Total pages in book: 50
Estimated words: 46314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 232(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 232(@200wpm)___ 185(@250wpm)___ 154(@300wpm)
4
I am nearly entirely wiped out when I get back to the station next morning. I start early. Early enough that it’s empty. Nearly empty, aside from two figures inside the chief’s office.
I recognize them both instantly through frosted glass. Connor is twice the size of his guest, who is short, lithe, and has hair so red and voluminous it can be seen even at a distance through the glass that usually drains color from everything.
“You’re an absolute little monster!” Chief Connor is yelling at Randy at the top of his lungs. “I should arrest you for what you’ve been doing. I want to know where you got those crime scene photos, or you can spend the weekend in a cell.”
“I’d love to spend a weekend in a cell,” she replies, sassy and unbothered like always. “There’s something strange going on at this precinct. Maybe if I was in the cells I’d see or hear something that made sense. You know, everybody is saying that some kind of mutant is stalking the neighborhood. I have reports of all kinds of strangeness going on in this precinct. It’s almost as if you are turning a blind eye on purpose.”
Words cannot express how much I hate Ramona Carrick, aka, Randy Carrot. She’s everything we don’t stand for. She’s an opportunist always out for herself, and she’s the closest thing I have to an enemy. She’s also the person I owe everything to.
Almost a year ago…
I am lying on the ground. The concrete feels warm, even though I know it is cold. I am cold too, and getting colder by the moment as blood drains from my body through a series of holes that didn’t exist until they were pumped into me.
There wasn’t any reason for this. There was no rhyme to it. I didn’t deserve it. The person who did this to me doesn’t know who I am or care. I was nothing but backdrop to them, part of the meaningless human scenery of their lives.
I have the sense of people moving back and forth around me. There are stars and or streetlights above me. I can’t really see anymore. It’s more like my eyes are imparting a vague suggestion of light, a light that gets suddenly brutally bright.
FWAMP!
For a moment, I am certain I have gone into the light. It seems to encompass me entirely, wrapping around me, making me part of it.
Darkness follows. A complete blackness. An entire nothing. I cry out, thinking I have fallen into some hell void.
Then I see a face. A pale face ringed with ruddy red hair looming over me. I also see a camera, and I realize with the remaining activity of my dying neurons that the light was not the welcoming embrace of the eternal. It was a flash from this fucking vulture’s camera.
“Well, hell,” Ramona says as my eyes roll toward her. “You’re alive!”
“Sorry to ruin your corpse picture taking, Randy.” I say, or I try to say. It’s more of a faint gurgle than anything because the muscles that control speech are starting to slacken, the way everything is slackening. I can hear her talking as my eyes close.
“Yeah, we got an officer down,” she says. “Yep. Shot. I’m putting pressure on the wound, but there’s a lot of blood.”
“Stay with me,” she says to me. “Or I’ll get to take that corpse photo. You make a beautiful fuckin’ body.”
“Sick.”
I manage to gasp that word out before the whole world fades to black.
Back in the office, listening to the fight…
I woke up three days later in a hospital bed covered in IVs and still just barely alive. I found out later that Randy Carrot published the pictures she took of me anyway. Apparently they were very popular with a particularly twisted subculture, and that’s all I can dare think about without wanting to be sick.
She technically saved my life. I should probably be grateful to her, but Randy has a way about her that makes her easy to hate. It’s an abrasive rudeness and a kind of callous disregard that somehow comes through even when she’s being what some would call nice.
After being shot, I became an object of pity, known for all the wrong reasons. I left my precinct and was lucky to be offered a position in Connor’s unit. Then I met Sally, and she didn’t give a fuck about any of the publicity around me. She didn’t feel sorry for me. She needed someone who could be on her side without being by her side, and I needed someone who needed me. We worked well together, and I miss her a lot.
The door to the chief’s office opens, and the pair of them tumble out like fighting cats. “You know what, little lady? Let me show you the inside of a cell,” Chief Connor growls. Oh she has fucking done it now. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be here in time to see this all go down. This has been coming for a very long time. Randy Carrick has been the flea biting us on the ass every second we turn around. She hacks communications, she breaks into crime scenes, and she never, ever leaves well enough alone.