Sheridan Holmes: A Muslim's Fate PART 18

"WATSON I NEED YOU!" Sheri shouted at the top if her lungs in the doorway of Duff's. A restaurant that is said to serve the best chicken wings in Buffalo.

Eli closed her eyes and sighed. "Just one minute." she told her friends, then ran back to the front entrance, dragging Sheri out of the building as she went. Sheri was wearing a pair of black skinny jeans, a striped black and gray shirt and a black vest. In her arms was a navy blue marine's jacket folded over her arms. "Just one day off." Eli muttered angrily on the sidewalk outside the gray building. "Can't I get just one day off? Who died!"

"No one, that's the problem." Eli glared at her. "It's been six days since my last case."

"Can't you just read a book like a normal person?"

"Watson, I've tried, but I have-"

"A very specific taste in literature. I know, you've been yelling that all week." Sheri shrugged.

"I need constant stimulation, otherwise I get violent." Eli looked down at Sheri's hand. It was flexing in out of a fist. Eli knew that that was Sheri's gesture for "I want to punch someone." It was true, last time Sheri went this long without a case she hot-wired a car and drove it into a demolition derby. She won it of course, not many people can change directions as quickly or violently as Sheri.

"Then can't you just, I don't know, paint?"

"Not a challenge. I need something hard."

"Then go play a video game. I'm with my other friends" Sheri frowned, "Yes I have friends aside from you."

"Obviously, you are allowed to have other friends. It's just that in that in the four months I've known you, you have shown no data suggesting that you do."

"Allowed? Data?" Eli yelled, "I have a life outside of work you know! I've just been baby-sitting you for the last how many months."

"As do I." Sheri said calmly.

"Really? What friends? Me, Linda, and Lestrade are not exactly a social life. "

"I have more friends than that."

"Oh yeah," Eli said slyly, "Your boyfriend?" Sheri sighed. Irem had been the constant point of teasing since "The Woman" came out on the radio.

"No, I was talking about the three nice people about to invite me to sit with them." Eli turned around just as the glass door opened. Her friend Ginger came out, crossing her arms over her blue scrubs for warmth. She was an average height, redhead with freckles all over her face and almost red hazel eyes.

"You okay, Eli? We thought you were about to kill someone." Sheri smiled and started to chuckle.

"Watson? Kill me? As if." Ginger looked up at Sheri in interest.

"Eli, who's this?" Eli sighed.

"Ginger, this is Sheridan Holmes, my boss. Sheri, this is Ginger, my old-"

"College buddy." Sheri interrupted looking at the ginger doctor.

"Oh, this is the famous internet detective." ginger said smiling.

"Consulting detective, actually." Sheri corrected.

"How exciting." Ginger smiled, "I was just starting to think Eli was making all this up. Her blog is so...fanciful."

"I assure you that every word, while written over-dramatically, is true."

"Wait, so you really don't know what the solar system is?"

Sheri frowned furiously.

"I wouldn't bring that up..." Eli whispered.

"Well, you want to come in and sit with us?"

"I'd be delighted." Sheri said with surprising grace. Ginger lead Sheri inside, and Eli silently went off a list of curse words in her head. Sheri pulled a chair up to the side of four person table and sat staring at Eli's other friends.

Eli sighed. "Candy, Reese, this is Sheri. Sheri this is Candy," she pointed to a small asian girl in a pair of purple scrubs, "And Reese." she motioned to a six-foot black guy in pair of jeans and a orange T-shirt.

"These are your doctor friends from medical school." Sheri observed.

"Yes." Eli muttered, waiting for the sarcastic comment or embarrassing observation. But Sheri just gave the hint of smiling and leaned back in her chair with one leg over the other.

"Sheridan Holmes," she said, "Consulting detective."

"Consulting detective?" Reese said, "Is that like a private eye?" Eli bit at the edges of her cheek.

"Sort of, except I work with the police, and I don't wear a trench coat and fedora." Reese smiled.

"So, Eli's a consulting detective too?" Candy asked, "I thought you needed training for stuff like that."

"Well she's more like my forensics assistant, or apprentice." Eli was surprised, Sheri didn't even add in her favorite term "Apprentice monkey." "She has proven her self immensely capable of detective work. It's amazing that more of you medical students don't turn detective." Eli's friends laughed.

"So, Consulting detective?" Candy asked, "Is that a police term or did you just come up with it."

"Well, I came up with it after I left the force. I needed a loophole that would give me the police resources as well as allow me to work on my own."

"Why exactly did you get kicked out of the police?" Eli asked, this being her first opportunity to ask since their visit to the hospital months before.

"Well, it's actually a long story. Me and Lestrade had some creative differences and-"

"We've got nowhere to be." Ginger interrupted.

"Okay, well it all started about ten years ago. When I was a cop...

