Yeah. [He gingerly touches the sore place on his jaw. Gonna be an impressive bruise.] I get the feeling you've got some practice.
[It's important to him, too.
Fresh air feels good on his face, and the dark is a relief. It feels like he's been under those bright lights forever. Steve walks along beside Heather.
It's a while before he says anything. He sees her face in his head for a while first. Glaring cold and hard at him, like the noise and light of the police station around them didn't exist.]
There was this guy who got hauled in for armed robbery. Nasty shit. He was there for a while, we had a witness who was real sure. Turned out they were wrong. Anyway, it was his wife who came to pick him up.
[Lady headed toward middle age, straight black hair falling around a face that had a lived-in kind of pretty. At least, until her eyes went wide at how her husband clutched his gut and limped. She'd grabbed his arm and turned him away, whispered to him in rapid Spanish. He didn't say much back. Wasn't the real talkative type.
As soon as she'd looked at Blake, he'd told her he came in that way. Resisting arrest. It was routine by then, he'd barely been paying attention to more than getting this done with so he could get the paperwork out of the way, but now he kept remembering the look in her eye as they thought the exact same thing: that she knew he was lying, and they both knew it didn't matter.]
She said something interesting.
[Blake looks up into the sky. Lots of stars. The only constellations he knew were Orion and the Big Dipper, and he could never find them here.]
[action]
[It's important to him, too.
Fresh air feels good on his face, and the dark is a relief. It feels like he's been under those bright lights forever. Steve walks along beside Heather.
It's a while before he says anything. He sees her face in his head for a while first. Glaring cold and hard at him, like the noise and light of the police station around them didn't exist.]
There was this guy who got hauled in for armed robbery. Nasty shit. He was there for a while, we had a witness who was real sure. Turned out they were wrong. Anyway, it was his wife who came to pick him up.
[Lady headed toward middle age, straight black hair falling around a face that had a lived-in kind of pretty. At least, until her eyes went wide at how her husband clutched his gut and limped. She'd grabbed his arm and turned him away, whispered to him in rapid Spanish. He didn't say much back. Wasn't the real talkative type.
As soon as she'd looked at Blake, he'd told her he came in that way. Resisting arrest. It was routine by then, he'd barely been paying attention to more than getting this done with so he could get the paperwork out of the way, but now he kept remembering the look in her eye as they thought the exact same thing: that she knew he was lying, and they both knew it didn't matter.]
She said something interesting.
[Blake looks up into the sky. Lots of stars. The only constellations he knew were Orion and the Big Dipper, and he could never find them here.]
'There's a special hell for people like you.'