The sun filtered through the curtains of Christina's window and landed directly on her eyes, providing her with the not so welcome awakening that came every morning. She never wanted to get up, yet she knew that if she didn't show up at the office on time, something was bound to happen that would require her assistance, meaning that her ass would be grass because of her tardiness. It had never happened to her before, but she always had the lingering feeling that someday it would. But it was the beginning of her morning ritual, the ritual that she had followed for the past two years since she moved to LA.
After clothing herself in yet another tailored suit, she made her way to the small kitchen in the corner of her apartment. Like the rest of her quarters, it was modestly furnished, reflecting how much time was really spent in the building. A few personal mementos here and there, but not many, and no photographs. In fact, the rooms were designed to look as generic as possible, for while Christina spent quite a bit of time in the city, it would never be home to her. No. Home would always be back in the small town in Vermont where she grew up, the small town she abandoned once she graduated from high school.
The final piece of her morning ritual was in its final stages, the therapeutic drip of the coffee maker bringing Christina to her senses. There were few things in her life that ever stayed the same, but this was always one of them. No matter what happened, this part of her life always remained the same. The soft dripping of the coffee stopped within the minute, leaving Christina to pour herself a cup of coffee and head for her car. Another day was about to begin.
It was strange, being one of the only females at the station. When she had first started out, it had caused her a lot of troubles, but now at twenty seven years old, Detective Anderson had learned to hold her own in the testosterone driven environment. Heck, most of the time her lack of a dick helped in most situations. Especially when it came to talking to certain people about certain incidents. The phrase would you like to talk to a female officer had become synomonous around the station for it's time to drag Christina out of her office and let her handle yet another awkward situation.
Men. Christina chuckled as she made her way towards her car, One of these days, they'll grow the balls to get over their own insecurities and step outside of their little box. I'm not always going to be there to fill in for them. She didn't know why she thought this; Christina Anderson had no intentions of leaving her current prescient for a while. Why should she? She had only been there for two years and was already established as one of the best undercover detectives in the area; if only she could shoot a gun halfway decently. But, as she had learned during her years at the academy, nobody was perfect; you just had your strengths.
The time that passed between her first sip of coffee and her arrival at the station was uneventful. She managed to avoid much of the traffic that the city was infamous for and pull into the parking lot five minutes earlier than usual. She did not have one of the earlier shifts today like Detective Nuendyke, but when she arrived at the station, she was greeted by the five people who occupied the building at that time of day. She didn't really speak to many of them, although there was one officer there who she was on friendlier terms with than the others: Officer Marvin Nash. He had been at the precinct for ten years he said, and was a combination of a brother, friend, and mentor to the detective. It was he who taught her how to drive in LA traffic, and he who taught her how to tell off the other guys in the station when they overstepped their bounds. Upon seeing him, a small smile spread across her face.
"Good morning, Marvin." She said in a genial tone that many at the station went weeks without hearing, "How's little Dave doing?"
"Anxious to see when his auntie Chris is going to come over and visit again." he replied. "He tells me to tell you that he misses you."
"You mean he misses me spoiling him rotten." Christina corrected him.
"Well, that too…" Marvin trailed off, a small grin spreading across his face.
"What's so funny now? Did I spill coffee on myself or something?"
"It's nothing like that." Officer Nash explained, 'It's just funny that a lady like yourself doesn't have kids of her own to spoil."
Christina sighed, facing yet again an all too familiar topic. "As I have told you time and time again, I am too young for marriage, children, and all of that stuff. Right now, I'm just focusing on my job. And that's the last time we're going to discuss this manner. I'm quite content with being Auntie Chris at the time being."
"And you better damn be content with that." A voice said behind the two chatting friends. "'Cause there's no way I'm losing one of my detectives to maternity leave."
"Thank you Chief." Christina said, glad that somebody was actually taking her side for once. While she had the respect for her work with the men at the office, rarely did they listen to anything that she had to say, especially if she was serious. Most of the time, she was just the lady who was called when something went awkwardly wrong, or when something was just plain awkward. Her field assignments had been highly successful, but at the same time highly simple and she was restricted to office work most of the time. After all, she was a sympathetic character, and you needed every one of those that you can get in a police station, especially where they were located.
"And now I suggest that you get to your office. There are some documents in there that I want you to read."
