Colby limped into the bull pen, his crutches sliding ever so slightly on the smooth floor. He managed to make it to his station without crashing to the floor in a heap and sank gratefully down into his chair. Don's head appeared above the partition that separated his desk from everyone else's.
"I thought you were gonna take a few days off?"
Colby settled into his chair, pulling his left leg up onto a small filing cabinet as he did so.
"I was, but there are only so many Rikki Lake re runs that a man can take".
"How's the ankle?" Don gestured towards Colby's raised leg with his head. Granger had twisted his ankle quite badly jumping from a balcony whilst chasing a suspect. The ER doc had chastised him when she found out what he had been doing and said, several times more than necessary he felt, that he was lucky that he hadn't broken it. What had dented his pride even more was that he had discovered that his fellow agents had been running a book for some time on how long it would take for him to injure himself jumping around the way he did. Turned out Nikki had won, though no one would tell him what her time frame was.
"Well" Don's voice cut across his thoughts, "We are heading out. Looking into a series of murders near Mullholland. Matches the m.o. of a series of deaths in Las Vegas two years ago." He paused and then grinned, "I would invite you along but…"
"Yeah, sure" Colby waved his arm dismissively. "Anyway, I have all these great files to sort through" He pointed towards a large stack of manila files sat on his desk.
Two hours, forty five minutes and thirty three, no thirty four seconds had passed since Don and the rest of the team had left. Colby knew this because he had spent most of the time staring at the clock, watching the hands as they crawled their way round the black and white face. He sighed and threw his pen down. This was a massive waste of his time. He grabbed his crutches and hobbled his way over to the coffee counter. He leaned the crutches up against the wall and hopped over to where the cups were stored. After a bit of searching he found his cup, it was old, chipped and very stained, which was the whole point as it stopped other people from "borrowing" it. He poured the steaming brown liquid into the cup, savouring the aroma as the vapour reached up to his face,. Setting the cup down on the top, he limped over to the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of milk. He frowned a little and gave the carton a little shake. He unscrewed the lid and held the open end over his cup and watched in dismay as a small, inadequate little dribble of milk fell out of the hole and into his coffee, barely changing the shade of brown.
Someone had stolen his milk.