Hello, Little Sparrow by Jordan Jones (the reading list .TXT) 📕

your shoulder blade, went through your subscapularis muscle, and out the other side. It was just an inch above your lung. You nearly bled to death.”

“Wait…” I sat and looked at the ceiling. The sky on the other side must’ve been bright blue with clouds intermittently sputtering about. It was a long while since I fully appreciated my surroundings. “The Sparrow did this.”

“What?” Abraham said.

“Miss,” LT Anderson interrupted. “This has turned into official police business. There’s an ongoing investigation and it seems here our boy was a victim. Can you give us privacy so we can talk?” His professionalism trounced any contempt he had holdover from our verbal scuffle in the office.

I appreciated it.

“I’ll go tell the doctor he is awake,” the nurse said, then walked out.

“How do you know it was our guy?” Abraham asked.

“Because he told me,” I said, wincing slightly as the pain began to creep into my shoulder.

“But, how do we know it’s him?”

“Because, who else would do this to an investigating officer on an active case?” I replied.

Abraham put his hand up by his chin. “How in the world does he know you’re the lead detective on the case?”

“The cameras,” LT Anderson said. “They shot live on that night in front of Geoff Burnley’s house. The killer must’ve seen it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He did, and he didn’t like me puking all over his scene. He had the audacity to ask me if I was always that undignified.”

“Pretty rich coming from someone who have brutally slaughtered two innocent men,” Abraham said.

“In his eyes, they aren’t innocent,” I replied. “They were both sex offenders on the registry. They signed their death warrant as soon as they committed those crimes, no matter how long ago they were.”

“Why didn’t he kill you?” LT Anderson said. He cleared his throat, “I mean, with you out of the picture, we’d be scrambling to find a new lead detective and that would buy him some more time.”

I sat back softly on the bed. The pillow acted as extra support, though it was slightly pink with blood leaking through the bandage.

“He has a way of doing what he does,” I said. “My hunch is that he can act any certain way for any occasion and only acts like a psychopath when the time is right.”

Abraham sat back and sighed. Everyone deserted the joyful moment quickly.

“And,” I continued. “He now has two extra pistols and a combat knife.” A look of shame fell across my face and I looked down to my feet barely hanging on the bed.

“What did he say to you,” LT Anderson asked, throwing my last comment to the wayside.

“He wants me to sabotage the case somehow. That tells me that somehow we’re getting close.”

Abraham looked at me disapprovingly. “All we have are pages from a notebook written by someone we don’t know. He didn’t kill the victims in any special way, just brutally. He is an impulsive psychopath that can’t control himself or his urges.”

“I think he controlled them pretty well up to this point,” LT Anderson interjected. “These are the first “vigilante” murders I’ve witness here in twenty-seven years on the line.” He straightened his collar. “Now, if you’re telling me that he moved here within the past month and started killing people like this, I don’t know how much of that I’ll believe.”

“No more believable than him waiting until he was a fully grown man acting on these urges,” Abraham struck back.

“We don’t know that,” LT Anderson said, his voice growing more aggressive.

I closed my eyes and saw the blade enter my shoulder once again. The pierce wasn’t just a physical pain anymore, but proof that I wasn’t safe at my home.

“Please believe me when I say this,” I started. “I believe he won’t kill those who haven’t abused children. That was the vibe I was given. It was a tense moment, yes, but I still felt like he didn’t want to kill me.”

“The nurse even said, you could’ve bled out,” LT Anderson said. “Then his principles would be thrown out the window.”

“I don’t think he meant to,” I said. “It would’ve gone against what he’s trying to do.”

“There’s no reasoning with this type of person,” Abraham said. “You of all people should know that.” I remembered firing the shot that killed Dugger, right in the left shoulder blade. The bullet curved slightly upon impact and struck his heart as a few more bullets followed.

Abraham was right, Alvin Dugger was a psychopath and The Sparrow should have been no different.

But, he was…I saw the difference in plain sight.

“There was something different about him,” I said. “I told him that he wouldn’t kill me because I didn’t fit his M.O. He told me that, basically, it was hard to keep principles in difficult situations. I think someone should be writing this down.”

“On it,” LT Anderson said. He was already writing a few sentences before prompted. “What did he say exactly?”

“He told me that ‘it was difficult to act on what we truly believe through all the fog.’” I cleared my throat. It became more hoarse and sore the more I talked.

“That sounds strange,” Abraham said. “So basically, he’s willing to go outside his beliefs at any given moment…if he thinks it’s right?”

I shrugged, causing a sharp pain to reach my lower back. “I don’t know.”

LT Anderson interjected. “It seems like he has a set of guidelines, but is willing to ignore them in a moments notice.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But, he could have stabbed me in the throat and ended it. I don’t think he’d do it.”

LT Anderson finished writing down in his notebook. Abraham contacted the precinct and had a few officers take control of my car for forensics.

“Benjamin said his crew will take every piece of DNA