I started working on A Thing this morning. Here's the bit I came up with, which I'm not sure I am quite happy with, but sometimes, people want to know just what the hell I spend my time writing.
The bitter convenience-store fakkuccino burned its way up Detective Saul Berg's esophagus, expressing its displeasure at being withheld in a spectacular belch that caused his partner, Annette Fingeroth, to smack the back of his head in the familiar manner of the Jewish mother he'd never had. The perp they'd rounded up just prior to his coffee stop moaned in the back seat, shifting for the first time in the half-hour since they'd tossed his apparently-dead carcass into the vehicle.
"Ow." It never hurt when she did that, not in the six years that they'd shared the Ford Analog the department was kind enough to provide.
"It costs maybe thirty cents more to get a real coffee from one of those fair-trade kiosks in the pedmall. Why do you go for that foul shit each and every time?"
"Foul shit it may be, but that was my fuel when I was working a beat and you can't tell me that any Ethiopian dingleberry deluxe is going to keep me awake nearly as well." He depends on that comfortingly awful petrol burn just like he depends on Annette to make sure his ass didn't get shot off on a regular basis. Saul may not be the brightest detective in his East Coast city, but he certainly would never be called a coward.
It was one of his sporadic moments of bravery that was the reason they were driving back to headquarters. While undergoing the weekly ritual of interrogating a certain Vietnamese bootleg dealer about his supplier, their heads had both snapped around at the sound of a wet, meaty slap that preceeded a Fay Wray imitation that was going have their ears ringing for the rest of the night.
They'd burst through the paper-thin door separating Nyugen's storefront from his residence just in time to stop the second plunge of a knife that seemed to have been regularly used in the service of high-end meatcutters that particularly hated their job and wanted the long-dead animals to suffer a little more somehow.
Without thinking (as was his wont,) Saul tackled Nyugen's pimp progeny from the side as Annette rushed to take care of the FOB adolescent that he was torturing for a reason they preferred to not imagine. Two quick blows to the boy's temple had rendered him insensate, which made Saul happy enough. Annette wrapped her coat around the girl and led her into the front room just as Nyugen attempted to burst past her to commence his "I-no-speak-Engrish-not-know-he-a-pimp" routine.
Saul hated that routine, so the fact that Annette whispered something violent and possibly illegal in his ear to get him to shut up was greatly appreciated.
Nyugen's boy moans in the back seat and immediately begins slamming into the glass, cursing in a patois that covered at three continents (four if you counted Portugese being spoken in Brazil.)
"Hey, hey, hey, Nature Boy. Knock it off." Annette snarls in her slightly bull, completely dykish manner. "That girl's going to need some serious reconsurgery to take care of that sick shit you did to her arm, so don't even act like you've been beaten or you'll get to spend some time in a quiet cell witha few members of the Overfiend gang."
Nyugen's son stops his thrashing and cursing just long enough to explode all over the car's back seat; raspberry jelly flies everywhere. Saul is too shocked to even register the event until the smell of iron and burned hair hits his nostrils and he has to pull over to vomit.
"That's the third one in a month." Annette announces as she hands him a hankerchief with an embroidered A on one corner.
He wiped his mouth for a moment. "This has become A Thing, hasn't it?"
She nodded. "You know we'll get assigned to this Thing, too. Our docket is the closest to clean in the office."
"I know. Shit." Saul flipped open his cell to get the Crime Scene Kids to their location.
