Cough. Cough. (sniff)
Hello and welcome to a fun-filled day in Futopia! Things should pick up here in the cafe soon, as my powerhouse meds are kicking things into high gear.
Enjoy! (dropping a few meds into the coffee) Drinks for everyone!
-chica
Winna sat down on what she hoped was a rolled carpet covered in a dusty sheet. She tilted her head in such a way, that Taryn thought she might either be looking at her…or out of an imaginary window in the far wall.
“ Four Fifteen.” Winna said after a disturbing stretch of silence. It was odd that Taryn, being a cop, didn’t immediately recognize the number right away.
“Hmm?” Taryn said, leaning in, wondering if she had heard Winna wrong.
“ A Four Fifteen call saved my life...” Winna said. Now Taryn was positive that the red head was looking out some cosmic window to the past. She was seeing a large, bear of a man in a police uniform moving casually across the front lawn of a nice house…
“ Domestic Disturbance.” Winna said under her breath…and told the story that Taryn had been waiting to hear…
*
Most people would have killed to be outside on a day like this. Walking through grass as thick and green as a shag carpet; the summer sun just barely beginning its arc into the Los Angeles sky.
Most people would have noticed the barking dogs, the laughing children already beginning to venture out onto the yards and into the sprinklers.
Rupert Thurman was not most people.
This morning he ignored the awe-filled stares of the children in the yards surrounding the one he now moved across. He tramped down the thick green grass and crunched into the flowers below a window in front of the large home without so much as a second thought to the painstakingly prepared horticulture.
Just like the previous two windows facing the street, the curtains were shut tight.
On an already hot morning in the suburbs, where air-conditioning and privacy were not uncommon, Thurman was not surprised.
And yet trickles of sweat ran their way down the center of his broad back.
One thing Thurman had was a sense of the out-of-place. And it didn't hurt that they had just received a 415 call over the radio of someone screaming inside this very nice house.
This house...with the well-trimmed yard in the middle of a nice neighborhood...was silent.
He cupped his hand over his eyes and tried to see beyond the drapes. Nothing at first… Then some kind of vague movement in the shadows inside.
"What do you think Thurman?" His partner asked from the front porch. Gilbert Sanso was a rail thin man who wore his uniform like a pubescent boy wears his father's too-big clothing. His hair slicked away from his face and a sad excuse for a mustache donning his upper lips tried to make him appear "older".
" Knock again." Thurman said, pulling back out of the flowerbed to look at his partner.
" I've been knocking for a minute and a half." Gil groused.
" I think I see someone in there.... moving around. Knock again." Thurman said, backing fully out of the trampled flowerbed.
Gilbert knocked again. This time with a little more force and a lot more impatience.
" This is the Police! Answer your door! Hello?" He shouted. Gil was anything but subtle.
Thurman walked up onto the porch to stand beside his partner. At six feet four, and two hundred and thirty pounds, he towered over the smaller officer.
" Go call it in. I'm going to check around the back. " Thurman stepped off the porch and almost plowed over a small blonde girl in a checkered dress.
" Is Gwenny in trouble?" She asked, looking up at the giant cop who was blocking out most of her sun. Truman squatted down, and rubbed his closely cropped hair.
" Does Gwenny live here?" He asked. The girl still had to look up only a bit now to see his face.
" Yeah. she hasn’t come out today. Her dad was yelling again."
Again.
" Does he yell a lot?" Thurman already had a crawling suspicion that Gwenny’s dad was probably just the kind of man who yelled a lot.
" All the time." She confirmed.
" Does Gwenny tell you that?" Thurman heard Gilbert in the car on the driveway, calling in the situation. The girl seemed to find his last statement almost humorous.
" Yeah."
Thurman stood up as Gilbert came back around to the porch.
“ Okay…I…” He started…
The sound of breaking glass made both men stand up at attention. Thurman’s heart began to pound in earnest.
" Gill... the door..." He started to say But Gill was already working on it. He found it unlocked. Another nervous tremor racked Thurman as the door swung inward.
