Young Writers Society

BANG BANG BANG! Bang, bang, bang! BANG BANG BANG! Bang, bang, bang, bang! BANG BANG BANG! Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! BANG BANG BANG! Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!

There was no end to the noise on the first floor of the Maple street apartment building. It alternated between Sheri's guns and the banging outside her door from the tired first, second, third, and fourth floor residents. Eli had tried to suffer through it at first, but when the angry mob began to bang on her door, she had no choice, but to answer.

She slumped off of her bed, held her hands over her ears, and a blanket tailed her for a few feet before finally falling off of her purple tank-top. The floor was cool when she stepped down, but she shuffled to the door and opened it lazily.

She smiled nervously at her neighbor Aaron Kelly. He was the epicenter for Sheri rumors and he did not look happy, neither did the twenty or-so people behind him.

"I'm so sorry." Eli yawned.

"Get her to stop." he growled, and Eli nodded. She shrunk her head down as she maneuvered through the angry tenants. Most of them glared at her, even nice Curtis Brown, who helped her move in, looked dead tired and unhappy. He tried to conceal it, but he was very annoyed by the disturbance.

Eli didn't knock as she walked to 6A, she just walked straight through the eternally unlocked door, and closed it fast behind her to keep people from strangling Sheri. She knew Curtis would if he didn't get sleep soon. There was no telling what the people who didn't like her would do.

Sheri was standing in loose black flannel pajama bottoms and a charcoal black tank top with a flowing dark blue robe over it. Her feet were bare and twitched as she shot the gun at the poor plastered up flowery wall in between the bathroom and bedroom. Her ears were covered by orange industrial earmuffs and she had protective glasses over her eyes.

"SHERI!" Eli yelled at first and when that didn't work she walked up to her and lifted a earmuff. Sheri stopped shooting long enough to swat Eli away and get her earmuffs on again. "Really?" Eli asked, drowned out by Sheri's gun fire. Eli's ears were ringing, but she couldn't stop Sheri from shooting.

Sheri's eyes were firmly on the wall, as if it was Moriarty's face.

Eli pulled the phone out from it's spot under the chair bottom and dialed Linda's number. It rang for a while before Linda picked up. Eli couldn't hear her, but she was sure the old nurse got her message.

Eli looked around for something to distract Sheri from her weapon, but she couldn't think of anything Sheri liked more than firing guns. She thought of putting Sheri's violin in front of the gun, but that would probably get Eli shot.

Finally, she decided she knew what would get her to stop. She reached into Sheri's robe pocket and pulled out a small rectangular photo and put it in front of Sheri's face. Sheri's gun stopped firing, and she took of her earmuffs.

"Why would you...?" Sheri said shoving the picture in her pocket with a red face.

"You wouldn't stop shooting." Said the brunette angrily. Eli would have normally teased Sheri about her feeling for the picture she kept of Irem, but she was so tired it didn't matter.

"I needed something to keep me busy." Sheri said bending her firing arm so that it cracked.

"You could try sleep." Eli sighed, rubbing the ponytail she slept in and feeling that it was falling out slowly and her hair was a mess beyond the hair tie.

"Can't, my head is too busy for sleep." Sheri picked up her gun again and began to refill the bullets while Eli was too busy falling asleep to notice.

"Try reading..."

"We've had this conversation before, haven't we. And I think it ended with you setting a fire alarm on fire." Sheri pulled a roll of tap out of her pocket and re-taped the gun to it's hiding place in the arm chair cushion.

"Something quiet..." Eli yawned so wide that her uvula showed.

"I could experiment on animals," Sheri said almost sarcastically, eyeing Eli curiously. "If you tape their mouths shut they are much quieter than guns." Sheri pulled a long strip of tape for emphasis.

"Sure, what ever." Eli mumbled, lying down on the couch. Sheri rolled her sea-glass green eyes and walked into the bedroom and grabbed a blanket for Eli, who was already snoring. She laid it over Eli then walked to the bathroom. She sighed and lied on the cold tile floor.

She could feel her stomach churn and her body betraying her commands to stop tearing her insides apart. She took out the picture of Irem and stared at it, half wanting to crumple it into a ball and half wanting to smile. Instead she got up and set it in the wall cabinet.

***

Eli's eyes opened slowly. For some reason her eyelids felt warm and when she opened them all she saw was a bright white light. She groaned.

