Let Slip the Dogs of Love: Prologue
Title: Let Slip the Dogs of Love
Author: i-must-go-first
Category: Major Crimes
Pairing: Sharon/Andy. Yeah, that's right. Sharon/Andy.
Words: 2,813
Genre(s): Suspense/Romance
Rating: Rated: M
Summary: The captain's green eyes sliced into Andy's brown ones as he lowered
himself into the plastic chair opposite her. Even here, she managed to look
aloof, regal. Reaching up with her cuffed wrists, she flipped her hair over
her shoulder and shrugged, jerking her chin toward the shapeless uniform that
obscured her shapely form. "I know," she said. "Orange really isn't my color."
Let Slip the Dogs of Love
"Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war" - Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1, line 273
Love Dogs
Mevlana Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with praising,
until a cynic said, "So!
I've heard you calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?"
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
"Why did you stop praising?" "Because
I've never heard anything back."
"This longing you express
is the return message."
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
Prologue
Waking up with a splitting headache, the vaguest possible recollection of the past twelve hours, and no ready knowledge of one's own whereabouts is usually not the herald of a fantastic day, so Captain Sharon Raydor had no trouble brushing Mr. Bluebird off her shoulder and refraining from whistling any cheery tunes as she squinted at the generic beige ceiling directly above her. As the concussive pounding that threatened to split her skull in twain subsided enough to let her think, she swallowed down her nausea and gradually drew a steely-eyed bead on the amoeba-shaped watermark just to the left of center.
Her mouth tightened in displeasure. She'd have to call Mr Petrossian, the super. The toilet up in 12D must be leaking.
The mattress creaked as she shifted, and the captain realized two things simultaneously: she was indubitably going to vomit, and the ceiling of her cozy but modern condo was not beige.
She made it to the bathroom of what turned out to be a generic motel room - and not a very clean one, she noted, recoiling in distaste from her bird's-eye view of the toilet bowl - just in time. After expelling the sour contents of her stomach, Sharon pressed the back of a shaking hand to her dry lips and winced, fighting another rising tide welling up from the pit of her stomach: panic.
How had she ended up here? And where, more pressingly, was here?
It was very bad form for the head of FID to wake up in a seedy motel, suffering the ill effects of a bender she couldn't remember.
No, that wasn't right either. Not FID. Major Crimes. The head of Major Crimes. Well, still: no better.
For Sharon Raydor, waking up in a seedy motel, suffering the ill effects of a bender she couldn't remember, was inconceivable. She closed her eyes - without her glasses everything was swimming dizzyingly anyway, making the nausea worse - and breathed deeply, just as she did in her yoga classes. She felt the sharply cool press of the tile floor against her knees and heard the buzz of the lighting strip. She swallowed down the bitter taste of bile and reminded herself that if she sought answers, the only way to find them was to clear her mind of all distractions.
The problem was that the captain's mind had already been cleared. It was a perfect blank. A void.
Well, not a perfect blank. She knew her badge number and her children's birthdays and the names of all the counties in California in alphabetical order.
She got to her feet without touching the toilet, flushed it, and fumbled to unwrap the cake of oily motel soap lying beside the sink. She was fully dressed in the clothes she remembered putting on yesterday morning - it had just been yesterday, hadn't it? - the gray pencil skirt and slate-blue blazer, but her feet were bare... and filthy. She stared at them there on the white tile as if they belonged to someone else - as if someone else's toenails were painted black in a tiny act of rebellion, someone else's secret little indulgence; as if the scar on her left ankle was the result of a particularly nasty slip of someone else's razor - with a strange sense of detached curiosity. Balancing against the sink, she lifted one foot to examine the sole, confirming what the smudges on the tile had already told her: it was black, the cleaner arch showing in stark relief, as if she'd been walking on asphalt. The parking lot, maybe. Had she left her shoes in her car?
No, she couldn't have. There was no way the captain would have gotten behind the wheel in the state she must have been in the night before. No driving meant no car, right?
She lifted her eyes to her reflection. Her hair was flat and a little tangled, her skin sallow. Otherwise she was the same unremarkable middle-aged woman she saw in the mirror every day.
