CSI Fic - Mistaken Identity Chapter III
Title: Mistaken Identity
Fandom: CSI - Crime Scene Investigation
Pairing: Sara/Sofia
Rating: M for extreme scenes of violence and some language.
Disclaimer and Spoiler Warnings: Not mine. See Prologue for full disclaimer and spoiler information.
Summary: The chaos continues as Ely’s escapees begin to trickle into Las Vegas and Warrick Brown finds himself in the middle of the beginning of a crime wave without his credentials, gun or backup.
Author’s Note: Finally! This is not beta read and I am not completely happy with it, but here it is - Chapter III: Fired. It’s progress and that’s good...ish, I think. Maybe this will cure the wicked bad writer’s block that’s been plaguing me.
Chapter III
Fired
The pickup truck he had taken from Ely’s parking lot was a piece of shit. He wasn’t going to bitch too much, though, the truck had gone further then he’d originally thought it would. The pile of junk hadn’t looked like it would get past Pioche, but it had made it all the way to the city. Now he needed to do was stay under the radar and away from attention and he would be fine. James Leroy tugged at the collar of the cover-alls he’d found stuffed behind the truck’s passenger seat. They smelled of motor oil, gasoline and another man’s sweat. The name stitched on the front pocket was Robert and he, whoever he was, was about two sizes smaller then James.
God, he needed to change clothes, these were way too fucking small and it wasn’t like he could put his prison orange back on. He was stuck until he found some cash. Robert had left his truck unlocked with the spare key in the center console, but had taken his wallet into the prison with him. James hadn’t even been able to find three quarters.
Fuck Robert.
He had found some cigarettes: cheap unfiltered Camels that burnt his throat and an equally cheap plastic Bic that might have been blue once. The grease stains made it hard to tell and the heat combined with his uncomfortably tight jumpsuit made it hard to give a damn.
He flicked his calloused thumb across the metal wheel and smiled when a small flame leapt up. He kept the light burning until the small lighter was too hot to hold onto anymore. James liked fire.
The rest of the truck was a waste. There were a few tools in it’s rusty bed, but they were used, abused and cheap. Even the roughest pawn shop in town would laugh at him. He was flat broke, wearing another man’s clothes and the cops would be breathing down his neck any time. Christ, it almost wasn’t worth it. Almost. He squinted up at the sun through the dusty windshield and glanced at the Robert’s discarded wristwatch, he’d been out for almost seven hours.
Seven hours of driving from the shit stain called Ely to get to a shitty part of North Las Vegas. He had taken every pig trail and dust-choked back road and had cut through both Utah and Arizona to avoid the cops, and he’d still had a damn close call with a state trooper on the outskirts of St George. He probably should have kept heading east, towards Oklahoma City, Phoenix or even south to Mexico. He would head that way, eventually. He just needed to grab a couple of things from home. Home was where you kept your shit, so at the moment James’s home was in Vegas. He had a few things squirreled away in a buddy’s garage that he could definitely use.
Lenny wouldn’t mind loaning a shirt and a shower either. He just had to get over in Winchester, which meant allot of walking down very busy streets. James ran his hand over his burred blonde hair. He wasn’t a genius, but he knew walking wasn’t exactly a great idea. He drummed his hands on the steering wheel and tried to think of a good plan.
He watched, easily distracted from his unproductive plotting, a sedan pull up and parallel park in the spot right in front of his own. The driver was an old woman on a cell phone, the car was a late model Honda. James looked at the pipe wrench lying on the truck’s passenger seat. It would be too easy.
*****
Nancy Sherman shut her cell phone and scowled at it for a minute. Her son’s car had been repossessed, a by-product of his divorce battle. Dana, the succubus he’d married, had stopped payment on all of the checks he’d written over the past month, including the one for his Corvette. They had repossessed it at the lawyer’s office for God’s sake.
She’d wished she’d never introduced Andrew to the woman. She also wished he’d have taken her advice and hired her attorney, George Howard, instead of the hotshot the television commercials and billboards raved about. At least she knew where George’s office was. Caperelli and Associates was proving harder to find then Andrew had made it out to be. She’d already had to call him twice for directions. This time she had pulled off onto a side street, parked, and written the directions out. She was going to find the place and then Andy would drive them home. She hated driving in the city around rush hour.
