It is mid-November during the winter of 1986 in the great city of Manhattan, New York, the metropolis of the United States of America. The ice and snow stirs upon the little ants, below the massive building that seemed to touch the sky. A man stands atop the building looking down on the small dots below in amazement of how high up he actually stands; below it’s a cold winter day, but atop the building it feels as though ghosts are gliding across one’s body when there’s but the slightest breeze. He can almost feel that there are other entities upon this earth sucking the mirth right out of ones soul. It is though the whole earth is a figment of imagination, beyond the reality of ones existence: another reality between heaven and hell. Where someone waits to be relieved of their duty, of stealing souls.
The man begins to tremble as he stands anew on top of the vast structure known as the Empire State Building. In his hands he holds what looks to be an empty bag. It’s but only mid-afternoon in the bustling town of Manhattan where people scurry about here and there, as though ghosts gliding upon the ethereal path that leads to heaven and hell. He cannot show emotion, this is his job. A job he must do for the sake of his life.
In the midst there’s one man who stands out above the others. He’s very different kind of man he sticks out from the rest of specs awning the ground, not from his air of calmness, but his air of resilience in every long stride of his hefty exterior. He’s a very stout, burly man of merely 24 years, but he’s one of the mob’s top priorities. Many hitmen have been hired to dispose of him, but despite their best efforts they’ve been out-witted and killed by him; he’s evasive. He has a reputation for being a stealthy assassin and biding his time to strike upon the top mob bosses. To secure a ladder straight to the top for himself. He had a very broad heritage with the mob, seeing how he was raised in Italy and Sicily for a majority of his life. He was born and raised in a strict Catholic family, where beatings were regular between him and three younger siblings. They were regularly hit, but perhaps that’s why the man turned out the way he did, strong, agile, and fearless. He lived in a house surrounded by the ever deepening thickets of lush green trees, and varieties of other shrubbery. It wasn’t until his teen years that as removed from his tiny family cottage in the woods of Sicily that he salvaged the money through the mob, taking his cut plus more conning the Patriarch of the devastating entourage known as the Italian-Sicilian mob.
He managed to escape the mob in Italy and Sicily, but they finally tracked him down to the bustling metropolis known as Manhattan. He thought he had been sly enough, but every corner of the mob is connected in a direct or indirect manner. His ghosts continually haunt him for his past sins; he is constantly on the run whether it be from hitmen or police. Though he has been stealthy enough to outthink, out run and out do every other dissentient he has come to face, he now deals with his better half.
Unknowingly the hitman had been watching, perceiving, and taking in every little aspect of his life. He had sized him up from top to bottom watching every movement, estimating his strength and overall fitness. Looking for weaknesses, but that had only proved to be a futile task because of the allusiveness of his older adversary. The hitman watches from a distance through a scope which he appeared to have spontaneously pulled out of nowhere. He has no emotion about him none whatsoever, could it be that something haunts him or that he knows he only has one chance at pulling his duty off. He will be paid seventy-five thousand dollars for the corpse of his opponent, but something eats at him, normally he would not have trouble in doing his job, but something about this man he was hunting made him very eerie, something crawled in him and ate at him, telling him something dark and foreboding that this would not end well. He must persevere though he cannot show emotion; if he does it could prove to be fatal. He has one chance and one chance only to deal a deadly blow to the man who stands nearly seven hundred feet down and almost half a mile away. It seems as though he is waiting calmly for something or someone….
He unloads what appeared to be an empty case, and assembles the intricately shaped sniper rifle. It is encased by a black exterior, with nothing more than a scope. He must account for everything; the distance, the direction of the wind, and how hard it is blowing, he has only one shot and one shot only. He begins furiously calculating everything, dialing in on his primary target. If he is successful an enormous pay check awaits him. He keys in and draws a bead on his target plugging in the distance and everything else necessary for the long slender black rifle with intricate cuts all about it to do its job, like the hundred times before.
It speaks to the hitman; it’s a very hungry soul that aches for the chance to quench its hunger by taking another life. It would seem that the rifle has a mind of its own, but that’s just the hungering side of the hitman waiting for the right moment. Before he looks into the elongated scope trying to connect the crosshairs to the young, but older adversary. He begins to reminisce of the old days, remembering his childhood with his one older brother and two younger siblings, his lovely baby sister and his twin brother. Even though there life was not prodigious, it was bearable and they made what they could out of it. He remembers the last time he had been with his older brother, so many long years ago, but his brother had gone away for unknown reasons fleeing to America. After thinking about his childhood merriment he comes to the realization that if he misses the shot, the hunter will become the hunted, he begins to sweat nervously as deathly cold sweat glistens down his forehead.
The air around him becomes very cold, he feels chills creep up and down his spine, and can see his own breath. Could it be ghosts of his past come back to haunt him? God is not on his side, the wind does not seize. It seems as though only ghosts of his past are with him, possibly the Angel of Death, Satan. He quickly shakes off the thought and begins to sight in on his kill zone. The man still stands there, he has not budged since the early morning. Now someone stands in front of him, through the scope the hitman can see that the person standing next to him is a woman with a child, a baby no bigger than his bag.
The man in the scope seems overly ecstatic, as though finds out promising news; the expression on his face is as innocent as a new bron baby. The hitman staggers for a second pondering what could be so perplexing about a woman with a baby. He nudges the thought away zones in and fires. The rifle screams “BANG!,” as the bullet soars toward its mark. All that can be heard for blocks and blocks is the echo of the reoccurring gun-blast. The hitman loses focus and can hear the faint shouts ringing out below. He refocuses in on the kill zone to see a blurry of dots running around. He can see a body lying on the ground, but he is not definite about which body it might be. He quickly takes apart his long slender rifle, piece by piece allowing some time to pass so that the area clears and the crowd thins out, this is not the case though as he comes to espy. He is a holy man though, and thanks his creator for the endowed vision and steadiness, he ends the prayer with the Trinity (father, son, holy-spirit.). He runs to the door of what seems to be a never ending run to begin down the slowly descending dstairs. Finally he reaches the long corridor below the doors to the lower streets; treading slowly, he walks toward the sight of mayhem.
He is relieved to see that the body is the designated target, but the woman is weeping uncontrollably with make-up in an array of colors rolling down her face onto the sobbing baby and deathly pale body, which has gone forever limp. A cop hurries over to identify the body and possible cause of death. The hitman sits in the back waiting for identification the lady releases the limp body, and the policeman pulls out a wallet and whispers the name; the hitman faintly hears it. The first time the name was said the hitman did not want to accept it, because the last name resembled his, but it was repeatedly stated.
The hitman stumbles back feeling all to sick to even begin to collaborate the evidence that had just struck him like a lightning bolt striking a tree. Could it be that he had actually been hunting his older brother for the past three months. He had quite possibly just earned his place in hell, for that day brought no glee for anyone, the innocent body lying before him was not only his objective, but it was his brother, the one who had backed and held him up so many times when he was down as a young boy. No justice had been served that day, many people died that day not on the outside, but on the inside, the poor lady, and the sickly hitman who would rather have died that day than come to observe the body. The torment is unbearable as though someone had just stuck a knife in his back and slowly and continually turned the blade. No one spoke, but the hitman couldn’t understand why. Something touched him though it was not a light-hearted touch, but something from a bible passage about the devil, he felt his body go cold, and the last thing he heard was the baby crying. The light faded, his eyes went dark, amd he heard nothing……….