Two Miles to Heaven

-Chapter 2- «S for Suicide?»

The police and the ambulances' sirens echoed in front of the building, in the Queens. A crowd of neighbors started to form itself at the front door as two police officers rushed to stop them from advancing. Another police officer set up a safety barricade with a "Police Line Do Not Cross" yellow tape.

I was standing next to them, leaning on the brick wall, trying to figure out what happened last night. It can't be Sam, it just can't be. He doesn't know where I live now and he can't be that evil to take an innocent woman's life away just to warn me that he's lurking around.

-"S for Suicide?" one officer asked, checking the woman's hand under the white sheet on the stretcher.

I snapped back to reality; That can be a theory, too, taking into consideration the bath and the blazer. But, if the woman wanted to put an end to her "obvious miserable" life, she wouldn't be bothering herself engraving a beautiful "S" on her wrist, right?

Too cliché to be true.

-"Maybe...", another officer answered while shrugging, unbothered.

Two nurses got out of the ambulance to lift the stretcher up and carry it inside. Meanwhile, the two kids started crying again and I felt an uncomfortable twitch in my heart, understanding them as I know exactly how it feels to lose your mommy. Whereas, their dad stood there, silent, glancing at the ambulance, speechless, looking a little perplexed but in a strange way. He didn't shed a tear or reacted violently.

Masculinity complex? Trauma? Or... Guilt? He was likely unreadable.

My phone rang. It was Kendall.-- I cursed at myself for forgetting about the breakfast.

-"Where are you?" she yelled at me. "I ordered you a croissant and it's already cold."

-"I'm on my way. Got something to tell you." I declared, hanging up after.

I went back to the flat to get some gasoline that I filled my car's tank with before heading straight to the Grumpy Café, in Brooklyn. I hurried myself inside and explained everything to Kendall about what happened in the last seven hours.

-"You don't think that someone killed her, huh?" she curiously asked, sipping in her organic chamomile tea, unconsciously leaving droplets of her beverage on the tip of her bottom lip.

-"I... I don't know." I blurted out, trying to gain back my focus on what happened earlier.

-"Are you okay?" she asked again, frowning with a questioning smile.

I couldn't answer, obviously feeling embarrassed like a little kid that got caught cheating on his mathematic test and his professor giving him that exaggerated threatening look, so I simply nodded, giving her a reassuring look with a little grin that crept on the corner of my lips.

-"So what do we do now?" she then demanded, out of nowhere, leaning on the table smiling big with the eyes widen in an excited expression.

-"What do you mean?"

-"Well... Should we investigate?"

-"Oh... Right." I retorted, feeling a little disappointed by her sudden suggestion that I have confounded with something else.

-"Just like old times, when we used to play detectives in high-school about boys cheating on girls and the other way around." she stated. "Remember when we found out that Suzy Hart, our German classmate, was having a spicy sexual intercourse with our French professor?" she recalled, giggling and making gestures with her fingers as she was talking.

God, how I missed that childish giggle.

-"We blackmailed the poor girl by asking her for some cash so we can go party in that new local nightclub." She continued, reminding me of that memory as if I, somehow, forgot it.