and now for something completely different
offspeed suggested St. Louis Cardinals/Arizona Diamondbacks, Mark Mulder/Dan Haren, alternate universe. Apparently she meant the kind of AU where they end up on the same team. Which is a neat concept for baseball RPS... what if Derek Jeter had stayed at U of M and ended up being signed by the Tigers? What if the Red Sox were an independent league team playing out of a crappy little ballpark in Salem? What if the A's were the richest team in baseball? Possibilities!
Unfortunately, this is not that AU.
Ummmm. Mulder and Haren are cops in the city of Cardnalis; Mulder's a patrol unit officer, and Haren is a drug task force officer on loan from the Deebak PD. This was going to be a short little thing, but it kept going. In fact, it wants to keep going, but I decided to cut it off and post at least this much. It may actually (horribly?) turn into a series. I'd love to get more of the league involved. Because I am insane.
Dan Haren, Mark Mulder, Albert Pujols. Gen, kind of pre-slash. Lots and lots and lots of cameos. PG, 3,826 words.
I don't really know what else to say.
Oh. There are pictures.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true. Obviously. If you think Mark Mulder is actually a police officer in a fictional city, you have problems.
Bust.
It's late when Mulder slouches into the station, the kind of late that turns itself around to early again. Haren should probably be at home, but the night watch guy has something very like the flu, and someone has to mind the station. If Haren can't be out where he wants to be right now, he may as well be here.
"One to book," Mulder says, sounding a little edgy, mostly tired. He wanders past the empty secretary's desk and ambles towards Haren with that deceptively casual lanky gait. "Where is everyone?"
Haren gives Mulder a quick head to toe glance-over, just making sure he's not obviously hurt anywhere, before turning his attention back to the computer. He pulls up the booking files and starts printing out the ones that need signatures. "Out on a bust." He looks up again at Mulder, the exhausted lean of him against the edge of Haren's desk, the conspicuous absence of anyone else in the station. "Where's the perp?"
"Pujols has him cooling his heels in the car. Where's the secretary? This isn't your damn job," Mulder says, and no, it isn't, but Haren doesn't expect Mulder to keep a perp sitting in his car all night long (the courts frown on that kind of thing, apparently), and anyone can do the paperwork necessary to put some asshole in the holding cell.
He restrains himself to a quiet, "It's 4 am, Mulder. He's off-duty at 1," before handing him the papers. Mulder looks down at them, huffing out a tiny annoyed noise through his nostrils, pulling Schumaker's chair away from his desk and rolling it over to the wrong side of Haren's. He ratchets the seat down (Schumaker being about half his height), sits, and starts filling in the appropriate sections.
It's quiet for a while, the only sounds the scritch of Mulder's pen and the hesitant tapping Haren makes against the computer keyboard.
"They're moving in on Canseco," Haren finally admits. "He's in town, we got a tip from Raffy, Canseco's supposedly making some big deal down by Ayteetee Pier tonight. We got all your drug units and half of Deebak's on it."
Mulder puts down the pen, eyes a brief flutter of blue as he looks up. "Why aren't you out there?"
Haren fidgets uncomfortably, the mere memory of the argument flashing adrenaline back into his bloodstream. "Chief La Russa only wanted experienced officers working this one." He manages to not say 'your Chief,' but it's a close thing. He's been reminding himself nearly every day that Cardnalis is only temporary, that he'll be back in Deebak soon enough, but most of the Cardnalis cops tend to get offended when he makes it obvious.
"Experienced officers?" Mulder sounds almost offended on his behalf, and Haren can't stop himself from smiling a little at it. "Experienced officers? Hell, you spent more time on that case than anyone. That's what they brought you over here for, wasn't it?"
Yeah. Yeah, it was. Haren sighs and scrubs a hand backwards through his hair, nods, and drops his eyes back to the screen.
----
Chief Melvin had recommended him for the posting because he knew that Haren could do it. Could take the case, track the dealer through a hundred thousand tenuous threads of connection and legality, from a hundred million drops of body-altering dope back to a single man. Haren was good at it, and Chief Melvin knew it, and knew that Cardnalis PD didn't have anyone as good as him on their narcotics task force.
Chief La Russa, though, didn't know a damn thing about Haren, and hadn't tried to find out. All he knew was that he was getting a 27 year old kid foisted onto his roster, someone who'd been on the Deebak force barely two years, and he was supposed to just hand his drug force operations right over. The whole thing had been handled badly; it would have been a sour pill to swallow for any police chief, and Chief La Russa is more ornery and conservative than most.
It hadn't helped that Haren didn't look like any other cop in the Cardnalis PD. Chief La Russa liked his cops neat and clean-shaven. Respectable. Haren's pretty sure the man has actually used the phrase 'a credit to the uniform' at some point in the recent past. Neat and clean-shaven just isn't Haren's look, not when he has to go undercover every so often and every last little thing he can do to look less like a cop is essential to his work and maybe his very survival.