A tap at her window made her jerk and she looked up from her recently written directions. She pushed her steel gray hair off of her forehead and looked at the young man outside her window. He was some sort of mechanic, she didn’t know him. She hit the door lock-button with her elbow. Outside of the glass he pantomimed holding a telephone to his ear with his thumb and pinky finger and then pointed to the ramshackle truck parked behind her car.
Ah, she realized, he just needed to borrow her cell phone.
Then the shattered safety glass of what used to be her driver’s side window hit her face.
*****
Warrick loosened his tie as soon as his feet touched the sidewalk outside of his lawyer’s office.
God, he hated lawyers. He hated paying so much money for one even more. Marrying Tina had cost him three hundred dollars: sixty for the paper work, forty for the drive through ceremony and another two hundred dollars for the rings. Divorcing the woman was going to cost him fifteen hundred dollars. Thank God Nevada was a no-fault state or it would have cost him at least twice as much.
He took off his jacket, a garment usually reserved for court appearances and funerals, and threw it over his shoulder. As much as he wanted the whole thing to be over, he was still curious. If Tina’s baby was his, that meant he was going to be a father. A father, him. Warrick shook his head, it was surreal. Tina wanted to wait until the baby was born to get the DNA work-up. On the one hand, that was another reason to drag the proceedings on and on and on. On the other, Warrick had to admit, it was safer to wait. Amniotic fluid testing could be dangerous to the baby and as a medical professional Tina knew the statistics and didn’t want to risk it. He would wait, it was all he could do.
“Dana they repossessed my car. My car, Dana!” A harried man paced the small parking lot beside the lawyer’s office, he was practically screaming at his Blackberry. “My mother has to come pick me up. My mother, Dana, do you know how humiliating that is? What do you think pulling this crap is going to get you the house? Well I’ve got something to tell you…”
Warrick tuned out the man and got into his own car. The restored muscle car roared to life around him, effectively drowning out the soon-to-be-divorced man, and he peeled out of the parking lot. That argument had sounded far too familiar for comfort. Why was it so damn easy for love to turn into hate? It didn’t matter, he didn’t even want to think about his own problems. He really didn’t want someone else’s worries on his shoulders right now.
It took less then three blocks for him to eat his words.
He saw the smoke first, it was pitch black and smelled of gasoline. Though he was suspended, he couldn’t ignore such an obvious sign of trouble. Warrick felt the jolt of adrenaline hit him and he jerked his tie off and threw it in the passenger seat with one hand and hit the red button to turn his car’s emergency flashers on. Even if he wasn’t in a department vehicle, the drivers around him let him pass.
The fire was on a side street and it had almost fully engulfed the vehicle. It was a work truck: old, dirty and it had the flotsam of a blue collar laborer in back. The fire had originated in the back, near the bed, and was moving forward towards the cab and engine. It was an obvious arson. Someone had probably hotwired the truck and was now destroying the evidence of grand theft auto. It was probably one punk giving another punk the middle finger.
Warrick got out of his car, phone already in hand. This was the most action he’d seen since he’d been suspended. He scrolled through his phone contact list as he walked, dispatch needed to get a fire crew and an officer attached to the auto theft unit. They could run the VIN number and inform the owner, though Warrick didn’t think the case would go anywhere, there were too many auto crimes and too little time to solve a case that was little more then malicious mischief.
He stopped still when he saw the woman in the cab. There was a person inside of the truck! He dropped his phone, dispatch forgotten and started to run. His slick soled dress shoes scuffed the asphalt and he slid to a less then graceful stop about three yards in front of the flaming pickup truck.
The woman inside, he realized, wasn’t moving. The fire was incredibly hot; he had to put his arm up in front of his face to stand it. Despite being several feet away, he could smell his hair singing.
“Ma’am!”
He only had seconds to get the woman free. The fire, a viscous and fast moving red, yellow and orange monster, was moving towards her fast. If he didn’t get her out now, she would be trapped and would die a painful death. He couldn’t let her die-not again.
“Ma’am!”
He grabbed the driver’s side door handle and pulled it three times. The metal was hot enough to blister his fingers and he cursed. The door was locked. He put his elbow through the window without a second thought. Glass fell inside of the truck and hit the woman. The rush of fresh air hit the fire inside and it roared with renewed life. Warrick reached inside and searched the door’s inside panel for the internal handle. It was like shoving his arm, in a live oven, an oven fueled by gasoline. Shards of glass cut through his shirt and scrapped his skin and the fire crept closer to the unconscious woman and him.
