Chasing Pavement

An ear-splitting yawn threatened to knock Jules right over as she wearily turned off the engine of her truck and sagged into her seat. It had been a really long shift. She had been tired all day – sleep hadn't been coming easily lately – but then right when they were supposed to clock out, and her thoughts of her bed were so tantalizing as to be bordering obscenity, her team had been asked to stand in for Team 5. Just for a couple of hours.

Jules snorted half-heartedly as she let her head loll to the side and gazed unseeingly out of the car window. What a night it had turned out to be… a crime-spree couple had seemed exciting enough, but then – then she had gone to profile the perp, and the assignment turned heartbreaking…

Her stomach turned as images of the night began flashing before her eyes, vying for her attention, demanding to be acknowledged.

With an irritable shake of her head, Jules opened her door, slid out of the driver's seat, and slammed the door shut with her last ounce of energy. "Good night to you too," she muttered, and trudged up the walk towards her front door.

Even in her semi-comatose state of exhaustion, Jules paused for a moment to run a critical eye over her handiwork. It looks good, she thought with satisfaction as she appraised the recent paint job. I'm pretty good with the handy stuff after all. Then she reached out for the doorknob, twisted it, and it fell off in her hand.

Oh. Maybe not that good.

Jules blinked down at the metal orb in her palm as her sleep-deprived brain tried to process what had just happened.

I never noticed it was loose. Must've – must've just been jolted too many times lately… She reached out, stuck two fingers in the neat hole where the doorknob had been until a few moments prior, and pulled the door towards her, realizing only as she did that she hadn't yet unlocked it. To her surprise, the door obediently swung open. The hallway behind it was blazing beneath a light that she hadn't left on.

Jules was suddenly very, very, awake.

Her breath hitched in her throat as she froze in place and gently eased her Glock out of its holster on her hip. Very slowly, she inched her way into her hallway, scanning for anything or anyone that did not belong. Her visual sweep tagged the hallway as being "clear", and she turned towards the stairs, which she carefully climbed one at a time.

Reaching the landing, she took a deep breath, exhaled, then kicked her door open and burst in to the room, gun held straight out in front of her.

"Police! Freeze!" she yelled into the stillness.

The yellow curtains she had hung last week fluttered gently on the windowsill. There was no other response.

Jules surveyed her living room. A grey blanket lay discarded at the foot of her reupholstered couches, next to a pair of abandoned high heels. Her TV set sat quietly in the corner, playing host to two empty soda cans and a half-drained beer bottle. A purple clutch lay open on the coffee table, change spilling out onto the glass table top and slightly obscuring her view of the paperback that lay on the floor beneath it.

Jules lowered her gun. Everything was as she'd left it.

But the door – I did lock the door. And the light was off in the hallway – I know it was. So what the heck is going on here?

Jules holstered her gun as she reached down to pick up the blanket and toss it over the back of the loveseat. She crossed over to the window and shut it firmly, then snatched the empty soda cans from the TV set to toss them out.

She didn't bother turning on the light as she entered the cool stillness of the kitchen. She'd put in the tiles and cabinets herself, and by now she knew every inch of the room by heart. Every spice's scent, every machine's hum, every –

The prickle on the back of her neck was so sudden that she dropped the cans on the floor and yanked her gun out of its holster, spinning in place.

There was no one there. Heart thudding, she bent to retrieve the cans from the floor and tossed them into the garbage, still grasping her gun. Then she swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and left the kitchen for the comfort of her bedroom.

It was in her bedroom that she shot him.

At him, more precisely. The male figure hulking next to her armoire had shocked her so completely – or maybe because it was so dark – or that she was so tired – or that he had rushed her so fast – whatever be the reason, her bullet had missed her intended mark and become embedded somewhere in the Santorini Sky of her bedroom wall.

It was all over rather quickly, as melees go. She supposed he hadn't been expecting the gun to be in her hand – he'd charged at her without a weapon, and when she'd fired at him, he scampered.

Years of SRU training be damned – she hadn't been able to move from her spot until the slam of the front door jolted her from her frozen state.

She pelted down the stairs after him, knowing he was gone, knowing she was too late, but scanning the street and garden nevertheless. They were empty, which wasn't surprising, and she was shaking, which was.

Jules could feel her heart pounding against her ribcage as she walked back inside and closed the door behind her. She turned to lock it, and stared blankly at the missing doorknob for two minutes solid before realizing that it could not properly lock.

Moving on autopilot, Jules grabbed the bench next to the stairwell, pushed it up against the door, jogged up the stairs, and once inside her living room once again, locked the door to the landing. Then, for good measure, she shoved her couch up against that door, and picked the grey blanket up off the floor once again.

The debilitating exhaustion from earlier combined with the post-adrenaline rush washed over Jules in waves. She collapsed onto the couch, completely spent.

And that was where she spent the night - curled in a fetal position, eyes wide open and staring, with her gun cradled in her lap.

She wasn't exactly sure when she fell asleep, but it was some time after the morning traffic had begun to hum.

*FP*FP*FP*FP*FP*FP*FP

AN: New author. Reviews are apple pies.