Still, no one can say that he let the whole thing interfere with his work. It's rainier in Cardnalis than it is in Deebak, but that had just encouraged him to stay inside and sort through evidence. It was true that there wasn't anyone with his kind of sparkling arrest record on this force, but the Cardnalis drug officers had been capable enough when he'd given them specific directions. Chief La Russa had made it pretty clear that he wasn't welcome, a sentiment echoed by most of the sergeants and some of the officers, but no one had actively gone out of their way to stonewall him. They wanted Canseco off the streets as much as anyone else did.
They'd started small-time and broad-spectrum, busting a bunch of the lowest level dealers, the kinds of busts Cardnalis PD hadn't bothered to waste their resources on before. It wasn't a bad impulse, and Haren had understood where they were coming from, but the best way to tap into a wide drug net was to get a feel for its edges and dregs first. It had looked good in the papers too-- Haren knows full well that this was the only thing that kept Chief La Russa from ripping his resources out from under him at the very beginning.
They got their first break with a dealer so minor that he was barely a dealer at all. Haren hadn't been on that sting, had only seen the guy when they brought him back to the station. He was a short guy, shorter even than Schumaker, with the big bulging arms that marked him as a user as well as a dealer.
It had been Mulder and Pujols who brought him in. Haren hadn't worked much with the beat guys before those early busts, but he had seen the way this dealer had been cringing when he came in, scared motion at odds with his bulky upper body, and Haren had known right away that he had to interrogate this one personally.
He had had Mulder and Pujols stand on either side of the interrogation room door, arms folded, while he leaned on the table, up close and personal with the dealer, whose name, it turned out, was Roberts. It was a great combination: Mulder's long clean hard-eyed look made a tidy counterpoint to Pujols' rougher, streetwise face and honest undoped muscles. Haren himself was something else entirely-- he didn't look like anyone this guy would have been dealing to, way too lean to ever play a convincing doper, but he still looked more like someone who'd be buying from a dealer than busting one. Roberts had been obviously unsettled right off the bat.
Ten minutes later Haren had had Roberts shaking and near tears, ready to confess whatever needed confessing. Haren had always been good at that part of his job, good at making people talk, and for all that he looked like a body builder, Roberts wasn't all that tough. Sometimes the dope made guys prone to rages, but it couldn't give anyone a backbone if they didn't already have one.
Nobody, of course, had really given a shit about Roberts and his little backyard operation, so it had been easy as anything to cut a deal with him, immunity for information. Roberts had been more than willing at that point to name names, and that was how they had found Raffy.
----
Raffy. Now there was a nasty piece of work. Biggest dope dealer in Cardnalis and nobody had known it until Roberts had offered him up. Despite their lack of distinction the Cardnalis drug task force had had a pretty good idea who the big players in the local dope market were, but they hadn't even had Raffy's real name on file. He was a word that showed up occasionally in other reports, a figure discussed in hushed tones by the local dealers, showing up only on the wiretaps they set.
It had been hard to believe, at first, that someone with as much influence as Raffy seemed to have would have anything to do with a dealer as little league as Roberts. Roberts had stuck to his story, though, and Haren hadn't thought the guy had it in him to invent something that involved. Later it came out that Roberts had gone to school with Raffy, played on a college baseball team with him. Haren spent a long evening with Mulder and Pujols on a stakeout, his legs cramping in the backseat of their cruiser, discussing the weird chance of it, of something like former baseball teammates giving them their big break against one of the most dangerous drug dealers in the Americas.
It had taken months of intensive investigation to track Raffy down, another month to make contact with him, another several months to turn him. Technically Haren had almost all of the Cardnalis PD at his disposal, but when he got a chance to choose which patrol units he worked with, he always ended up choosing Mulder and Pujols. If anyone from Cardnalis had asked he would have said that he liked the way they operated in the field, trusted their judgement and ability. If anyone from Deebak had asked he would have said that they treated him like any other cop, not like some kind of idiot child needing to be humored.
If he's honest with himself, he would have to admit that it was both those things, and maybe a little bit of selfishness. He likes working with Mulder and Pujols. If he's being really honest, he'd have to admit that he likes Mulder and Pujols themselves.
That's not something he can let get around, though; not in his line of business. All he needs is for one of Canseco's pushers to hear that he's getting close to someone, anyone, and instantly that person would be in danger. He keeps a low profile, keeps his mouth shut, and keeps working.
----
Mulder finishes filling out the booking forms and shoves them across the desk. Haren picks them up and flips quickly through them, making sure Mulder hasn't left any important fields blank.
"Soliciting?"
