Once Upon A High-Rise

The July afternoon sun beat down unmercifully on Mark Winslow’s head. Beads of sweat percolated from his scalp, racing through his prematurely grey hair, like ants to a picnic, eager to be the first to drip down his face and neck. He trudged along the edge of the highway muttering to himself while forcing one foot in front of the other. You’ve got to take a break from this case, Mark. You’re a walking nervous breakdown looking for a place to happen, Mark. I can see them now, throwing darts at a map after they cut Hawaii, Bermuda and the Caribbean out. One of the darts lands on Atlanta muggy Georgia, and voila, that’s where we’ll send him...in the middle of July. Oh, he’ll love it. Well, one more night of this crap and I’ll resign and haul my ass back to the Rocky Mountains in Montana, where the summers are seventy degrees, both days of it...and we hope it falls on a weekend. He laughed. He didn’t care. No one could hear him. Thankful that he left his sport coat in the rental that now sat umpteen miles back, he loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top three buttons of his sweat soaked white Oxford shirt and rubbed the back of his neck. I’ll call and let them know where they can find their damn car, but I bet I’ll never see that coat again. Wiping his face with his Dolcé & Gabbana silk necktie, a Christmas gift from his rich uncle, now hanging loosely around his neck, he thought, Suck it up, Sport, you could be back in New York still searching for the bastards who raped and tortured those four young women. Visions of the gruesome crime scenes mocked him yet again. Mark’s heart rate soared and his insides twisted. He could almost smell the rancid stench of what they had found at each grisly scene. He couldn’t get the vision of one of the victims out of his thoughts or dreams; no, they were nightmares. Bile rose up in his throat when he remembered her mutilated body, the cigarette burns on her breasts, and long surgical steel needles jammed through her cheeks and lips so she couldn’t scream or beg for mercy. The look on her face of agonizing pain and fear, frozen there by death, haunted him day and night. Those vicious, bloodthirsty bastards were clever, leaving no clues, but every dog has his day and I’ll get them yet. When I do I’ll castrate... Mark shook his head. Maybe the Bureau Chief was right, I did need to get away from it.