Serial Killer Super Short Stories

If I ride hard and I ride through the night, I’ll reach Barstow by morning.

And there,

There, I’m gonna kill me a man.

Don’t know the guy. Never met him. Never had any hatred for him neither. All I have is his first name, an address, a list of things I’m supposed to say when I kill him.

Every week it’s the same thing. One name, one address, one list of things I forget as soon as I’ve read it to the poor sucker on the wrong end of my twelve gauge. Sometimes the name is someone just a few miles down the road, sometimes halfway across the country. Sometimes the name I get belongs to a girl, sometimes to a little kid, but most of them, most of the names I get are men, mid-thirties or forties, balding, in business or accounting, a job that puts their dirty hands in contact with a lot of easy money.

All of them have one thing in common.

All of them are sick.

On the first morning of Mr. Sleuth’s stay in the Buntings’ house, while Mrs. Bunting was out buying things for him, the new lodger had turned most of the pictures and photographs hanging in his sitting-room with their faces to the wall!

But this queer action on Mr. Sleuth’s part had not surprised Mrs. Bunting as much as it might have done; it recalled an incident of her long-past youth—something that had happened a matter of twenty years ago, at a time when Mrs. Bunting, then the still youthful Ellen Cottrell, had been maid to an old lady.

The old lady had a favorite nephew, a bright, jolly young gentleman who had been learning to paint animals in Paris; and it was he who had had the impudence, early one summer morning, to turn to the wall six beautiful engravings of paintings done by the famous Mr. Landseer!

The old lady thought the world of those pictures, but her nephew, as only excuse for the extraordinary thing he had done, had observed that “they put his eye out.”