"Yes, sir." she replied, as she walked down the hallway towards her office. It was off of the main hallway, a nice little quiet space with a few reinforced windows along the back wall. Like her apartment, there were no personal touches adorning the walls or the surface of her desk, the only outside influence being a calendar that hung on her wall with a nature scene for every month. Most of them reminded her of home, and helped relieve any feelings that the young detective had of ever wanting to return to her small home town. She had left there to lose herself in something greater, and on her way across the country, she had found it.
Taking a seat behind her small, metal desk, she reached for the manila file that was placed in the middle of it. Carefully opening the metal butterfly clasp at the end, she let the pile of papers slide into her hands, tapping them gently against the edge of her desk when she had them all. It was not uncommon for the detective to find such files on her desk; it was part of the job. Usually, though, they contained mountains of paperwork that had to be filled out and given to the proper authorities outside of the station before the end of the day. The file in front of her contained no tedious forms that needed to be filled out. Instead, from what Christina could tell, it looked like a plan of action, a story that she was to stick to while she was on this job, details that would help her out when she went undercover, and hopefully help her get out of there alive.
Her eyes scrutinized every word on every page, placing it in the most secure part of her memory. Forgetfulness of the rules was a prime way to get yourself shot out on a job, and the last thing Christina wanted to do was me a mytar for the cause of justice because she screwed up and did something stupid. No, Christina already knew that if she was going down, it would be in a blaze of glory and with no fault in the situation of her own, she would make sure of that. It was the way everyone at the station joked about going at the station. Everyone knew that what they were doing was dangerous work, yet there was something about it that kept them all there. For some, it was a feeling of accomplishment, for others, it was the power, and still for others it just made them feel good that they were making a difference. But for Chris, it was knowing that she was helping to prevent something horrid, something that nobody should ever have to deal with.
But while she knew that memorizing the information in that packet could help save her, it was not all that could be done to prevent her death and the death of her partner. No, yet again, it was a matter of acting, taking up the role of another person so believably, that not even her fellow officers would know who she was when they saw her on assignment. Her fingers deftly leafing through the pages, she found the section that she had been looking for: the story, her story. Yet again, her eyes scanned down it, but unlike the last time when she was going through all of the papers, a small, amused, smile spread across her face. Sitting up a little straighter in her seat, she began to speak the words on the page.
"...And then the damn bastard flunked me, just like that. All because of that paper. What did he know about the intellectual art of committing an act that was against the law? Nothing. I bet the ass had never even remotely out of line, except stare at his female students, fuck knows the dick did that enough.
"I left the college the next day, term paper in hand. If that asshole didn't see the beauty of it, I would bring it to those who would. Through the campus's database, I found the names of several released convicts from prison who might see the light in what I had written. Don't ask why the fuck I did it, because even I don't know that much. All I know is that I wanted somebody to tell me that I was right and who better than a guy who had just gotten out of prison for doing some of the stuff that fell under the category of genius? Nobody, that's who. I went to one of the guys, he must have been around sixty five, Old Man Dan, and they called him, just released from the pen after serving twenty years for armed robbery of a jewelry store. Now, there was somebody who seemed interested in what I had to say. Absorbing ever word of my paper, he saw the genius in what I had to say and offered me a position in his network. Who was I to refuse?
"You know the job at the Tiffany's in New York? That was all my planning. The timing, the orchestration, all my genius. We got away untouched, each with our own cut of the job. I had tickets to fly down to the Caribbean, lay low there for a while. So I caught a cab, my bag filled with stolen jewels, including some god ugly tiara that you would have to be stoned to wear, and made my way through the airport. And then I came to the baggage screening counter. I thought I was screwed. One look inside my bag and they would know that something was up. Placing my bag on the conveyer, I tried my best to keep my cool. If worse came to worse, I could always make up some cock and bull story about somebody taking my bag instead of their own. The suitcase was generic enough, so it just might work. As I waited in line to go through the metal detector, I saw my bag coming closer to the point of truth. Something would go wrong, I just knew it, so I did the only thing I thought would save me, I pretended to faint.
"You see, such a feat is not that hard to accomplish, and if you do it right, you might actually black out. From years of training to get out of class when I was in high school, most of the time my little shows actually turned into the real thing. This was just another example. The security officers came over and dragged me over to a chair, and some doctor who was on my flight revived me. In the commotion, my bag made it through the scan without being noticed. Assuring the men that I would be fine, the security officers escorted me onto the plane, and one of them even put the bag with the stolen goods in the overhead compartment. From there on, it was smooth sailing. I cashed in the gold and the stones, and lets just say that I had an interesting time while I was down in the tropics."
