingers wrapped around the silver volume dial, much like the practiced hands had contorted around the rifle trigger. He turned it ever so slightly down, captivated by every word.

"Dallas police arrest suspect in presidential assassination, after murder the of a local officer"

"Overwhelming evidence found relating Russian defector to JFK murder, he is currently being held in police custody"

"There is no conspiracy, I repeat, no conspiracy. This atrocious act is purely the action of a single gunman... more information coming as it is available."

Every word grabbed his attention and held it, like a kidnapper demanding a ransom. Every word he heard, every word that was fed to the public, was lapped up like warm milk. And only he knew how false it truly was. He lowered his exhausted body onto the faded floorboards, spewing up dust and dirt as he sat down. He crossed his legs, still clad in the same wool pants as the day before, as he intently studied the expressions of the newscasters. He felt juvenile, like a child watching cartoons, but these cartoons were far more stern than anything a child would be concerned with.

Footage of a familiarly scrawny man flashed across the screen, unsteady camera work struggling to keep him in frame. Reporters' flashing camera bulbs illuminated his defeated face. To Ed, if hit wasn't for the man's voice, he would have been unrecognizable. It was as if he had aged ten years in the past ten hours; he had the same hollow stare, but his eyes were no longer desperate or innocent. A large gash had been sketched above his right eye. His left had been marred with a swelling bruise. What was his name again...Oswald?

Ed watched the broadcast as he was led down the corridor and away from the Press. He smirked to himself. How easy it had been to pawn the evidence onto the Oswald man. To exploit his desperation with nothing more than the promise of a small sum of money. The gun... the bullet and cartridge...the fingerprints... all of it had deferred the attention from him.

He thought about his earlier discussion with Jack at the bar. How Jack had told him that the man who did this would forever live in history as the most infamous man in domestic history. He felt the jealousy again. The trip to the Depository was a suicide mission. He had disguised the rifle by wrapping it in the only sheet on his mattress. The sheet was now lost somewhere in the city, and his mattress lay bare. There was no intent to ever return home. He would have welcomed death... but that all changed after the third shot. After the third shot, the one that sent the President to his grave and the world into shock, his entire intent changed.

It was embarrassing. With Jackie dressed in that attention-grabbing shade of pink, his eyes were drawn to her like a target. That shot shouldn't have been difficult. He shouldn't have missed. Especially with that pillbox hat... it had sighted as the perfect headshot.

The hat.

He rose from his perch on the oak floorboards. Sweaty leather boots were replaced on his feet, and the door opened. It was still early in the morning, but he wouldn't have guessed it by the relentless sun already scalding the earth. It was sure to be yet another optimistically bright day.

The hat was still carefully placed on the passenger seat. He reached for it, pausing before he could feel the woolly texture on his skin. No one could ever know that he had taken it. A reputation as an assassin is one thing, but a reputation as a thief is another. His fingers grazed the top of the hat. Even only a day later, the brilliant pink seemed to have lost the enticing lustre he had seen through his scope. He no longer needed it, or the woman who owned it. Killing her now would solve nothing, for he didn't intend so much suffering on her. She was an innocent in his vendetta, caught in an unintentional turn of events.

A whiff of cigarette smoke drew his attention sharply back. The Latino woman next door was now standing on her piss-yellow grass, a grungy smoke stick shoved crudely into her mouth. The sound of strained metal erupted in down the street as her child pulled his wagon through the grass, collapsed wheels groaning while they reluctantly moved along.

"What do you have there?" Her tone was smooth but substantial, a surprising variation from her calm and clueless appearance.

"I ain't got shit. Mind your own goddamn business next time." Snarling words flew from his mouth. Upon slinking back into the ramshackle residence, his first move was to draw the ragged curtains across his window. The woman still watched him through the glass, as if she were aware of his mortal secret. He looked down at the hat; for as much time as he had spent fixated on every detail of it, it remained an unfamiliar sight. Even when he and Verna had been living together, she had never seen such as frivolous accessory.

Verna.

It was all for her that he had done this, and now it was all for nothing. A picture of her still sat on the stacking crate nightstand beside the mattress. But not for much longer. The glass already long gone, he didn't hesitate before pushing it onto the floor. He didn't even hear the clatter of cheap aluminum on gouged oak as it fell. Steadying his hand, he meticulously placed the hat on his bedside table. It was a trophy now.