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"What are we watching?"
"Car show."
"Well that's one way to make me sleep."
And, with the first lights of morning, I finally did.TWENTY-TWODetective CollingsThings were seriously screwed.
Five years. All he needed was five more years of things going the status quo, no matter how messed up that status quo was. He wanted to handle the cases he could, overlook the cases he couldn't, and ignore the situations where the bad guys took out the worse guys because, well, alls well that ends with a shithead in the pen or the ground.
He'd underestimated the new blood.
When he'd said that flippant comment about a wolf in the morgue, he never thought the guy would put two and two together. As far as anyone knew, Wolf had no motive to take out Lex Keith. In general, their two organizations largely ignored each other. If Collings hadn't been on three other cases over the years, since Wolf was a young man, that had the same characteristics that Wolf did have a loose connection with, he never would have placed it himself.
Then all of a sudden, he found out Marco was running the boot prints.
And from there, it spiraled out of control, leading to an arrest and the most frustrating interrogation in his career.
The evidence was shit. Normally, it would never stand.
But Marco pitched a fit and the captain just waved a hand.
Then Collings got a desk full of files from a clerk who said there was an order for them, an order he never placed. With it came the email.
He'd actually smiled when he finished reading it for the second time. It didn't have to be signed for him to know who it was from. Janie. Hailstorm's favorite child. Lo's little prodigy.
See... if Collings had learned one thing from the dissolution of his marriage twelve years before, it was that women will only take so much shit from their lives.
Apparently Janie hit her max level of shit-taking and she was going to take down every mother fucker who had ever piled it on in the first place.
That included him.
Not because he had ever done anything to her, but because he had simply... not done anything at all. So he bunkered down and he got all of the rape kits sent out to the lab well before the first news story ever hit. The station had watched it in silence, the tension a palpable thing humming off of every crooked cop in the building.
"Tell me there is something we can do to head this off," the captain yelled out, watching his men duck their heads. They were all fucked and they knew it. And, by extension, so was the captain.
"Those rape kits are at the lab," Collings supplied, making all eyes, including his new blood's, fall on him.
"Come again?"
Collings shrugged. "I, ah, found them laying around. Figured there must have been some kind of mistake so I re-opened the cases, properly labeled everything, and sent them off to the lab."
The captain exhaled a loud breath. "You just saved your own ass at least Collings," he said with a shrug. "Time will tell if the rest of us will be so lucky."
Up until that moment, he hadn't considered it an olive branch that Janie had sent him. She gave him the only thing she had that could have saved him his job when IA finally came in to investigate. That was why she asked him to bury the boot print evidence (which, in his humble opinion, was not much evidence at all to begin with. How it was going to actually go to trial was completely beyond him). She gave him his job security, the guarantee of his pension, by making it seem like he was the only detective on the force who was doing his job.
But in exchange for that, she was asking him to do the exact opposite of his job.
Collings sighed, powering down his computer and going home for the night. He needed to sleep on it.
He woke up to the news of Marco getting his ass handed to him in a back alley.
He deleted the boot print and hoped for the best.
Nothing happened for a full day, making Collings do nothing but sit and sweat.
And then he got the call...TWENTY-THREEWolfI'd spent time in holding cells before. They weren't fun, but they weren't the worst places in the world either. I had mine to myself, giving me nothing but time to think.
And those thoughts? Yeah, they were about Janie. As if anything else would occupy my mind.
I'll never forget the raw panic on her face when she shoved me awake to the cruiser lights dancing off the walls. It was such a strange thing to see on her face until I realized it was there because of me. She wasn't the type of woman to worry about cops. Working at Hailstorm, she had had more than a few run-ins with them herself. She was freaking out because she didn't want me to get locked up.
And fuck if that wasn't one of the nicest feelings in the world, to realize someone gave a damn enough about you to worry. Granted, I was pretty fucking sure she had no idea she cared, but she did. It was in the look of helplessness on her face when they put me in the cruiser. It was in the momentary relief I saw when I came out of interrogation before she realized I was cuffed. Then it was in the devastation and outrage when she charged across that station toward me and started hollering. It was in the momentary hopelessness I caught sight of before I was led away.
She cared about me.
And wasn't it some sad, sick, cruel twist of fate that I cared about her too and wouldn't see her again except through a pane of resistant glass?
But it was okay.
I was alright with that.
I did what needed to be done.
I got her safe.
I slayed her demons.
And in return, I got several days with the most unpredictable, frustrating, interesting, capable, headstrong, funny, and loyal woman I had ever met in my life.
