Stuffiness in the dark high-rise apartment discomforts a red-eyed man as he sits up in the same recliner he dozed off in, his insomnia wretched as usual.  A number 1 shaped like a red dagger reflects across his pupils from the digital clock, preceding digits blocked off by a stack of paper and clutter. He mumbles and hurls it off with a curse as a car alarm shrieks five stories below him. Agitating, incessant, this racket just proves to him this has been the horrible month he thought it before he dozed off, filled with just false alarms, petty crimes, and people feeling too safe for their own good. Undercurrent of worry the quiet fills his veins with, not peace. Being a top-shelf detective, he exclusively knows always a hidden man plans a terror when no one sees it coming. He loses sleep on uneventful nights routinely, one side effect of knowing the inevitable  —  at any moment something darkly world changing can happen —  and from shadows he must investigate.

Things are too quiet, Dex thinks. Something's brewing. I can't stand not knowing what.

Just as he staggers with mumbles to the kitchen, his smartphone rings.

“Stanton, I’ve a call of a suspicious man lurking around the Hilton Midtown," says Cole.

“But he’s not doing anything?”

“There's the mask, the pacing,  the guy creeps out the workers.”

The ashen-haired man strokes his temple.

“Look, he could be a wannabe or on a wanted list. You want to make a buck, don't you?”

“I’m on it.” 

After getting the identifying details of the man, he abruptly hangs up and throws on a tan wool jacket. Loudly he plops into the  driver’s seat of his Dodge Charger that conceals him behind tinted windows. Right around the corner, he squeezes his vehicle soberly into an empty space with perfect parallel parking. 

Whether or not this is worthwhile I question, he thinks, shivering in the cold. Surveillance cameras watch every inch of that place. Intentionally no one'd be brazen enough to do anything.

Scent of  raw bean brew in the air, the Starbucks beckons him like a siren, but he will not be tempted because the call to protect the people is undeniably stronger; Something else in the environment holds overpowering allure. Smartphone glowing, a man in a black hoodie, mask over nose and mouth, shifts about awkwardly. He lingers and paces with no obvious purpose.

That must be him. Really ... Cole should stop looking out for my paycheck.

Dex's throat tightens, hiding difficult, and two hours later, he feels defeated — nothing happening. Lit up brightly under a streetlamp, the lanky stranger tosses a coffee cup into a rusty trash can, unaware the detective looms. Belligerently he mumbles as he trots off into the shadows, shoes thudding hard. 

Cole knows I live to stop wannabes before they commit a crime. But this is a goose-chase with no goose to shoot down. No one to talk sense into.

He loses focus on criticism as he eyeballs the inspiring new surrounds, modern, well-lit, nothing short of flashy — the commercial hub of Manhattan. The skyscrapers of 6th Avenue invoke admiration as he recalls the history regarding the greats whose successes in business made construction possible. Deliberately he counts all forty-seven stories of gleaming windows in the Hilton Midtown, from the top down, as he imagines its lobby doors,  staring inside intensely, serve as a portal to which presidents, revolutionists, and CEOs alike walked through and still do, always bustling. For once he would like to venture inside and very well may once this false call is finished for the morning.

Fantasy time is disrupted as a herd of pungent folk push past him to get inside, dressed in business attire, carrying briefcases. 

“Lacking that 360 again ...” says Dex under his breath.  

Cole should have called me back, he thinks, to explain why suits swarm the Hilton Midtown this early.

A tall, plump man dressed loosely in a blue suit pops out from the adjacent hotel, path off kilter, his mind obviously filled with something else. A car whirs by and then another.  A vertical whir of black, fast moving, quite out of place, snaps Dex's eyes to a man in black lunging up behind the snorting businessman's back with a pointed gun. Stymied in the crowd, Dex fumbles.

Mouth unhinged, he mentally shouts. Get out of the way! 

His eyes and ears betray him. Cacophonic are the harmonics of bullets whipping through the air in a disconnect of sight and audio where the detective sees, suffers, yet still understands what his human limitations can not empower him to stop — the inevitable crime he feared the city was due for. The piercing wail of agony from the beady-eyed fat cat, back torn before guts, blood spilling, precedes the thud of his humongous body flung smackdab onto the cold sidewalk. His curse words burn with vexation as he looks directly at his shooter who turns away and flees into the shadows with the stealth of a tiger that hates the bitter blood he tastes in the assault. 

“Nasty biter! He flipped our street dynamics …” Dex mutters, collective in his calm anger. "We go from safe and secure in Manhattan to shootable prey."

Empowered to save a life, the secret detective rushes to the moaning, collapsed victim, falls on knees, dials 911, and shows his downturned smartphone to the man, who struggles to breath. 

