I take credit for the great bastardization of hospital protocol, police work, and the random appearance of characters I see as both Zoe Saldana and Sean Faris, respectively, in my head.
I don't own, otherwise it'd be mysterious and romance interspersed with violent vendettas all the time.
So, here's the thing:
She has every right to hate them, to want them dead and buried six feet underground. To play like Achilles' and drag their corpses around the city for days on end.
She shot the hell out of Andy, and sabotaged a coffee cup with freaking peanut oil, but really, who can blame her?
After all, they did ruin her life.
-o-
In reality she was already halfway to revisiting her breakfast after detective what'shername loses most of the grey matter in her head, but she barely has time to get through oh sh- before the phone is ringing.
It's not the voice that tips her off, not the actualwords anyway, but instead the certain tilt of her speech. The soft roll around her vowels, a part of the country girl she couldn't ever completely abolish. The slight tip of her tone used to annoy the hellout of Peck. (Not that everything about the girl hadn't made Gail want to strangle her with a pair of socks, but in hindsight that had probably somehow contributed to them ending up here, in afreaking second floor waiting room with two-fifths of them in hospital beds and another cop's brains on the floor.
It's beginning to be a touchy subject.)
It doesn't happen when she says 'sup Peck', or when she asks 'remember me?', and even though she probably should, it doesn't even occur to Peck to do anything but clench her jaw when she clicks her tongue and says 'really now Gail, I figured you would have solved this riddle by now. Has someone lost her touch?'
Gail doesn't even consider throwing up through any of it. It's nothing, a bitch with a grudge and a sniper rifle. She's taken down more with less before, and then a breathy chuckle filters through the line, followed by a slightly fuzzy 'Oh, and Peck, sweetheart, didn't I call dibs on Chris? You're just a traitorous bitch all around then, huh?' It's sing song, like a joke no one else knows the punch line for.
The line clicks dead and then, and only then, does Gail bend in half and try to focus solely on not getting anything on Dov's shoes.
-o-
Gail has blood on her sweater.
Gail has blood all over her crisp white sweater and her face; her palm is still sticky-wet from when she placed it flat on the table before she'd started gagging.
Gail has blood on her sweater when she looks Dov straight in the eye and says over the blaring of the lock-down warning, 'Traci is going to have a field day telling us she told us so.'
-o-
Traci at least waits until the nurse yanks the tube out of his throat to respond to the hastily scribbled note he passed her. She's been standing in the same spot for five minutes, and she doesn't even glance up when the nurse tells him that his throat will be sore; that he should try not to talk for a while still. She waits until ten minutes after the door closes, and then promptly loses her shit.
"I told you. I told all of you that this wouldn't end well, but you guys said 'oh no, Trac, don't worry everything will work out, okay? We just have to get our story straight, and I'm sure the crazy bitch will find somewhere else to use her crazy eyes-"
It's here that Chris tries to scrawl that he's pretty sure Peck was the one who said that last part, and he had kind of been stupid in love with her back then so he can't be blamed for his actions, okay, but Traci's on a roll and she's already pulling the pad of paper out of his hand. An alarm blares, something about a lock down, and Chris makes a gesture, as if to say well, she is crazy, but aborts it halfway through, because he really does like his fingers.
(They should probably be panicking more than this, but they're all adrenaline junkies. It makes them shitty rookies on paper, but it allows them to have normal conversations in the midst of complete chaos.)
She's still got the other sheet crumpled in her palm, damp with the water they have yet to clean off the floor, and the inks running, staining her fingers blue where they're not red from how tight her fists are clenched.
"No, I know what you're going to say, and I don't care. We're in a lock-down Chris. Hospitals don't take those lightly, which means that something is really, really wrong. Andy's in the OR, and you had to have a tube shoved down your throat, and I'm only asking because I like to have some sort of plan before the shit hits the fan, but are you sure it's her?"
He knows all of this already, and he realizes that it's common sense to air on the side of caution with someone's memory after they've been poisoned, but he's sure. He's abso-fucking-lutely positive, and he's just reaching out for the notepad to write that down when Traci's phone rings.
She picks it up without flinching, and that's more than Chris can say for himself, so he ignores the fact that she's still glaring at him.
"Gail, please tell me that Swarek punched a doctor and that the lock down is just a precaution."
There's a long awful moment where Chris can hear her talking on the other line, and Traci's jaw clenches like it did that time she punched Dov.
Peck has horrible phone skills. She always talks too loud and too fast, and Traci hits speakerphone, and turns to pace.
"-but seriously, she sounds pissed, Trac."
Chris shifts half out of bed to pull his pants on because this seems like a situation he should be properly dressed for, and Traci tracks the movement with her eyes before glancing back to the phone in her hand.
"Are you sure it's her?"
Gail takes a deep breath, and then Dov's talking, loud like he only does when he's panicking.