There was a bloody footprint smeared on the foyer floor.
Thurman pulled his gun from its holster. He made a pressing down motion with his free hand.
" Stay back." He mouthed to the little girl. And Gil put a hand on her shoulder to take her out of the line of possible fire.
Thurman moved into the house. His gun pointed at the floor, his heart thrumming in his ears, his eyes taking in everything as they adjusted to the dim interior.
The first thing he noticed was more blood. There was so much of it. He honestly doubted that anyone with wounds enough to leave this much blood could have survived. On the far wall, on the white carpet. A handprint on the back of the nice white couch.
Instinct told every muscle in Thurman’s body to run. There was danger here…the air hung heavy with it. He’d only been on the force for ten months…and he was used to obeying his instincts.
Run. They said. But he didn’t run. Somewhere in this house, someone was hurt…possibly dying…and he had a job to do.
He inched as quickly as he dared towards the hall, and stopped when the first white tennis shoe came into view.
After ten months as a cop, Thurman was not surprised by violence. It sickened him. It made him angry. It made him a stricter, cautious, more astute father at home.
But it didn’t surprise him. Not anymore.
The shoe on the floor, and the pale leg, smeared with blood didn't surprise him. He kept his attention on the sounds of the house, even as he hurried over to kneel beside the woman's prone body.
She looked oddly familiar...pretty. He had the eerie feeling of many Hollywood cops, that he had seen this woman on television, or on screen in some film he had seen. Even with her eyes closed, she had thick red hair and thick lashes, and porcelain skin a stark contrast against the blood on her arms and chest. Defensive wounds.
He felt for a pulse at her throat. Keeping his eyes on the house…searching… She was still.
" No." He said out loud. A plea more than a curse, and stood up.
" Wouldn't shut up." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once. The acoustics in the house were disorienting. Thurman stood and spun around, gun up, trying to get his bearings.
" Wouldn't shut up." The voice said again.
" This is Officer Thurman, Hollywood Police Department!" Thurman said to the hall.
The sound of a glass cup sitting on a glass table.
There was a door just to the right. He pushed the door open slowly with his shoulder, gun higher, ready for anything.
Thurman wasn't ready for what he saw.
A man sat at a large glass kitchen table. He was pouring himself a drink. Expensive Scotch over designer ice cubes.
There was blood in his blond hair, blood crusted on his thin fingers.
Thurman stepped into the kitchen. His boot kicked a child's hard plastic cup across the floor. It spun away, spraying juice across the floor. Thurman kept the gun leveled at the man.
" I want to see your hands! Show me your hands!" He shouted. The man finished pouring his drink as though he hadn't heard the man who probably outweighed him, by a good seventy or eighty pounds. The cop with a gun aimed right at his torso.
" She wouldn't shut up." The man said again. And Thurman stepped closer.
" You have the right to remain silent! Anything you say can and will..."
" She wouldn't stop crying. So I gave her something to cry about." He didn't seem to be talking to Thurman. He seemed to be bragging to some higher power. " And then the wife starts in...with the nagging…you know how women get… and I had to give her something to scream about." He smiled thinly into his glass like he was chatting with a drinking buddy.
Thurman saw a blood-slicked knife on the table next to a bag of what he thought was sugar.
The knife and the blood, and the bag. and the juice. It didn’t make sense…not yet…
" I want your hands in the air! NOW!!" Thurman shouted.
And then there was a sound just off to his right.
A thumping sound.
Thurman kept his eyes directly on the man at the table, his peripheral vision keeping track of those hands. Those blood-stained hands wrapped around his glass of Scotch. Thurman moved forward carefully but in a forceful manner adequate to his size. When the man finally acknowledged Thurman it was with a smile. As though the six-four man in uniform had just stopped in for tea.
"I thought you guys would never get here. You wanna drink?" He asked casually, lifting his cup to his lips with what could only be considered a smirk.
Thurman was not a man who hated many people. He was a live-and-let-live kind of guy.
