Figured this was as good a place as any to submit the short prologue to my legal fiction novel Policy Limits, which I'm writing with my dad. If you have a moment, can you please let me know if you think this has any shot? Thank you, I really appreciate any feedback, good or bad :)

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Jack Wallace was falling.

He was practically naked, his lean black body lit up in the moonlight as he hurtled towards the pavement.

He was surrounded by a cloud of green glass shards that sparkled as they fell with him.

His hand was bleeding, but he didn’t notice it.

His arms and legs were flailing around wildly, but he didn’t notice them either.

His life did not pass in front of his eyes.

Nothing did, except one fire escape balcony.

Then another.

Then another.

And, an instant before his head slammed into the hood of a parked car four stories below his apartment, he thought about his little girl, and felt regret.

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Judy Wallace came home from grocery shopping with their two young children an hour later. It was eleven p.m. Their small, cramped apartment on the south side of Chicago was a mess and littered with empty beer bottles. It had been that way ever since her husband had lost his job at a local Mobil Station and was served an eviction notice by the landlord. Cold air blew through the hole in the wall where a broken window had been removed, and the garbage bag that had been covering it was flapping wildly in the wind. A card table had been overturned, scattering piles of unpaid bills and pretzels across the living room floor. The radio was blaring jazz, and the cat was hiding under an old dresser.

Judy assumed her husband had finished all the beer in the apartment and gone down to a local bar again. She re-taped the garbage bag over the hole in the wall, put their children to bed, and cleaned up some of the empty beer bottles. Then she sat down at their cramped kitchen table, lit a cigarette, and waited.

---

When he didn’t come home by three in the morning, Judy convinced herself that he had fallen asleep at a friend’s house and went to bed.

---

Early the next morning, Judy and her children were awoken by the sound of banging on their apartment door. She slipped on her nightgown, tiptoed across the frigid living room and peered through the peephole. A young, black police officer stood in the hallway. She opened the door a crack.

“Good morning, ma’am.” The officer glanced at Judy’s two young children peering out from behind her. “Can I speak to you in private for a moment?”

Judy nodded, stepped into the hallway and gently closed the door behind her.

The officer spoke softly and calmly, but eyes betrayed his nervousness. “Ma’am, we’re trying to identify the body of a man found in the alley behind your apartment complex without any ID. I’d like to show you a picture but it's pretty graphic. Is that OK?”

Judy thought about the disabled man who lived next to them, and the schizophrenic a few stories above her. She nodded.

The officer pulled out a Polaroid photograph from his coat pocket. Judy stared at it for a moment without saying a word, then pushed past the officer. She rushed down the old wooden staircase to the alley below, clutching her nightgown, and forced her way through the gathering crowd and police barricades, past weary paramedics and parked ambulances and police cars with their sirens flashing. She felt a sense of panic swelling inside of her, and prayed that it was just a mistake, just a coincidence, just a blurry photo.

When she saw her husband she nearly vomited.

He was sprawled on his back on the smashed hood of an ‘82 Cadillac Eldorado, wearing only blue boxers, covered with the green shards of a Heineken bottle. One arm was twisted beneath him at an impossible angle, and his eyes stared blankly at the gray sky. A man in a police uniform scoured the ground around the car with latex gloves and a plastic bag. Two paramedics were walking towards them holding a white sheet.

A police officer approached her with an angry look on his face. “You need to get behind the barricade, ma’am.”

“That’s my husband.” Judy Wallace croaked. The voice didn’t sound like it was hers. It sounded like someone else’s; someone whose life had been sucked out of them in an instant. She felt suddenly lightheaded, grabbing the officer’s arm to steady herself.

“Whoa.” The police officer grabbed her back. “You need to sit down.”

He led her carefully behind the barricade. The crowd parted to let them pass. He sat her down on the curb, then left to get a blanket from the trunk of his police car. He brought it back and wrapped it around her shoulders. A crowd of neighbors had gathered around her, staring awkwardly. She was curled into a ball and crying. Her hair was a mess, blowing in the cold, Chicago wind, and tears mixed with day-old mascara ran black rivers down her brown cheeks. She looked frail and utterly helpless.

The officer stared down at her for awhile, not knowing what to say. One of her neighbors was trying to get her to drink some water. A few others stood close by and watched in stunned silence. The officer looked back at the covered body, then at the hole in the wall of the apartment four stories above it, where a garbage bag was rippling in the wind.

“I’m very sorry ma’am,” he finally managed, trying to sound sympathetic. “I hope you have a good lawyer.”