Flash Friday: wet-work, lab results, justice

1:28pm
The problem wasn’t the simple fact that it had been raining for what felt like years and that puddles were already overflowing drainage ditches and flooding sidewalks all across the city. The problem wasn’t that no matter how many times I changed clothes or tried to use an umbrella, I got soaked anyway. The problem wasn’t that I hadn’t managed to have a smoke in hours since every time I lit up it was extinguished by the downpour or disintegrated into a pile of shit in my shaking fingers.

The problem was that no matter how many times I looked at the body, it didn’t make sense. I’ve seen my fair share of dead shit, people included. Human beings can do some damn messed up things to each other, and I thought nothing could surprise me. I was wrong.

Only bits and pieces of the pile in front of me resembled a human being. Things were not in the right place or the right order. It was like god dropped the reigns to his marionette and the pieces of the puzzle fell in a cluster-fuck on my pavement. Why couldn’t he play doctor in any other city?

I growled as my fifth consecutive attempt at lighting a smoke went up in anything but smoke and the sopping tobacco landed on my shoe in a clump. What evidence may have been present was long washed away by the deluge, and the coroner was in no rush to try and clean this mess up.

I looked up to the sky in the vague direction that god was supposed to be and shook my head. The motion poured a bucketful of water off of my hat and onto my sixth shirt of the day, chilling me to the bone. When the captain told me that wet-work was an unfortunate reality in this line of work, I didn’t think this was quite what he had in mind.

My partner sauntered up to me, dry as a bone and just extinguishing a perfectly burned cigarette stub by grinding it into the concrete. “looks like the lab work won’t be back for awhile” he said, low southern drawl over-enunciating every syllable with maddening clarity.

I responded with what could have been a measure of assent. “did they scrape enough to send to the lab?” He simply stared in response. I pressed on. “it doesn’t really matter, anyway – it’s not like it’s going to turn anything up”.

He motioned for the coroner who was currently huddled under the protective shelter of the ambulance.
“Christ, Ron, what happened to your shirt?” He pointed a stubby finger at the dripping water like the overabundance of rain was the furthest thing possible as the culprit.

I shook my head in simple incredulity and groped in my pocket for another cigarette. I dropped the pack in the puddle at my feet as it slipped through my soggy fingers and barely resisted the urge to scream or begin a shooting rampage.

Then again, my urges were usually resisted. I was looking at the evidence of what happened when they weren’t – but no one, not even my meticulous partner – would ever know. Such is the nature of justice. Some people wind up in pieces while others just stay wet.

1:40

 

 

 

 

 

 

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