Mulder nods glumly. "Didn't want to bring him in-- you know how Chief hates us wasting station resources on the hookers if they're not doing any real harm. But he was being so damn obvious that we didn't hardly have a choice."
Haren grimaces a little in sympathy. He gets up and unhooks his keys from his belt, stretching his back out as he does. Too long in front of the computer when he knows, knows he should be out in the field right now. "I'll go open up the holding cell if you go tell Pujols to bring him in, OK?"
"Yeah." Mulder's looking at him kind of funny, but Haren's willing to chalk it up to the late hour. He looks down at Mulder and Mulder shakes his head, like he's just waking up. "Yeah, OK, right." He gets up, sets his shoulders the way he does when he's steeling himself for something unpleasant, and walks back outside.
The holding cell is in pretty good shape. Haren thinks it must not have been in use for a couple of days, because nothing needs dusting or replacing, but all the obvious stains and smears of occupation have been cleaned out. He doesn't usually have much to do with it-- holding cell duty is more a patrol unit or administrative thing-- but it's not like it's rocket science. He checks all the cracks and corners to make sure nothing sharp is hidden anywhere, makes sure there's enough toilet paper, gives the pillow a quick punch to check for bugs.
An overly loud, slightly trembling voice fills the station. "I know my rights! Quit shoving, I know what my rights are!" Haren pokes his head around the corner, looking back into the main lobby of the station.
Pujols has a firm grip on the upper arm of a young man, probably no older than Haren himself. He's skinny, wearing too-tight jeans and a too-small shirt riding up to expose at least four inches of pasty white stomach. His hair is long and black and flops down in roughly cut chunks that actually kind of resemble Haren's own hairstyle. Such as it is.
Mulder, weirdly, is standing off to the side, acting like he's deeply invested in paperwork, not looking at the kid or at Haren. Haren might not even see anything weird about it if he hadn't just watched Mulder fill out all the forms that needed to be filled out. He catches Pujols' eye. Pujols shrugs. OK, then.
"Name?" He assumes Mulder already has this all on the forms, but he asks anyways.
The kid looks blankly at him through a stray chunk of bangs. "Uh. Barry. Barry Zito." He tugs his arm a little, not budging Pujols an inch, before letting his eyes more or less focus on Haren. "Hey. You got some pretty cool hair for a pig, man."
Mulder makes a low noise. Haren holds up a hand to hold him back without turning around. "Zito. How about we do this civil? You be civil, we'll be civil, everyone wins."
Zito blinks slowly at him. "Wasn't trying to be rude, man, hey. I like your hair. And you can't help being a pig no more'n I can help being, like, a man of the streets, you know." He sways a little and Pujols tightens his grip. It should be painful, at this point, but Zito doesn't seem to really feel it. Haren frowns.
"You taking something, Zito?"
"Uh. Maybe?"
Pujols tugs the kid forward. "Le's get him squared 'way firs'." Which means they took something off him when they first arrested him. Haren sighs and nods and helps Pujols get Zito into the cell. Zito's going loose and boneless the way some of them do when they're crashing hard off a big high, and they have to manhandle him quite a bit to get him put away. He's skinny all over, doesn't have any of the adult acne that's so often a side effect of the dope. There aren't any needle tracks on his arms, so probably not heroin. Something else, then.
They lock the door and look at Zito, sprawled on his stomach on the narrow ledge that serves as a bed. Pujols heads back to the lobby with an amused snort. Haren leans against the bars. "Hey." Zito slowly and laboriously rolls his head around to look at Haren. "Hey, Zito. What're you taking?"
Zito shrugs as best he can while lying down. Even in the harsh light of the cell, his pupils are huge and dark, blown wide open.
"You on one of those new Lucys?" Haren asks. 'Lucy' is the general name the drug task force uses for the newer class of hallucinogen. It started on the street, of course, as most of their drug nicknames did.
"Maybe." Zito scrunches up his face, thinking. "Little, oval. Green. Like plants, you know, man?"
"Greenies. Great." Haren sighs and drags his fingers across the bars, tang tang tang. "Get some sleep, OK?"
Zito looks up at him and makes a limp, abortive gesture with his arm. "Hey. C'mon in, man."
It's pretty typical for the hookers to try to sleep their way out of jail, but even if Haren was the kind of cop who could be swayed that way, he wouldn't fuck this kid. Too young, still too clean; greenies are among the lightest of the street drugs, worse than alcohol and pot, but not by too much. This one, in Haren's professional opinion, is still salvageable. "No work for you tonight, buddy."
Zito rolls onto his back and rubs his stomach loosely. "Who said anything 'bout work?"
"Goodnight, kid." Haren hits the bars with the flat of his palm once more and turns his back on the cell. Zito snuffles and resettles and sounds for all the world like he's nestling into a fine hotel bed. Coming down off his greenie high, he probably barely even knows where he is.
