This fic should stand alone, but just to have all the background, you might want to first read my fic "Daylight" which is where the narrator is introduced. :)

-#-

I really hate getting shot. It has to rank as one of my top three least favorite things, right up there with dental surgery and dealing with children. I hate it enough, in fact, that over the years I've gotten pretty good at avoiding it, 1996 notwithstanding.

However, she who lives by the sword….

I've led some very straightforward, "simple" missions that involved nothing more than playing bodyguard to some overpaid, overzealous politician. The job that laid me down, though-- there was nothing simple nor straightforward about it. When it all came down, we had about ten active shooters, and only four of them were my boys. I took two bullets in the abdomen and one in the lung, and went down like a rock. Woodson was on me in an instant and kept me from bleeding to death, but the real damage was done: one of the bastard bullets lodged in my spinal column.

My career days were instantly behind me.

I was lucky, and I knew it. As it was, I was hospitalized for over a month. My boys hung around for the first week or so, but Woodson and Jonesey got instant promotions on that bullet, and they could only stay out of the field for so long. I spent a couple of weeks alternately staring at the hospital ceiling and learning how to walk again with a bullet in the vertebrae. One hundred and one tons of fun.

About the fourth week, though, I got a very surprising visit-- a former "client" of ours, a district attorney whose life I had saved with-- coincidentally?-- three bullets of my own. He barged into my hospital room without so much as knocking. Remember me? he asked, grinning.

Jack, I replied, taking a few seconds to pull up a last name to go with the first. Jack McCoy.

He took over the chair next to the bed and sat there for the next three weeks.

I'd have gone crazy without him.

-#-

They couldn't remove the bullet, of course. That would have made my life far too simple, and simple has never been my style. They hemmed and hawed about what recovery they thought I might make, then stood around watching to see what actually happened. I did learn to walk again, very well. Sitting had become extremely interesting, with little lightning shots of pain arcing up and down my spine with both sitting and rising. But walking was a wonderful thing, and I was happy with that.

McCoy was very encouraging. "Get up. Now walk. Come on, try harder. I don't think you're trying." He very politely ignored the prolific amount of swearing I heaped on him during those weeks. I could see my daily progress under his tender mercies, but my temper was legendarily frayed.

"Don't you have a job?" I asked him that at least twice a day.

His answer was always the same: a shrug, and "I have a little bit of vacation coming."

I didn't have to ask him why he was taking such an interest in my recovery. If not for me, he would have been having this fun himself. Or not doing much of anything at all. Ever. By unspoken arrangement, we both tacitly ignored the incident that had led to our meeting and to this misplaced idea that he owed me something; I was with him when he went back to his apartment for the first time after the shooting. He took a full ten seconds to work up the nerve to walk through the door. He kept looking at the floor like he thought he could still see the bloodstains; I don't think he could, but I didn't try to tell him otherwise. It's certainly not my place to tell someone to readjust after having their would-be murderer blown all over their living room.

I do have to say that the hazmat cleaners in New York do a hellofa job. But then, I imagine they're pretty experienced.

Anyway, I sure wasn't going to be the one to bring the incident up in casual conversation. So we let it lay, and concentrated instead on making my feet and legs learn again to obey my brain.

The first time I fell, he was there to catch me. The first time I walked, really walked, he was there to smile and beam and wipe away the sweat and tell me to do it again.

He didn't owe me a goddamned thing.

-#-

When I was released from the hospital, I was alone. McCoy had a court date he couldn't move, so I called a cab and got myself a hotel room. I'd been asleep about a day and a half when a furious pounding at my door sent me grabbing for a gun I no longer carried. When I came to a little more, I limped to the door, expecting McCoy. It wasn't, though-- it was his friend, Detective Briscoe. I opened the door to him.

"Jack's been worried sick," he greeted me. "Hi. You look like hell."

I thanked him and tried to sit down. I'd stiffened up, though, from sleeping instead of moving, and shot back up again before I'd touched the couch. That wasn't a wise move either. Tears burned my eyes and the lightning scorched my back.

Briscoe didn't say a word; he just took one of my arms in his hand and supported my back with the other, and eased me down onto the couch. After a few shaky breaths on my part, he let me go. "You gonna be all right?"