His fingers finally fumbled onto the lever and he pulled it. The click told him that the door was open and he wrenched it open as quickly as he could. The number one priority was getting the woman out and away from the fire. He didn’t even flinch when the flames licked at his arms and hands.
There was no time to lose and Warrick knew it. He’d seen enough vehicle fires to know that an explosion, while not guaranteed, was very possible. He gingerly lifted the woman into a firemen’s carry across his shoulders and moved away from the truck as quickly as he could. He gagged when the smell of her burnt and blistered flesh hit him.
Warrick could hear sirens and hoped that they were headed their way. When they were a safe distance away, a few yards from where he’d left his car, he laid the woman down on the cement. Though he doubted she could hear him, he began to speak.
“My name is Warrick Brown and I’m with the Police. I need you to answer me if you can hear me.” He took her left, and relatively whole and unburnt, hand in his own. “Or squeeze my hand if you can’t talk.”
She squeezed his hand, but he wasn’t sure if it was because she could hear him or from pure reflex.
“You’re going to be okay, help is on the way.”
Her chest, a mess of charred and melted clothing and charbroiled flesh, moved up and down but only barely. There was more burnt than healthy flesh and when he gently turned his head he knew she was going to die. The back of her skull was a pulpy mess of singed hair, sticky blood, chips of white skull bone and decimated brain matter. She was probably only alive enough to feel the pain.
Son of a bitch. His eyes, irritated from the smoke, teared up. Son of a bitch.
The sirens, complete with the blue lights of two LVPD cars and the red of both a fire-truck and an ambulance arrived less then four minutes later.
Though he still held the woman’s hand, they were three minutes too late to do anything for her.
Warrick recognized one of the responding officers. Kevin Thomas was a good patrol officer who was on the fast track to being a sergeant. He had a good head on his shoulders and he didn’t scare easily. He also had shit luck when it came to locker-room betting.
“Paramedics are here, Brown.”
Though he’d folded the unnamed woman’s hands across her stomach, he hadn’t bothered to stand up. He was still sitting on the pavement; he looked up at Thomas. “She doesn’t need them anymore.” His voice was raspy from the smoke and the bitter tears he was forcing back down his throat.
“They’re not for her; they’re here for you, man.”
Warrick blew out a breath, “I’m fine.”
Thomas shifted from foot to foot before kneeling down beside him. “Those look like pretty serious burns on your arms. Just let them check you out, if you don’t want to go to the hospital that’s fine.”
Warrick just grunted and took Kevin’s offered hand to help him up.
“You’ll have to stay and wait for the Detectives to take your statement, and the coroner might have some questions for you too.”
Warrick nodded, he had known that, “Have you taped off the area? We’ll need to process this entire street for trace evidence and photograph the truck from several angles before we transport it to the garage to process it.” He looked over his shoulder and winced at the several thousands of gallons of water that were being pumped on and into the truck. If the fire hadn’t destroyed the evidence, the water was going to wash it away.
“The good news is that I removed the woma-victim before her body was completely destroyed. There might be some evidence we can salvage, and my clothes will have to be taken as evidence, of course.”
Officer Thomas looked very uncomfortable. “Yeah, we’ve already called for a CSI.” He paused and looked away. “I’m going to have to ask you to stay behind the tape, Brown. You’re suspended and I can’t have a civilian on the crime scene, even if you are a witness.”
The cop wouldn’t, or couldn’t look him in the eyes. His words stung but Warrick made himself smile and shrugged a shoulder. He didn’t even hiss when the little lightning bolts of pain tore across his skin when he moved. He might be suspended, and he was pretty sure that half of the department thought he was a screw-up, but he still had his pride.
“So how long do you think it’s going to take for someone to get out here? I’d like to get back to my little vacation.” He grinned at his own lame joke and Thomas laughed a little.
“I have no idea, most of the force, especially the detectives and crims are out at Ely trying to get things back under control.”
Warrick paused beside the open ambulance’s doors. “What are you talking about?”
A wave of shock went across Kevin’s face, and he rubbed his hand over his dark, short Marine Corp hair. “You mean you haven’t heard?”
It took Kevin less then a minute to lay out exactly what was known about the Ely breakout. It took less then thirty seconds for Warrick to process everything he was being told.
“Son of a bitch,” Warrick swore but he wasn’t sure that it was just the sting of disinfectant and bactine on his freshly burnt arms. There was a part of him, deep inside, that howled at the injustice of what had happened. The state penal system had just experienced an unparalleled meltdown and dozens of hardened rapists and murderers were pouring into his city, and nobody had called him.
