Free Bad Desire by Gary; Devon

was a book in heaven and that everyone’s name was written in that book and along with their names, a time was written—an hour, a minute—when each living thing would die. Beecham remembered her saying that nobody could tamper with that book or stop it or do anything about it, not even Satan himself—that we all lived until we died and that it was God’s will. Beecham wondered if what he was doing wasn’t something like keeping God’s timetables. The thought of it made him smile.
    The second hand swept past eleven-fifteen as he staunched the car’s headlights, pulled the black Mustang into the churchyard of the San Lucia Mission and parked between the construction trailer and a stack of lumber. He shut the motor off, unzipped the gym bag on the seat beside him and began to remove its contents. On top was the snub-nosed .38 with the silencer attached. He set that out on the seat. Next was a denim field hand’s coat and two flannel-wrapped parcels, which he placed on the shallow floorboard. Now that the rain had started, Beecham put on the hip-length denim coat. Then he took a navy blue sock cap from the bag and tugged it smoothly over his head. He pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves.
    Once his hands were covered, he unwrapped the flannel from the two parcels: the first contained the working mechanism of a double-barreled shotgun sawed off to fourteen inches, an old LeFever Nitro Special, a beast of a gun still smelling faintly of oil and camphor. The second parcel held the stock, handmade of tubular steel; with a quick twist of a wing nut, he attached it to the back of the shotgun. Outside, lightning flared, but it was dark as a closet inside the car. He worked quickly, from memory. When the gun was assembled, he sat listening to the rain drum on the roof of the car and watching the lightning flash closer and closer. The storm was moving directly over him and settling in.
    A third square of flannel, which remained in the bag, contained a twin silencer that Beecham had tooled himself, but the thunder made the silencer unnecessary tonight and he preferred to work without it. Fire would spurt from the shortened barrels of the shotgun, but the shot would be cleaner.
    Assembled, the gun felt amazingly light; he swung it up toward the passenger window, drawing the hammers back. His finger grazed the triggers and the hammers flew down, striking with a single empty clack.
    He patted the two .00 bucks in his right denim pocket. They were three-inch, red-dot shells that he had loaded himself. He took the wire-rimmed glasses off and dropped them on the dashboard, squeezing the bridge of his nose with a pinch of his fingers. He returned the flannel pieces and the .38 Special to the bag and zipped it shut.
    There was a strip of tape over the switch in the door. When he got out of the car, the ceiling dome light remained dark. He placed the shotgun inside his coat, snug under his left arm. Taking the gym bag, he closed the driver’s door, locked it, then stashed the bag in the trunk, tugging briefly at the trunk’s lid to make sure it was secure.
    Beecham checked his watch. 11:23. The rain was falling harder now; his cap and coat were already wet with it. The lightning seemed to come in sheets and grow in intensity. Out over the Pacific, the storm was crossing the entire horizon like a volley of artillery fire. He set off on foot, following the short lane from the old chapel to the street and going across the street to the other side.
    The Buchanan house was five houses away, and in the flashes of light from the low, rolling clouds he could see the outline of its tile roof through the wind-whipped trees. The curving lane was deserted at this hour; only the streetlights cast ghostly pools on the pavement. Most of the houses were completely dark, but Beecham stayed well off to the side of the road, the rainy wind rustling the grass around him.
    When he was still a house away, he heard a car