Rhapsody for Two #2: Surveillance and Covalence
TITLE: Rhapsody for Two
AUTHOR: fixomnia
PAIRING: Flack/Angell
RATING: English-style "tea" - strong but sweet. (And always warm the teapot first.)
SPOILERS: Various Flack/Angell scenes from Season 3-5, and Flack's season 6.
Chapter Summary: Rollercoasters start so slowly...
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Chapter Two
Surveillance and Covalence
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...and just between you and me,
I think she'll soon have you temptation bound.
Now here she comes, here she comes...
- Bonnie Tyler, "Here She Comes"
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Surveillance could be a mindless slog, but the day was slipping by faster than she wanted.
It was serendipity and a quirk of scheduling that found them together on a bright, brisk afternoon, sharing eyes duty in a patrol car. With not much else to do but wait for their mark, a socialite promotions magnate, conversation once again came easily and quickly. She found herself intrigued. Maybe it was the private, enclosed space he liked? He did come to life in the interrogation room...
"Soon as I turned nineteen," he said in answer to her query. "Never planned on doin' anything else." He took the upgrading courses and seminars offered by the Academy at regular intervals, and didn't see the point in investing in college until, and unless, there was a specific need for it.
"Nineteen, too, after freshman year." she told him. She'd gone to college for a year, to appease her mother, before entering the Academy. Then, as soon as she'd made Detective and had a little more control over her work hours, she'd begun taking one or two night classes at a time at CUNY, taking advantage of the tuition incentive program offered by NYPD. She was working towards a Crim degree, minoring in Sociology. Eventually, she planned to move into Criminal Intelligence Analysis, working with the reams of information that the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies gathered, and making predictions and resource allocation recommendations.
As much as she loved the puzzle-solving and physical demands of being a Detective, there came a time when the body and soul began to wear down.
"I don't want to be forty-five years old and chasing after some dealer in a dark alley. Or get pushed up the ladder by default. And if - someday - I ever have a family to come home to, I'm not gonna want to be pursuing high crimes on the streets of New York. So I'm planning ahead. At the very least, I come out of it with a degree."
"Impressive," he nodded. "From what I hear, you'd be great at that kind of thing."
"Why? What do you hear?"
"That you're good at seeing patterns, and that your case reports show great perspicacity."
" 'Great perspicacity'? Who talks like that?"
"Taylor. The one from CSU, not Victim's Assistance."
"Oh, that makes sense. I thought you meant Sythe."
"No, he just thinks you're a good return on investment. His words."
She cracked up at that, and he grinned back, watching her with open enjoyment. "Well, it's good to know where I stand." she said at last.
"So where is this broad?" he muttered, still smiling, checking his wing mirror for any sign of Amber Stanton.
Unlike Timothy, he didn't pester her for advice about his girlfriends, and unlike Sig, he didn't act as though every moment was a potential international event. And unlike many, many cops with whom she'd shared a car on a New York afternoon, with the late summer heat rippling off the teeming pavements and glass-sided buildings, Flack seemed to smell better as the day wore on. But she wouldn't tell him that.
He still didn't have a lot to say about himself, though. "So I know you're a second-gen Blue, too." she asked eventually, trying put him at his ease. "Does it go any farther back? Any more Flacks in the department?"
"Not really," he said. " 'Course you know about my dad. He came straight from Ireland. Garda Síochána na h-Éireann to NYPD, back in 72. My mom's dad owned a transport security company here in Manhattan, though, so he did his bit for the law. My older brother does something at the Stock Exchange, and nobody really knows what my little sister wants, so I'm it for the family...not that some basic training wouldn't do Sammy some good. I think she's an actress this year. Between waitressing gigs."
Jess made an understanding moue.
"What about you?" he asked. "Besides your old man, any other Angells in blue?"
"No, I'm it for the family, too. None of my brothers ever wanted it, and Dad never pushed. Rick's an EMT, here in New York. Jean-Richard, but don't call him that. He says I have a cushy job next to his, and I actually have to agree. He moved down from Montréal a few years after Mom and Dad and I did. Dominic and Jerome stayed up in Canada and moved to the National Capitol Region. They're public servants, like every second person you meet in Ottawa."
"Okay, Montreal explains the French." he nodded. "And the hockey. How'd you end up here?"