When Haren comes back into the main station, Pujols is sitting in Haren's chair, polished black shoes up on Haren's desk. Mulder is back in Schumaker's chair across from him, twirling one of Haren's Deebak PD pens nervously around the fingers of one hand like a miniature baton.
"Mulder here say you ain't bustin' Canseco cause Chief no want you to," Pujols says, at the exact same time that Mulder says, "You get the, uh, the kid put up OK?"
Haren blinks. "That's right," he says after a moment, nodding to Pujols. He turns to Mulder. "Yeah. Uh, wasn't exactly hard."
Mulder looks intensely uncomfortable. He twirls the pen faster over his knuckles, eyes locked down on it. Haren stares at him for another moment before looking askance at Pujols.
Pujols is eyeing Mulder with great interest. "I t'ink," he says, not looking away from Mulder's bowed head, a very small amused smile starting to twitch the corners of his mouth, "dat seein' a hooker who look like you, Of'cer Haren, is freak out my poor partner."
"That kid? The kid we just booked? Zito? He, what?" The kid does not look like him. Except if Haren looks at it objectively, looks at it like someone who hasn't seen his own face in the mirror every day of his life, he can kind of see it. The build, the hair, the coloring. Mulder's head snaps up and, wow, yeah, his expression is disturbed and pained and damn it all if Pujols isn't right on the money. As usual.
"Officer Pujols..." Mulder starts, all warning.
"Actually," Pujols says, grinning for real now, "I t'ink it was seein' a hooker who look like you ask if he want blowjob or fuck dat freak Mulder out."
Mulder gives Pujols a sharp, pissed-off look. Pujols smiles mildly back.
"You took some greenies off him when you arrested him, yeah?" Haren asks, just a tiny bit desperate to change the subject. He is really, really not equipped to deal with the fact that Mulder was solicited by a hooker who looked like him, and that it freaked Mulder out in unspecified ways. He doesn't even want to start thinking about what any of that could mean.
Mulder and Pujols hold their staring contest for another few seconds before Pujols turns back to Haren. "Sì. In the car. You wan' them?"
"Don't see why not. I can file 'em away with the other seizures." He might as well take the opportunity to do his own proper job in one small capacity tonight.
"Pretty big bag. I t'ink he is serial user." Pujols swings his feet down off of Haren's desk without shifting any of the papers on it, something Haren has never gotten the hang of doing. He heads out to the patrol car, pausing only to look over his shoulder and fucking wink at Haren before he steps out of the door.
For lack of anything better to do, Haren reappropriates his chair, then immediately wishes he hadn't, because it puts him right in Mulder's line of sight, and Mulder is determinedly not looking at him. Haren sets his jaw and firmly directs his own gaze to his computer screen. He reviews the transcript of the tip call they'd gotten from Raffy that set up tonight's sting. The sting he should be on.
Mulder finds something very interesting on the floor to stare at. Haren sighs at his computer and wonders how his night could possibly get any worse.
----
It's a bad thing to wonder. He goes home to his temporary Cardnalis apartment (he's been living there 8 months now, but he still thinks of it as 'temporary', because it's not really home; Deebak is home) when the first early shift officers start coming in, blinking and demanding coffee. Three hours later he's jolted out of a restless sleep by a phone call from Officer Looper, one of the more incompetent narcotics officers who's still somewhat starstruck by Haren's reputation.
They didn't get Canseco.
Not only did they fail to get Canseco, but they also managed to get five officers shot, and three of those are critically wounded. It's about as immense a fuck-up as a drug task force can have: men hurt, no worthwhile arrests made, and now Canseco knows they're on to him.
Haren groans, hangs up on Looper, and drags himself out of bed. He'll have to try to salvage whatever he can from this mess. It's his job.
----
Chief La Russa is nowhere to be found, which spares Haren the job of pointing out the obvious-- he should have been out there. He's the expert. He's been leading the drug task force since he got here. He knows more about Canseco than anyone else in the Cardnalis PD. It's not, he knows, as if his presence on the sting would have stopped it from going to shit, but if he could have done something to prevent one officer from getting shot... well.
There are some guilty looks directed his way as he walks to his desk. He sits and opens his email client. Reports from last night are starting to trickle in. Someone has to figure out exactly what went wrong, and, more importantly, why.
Schumaker wordlessly drops off a mug of coffee on his way to his own desk. Looper hands him his report in person, looking like he could almost believe that Haren has the whole thing worked out already. Detective Isringhausen and Officer Ankiel, another one of the patrol units that Haren has worked with before, drag him away from his desk when lunchtime rolls around, insisting that he needs to eat. He even, much to the amusement of everyone else, gets a wave from Zito as the kid's escorted out of the station, someone in processing having decided that a night in the holding cell was punishment enough for a light offense.