She shuffled back out into the bedroom and confronted the queen-sized bed with its sagging mattress and the print of a vase of carnations that was bolted to the wall. Even the subject of the "art" was heap, she thought, even as she noted that she'd slept atop the covers, leaving a small depression where her body had rested. She turned slowly, hands on her hips (best to make no sudden moves in her state), and then bent cautiously and peered under the bed. There was no sign of her shoes. Her handbag, however, the sturdy brown leather she used for work, slumped haphazardly on the nightstand.
But where were her shoes?
Her heart was beating rapidly as Sharon used two fingers to open a crack in the faded green curtains. She was on the second floor, looking out over a parking lot that could have been any parking lot, except that in this particular parking lot there was her car - not the Crown Vic but her own car, the little silver Accura with the scrape on the front bumper that Rusty had put there when she'd given him his first driving lesson.
Oh, Jesus, she thought.Rusty. What must he be thinking? He'd be frantic. He'd think something awful had happened to her - and this was a boy who had been abandoned by his own mother at a damn zoo.
The captain swallowed hard and sank down on the edge of the bed. Doubtless the comforter was as filthy as the rest of her surroundings, but surely she'd already contracted whatever contagious diseases might permeate its fibers. She was momentarily distracted from her worry over Rusty by a worse thought.
She had driven here.
Unless someone had driven her...?
Sharon took a tight, fluttery breath, trying to convince her stomach not to revolt again. She wasn't sure which of the two possibilities was more horrific. Both made her skin crawl. Either she'd driven under the influence, which was unconscionable, or she'd been with some faceless stranger in this place. She jumped up from the bed and rapidly scrutinized it again, this time with a forensic eye, but saw no indication that another person had been there. Nothing had been disturbed in the bathroom; there was nothing in the trash. There was no tell-tale soreness in any seldom-used muscles.
So there was that, then; she probably hadn't had blind-drunk sex with a stranger she'd met... in a bar? Had she been in a bar?
That was a hell of a silver lining.
Her mouth was as dry as the desert, and her heart was hammering. Drugged, she thought, and was vaguely astonished that it had taken her fuzzy brain so long to reach that conclusion. She must've been drugged.
The heart that was already beating unnaturally rapidly lurched as if it might leap right out of her chest and flop helplessly onto the hideous floral bedspread.
She should go see her doctor. She should do that now, first thing, and have blood drawn. She needed to know what had been done to her.
Been done to her: Raydor revolted at the passive construction of the sentence. It made her sound like a victim, and while the captain was many things, she was no one's victim.
She stood up again and looked around irritably. Where were her goddamned shoes?
She seized her purse and was struck immediately by its lightness.
Shit. This day kept improving.
Her fingers were already scrabbling inside, brushing against her badge, her service weapon - thank Christ for that - but no phone, and no keys.
Someone had drugged her and taken her cell phone and keys, she thought with an odd sense of calm. This was not good. This was really not good.
But they'd left her wallet, heavy with the change she had a habit of collecting until she did something like pay for an entire cup of coffee all in dimes. She felt a glimmer of relief as her eyes swept over her driver's license, the two crumpled twenties someone had probably washed in the washing machine (like her aunt Laverne used to do on purpose), the AmEx and debit card and that discount card from the pharmacy and the coupon for the brand of eyeliner she liked. Okay, she thought, making an effort to jiggle her sluggish thought process, force it into action. Okay, okay.
Clearing her throat, she lifted the receiver of the bedside phone and stabbed at the number zero. When a heavily accented voice - Russian? Eastern European, anyway - answered, she curtly announced, "I need a cab."
"Lady, you no have cell phone?"
Sharon's jaw tightened. "What, is it long distance? Call me a cab and I won't report you for health code violations - I'm a cop," she added when the man began to protest, and hung up.
Perhaps nearly a decade in Internal Affairs had done little to hone her people skills.
She was perspiring profusely, an unnatural sweat that felt sticky, clammy, and dense on her skin. She shuddered and automatically drew her hairbrush through her long dark hair.
The bedside phone rang and the voice from before snarled, "Ten minutes."
The air was very dry, the rays of the sun intense for late September - but Sharon realized that for all she knew it could be afternoon.
