Constantine Ashe: Does anyone notice?

Light flooded the tiny warehouse room, and Constantine flinched back automatically, blinded.

"Police! Freeze!"

His vision adjusting slowly, Constantine couldn't have moved if he wanted to. He felt rooted to the spot, staring down at the form slowly coalescing out of the dazzle of light-- the form in a tight red leather skirt, with neon red hair, and a multitude of silver piercings-- sprawled back against the wall and floor in front of him.

"Oh, God," he breathed, even as a policeman, gun in hand, knelt beside her for the split second it took to ascertain that she'd been shot.

She'd been shot.

"Officer Beuregard, requesting an ambulance! Immediately!"

"I didn't mean to," Constantine whispered. "I didn't mean to-- it was an accident. Oh, God, Ana...."

The police-- there were three of them, now-- paid him no attention, swarming over Anastasia, chattering in tones of hurry and command. They were probably applying whatever first aid one applied to victims of a gunshot wound at the scene of a crime. Constantine thought he probably should run-- or offer himself up for arrest-- but he still couldn't move, horrified stare fixed, half-unseeing, on Anastasia's dull eyes.

The sirens of an ambulance echoed through the empty district, the room filled with medical personnel, crime scene investigators, and more policemen. The ambulance team took over on Ana, the crime scene investigators swarmed around the room, looking for clues and taking photographs, the policemen set up crime scene tape and jotted down notes. None of them so much as looked at Constantine-- and they should have, for he was at least a witness, if not perpetrator. They moved deftly and purposefully through the room, avoiding his presence absently but not so much as looking at him.

No policeman would ignore him standing there. Not on purpose.

Connie, you're already dead!

"Hey!" he said, taking a step closer to the nearest little knot of policemen. "Hey, you want the one who did it? Huh? It was me! I shot her!"

Not one so much as glanced at him.

"Hello! Murderer, right here! Confessing! Arrest me already!"

Still no response. He stepped back-- once, twice, hurrying backwards until he hit the wall and stopped there, breath coming fast and shallow.

Connie, you're already dead!

I promised!

Connie, promise me?

He slid down the wall, sitting against it heavily, stunned. "She's right. She was right."

Constantine didn't move again for the rest of the night, as the emergency doctors rushed Anastasia to the hospital in their siren-blaring ambulance, crime scene investigators took pictures-- and removed the gun-- and the police shooed off the few rubberneckers who came to gawk, even in this remote, deserted part of the city. His thoughts wouldn't follow each other; they kept chasing themselves around in tight, rapid little circles, full of two inescapable but incomprehensible truths: he was dead; so was Ana. His body wouldn't move-- did he even have a body? Was he something of pure spirit, like them? But then how could he have held the gun that shot Anastasia?

He'd shot Ana.

Ana was dead.

So was he.

None of it made sense, and he couldn't even begin to grasp any of it. It just went around and around in his head, like a state of shock. If dead people could go into shock.

Finally, near dawn, things started to calm down. The crime scene team carried away what little evidence they'd managed to find, ran out of photographs to take, and finished jotting down notes and speaking into hand-held tape recorders. The police started shutting down the portable flood lights, leaving up the yellow tape and warning cones, and leaving in their black and white cars-- quietly and unobtrusively. Only one car remained, and only two policemen remained with it. One of them was the bushy-browed, sharp-eyed policeman who had seen him before. Constantine recognized him with a vague kind of surprise, but had no room in his head to wonder why he hadn't arrested him, if he could see him.

The sharp-eyed policeman ducked under the tape, leaving his partner at the car, apparently making a final survey of the site, or perhaps patrolling it. Left behind as a rear guard, in case the murderer came back.

Even though the murderer had never left.

"I know you're in here...."

The voice was oddly cultured, for a beefy policeman with bushy eyebrows. Constantine looked at him dully: he stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the rising sun, his eyes wandering around the room, as if trying to see what was really there but hidden from him.

"I can't see you, but I know you're there. And I know you had something to do with this. But I cannot arrest a ghost. The law cannot take a ghost to trial, for murder or otherwise."

Constantine could have said something witty. Or even something stupid. No words came. Was he a ghost? Was that what you called someone like him?

"Just... stay here. Don't go anywhere."

Don't go anywhere. Okay?

That he had an answer for: "I'm not going anywhere," he whispered, and shut his eyes.

"I'll be back," the policeman answered, and then walked away, closing the door behind him, blocking out the dawn and throwing the room into darkness.