Discardia: Homicide: Life on the Streets
Homicide: Life on the Streets - Tim Bayliss post Sniper
Tim hasn’t slept in four days, and he can still taste the stale champagne at the back of his throat. It burns like cigarettes used to, but it doesn’t give him the relief he used to feel when he could suck the nicotine into his lungs. Instead he feels like he’s on fire, every inch of him burnt to ash, falling apart in pieces, chucks dropping off like he’s being cremated and turning to dust.
It’s all starting to make sense to him, which he knows should frighten him, but knowing it and feeling it are two separate things. He doesn’t feel frightened. He feels alive.
Homicide: Life on the Streets - "edicimoh"
Nine names.
Nine names all in red.
Bayliss stares at the board, listening to the sound of the squad room as everyone moves around him, buzzing like a hive. Tim reads the names over and over again until the letters blur and smudge and merge together into a giant red ball.
Tim can feel his back. He can feel every push of blood through it, pulsing hot and hard, pounding like an angry drum. It sounds like victims, crying out for justice that Tim can’t give them. No clues. Nothing to go on but a goddamn children’s game and shells, marksman skills and eight hours. Every eight hours. Just another couple hours until there are more names under his, bleeding on the board like the people will be bleeding onto the sidewalk.
It would be so easy, he thinks. So easy to stand there and just breathe until everything went away except the sight of his gun. He knows how this guy does it. He can see it so clearly. The feel of the rifle in his hands, practically humming with the life it’s going to take. Everything else fades to gray, ceases to exist except for the body in the sights and it’s like the scope lets him see further, past the coats and clothes to the heart of them, to the heart.
It’s not the case that keeps him standing there in the window, not the unknown. Since his first day on the job, he’s been living with the unknown, because even when you know something in your heart, in your gut, it isn’t true unless you have evidence. Hard facts as cold as the bodies in the morgue, undeniable and irrefutable, even though twelve random people might send you to hell instead of the person who deserves to go.
Bayliss is resigned to the unknown, to not knowing. It’s not the who that drives him nearly as much as the why. Because for every drug, money or sex death, there is this: Random, senseless violence that sticks with him, a stain on his conscience that never clears.
The sniper has a mission. Tim gets that. He understands the way there seems like a higher purpose. Not God - if Frank can’t believe in God, there’s no way in hell Tim can. But there’s still something more. A voice. A demand. A plea.