"Yo Pez! Are you even listening to me?"
The vision faded, only the nagging sense of something horribly wrong lingering in her mind. Sara shook her head and looked around nervously, "Uh sorry, just drifted off there for a minute. Long shift."
Sara tried for a laugh, but it fell flat. How long had she been out of it, and what the Hell did the Witchblade want now?
"I guess that means you missed Dispatch giving us a 10-83." Jake looked at her with concern. A tired cop was a careless cop, and as out of it as she was, they really didn't have any business going into possibly dangerous situations.
Sara rubbed her face with one hand, doing her best to scrub the lingering fog out of her head. "Do we have time to grab fresh coffee? I need to jump-start my brain."
"I don't think the body is going anywhere. Keep your eye out for a 7-11 or something; I don't drive down here much. I don't know where one might be."
"So where is this corpse anyway?" Sara asked casually while watching the storefronts for anything that served coffee. They were getting into the Village, there had to be something open.
"You really are out of it aren't you?"
The question was largely rhetorical, so Sara ignored it. "You already call the Meat Wagon?"
Jake winced, Meat Wagon being the extremely politically incorrect moniker for an ambulance called on a dead body. "No, we aren't supposed to call them until we've examined the scene."
"Normally that's true, but Christmas Eve? If we call now, they might show up about the time we're done. That way we don't have to sit on the corpse for a couple hours waiting on them."
"Right." Jake just nodded, knowing that if he had suggested violating procedure to expedite a call, he would have gotten his ass chewed. Instead of commenting, he concentrated on the passing street names. They should be getting close to the address Dispatch had given him.
The studious watching also gave him an excuse not to radio Dispatch. If Sara wanted the request made, she could do it herself. Jake was not going to take the heat if Dante decided to take exception to the call. After several minutes of blaring heavy metal music, which was rather obviously not broken by any calls in to Dispatch, they came to MacDougal Street.
Sara tilted in her seat as they slid a little turning a particularly sharp corner. An empty can of Cheese Whiz rolled under her feet, reminding her that her last meal hadn't really been what anyone would call nutritious. She really needed caffeine and food, but the meal should probably wait until after dealing with the body. A full stomach and the smell of corpse never went well together, and she was so not going to hurl in front of Rookie-boy.
She jerked her thoughts away from food as she read the next signpost. Just a few more blocks down and they would be at Washington Square Park. A dead body there would hardly be a surprise, even if the area had cleaned up a lot since Vice made it their pet project.
Half the surrounding neighborhoods were still pretty seedy and the vagrant population was thicker than pigeons during warmer months. In the winter, only those with absolutely nowhere indoors to go flopped in parks. They froze to death more often than not.
By the time the car stopped at a red brick building just before the park, Sara had the report half-written in her head. She had been on this kind of call loads of times. It was still kind of sad, and horrifying in a distant kind of way, that a human being could die of exposure right in the middle of civilization. It seemed like the ultimate in social neglect back when she'd been a rookie, but she had gone on to see so much worse that her empathy was as remote as the stars.
"Hey Pez, where are you going?" Jake called as Sara started toward the park.
"That way," Sara jerked a thumb at the disreputable little square of winter-dead trees, scrub, and trash. Even the snow did not improve the view.
"Uhm," Jake ran a hand through his hair as he stalled, trying to think of a diplomatic response.
After a long moment of staring, Sara understood what he hadn't said. A blush mantled her cheeks, "Where are we going then?"
"Across the street. See the other Greek revival, the one with the plumbing van in front of it?"
"Got it." Sara paused for a minute, stared at the white van, and then sighed. "Look, it's been a helluva day, and I'm seriously coffee deprived. Just what did Dispatch say when they put us on this call?"
"The body was found by one Duie Pyle, plumber, while trying to find out what had caused the building's sewer main to back up."
"Please don't tell me that our body was stuffed in a shit pipe," Sara sighed, not looking forward to slogging around in feces looking for clues. Wouldn't that be a perfect ending to the day?
Jake twitched, the thought obviously not appealing to him either. "Nope. He found the body while following the pipes down past the foundation."
"Well that's something at least." Sara glanced over at Jake, who was very carefully not saying something else. "All right, out with it. What's the bad news?"
"Mr. Pyle did say that the victim was dressed as an angel." Jake added reluctantly.
Feeling vindicated for her earlier comments, Pez hummed a few bars of 'It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas'.
"That's not funny." Jake protested her gallows humor.
Sara didn't bother to reply as she climbed the four steps that led from the cracked sidewalk to the door. Homicides were never funny, but if you didn't find something to keep your spirits up the job would grind you to dust.