It was Saturday. She was pretty sure it was Saturday. It was supposed to be Saturday, and she was off - unless she'd been summoned to a crime scene. Without her phone she had no way of knowing. Hoping she was still employed, the captain gingerly picked her way across the parking lot to her car, skirting a several broken beer bottles and a used condom. It was locked, but through the window she could see no sign of shoes.
Sharon blew out a shaky breath. Her eyes fell to her front bumper and then widened, the automatic response making her wince. The wide, deep dent there was not the little scrape Rusty had left. It looked as if she'd rammed into a post... or worse.
Her entire body shuddered, and she was afraid she was going to vomit again.
She had a duty to report this... incident. She'd been the victim of a crime. At the very least, the head of Major Crimes was in a very compromising position and there was someone out there with all her keys, her cellphone, with access to her work email, and her most reliable blak pumps.
She could call in now, from the motel office - the Golden Palm, according to the dilapidated neon sign - have a blak and white come meet her. A tech from SID would need to sweep the room before it was cleaned (althought the likelihood of its being leaned again this year seemed very low).
She desperately wanted a shower. She wanted to hug Rusty, if he would let her, and assure him - assure both of them - that everything was okay. She wanted an extra large cup of coffee. She wanted shoes.
A car pulled into the parking lot, but it wasn't her expected cab. As if someone had read her mind, it was a police cruiser. The two officers who emerged were young, not rookies but still wet behind the ears; Sharon read them at a glance. She shifted, standing up straight the way Elinore had taught her, exuding dignity even in her bare feet.
"Sharon Raydor?" asked the chocolate-skinned man, and his petite blonde partner murmured, "It's her, Ty. I recognize her."
"Captain Sharon Raydor?" the first officer repeated.
"Yes." Sharon took two steps forward, reaching into her purse. "I -"
She felt them draw their weapons before she saw them. "Hands in the air!" the male officer barked.
No stranger to police procedure, she wasn't stunned; but she was surprised. These kids were jumpy. If she were still in FID, she would've expected to see both of them in the not-too-distant future, sitting sullenly in her office. If they went around pulling their guns on superior officers, what would they do when confronted with real perps?
"I was reaching for my identification," Sharon replied as calmly as she could - her calm was in short supply this morning, but she still had more than most people possessed. "How - have you found my lost property?" Behind their service weapons they looked blank (they were, she reminded herself, younger than her children), and she elaborated, "My cell phone and my keys. They were stolen."
She wished her head didn't hurt so badly. She wished the light weren't so bright. If they hadn't found her phone and keys, why were they here? How did they know she was here in the first place? No one would dispatch a black and white to return someone's cell phone, not even a captain's cell phone. Her head swam.
"I don't understand," she admitted quietly, her voice sounding strangely absent in her ears. "I'm not feeling well."
It was embarrassing, potentially damaging - any display of weakness. She stood a little straighter.
The two officers - squinting very hard, she was able to read their names on their uniform shirts, Purcell and Jevshenko - exchanged a long look, but their guns didn't waver. Slowly, carefully, Jevshenko lowered her weapon and stepped forward, left hand going for the standard-issue cuffs attached to her belt. Instinctively Sharon took a step back, and felt the side of her Accura pressing against her body. She had nowhere to go, literally and figuratively.
"Sharon Raydor," began the young woman, her blue eyes wide and frightened while the captain's own face took on a mask-like calm, "I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Thomas Alvarez. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you by the court."
Jevshenko sounded very far away, as if she were perhaps across a body of water - a canal, a river. The cuffs that snapped onto her wrists pinched, but Sharon didn't flinch. Purcell carefully maneuvered her so that her head didn't bump the car door. Good, noted the calm, bloodless FID portion of her brain.
The back seat smelled of warm leather and fast-food biscuits. Sharon's stomach roiled. She thought perhaps she was on the verge of panicking. Her heart pounded, she was sweating, but her body felt hollow somehow. There were too many questions. Who the hell was Thomas Alvarez? Why would anyone think she had killed him? How had she ended up at this fleabag motel? Who had drugged her, and why?
Sharon didn't like questions, so she sank back against the seat, regulated her breathing - deep and slow - and allowed herself to focus on only one: where in the hell were her shoes?