But as this man pushed himself away from the table as casual as you please, and reached for the knife next to the bottle of scotch, he wanted nothing more than to put bullets through both of this man's knee caps. He had never shot another human being in his life, and he knew he wouldn't have to shoot this one either.
The man was slow on the draw. His fingers fumbled over the handle of the knife. He was drunk, and from the sheen of sweat that slicked his features, he was probably on something else too.
He wasn't expecting Thurman's speed. He certainly wasn't expecting the brute strength of the cop as he shoved him off the chair and down to the floor with a bone-rattling thud. He flipped the smaller man like a seasoned ranch hand tying a hog.
"Ow! Hey!" The blond man shouted plaintively. " Son of a bitch!"
" Hands! Lets have those hands!" Thurman heard Gilbert thunder into the room, gun poised. Thurman wrestled the man's arms while Gilbert dropped down on the squirming man like a high school wrestler.
And still the thumping continued. Somewhere in the kitchen, soft and continuous.
Thurman shoved the man's face against the floor.
" We have a female DOA in the hall and another one in the back of the house... We have back up outside, and a bus on the way..." Gilbert said pale as a sheet, but making sure he ground one of his pointy knees into the perp's back.
" You didn’t find a kid?" Thurman grunted, putting cuffs on the man, and patting his pockets down for weapons and ID. “ The little girl?”
" No little girl…just the women." Gill said.
Thurman lifted the man's wallet out of the pocket of his slacks. He flipped it open. Across from a driver's license picture of a clean-cut version of the man spitting obscenities beneath Gilbert's knee, was a family photo.
This man, the dead woman in the hallway and an angelic little red haired girl of about four or five. All three of them were smiling into the camera, without a hint of the tragic events to come.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was aware that the thumping had stopped.
" There’s a girl here in this picture." Thurman slapped the wallet into Gilbert's free hand. " Read this asshole his rights." Thurman shoved himself up to his feet.
"Lesley Patrick Gunnar. You are under arrest..." Gilbert started, punctuating the ends of his sentences with not so subtle shoves and tightening of the cuffs.
Thurman used the table to steady himself as he stood up. His hand knocking over a jug of red juice on the table. He reached for it, trying to stop the flood, but pulled his hand back just as quick. He moved around the table to get a better look at the bag.
Gopher-Go.
Gopher poison…
What the…hell…
And it all came together in a sickeningly sweet odor of fruity punch.
The child’s cup.
The poison.
The thumping sound.
Thurman stormed across the room, and pulled open what he guessed was the broom closet. Where he was sure the sounds had been coming from.
" Ah, Jesus… God." Thurman moaned, immediately dropping down to his knees again on the floor.
The little girl was on her back, her chest rising and falling sporadically her little green jumper was soaked with sweat. As soon as the door was open and the light filled the closet, she went into what Thurman could only guess was a seizure. Her little fingers curled and her palms slapped the floor of the pantry hard, her back bowing at an impossible angle, even for a child.
It seemed like an insufferable amount of time before the seizure passed and he was able to scoop the tiny girl into his arms and pull her out. Her head hung loosely over his arm, and her eyes were half-lidded and dilated.
She weighed next to nothing. He was immediately reminded of carrying one of his own girls up to bed. She weighed as much as Chloe, his youngest, and it struck him as he headed through the kitchen and into the dining room. It struck him that she was so tiny...so frail.
" It's okay, Baby. You're gonna be all right. I'm going to take care of you." He said in a voice that was too choked up with emotion to be convincing.
He was met at the door by a surprised medic who could not pry the little girl from the gargantuan man's arms. When Thurman finally laid her down on the gurney outside, the flashing lights and sirens started a whole new round of seizures.
" Is this how you found her?" One of the medics asked.
" He fed her poison...animal poison..." Thurman said, and stroked the little girl's forehead as she rode out the seizure. Her lips were blue and pulled away from her teeth.
" What kind of poison?" The older medic asked.
