Dreams in Noir - a Short Story

The streets out below the office building window teemed with bad characters. I was looking for a particular one; they call him Jack. He's responsible for a slew of murders ranging from infants not old enough to crawl, to old timers exhaling the dust in their age. Girl or boy, man or woman; there's no veritable pattern in what he kills or has killed, except that there's always a dried red rose left resting across the victim's mouth. What's left of it, at least. What's worse is that he just kills them, no identifiable motive, no property of the victim's is taken, just a sport kill and a withered rose to show for it. This rung bells across the low lives and the scum of the city; "a murder almost like art" some fool reporter wrote in the paper, spawning numerous copy-cat killings in a sub-culture where thieves and rapists in the mind of poetic zealots became Picasso and Dali almost overnight. I took the case because I never had much interest in artistic merit. As a child, I never had much of an imagination. My mother said I had serious eyes; the women in my life said they were lonely. To add to that, my dreams haven't been too kind to me; and to be candid about it I'd rather not knock on the door and ask why. I'd bet a pretty penny that Rita Hayworth isn't going to be there to answer it.

It's been almost eight months since I took the case on. The fellas upstairs have always been a nice enough crowd, asking every chance they get if I need help gathering intel. But all that jazz is simply out of courtesy. If you look, and I mean really look at their faces when they say it, the way their lips press together so thin their mouths almost cease to exist; they're really scared to death of this guy, and who can blame them? A psychopath killer who leaves a trail of dead roses wherever he walks would scare the wits out of the most hard-boiled of men.