Edge of the Ocean
an excerpt

He stared at the plane ticket that he had stuck on his fridge; a sense of dread filled him. Bosco didn’t really want to go, but his mom had had a way of persuading him that he had to come along. It was the last thing that he wanted to be doing.

He had no idea s to why he was staring at the ticket, but he supposed it was just a way of passing the time, not wanting to think of the fact that he needed to get ready for work and reminding him that he needed to put in his papers for the time he would need for the trip. Bosco knew that he would get it; the fact that he had accumulated so much vacation time over the years and never had used them and the fact that he had worked on the force for as many as he had, meant that he would get the days he needed. But it was paperwork that he feared doing.

He hated anything to do with paperwork, as his former partner, Faith Yokas, and every other cop that he had partnered up with over year could attest to. In fact, it was more likely that he detested it and did everything he could to not do any of the paperwork that was needed to. As Faith would sometimes say, it was usually one big, long spelling error that needed to be corrected by somebody else or for him to redo the paperwork. More often than not, he was redoing the paperwork, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning. Thankfully, there were times that he could fill out the paperwork on one of the many department computers and gratefully advantage of it.

He quickly glanced at the clock on the stove next to the fridge; he needed to get going or he would be written up again for being late. Quickly finding a piece of scrape paper and a pen, he wrote down the dates of the vacation and hurried out.

****

Two weeks later...
She tapped her pencil on the file folder, wondering what to do next. The case was frustrating her and she hated to let the case grow cold. Nothing was adding up and there wasn’t anything new coming in at the moment. Most of the viable leads that had been followed up had ended up on a dead end, nothing either new to add to case or nothing to add period.

Faith could see that her boss was looking over at her desk, even though he was currently deep in conversation with another detective about something unrelated to the current case that Faith was working on. She had had the case for almost two days now and there was nothing new that she could report on. It frustrated her that there was nothing that she could do and she also knew that her boss was likely to send her home in a little bit. It also didn’t help that she had had little sleep, if any, during the past two days and she just wanted to crash. Her body was telling her to slow down, but she didn’t, especially since in a couple of days she was scheduled to go on her long awaited vacation.

It was all that she could really think about: the warm breeze coming off the water, the sound of water lapping against the shore, the thought of not answering her cell phone for 10 days and spending time with Emily made her long for the time in which she was able to go home. Hopefully if another case came through, she wouldn’t be the one that would catch the case and she could be free for the next day and a half as she got ready for the vacation that was taking her and Emily to Cancun for 10 glorious days. But first a decision would have to be made about the case in front of her and it was looking more and more like this case would be unsolved, at least for the time being. She closed the file, not knowing where she should go next. Sure it frustrated her to no end, but she realized that there was little point in dragging it out. She closed the file folder up and got up and put it in the box, before putting the box into the storage area where all the cases went.