~oOo~
No idea at all, and it isn't as if you haven't been looking in the three days since then.
Well, as well as you could with your caseload. Same old stuff, bank jobs, smugglers, drug wars, serial-murdering green aliens... though that one Simon offloaded back on Homicide over half the bullpen's fascinated protests. Oh, and the Great Serial Labradoodle-Nappings, of course, and you have no idea how that is a Major Crime (fuck it, yes you do, the Mayor's mother owns at least three of the damn pooches).
But the case of Blair's beloved and wounded Sentinel book is always there at the front of your thoughts. Which doesn't endear you to your Captain, but he's got to be used to it by now.
And he knows as well as you do how Sandburg loves that book... hell, all books. Blair would cheerfully move out of the loft and into the library if you - and the campus librarian who scares the crap out of everyone, even big tough cops, and who loves Sandburg but not enough to give him a bed among the bookshelves - would let him.
You'd swear he thinks of the damn things as best friends, even family, sometimes even more than that. It's the way he cares for them, touches them, strokes them, sometimes just the way he looks at them. You'd worry about it, but you've been hanging around Rainier long enough to know it's a genius academic thing, they all do it.
Yeah, he loves them, but he loves that one most of all. For all he's bounced back (bounces like a rubber ball on speed, does your Darwin, well after the first night when you literally sensed that he sat up all night with it, trying to repair and clean and damn well heal it. By the morning he was all brave and stoic and "it's just a book, man, just the cover and spine, none of the actual print, the printed words are gone, they're what matters, not what it looks like"... yeah right, Chief). Yeah, well, for all that...
He really loves that book, and you can't help thinking it's your fault it got hurt. You hate that, too.
He's now talking to Rainier's rare books department about repair, and you're ringing book restorers instead of case leads. Every damn one of whom makes the same weird sounds when you mention how it got this way.
Crap, you didn't get this reaction when Sweetheart got her wounds, at least not the first, second - okay, fifth time. So she isn't as old... fragile... valuable... and maybe books don't get gunfire damage as often as trucks, or people for that matter.
But this is a university town. Surely someone somewhere on this seaboard has shot a hardback before?
~oOo~
Ooohkay, you've done your homework.
Ooohkay, you've really gone to the city library and asked the Head Librarian there (a terrifyingly friendly old bat who put you in mind of a six-foot tall Fred Flintstone in drag, blue rinse hair and fluttering fake eyelashes. You kept smiling while she fluttered them at you, then ran for your life) to do it for you.
And ooohkay, it seems you can get plenty of firms to 'restore' the book. Sorta.
For one, it'll never be the same as it was - for one, there's a limit to how much... patching (Miz Freda Flintstone or whatever her name was made it sound way more fancy and complicated, but what it came down to was patching) they can do, at least for fucking great bullet holes and paper blackened by residue.
Two, even if they took it at once - and with the good ones there's usually a waiting list longer than for liver transplants - it would take months to do it properly. And you have this hunch that Sandburg will mope worse than an orphaned duckling if he can't read the damn thing cover to cover at least once a week.
And three? Miz Flintstone may have discounted the cost ("it is only what one anticipates, dear Detective, and why knowledgeable people take care that such tragedies do not transpire, I don't believe you mentioned precisely how it was damaged so criminally appallingly -?") but you know Sandburg won't. So you make some phone calls, and then a few more, and all the time your jaw is dropping to the point where it's about to hit the floor. They like to wrap it in more words than Miz Flintstone (and you thought Sandburg never shut up!) but what it comes down to? - It'll cost an arm and a leg, and at least two more kidneys that you can come up with between you, and the damn thing will still have the holes in it, because it isn't 'proper' restoration unless people can see what's original and what's restored.
You have this sinking feeling that that will make sense to Blair, and he won't take the arm, leg and kidney from you anyway. You have this other feeling he's been doing his own homework - in all the spare time he has, between classes, study, getting shot at again, observing, guiding, getting shot at again, for Chrissake - and he has worked out one, two and three much faster than a simple cop could.
And he hasn't said anything, so he doesn't have a four.
Crap.
But maybe you and Miz Flintstone do.
~oOo~
