The business of murder is a messy business, which I why I could've never succeeded as a hit man.

Don't underestimate me. It's not because I can't handle the gore, the viscera, that single moment when the eyes of your enemy realize you are going to take his life and they flash furious and pleading. Those who've known me know that I can be cold and heartless when it's required of me.

No, I became the Point Man because of my impeccable attention to detail. And it's in the detail, the flawless precision of every moment I can control in my life, that I could never have been a murderer.

Murder-in real life-is unpredictably messy. It's all gun angles and splatters, digging shell casings out of walls, wiping fingerprints off door handles, straining to hear sounds approaching. It's cause, and it's clean up. And, of course, it's all terribly illegal.

Murder in dreams is something else, though. It feels like magic, I guess because it is, in a way. It's not real. When I pull that trigger, I know he's going to wake up, shocked and panting, adrenaline and endorphines pumping from his heart to his feet in waves of pain and panic. But because it's a dream, it's my dream or whoever's that's dreaming it, we make murder neat. A single bullet to the heart, the blood blooming onto a white shirt like a bouquet of red roses. Or to the brain, a body crumpling at my feet, a dark trickle rolling across the floor from an unseen exit wound at the back of the head, his hair hardly even mussed.

Murder in a dream feels like clipping a rose off a bush in real life. It's banal and predictable. It has weight-the weight of the gun, the trigger, the stem, the clippers-but no consequence. It's tidy, and it's over in less than a moment and then I can simply move on to the next task.

In real life, the business of murder is a messy business, one in which I have no interest. But in dreams, the business of murder becomes my buisness. I have made it so.