By the time Mulder and Pujols report for duty, Haren has been in the station for ten hours straight, sifting through reports and snippets of wiretap recordings, completely absorbed in his work, and he hasn't once thought about the difference between Deebak and Cardnalis.
Unfortunately, this is not that AU.
Ummmm. Mulder and Haren are cops in the city of Cardnalis; Mulder's a patrol unit officer, and Haren is a drug task force officer on loan from the Deebak PD. This was going to be a short little thing, but it kept going. In fact, it wants to keep going, but I decided to cut it off and post at least this much. It may actually (horribly?) turn into a series. I'd love to get more of the league involved. Because I am insane.
Dan Haren, Mark Mulder, Albert Pujols. Gen, kind of pre-slash. Lots and lots and lots of cameos. PG, 3,826 words.
I don't really know what else to say.
Oh. There are pictures.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true. Obviously. If you think Mark Mulder is actually a police officer in a fictional city, you have problems.
Bust.
It's late when Mulder slouches into the station, the kind of late that turns itself around to early again. Haren should probably be at home, but the night watch guy has something very like the flu, and someone has to mind the station. If Haren can't be out where he wants to be right now, he may as well be here.
"One to book," Mulder says, sounding a little edgy, mostly tired. He wanders past the empty secretary's desk and ambles towards Haren with that deceptively casual lanky gait. "Where is everyone?"
Haren gives Mulder a quick head to toe glance-over, just making sure he's not obviously hurt anywhere, before turning his attention back to the computer. He pulls up the booking files and starts printing out the ones that need signatures. "Out on a bust." He looks up again at Mulder, the exhausted lean of him against the edge of Haren's desk, the conspicuous absence of anyone else in the station. "Where's the perp?"
"Pujols has him cooling his heels in the car. Where's the secretary? This isn't your damn job," Mulder says, and no, it isn't, but Haren doesn't expect Mulder to keep a perp sitting in his car all night long (the courts frown on that kind of thing, apparently), and anyone can do the paperwork necessary to put some asshole in the holding cell.
He restrains himself to a quiet, "It's 4 am, Mulder. He's off-duty at 1," before handing him the papers. Mulder looks down at them, huffing out a tiny annoyed noise through his nostrils, pulling Schumaker's chair away from his desk and rolling it over to the wrong side of Haren's. He ratchets the seat down (Schumaker being about half his height), sits, and starts filling in the appropriate sections.
It's quiet for a while, the only sounds the scritch of Mulder's pen and the hesitant tapping Haren makes against the computer keyboard.
"They're moving in on Canseco," Haren finally admits. "He's in town, we got a tip from Raffy, Canseco's supposedly making some big deal down by Ayteetee Pier tonight. We got all your drug units and half of Deebak's on it."
Mulder puts down the pen, eyes a brief flutter of blue as he looks up. "Why aren't you out there?"
Haren fidgets uncomfortably, the mere memory of the argument flashing adrenaline back into his bloodstream. "Chief La Russa only wanted experienced officers working this one." He manages to not say 'your Chief,' but it's a close thing. He's been reminding himself nearly every day that Cardnalis is only temporary, that he'll be back in Deebak soon enough, but most of the Cardnalis cops tend to get offended when he makes it obvious.
"Experienced officers?" Mulder sounds almost offended on his behalf, and Haren can't stop himself from smiling a little at it. "Experienced officers? Hell, you spent more time on that case than anyone. That's what they brought you over here for, wasn't it?"
Yeah. Yeah, it was. Haren sighs and scrubs a hand backwards through his hair, nods, and drops his eyes back to the screen.
----
Chief Melvin had recommended him for the posting because he knew that Haren could do it. Could take the case, track the dealer through a hundred thousand tenuous threads of connection and legality, from a hundred million drops of body-altering dope back to a single man. Haren was good at it, and Chief Melvin knew it, and knew that Cardnalis PD didn't have anyone as good as him on their narcotics task force.
Chief La Russa, though, didn't know a damn thing about Haren, and hadn't tried to find out. All he knew was that he was getting a 27 year old kid foisted onto his roster, someone who'd been on the Deebak force barely two years, and he was supposed to just hand his drug force operations right over. The whole thing had been handled badly; it would have been a sour pill to swallow for any police chief, and Chief La Russa is more ornery and conservative than most.
It hadn't helped that Haren didn't look like any other cop in the Cardnalis PD. Chief La Russa liked his cops neat and clean-shaven. Respectable. Haren's pretty sure the man has actually used the phrase 'a credit to the uniform' at some point in the recent past. Neat and clean-shaven just isn't Haren's look, not when he has to go undercover every so often and every last little thing he can do to look less like a cop is essential to his work and maybe his very survival.
