Tartarus

Chapter 4: Shit! Shit! Shit!

Detective Stone was on her way back to her desk, coffee in hand when she heard a shout from across the room.           

“Hey! What are you doing?” Which was quickly followed by. “Stop right there!”

Stone’s eyes tracked quickly to the source of the outburst, learning that the voice in question belonged to one Detective Heinrich Carlsson – the very man who had been brought in to replace Jim Johnson. As her gaze found him, she saw that he was already in motion, heading quickly toward the object of his ire.

Turning her head perhaps twenty degrees to the right, Stone’s eyes widened as she saw none other than Virginia running toward the stairwell with a box underneath her left arm. “Is that…?” She began to say, only to have her half developed thought interrupted by another shout.

“Stone!” Carlsson called out to her. “She’s got Johnson’s stuff!” Snapping immediately into a sprint Stone followed hot on Carlsson’s heels, even as she watched Virginia disappear through the stairwell door.

“Fucking bitch!” Stone heard Carlsson growl as he reached for his sidearm.

“Holster that weapon right now!” Stone snapped and when Carlsson didn’t comply she sped up and rammed her shoulder into his back, which sent the blond haired rookie sprawling into the wall. Without stopping to see if he was okay, Stone continued to spring right past him toward the door.

When she got there, Stone flung the door open and immediately began heading down the stairs. This stairwell, she knew, led to the visitor’s parking lot. If Virginia could get there ahead of her, Stone doubted that the streetwise girl would have any trouble disappearing.

Stone all but flew down several flights of stairs and by the time she arrived in the parking lot, she was breathing hard. As she looked around, the Detective saw no sign of the girl. Surely she couldn’t have been that far ahead of her. And yet, it seemed as if Virginia had eluded her.

Irritation welled up inside of Stone. It was bad enough that she’d let the get away, but it was even worse that she’d let Virginia take her completely by surprise. How could she not have seen it coming? Those tears had seemed so real to her she could have sworn she’d seen real pain behind them.

***

            “Uhh Jim?” Virginia called out to thin air. Her voice wavered as she looked down from the precinct’s roof to the street below. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

Below she could see tiny profiles of people walking, going about their daily business, and for a moment she felt an intense wave of vertigo rush through her. A gust of cold wind rushed up through the space between buildings, causing Virginia’s hair to fly into her eyes.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” She muttered to herself wondering, not for the first time, how she always managed to end up in situations like this. She knew what Jim wanted her to do, but the very concept of jumping between buildings scared the hell out of her. On a certain, purely academic, level Virginia knew that it made sense. Detective Stone would almost certainly be scouring the lower levels by now. If she’d headed down, she doubted she would have even made it to the parking lot before they caught her. For a brief moment, she wondered how long it would take the raven-haired beauty to figure it out.

‘Not long enough.’ Something inside her said-for lack of a better term. Virginia was suddenly overwhelmed by an eerie compulsion to jump. Gripping the banker’s box, which held the contents of Jim’s desk, for dear life she forced herself to take another step closer to the edge. The tips of her toes now hung over the side. She squinted against the wind as she searched the adjacent building for a place to land. She found it about three seconds later, the landing of a fire escape about a story below her. Once again, she was hit by a wave of vertigo and began to wobble.

“Shit!” Virginia reiterated just as the steel door, leading to the stairwell she’d just come up, swung open to reveal Detective Stone leading a party of about five angry looking police officers.

“Virginia! Stop!” Stone called out. All traces of the compassion and empathy she’d shown a few minutes earlier was now gone from her voice, instead they were replaced with unyielding authority. “Don’t move!” On the streets, the girls called it the “cop voice” since only cops ever seemed to be able to pull it off. It wasn’t quite as harsh as the way the vids showed soldiers giving orders, but it was a tone that brooked no defiance. Jim had used it on her, days earlier, when he had all but thrown her out of his car.

Virginia knew it was now or never and though the thought of Detective Stone handcuffing her tickled every inappropriate bone in her body, she let herself fly with one last cry of: “Ohhh shit!”

The fall lasted less than a second, but to Virginia it might as well have been an eternity spent in limbo. When she landed, she landed hard. A blast of pain went through her as she felt something in her ankle give way. The pain was so bad that it actually caused her to scream.

Above, Virginia could see Stone and the other officers looking over the edge. For a split second their eyes met and Virginia cocked her head slightly to the side, as if to say “Sorry sweety.” Then she forced herself to her feet, somewhat surprised that she’d managed to hold onto the banker’s box through the whole thing.

She took a tentative step on her injured foot. Though it hurt like hell, she was happy to find that it still held her weight. Setting her jaw against the pain, she hobbled down the fire escape until she reached street level. Then she darted as fast as she could, through the traffic and disappeared into the city.