All characters belong to CBS and company. Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback.

Prisoners of Circumstance III: The Last Place
Violet

"Prisoners of circumstance, trapped in situations--
You never were one to be tempted by temptation..."
- Martin Kelleher

He lay very still and flat on his back, eyes wide with terror. She did her best to pretend he wasn't there.

"I see dead people," Warrick whispered hoarsely. "All the time. Walking around like regular people. They don't know they're dead...."

Sara shook her head. "Funny once, Brown. Not so funny twenty times."

"Spoilsport." He sat up. "I hate this shift."

"Me too." She leaned closer to the microscope. "I like my dinner time to feel like dinner time, not six in the morning."

"At least around here there are places to go at six in the morning." Warrick swung his legs over the side of the gurney and stood up. "Where I went to college, if you were hungry before noon you had to live on chewing gum and vending-machine Fig Newtons. That's no way to live."

"Where'd you go to college?" Sara asked without looking up.

"Connecticut." He said the word as if it tasted bad. "How's that looking?"

"Like semen usually looks."

"Can I see?"

"When I'm done." Sara fiddled with the focus knob. "So you went to school in Connecticut; how'd you end up in Vegas?"

"Six years living on the frozen tundra," he told her, pacing around idly. "This is the last place I thought I'd end up. But I got out of there and I made a beeline for the desert. Don't you think it's weird?"

"I think it's pretty weird that you walk around saying things like 'made a beeline.'"

"No, I mean, I've worked with you for what, a year now? And you didn't know where I lived before. You know more about Jane Doe number three than you do about me."

Sara shrugged. "No one pays me to read your permanent record."

"And I don't know anything about you either. I don't know where you went to school."

"UCLA."

"There you go." He held out his arms. "We're sharing. So you're from California. What made you come to Vegas?"

"I spent half my time here growing up. My dad was a pretty high roller." She pushed her chair back and stood. "He's all yours."

Warrick bent to study the sample. "I know one thing about you. You're what my mother would call a sourpuss."

"That's what my mother calls it too."

"Come on, Sidel."

Sara tossed her head. "What makes you think we need to know anything about each other? What makes you think you want to know me?"

He squinted up at her. "Well, what else are we gonna do on the slow nights?"

"Don't say that," she barked. "Don't call it a slow night. You just jinxed us."

He was unfazed. "You got a boyfriend?"

"This is what I'm talking about when I say 'none of your business'."

"I had a girlfriend in Connecticut. Aimee. She came out here with me after graduation. Didn't work out, though." Warrick waited, but Sara said nothing. He tapped his foot impatiently.

"Oh, for crying out loud." She sighed resignedly. "Why didn't it work out?"

"The job," he said. "She was working as a receptionist and all. She'd come home, 'Hi, honey, I was filing papers and calling travel agents all afternoon, how was your day?' What am I supposed to tell her? 'Not bad; I found a piece of a guy's brain on his brother's tennis racket'?"

"So she went home?"

"She went home." Warrick stood up straight, turning to lean against the table's edge. "I don't know, it's kind of hard to explain to a pretty girl how you spend your days and nights chasing after bodily fluids."

Sara crossed her arms. "So don't explain it."

"What am I gonna do, lie?"

"You can't find a girl whose first priority isn't who signs your paycheck?" Her eyes twinkled mockingly. "You gotta stop hanging around those parts of the Strip."

"That's Stokes."

"That is Stokes." She looked around. "What happened to the Gallagher carpet sample?"

"Down at the lab since nine o'clock," he reminded her.

"You should go down there and chase it."

"How come I have to go?"

"Because I said so. And because I'm the one who had to sit and listen to your life story."

"You're hard, Sidel." He clutched his chest dramatically. "You wound me. Find me a slab to lie on."

"Don't tempt me," she warned playfully. "Seriously, what's this about? You're not going through one of those 'what's it all about' things guys pull sometimes, are you? Because I figured that was more a Grissom thing."

"Zen master Grissom." Warrick sat back on the counter and rested his hands, palm-up, on his knees. "Match, or match not. There is no partial."

Sara chuckled in spite of herself. "Always the comedian. Aren't you too young to be having a midlife crisis?"

"Not if I die before I'm sixty." He put his feet back on the floor. "I don't know. I just think, even if I find a girl who doesn't care, right? Even if I find her and it doesn't matter, there's nobody out there who's really gonna understand. Nobody who doesn't do this job can understand what it's like. We're like garbage men."

"Garbage men with science and five-thousand dollar instruments." She indicated the equipment on the table. "And don't knock garbage men. Where would you be without them?"

"Buried under a pile of pizza boxes in my apartment."

"I hear that."

"Yeah?" Warrick raised his eyebrows. "I had you pegged as the tidy type. Everything in its place."

"Yeah, right. My apartment looks like a tornado came through. But how much time do I really spend there anyway?"

"That's what I'm trying to say. It gets to you. It's hard to just leave it somewhere when you're off the clock. When this is your job, this is your life and you can't get out."

"Working for the man every night and day," Sara said.

He pointed his fingers at her like a gun and mimed pulling the trigger. "And the big wheel keeps on turning."

"Personally, I think we're lucky."

"Lucky?"

"Sure." She placed her hands on the back of the swivel chair and leaned forward. "We're actually doing something with our lives. We're not sitting around being wage slaves to some company or flipping burgers at a fast-food joint."

"I did that summers in high school." Warrick grimaced. "You want to talk about a nasty job?"

"We're doing something that stretches our minds and helps keep society from falling apart. And we get to do it in one of the coolest cities in the world."

"You really like Vegas."

"Always have," she said. "Come on, where else do you get all this? All the neon and the champagne bottles popping, all the spectacle? Wayne Newton and Debbie Reynolds?"

"They call it Sin City for a reason," he said wryly. "My mother's a Baptist. She's praying for my soul right now as we speak."

"Well, you're not sleeping with any hookers or showgirls. You haven't killed anybody. As far as I know, you're doing all right with your soul on your own."

"Don't underestimate my mama's prayers," he joked. "Nah, really, they're just not my style. Nice to look at, but not something you want to touch."

"So you're just in Vegas for the weather."

"The weather and the bones." He grinned. "Although we could go down to the Horseshoe and toss a couple rolls of quarters down the slots. Not much is happening around here."

"Stop saying that!"

"It's not like I can really make a corpse appear."

"Sure you can. With our luck it'll be someone rich and famous, too."

"Maybe Wayne and Debbie are having a lovers' quarrel." He snorted. "Now I know another thing about you. You're superstitious."

"See, you think that, but it's just the voice of experience. Any second--"

"Put your clothes back on," Nick called, from down the hall. "I'm on my way in."

Sara rolled her eyes. "What did I tell you?"

"Maybe he just has the Gallagher results back."

"Or maybe you got us into trouble. You talk too much, Brown."

"No, I work too hard." He went back over to the gurney and climbed onto it, folding his arms behind his head as he lay down. He stared at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling as if they were clouds. "Someday I'm gonna bust out of here. Go start me a little restaurant out in the country."

"You'll be so bored," she warned him. "That's what happens when people go out to the country and start little restaurants. They just don't tell you that on television."

"So you think I should stay put?"

"I don't care what you do." Sara rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist. "All I know is, I like it here. Under the circumstances, I think it's the best place to be."

He let this sink in. "Hey. Grab that sheet for me. I'm gonna make Stokes wet his pants."

"He'll be expecting you to do that," she warned, but tossed it to him anyway.

"This job does have its moments," Warrick observed, pulling the sheet over his face.

She suppressed a laugh. "It does indeed."


Back to stories
Feedback