You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Wait, wasn’t chapter three last week?” Well, yes, it was, except, frankly, it stunk the place up, and I can do better. So, here’s the “revised” chapter three, new and improved. Enjoy.
     – Java

     Somewhere, a bird twittered, and further on, I could hear traffic, the busy life flow of Detroit. Here in the parking lot it was quiet, and a cold breeze blew leaves over the wet, snow-frosted pavement. In the car, blood dripped, and the driver stared back at me. Thin white smoke drifted up from his blank, empty eyes. He blinked, slack-jawed.
     I stood as the shadow crawled back out of the car, spilling over the side and falling to my feet, stretching out where she belonged. I drew my Colt and popped the drum, checking the load. Mundane ammunition. I snapped the drum shut and paced back a step or two, leveled the gun, fired. The bullet took his head and the window glass in a fine, twinkling red spray, the noise rolling across the parking lot like thunder.
     Can’t leave the soulless wandering around alive. Without a soul to protect him, anything might come along and fill the man up. There’s no end of troublesome shit out there that would love an opportunity like that.
     I holstered the gun and looked around. You would think that the biggest problem with killing someone is body disposal. Not so. Unless you’re connected to the person you kill somehow — you know them, or have an obvious motive — you can pretty much leave the corpse lay. Someone else will inevitably come along and clean it up for you. Handy, that. On the occasions when you do know the person you’ve just offed . . . well, that’s what the Detroit River is for, right?
     The biggest problem is actually cleaning up the kill site, making sure you don’t leave any of yourself behind for the cops to find. Damn forensics being what they are these days, you don’t want to leave something like hair or blood or skin behind. Mages have other reasons for not wanting to leave bits of themselves around. Don’t want some magically talented person wandering by and scrying out the killer because I left a hair on the scene. Your average person doesn’t have a good way to clean up that kind of evidence – tough to find every little cell you drop, particularly during those first hectic moments after slaughtering someone. Fortunately, I’m not your average person, and I wouldn’t be much of a mage if I couldn’t erase tells like that.
     I keep a voodoo doll in the glove compartment for just that reason. This is a handy little fetish, the kind I don’t advertise much. I mean, you don’t exactly want “Murder Scene Clean-Up Fetishes” embossed right on your business cards. Too many nutjobs out there read it as Murder Scene Clean-Up Fetishists and you do. not. want. to know what kind of voice mails that leads to. There’s a lesson I didn’t have to learn twice. Besides, it turns out there’s some kind of “plausible deniability” issue.
     

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