The Killing Vision - By Will Overby Page 0,1

that old rhyme? Red sky at morning, sailor take warning, or some shit like that. Only the sky wasn’t red, just gray and lifeless.

He peeked under the covers, down past his rotund belly, to his underwear. Was anything happening down there this morning? Any party in his pants today? Nope. Nothing. Limp noodle city, baby. Actually, he hadn’t had an erection in so long, he could hardly remember what it felt like. Or what it looked like, for that matter. It was probably shriveled up past the point of no return. Like a fucking raisin.

He reached out and grabbed a crumpled pack of Marlboros off the bedside table, pulled one out with his gummy lips, and lit it. First one of the day. God, it felt good, sucking that sweet nicotine down inside. He placed the ashtray on his chest, the amber glass cold against his skin, and balanced the cigarette on its edge, watching the steel-blue smoke curl upward from the smoldering glow of the tip, feeling the pleasant buzz in his chest.

The radio blared on again, and the ashtray tumbled off his chest when he jumped, spilling ashes, crushed butts, and his lit cigarette across the sheets. “Shit!”

Gary Hamby of the WCDH morning show was just starting the news. Joel was in the midst of cleaning up the mess on the bed when he heard the report of the body they had pulled from the river last night. It was Sarah Jo McElvoy. The fourteen-year-old girl had been missing since April. Her throat had been cut.

Joel wondered briefly if he might be able to find the killer, wondered if by touching Sarah Jo’s lifeless body the vision of her attacker’s face would swim before him. But he knew better. The few times he had touched a dead person he had come away with nothing.

After standing in the numbing flow of the shower for ten minutes, Joel pulled on his coveralls and sat down at the kitchen table for another cigarette and a mug of black coffee.

He leaned back and stretched, feeling the soreness in his shoulders from climbing the cable tower at work the other day. He had almost asked Wade to do it; Wade was older, thirty-three, but he was in much better shape. But he knew Wade would get pissed. Wade was like that; you couldn’t ask him any favors because he resented it, and he held it over your head for the rest of your life. Even if he was your older brother. Besides, climbing the tower was Joel’s job.

He had been halfway up when the pain shot through his left arm, a pain so sudden and sharp he thought at first he had been stung by a hornet. But there was nothing. Sweat poured down his face, and despite his lack of fear of high places, his head spun with vertigo. His boots slipped off the tower. For a brief, horrifying moment he knew he was going to fall. He was going to plummet straight to the bottom of the ridge that held the tower. The safety equipment holding him, the same straps and buckles he barely looked at when he put them on, would fail, would break under the strain of his weight. He clinched his eyes shut and braced his body, waiting for the plunge.

But it never happened. The safety harness held, and he was able to regain his footing, resting his head against the hot metal of the tower while he tried to catch his breath.

“Hey,” Wade called up to him. “Let’s get on with it. It’s almost time for lunch.”

Joel climbed the rest of the way to the top without incident, made a great show of pretending to inspect the cables, and inched back to the bottom. He doubled over and rested his elbows on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. He fully expected Wade to lay into him for almost falling, but he didn’t. Wade had apparently either not seen or didn’t care.

Wade clapped him on the back. “You’re gonna have to start workin’ out, man,” he said.

And now as he sat at the table in the dim kitchen, Joel massaged his arm and shoulder. For a while he had thought he might have suffered a light heart attack. That scared him worse than the possibility of falling to his death. But this morning he still felt sore, and he was fairly sure he had just pulled a muscle. But he was still going to find