"The usual way. Dad was a Staff Sergeant with the RCMP in Québec, and the NYPD offered him a step up, with the works. By then, the boys were either safely in university or already out, and I was only ten, so Dad and Maman figured what the hell, they'll pretend they're a young family again. Next thing you know, it's au revoir, tu me manqueras, and I'm leaving one set of nuns for another - same order, same habits, different faces."
"No way. A convent girl? I would not have...really? With the sports and the...?"
His reserve dropped, he sounded so thoroughly taken aback that she sent him a slightly dangerous eyebrow. "Bless this, Detective."
"Hey, I'm not being a jerk, I'm just sayin' - I got the nuns, too."
"Ah. My bad. Irish Catholic?"
"I was. Now, not so much."
"Same. Well, French Catholic on mom's side. Dad's English Protestant. Me, I'm, I don't know. I sort of miss some parts of it all, but it stopped working for me a long time ago."
He nodded in understanding. Jess thought privately that the whole conversation - the whole afternoon - had taken a turn for the surreal. She'd been curious to learn something more about him. Discussing their early religious upbringings, however, hadn't been on the agenda.
A line from an old favourite poem sprang into to her mind: "I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints..." and she shivered, quite as if, she thought, a ghost had indeed walked over her grave.
She blinked and focused on Flack once more.
"Oh, I get your brothers' names now." he was saying. "Saints' names, all three. And yours."
"And Martin, too. He's in Jersey now, with his family. He's the oldest."
"Four older brothers...and a Detective Sergeant for a father?" He looked at her. "Your old man dust you for prints when you came home from a date?"
He would if he could have, Jess thought, and I can hardly blame him. She gazed into the rear-view mirror.
With an eight-year gap between Jess and her nearest brother, she was often referred to as the late-entry, or, when her brothers were being cruel, "The Accident". Their mother, Chérie, insisted they were just a good Catholic family who left it up to God. Jess took it all with mostly good humour. Her brothers treated her like a life-size action figure and her father called her "Sarge". She put up with wearing her St. Ignatius' gym slip because it was uniform, but the moment she was home, she was into her brothers' well-worn hand-me downs and out into the backyard for some catch practice before dinner. Life was a romp, and she grew up sturdy and dimpled, more boy than girl, to the quizzical relief of her parents, who knew boys best.
Then, as puberty hit a year after their move to the States, her parents were broadsided by a tall, willowy girl who wailed about everything. Suddenly, the girls at school were horrible, she hated New York, her kilts were too short, and her parents were hopelessly clueless. Being hauled out to buy her first brassiere was nothing short of traumatic. By her fourteenth year, though, she'd developed a taste for the attention she was getting, and Chérie found herself having to put the brakes on her tomboy daughter's sudden transformation into a young Claudette Colbert.
Girls with whom she had nothing in common before were now the keepers of her secrets. The local boys were stunned into silence at the reality of their old playmate's encounter with full-on early sex appeal. She was gentle with them; she let them take her to the movies or for burgers and fries on the weekend, and she was patient as they figured out how, and when, to kiss her goodnight. Growing up surrounded by protective males and eavesdropping on her father's police shop talk had served her well. She maintained a sort of buffer around herself, never committing, always slightly remote, and wary of anyone who might be trying to catch her with her guard down.
That didn't stop her from sneaking out the basement door to meet boyfriends for breathtaking midnight trysts, though, or later, from being smuggled into her first lover's college dorm room at not-quite seventeen. And it didn't stop her from coolly defending herself to an outraged, horrified Cliff, when he caught her returning home one night, reminding him that he'd raised her to always take care of herself, and to set her own terms.
And she had. A year in college, still living at home, had only sharpened her original desire to follow her father and become a cop. Overtaken by a bone-deep sense of purpose and of returning to her original self, she'd been grateful to have gotten her kicks out early. Except for a couple of low-key romances after she'd graduated from the Academy, she'd only dated casually.
The tattoos around her wrist and down her spine, and the scars all over her body from a competitive athletic childhood and a hold-nothing-back police career, told the continuing story of her life, but it wasn't one that many men cared to hear in full. She'd played so hard to be one of the boys that she'd beaten them at their own game, at every level. They seemed to regard her either as a sister or an unapproachable lust-object, with little in between. It was ironic, she thought, that she'd never allowed herself to date a fellow cop, who might appreciate her fully, knowing all too well the blue line gossip that would hound her entire working life.
