2020-04-24 - Blood on the Doorstep

There is a thundering crash just outside of Ruiz's cabin in the woods. It's enough to feel the slight shockwave from it inside, and also enough to set his truck's alarm to bleeping a few times in warning. Moments later, there is the sound of a single knock on the door, close to the bottom of it, then silence. If he looks out a window, there appears to be a body strewn across his doorstep on his porch, with bloody legs, and a tree fallen beside his vehicle. Bloody drag marks in the dirt are visible from the tree to the porch steps in the dirt.

Of the two vehicles parked on the drive, the black Charger with steel rims that's pretty transparently a cop car in 'disguise' has by far the more aggressive security. It whoops loudly, and keeps going after the truck's given up, lights flashing in a strobe pattern along the front and rear of the vehicle.

It's about half a minute before the front door of the house is cracked open, and the reason for the delay becomes obvious fairly quickly; it's the amount of time it took the man to find and load his gun, and assess things from the window. The weapon's held loosely in his right hand, finger off the trigger, and he sinks slowly into a crouch with his eyes on the unconscious woman's face. "Que demonios," he murmurs, brows creasing in confusion. Whoop, whoop, whoop goes the damned car while he brushes her hair aside and checks her pulse. Then the back of his hand under her nose to make sure she's breathing.

Then he digs in his pocket for his car keys, and taps a button on the fob, and the noise cuts out abruptly. And with it, the flash of headlights. With a sigh, he stows his gun and starts getting his arms under the brunette, to hoist her up off the ground. She's taller than him, but he's strong.

Vic doesn't look so good. She's clearly lost a good bit of blood and, when he goes to lift her, the back of her jacket is soaked with it, and it's run down her left leg from her hip. She's breathing, and she has a pulse which is just slowing from the racing it did from the effort to reach the door to knock. When she is lifted, she twitches and groans, and her blue eyes slit open to slowly focus on the face of the person lifting her.

"Fuck me. I landed in your yard?" she mumbles woozily. "I should have let that bear thing eat me." Yep, delirious. Clearly, since she's not punching him for touching her.

Lift with your legs, not your back, goes the old idiom of first responders everywhere. God knows he hasn't always followed it, but he does now; the younger woman is lifted up and into his arms with ease, and hefted through the open doorway. It's just as he's shoving the door shut with a shoulder that the brunette slumped against him decides to pipe up with some choice commentary. And gets, initially, little more than an unintelligible grunt in reply. Thump, thump over to the couch, which he eases her onto as gently as he can manage. The blood, he'll worry about scrubbing out of the upholstery, later.

"You want me to throw you back out there, you just give me the word," he mutters, examining his hands briefly, then prowling off for the kitchen to wash them off, and hunt down a first aid kit. "What the fuck happened?"

Vic has to roll onto her stomach, because it's her back and hip that the creature tore into with its claws. She lets out a whining grunt of pain as she moves. The lower left quadrant on the back of her jacket is in bloody tatters. She tries to work it off, gritting her teeth as every movement sends ripples of pain through her. "I went for a run in Addington Park. Ended up someplace else and some bear....thing...came after me." She shudders at the memory of it.

When he gets back with the first aid kit, he'll see something he hasn't before. Her back. Of course there is the new, gory, gouges from the animal that attacked her in a diagonal from her lower left back to her left hip. But there are old scars everywhere.

Peeking from the straps of her sports top are what look like the remnants of torn punctures, like she'd been impaled on something and hung from it by her scapula. There are burns, and marks that look to have been made by whips of some sort. Most horrifically, there is a two by two inch, perfectly square patch of skin that is clearly a graft, the original area having been flayed off her.

Those wounds weren't there when he'd known her. At least not before she sold him out. Was that why it happened? Did they torture her? They were a cell of Sinaloa, calling themselves the Fantasmas de Sangre, and their interrogation specialist was notoriously good at his job. Vargas, his last name was Vargas.