Still, no one can say that he let the whole thing interfere with his work. It's rainier in Cardnalis than it is in Deebak, but that had just encouraged him to stay inside and sort through evidence. It was true that there wasn't anyone with his kind of sparkling arrest record on this force, but the Cardnalis drug officers had been capable enough when he'd given them specific directions. Chief La Russa had made it pretty clear that he wasn't welcome, a sentiment echoed by most of the sergeants and some of the officers, but no one had actively gone out of their way to stonewall him. They wanted Canseco off the streets as much as anyone else did.
They'd started small-time and broad-spectrum, busting a bunch of the lowest level dealers, the kinds of busts Cardnalis PD hadn't bothered to waste their resources on before. It wasn't a bad impulse, and Haren had understood where they were coming from, but the best way to tap into a wide drug net was to get a feel for its edges and dregs first. It had looked good in the papers too-- Haren knows full well that this was the only thing that kept Chief La Russa from ripping his resources out from under him at the very beginning.
They got their first break with a dealer so minor that he was barely a dealer at all. Haren hadn't been on that sting, had only seen the guy when they brought him back to the station. He was a short guy, shorter even than Schumaker, with the big bulging arms that marked him as a user as well as a dealer.
It had been Mulder and Pujols who brought him in. Haren hadn't worked much with the beat guys before those early busts, but he had seen the way this dealer had been cringing when he came in, scared motion at odds with his bulky upper body, and Haren had known right away that he had to interrogate this one personally.
He had had Mulder and Pujols stand on either side of the interrogation room door, arms folded, while he leaned on the table, up close and personal with the dealer, whose name, it turned out, was Roberts. It was a great combination: Mulder's long clean hard-eyed look made a tidy counterpoint to Pujols' rougher, streetwise face and honest undoped muscles. Haren himself was something else entirely-- he didn't look like anyone this guy would have been dealing to, way too lean to ever play a convincing doper, but he still looked more like someone who'd be buying from a dealer than busting one. Roberts had been obviously unsettled right off the bat.
Ten minutes later Haren had had Roberts shaking and near tears, ready to confess whatever needed confessing. Haren had always been good at that part of his job, good at making people talk, and for all that he looked like a body builder, Roberts wasn't all that tough. Sometimes the dope made guys prone to rages, but it couldn't give anyone a backbone if they didn't already have one.
Nobody, of course, had really given a shit about Roberts and his little backyard operation, so it had been easy as anything to cut a deal with him, immunity for information. Roberts had been more than willing at that point to name names, and that was how they had found Raffy.
----
Raffy. Now there was a nasty piece of work. Biggest dope dealer in Cardnalis and nobody had known it until Roberts had offered him up. Despite their lack of distinction the Cardnalis drug task force had had a pretty good idea who the big players in the local dope market were, but they hadn't even had Raffy's real name on file. He was a word that showed up occasionally in other reports, a figure discussed in hushed tones by the local dealers, showing up only on the wiretaps they set.
It had been hard to believe, at first, that someone with as much influence as Raffy seemed to have would have anything to do with a dealer as little league as Roberts. Roberts had stuck to his story, though, and Haren hadn't thought the guy had it in him to invent something that involved. Later it came out that Roberts had gone to school with Raffy, played on a college baseball team with him. Haren spent a long evening with Mulder and Pujols on a stakeout, his legs cramping in the backseat of their cruiser, discussing the weird chance of it, of something like former baseball teammates giving them their big break against one of the most dangerous drug dealers in the Americas.
It had taken months of intensive investigation to track Raffy down, another month to make contact with him, another several months to turn him. Technically Haren had almost all of the Cardnalis PD at his disposal, but when he got a chance to choose which patrol units he worked with, he always ended up choosing Mulder and Pujols. If anyone from Cardnalis had asked he would have said that he liked the way they operated in the field, trusted their judgement and ability. If anyone from Deebak had asked he would have said that they treated him like any other cop, not like some kind of idiot child needing to be humored.
If he's honest with himself, he would have to admit that it was both those things, and maybe a little bit of selfishness. He likes working with Mulder and Pujols. If he's being really honest, he'd have to admit that he likes Mulder and Pujols themselves.
That's not something he can let get around, though; not in his line of business. All he needs is for one of Canseco's pushers to hear that he's getting close to someone, anyone, and instantly that person would be in danger. He keeps a low profile, keeps his mouth shut, and keeps working.
----
Mulder finishes filling out the booking forms and shoves them across the desk. Haren picks them up and flips quickly through them, making sure Mulder hasn't left any important fields blank.
"Soliciting?"
Mulder nods glumly. "Didn't want to bring him in-- you know how Chief hates us wasting station resources on the hookers if they're not doing any real harm. But he was being so damn obvious that we didn't hardly have a choice."
