<span style="color: #FF80FF"> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="font-size: 150%; line-height: 116%;"><div style="text-align: center;">Lea Stevens</div></span></span> </span><br/><div style="text-align: center;"><a class="postlink" href="http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/nn24/SociallyToxicBeauty/036e0d3a-b28c-47ec-b858-0eaea6c67e4d.jpg">[ img ]</a></div><br/><span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="font-size: 150%; line-height: 116%;"><span style="color: #FF80FF"><div style="text-align: center;">"Jazz"</div></span></span></span><br/><br/>Lea slumped in some relief when Carlos seemed to think the gun was a good idea. She didn’t know why she was so worried to begin with. The reward seemed like a good idea, but she didn’t know how willing the drug dealers would be with working with the police, though she supposed if it were only through Carlos it wouldn’t be that big of a problem.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FF80FF"> “That money would be awfully enticing to them, but I doubted they’d be willing to work with anyone else but you—if we manage to convince them to even work with us to begin with. I imagine if we mention the fact that the guy is killing off potential customers. They mostly cater to prostitutes and strippers anyway—less dangerous, according to them. I don’t know,”</span>she said with a shrug of her shoulders. She looked around them for a moment and realized they had been sitting in the parking lot for a while,<span style="color: #FF80FF"> “Maybe we should go?”</span>she suggested as she adjusted the vent to blow directly on her. She was absolutely freezing, despite the toasty temperature in the car.<br/><br/>Carlos gave a nod and pulled out of the parking spot, and they began heading for the local hardware store. Lea tried to take her mind off the killer and the way the precinct was treating Carlos, but it was hard to distract herself from it. Her foot was tapping quickly against the floorboard, though she didn’t notice, and her heart felt like it was beating a million miles a minute. She began to chew on her bottom lip and she wished, for the millionth time that morning, that she had just a little bit of something to take. She felt flustered with her bouncing thoughts.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FF80FF"> “Maybe a soft grey color for the ceiling and then the walls could be a soft purple? I don’t know…I don’t know…everything is just so hideous. All the colors are just off…nothing makes any sense at my place. Did you see the handles of the cabinets? Not all of them match…who does that? Who doesn’t have matching cabinet knobs? It’s…”</span>Lea continued to ramble on about her apartment and how ugly she thought it was. She explained that she cleaned it all the time, but she still felt like it was dirty, and how the coloring was off.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FF80FF"> “Sometimes I feel like someone is watching me in that stupid apartment. It just makes me really sad sometimes. My house was never like that. My house always felt comfortable, and I had a fire place, and…and…” </span>she stopped talking, her eyes casting down. She realized a bit too late that she had gone off onto some conversation no one else was a part of, that she had just started letting her thoughts spill before she could stop them. She hated that she couldn’t seem to control it and it made her angry. She crossed her arms and then brought her knees to her chest, looking more like a petulant child in the passenger seat rather than the woman she was.