He pulled out the treasured pint bottle and drained the remaining brown liquor down his throat, almost choking because he forgot to quit singing his pornographic ditty before swallowing. He wiped the spittle from his face with the back of his thin sleeve and coughed raspily once again. When he lowered his gaze to the fire, his mouth fell open and the contents of his stomach, cheap whiskey and bile on the whole, were propelled to the concrete with a liquid splatter. Putrid smells rose steamily from the vomit to mix with the foul reek of sizzling flesh. The old man fell heavily to his knees and pitched forward, heaving twice more. When he finally looked back up, the body of the charred human being was still there. Still there, teeth grinning at him morbidly where the flesh was even now searing away.
Out in the darkness, wet clumps of snowflakes streamed heavily downward from the low blanket of clouds that covered the city.
CHAPTER 1
I rolled over in the darkness and tugged the blanket up over my shoulders, but only after a brief, lethargic struggle with Salinger, our overstuffed, under-exercised Himalayan. His mild protestation came as a short pause in his otherwise incessant purring, coupled with a wimpish “mew” one would expect from a kitten, not from a full-grown cat. My ears further discerned that the wind was sighing forlornly through the leafless branches of our tree-lined yard, audibly bringing the outside chill into the bedroom.
I shivered slightly at the thought and assumed that Tracy Watson, the Eyewitness News meteorologist, had probably nailed her forecast squarely on the head yet again. If I were brave enough to crawl from the warmth of the bed and look out the window, I presumed I would be witness to the snowfall she predicted as well. Her uncanny accuracy would most likely be capturing her another American Meteorological Society Award in the near future. Not that this fact was all that important to me, but half-sleep has a tendency to make one concentrate on things that would normally flit past unheeded.