Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz

this floor plan as with the street layout of the city.
    Through the goggles, everything has a greenish cast, and white objects seem to glow with a ghostly inner light. He feels as if he is in a science-fiction movie, an intrepid hero exploring another dimension or an alternate earth that is identical to ours in all but a few crucial respects.
    He eases open the master-bedroom door, enters. He approaches the king-size bed with its elaborate Georgian headboard.
    Two people are asleep under the glowing greenish blankets, a man and woman in their forties. The husband lies on his back, snoring. His face is easily identifiable as that of the primary target. The wife is on her side, face half buried in her pillow, but the killer can see enough to ascertain that she is the secondary target.
    He puts the muzzle of the P7 against the husband’s throat.
    The cold steel wakes the man, and his eyes pop open as if they have the counterbalanced lids of a doll’s eyes.
    The killer pulls the trigger, blowing out the man’s throat, raises the muzzle, and fires two rounds point-blank in his face. The gunfire sounds like the soft spitting of a cobra.
    He walks around the bed, making no sound on the plush carpet.
    Two bullets in the wife’s exposed left temple complete his assignment, and she never wakes at all.
    For a while he stands by the bed, enjoying the incomparable tenderness of the moment. Being present at a death is to share one of the most intimate experiences anyone will ever know in this world. After all, no one except treasured family members and beloved friends are welcome at a deathbed, to witness a dying person’s final breath. Therefore, the killer is able to rise above his gray and miserable existence only in the act of execution, for then he has the honor of sharing that most profound of all experiences, more solemn and significant than birth. In those precious magic moments when his targets perish, he establishes relationships, meaningful bonds with other human beings, connections that briefly banish his alienation and make him feel included, needed, loved.
    Although these victims are always strangers to him—and in this case, he does not even know their names—the experience can be so poignant that tears fill his eyes. Tonight he manages to remain in complete control of himself.
    Reluctant to let the brief connection end, he places one hand tenderly against the woman’s left cheek, which is unsoiled by blood and still pleasantly warm. He walks around the bed again and gives the dead man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, as if to say, Goodbye, old friend, goodbye.
    He wonders who they were. And why they had to die.
    Goodbye.
    Down he goes through the ghostly green house full of green shadows and radiant green forms. In the foyer he pauses to unscrew the silencer from the weapon and to holster both pieces.
    He removes the goggles with dismay. Without the lenses, he is transported from that magical alternate earth, where for a brief while he felt a kinship with other human beings, to this world in which he strives so hard to belong but remains forever a man apart.
    Exiting the house, he closes the door but doesn’t bother locking it. He doesn’t wipe off the brass knob, for he isn’t concerned about leaving fingerprints.
    The cold breeze soughs and whistles through the portico.
    With ratlike scraping and rustling, crisp dead leaves scurry in packs along the driveway.
    The sentinel trees now seem to be asleep at their posts. The killer senses that no one watches him from any of the blank black windows along the street. And even the interrogatory voice of the owl is silenced.
    Still moved by what he has shared, he does not hum his little nonsense tune on the return trip to the car.
    By the time he drives to the motor hotel where he is staying, he feels once more the weight of the oppressive apartheid in which he exists. Separate. Shunned. A solitary man.
    In his room he slips off the shoulder holster and puts it on the