More of my Baltimore Faith prequel. Despite his best intentions, when he gets back to the bar where he met Faith, he gets a little…overserved. He may be a stupid guy as much as a detective, but he knows it’s partially because she’s planning to leave, he’ll miss her, and they both know any time she would be sitting around in a frilly apron, she won’t be wearing anything else. Already, even she can probably tell part that doesn’t last, which, in his lubricated state, threatens to make him tear up. He’s still together enough to keep it within a drop or two. Damn allergies.
So maybe the shadows looked kind of ominous because he was stumbling out…kind of polluted, not at his full tolerance,ironically because he’d been feeling young and full of energy, but Faith noticed something too. ”Stay back,” she said, and kind of tried to hold him back with her arm as if she were a mother in a station wagon that stopped too fast. “ You can’t treat me like that. I’m one of Baltimore’s finest.”
A moment later, he could see a slight figure in a hoodie and Timberlands…he braced for them to get robbed, but instead he saw something else, all yellow eyes and sweatpants swoop down on them while the first guy, seemingly unaware that his face had gotten bumpy, goes into some patter about not knowing what time it is or needing change for the last bus. He was probably bad at stick-ups when he was alive too, which is how the things that went bump in the night nabbed him anyway…in the weeks that followed, Jimmy marveled at how quickly he could accept that the things he knew from horror comics were real, but the streets of Baltimore were always crazy. Maybe it was a relief to know it wasn’t always just people being stupid that did it.
He didn’t expect it to make him sad. Like, what, this guy was going to have a long, fruitful life robbing people as they weaved home on some Saturday night? Maybe learn the art of the family armed robbery? Jimmy mocked himself as his head cleared a bit.
Faith pulled something from her cleavage(lucky object, he still had an instant to think) before she said “Maybe it’s stake o’clock,” and plunged it in somewhere. The other guy(Were they still guys? Yes and no.) took off, but she grabbed him by his jacket collar, as if this time *he* were the misbehaving son, and poof, pile of dust and sudden quiet. Jimmy looked around out of habit in case of hidden cameras.
“You would save me *hours* in paperwork.”
“Right?” He only wishes he made her glow that much, talented tongue or not.