Out on a Limb

What Goes Up

Donald spent the next several minutes staring at his father-in-law's lifeless expression. The harsh lines of the octogenarian's face were relaxed now, and the mottled skin that tarnished his complexion looked even more transparent and paper-thin now that his foul blood no longer ran through his veins.

Don always marvelled at the dissipating light in someone's eyes as they died, and watching the life fade from Ferguson Chatterton's was no different and brought him no less pleasure. Granted, the man was infinitely fouler than the pretty birds he liked to add to his collection, but even a dead albatross carried a certain beauty to it when it represented one of his kills.

He wasn't lying when he told Ferguson he had a late dinner planned with Constance, and when he pulled back his shirt from the cuff of his wrist he made a small tsk! at himself and began cleaning up so he could depart for his wife and their evening plans. His memento was safely tucked into his small satchel along with Evelyn's finger, and the room bared not a trace of him. He replaced the magazine to the neat stack where he found it, corrected the chairs in front of Ferguson's desk, re-positioned his son's blob of would-be art, and dropped a splash of tea into the bottom of the newly cleaned porcelain cup so it appeared drank but not quite finished by his fiftieth victim.

After so much tedious planning, it would have been far easier (and far lazier, which therefore meant far stupider) to take a quick shortcut out the door and slink through the shadows of the hallways to make his escape for the evening, but even the motion of elevator cars were traced thanks to Ferguson's paranoia, so it was back out the window and into the night he went.

Climbing down to his office was trickier than the climb up, but he made it back to the twenty-seventh floor with relative speed.  The cracked ledge on the twenty-ninth split into the perfect wedge to lower himself down, and the pigeons lured him to safety on the twenty-eighth with their gentle lullaby. He thought about kicking their nest clean off the ledge or twisting one of their necks until it made sounds like crackling bubble wrap, but even that childish temptation was staved off for the sake of his perfect duplicitousness.

He simply slipped back through the window of his office on the twenty-seventh floor, changed back into his paltry two thousand dollar suit, packed the rest of his nightly belongings and headed home for dinner and a night of depraved fuckery with Constance Marietta Louise Ferguson. His erection returned as he thought of the newly minted billionaire and her decomposing father, Ferguson Chatterton, reviled CEO, Depression-era survivor turned wealthy elite, perpetrator of patricide, corporate lecher, and upon survey, evil sonofabitch voted most likely to be writhing in unspeakable pain at the throne of Satan himself following his demise. Definitely a worthy, torturous gift of a life well-lived.