" Uhm...gopher poison...the kind you use on yards...She's not...she's not breathing...help her!""
" Christ. Strychnine. Cover her...cover her face....get her in the bus." Thurman was shoved back and out of the way as the two men hurried the child to the ambulance on a gurney that swallowed her tiny form.
" Are you gonna help her? Can you help her??? I promised her she was going to be all right." Thurman asked. One of the medics turned to look him right in the eye. Thurman could see the man knew the range of emotions he was feeling right now. There is nothing in the world like seeing a child in pain...nothing.
" We are going to do what we can." The man said.
And then he slammed the door in Thurman's face.
Rupert Thurman was left staring numbly at the back end of a retreating ambulance.
Thurman turned back to his peers. They were milling around the scene...keeping back the curious neighbors that had begun to form. He slipped back through the crowd and put himself between the onlookers and his partner as he wrestled the blonde man out onto the porch. Already the press had caught wind of the tragedy. They had already begun snapping off pictures.
Thurman raised his hand into the flash bulbs as he started up the steps to help his partner handle the man into a cruiser.
" Who told them that this was going down?" Thurman asked as Gilbert slammed the cruiser door shut on a still shouting Lesley Gunnar.
" I don't know. This guy is some kind of damn Horror Movie Deity." He was putting on his "tough cop" face. But as he looked over the top of the car his eyes were deep.
" The kid gonna make it?" He asked.
" I don't know." Thurman said, rubbing his closely shaved cut as he did when he was nervous. He slid into the passenger side to avoid any more eye contact.
In the car, Lesley Gunnar spat through the grate at them. He has gone from smug insanity to outright-frenzied victim.
" Do you know who I am???" He shrieked through the grate...kicking at the seat as though wishing to go right through it.
"Shut up back there." Gill said between his teeth as he pulled the cruiser out onto the street and flicked on the lights.
" Do you...Know who you have back here??? Do you hear me???" The man howled.
And then Thurman did something that shocked his partner. He slammed a sledge-sized fist against the grate where Mackenzie’s face hovered just beyond. He hit it again, and it rattled under his wrath.
Thurman fumbled his seat belt off and turned in his seat to hit the grate again. Lesley Gunnar sat back, stunned almost sober by the image of an enraged giant trying to break through to him.
" If that little girl dies...do you know who you'll be??? Do you?? You'll be dead!!! You'll be dead because I will kill you! Do you HEAR ME???" He pummeled the grate harder...until the whole front seat shook.
Gilbert kept driving, but he glanced nervously at his partner. It was the first, and the last time he had ever seen Rupert Thurman completely out of control.
" Whoa, Man...chill out." Lesley said, leaning back as though Thurman had just killed his buzz.
Thurman sat back down and buckled in. His heart ricocheting in his chest, his lips set in a grim line, slowly regaining his unflappable control.
*
Winna got up from the rolled carpet and crossed the small room to look out over a cluster of dusty chairs. She put her fists on her hips, her back to Taryn.
“ Like I said, his ugly mug was the last thing I saw in the sunlight. I remember it. It was like a halo of fire surrounded his face as he leaned in to take me out of that pantry.” Her voice had dropped a little, like she was telling a secret. “ Strychnine affects the nervous system. The pupils of the eye dilate…there are seizures…terrible seizures…” Winna shrugged in the dark. “ Most people die of severe poisoning…if they’re lucky. I got to live. I got a get out of death free card complete with the eyes of a house cat and the knowledge that my father tried to kill me. Being kind to me growing up wasn’t easy. Still isn’t if you ask Thurman on a good day.” She sighed. “ The only things I fear now is the light…” Winna fell silent.
“ And?” Taryn prompted. Winna turned to look at her in the dim room. With the glasses off she looked normal…beautiful…but vulnerable.
“ Pity. Pity is my kryptonite.” Winna said. Taryn felt herself smile.
“ Are you saying you’re a superhero?” She asked, amused, yet genuinely interested in the answer. She caught a flash of white straight teeth in the dark as Winna tried to keep from smiling.