He strips out of the hoodie he'd pulled on before going to investigate who the fuck was on his property, balls the blood soaked thing up, and tosses it into a hamper near the bottom of the stairs. Then the first aid kit is indeed brought over, unzipped and opened out on the coffee table while Vic answers his question. His hands have been washed, and he doesn't bother with latex gloves. A flick of his eyes to take in her bloodied and torn up back, and no doubt he spots the hallmarks of what's been done to her before that animal ever reached her. A crease forms between his brows, but he doesn't say a word, simply rummages around in silence until he finds the bottle of antiseptic he'd been looking for.

"This is going to sting," he warns her, digging out a wad of gauze and soaking it with the stuff. "How'd you wind up here?" On his doorstep. Probably he wants to keep her talking, to distract her from the discomfort of cleaning out those cuts, so he can assess the damage.

"I found a thin place and opened a door back out just before the thing attacked me. Climbed a tree but it got me before I got off the ground. I got up into the branches but the fucking thing knocked the whole goddamned tree over, right through that door I opened." Sweat has begun beading on Vic's forehead. "It had no skin on its head. And the rest of its body was missing fur patches, it was covered in sores. You need to clean it out really well, it looked diseased."

At the warning she shoves the clean sleeve of her jacket into her mouth to bite down on and prepares herself for the worst.

Nothing in this godforsaken town seems to surprise him any longer, least of all what amounts to an undead Veil bear. The cop pauses in the midst of cleaning out one of the cuts, meets her gaze for a few beats. "You want to fucking do this yourself?" Then, assuming she declines, he resumes what he was doing. He could be a little gentler about it, but she isn't making him feel particularly charitable at the moment.

Once he's got a few of the shallower gouges disinfected, he goes to work digging dirt and god knows what out of a deeper wound bisecting her shoulderblades. "You mind if I..?" He's going to need to pull her bra strap down, a fact that makes him visibly awkward.

"Just cut the fucking thing off. You can spare one of those t-shirts of yours that looks like it's outlived any sort of usefulness I assume," Vic grouses back at him. Yeah, she's taken note of his wardrobe. Her eyes are squinted up tight and her teeth are grinding from the sting of the less than gentle cleaning being done.

"Of all the goddamned log cabins I could wind up in front of..." she mutters, then chomps down on that jacket material again knowing there is way more suckage coming.

He hesitates, weighing her words for a time and taking in the look on her face. Of course she's in pain, he's not making this easy on her. And he might even feel a little badly about it, just for a moment. Until she starts griping at him again, anyway. With a disgusted sigh, he goes to rummage for a pair of scissors in the kit, then efficiently and wordlessly starts cutting off the damned bra. He's no expert at this, but he's almost certainly had to change a field dressing or two, in his time. The tattered fabric is left in place where it slithers off her, and he resumes his cleaning out of the last of her wounds.

"Who did this to you?" he asks abruptly, after a time, once the worst is over. And, "I'll bandage you up, but I strongly suggest you get your ass to the hospital to get checked out." He, unfortunately, has none of the healing Gift.

"I told you, old man, a goddamned dead bear thing," Vic snaps back. She knows he means the rest of her back, she's clearly trying to avoid answering. But the idea of having to go into a hospital has her tensing up. That leaves medical records, not good in her line of work. She sighs.

"You remember Vargas, I'm sure. Carlos. Ojeda's interrogator. I'm told he made an origami swan out of that square of skin he took off me," she rasps out. She's not looking too great at the moment, too pale and a bit greenish around the edges from the pain. She swipes her hand across her forehead to remove the sweat, smearing it with blood instead from where she'd held onto her hip to try and stem the bleeding up in that damned tree.

He wasn't born yesterday, de la Vega. Surely he knows perfectly well that the hospital's a liability for her. Maybe he doesn't really expect her to follow his advice. "Might need stitches here," he observes, after a little prodding about to one side of the nasty gash that cuts between her shoulderblades. "And yeah, I remember Vargas." More gauze is unrolled, and her shoulder wrapped snugly, the stuff taped in place. Lower, "Sounds like something he'd do." There's little sympathy evident in his voice, but then he's never been a man to wear his heart on his sleeve.