Haren grimaces a little in sympathy. He gets up and unhooks his keys from his belt, stretching his back out as he does. Too long in front of the computer when he knows, knows he should be out in the field right now. "I'll go open up the holding cell if you go tell Pujols to bring him in, OK?"
"Yeah." Mulder's looking at him kind of funny, but Haren's willing to chalk it up to the late hour. He looks down at Mulder and Mulder shakes his head, like he's just waking up. "Yeah, OK, right." He gets up, sets his shoulders the way he does when he's steeling himself for something unpleasant, and walks back outside.
The holding cell is in pretty good shape. Haren thinks it must not have been in use for a couple of days, because nothing needs dusting or replacing, but all the obvious stains and smears of occupation have been cleaned out. He doesn't usually have much to do with it-- holding cell duty is more a patrol unit or administrative thing-- but it's not like it's rocket science. He checks all the cracks and corners to make sure nothing sharp is hidden anywhere, makes sure there's enough toilet paper, gives the pillow a quick punch to check for bugs.
An overly loud, slightly trembling voice fills the station. "I know my rights! Quit shoving, I know what my rights are!" Haren pokes his head around the corner, looking back into the main lobby of the station.
Pujols has a firm grip on the upper arm of a young man, probably no older than Haren himself. He's skinny, wearing too-tight jeans and a too-small shirt riding up to expose at least four inches of pasty white stomach. His hair is long and black and flops down in roughly cut chunks that actually kind of resemble Haren's own hairstyle. Such as it is.
Mulder, weirdly, is standing off to the side, acting like he's deeply invested in paperwork, not looking at the kid or at Haren. Haren might not even see anything weird about it if he hadn't just watched Mulder fill out all the forms that needed to be filled out. He catches Pujols' eye. Pujols shrugs. OK, then.
"Name?" He assumes Mulder already has this all on the forms, but he asks anyways.
The kid looks blankly at him through a stray chunk of bangs. "Uh. Barry. Barry Zito." He tugs his arm a little, not budging Pujols an inch, before letting his eyes more or less focus on Haren. "Hey. You got some pretty cool hair for a pig, man."
Mulder makes a low noise. Haren holds up a hand to hold him back without turning around. "Zito. How about we do this civil? You be civil, we'll be civil, everyone wins."
Zito blinks slowly at him. "Wasn't trying to be rude, man, hey. I like your hair. And you can't help being a pig no more'n I can help being, like, a man of the streets, you know." He sways a little and Pujols tightens his grip. It should be painful, at this point, but Zito doesn't seem to really feel it. Haren frowns.
"You taking something, Zito?"
"Uh. Maybe?"
Pujols tugs the kid forward. "Le's get him squared 'way firs'." Which means they took something off him when they first arrested him. Haren sighs and nods and helps Pujols get Zito into the cell. Zito's going loose and boneless the way some of them do when they're crashing hard off a big high, and they have to manhandle him quite a bit to get him put away. He's skinny all over, doesn't have any of the adult acne that's so often a side effect of the dope. There aren't any needle tracks on his arms, so probably not heroin. Something else, then.
They lock the door and look at Zito, sprawled on his stomach on the narrow ledge that serves as a bed. Pujols heads back to the lobby with an amused snort. Haren leans against the bars. "Hey." Zito slowly and laboriously rolls his head around to look at Haren. "Hey, Zito. What're you taking?"
Zito shrugs as best he can while lying down. Even in the harsh light of the cell, his pupils are huge and dark, blown wide open.
"You on one of those new Lucys?" Haren asks. 'Lucy' is the general name the drug task force uses for the newer class of hallucinogen. It started on the street, of course, as most of their drug nicknames did.
"Maybe." Zito scrunches up his face, thinking. "Little, oval. Green. Like plants, you know, man?"
"Greenies. Great." Haren sighs and drags his fingers across the bars, tang tang tang. "Get some sleep, OK?"
Zito looks up at him and makes a limp, abortive gesture with his arm. "Hey. C'mon in, man."
It's pretty typical for the hookers to try to sleep their way out of jail, but even if Haren was the kind of cop who could be swayed that way, he wouldn't fuck this kid. Too young, still too clean; greenies are among the lightest of the street drugs, worse than alcohol and pot, but not by too much. This one, in Haren's professional opinion, is still salvageable. "No work for you tonight, buddy."
Zito rolls onto his back and rubs his stomach loosely. "Who said anything 'bout work?"
"Goodnight, kid." Haren hits the bars with the flat of his palm once more and turns his back on the cell. Zito snuffles and resettles and sounds for all the world like he's nestling into a fine hotel bed. Coming down off his greenie high, he probably barely even knows where he is.
When Haren comes back into the main station, Pujols is sitting in Haren's chair, polished black shoes up on Haren's desk. Mulder is back in Schumaker's chair across from him, twirling one of Haren's Deebak PD pens nervously around the fingers of one hand like a miniature baton.
