Post Nap Detective Episode

Faux-Pa was dead.

Blood dripped down the crease of his lip, the force of gravity painting a clown like grimace of sorts along his cheek. One brown eye glazed and empty, the other sunken in, a pool of yellowy mucus and brain fluid collecting up towards the bridge of his nose.

The rest of the scene was just as graphic.

Faux-Pa's sudden contact with the ground had left his wife-beater covered in bits of asphalt and road grease. Tattoo's faded by years of black-rock desert sun looked vintage in color compared to the rich coagulation of blood pooling out of his upside-down forearms. Tweaked elbows and wrist bones jutted out through ligament leaving him impossibly triple-jointed from an apparently instinctual attempt to brace his fall. A spray of his jagged chipped-out front teeth lay in the road next to his oddly splayed out body.

The jump from a building and the impact that follows always contorts the bones into such a disgustingly beautiful posture, as if the arc and fear of the fall can be seen in the tealeaves of a person's last pose. Dirty rumpled and torn second hand jeans were not but moments before both broken in perfectly and coursing through the air like a loft sail only to end up displaying the mischievously contorted legs of a young man with two compound breaks at the hip.

It all seemed as though it was staged by a boutique jeans ad campaign.

"But that's modern suicide, I guess." Casey thought as she stepped back from the scene and tucked her fingers through her closely cropped bangs, "Everyone's gotta' go out in the latest fashonista style. Even if it's going out for the last time."

Feeling for her phone in her slacks, searching for the time, she patted her own ass and turned back to her unmarked squad car to retrieve her Blackberry.

"Damn, it's only 7PM and we've already had a jumper", she mumbled to herself after pulling the device from the front pocket of her black jean jacket.

She drummed the steering wheel with her trim nails as she sat in the front seat of her Cammaro, one leg outstretched onto the asphalt, exposing her black steel-toed ten eyed Grinders. She presented like a heroine under the mixed shadow of streetlights and sunset, her other boot tucked up underneath her so that she perched like a bird on a wire. Casey's stomach growled from the lack of food and excessive amount of coffee she'd been taking in since four o'clock when she came on shift. She rocked herself out of her ride, climbed into her fitted jean jacket and began walking back toward the scene of the crime when she heard her phone ring from atop the dashboard.

"Damn it", she cursed herself under her breath as she jostled the keys out of her pocket, she could barely see the phone light up through the limousine tint on the windows. Finally getting to the phone on the increasingly louder third bar of "Pump Up The Jams" she answered,

"Detective Casey here."

"Are you at the scene?" Thumper's voice demanded.

"Yes, Sarge."

"We'll then why the hell haven't you called me?" Thumper demanded again.

"I'm sorry sir, I was just about to." Casey placated.

"Well, let's get on with it, gimme' tha' story!" Thumper expelled, as his intensity nary wavered and he blatantly refused to calm.

Sarge was pissed and wired 'cause he'd been at a city council meeting for five hours, was just as hungry as Casey and had been drinking shitty coffee the whole time. There was nothing Sergeant Thumper hated more than shitty coffee that was free. Except of course unless it was shitty service when paying for good coffee at some high-end joint.

"Sometimes life really cuts you a raw deal!" He'd said to Casey on a recent evening pick-me-up post the 'E' street arson work-up. After considering putting money in the tip jar at the Starbucks on 19TH, Sarge instead gave the petite vacuous emo hipster a wink folded and then slid the bill into his shirt pocket.