After a long silence while he works, "I told you what he was capable of, you know. Men like him.." The sort of men he's spent much of his formative years around. His jaw's a little tight as he finishes up with the bandaging.

Vic is doing her best to try and chew through her jacket sleeve at this point. She definitely needs stitches. She's also likely to suffer rather than go to a hospital to get them. She saw some Friendzone post about some dude willing to heal for cash. That'll be her likely bet. When he makes the comment about warning her, she grunts and spits out the jacket sleeve.

"And I told you he could do his worst and he wouldn't get shit from me. He didn't." So, she went through all that and didn't sell him out. The question is, what made her do it then? "I just need to get back to my trailer. I'm not going to any hospital."

She's still clearly in fighting shape. Maybe even moreso, without the burden of police paperwork and shifts to keep her away from the gym or other training. But her back is like a horror show, so she's not going to be winning any bikini contests.

"You need to get this fucking looked at, tu perra terca," growls the cop, leaning away from her and shoving supplies back into the bag with a thump and clatter. His eyes tick up to hers when she mentions that he didn't get shit from her, his look hard. "Didn't make you a good enough offer, huh?" A long pause as he studies her, then zips the bag closed and pushes to his feet, and prowls off for the kitchen to soap up and rinse off his hands.

"Right," she snaps back. "Because money and blow are worth more to me than my fucking skin, Javier." She shakes her head and sits up, holding the tattered jacket to her front. She gets dizzy for a moment, but stubbornly wades through it, shaking her head to clear it.

"Have that tee I can wear on the hike back to Huckleberry?" she asks flatly, her face gone to that stony place that wins poker games.

There's a glance from the older man, and his eyes narrow a fraction before he drops his gaze again. Finished rinsing off, he dries his hands and wordlessly heads up the stairs to clatter about in the bathroom for a few moments. When he returns, it's with a clean shirt and a bottle of painkillers, which he cracks open and dispenses a couple of pills into his hand. "Yes, and no," he murmurs in reply. The shirt is balled up and tossed toward her. "You can borrow that. And sleep on the couch tonight." Then he steps in close and offers the painkillers in his upturned palm. Clearly, he knows better than to give her the whole bottle.

If reaching for the whole bottle wouldn't cause more pain than the bottle could fix, Vic definitely would. But she snorts and drops the jacket to tug the shirt on. No shame here. The front of her torso is still in perfect condition. She dry swallows the pills and shakes her head. "How stupid do you think I am? Sleeping on your couch? What so you can shank me in the middle of the night?" Not that she wouldn't totally deserve it.

She forces herself to her feet. Bad idea, a few of the bandages are already getting soaked through. She wobbles, and grabs hold of the nearest furnishing to stay upright. "I'll call an Uber. Does Uber even come out to the middle of assfuck nowhere?"

Does he look? Of course he does. His eyes - and his dick - are in perfect working order. His gaze doesn't linger though; he's already turning away by the time she pulls the shirt on. It's black and faded, like half of what he owns. Far too big for her, too, and perhaps the worst part about it all is that it smells like him, and the faint citrusy tang of his soap. "Suit yourself," he replies, low-voiced, when she starts making noises about calling an Uber. He retrieves the first aid kit to go and put it away, and then returns to deal with his gun. Ejecting the clip into his hand with a soft clack, weapon and ammunition stored separately in a locked cabinet under the stairs.

Vic digs in her destroyed jacket for her phone and grunts, wiping some of the blood off it, to turn it on. Uber...Uber...there's the logo. She taps it and the app opens. She peers at it blearily. She taps in her address at Huckleberry, then squints at the pickup location box. "Where the fuck am I?" she snaps at Ruiz, taking an unwise step towards his front door. Her left leg has already decided it's done for the night after having that hip slashed. She instead finds herself back on the couch on her ass.