“ Not fair…I was just getting my maudlin on.” She said.
“ And hell yes… I’m a damn superhero…”
“ A nice car, and a wicked gun a superhero does not make.” Taryn pretended to be reading it off her palm.
“ Do I impress you at all?” Winna asked incredulous. Taryn pretended to think about it. Winna stepped closer. “ Nothing?”
“ Jury’s still out…” Taryn said. Without much warning Winna moved closer, invading Taryn’s space. Oddly, Taryn didn’t seem to mind.
Winna kissed her. It wasn’t the suave, floor-dipping kind of kiss that she’d expected. It felt shy, almost chaste. ..and way too brief.
It reminded Taryn of Jenny Travis from high school, two otherworldly seconds behind the gym… The kind of kiss that made your knees weak and your stomach get that achy flutter.
Winna Gunn, up close, was something to marvel at. Though it was impossible to tell what shade her eyes were, they finished off a proportional compliment to her face that Taryn had only imagined until now.
“And FYI…the bed IS part of my superpowers.” She said this close enough to kiss Taryn again if the whim struck her to.
And it looked like she was going to. She leaned in slowly this time. Taryn closed her eyes and smiled wryly.
“ I think your glasses are talking to you.” She said, hearing Ryder’s tinny voice coming from Winna’s hand.
“ Damn it.” Winna said, and pulled back, slipping on her glasses. “ Hold that thought.” She said to Taryn. “ Ryder…this better be life threatening or extremely amusing…” She said.
“ I’m sure I’m not interrupting anything in there…right?” Ryder sounded like she was smirking.
“ Do you have news, or do I get to mame you?” Ryder snickered in the mic.
“ Lo and behold…Bizzy is now in the hizzy.”
“ What’s she wearing?”
“ Black…it’s always black isn’t it? Black shoes…black pants… Black T-shirt. Blond hair circa early American bimbo/chic…”
“ Keep an eye on her. We’re coming.” Winna said.
“ I don’t need your gory details…just get out here.” Ryder said with a broader grin in her voice. She cut off transmission before Winna could counter.
Winna took Taryn’s hand.
“ Where are we going?” Taryn asked.
“ Have you every met an ex slayer?” Winna asked.
“ Slayer? As in Vampire Slayer?”
“ Not anymore…one toothy seduction later and she’s a walking library of information for the other side.”
“ She’s a Vampire?” Taryn said, her jaw dropping.
“ Oh…Elizabeth is so much more.” Winna said, leading her to the door.
TBC…
"You there...Cake or death???"..."Uhm....cake please."- Eddie Izzard
by Big Dummy » Sun Mar 09, 2003 10:13 pm 
OMGOMGOMG....I don't care what else you put up but pleasepleaseplease bring back the Late Shift!!!! Actually, I wouldn't mind to find out what happens in the living network and umm, let's see....Futopia, yes...I wanna know BUT I need the late shift and the discoteckie thingie and and and...ok, breeaatthheeee....... 
They all FRICKIN ROCK is how!! And I get to vote for more - yay me
) i can't believe winna told her like that. not very conducive to positive feelings. 
But...and feel free to flay me if this is wrong...I gotta say, when I first read that you had an allergic reaction to your job, I almost lost it. 
I was trying to think of what kind of job would be so horrible that you would become allergic to it. Glad to hear it was just the refurnishing. Hopefully that's it, and it's not a "someone". That's a little harder to just throw out.
Never mind. I have no meds. I have no excuse. 
Be well!
poor nikki! I'm glad to hear that you're ok, I was gettin' worried, chica...hope all can be resolved with the work thing (and just out of curiosity, did anyone else think of that ep of the brady bunch when jan was allergic to tiger's flea powder, but at first they were somehow convinced she was actually allergic to her father? Um, I think I just gave away my "geek-infested roots"...) anyhoo, FEEL BETTER SOON NIKKI! 
I'd like to offer up a great big ol' WOO HOO!
