Page 136 of The Grave Artist

Ah, yes!

He recalled that Miss Spalding had a workbench downstairs in the basement.

His heart danced a bit at the memory, and he recalled a propane torch she’d bought to blister off paint.

Damon had been here recently and knew the red-and-black cylinder was still there.

He went downstairs to fetch it.

Chapter 65

Tristan Kane centered the crosshairs of the gunsight on where he knew the individual would appear from behind a building.

Unaware and vulnerable.

The weapon was a Hawk & Little Bullpup assault rifle with a sixty-round extended magazine. It had cost $14,000, but Kane didn’t mind because he happened to own stock in the arms manufacturer.

“Come on, come on,” he whispered.

And then the target appeared.

Kane watched Jake Heron scan the parking lot as he stopped walking.

Now . . .

A three-round burst from the Bullpup.

Every round struck its target. Blood spurted and Heron dropped. He twitched once.

And, why not? Kane let loose with another stream.

Now, the figure was still.

Kane, not a smiler, smiled now.

If only it had been real.

In his modest bed-and-breakfast two-roomer not far from Damon Garr’s house, Kane was sitting in front of his Dell Alienware gaming computer with 64 GB RAM and a 24 GB Nvidia graphics card. The game he was playing was his own version ofGrand Theft Auto. He’dscored the source code and hacked together some script that let him do deepfakes—swapping the faces of the characters inGTAfor faces of those he wanted to shoot, bludgeon, stab, burn and blow up.

Jake Heron’s avatar figured in several of his games.

So did Carmen Sanchez’s.

To Tristan Kane, first-person shooter games were one of the finest creations in the history of ... well, he was going to say the computer gaming world, but he had to expand that to one of the finest creations ever. He was too young to have playedMaze War, the originalWolfenstein 3D(which put FPSs on the map) or the firstDoom. But at eight or so he jumped on the bandwagon, and lost himself inHomefront,Rainbow Six,Gears of War,Call of Duty,Far Cry...

His favorite, though, wasGrand Theft Auto, which started as a third-person shooter, but was now a first person. (And, yes, it was a shooter game but there were adventure and social simulation elements to it as well.) He did more than just kill prostitutes, police officers and passersby. He was active in the community. The Hawk & Little arms company was traded on the game’s fictional stock exchange.

Kane could have made a million dollars a year on Twitch or another gaming channel, where people (and advertisers) paid talented gamers money while they sat on their asses and manned or womanned joystick and keyboard. But that would have meant killing only pixels. If Kane were to make a million dollars it would be from arealjob—say, working for a hit man who needed help in breaking through his targets’ security system.

Sipping herbal tea—chamomile—he reflected on what he loved about first-person shooters: they were in perfect harmony with who he had been at a young age. In a shooter game there was no delicacy, no propriety, no coddling.

Through your moves you could unapologetically destroy your opponent. Make them quiver, make them cry.

Make them dead.

And inMortal Kombat, say, rip out their spines and their beating hearts.

Politeness and, by extension, mercy were a waste of time in the FPS world.