“Christ.”
Fandom: CSI - Crime Scene Investigation
Pairing: Sara/Sofia
Rating: M for extreme scenes of violence and some language.
Disclaimer and Spoiler Warnings: Not mine. See Prologue for full disclaimer and spoiler information.
Summary: The chaos continues as Ely’s escapees begin to trickle into Las Vegas and Warrick Brown finds himself in the middle of the beginning of a crime wave without his credentials, gun or backup.
Author’s Note: Finally! This is not beta read and I am not completely happy with it, but here it is - Chapter III: Fired. It’s progress and that’s good...ish, I think. Maybe this will cure the wicked bad writer’s block that’s been plaguing me.
Chapter III
Fired
The pickup truck he had taken from Ely’s parking lot was a piece of shit. He wasn’t going to bitch too much, though, the truck had gone further then he’d originally thought it would. The pile of junk hadn’t looked like it would get past Pioche, but it had made it all the way to the city. Now he needed to do was stay under the radar and away from attention and he would be fine. James Leroy tugged at the collar of the cover-alls he’d found stuffed behind the truck’s passenger seat. They smelled of motor oil, gasoline and another man’s sweat. The name stitched on the front pocket was Robert and he, whoever he was, was about two sizes smaller then James.
God, he needed to change clothes, these were way too fucking small and it wasn’t like he could put his prison orange back on. He was stuck until he found some cash. Robert had left his truck unlocked with the spare key in the center console, but had taken his wallet into the prison with him. James hadn’t even been able to find three quarters.
Fuck Robert.
He had found some cigarettes: cheap unfiltered Camels that burnt his throat and an equally cheap plastic Bic that might have been blue once. The grease stains made it hard to tell and the heat combined with his uncomfortably tight jumpsuit made it hard to give a damn.
He flicked his calloused thumb across the metal wheel and smiled when a small flame leapt up. He kept the light burning until the small lighter was too hot to hold onto anymore. James liked fire.
The rest of the truck was a waste. There were a few tools in it’s rusty bed, but they were used, abused and cheap. Even the roughest pawn shop in town would laugh at him. He was flat broke, wearing another man’s clothes and the cops would be breathing down his neck any time. Christ, it almost wasn’t worth it. Almost. He squinted up at the sun through the dusty windshield and glanced at the Robert’s discarded wristwatch, he’d been out for almost seven hours.
Seven hours of driving from the shit stain called Ely to get to a shitty part of North Las Vegas. He had taken every pig trail and dust-choked back road and had cut through both Utah and Arizona to avoid the cops, and he’d still had a damn close call with a state trooper on the outskirts of St George. He probably should have kept heading east, towards Oklahoma City, Phoenix or even south to Mexico. He would head that way, eventually. He just needed to grab a couple of things from home. Home was where you kept your shit, so at the moment James’s home was in Vegas. He had a few things squirreled away in a buddy’s garage that he could definitely use.
Lenny wouldn’t mind loaning a shirt and a shower either. He just had to get over in Winchester, which meant allot of walking down very busy streets. James ran his hand over his burred blonde hair. He wasn’t a genius, but he knew walking wasn’t exactly a great idea. He drummed his hands on the steering wheel and tried to think of a good plan.
He watched, easily distracted from his unproductive plotting, a sedan pull up and parallel park in the spot right in front of his own. The driver was an old woman on a cell phone, the car was a late model Honda. James looked at the pipe wrench lying on the truck’s passenger seat. It would be too easy.
*****
Nancy Sherman shut her cell phone and scowled at it for a minute. Her son’s car had been repossessed, a by-product of his divorce battle. Dana, the succubus he’d married, had stopped payment on all of the checks he’d written over the past month, including the one for his Corvette. They had repossessed it at the lawyer’s office for God’s sake.
She’d wished she’d never introduced Andrew to the woman. She also wished he’d have taken her advice and hired her attorney, George Howard, instead of the hotshot the television commercials and billboards raved about. At least she knew where George’s office was. Caperelli and Associates was proving harder to find then Andrew had made it out to be. She’d already had to call him twice for directions. This time she had pulled off onto a side street, parked, and written the directions out. She was going to find the place and then Andy would drive them home. She hated driving in the city around rush hour.
A tap at her window made her jerk and she looked up from her recently written directions. She pushed her steel gray hair off of her forehead and looked at the young man outside her window. He was some sort of mechanic, she didn’t know him. She hit the door lock-button with her elbow. Outside of the glass he pantomimed holding a telephone to his ear with his thumb and pinky finger and then pointed to the ramshackle truck parked behind her car.