***

Sheri burst on the scene, her gun pointed squarely in at the man's nose. "Hands up!" she yelled. The man quivered at this dining table. He was having KFC take-out, but the more interesting factor in the room was the small girl chained to the radiator on the grubby floor with a Peanut Butter and jelly sandwich in her lap, where it had fallen when Sheri burst through the door.

"Uh...uh..." he set his chicken leg down and picked a gun up and pointed it at the girl.

"I don't want to shoot you, it's too much paperwork, but-" she fired and hit him in the knee. His gun, while the trigger still went down, aimed just enough away from her head that it just grazed her arm. They both screamed out in pain, but Sheri was already on the man with a pair of handcuffs. She handcuffed him to the table and threw a roll of paper towels at him for the blood squirting out of his leg.

Then, calmly and slowly she approached the girl with her lock pick. The girl didn't seem to believe that she was a cop. Even with the badge. But the punches of a twelve year-old kidnaping victim didn't exactly stop Sheri from picking the lock and helping her off the ground.

"What is your name?" Sheri asked her, just to calm her dow a bit.

"Kallie B-Belle."

"Kallie, my name is Sheridan Holmes. I'm a police officer, and I'm here to take you back to your family." Kallie nodded. Suddenly there was the sound of twenty footsteps coming up the stairs to the kidnapper's apartment. The other police officers rushed in and Sheri stood up from her spot kneeling on the floor so that she could look at the other officers.

There was a murmur through the group, before the other officers noticed Angelo Kaplan groaning on the floor with blood squirting out of his pants. Most of them went to him, three rushed to the girl, but she strangely held onto Sheri's leg, despite not being sure of her a few minutes ago. Eventually Sheri managed to coax her off her leg and into the arms of the other officers.

"Holmes!" someone yelled just as Kallie left for the ambulance. Sheri sighed and watched as Captain Gregson came toward her. "What the heck was that?"

"I just saved her!" Sheri yelled.

"You got her shot!" he yelled, causing a number of her colleagues to look up and grin at her humiliation.

"She would have been shot anyway, I looked at the plan the team had. She could have gotten a lot worse than a graze."

"That doesn't matter, you stick with your team whether you think you're better or not!"

"Ugh, this country and teamwork!"

***

"Wait, wait, wait!" Eli interrupted.

"What?" Sheri asked, sticking a chicken wing in her mouth and within twelve seconds, pulling it out, clean of meat.

"Are you saying your not American?" Sheri smiled broadly.

"I'm British." she said in her original british accent that she acquired when she was a kid in London.

"But you sound so..." Ginger started.

"I assimilated quickly. Now back to my story..."

***

"I don't see what the problem is, she's alive and, unfortunately, the kidnapper is alive. The end result is what you wanted."

"No, what I want is for the force's Psychopath to stay with the rest of the group instead of going ahead and doing whatever she wants." He snarled like an angry bulldog, and with his build Sheri could almost believe he was one. I'm not saying that she was the person who Photoshopped a picture of a bulldog with his face on it, but she defiantly the one who put a copy of it on his office door.

"Gregson." a tall officer said from the doorway. Sheri looked over Gregson, she saw an officer she only recognized from seeing him around the station. Though she could see every detail about his life, his name was not as easy to figure out without knowing it. "Can I speak with you?" Gregson turned angrily away from Sheri and toward the aging police officer and they walked into the hallway. Quickly Sheri grabbed a glass from the cupboard and placed into on the wall and listened. None of the other officers tried to stop her, they'd seen what she could do if they did. And none of them wanted kidney transplants.

"I don't think you should be so hard on her." the other officer said.

"She's a danger to everyone around her, Lestrade. She has issues, she's not right in the head."

"She's brilliant."

"What? She barely passed every exam we gave her."

"Well the tests are wrong."

"For god's sake-"

"Look, you've seen her out in the field, she doesn't act like the other flunkies. She's brilliant, more than brilliant, genius."

"Are you accusing me of falsifying her exams?"

"Not at all, I think she did it herself."

"I don't understand, are you saying she purposefully sabotaged herself."

"Exactly. I think she's capable of a lot more than she shows."

"It doesn't matter, she's still an awful officer."

"As an officer, yes, as a detective..."

"Look, if you want to try to train her to be a detective then fine, go ahead. She's still a psychopath. You think she won't create a crime ring or tamper with the evidence?"

"I think, if she's here we should give her a chance. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If we have her on our side of the fight, then we have a powerful weapon helping us. If we let her go than we could have a worse enemy."

"How do you know she's not already on the wrong side?"

"You read her file, she lost her mom to gang violence. That's the kind of thing that turns killers into heroes."

"You've been reading too many comics....fine, go ahead. Put your head on the chopping block, but I did warn you." the two came back into the room, with Gregson smiling viciously.

"Holmes!" Gregson yelled, as Sheri hid the glass behind her back. "You're getting promoted to Detective, you'll be working with Lestade now."

"Aye aye, Captain." she said giving him a sarcastic salute. On her way out the door, she slipped a picture of bulldog Gregson onto his back.