"Good you're up." Sheri said, lowering her phone to let the light stop going into Eli's eyes. "Can you go get the towels from the cabinets. Preferably the dark ones."

Eli pushed herself up, her face was red from lying face down on the course fabric and for some reason she had Sheri's houndstooth blanket on her. Her eyes were still sensitive from sleep, but she could see that Sheri was sitting on the ground a few feet away in her pajamas with her hands folded like she was praying.

"Why can't you?" Eli argued, cracking her back straight.

"Because I am currently sitting in a pool of my own blood. Towels?"

"I'm sorry, did I miss the part where you got a gaping wound, again?" Sheri's eyes opened and her hands fell.

"Watson, you are a girl correct?" Eli nodded, confused, "And you have always been a female?"

"Oh..." she said awkwardly, "I'll go get the towels." Eli walked into the kitchen and tried to pull the towels out without dropping the contents of the cabinet onto the floor.

"Gratis." Sheri said as Eli handed her the towels.

"I didn't know you still..." Sheri looked at her judgingly, as if she was interested on where Eli was going with this. "You, know with your habits, I thought that would have...You haven't had one since I've known you."

"Once every six months for nine days." Sheri said simultaneously soaking up blood and standing up at the same time.

"That's insane!" Eli said, knowing full well, as a doctor and a female, that a woman should have her period once a month for five to seven days at a time. Anything else would be a horrible experience.

"It is what it is." Sheri said rapping a towel around the seat of her pants and moving carefully to the bathroom.

"You know birth control pills would help with that." Eli suggested.

"I thought I wasn't supposed to take drugs." Sheri responded from the bathroom doorway, and the door slammed behind her.

***

Eli gave Sheri a wide berth in the next few days. She wasn't being annoying and when Eli came by to talk she started yelling at her to wear something other than purple and leave her alone. She understood why Sheri was acting like this, but it didn't make it sting less.

"She just needs time to calm down." Linda told her when Sheri had yelled at her, "She gets like this every time. She doesn't mean it."

"I know, I just wish she had a case so she wouldn't have to sit in the bathroom dying inside." Linda sighed, folding the pajama pants.

"I'll need to get her some new pajamas." she sighed, balling the fabric up and tossing it in the garbage.

"Why do you do her laundry?" Eli asked for the first time. Linda frowned. "I mean this isn't a normal thing for a personal nurse to do."

"I didn't at first." Linda said, going back to the couch to fold the rest of the laundry. "But at that point she was so angry at the doctors and officers she burnt all her clothes in the dryer."

"Can that happen?" Eli imagined the golden flames and the smell of detergent filling the smog. She tried to associate the fire with burns, but it was just so beautiful.

"Not in a regular wash, no. Gasoline and a match help." She folded a small black concert T-shirt, "I did her laundry the rest of that month. I guess I sort of didn't stop doing it. Sometimes she just let's you treat her like a kid."

"She is a kid." Eli muttered.

"A kid with the weaponry knowledge of a World War 2 general."

***

"Ello?" Eli said into her new cell phone. She blew out her candle and listened.

"Eli, I need to to get Sheri right now." Lestrade said, dead serious.

"What? Why?" Eli tried to pull her ski jacket over her her shoulders with one hand.

"It's Moriarty. He's struck again. Just get Sheri, she keeps yelling 'Leave me alone' into the phone when I try to call her. Is everything all right up there?"

"Yeah, she's just been a little anxious the last couple of days, I think its the lack of drugs putting her off. Don't worry about it. What's the address?"

"4347 Elmwood Ave." Eli hung up the phone, and made her way to Sheri's apartment. The house was just as she'd last seen it. Looked like Sheri had been in the bathroom the past two full days. Eli knocked on the cheap plywood door.

"LEAVE ME ALONE!" Sheri groaned and yelled at the same time.

"Sheri, it's me, Eli, Lestrade called he wants you to come down to 4347 Elmwood Ave. It's Moriarty again."

"Give me ten minutes." she sighed. Eli heard the toilet flush and the shower run from out in the hall. She decided to text Lestrade that they were coming while she waited. After nine minutes, Sheri came out of the bathroom. Her calculating eyes tired with pain and her black wavy hair lying wet in tight clumps. She was wearing a black dress with black leggings, but instead of her boots she was wearing old, torn apart, black sneakers.

"Ready?"

Sheri nodded, looking like she was about to fall over. She led Eli out, grabbing her long coat as she left.

