"...who
stand and wait"
by Rhyo
*~*~*
Notes: Set right after Survival. Thanks to my
beloved Retro for the idea.
*~*~*
The first phone call, from the Commissioner's aide-de-camp, was bad enough. I
was really not looking forward to explaining to the man himself how it came to
be that a civilian, a non-staff-member who has been part of the department for
18 months longer than his original 3 month observer pass allowed, managed to
rack up a $7,500 medi-evac bill that the department was now being asked to
cover.
If I'd been thinking at the time I submitted the open payables, I would have
changed the line-item title and buried it deep in the budget of some other
case. One more lie in the string of lies that I had been holding up with a
smile for the approval of my superiors really should not have been such a big
deal. But I wasn't thinking. I was too busy being grateful that Dawson Quinn
was behind bars again, grateful that Sandburg had survived and grateful that
I'd kept Jim from tossing Quinn's body--and with it his own career--down that
mine shaft. I'd had my doubts about all of those things at the time. So now I
was going to have to take a little heat over the budget item, pucker up and
kiss a little higher-up ass over it. It wasn't the first time.
I'd always known that some day I would have to pay for what I had allowed to
happen in my department; hell, what I had done myself-- deliberately falsifying
reports, looking away while my detective and his observer stretched the truth, leaving
out critical information. By the police standards I had trained to, it was wrong.
But Sandburg had said that Jim's abilities were a gift, and if Jim had been
given a gift, so had Cascade and the police department. Jim's gifts meant that
we caught and put away high-level criminals that probably would have slipped
away otherwise, and there was not a doubt in my mind that those criminals were
guilty of the crimes they had been convicted of.
It would be foolish to turn such a great gift away because it didn't fit into a
neat, preconceived box. But the day it all becomes public is the day my head
goes into that neat box. So I wait for the Commissioner's call, sorting through
my strategies, and hoping that today I will be clever enough to divert everything,
just one more time.
The End
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