“Get him!" The grimacing victim squeals. "Don’t let him escape.”

Dex nods, saying, "shh! Keep quiet or you’ll get weaker. Being a mouse might be good for you for once.”

“Damn this!” His head falls over, roar botched.

Voice deep and authoritative, Dex instructs the distraught witnesses to keep respectful distance and not depart in panic. However, many disobey, bewildered, discompassionate, or just plain irresponsible — the CEO nobody to them. 

Fingers digging in a blue pocket, the shaky detective pulls out a wallet from the man's blood-soaked suit for a looksie.

“Brian Thomas…” He mutters. 

Unified Health Services’s annual investor conference he is supposed to be hosting in less than an hour, Dex thinks. With him being their figurehead CEO, this is no random shooting. Absolutely not.

Two law enforcement vehicles park across the road, and the sprawled body flashes in red, blue, and white, put on morbid display as lights strobe. The gruesome scene turns skins pale, countenances aghast, the remaining citizens nervously skittering around the dying man who moans in a puddle of fetid blood; The leaking outward of his life-force is chilling, and the air around wreaks, still and frigid. Their remarks vary from humane to callous, vocal cords scratchy.

“He’s gonna make it!” says Dex. 

He grits his teeth, knowing how much of a lie he gives as he studies three bullet holes in his suit.

Two fazed, straight-faced officers, one shorter and blonder, stagger out rigidly.

“Detective Stanton!" says the second.

The private eye grimaces. “Not yet,” he says. “Go get to the witnesses while Cole and I get Brian in the ambulance.”

“One of these days, I’m gonna get your autograph.”

“To the victim. Move, move," says the senior. "This ain’t no movie. Idling kills.”

Detective Stanton and his buddy overwatch the paramedics wrap up the victim to halt bleeding while a new duo of policewomen joins the first officer in collecting eyewitness accounts from the tiny portion of people who remain on the scene with good willingness to be of the utmost help possible. Once the ambulance speeds off, Dex and Cole get into a brief argument about the assailant being unchased, spurting the detective to desert.

Red-faced, breath short, he stops at Starbucks, no doubt in his mind that the man who he saw idling with coffee is the shooter. Without humility, he pops the lid right off the rusty trash can. A whiff of rot and mildew nauseates before he reaches in to pull up a paper coffee cup from its bottom. Brown liquid droplets cling still at its stained base. 

I should have been more prepared, he thinks, wishing he had a bag for it.

His smartphone rings.

“You got him, right? The CEO shooter?” asks Cole.

“No, no I didn’t stop him from becoming a killer.”

“Now come on, we both saw Thomas off to the hospital.”

“My friend, that bigwig took three shots to the back from a man who barely could figure out his distance.

Just a few feet further back and he might have missed. 

He was off in more than character. But agenda…”

“Already you’re in his head.”

“Yes, CEO killers don’t exist, save for in nightmares. And I never sleep.”

“Well, he was head of Unified Health Services and a real somebody.”

“Yes, yes. But let’s hold off on further talk until we verify because this could very well be a hit job and him no good.

And Cole, I prefer you don’t mention my being here.”

“Ouch.”

“I mean it. My wife’s out of town. I work for myself. And you’re on a private phone.”

“I still can’t promise that.”

Cringing, Dex turns off his smartphone.

Long and hard he stares inside the coffee cup, the droplets of black coffee disgusting.

Should I hand it over to the cops? he thinks. Or just keep it for now? Hmm ...

His black Dodge Charger brings him no relief, ignition turned on, rumbling as loudly as his panicked head as he realizes his chance of encountering the shooter remains highest for him in the area. The roads are dark, the sun rising, visibility increasing, and him empowered to do what he must — do as his instincts direct — catch the CEO killer. He heads to Central Park, driving the perimeter, idling at times, the 65th Transverse Bridge bringing him to an abrupt halt before he speeds off back into  Manhattan's now bustling downtown. 

Chaos breaks out as an array of police cars starts zipping by him, people entering and exiting parked taxis along the sidewalk. While stuck in unmoving traffic, he stares at an individual arguing with an Indian cab driver, a gray hoodie and surgical mask hiding his face. The stranger's sharp eyes lash out meanly at Dex with mania and trigger his rage. Flaunting his head, he gets inside the yellow vehicle which slowly outpaces Dex down the road, surrounded by cop cars, all clearly leaving the shooting scene he himself narrowly escaped.

This coffee cup, he thinks. I can keep it. I can give it to Cole for the department. I can talk to him and say nothing about it, just give myself time to think this out some more.  

Obviously, I am going to ...