***

"What took you so long?" Lestrade asked as the girls walked into the little yarn shop. Yarn was scattered across the floor, radiating from an overturned storage rack.

"Sheri wouldn't drive here, so we had to-" Eli started.

"THOSE ROTTEN ESCALATORS TRIED TO KILL ME!" Sheri said, glaring at the yarn she kicked across the room.

"With boredom." Eli clarified, "Where's the-" Sheri stomped forward, cutting Eli's sentence short. She left puddles of snow melt where ever she stepped.

"Why does this concern me?!" she demanded, looking down at the body hidden behind a rack of yarn. It was a middle-aged woman in jeans and a long sleeve, white shirt. A colorful, unzipped hoody sweater absorbed most of the blood surrounding her, but there was blood all around her head and coating the wool yarn. Her head was twisted uncomfortably around her neck. "Simple break-in and murder. Nothing devious about it! Lestrade, you and the escalators are wasting my time!"

"What's with you today?" he asked. Sheri breathed out through her nose loudly. "I swear, it's like you think I can't hear you."

"Why does this concern Moriarty?" she asked, almost snarling.

"Why don't you tell me?" he suggested, motioning to the body, "That is why we bring you here." Sheri glared again and approached the body. She stood over it, her eyes looking back and forth, but her mouth remained shut.

"Sheridan Holmes, is stumped!?" Mark laughed, walking over from the back room of the yarn shop. Sheri sneered, but she didn't defend herself. "Now this is a moment I will savor." he kneeled next to the body and lifted the hands, so Sheri could see the fingertips line up and spell out a word.

"Moriarty" was carved in the finger tips. Two letters on the left hand and three on the right. M-OR--IA-RT-Y. Sheri's face relaxed a bit.

"Even we noticed that." he said, letting the hands go, and standing up.

"Yes, but do you understand the significance?" she asked.

"No, but do you?" she pulled a receipt and pen out of her pocket and scribbled something down. She showed the paper to them and they all looked at her confused.

"That's just a bunch of numbers." Mark decided. On the paper was in fact a series of numbers.

"8-31-62-75-4, 8-2-4-2-4, 16-4-12-6-12, 32-16-12, 5-7-3, 5"

"I showed my work, you only need the five at the end." Lestrade squinted at the paper.

"I don't get it." he said after a while.

"'Moriarty'," Sheri explained quickly, "Was originally an acronym for the first initial of eight criminal masterminds in London of the late twentieth century. The list I made in the beginning here-" she pointed to the "8-31-62-75-4" "-is the order they were eliminated from the crime ring. The numbers '8-2-4-2-4' refers to the numbers left over if you subtract the numbers in each section to get a positive number of course. Next I multiplied the first two numbers by two and the last three by three and added those numbers by corresponding finger digits. Ring to ring finger, pinkie to pinkie, and middle finger. Then add the digits in each section and add the ending digits and subtract the first digit from it. Five. Simple."

"What the-" Mark started to say.

"Once again, then. Moriarty was originally an acronym for the first initials of the eight-"

"He means, how did you know to do all that?" Lestrade clarified. Sheri handed the receipt to Lestarde and rubbed her abdomen.

"Trevor was a math nerd. He was crazy for puzzles like this. He made me memorize all his little techniques when we were kids. This he called the finger countdown. I never thought I'd have to use it again." she sighed and pulled a small, travel-size bottle of aspirin out of her pocket and swallowed three dry.

"So, you got all that," Eli asked, "By knowing he liked numbers?" Sheri nodded tiredly.

"I suppose this means he counting down, though." Sheri nudged the dead lady's shoe with her toe.

"I'm sorry," Lestrade said, causing her to look up again, "Counting down?"

"Well, five, not much he can do with five. Trevor is compulsive, he has perfect numbers he uses to end a problem. 1,2,3,5,7,11,17,19, et cetera. He wouldn't leave a five for a message. Unless he was trying to say orange- he gave them all colors too- so he is telling us 5. What can a single number be used for? Nothing useful. But a number... He's counting down to something."

Mark and Lestrade didn't look entirely convinced.

"May I just go home?" She sighed.

"Sure, we just have a psychopathic crime-lord to catch." Lestrade said sarcastically.

"Thanks." Sheri hugged her jacket closer to her body and took one last look at the lady before leaving.

"She okay?" Mark asked Eli, as she followed Sheri out.

"I hope so." Eli answered.