I sniffed back a few remaining tears. "Yes. I am."

He smiled knowingly at me and propped a few pillows around, then started puttering around the room's little kitchenette. He found the wet bar and fixed me a "muscle relaxant," then settled down next to me with a cup of coffee. He offered to see me to bed, but I'd had enough of being prone and declined; he left me on the couch with the television remote and my bottle of pain pills nearby with a strong admonishment to wait until the booze wore off before I took any. I tried the tv, but the only thing even remotely worth watching was Rear Window, for which I was understandably not in the mood. I took up ceiling-staring again, and dozed off after a few minutes.

Not two hours after Briscoe left, McCoy showed up at my door. He yelled at me a little for not telling him where I was staying, then shut the hell up when he noticed all the pillows holding me upright. He still grumbled some, but not much; then he disappeared into the suite's bedroom. When he came back out, he was carrying my bag. I didn't have it in me to argue; and truthfully, I also didn't have it in me to be staying on my own. I let him usher me back to his apartment for the duration of my recovery. Thank god he hadn't driven his motorcycle.

First thing I noticed when we got there is that he'd had the carpet replaced. I wasn't terribly surprised. Before he swept half a dozen or so newspapers from the couch into the floor so I could sit down, I saw that they were all open to the rental sections. That did surprise me, a little; it's not like anyone important got shot in here that night. Granted, I lost two of my boys in one of the building's stairwells, but here in the apartment…still, I didn't know what other violent deaths might haunt Jack McCoy, so I kept my opinions to myself about his desire to leave this place far behind. Who am I to say? I've waded through people I knew without having nightmares to pay for it; I don't think I'm the best judge of what a sane person can tolerate.

The next few weeks were actually blissfully, agonizingly dull. I adjusted to having a little more iron in my diet, so to speak; I learned better how to sit down and stand up, and walking was becoming less of a thought-provoking activity and more of the mindless action we so take for granted until we can't do it anymore. McCoy went back to work full time, and I became fairly well read on law as I searched endlessly for something to do. Then I found the stash of "real" books behind the law volumes-- he actually had a fairly good smattering of classics. I decided it couldn't hurt to brush up on my Shakespeare and Dickens. They had to be better than the law books. Smashed back behind Dickens, I found a couple of battered Agatha Christies. Those immediately went to the head of the "read me" list; at the same time I added them to the "interesting things I know about McCoy" file. That file was growing pleasingly complex.

Thus was spent the majority of my recovery. When I could really walk well again, I asked McCoy for a set of keys so I could leave the apartment during the day. I couldn't believe it when he told me no-- he didn't think I was ready to be out on my own. I tried to shout at him, which was a colossally bad idea, but we managed to have a nice knock-down drag-out anyway. End result, of course, was that he still refused to let me wander around alone.

So I waited until he was at work and called Briscoe.

Lennie's a great guy. Do anything for a friend, loyal, dependable. Tight-lipped. Had me home before eight every day. He kept a tight check on my schedule, always knew where I'd be and when; in fact, one day we only beat McCoy home by about twenty minutes-- apparently Lennie had somebody at Hogan Place alerting him to McCoy's comings and goings. Took good care of me.

That's how we happened to be together when he and his partner got the "Jolly" Roy case.

I shouldn't have been there, of course; but Lennie had just liberated me when his partner called him to the precinct. He hauled me along with him with every intention of dropping me off somewhere as soon as he was done. I sat at his desk while he and Detective Green spoke with their Lieutenant, and played with his pencils. I had the good makings of a No. 2 fort when they came back, hell on their faces. "What's up?" I asked him. Morbidly curious, that's me. The man's a homicide detective, for christ's sake. What did I think was up?

"Stiff at the racetrack," Lennie replied colorfully and succinctly. "We gotta go check it out."

"Can I help?"

Ed Green looked at me like I'd been recently released. Which I had been, but not from the asylum he obviously suspected. "Look, this is a police--"

"Yeah, I know. But I'm still official, and I do have some experience with murder scenes," I pointed out. Both were true-- I was still on government payroll, with a ticket to interfere anywhere I damned well pleased. I'd earned the thanks of a few people over the years, after all.

