I started the Death and the Detective series from the writing prompts challenges at Creative Copy Challenge. The words in bold are the writing prompts from the challenge.
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Challenge #19
Brett watched the fog roll in to swallow Morro Rock. It was surreal to watch a nearly 600-foot volcanic plug disappear. It was time travel without the machine.
“If I could turn back time,” Brett thought, “I’d get there before the first slaughter.”
That’s how he thought of his last murder case – senseless slaughter. His heart still ached with the residue of hopelessness he felt as he raced against lunacy. Brett would never forget that last day, the day the killer died.
Sobbing like a child as he mistook Brett for the tyrant of his past, he huddled in a corner with his arm wrapped around his latest victim. Brett arrived too late to save her. Like the others, she would never know the simple luxury of a caring touch, the warmth of a San Diego ocean breeze.
He was no foreigner to the macabre, but this killer took it to another level. Her vacant stare of death silently told the story of a madman. Drained of life, they took no relief in the vanishing of the horrific scene. Brett almost envied her loss.
Brett could still hear her scream as he pounded up the stairs. His heart racing like a cocaine hit, he had broken down the door. But he was too late. Her severed hand still held the glass of red wine as blood and wine mixed in a trail of no direction.
“Don’t touch me. Do you hear me? Don’t touch me,” sobbed the hysterical cry of a killer, trapped in the past.
“She made me do it. They always make me do it. Why? Why”
With a shriek of madness, he charged. The bullet of the police sniper spun him around and there he fell – his hand touching one of another – accepting a last glass of wine.
Challenge #21
Like most adults, Brett’s taste in music was stuck back in his teenage era. His collection of CDs was totally 80s, totally rock.
It was a miracle he survived those years. He kept the collection as a pounding reminder. It amused him that the younger guys at the precinct might think him a dinosaur, but appreciated the Boss, U2, Queen and the other legends of the time.
Propping his feet on his deck railing, Brett smiled at the memory of his grandmother, Nana Connors, warning a 17-year-old Brett of the dangers of getting a tattoo.
“You might think they look cool now but just wait until you get to be my age. There’s shrinkage and they’re not exactly reversible. Not to mention you wouldn’t live long afterwards, ‘cause I’d kill you for getting one.”
Brett chuckled, remembering it all started when he admired the knife and heart tattoo of Poison band member, Bret Michaels. God, he missed Nana. She was his rock, when no one else cared.
It was a rare day off from his job as a homicide detective in the north coastal community of Encinitas. His plan was to do absolutely nothing. From his deck, he watched some new construction going up, half a block from his beach bungalow.
He watched a worker lift the handles of a wheelbarrow, piled high with gallons of epoxy paint, his muscles straining with the load.
Brett loved the idea that he had nowhere to go, nothing to do. It was a dreamland he had not visited in much too long.
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