Did the doorknob move? The assassin held the rifle still, refocused his eye, and took another look through the high-powered scope. The front door cracked, but just barely. Maybe an inch or two. His heart pounded with the excitement of a hunter closing in on his prey. The target—he thought of her as a target because that made it easier to embrace the idea of shooting a woman—would be emerging any second, and hopefully he would be able to nail her right there on her front door stoop, dropping her like a stuck pig with a bullet to the head, and then he would be on his way, out of sight before someone noticed her lying there. He pulled back on the bolt action and then pushed it forward, chambering the single .223 death bullet, and with his right finger he began caressing the trigger, waiting for the target to emerge. He felt himself enter into a zone. Only a hunter-killer could relate. The seconds before a kill, the body of the killer was filled, from head to toe, with adrenaline-charged electricity that couldn’t be replicated by any other human sensation known to man.