Ah, she realized, he just needed to borrow her cell phone.
Then the shattered safety glass of what used to be her driver’s side window hit her face.
*****
Warrick loosened his tie as soon as his feet touched the sidewalk outside of his lawyer’s office.
God, he hated lawyers. He hated paying so much money for one even more. Marrying Tina had cost him three hundred dollars: sixty for the paper work, forty for the drive through ceremony and another two hundred dollars for the rings. Divorcing the woman was going to cost him fifteen hundred dollars. Thank God Nevada was a no-fault state or it would have cost him at least twice as much.
He took off his jacket, a garment usually reserved for court appearances and funerals, and threw it over his shoulder. As much as he wanted the whole thing to be over, he was still curious. If Tina’s baby was his, that meant he was going to be a father. A father, him. Warrick shook his head, it was surreal. Tina wanted to wait until the baby was born to get the DNA work-up. On the one hand, that was another reason to drag the proceedings on and on and on. On the other, Warrick had to admit, it was safer to wait. Amniotic fluid testing could be dangerous to the baby and as a medical professional Tina knew the statistics and didn’t want to risk it. He would wait, it was all he could do.
“Dana they repossessed my car. My car, Dana!” A harried man paced the small parking lot beside the lawyer’s office, he was practically screaming at his Blackberry. “My mother has to come pick me up. My mother, Dana, do you know how humiliating that is? What do you think pulling this crap is going to get you the house? Well I’ve got something to tell you…”
Warrick tuned out the man and got into his own car. The restored muscle car roared to life around him, effectively drowning out the soon-to-be-divorced man, and he peeled out of the parking lot. That argument had sounded far too familiar for comfort. Why was it so damn easy for love to turn into hate? It didn’t matter, he didn’t even want to think about his own problems. He really didn’t want someone else’s worries on his shoulders right now.
It took less then three blocks for him to eat his words.
He saw the smoke first, it was pitch black and smelled of gasoline. Though he was suspended, he couldn’t ignore such an obvious sign of trouble. Warrick felt the jolt of adrenaline hit him and he jerked his tie off and threw it in the passenger seat with one hand and hit the red button to turn his car’s emergency flashers on. Even if he wasn’t in a department vehicle, the drivers around him let him pass.
The fire was on a side street and it had almost fully engulfed the vehicle. It was a work truck: old, dirty and it had the flotsam of a blue collar laborer in back. The fire had originated in the back, near the bed, and was moving forward towards the cab and engine. It was an obvious arson. Someone had probably hotwired the truck and was now destroying the evidence of grand theft auto. It was probably one punk giving another punk the middle finger.
Warrick got out of his car, phone already in hand. This was the most action he’d seen since he’d been suspended. He scrolled through his phone contact list as he walked, dispatch needed to get a fire crew and an officer attached to the auto theft unit. They could run the VIN number and inform the owner, though Warrick didn’t think the case would go anywhere, there were too many auto crimes and too little time to solve a case that was little more then malicious mischief.
He stopped still when he saw the woman in the cab. There was a person inside of the truck! He dropped his phone, dispatch forgotten and started to run. His slick soled dress shoes scuffed the asphalt and he slid to a less then graceful stop about three yards in front of the flaming pickup truck.
The woman inside, he realized, wasn’t moving. The fire was incredibly hot; he had to put his arm up in front of his face to stand it. Despite being several feet away, he could smell his hair singing.
“Ma’am!”
He only had seconds to get the woman free. The fire, a viscous and fast moving red, yellow and orange monster, was moving towards her fast. If he didn’t get her out now, she would be trapped and would die a painful death. He couldn’t let her die-not again.
“Ma’am!”
He grabbed the driver’s side door handle and pulled it three times. The metal was hot enough to blister his fingers and he cursed. The door was locked. He put his elbow through the window without a second thought. Glass fell inside of the truck and hit the woman. The rush of fresh air hit the fire inside and it roared with renewed life. Warrick reached inside and searched the door’s inside panel for the internal handle. It was like shoving his arm, in a live oven, an oven fueled by gasoline. Shards of glass cut through his shirt and scrapped his skin and the fire crept closer to the unconscious woman and him.
His fingers finally fumbled onto the lever and he pulled it. The click told him that the door was open and he wrenched it open as quickly as he could. The number one priority was getting the woman out and away from the fire. He didn’t even flinch when the flames licked at his arms and hands.
