Free The Election by Jerome Teel

gathering around the front of the barn. Creatures of habit, Jesse thought, as the cattle lined up along the feeding troughs. They recognized his truck and knew it was feeding time.
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    A man lay undetected in a wooded area two hundred yards away, watching as a white pickup rolled slowly toward the barn. Clouds of dust rose up behind the vehicle and then settled softly to the ground.
    He glanced at his watch. 7:40. Right on time.
    He looked back at his prey. A man with the same routine was easy to kill. A small hill in the wooded area near the barn provided the best position from which to make the hit. He’d discovered the area the day before when he’d scouted the farm. It had plenty of underbrush to provide cover and was slightly elevated from the target destination.
    The camouflage clothing he wore blended precisely with the underbrush, making him virtually invisible. He lay on his stomach near the crest of the rise, peering at his mark below. As he kept his eye on the white truck of his enemy, he reached into a pocket on the outside of his right leg and removed two brass-colored .308 hollow-point bullets.
    He thought of every victim as the enemy. It didn’t matter that he had never met any of his victims or that he knew little about them. They stood between him and payday, and that made all of them the enemy.
    Hardly a muscle in his body twitched as he slowly slid the two bullets into the chamber of his Tango 51 sniper rifle and heard the click of metal against metal. He rarely needed the second but wanted it as a backup. He preferred hollow points because they made a small entry point but an exit hole the size of a grapefruit. With his rifle loaded, he lay motionless, waiting for the precise instant to complete his assignment.
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    Bad Dog Saloon, east of Jackson, Tennessee
    Jed awoke after sleeping slumped over for several hours in the cab of his pickup in front of the Bad Dog.
    It was the day scheduled for the foreclosure on his house. A sudden pain stabbed him in his stomach. He quickly chased it away with anger and a sip from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he found in the seat with him.
    He had no intentions of losing his home. If his lawyer wouldn’t help, he’d just have to convince the great Jesse Lamar Thompson himself to stop the foreclosure.
    Jed left the Bad Dog and miraculously made his way across town without colliding with any other vehicles or being stopped by a member of the Jackson Police Department. He took another long, hard drink from the whiskey bottle as he drove along Old Medina Road toward the Thompson farm. It was well known that Jesse Thompson stopped by his cattle farm every morning before going to his office at the bank.
    The alcohol in his blood system negatively affected his motor skills, and his old, dented, red Dodge truck swerved from side to side, crossing the centerline of Old Medina repeatedly. He ran off the shoulder on the right-hand side of the road, scattering dirt and gravel, and then whipped the steering wheel to the left, barely avoiding going into a drainage ditch. That overreaction almost caused him to broadside a small black pickup parked on the side of the road. Somehow he managed to straighten his front wheels and avoided hitting the other truck by mere inches.
    Jed was going too fast to turn in to the Thompson-farm entrance, but he tried anyway. He came to a sliding stop with the front half of his truck hanging off the shoulder of the road. He wasn’t surprised to see that the gate was locked. Jesse had to be there, though, because the white pickup was parked at the barn.
    Jed was determined not to leave until he’d convinced Jesse to stop the foreclosure.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Thompson cattle farm, Jackson, Tennessee
    The assassin lying on his belly heard the commotion at the entrance of the Thompson farm as a red Dodge pickup pulled up. He thought about aborting his mission, but only for an instant. He had to make the hit today, and nothing was