Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alliance and the Pauls, more's the pity.
Notes: I could clearly hear the actor's voices while I wrote this, and that's why it's a Vecchio story.  I heard his whine. :)

Welsh in Blue

Harding Welsh stared out through the blinds of his office and sighed.  There was a large assortment of people in his bullpen making a hell of a racket.  The fact that they were all vaguely blue in color didn’t phase him one bit.  Welsh pondered when the strange and unusual had stopped being so strange and unusual.  He’d been a cop for a long time now, so he had the regular cop ‘seen it all’ attitude, but it was only recently that that attitude had been sorely tested.  It was enough to make Harding start to wonder about his sanity.  Then again, maybe it wasn’t his sanity that was the problem.  The Lieutenant swung open his door and bellowed his most used curse of late.

“Vecchio!”

Welsh watched the Italian, who was complaining loudly about his now overly blue Armani, freeze and look over at him.  He pointed his thumb back towards his office.  Without bothering to see if the Detective followed, he turned and moved behind his desk to sit.  A blue tinted Ray Vecchio stepped in and paused.

“Now, Detective, perhaps you can tell me why you and the people occupying my bullpen are all attempting to impersonate smurfs.”

“Well you see, sir, it’s like this…”

A polite voice interrupted the detective’s obvious beginnings of bullshit, “Ray, if I may.”

Harding sighed again.

“Constable Fraser.  How did I know you were involved with this?” he asked.

“I’m not sure, sir,” the young man paused before continuing.  “Detective Vecchio and I were working on the Marx case when we came to suspect that Marx’s business partner, a Mr. Hastings, was trafficking in endangered species.”

“That’s nice, son, but it doesn’t tell me why Vecchio is suddenly indigo,” Welsh said.  A large part of him really didn’t want to know because he was sure that the Police Commissioner and the State’s Attorney’s office wouldn’t believe it anyway.  Fraser’s mouth opened and he looked over at Vecchio.  The pair exchanged a look and Harding knew that it was going to be a doozy this time.

“Well it all started with the flamingo, sir,” Ray said quickly.

“Yes,” Fraser continued, “Hastings was selling exotic animals, illegally I might add, and several of them were, in fact, endangered as I said.  He was holding them at a warehouse on Bleeker Street.  That just happened to previously house a dye company.”

Harding rubbed his eyes wearily.

“I think I see where this is heading, gentlemen.”

“Yeah, well some of the animals got loose during the shooting, sir,” Vecchio said with a cringe.

“Is that why I have an APB for a Siberian Tiger on my desk?”

“Animal control didn’t think there would be any trouble finding it, sir.  There have already been a few calls.”

Harding nodded at the Detective.

“I’m sure.  Now let me guess, in your zeal to apprehend the suspects, you managed to tackle them into a vat of blue dye.”

Vecchio scratched the back of his blue neck with a bright blue hand and said, “Well actually, no, sir.  You see, I was sort of pinned down and Benny, um Constable Fraser, decided to distract the suspects by causing a leak in one of the dye vats with a fire axe, sir.  The tactic worked.  The men were knocked off their feet by the spray, but unfortunately, the vat was kind of rusty, sir, and the whole thing collapsed causing a large blue tidal wave that washed away the suspects, myself, and several of the animals, sir.”

Harding stared at the pair as if they were bright blue Siberian tigers.  The Canadian seemed to notice his dazed expression.

Fraser said, “No one was harmed, and the vets they brought on scene assured me that the dye is harmless to the platypus, ocelot, Canadian lynx, and the bighorn sheep.  I’m afraid that we lost the Carolina northern flying squirrel.  Apparently, they aren’t very good swimmers, sir.”

“No, I would suppose not,” Harding said and rubbed his face.  Quietly, he re-calculated the days to his retirement in his head.

Vecchio chimed back in, “The Chicago Zoo has taken in all of the animals, sir.  They are going to try to release most of them, once the dye wears off.  The zoo director said that they would find placements for the animals that couldn’t be re-released.”

“Detective, do you have vacation time coming up?” Welsh asked absently.

“Ah, no, sir.”  

Harding sighed, “No, of course not, but a man can dream, can’t he?  Detective, Constable, I would like the paperwork on this on my desk by tomorrow.”

The two men knew a dismissal when they heard one and quickly turned for the door.  He thought for a moment before standing once again.

“And Detective,” he said catching the pair in the doorway, “try to make it as clear as possible.  The State’s Attorney is starting to doubt most of our casework.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Vecchio said quickly moving towards his desk with the Canadian at his heels.

Harding watched the Mountie leave and noted with rue that the unlike the others involved in the case, Fraser was completely spotless.  The Lieutenant turned and reached for the antacids on his desk and wondered, not for the first time, if Mounties were covered under his psyche leave.


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