WARNING: Lots of swearing.
About this collection:
These are stand-alone flash fiction pieces set mostly pre-NCIS in Baltimore. Each story has three random words as a prompt. I'll be adding off and on, semi-regularly. This collection is rated M for language, violence, maybe even sex. Who knows what might happen.
Prompt words: mistrial, tempt, breaking point.
Fuck you
Love, Baltimore
A mistrial.
It was fucking ridiculous. This entire city was fucking ridiculous. The evidence was there. The testimony, too. The two state's witnesses hadn't recanted, for once. They'd showed up, done their part to put away a killer. One killer. One of many responsible for yet another dead body shot up once, twice, three times. However fucking many times, it didn't seem to matter. It was always a gun.
Except everything fell apart. The jury had waffled. They couldn't decide. The evidence had been there, but it had been fucked up. He had to admit that. It wasn't perfect, okay? It was never perfect, or easy. This city was too much. It couldn't even help itself. The system was rigged to fail.
Convicting one killer was like pissing into an ocean. Policing those neighborhoods... it was a fucking war that no one would ever win.
It wasn't any wonder why good police were in short supply. This moral wasteland would turn anybody. Never mind the fact that the great many who ended up here on the front lines were either stupid or borderline sociopaths. And no one had enough righteous fight in them to question why, time after time, someone's cousin, nephew, somebody-in-law shot up the ranks like... No fancy fucking simile would do this truth justice.
So what did that say about him?
Cocky one moment, fucked over the next.
"Did you drive yourself home?" Wendy asked, looming above his body, currently draped over the couch like yesterday's dirty laundry.
Wendy. Dressed in her "classroom clothes." Neat and prim, dark hair tied back, face all sharp and angular, like a rat's.
"Fuck do you care?" he mumbled. It wasn't worth denying the boozy effluence that seemed to leak from his pores, or the fact that his decade-old car was parked against the curb outside, the keys laying on the cluttered coffee table.
Him and Danny and Narcotic's chatty pet-CI had driven out to the county to shoot muskrats from a vacant third story apartment window. Tony wasn't much of the animal shooting kind, but there was enough primal attraction drilling bullet holes in the trash-strewn mud of a weedy river bank.
"You'll have better luck, even-chuly," the CI had assured him.
It was really a wonder that this guy - this guy who made a life selling his body for the next high - had this much faith in life.
Tony felt stupid after that, and he felt even more stupid swearing at his fiancee while lying halfway between drunk and hungover on this nice couch, in this nice apartment, in this decent neighborhood where walking down the street wouldn't earn you a bullet or two or three or -
He hated this city. Loved to hate it. At times, hated to love it. It drew you in, fucked you up, and left you with the tab.