An address is rattled off mechanically, Javier having taken up a lean against the kitchen counter while this all plays out. Hands shoved into his pants pockets, he watches her steadily, unflinching as she starts to haul herself up.. and goes right back down again. He's waiting, perhaps, for her to see reason. Or maybe just make it out the fucking door before she passes out, so he can convince himself she's not his problem any longer, who the hell knows.

The address is tapped in. And she frowns at the response. Apparently, no one in Gray Harbor is willing to drive all the way the fuck out to a cabin in the firefly forest in the middle of the night. She throws her phone halfway across the room and drops her aching forehead into one hand. "Right. So, the couch," she mumbles. "I suppose with how bad I feel right now, you killing me in the middle of the night might be a fucking relief."

She starts working off her sneakers clumsily. Blood loss doesn't suit her. She can send a message to that Lockhart guy in the morning. If she's still alive by then.

Well, he probably could've told her so, and saved her some time. But where's the fun in that? "Mm," is the only sound he makes. Some gruff combination of amusement and vague irritation that she is, unfortunately, going to be his problem for a little while longer. Then he pushes off the counter and goes to grab a couple of beers from the fridge. One's passed off to Vic, and he thumbs the cap off the other one as he goes to rummage for blankets. "Got anyone you need me to call?" he queries, eventually.

"No." comes the quick reply to that. No one to call, or no one she wants to know she got herself injured? Who knows with Vic. She thumbs the cap off the beer she is given and slugs back a good third of the bottle in one go. She wipes the back of her hand across her mouth. "Javier," she says, finally, eyes not quite sliding to meet his. "You know," she tips the beer at him. It's her version of thank you, maybe. She was never good at thank yous, or asking for help. Stubborn as a mule.

A warm-looking fleece is dug out, and he pauses a moment when she speaks his name like that. Then shuts the door to the linen closet, and ambles back over. There's a soft thump as the folded-up blanket is tossed atop the couch, and then a slosh of his own beer as he tips it back for a swallow. Pop. "De nada." The way he's looking at her, it's not nothing.

Then his gaze slides away, and he sucks his upper lip between his teeth a moment. "You'll be safe here. Okay?" The bottle's tipped toward his mouth again, another third of it gone down in one swallow.

That assurance gets a smirk from the woman. "Sure. Safe. Like I'm ever safe, anywhere," Vic quips. She sets the beer down on whatever passes for a coffee table, and wraps the blanket around herself, sliding down, carefully onto her right side on the couch. She has to balance to not roll onto her back or left side. It's going to be a rough night for her. She no doubt deserves it after all the horrible things she has done.

"If I don't wake up, call Joey Kelly. He'll know what to do."

No more words from the cop. He lets Vic get herself sorted, finishes off his beer, and heads for the stairs while digging his phone out of his jeans pocket. He'd seen something on Friendzone recently.. where is it. There. With a brief glance over his shoulder at his guest, he furrows his brows and disappears up the stairs while composing a message.

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : Is this Tor Lockhart?

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Yeah. Who's this?

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : (a couple of minutes later) You take money for healing, yeah? How much?

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Yeah. Depends. How bad we talking?

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : Bad enough she's going to need stitches. Probably a blood transfusion. hopefully not surgery.

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : Can you do it or not?

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Yeah, I can do it. At least I think I can. If you know shit about how healing works though, you know that sometimes it's a crapshoot.

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Hundred bucks gets me through the door. Another 200 if it all goes right.

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : If I knew shit about healing, why the fuck would I be asking for your help

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : So 300 bucks

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Yeah. And gas money if I have to come to you.

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : Yeah, you have to fucking come to me. She's hurt, I'm not taking her on a fucking field trip

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Give me the address.

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : You're alone, right?

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : I don't bring tag-alongs on my jobs.

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : good. (address follows, looks like one of the acreages on the outskirts of town)

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Do I need to worry about anyone jumping my ass?