"It's her, guys, who the hell else could it be? We ruined her life. It's not like we didn't hear the stories. Job, family, friends; that's a lot to lose for something she didn't exactly do. Did we really all think she'd let it go?"
Everything shifts sharply into focus, because yeah, she lost her life because of them, for them, and it's not like she wasn't batshit crazy to begin with.
An eye for an eye and just for a second, Chris is blind.
-o-
Swarek's not paying attention.
Swarek's watching a doctor press his hand to Detective Walsh's neck, and Dov and Gail whisper secretively in a corner while she tries to wipe blood from her hands onto a wad of napkins. Swarek can see some nurse try to scope brains off the floor with a rag and bucket. And he's listening to his radio crackle shots fired like he would be expected to be anywhere else but right there.
He is listening, and watching, and making snide observations, but he's not paying attention because Andy's in an OR during a lock-down, and something is just not right. (In a couple days, when this is all over, he'll have to look Walsh's husband or mother or sister in the eye and tell them he did everything he could to save her life. It's kind of sick if you stop to think about it, which he won't because he's not paying attention to anything but the thump of his own pulse and the speck of blood on his third knuckle.)
Suddenly, out of nowhere like he's been prone to do, Best appears at his elbow.
"What the hell happened up here, Sam?"
"I don't know, really. There's a bullet hole in that window over there, though."
Best's boots squeak as he moves to inspect the bullet sized opening in the glass pane. Swarek turns away from him, realizing Oliver and Noelle are wandering their way through other officers until they reach him. They're silent, shell-shocked, but something is off. He can feel it. "I mean one second I'm sitting there and he nods his head in the direction of chairs, "listening to Peck bitch about some conspiracy theory, and the next, bam. I didn't even see it coming."
He squints, pauses and Jerry, who's on the other side of the small table across from them, trying to look like he isn't relieved it wasn't Traci's dead body on the floor, looks up, attention caught by the question in Sam's voice.
"Epstein, though, he saw it, almost like he was expecting it. And then after, with Peck and that phone call? I thought it was one of you, or maybe Chris, but I mean she isn't Epstein, something huge would have had to happen to make her respond like that." He's thinking out loud now, not making sense to anyone but himself.
And that's it, the missing piece, so he stands up trying to find the blonde head of their rookie. He takes a step forward, though, when his search turns up empty because he thought he just heard-
He side-steps a couple uniforms, and hears a shuffle behind him. He knowsthem, knows they probably think he's crazy because he's witnessed two seemingly random attacks, but they're not random, none of them were.
"-and Sherry calls me, says she's stuck in some room with that cop that got poisoned or something. And apparently, there's this knock on the door, and they just open it. And then they just up and leave with the people who knocked. I mean, really, I've seen this episode on Grey's Anatomy, and that's how people die."
It's two nurses, their backs turned to him, but that's all he really needs, and everything just clicks. So he turns back around, and everyone's staring at him like he's lost his mind. Which, yeah, emotional stability isn't high on his list when Andy's got a bullet in her chest, but this is different.
"Sam, buddy, what's going on?" Oliver has put his hands at waist level, palms up, like he's trying to calm a jumper, and seriously Swarek is not that bad.
"Peck and Epstein. Nash and Diaz. They're all up to something. I think Peck was trying to tell me something, and then after," he gestures vaguely to the chaos in the waiting room, "someone calls her, and they just disappear. Nash and Diaz are gone, too. I feel like something big is going down. I think all of this is about them."
None of them really look impressed with his theory, and Best says as much. "Look, our rookies don't exactly have the nicest track record, but all of this is a little extreme, don't ya think? I mean, you're saying you think someone is trying to kill them off? Swarek, no one is that stupid."
And, yeah, he could be exaggerating. He could be trying to rationalize all this craziness away, but then someone to his right clears his throat.
He's another rookie from another precinct, Swarek thinks. Recognizes him from a bust a couple months back when jurisdiction had been a bitch. His name's Levitt. Corey Levitt.
"Hey, I don't mean to interrupt, but I couldn't help but overhear, and I think there's something you guys should know."
Levitt looks like he would be smirking if he wasn't so intimidated, and everyone stays silent, lets him continue from curiosity or courtesy.
"I was in training camp with them, all six of them, for a couple weeks." He doesn't even get the chance to say anything before Jerry is raising his eyebrow.
"There's five not six, so if you'd excuse us, we have some actual-"
This time Levitt truly does smirk, and Swarek's going be really pissed if he has to spend time prying Jerry's hands from around the kids throat in the near future. A couple other rookies shift behind Levitt, like they're thinking the same thing, and wildly, Swarek wonders if it wasn't just the ones at his precinct, if maybe all the kids in that class came out crazy.
"Before, though, there were six. Laura Hitchens. She was kicked out with, like, two and half weeks left. There were some rumors that she'd been set-up, just whispers. But that, bitch-" And he's not laughing anymore, looks so serious that even Best is listening.
"Now, that bitch is crazyenough to kill us all, and probably get away with it."