The Sinner Hunting System

Elena looked around the café. Nobody had noticed the gun.

The weight of it, being at the wrong end of something like that, feeling her own life sitting in another person’s hand, settled over her cold and unpleasant.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," she said, keeping her voice level.

The stalker’s jaw was tight.

"You were supposed to be perfect. The untouchable kind. The girl everyone envies, brilliant student, future pride of your family, everything going right.

Not this. Not wandering around on vacation, wasting your time, letting some man you’ve known for two days follow you around like you’re a normal person with no standards."

His eyes had the particular shine of someone whose reality has been organized around a single idea for a very long time.

"You weren’t supposed to be like this. It’s all wrong. Everything is wrong."

He reached into his pocket and produced a doll. Rough work, carved wood, a crudely painted face, brown eyes, a wig assembled from hair that had clearly been collected from somewhere it shouldn’t have been.

"See? I made you. Doesn’t it look just like you?

Ha. I had to go through the drains under your building to find enough of your hair. Took a long time."

Elena breathed slowly and felt the cold spread up the back of her neck.

The stalker looked at the doll. The worship in his eyes shifted into something darker.

"I admired you so much. You were everything. And you threw it all away."

His voice had the quality of someone reciting a grievance they’ve lived with for years.

"You have the family everyone wishes they had. The money, the connections, a mother who’s a Chief Justice.

You have the mind everyone wants, memory like a machine, top marks in everything, every teacher’s favorite. And you..."

He pointed at his own face.

"You’re nothing like me. Ugly, mediocre, nobody. You were beautiful and graceful and everyone loved you. You had no idea what it cost the rest of us to watch that."

The bell above the café door rang.

A warm current of outside air moved through the room.

The stalker felt something knock against the gun in his hand, light, like a brush, but when he looked around, nobody was close enough. He told himself it was nothing.

Elena didn’t look. She understood, now, what was driving this. She’d seen it before, in a different shape.

The constructed idol. The person who exists only inside someone else’s imagination.

She borrowed her mother’s voice, cool, flat, carrying the weight of a courtroom.

"Are you finished? Because what you’ve described is a disappointment of your own making. You built someone in your head.

You gave her every quality you wanted her to have, perfect, pure, elegant, untouchable. And then you watched the actual person fail to match the version you invented."

He tried to interrupt. She held eye contact and he stopped.

"So when I wasn’t clever enough, or elegant enough, or pure enough, whatever that means to you, you decided I’d betrayed you. That I’d broken character.

That the good student and the family pride were performances, and I’d dropped them."

She tilted her head slightly.

"You gathered a remarkable amount of information about me. More than I’ve put into learning about myself, honestly."

She almost smiled.

"You turned me into your ideal self. The version of you that succeeds, that’s loved, that the world treats well. You needed me to keep being that so you could keep believing it was possible."

A pause.

"You were a classmate, weren’t you. Suspended? Poor marks? I don’t even recognize your face."

She saw a familiar silhouette in her peripheral vision, standing just to the side, unhurried, listening.

Her voice came out sharper.

"So tell me. What standing do you have? What right do you have to stand over me and announce that I’ve failed to be what you decided I should be?

What obligation do I have to fulfill your expectations and live out your ideal future on your behalf?"

She looked at him directly.

"The person you worshipped was never me. It was a character you wrote. I didn’t audition for that role. I’ve never even met you."

His mouth worked. Several responses started and died in his throat.

"Shut up—!"

He slammed his palm on the table and stood, face red, voice breaking. Everyone in the café looked over.

When they registered that the woman’s companion had returned and was seated nearby, most of them looked away again.

He leveled the gun at Elena’s head.

"You think you’re so much better than me? You arrogant, disgusting..."

"I don’t believe you."

The stalker spun.

Raphael was sitting right beside him, one hand propped under his chin, elbow on the table, watching with the expression of someone who has been following a moderately interesting street performance.

The stalker swung the gun at him immediately, the sneer returning.

"Good. You’re here. I don’t know when you snuck in, but, kill you, and she goes back to being what she was supposed to be. Perfect again."

Raphael looked at him the way you look at something that doesn’t quite make sense, then exhaled.

"I’m not going to explain why you’re wrong. You don’t deserve to hear it."

The words landed like a pin going in somewhere specific. The stalker’s face changed.

"Then you can die without hearing it—"

He pulled the trigger.

No shot. No sound. Nothing.

"Looking for this?"

Raphael yawned, reached into his jacket pocket, and produced a full magazine and a single brass cartridge, both of which he set on the table with the casual presentation of someone returning borrowed items.

"No — that’s impossible! "

The stalker checked the gun with shaking hands. The magazine gone. The chamber empty.

Sometime between sitting down and this moment, while he’d been speaking, the man beside him had emptied the weapon without him noticing.

Raphael watched him work through this with a faint, cold curve at the corner of his mouth.

The red in his eyes was fading slowly.

The stalker laughed, not the sound of someone who has found something funny, but the sound of someone choosing a different strategy.

"You think this is over? You don’t understand."

He grabbed the wooden Elena doll from the table and threw it into the fireplace set into the café wall. The wood caught immediately.

He turned toward the window and raised his voice.

"Witch! I know you’re watching! I offer my life as the price, I want your curse!" He pointed at Elena. "I want her dead."