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : Right, because I've got nothing better to do than assault some pizza delivery boy for the five fifty in change he's got in his fucking pocket

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : Just get your ass over here. and don't even think about trying to fuck me over.

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Jesus, relax. I'm just asking if I'm walking into a fucking gang situation.

Vic stubbornly works off her running shorts, because the blood is still damp and gross and ugh. If she had her wits about her she could just TK that shit right out of the fabric, but the whole thinking process at the moment is basically, blood icky gerrrrrofffff! At least she's wearing boyshorts under them, so Ruiz doesn't have to be subjected to further nudity. Poor guy. She grunts as some patches stick to her leg and she has to tug them off, which pulls at the injuries.

There is a sudden audible stream of profanity coming from the couch that would make a sailor blush.

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : I'm already fucking driving over.

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : Gang situation? What the fuck? No, I have a girl. She's hurt. There are no gangs involved.

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Listen man, I get called into all sorts of shit in this town. I just watch my own ass. I'm like, ten minutes out.

(TXT to Tor) Ruiz : Great, see you in ten.

The house is a good mile or two from anything else resembling habitation; one of the A-Frames built on the outskirts of town, it's accessible via a narrow drive hemmed in with trees. Once Tor arrives, he'll find that the lights are on in the living room, and there are a couple of vehicles parked in the drive: a newer model blue pickup truck, and what looks suspiciously like an unmarked police cruiser. Mud-spattered black muscle car with steel rims and a look of latent aggression about it, the occasional blip of light about its perimeter suggests an active security system.

Oh, and don't forget the fallen half tree of a species that doesn't grow here. That one is right beside the pickup like it had been chopped in half cleanly somewhere along the way, with no stump in sight. There's also drag marks and blood leading from it up onto the porch.

The car that pulls up is quite well-known around town. The cherry red 1964 Mustang has been a fixture in Gray Harbor for a few decades, though only recently in the posession of Tor Lockhart. That's who gets out of the car, with a hoodie pulled up over his head and a thin shell raincoat sort of lazily over his shoulders. He looks down at his phone, eyes the cars, eyes the blinking security system. Rather than just walk up and risk getting a gun in his face, he texts his summoner.

(TXT to Ruiz) Tor : Outside.

Perhaps a minute or so after Tor's last message is sent, a creak of movement on the stairs. "Stay right there," murmurs the cop without looking over at his guest, as he collects his gun and ambles over to check the front window. Click as the deadbolt's cleared, and the door hauled open. There is indeed a weapon held loosely in the guy's right hand, finger resting along the barrel instead of touching the trigger. His dark eyes are fixed steadily on the younger man standing there in the rain jacket. "Come inside," is offered evenly, not so much as a hint of a smile as he steps to the side.

Vic grunts in reply to the order from Ruiz. She looks like she really doesn't much like being ordered around by the man, but the fact moving anywhere at the moment isn't gonna happen anyway dulls the crankiness a touch. The tall woman on the couch is in a pair of pink boyshorts and a faded t-shirt that is sticking to her back already where she's bled through the bandages Ruiz put on as a stop gap.

Tor's posture is unthreatening, shoulders loose, expression neutral. His eyes go down to the gun, then up to Ruiz. He twitches a half-smile that's hard to see between his hair and the hoodie as he places who the other man is. Then he makes his way towards the door, then past the cop into the interior of the cabin. "I'm not a nurse or anything, so after I do my thing, you might need..." he looks over at the couch, "...to still patch her up a bit. Sometimes it doesn't heal people all the way. How long ago?" He pushes the hood back, revealing scruffy, slightly damp hair.

Yeah, it's no particular secret any longer, who the guy is. Gray Harbour's a small town with a small town police department, and de la Vega's not hard to recognise on sight. He's in a rumpled black tee shirt and jeans, and looks to have showered not too long ago. Once Tor's inside, he locks the door again and sets his gun on the kitchen island. "Hour or two ago." He nods him toward the couch while digging his wallet out of his pants pocket. A few crisp bills come out, and are folded in half, and held out to the younger man.

