Free The Eye: A Novel of Suspense by Bill Pronzini, John Lutz

my choosing.
    My first choice was Charles Unger. Have I explained about him? Not in enough detail, perhaps, and he is important. Because he was the first, and because it was through him that I realized my destiny and achieved my apotheosis.
    The Eye had closely observed him, along with all the others in my universe. A cantankerous old man, red of nose and gray of hair, a prodigious consumer of alcohol. But it was not drink that led to his death, except indirectly; it was rudeness. For he was rude to me, and that is a form of blasphemy.
    I was walking one afternoon in the midst of that which is mine, having parked my car some distance from West Ninety-eighth, as I generally do. I felt my power that day as I walked among my children, felt it surging through me like an electrical current. And Charles Unger, whom I considered to be without sin at that time, rudely shoved me aside so he could cross an intersection before the traffic light changed. A cab screamed to a stop quite near me. Furious, I protested. But Unger was drunk; he became loud and belligerent, turned and shoved me again so that I stumbled backward over the curb and almost fell. Then he walked on in mortal ignorance.
    I was stunned and I did not act immediately. But I understood as I watched the lurching old man push his way through other pedestrians and cross the street that he had made a fatal mistake. In my mind he was already dead, and so he would be, and was, in actuality. He had left me no choice. As Bailey said, “He hath no power that hath not power to use.” So, in a sense, not acting against Charles Unger would have diminished my power.
    The Eye observed him for several days after that. I would smile as I watched him idly stumble about the neighborhood. He was restless in his retirement, unsure of how to spend his time, not realizing that nearly all of it was already spent. Then one night I parked my car in the usual place, walked into my domain, and waited for Charles Unger to return from a tavern he habitually frequented in the evenings. And after first whispering to him of vengeance and of the wages of sin, I released him from this life.
    On my way home last night, I understood that Unger would not be the last of the evil ones to receive swift justice by the hand of the deity. Death is the swift and deserved end for the sinner. To eliminate the wicked is to strengthen the lives of the chaste and the pure. A good god is a just god, and I was determined to be both.
    It was not difficult to select the second evil one to die. Peter Cheng I had observed with various young men, some Chinese and some Caucasian; his homosexual couplings were a mockery of all that is good and clean. And then, one night before his unshaded window, the Eye observed him lewdly exhausting his passion with two young men in leather costumes, while an obese Chinese woman looked on, stroking herself. It was bizarre and repugnant. Could I allow Peter Cheng to remain among the living after this?
    I forgave him as I sent the bullet into his brain and freed him from his sins. I forgave Charles Unger as well; and I will forgive all the others who are to follow.
    Oh, I admit again that Martin Simmons was a mistake, and yet I have decided that he, too, deserved to die. He was a fornicator, an evildoer; he brought his evil into my universe, and he paid justly with his life. I have forgiven him too.
    The Eye continues to scan the windows of the buildings across the river, even as I dictate these words. Most of the windows are dark now, shades and curtains drawn; most of my children are asleep. The sinners too—some of them. The brief sleep before the final one soon to come.
    Do they suspect, any of them, what is in store? Do they sense the higher purpose that is mine, or glimpse the specter of pale horse and rider? There is poetry in death, as every poet knows. Perhaps those about to die can somehow detect the meter of their own imminent demise.
    Yet if they do, they ignore it. Far removed