Prologue

​​The Will To Kill

        The woman quickened her pace and threw a glance behind her. There was no one there, but she could feel that someone was following her. It was nothing that she could detect with her normal senses; it was just an ominous feeling. She walked even more quickly, stretching her long legs to cover more ground. She saw a small park on her left but kept walking briskly to get back into the light from the next street light. She had phoned for a cab to pick her up, but knew she had to keep moving to get away from whoever might be following her. She heard a crunch of footsteps behind her and heard someone say, “I finally caught up to you.” She started to turn but suddenly felt a blinding pain in the back of her neck and everything went dark. She fell forward, her face planting in the grass and the gravel of the sidewalk.
        The man looked down at her and dropped the piece of pipe he had just used to knock the woman unconscious. He stared for just a moment, then went to work. The woman was lying face down in the grass beside the sidewalk, so he was forced to grab her shoulder to roll her over so he could see her. He looked at the woman lying in front of him and studied her bruised forehead and right cheek where she had landed half on the grass and half on the gravel sidewalk. He knelt down beside her, pulled her shirt out of her slacks, exposing her stomach and the bottom of her bra.
        He took a deep breath as he removed a short-bladed knife from the case he had been carrying. Holding up her shirt, he suddenly drove the blade into her, just below her chest. He pulled the blade out quickly and, still kneeling, rifled through the pockets of her shirt and pants but the only thing he could locate was a business card. He folded it and used it to wipe the woman’s blood from the knife, then replaced the weapon in the case.
As he stood up, he suddenly realized his error. He stared intently at the bruised face and said, “Shit, she’s not the right one.”
        Moving quickly, he grabbed the woman’s shoulder bag and ripped it from her unmoving body. He started to open it to see who it was he had just killed, but was startled by a small dog barking; the sound coming from across the street. He grabbed the pipe used to hit the woman then turned and hurried off, still grasping the purse and the bag holding the knife.
       An older man, being pulled ahead by a small dog, approached, then stopped and stared at the woman’s body and looked off into the distance at the dark figure moving quickly away from the scene.

Continental Heights, New York

Sunday Night