There was no time to lose and Warrick knew it. He’d seen enough vehicle fires to know that an explosion, while not guaranteed, was very possible. He gingerly lifted the woman into a firemen’s carry across his shoulders and moved away from the truck as quickly as he could. He gagged when the smell of her burnt and blistered flesh hit him.
Warrick could hear sirens and hoped that they were headed their way. When they were a safe distance away, a few yards from where he’d left his car, he laid the woman down on the cement. Though he doubted she could hear him, he began to speak.
“My name is Warrick Brown and I’m with the Police. I need you to answer me if you can hear me.” He took her left, and relatively whole and unburnt, hand in his own. “Or squeeze my hand if you can’t talk.”
She squeezed his hand, but he wasn’t sure if it was because she could hear him or from pure reflex.
“You’re going to be okay, help is on the way.”
Her chest, a mess of charred and melted clothing and charbroiled flesh, moved up and down but only barely. There was more burnt than healthy flesh and when he gently turned his head he knew she was going to die. The back of her skull was a pulpy mess of singed hair, sticky blood, chips of white skull bone and decimated brain matter. She was probably only alive enough to feel the pain.
Son of a bitch. His eyes, irritated from the smoke, teared up. Son of a bitch.
The sirens, complete with the blue lights of two LVPD cars and the red of both a fire-truck and an ambulance arrived less then four minutes later.
Though he still held the woman’s hand, they were three minutes too late to do anything for her.
Warrick recognized one of the responding officers. Kevin Thomas was a good patrol officer who was on the fast track to being a sergeant. He had a good head on his shoulders and he didn’t scare easily. He also had shit luck when it came to locker-room betting.
“Paramedics are here, Brown.”
Though he’d folded the unnamed woman’s hands across her stomach, he hadn’t bothered to stand up. He was still sitting on the pavement; he looked up at Thomas. “She doesn’t need them anymore.” His voice was raspy from the smoke and the bitter tears he was forcing back down his throat.
“They’re not for her; they’re here for you, man.”
Warrick blew out a breath, “I’m fine.”
Thomas shifted from foot to foot before kneeling down beside him. “Those look like pretty serious burns on your arms. Just let them check you out, if you don’t want to go to the hospital that’s fine.”
Warrick just grunted and took Kevin’s offered hand to help him up.
“You’ll have to stay and wait for the Detectives to take your statement, and the coroner might have some questions for you too.”
Warrick nodded, he had known that, “Have you taped off the area? We’ll need to process this entire street for trace evidence and photograph the truck from several angles before we transport it to the garage to process it.” He looked over his shoulder and winced at the several thousands of gallons of water that were being pumped on and into the truck. If the fire hadn’t destroyed the evidence, the water was going to wash it away.
“The good news is that I removed the woma-victim before her body was completely destroyed. There might be some evidence we can salvage, and my clothes will have to be taken as evidence, of course.”
Officer Thomas looked very uncomfortable. “Yeah, we’ve already called for a CSI.” He paused and looked away. “I’m going to have to ask you to stay behind the tape, Brown. You’re suspended and I can’t have a civilian on the crime scene, even if you are a witness.”
The cop wouldn’t, or couldn’t look him in the eyes. His words stung but Warrick made himself smile and shrugged a shoulder. He didn’t even hiss when the little lightning bolts of pain tore across his skin when he moved. He might be suspended, and he was pretty sure that half of the department thought he was a screw-up, but he still had his pride.
“So how long do you think it’s going to take for someone to get out here? I’d like to get back to my little vacation.” He grinned at his own lame joke and Thomas laughed a little.
“I have no idea, most of the force, especially the detectives and crims are out at Ely trying to get things back under control.”
Warrick paused beside the open ambulance’s doors. “What are you talking about?”
A wave of shock went across Kevin’s face, and he rubbed his hand over his dark, short Marine Corp hair. “You mean you haven’t heard?”
It took Kevin less then a minute to lay out exactly what was known about the Ely breakout. It took less then thirty seconds for Warrick to process everything he was being told.
“Son of a bitch,” Warrick swore but he wasn’t sure that it was just the sting of disinfectant and bactine on his freshly burnt arms. There was a part of him, deep inside, that howled at the injustice of what had happened. The state penal system had just experienced an unparalleled meltdown and dozens of hardened rapists and murderers were pouring into his city, and nobody had called him.
“Christ.”