As she finished reading her little script out loud, the sound of applause could be heard from her doorway. Leaning up against its case causally was Detective Nuendyke, an amused grin on his face. "Bravo, dear lady, bravo. Please, tell me where you learned your skill." He joked.
"Oh, that. It's natural." Was Christina's dramatic reply as she flipped her hair over her shoulder in a highly prim Dona fashion. The dramatic edge was soon replaced by a small grin of her own. "Plus, while I was in college, I was a part of the theater club. Not strange, really. Half of the criminal justice department was part of the club. We said it helped us with our lying skills."
These words drew a laugh from both parties. "From the way you told that little lie of yours, I can see what you mean by that. They'll buy it for sure. It just doesn't seem like you, though. The whole bitchy act."
"Yes, but I won't be me when I say these words, I'll be Allison Lynksey, criminal justice dropout. A highly different person, I can assure you. She's just a character, a girl made up to serve a purpose, and once the job is done, she will no longer be needed and will be discarded. I won't be able to use her again, so why not shock the world with her while I can?" True, it wasn't the best explanation in the world, but it was the best she could come up with at the moment. It was a wired thing to explain, how to become somebody else. In Christina's mind, it was a talent that some possessed and others did not. Simple as that.
"So, you're saying that you're an actor." Freddy said, amused.
"An undercover cop is an actor." Christina said matter-of-factly, "Well, at least a good undercover cop is."
"Then what is a bad undercover cop?" Freddy asked, interested in the conversation.
"Dead."
This one word made Freddy stop in his tracks. Why was it that she had to say this? Was it to make him feel like a dead man? It would not be the last time that he heard those words, he knew it, but it still gave him a sense of foreboding. He couldn't lie to save his life. And to live a lie, such a concept was beyond him. The silence between them echoed for a while longer, until it was broken by a word from Freddy.
"So. I came by to see if you wanted to go to the range to practice, Holdway says you're going to need all the practice you can get." Now, it was his turn to tease, his turn to instill a sense of fear in her. Hell, if she couldn't shoot a gun, then she was fucked. And he would be damned if she died because she couldn't shoot, and he would be even more damned if he died because she couldn't shoot.
"Just let me put these papers up then." She replied coolly, sliding them back into her folder and locking it in the center drawer of her desk. "As long as we have an ambulance on standby, I would be more than happy to go."
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There was no ambulance at the range. In most cases, there was no need, but it was just a personal joke between Christina and the rest of the officers at the station that there was a need for such precautions whenever she was in close proximity to a firearm. She had passed the test at the academy solely because of luck, and it was a wonder that none of her instructors died in their little hands on sessions.
But today would be different. Chris knew that she could not afford to make a mistake in the upcoming weeks. Her life, and Freddy's life, depended on the combination of both of their abilities, and if one of them faltered, it could be both of their demises. So she promised herself that when she agreed to go with Freddy to the shooting range, that she would at least make some semblance of progress. After a car ride of silence, the two arrived at the range and were now standing in one of the lanes, looking down at a paper target at the other end.
"Okay, Christina. Shooting is more of an art than you think. It is 75 mental, 10 aim, 5 timing, and 10 instinct. You have to be in the zone to hit that target; you have to forget everything else and focus all of your energy onto that small circle at the end of the range. Clear your mind of all other thoughts except the bull's eye. Close your eyes, visualize it." His eyes darted back towards Christina. "You're not focusing on your target." He said with a small grin tugging at the corners of his mouth.
Rolling her eyes, Christina closed her eyes, trying not to think about how stupid it was to focus on something that she couldn't even see. If the situation were different, Christina would have pretended to visualize, but now she knew that the stakes were much too high for such things. Her brows furrowed together as she tried her hardest to make the image that she could not see solidify in her mind.
"Can you see it?" Freddy asked patiently.
"Vaguely." Christina murmured in response.
"Good enough. Now open your eyes. With the image of the bull's eye still in your mind, take your pistol and raise it to the target. Use the image in your mind to aim your weapon, taking special care regarding accuracy. There is no need to rush, timing is not important at the moment.
As he spoke, his colleague followed the directions he had given, raising her pistol so it was level with the target, her eyes focused on the center of the target in the distance.
"Now, shoot." Freddy whispered. A single bullet came barreling out of the firearm and down the range, and the sound of a fluttering paper could be heard in the distance. "Now let's see how you did." He replied, pressing the button that makes the paper come forward. A small hole was present in the left of the target. In the shape of a human, the shot would have hit towards the shoulder. "Good." He said, nodding his head. You have just immobilized your opponent. Usually, a shot in the arm will suffice, but when able, you want to…"
"Shoot them in the leg so they will drop to the ground to tend to their wound." Christina said, rambling off what she had been taught at the academy.
