A ringing in his ear, the cry of his saint-like shoulder angle, interrupted the tuneless melody of the  people far below. Mosquitoes of traffic, buzzing in impulses so speedily that it sounds as if it was but one drawn-out note, the taxis honked their horns with the fury caused by the city’s everyday traffic. They experience this everyday, he thought. Why act as if this is a new cause of such frustration?
 
He had never experienced road rage.
 
I suppose murderers have more things on their minds.
 
Kasey Rustler was what one would consider a quiet type in her youth, hushed by the events in her life that drove her to madness. At first look, one would say she’s attractive in a petite, healthy way. She had rich hair, a poetic person would say strands of gold woven by expert craftsmen who have perfected their work through generations of equally passionate artisans. However, Kasey was from the suburbs, and they would call it “hot”.
 
In reality, though, Kasey was a methhead, a pothead, a pillhead, and a true redhead. That’s right. She wore a wig. Everything’s not as it seems.
 
And if he new that from the start, he would have never taken her in, and seen fresh blood flowing down her nervously droopy face, and her scared ivory arms, and in between her black-coated lashes that clutched her dilated pupils. And he would not be up on the ledge, contemplating the general census of yellow cabs’ noise-making frequency and worrying about their driver’s blood pressure.
 
They had no money, not anymore. A stupid investment, brilliant seeming at the time, of course, led them to bankruptcy after the fall of the economy. Now unable to spend on Kasey’s “recreational habits”, she found alternatives, the kind of alternatives that strike fear into the hearts, mind, souls, of full-grown men. Like himself. The kind of alternatives that make you wish you had used the sketchy, black-market hallucinogenics from a large, trench-coated, stereotypical stranger propped against the brick of a nearby dark, secluded, stereotypical alleyway. 
 
It was the last alternative she hadn’t come back from. The last option, the last resort, the last dealer holding the only kind of precious water to quench her crippling thirst. She had gone alone, sneaking out from embarrassment. She was in a weakened state, not something she took pride in, she wasn’t the kind of girl who craved your pity or attention. That is, unless you were the attention of the needle to inject her with brief relief. She had paid in cash, not by choice, but it was all they had to choose from. The wrinkled Washingtons clung to her dripping palm, covered with the sweat leaking from the skin, bringing the stench of failure, failure from the lack of self control to combat the symptoms from her all too frequent withdrawals. 
 
They took her. She was no more. The last he had seen of her, hijacking the cocktail of scrap metals that passed as their car hurriedly spinning out of the driveway, tires screeching like the mangy cats residing in the trash bins towards the back with matted hair indistinguishable from their neighbor.
 
Spade, she had called him. She was going to see Spade. He had never seen Spade, just heard the reaction of the laced products he slipped for a cheaper price. The personification of a mentally looming figure bore less frightening when he thought of this monstrous being laying down a doily on the drugs that beat his wife more than her father had.
 
People say that killing will make you mad, or you have to be mad to kill. He wasn’t either of those. He was both. He was standing on the edge, swaying with the breeze, shaking from nervousness, but with a mind as still as his life, post-Kasey: stagnant.
 
A week after her disappearance, after the phone had never left its cradle, after the police had showed up for the first time in the neighborhood without arresting someone, he had decided. She was gone. Three lives were to die. Her, himself, and Spade. He was to die.
 
The initial shock befell upon him. Three days of planning obsessed him, her drugs becoming indirectly his. Finding his schedule wasn’t hard considering the location of his dwelling, nothing a bottle of substance can’t get you over there. Or a broken bottle, for that matter.
 
The shock wore off, he was numb. He felt not anger, not worry, not necessarily eagerness. It was not entirely revenge, avenging Kasey’s murder anymore. Its was going to be satisfaction. Not joy. No, not joy, it was his mission, something he must do, but no joy was to come. He felt his face go numb with his emotions: the walking dead.
 
He reached the place. The man, “Spade”, was not his expected appearance. Spade was, however, propped against the wall, and it was a rather dimly lit environment. He approached, gun in hand. He watched as Spade’s smirk faded into oblivion, as his thin, mustache-rimmed lips formed the “o” of a scream.
 
Bang.
 
It had been four weeks and two days. There had been no sign of Kasey’s body. His embodied soul was absent, lost. It was time to go. He had hated this town anyway, he thought about leaving a while ago. No point now.
 
Jump.
 
There were then 8175130 people currently residing in New York City.
A seemingly attractive woman exited a yellow cab driven by a man with a bulging vain protruding from his forehead. She was obviously very wealthy, obtaining her money from a job that one dreams about but never achieves; ballerina, singer, actress. Her thoughts were calm. Kasey had been a less than desirable name. And she thought blonde was overrated. She liked brunette. There was going to be a new girl in town.