"Mulder here say you ain't bustin' Canseco cause Chief no want you to," Pujols says, at the exact same time that Mulder says, "You get the, uh, the kid put up OK?"
Haren blinks. "That's right," he says after a moment, nodding to Pujols. He turns to Mulder. "Yeah. Uh, wasn't exactly hard."
Mulder looks intensely uncomfortable. He twirls the pen faster over his knuckles, eyes locked down on it. Haren stares at him for another moment before looking askance at Pujols.
Pujols is eyeing Mulder with great interest. "I t'ink," he says, not looking away from Mulder's bowed head, a very small amused smile starting to twitch the corners of his mouth, "dat seein' a hooker who look like you, Of'cer Haren, is freak out my poor partner."
"That kid? The kid we just booked? Zito? He, what?" The kid does not look like him. Except if Haren looks at it objectively, looks at it like someone who hasn't seen his own face in the mirror every day of his life, he can kind of see it. The build, the hair, the coloring. Mulder's head snaps up and, wow, yeah, his expression is disturbed and pained and damn it all if Pujols isn't right on the money. As usual.
"Officer Pujols..." Mulder starts, all warning.
"Actually," Pujols says, grinning for real now, "I t'ink it was seein' a hooker who look like you ask if he want blowjob or fuck dat freak Mulder out."
Mulder gives Pujols a sharp, pissed-off look. Pujols smiles mildly back.
"You took some greenies off him when you arrested him, yeah?" Haren asks, just a tiny bit desperate to change the subject. He is really, really not equipped to deal with the fact that Mulder was solicited by a hooker who looked like him, and that it freaked Mulder out in unspecified ways. He doesn't even want to start thinking about what any of that could mean.
Mulder and Pujols hold their staring contest for another few seconds before Pujols turns back to Haren. "Sì. In the car. You wan' them?"
"Don't see why not. I can file 'em away with the other seizures." He might as well take the opportunity to do his own proper job in one small capacity tonight.
"Pretty big bag. I t'ink he is serial user." Pujols swings his feet down off of Haren's desk without shifting any of the papers on it, something Haren has never gotten the hang of doing. He heads out to the patrol car, pausing only to look over his shoulder and fucking wink at Haren before he steps out of the door.
For lack of anything better to do, Haren reappropriates his chair, then immediately wishes he hadn't, because it puts him right in Mulder's line of sight, and Mulder is determinedly not looking at him. Haren sets his jaw and firmly directs his own gaze to his computer screen. He reviews the transcript of the tip call they'd gotten from Raffy that set up tonight's sting. The sting he should be on.
Mulder finds something very interesting on the floor to stare at. Haren sighs at his computer and wonders how his night could possibly get any worse.
----
It's a bad thing to wonder. He goes home to his temporary Cardnalis apartment (he's been living there 8 months now, but he still thinks of it as 'temporary', because it's not really home; Deebak is home) when the first early shift officers start coming in, blinking and demanding coffee. Three hours later he's jolted out of a restless sleep by a phone call from Officer Looper, one of the more incompetent narcotics officers who's still somewhat starstruck by Haren's reputation.
They didn't get Canseco.
Not only did they fail to get Canseco, but they also managed to get five officers shot, and three of those are critically wounded. It's about as immense a fuck-up as a drug task force can have: men hurt, no worthwhile arrests made, and now Canseco knows they're on to him.
Haren groans, hangs up on Looper, and drags himself out of bed. He'll have to try to salvage whatever he can from this mess. It's his job.
----
Chief La Russa is nowhere to be found, which spares Haren the job of pointing out the obvious-- he should have been out there. He's the expert. He's been leading the drug task force since he got here. He knows more about Canseco than anyone else in the Cardnalis PD. It's not, he knows, as if his presence on the sting would have stopped it from going to shit, but if he could have done something to prevent one officer from getting shot... well.
There are some guilty looks directed his way as he walks to his desk. He sits and opens his email client. Reports from last night are starting to trickle in. Someone has to figure out exactly what went wrong, and, more importantly, why.
Schumaker wordlessly drops off a mug of coffee on his way to his own desk. Looper hands him his report in person, looking like he could almost believe that Haren has the whole thing worked out already. Detective Isringhausen and Officer Ankiel, another one of the patrol units that Haren has worked with before, drag him away from his desk when lunchtime rolls around, insisting that he needs to eat. He even, much to the amusement of everyone else, gets a wave from Zito as the kid's escorted out of the station, someone in processing having decided that a night in the holding cell was punishment enough for a light offense.
By the time Mulder and Pujols report for duty, Haren has been in the station for ten hours straight, sifting through reports and snippets of wiretap recordings, completely absorbed in his work, and he hasn't once thought about the difference between Deebak and Cardnalis.