Author: i-must-go-first
Category: Major Crimes
Pairing: Sharon/Andy. Yeah, that's right. Sharon/Andy.
Words: 2,813
Genre(s): Suspense/Romance
Rating: Rated: M
Summary: The captain's green eyes sliced into Andy's brown ones as he lowered
himself into the plastic chair opposite her. Even here, she managed to look
aloof, regal. Reaching up with her cuffed wrists, she flipped her hair over
her shoulder and shrugged, jerking her chin toward the shapeless uniform that
obscured her shapely form. "I know," she said. "Orange really isn't my color."
Let Slip the Dogs of Love
"Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war" - Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1, line 273
Love Dogs
Mevlana Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with praising,
until a cynic said, "So!
I've heard you calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?"
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
"Why did you stop praising?" "Because
I've never heard anything back."
"This longing you express
is the return message."
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
Prologue
Waking up with a splitting headache, the vaguest possible recollection of the past twelve hours, and no ready knowledge of one's own whereabouts is usually not the herald of a fantastic day, so Captain Sharon Raydor had no trouble brushing Mr. Bluebird off her shoulder and refraining from whistling any cheery tunes as she squinted at the generic beige ceiling directly above her. As the concussive pounding that threatened to split her skull in twain subsided enough to let her think, she swallowed down her nausea and gradually drew a steely-eyed bead on the amoeba-shaped watermark just to the left of center.
Her mouth tightened in displeasure. She'd have to call Mr Petrossian, the super. The toilet up in 12D must be leaking.
The mattress creaked as she shifted, and the captain realized two things simultaneously: she was indubitably going to vomit, and the ceiling of her cozy but modern condo was not beige.
She made it to the bathroom of what turned out to be a generic motel room - and not a very clean one, she noted, recoiling in distaste from her bird's-eye view of the toilet bowl - just in time. After expelling the sour contents of her stomach, Sharon pressed the back of a shaking hand to her dry lips and winced, fighting another rising tide welling up from the pit of her stomach: panic.
How had she ended up here? And where, more pressingly, was here?
It was very bad form for the head of FID to wake up in a seedy motel, suffering the ill effects of a bender she couldn't remember.
No, that wasn't right either. Not FID. Major Crimes. The head of Major Crimes. Well, still: no better.
For Sharon Raydor, waking up in a seedy motel, suffering the ill effects of a bender she couldn't remember, was inconceivable. She closed her eyes - without her glasses everything was swimming dizzyingly anyway, making the nausea worse - and breathed deeply, just as she did in her yoga classes. She felt the sharply cool press of the tile floor against her knees and heard the buzz of the lighting strip. She swallowed down the bitter taste of bile and reminded herself that if she sought answers, the only way to find them was to clear her mind of all distractions.
The problem was that the captain's mind had already been cleared. It was a perfect blank. A void.
Well, not a perfect blank. She knew her badge number and her children's birthdays and the names of all the counties in California in alphabetical order.
She got to her feet without touching the toilet, flushed it, and fumbled to unwrap the cake of oily motel soap lying beside the sink. She was fully dressed in the clothes she remembered putting on yesterday morning - it had just been yesterday, hadn't it? - the gray pencil skirt and slate-blue blazer, but her feet were bare... and filthy. She stared at them there on the white tile as if they belonged to someone else - as if someone else's toenails were painted black in a tiny act of rebellion, someone else's secret little indulgence; as if the scar on her left ankle was the result of a particularly nasty slip of someone else's razor - with a strange sense of detached curiosity. Balancing against the sink, she lifted one foot to examine the sole, confirming what the smudges on the tile had already told her: it was black, the cleaner arch showing in stark relief, as if she'd been walking on asphalt. The parking lot, maybe. Had she left her shoes in her car?
No, she couldn't have. There was no way the captain would have gotten behind the wheel in the state she must have been in the night before. No driving meant no car, right?
She lifted her eyes to her reflection. Her hair was flat and a little tangled, her skin sallow. Otherwise she was the same unremarkable middle-aged woman she saw in the mirror every day.
