Dreams of a Red Horizon

Prologue - Jon

"It always begins, and ends, with a bullet."

My father told me this when I graduated from the academy. He took me out to a dive bar and sat me down and gave me the talk he'd been preparing me to hear for my whole life. He discussed probationary periods and partner etiquette and the mechanics of 'keeping my head low.'

And then he told me, "Jon, this is the most important part - It always begins, and ends, with a bullet. Every case, every time."

For years I tried to understand what it meant, but much like what little else I had left of my father, it never made any sense to me. It was almost never a bullet. Firearms were heavily restricted in the city of New Babel. Shooting deaths were extremely rare except on the most lawless levels of my city. In all my years on the murder beat, when it wasn't suicide, it was usually a knife or hands wrapped around a throat or other objects used in human ingenuity colliding with malice.

All throughout my training I was told that there would be a case that would define my career, that would be so difficult to solve that I would either falter or thrive. It was ironic then that that case, my last case, did actually end and begin with a bullet, just like my father had said.

And it was in the midst of this final case that I finally understood what my father's saying meant. It had nothing to do with Cause-Of-Death, meaning instead that every case every case was a story. When you are a cop, you arrive to the crime scene at the ending. But to solve the case, you have to go backwards from there. You follow a bullet in a skull to the gun that fired it, to the hand that held it, to a motive conceived in a dark beginning.

That's how I'll tell the story of that last case I'll ever work then. With the ending before the beginning.