"Goddamit De la Vega, I'll pay you back tomorrow. I was gonna call the guy myself in the morning," Vic mutters with a scowl. She does NOT want to be in debt to the cop, clearly. She's lying on her stomach, because lying on her back isn't possible in her current condition. To illustrate, she lifts the back of the tee gingerly to show the swath of bandages in a diagonal from shoulder to left hip where something gouged her. That's the current injury at least.

The rest of her back is basically a horror show of it's own, covered in scars from cuts, burns, punctures, gunshot wounds, and one two by two inch square that appears to have a graft on it.

And the criminal element tend to make sure they're up on who the cops are by sight. Tor's family has been wading in the muck of Gray Harbor's criminal side for a couple generations at least. He takes note of his surroundings. Not often you get into the belly of the beast after all - then takes the money from Ruiz. He clearly doesn't care who is paying the bill. "That's between you two."

He shrugs off his jacket, revealing his usual button up plaid and leather vest ensemble. He finds a place to drape that and his hoodie, then picks up a chair which he sets down next to Vic. "So. No promises this is gonna fuckin' work. If you know anything about weird abilities in this town is that nothing is a guarantee. But I've had success before, or I wouldn't be whoring myself out. So," he tries to look Vic in the eye. "I'm gonna touch you. Just your shoulder. Lie still. I'll do what I can. Okay?" He's clearly not trained to have a good bedside manner, but nor is he being completely lax or uncaring about it. And he notably does not ask what happened.

The belly of the beast, indeed. There are signs that Tor's in the home of a cop, if he knows what to look for; the secure firearms lockup under the stairs, the lack of any valuables left in plain sight. The cameras mounted outside and the sturdy deadbolts on the doors. And, of course, the unmarked Charger in the drive.

Once the money's been accepted, Ruiz collects his gun again and takes up a lean against the kitchen island as he watches the proceedings. The barrel's tapped lightly against his thigh, jaw hard, still no sign of a smile in sight.

"I know about the weird shit. The weird shit is what attacked me. Goddamned Veil bear thing. It looked diseased. Can you check for that? Make sure I'm not gonna mutate and get sores all over me and lose the skin on my head?" Yeah that thing was creepy as hell. Vic is also on a mix of painkillers and beer courtesy of Ruiz, and thus offering up more information than she likely would otherwise. At least she doesn't have any coke on her. She looks over at Ruiz, so she can focus her eyes on something other than whatever this kid is going to do.

She is definitely new to town, but if he's in contact with Felix's people, he'd have heard about an enforcer being sent down from Hoquiam to work for Joey Kelly.

Tor is in fact, one of Felix's - albeit far down the totem. "If I do this right, it should take care of any infection. Normal ones, anyway. Shit from the Veil can be unpredictable. So, no promises." He did warn that he isn't actually a medical professional, yes? That means no reassuring platitudes. "It doesn't do shit against the Veil flu that was going around a few month backs, for instance."

He glances over at Ruiz, his expression surprisingly chill given the situation. He then flexes his fingers, then reaches out to set a hand on Vic's shoulder. "Hold still." And then he's closing his eyes and concentrating, his facial muscles ticing.

The deep gouges from the bear's claws begin to close up, muscle and nerves knitting then the skin itself becoming smooth, well, as smooth as it was before the encounter. There is still a goodly amount of scar tissue all over her back. But at least there are no new scars to add to the older ones.

Vic shudders at the sensation of foreign Glimmer moving through her and grits her teeth as nerve endings repair first, letting the full pain of her injury set in for a few brief moments. She grits out an elongated "Ffffff-uuuuuuuck" at the sensation and slams a fist into the couch until the agony subsides. It'll take a bit for her blood supply to get back up to normal, but for now it's stable.

She tentatively moves her back and hip and the pain is no longer there. "Feels better, can you take off those bandages and make sure?" she requests.