She shuffled back out into the bedroom and confronted the queen-sized bed with its sagging mattress and the print of a vase of carnations that was bolted to the wall. Even the subject of the "art" was heap, she thought, even as she noted that she'd slept atop the covers, leaving a small depression where her body had rested. She turned slowly, hands on her hips (best to make no sudden moves in her state), and then bent cautiously and peered under the bed. There was no sign of her shoes. Her handbag, however, the sturdy brown leather she used for work, slumped haphazardly on the nightstand.
But where were her shoes?
Her heart was beating rapidly as Sharon used two fingers to open a crack in the faded green curtains. She was on the second floor, looking out over a parking lot that could have been any parking lot, except that in this particular parking lot there was her car - not the Crown Vic but her own car, the little silver Accura with the scrape on the front bumper that Rusty had put there when she'd given him his first driving lesson.
Oh, Jesus, she thought.Rusty. What must he be thinking? He'd be frantic. He'd think something awful had happened to her - and this was a boy who had been abandoned by his own mother at a damn zoo.
The captain swallowed hard and sank down on the edge of the bed. Doubtless the comforter was as filthy as the rest of her surroundings, but surely she'd already contracted whatever contagious diseases might permeate its fibers. She was momentarily distracted from her worry over Rusty by a worse thought.
She had driven here.
Unless someone had driven her...?
Sharon took a tight, fluttery breath, trying to convince her stomach not to revolt again. She wasn't sure which of the two possibilities was more horrific. Both made her skin crawl. Either she'd driven under the influence, which was unconscionable, or she'd been with some faceless stranger in this place. She jumped up from the bed and rapidly scrutinized it again, this time with a forensic eye, but saw no indication that another person had been there. Nothing had been disturbed in the bathroom; there was nothing in the trash. There was no tell-tale soreness in any seldom-used muscles.
So there was that, then; she probably hadn't had blind-drunk sex with a stranger she'd met... in a bar? Had she been in a bar?
That was a hell of a silver lining.
Her mouth was as dry as the desert, and her heart was hammering. Drugged, she thought, and was vaguely astonished that it had taken her fuzzy brain so long to reach that conclusion. She must've been drugged.
The heart that was already beating unnaturally rapidly lurched as if it might leap right out of her chest and flop helplessly onto the hideous floral bedspread.
She should go see her doctor. She should do that now, first thing, and have blood drawn. She needed to know what had been done to her.
Been done to her: Raydor revolted at the passive construction of the sentence. It made her sound like a victim, and while the captain was many things, she was no one's victim.
She stood up again and looked around irritably. Where were her goddamned shoes?
She seized her purse and was struck immediately by its lightness.
Shit. This day kept improving.
Her fingers were already scrabbling inside, brushing against her badge, her service weapon - thank Christ for that - but no phone, and no keys.
Someone had drugged her and taken her cell phone and keys, she thought with an odd sense of calm. This was not good. This was really not good.
But they'd left her wallet, heavy with the change she had a habit of collecting until she did something like pay for an entire cup of coffee all in dimes. She felt a glimmer of relief as her eyes swept over her driver's license, the two crumpled twenties someone had probably washed in the washing machine (like her aunt Laverne used to do on purpose), the AmEx and debit card and that discount card from the pharmacy and the coupon for the brand of eyeliner she liked. Okay, she thought, making an effort to jiggle her sluggish thought process, force it into action. Okay, okay.
Clearing her throat, she lifted the receiver of the bedside phone and stabbed at the number zero. When a heavily accented voice - Russian? Eastern European, anyway - answered, she curtly announced, "I need a cab."
"Lady, you no have cell phone?"
Sharon's jaw tightened. "What, is it long distance? Call me a cab and I won't report you for health code violations - I'm a cop," she added when the man began to protest, and hung up.
Perhaps nearly a decade in Internal Affairs had done little to hone her people skills.
She was perspiring profusely, an unnatural sweat that felt sticky, clammy, and dense on her skin. She shuddered and automatically drew her hairbrush through her long dark hair.
The bedside phone rang and the voice from before snarled, "Ten minutes."
The air was very dry, the rays of the sun intense for late September - but Sharon realized that for all she knew it could be afternoon.