"So, you did learn something in your training." Freddy grinned.
"You mean besides how to BS my way through anything." Christina said, returning his grin.
"Okay, then. Now let's try something a little more complicated." A new sheet was attached to the wire and sent back down to the edge of the range. Walking down the aisle, he held up his hand to Christina, signifying that she was to hold her fire. From where Chris was standing, she could not see exactly what Freddie was doing, but from the looks of things, he was pressing at least one or two buttons. She knew this was not going to be easy. As her colleague started to walk back up the aisle, the paper target at the end of the range began to move from side to side, sometimes in an easy, paced swing, occasionally being jerked to one side or another. Christina shot her partner an irritated glance. Why on Earth did he have to make this difficult for her? In all likeliness, she wouldn't have to shoot a target a mile away that was being jerked wildly from side to side. It just wasn't going to happen.
"So now we're going to work on your timing." He explained.
"I can see that much." Christina snapped. She hated people treating her like she was a child. Explaining things to her, making her go through stupid visualization exercises. If this is what success on their assignment meant, they would both probably be dead.
"No need to get pissy on me, detective. I'm just trying to help you out."
Christina didn't know what it was, maybe it was how he had said those words, the sense of confusion in his voice, but for once in her life, Chris felt guilty about her little snap. Her head inclined slightly as she mumbled an in cohesive form of an apology. In return for this, Chris got a small incline of the head.
"This is more difficult, for you must learn the motions of the target. You must learn their pacing, or lack of it in some cases, and then you must use your own instinct to know when the time is right. At the moment, we have all the time in the world, so just watch the target, observe its motions. See how it sways from left to right, and then jerks to one side or another. Focus on its motions, try to predict where the target is going to move next. When you feel that your aim is sure, pull the trigger. There is no need to rush. This is more about accuracy than it is about speed.
Her eyes glued on the target, Chris tried her hardest to predict its movements, which in itself was an impossible task. For a moment, she swore the target was stationary. Her finger reacted, sending a bullet flying down to the other end of the range. She would hit the target. But before her eyes, she felt her confidence fade away. Jerking suddenly to the right, her bullet skirted the lower corner of the paper, completely missing the outlined form. The line of determination that her mouth had been set in turned into a scowl as the paper was whisked forward. She reached for the paper, but Freddy's hands reached it before her. As he unclipped the paper, Chris felt a hint of resentment flowing through her body. Why did she have to make an ass out of herself? Why did she even agree to come here? He was making her look like a fool. He knew that Chris wouldn't turn down a chance to practice her nonexistent abilities, and took it as a chance to make himself greater than her, to show in a very untactful way, his own abilities. She watched as Freddy's eyes narrowed on the target, observing the little tear that her thought perfectly aimed bullet had created.
"That could have been better." He said. "Your aim was good, but you were too sure of your timing, and shot a moment too late. Just a fraction of a second earlier and you would have had it."
Christina did not respond to this remark, but glared at her partner, her green eyes becoming nothing more than angry slits in the center of her head. "Easy for you to say." She said after a long silence. "You weren't the one standing on my end of the gun."
"Actually, for me, that would have been an easy shot." He said simply, "You get used to those when you work out in the field."
"So you're saying that I'm incompetent?" Chris responded, her voice nothing more than a scathing whisper.
"No, I'm saying that all those hours you seem to spend sitting behind that desk may have screwed you the fuck up!"
Christina didn't know how to respond to this. She never got yelled at by the other officers. Usually, they treated her with a sort of indifference, for she was very rarely seen hanging around with the others. The only two people she really talked with at the station were Holdway and Marvin. One respected her and protected her; the other was a close friend who treated her like family. But that was not all. Chris had never heard Freddy swear. Heck, everybody swore, but it was just to have it directed at her that was such a shock.
"Well, since you seem to think that I'm just another detective who sits around the office all day, I'll just go right back there and let it screw me up some more." She hissed, turning on her heel and waking back towards her car. If he was going to treat her like this, then to hell with him. She had asked for this assignment, not to be paired up with some cocky asshole who treated her as a child. When she reached the car, Chris stepped inside and slammed the door behind her, driving back to the precinct. It wasn't until she had arrived that she realized the two of them had ridden in the same car.
Well, then. Sucks to be him. Christina thought as she walked back to her office, taking a large file out of the locked drawer of her desk.