Tor's features don't relax immediately after the wave goes from him to her. It takes him a second, like a muscle seizing up after over-exertion for him to relax again. He pinches his nose and shakes his head, then grunts softly. "Yeah. I think that worked, though." He reaches for the bandages and peels them back. It's hard to tell for sure through the blood, but it definitely looks less critical. He makes sure Ruiz sees what he paid for as well. "I'd still take it easy. I don't know if I got all the internal trauma bits. And I find this shit's hard on your body even if I erase all the injuries."

"Yeah, I'm familiar with how it works," Vic notes. She gets up slowly, testing her leg and hip first because those had given out on her earlier. This time, the leg holds, even if she's still a bit lightheaded from mixing drugs and booze, and blood loss. "How much is he paying you? So I can pay him back tomorrow?" she demands, with all the cordialness of a feral animal.

Ruiz had to take a phone call, so he's left the pair mostly to their own devices. Gun held loosely still in his right hand, he paces absently about his kitchen while he mostly listens to someone else prattle on at him. And ticks his eyes over when it sounds like things are wrapping up. Another wad of money is dug out of his wallet, phone held between shoulder and ear.

"He wasn't," Tor nods towards Ruiz. "So I thought I'd give the Cliff's Notes." He stands up and wipes his hands off on a cloth handkerchief he produces from his pocket. "Three hundred." And then he quirks a brow. "Don't suppose either of you have any weed? This shit tends to give me a fuckin' migraine."

Vic makes a mental note to pay Ruiz $300 tomorrow, even if she has to shove it down his stubborn throat. "Wasn't room for any in my joggers, sorry man," she tells Tor. She looks over to Ruiz. "Ok if I grab a shower to get all the blood off? Or should I see if Lockhart here can drive me home to use mine?"

The wad of cash is given a little waggle, to indicate that Tor should take it. If he doesn't, it's tossed on the coffee table, and the cop's phone conversation resumed shortly. English interspersed with the occasional quip in Spanish; whomever it is on the other end, he doesn't seem terribly pleased. "Disculpe," he mumbles into the phone, and holds it away from his ear, brows furrowing as he watches Tor. "The fuck do you think I am, a dispensary?" He continues to stare for a few seconds, then prowls away, resuming his conversation. The drawer under the microwave is tugged open, and a small baggie withdrawn. And tossed next to the money, once he's reclaimed about fifty of it. To Vic, a somewhat distracted, "Yeah, sure." In regards to the shower, presumably. "Towels are in the closet on the right."

Tor takes the money and touches his tongue to his canine when he does. "No Uber receipt for this one." As in addition to pizza delivery, he Ubers, both Eats and people. The money disappears with a flick of nimble fingers. He notes the skim off the cash, then makes a finger-rubbing motion, "Uh uh. Fifteen for gas, man. My girl's pretty but she's a heavy drinker." He means the Mustang. He takes the baggie and pulls out a joint, but he doesn't light it. He does however, start to pull on his hoodie and the rain shell.

Vic nods in thanks to Ruiz, then heads off towards the shower, grabbing a towel on the way. She's still moving at about half speed, but she'll damn well be in that shower until the hot water is gone and she's convinced herself that she doesn't have mutant diseased Veil bear cooties. Fuck this town. Fuck it.

A glance out the window, of course, finds that red Mustang nose to tail with the cop's Charger. Probably give each other a run for their money, those two. The fifty doesn't make a reappearance though; de la Vega simply flashes a quick, wolfish smile that holds zero warmth, and pushes the front door open for Tor. Like, get the fuck out.

"Seriously? Fuckin' cheapass." Tor scoffs, flips his hood up, then lights the joint. He was going to be polite and wait until he's outside. Then he lifts a salute to Ruiz and steps outside. "Pleasure doing business with you, Viva Las Vegas."

Ruiz is still on his phone, the ass, and flashes Tor a wink without a smile in accompaniment as he ushers him back out. Then the door's thumped shut after him, and the deadbolt thrown. And hey, at least nobody got shot.