It was Saturday. She was pretty sure it was Saturday. It was supposed to be Saturday, and she was off - unless she'd been summoned to a crime scene. Without her phone she had no way of knowing. Hoping she was still employed, the captain gingerly picked her way across the parking lot to her car, skirting a several broken beer bottles and a used condom. It was locked, but through the window she could see no sign of shoes.
Sharon blew out a shaky breath. Her eyes fell to her front bumper and then widened, the automatic response making her wince. The wide, deep dent there was not the little scrape Rusty had left. It looked as if she'd rammed into a post... or worse.
Her entire body shuddered, and she was afraid she was going to vomit again.
She had a duty to report this... incident. She'd been the victim of a crime. At the very least, the head of Major Crimes was in a very compromising position and there was someone out there with all her keys, her cellphone, with access to her work email, and her most reliable blak pumps.
She could call in now, from the motel office - the Golden Palm, according to the dilapidated neon sign - have a blak and white come meet her. A tech from SID would need to sweep the room before it was cleaned (althought the likelihood of its being leaned again this year seemed very low).
She desperately wanted a shower. She wanted to hug Rusty, if he would let her, and assure him - assure both of them - that everything was okay. She wanted an extra large cup of coffee. She wanted shoes.
A car pulled into the parking lot, but it wasn't her expected cab. As if someone had read her mind, it was a police cruiser. The two officers who emerged were young, not rookies but still wet behind the ears; Sharon read them at a glance. She shifted, standing up straight the way Elinore had taught her, exuding dignity even in her bare feet.
"Sharon Raydor?" asked the chocolate-skinned man, and his petite blonde partner murmured, "It's her, Ty. I recognize her."
"Captain Sharon Raydor?" the first officer repeated.
"Yes." Sharon took two steps forward, reaching into her purse. "I -"
She felt them draw their weapons before she saw them. "Hands in the air!" the male officer barked.
No stranger to police procedure, she wasn't stunned; but she was surprised. These kids were jumpy. If she were still in FID, she would've expected to see both of them in the not-too-distant future, sitting sullenly in her office. If they went around pulling their guns on superior officers, what would they do when confronted with real perps?
"I was reaching for my identification," Sharon replied as calmly as she could - her calm was in short supply this morning, but she still had more than most people possessed. "How - have you found my lost property?" Behind their service weapons they looked blank (they were, she reminded herself, younger than her children), and she elaborated, "My cell phone and my keys. They were stolen."
She wished her head didn't hurt so badly. She wished the light weren't so bright. If they hadn't found her phone and keys, why were they here? How did they know she was here in the first place? No one would dispatch a black and white to return someone's cell phone, not even a captain's cell phone. Her head swam.
"I don't understand," she admitted quietly, her voice sounding strangely absent in her ears. "I'm not feeling well."
It was embarrassing, potentially damaging - any display of weakness. She stood a little straighter.
The two officers - squinting very hard, she was able to read their names on their uniform shirts, Purcell and Jevshenko - exchanged a long look, but their guns didn't waver. Slowly, carefully, Jevshenko lowered her weapon and stepped forward, left hand going for the standard-issue cuffs attached to her belt. Instinctively Sharon took a step back, and felt the side of her Accura pressing against her body. She had nowhere to go, literally and figuratively.
"Sharon Raydor," began the young woman, her blue eyes wide and frightened while the captain's own face took on a mask-like calm, "I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Thomas Alvarez. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you by the court."
Jevshenko sounded very far away, as if she were perhaps across a body of water - a canal, a river. The cuffs that snapped onto her wrists pinched, but Sharon didn't flinch. Purcell carefully maneuvered her so that her head didn't bump the car door. Good, noted the calm, bloodless FID portion of her brain.
The back seat smelled of warm leather and fast-food biscuits. Sharon's stomach roiled. She thought perhaps she was on the verge of panicking. Her heart pounded, she was sweating, but her body felt hollow somehow. There were too many questions. Who the hell was Thomas Alvarez? Why would anyone think she had killed him? How had she ended up at this fleabag motel? Who had drugged her, and why?
Sharon didn't like questions, so she sank back against the seat, regulated her breathing - deep and slow - and allowed herself to focus on only one: where in the hell were her shoes?