A Change of Heart (MacKay - Canadian Detectives, #3)

PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

Stray sunrays broke free through the gray of the sky and reflected into the glass of the wide window, blinding Jose for a few seconds at a time. However, he didn’t mind. The wind didn’t seem as strong as the other day, so the twenty-four-year-old man enjoyed his job for a change.

That morning, in the mild breeze, floating above the city on his window washing platform, the man could believe himself the king of the world. Whenever Jose looked down, the other mortals looked like tiny ants running here and there at the street level.

The other day, the man had experienced the feeling of a leaf caught in the whirlwind of air, and he had cursed his job and his willingness to do it. It seemed pretty different now.

Satisfied with himself and his work, Jose started whistling in the rhythm of the song pouring in his ears through the earbuds.

He made a whopping twenty-two dollars an hour, after all. The man was the first to admit that he made much more than some of his friends. They toiled in an airless factory almost ten hours a day for a little more than a half of that.

Jose knew that he had it good even though he grumbled now and then. But then, who didn’t complain about work? It was in the man’s nature to find something to whine about in anything. The more people had, the more they lamented.

Pondering on his luck motivated Jose to work harder, standing on tiptoes to reach higher and bending his knees to cover more of the glass panel. If someone had watched him from afar, they would have thought that the man had lost his mind. His disjointed movements resembled a weird ballet.

Still, besides a seagull, no one bore witness to his zealous hard work. The bird clonked and cried out, put out by the display, but the man didn’t hear it over the blast of rap in his ears. With a last disgusted cry, the seagull chose to look for something to eat and left the scene.

Thinking of the twenty-two dollars an hour gave Jose the strength to finish the window. The man braced his hands on his hips and breathed deeply.

Damn, if he didn’t deserve that money. The surface of those glass panels could haunt a soul, and he had to make them shine. He couldn’t afford another complaint. HR had already written him up after the debacle with one of the customers last month.

The man breathed in and out a couple of times and then glanced at his watch. The digital display told him that the time for lunch had come, so Jose sat down on the platform, crossing his legs, and took a sub out of his backpack.

He unwrapped the sandwich and sniffed it. Yep, he had hit the right combination when he put it together in the morning, and that wasn’t too bad for a mamma’s boy, as that snotty Isabel girl had called him.

Jose had broken up with Isabel more than a year before. Still, that didn’t mean that the man had forgotten all those hurtful things the woman had hurled at him. Some things stuck with a person long after their expiration date. Whenever something unpleasant happened, Isabel’s words also popped into his head.

However, the young man had already met the woman of his dreams, so Isabel belonged into the past. He had even decided to ask that woman to marry him.

Alicia didn’t mock him, and she didn’t try to belittle him. Jose had only waited for his pay check to invite her somewhere special and to ask her to be his wife. And the day had come. It was payday.

Jose wiped his fingers off his sweatpants and took out his phone. The man checked his bank account, and when his eyes fell on the deposit made that morning, he smiled. Oh, yes, the day had come.

He couldn’t wait to see Alicia’s surprise at his choice of venue. Jose had already made reservations to one of the fanciest restaurants in Toronto, and a well-thought ring waited for him at home. He needed only to buy some flowers, and the evening would kick off the rest of his life.

To make sure that there would be no glitch, the man sent a text to his girlfriend, ‘Don’t forget, at six at our spot.’

Jose didn’t have to wait too long for her reply. The sight of all the oxoxoxox displayed on the screen made him chuckle. Girls turned out to be so silly sometimes!

Jose gulped some water and put the sandwich wrap back in the backpack. With a satisfied sigh, the man maneuvered the platform to the next set of windows and started wiping them.

It would have been fun if he could see through the windows inside, at least. However, the tainted glass didn’t allow him a glimpse of what was happening on those floors. The man shrugged. At least he could imagine what would happen that night when he would ask the question. Jose had a good imagination, and he knew Alicia would be so happy that she would cry. While the man pictured her crying and kissing him, a wide grin perched on his lips.

When the sharp pain struck his heart, Jose cried out, but no one could hear his shout over the noise of the traffic below. For a second, with disbelief, the young man wondered if he suffered a heart attack. However, the thought seemed way too farfetched.

Then, the man fell backward, and, with a last conscious thought, he tried to catch the safety bar to hold on, but he missed. The feeling of flying over the handrail overwhelmed the man's brain, which still fired messages down the synapses, even though a bungled bullet had already stopped his heart.

Lifeless, the man dangled in his harness at the mercy of the mild wind. The sky turned grayer, and the wind started picking up, but Jose was way beyond the material plane.