Lennie knew it, too. "Couldn't hurt," he decided, and I very quietly left with them. Truth is, I thought maybe I could help; I'd half grown up at Fairheights Downs, walking hots for free. The trainers thought I was some horse-struck girl, willing to do the dirt work just for a chance to be close to the Thoroughbreds. While I had a great respect and admiration for the equine athletes, the actual matter was that the racetrack was more alive with character and activity than anywhere else I knew. I got a good education in human behavior that has served me well. Basically, people are freaks, and you'll see it all at a racetrack. This one was no different; we brushed through the crowd behind Lennie and Ed's badges, and I suppressed a grin. I could have believed any of these people were killers.

I love racetracks.

When we finally got to the crime scene, the body was still in place, bloodying up the straw of one of the stalls in an otherwise unremarkable track barn. The erstwhile equine occupant of said stall jigged nervously nearby where a short, solid girl held his lead rope, her eyes lowered but watching us. As Green started questioning the men in and around the stall, Briscoe headed for the girl, and I followed. She looked maybe eighteen, with the muscled arms of someone used to working with animals ten times bigger and heavier than they are. And this horse was big even for a Thoroughbred, and stood out in this crowd like a beacon; big, gray, and pissed as hell. Briscoe introduced himself to the girl at his shoulder.

She replied quietly. "Hi."

I read the brass nameplate on the stallion's halter: Ghost Dancer. "He a Native-bred?" I asked.

The girl's brown eyes lit like I'd offered her a million. "Yeah! You know Thoroughbreds?"

"Been to a track or two," I said. "Besides, he might as well have a pedigree tattooed on him." It was true enough-- seeing the name had only confirmed it for me. He might as well have been Native Dancer-- he was the Dancer in color and width of chest, and certainly seemed to be the Dancer in temperament. Hell of a horse, Native Dancer-- would drag jockeys off his back with his teeth and rush the fence to attack a reporter, but let his old groom pull himself up by the stallion's long tail and ate around the kittens that the barn cat insisted on birthing in his manger. It wasn't much of a stretch to imagine a great-great-grandson bouncing nervously while never jostling his teenaged handler.

"How's he holding up to the excitement?" Briscoe asked her.

The girl paled. "He'll be happier when everyone's gone."

"Yeah," Lennie agreed. I could almost hear him add, And he's not the only one. I agreed. "What's your name?"

"Sheri."

"Did you see anything--" Lennie began,but the girl shook her head quickly.

"There were people already swarming around when I got here. Dab gave me the Dancer to hold, to get him out of the way. I haven't even seen the b-body." She bit her bottom lip, like she was punishing it for stumbling.

Lennie took down her name and address, SOP stuff, and we headed back to the crowded stall. We came up beside Green, who glanced at us and started talking.

"Guy's a trainer," he said, gesturing at the body. "Somebody smashed his head in sometime early this morning, maybe between 3 and 4 a.m."

Green was right; the guy's head had been bashed in, quite thoroughly. The whole back and part of the top were gone, and his brain was a pulpy mess in the straw. The murder weapon, a sledge hammer, lay nearby. "Good lord."

"If it's too much for ya," one of the police officers present told me roughly, "then you shouldn't be here."

Briscoe spared the man a somewhat withering glance, then asked me, "What?"

"Well, why would this person so obviously want to get caught?" I asked. "I mean, leaving the murder weapon with the body? Leaving the body at the scene? And in a public place...this person is either entirely not a pro, or stupid beyond all belief." I knelt very carefully behind the body, taking a good look at the massive trauma to the back of the head. "And they really, really didn't like this guy."

"He," corrected one of the officers. "A woman wouldn't be able to do that much damage."

"I know plenty who could," I replied without looking at the speaker.

"Not this guy. He was 6'4" when he was upright."

I shrugged, wincing with the pain it caused. I still knew plenty who could. Granted, the guy's size and obvious physical strength narrowed down the likely list of suspects to "mostly men," but there was still the girl...though she obviously couldn't have brought this guy down. Not even with a sledgehammer.

Still. She could have given him a hell of a headache.

Not that he had to worry about that now.