Money Talks - Sierra Aguirre-Stoker, Pete Jemison

Sierra shoves open the door to the debriefing room, leaning against it for a moment. She isn’t too fond of rehashing the events of a patrol when she’s been awake for fifteen hours and mildly concussed for two of those, but there is an upside. Free food.
She grimaces when she sees the countertop clean, no platter of bagels or donuts resting on top. Damn it, I was counting on something. She really shouldn’t, it’s sort of an unspoken rule that admin staff rotate through bringing in food, and not everyone remembers.
She pours herself a mug of coffee from the carafe sitting on the hot plate. She doesn’t normally like cream, but there’s some of the real stuff in the shared fridge and she really shouldn’t drink black coffee on an empty stomach. She has enough problems.
The cream smells a little off, but it doesn’t taste bad enough to make her dump it down the sink, so she pours a generous helping into her coffee and finds a chair.
She thinks about tossing her jacket on the back, but the air conditioning in the room is already making her fingers feel a bit stiff and chilly, so she just slouches a little further into the chair, letting the jacket collar ride up her neck and wrapping her fingers tighter around the coffee cup.
Teams report by seniority, unless there’s been a major bust or someone has time-sensitive information, and given she and Pete have only about four months’ experience right now, they’re close to the bottom of the pecking order. It’s going to be a while.
She takes a sip of her coffee. It’s slightly scorched, and the cream is definitely past its prime, but it’s something in her stomach. Hopefully she can drink enough to trick it into not growling by the time she has to report.
“Sierra?” A bony elbow digs into her side, and she jumps, spilling coffee on her thighs, then hissing a curse between her teeth as she tries to wipe it off.
She looks up, and realizes Carter and Stevenson have somehow been replaced by Ramirez and Walker. She’s managed to sleep through everyone with eight years of seniority without realizing it. That’s at least four teams’ reports. Her blood sugar must really have tanked.
“You okay?” Pete asks.
“Yeah, just tired.” She shrugs. “And it’s a slow night.”
“You’re not wrong.” He shifts in his chair. “The only thing you really missed was Hayashi’s team arresting a vamp with a teenage host at one of the downtown clubs.”
She’s going to start making mistakes if this keeps up. Falling asleep in debriefing is one thing. Everyone nods off at one point or another in there. But that kind of exhaustion can be deadly in the field. And she knows this is far more than simple boredom.
She’s been dragging herself out of bed after slapping her alarm clock into snooze at least twice. She’s wearing a long sleeved button down and leather jacket when most of the rest of the city is in t-shirts. She can barely focus long enough to turn her field notes into coherent reports.
But it’s come down to gas in the car or food on her table, and anyone who knows Sierra Aguirre-Stoker knows which one she’s going to pick.
She forces herself to stay awake through the rest of the reports by alternately digging her fingernails into her palms and biting the inside of her cheek. The taste of blood when she accidentally closes her teeth on the edge of her tongue adds a metallic tinge to the already bitter coffee.
She makes it through her report with minimal issues, they had a quiet night themselves, and since her team is the newest formed, she’s able to bolt for her desk as soon as it’s over. She only has to fill out two incident reports, and then she can go home and sleep.
She drives home on autopilot, risky in LA morning traffic, and statistically more likely to kill her than even her job, but the last time she crashed on the agency couch instead, Uncle John found her and every member of his team offered her a ride home or a place to crash. She doesn’t want their pity. She wants to prove she’s worth the name she chose to add to her own.
She grabs the handful of mail stuffed into the little metal hanger outside her apartment door. Packages have to be picked up at the office, but despite complaints of stolen mail from the residents, a locking mailbox system has yet to be installed anywhere.
Sierra glimpses a red stamp on the outside of one of the envelopes as she tosses them onto the scarred counter and figures no one is going to want to steal her mail.
She opens the fridge out of habit, even though the only thing it is a dessicated lime she should have thrown away weeks ago. She opens the silverware drawer for a knife, dragging its nicked edge through the envelopes that need it, tossing junk circulars into the trash. She doesn’t want to trade in her car for a model a year ahead of date, she can’t afford a new kitchen and her landlord would never approve a remodel anyway, and there’s not enough in her bank account to invest in anything, no matter how good the rates are.
She leaves the red-stamped envelope until last. Honestly, she doesn’t even need to open it. It’s not stamped, just addressed with her landlord’s scrawly handwriting and that stamp is the same one she’s seen before, with the little chip out of the rubber in the upper left hand corner of the O. It looks a bit like it says UVERDUE, and the first time, she’d laughed at it a bit.
She isn’t laughing now.
She’s cut every corner she can, scraped and gone without and scavenged, and she still can’t pay this bill. Not even the minimum it’s going to be asking for. She can’t make it here. She’s done everything she knows how to do, everything she learned from her mother, every trick they used to keep a single woman and two growing girls housed and fed, and it still isn’t enough. She lays the envelope on the table with the knife on top of it. She doesn’t want to see what it says, she already knows.
No matter what she does, she can’t break even.
At least she doesn’t have much to pack.