Miami in New Yawk
Mac didn't deserve this, not by a long shot. A big chunk of coastline had thankfully separated him from the histrionic Horatio while H. was doing his crime-scene thing in Miami-Dade. Dead in Dade, that's a good one - an anagram! But now Lt. Horatio "Mr. Ego" Caine was back in the Big Apple, Mac's own turf, with a major bug up his self-righteous posterior for getting the boot from the Miami CSI. And not just the boot. The loser lieutenant had been busted back into his old NYPD blues for sampling a few keys from the Keys, and (Mac had to chuckle at this) he'd been sent to pound the mean calles of the Heights. Washington Heights. It was a far cry from the sunny blue clime and nose-candy beach parties of Biscayne Bay. Hey – BisCAYNE, Horatio Caine. Coincidence?
The nuyo-latinos would raze Caine. They weren't gonna take a shine to a Miami cop who'd been married to a cubana but never even learned to speak the español; in fact, he spoke only one lingo, cliché. Detective Mac Taylor sighed. Nah, Horatio's red mop (is it real or is it Clairol?) wouldn't last long in the Heights, 'specially if he did that goofy on-off stuff with his shades. Some paisano was gonna put those Raybans where the sun don't shine. Mac hoped his body-part collecting team would be the first responders.
But Mac didn't need this; he had other problemas. The luscious Detective Bonasera – he wanted to pull a Marlon Brando and scream "Hey, Stellaaaaaaaaaa!" - had jumped ship and left him with that cougar, Jo Danville. Nothing wrong with ol' Jo; she was a looker and he couldn't ward her off anyway. But he missed Stella's ungeeky Greeky looks and curly tresses and low-cut blouses … Oh, hell, face it. He'd always had the hots for Bonasera. She was a goddess, even if she had abominable taste in men. Why hadn't they done more than the friendship-working buddy thing? "Buona sera" – that means good night in some language, mused Mac. He had waited too long; heard she might be shacking up with Gil Grissom, who'd fled CSI in Vegas and supposedly was counting his toes in the hills of Montana.
And who had time to solve homicides? Mac had more drama queens on his team than a daytime soap. Danny and Lindsay were seeing a marriage counselor and bitching about the cost of day care for baby Lucy. A far cry from their early days of canoodling in the team's high-tech mobile lab. (If the crime lab's rocking, don't bother knocking.) And the traumatized Hawkes was sulking again, worrying about his "medical prowess" in the field. "Sheldon," I tell him, "you can't kill a stiff that's already dead." But he stresses anyway. Then there's Hammerback – Dr. Sid, the chief ME – and his meltdowns: misplacing corpses and yanking out morgue drawers, desperately screaming, "Susan, Susan, where are you?" and calling her his Madonna. Where's the joy? Some days, it's enough to make you want to jump off the now proverbial Twin Towers.
Why couldn't he, Mac, have someone as even-keeled as Doc Langston out in Vegas? Well, even Ray was a bit fishy. The whole team made Forrest Gump look like an average Joe. CSI – what a joke. Maybe, thought Mac, it was time to move on to another CSI he'd heard about – the Cetacean Society International. Hey, it'd give Mac a new porpoise in life!