"If it was up to them, I wouldn't have known boys existed until I was twenty-one," she replied wryly to Flack, still watching the mirror for Stanton. And they'd certainly have preferred that I not get behind a badge.
"I'm sure the boys knew you existed."
There was a wistfulness in his voice that made her pause in her memories and look up. She heard a shadow of some long-ago teenager who believed himself to be undistinguished, without much hope of having his affections returned. She wondered if he'd heard his own words, the way they slipped out.
"Was that a line, Flack?" she shot back, aiming for levity. Flack-the-adult had his own groupie issues, and was never short of female attention, but if rumor was correct, some rich strawberry-blonde had been recently parading him on her arm all around the philanthropy-as-foreplay scene. Had that come to its inevitable end already? "Did you just bust out your game on me?"
Flack avoided her gaze, grinned sheepishly and seemed to be casting around for a reply, though his ears and then his throat flushed an interesting shade. Oh, good grief, she thought, taking a closer look. I was joking. I think. This just got interesting.
"It was, wasn't it? Look at you, you're blushing."
"C'mon, game? Game? I have no game. If I did, that's probably as good as it gets."
He was entirely in earnest. In some respects, at least, Detective Flack Jr. regarded himself as a bit of a dork. She felt a warmth welter up inside. "I thought it was pretty good."
She was just deciding whether to say anything further, or see where he jumped next, when there was a tap on the window.
Oh, shit. Her stomach shriveled.
If there was anything worse than being made by a mark, it was being made by an unpleasant, power-mongering, saccharine-tongued mark.
"Detectives," Amber said brightly. "Oh, I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"
My own stupid fault for not watching, thought Jess, knowing Flack was thinking the same. They sat and let Amber breeze her charming way through her hissy fit, and by silent accord, snapped back into work-mode as soon as she exited the car.
"That woman pisses me off," Flack growled. Jess nodded mentally, and watched as Flack got out and began looking over the back seat.
"What are you doing?"
"Looking for anything that'll help me put her in handcuffs next time I see her."
And not the fun ones, her brain added helpfully.
He triumphantly held up a single hair, and she passed him a paper bindle from the glove box.
"Not bad for a guy on a city salary," she ventured, slyly.
"Thank you," was his demure response, and he blushed again. So Don Juan de Flack could dish it out, but didn't know how to take it?
Interesting.
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The thing with Devon lasted a month longer than he'd thought it would. The truth was, they liked each other. They made each other laugh, and they were from such different worlds that there was a mutual fascination.
She'd placed herself in front of him, sweaty and dishevelled as he was, after an NYPD / NYFD hockey game fundraiser for the New York Veterans and Families Association, and introduced herself. She liked what she saw, and it didn't occur to her that she wouldn't get it. That was all right. He liked what he saw as well. Devon might have been a trust-fund kid, but her head and her heart were in the right place, as incidentally was every curve on her well-tended body.
She liked hearing about the gritty underbelly of New York. He enjoyed her stories from her Swiss boarding school childhood, and meeting the glittering citizens she now called her New York circle. She introduced him as "my Detective", and had him painted as a sort of knight-champion in her mind. He saw an opportunity to open her mind to the more basic reality of the city and its people, not served by any charity society. And sex with Devon rocked his world. He had no illusions that they were remotely well-matched for the long term.
She let him off gently one evening in early December, as the inevitable discussion of Christmas plans drew near. Her apartment had a fireplace, and she'd built a small fire, which went perfectly with rum and eggnog at the end of a snappingly cold day
"Donnie," she said, leaning back against his knees, "My parents want me to go skiing with them over the holidays. In Switzerland."
Must be swell, he thought. "Sounds nice. You gonna go?"
"Yeah," she said, hesitantly. She looked into the flames. She didn't ask him if he could go, or if he wanted to. She knew his job. He'd never get the time off in the holidays, and even if he did, she'd have to pay for him. And I don't belong in that world.
"You planning on coming back?" he asked. He knew where she was going with this. He played with a strand of her hair. He'd assumed she'd chosen the colour herself, but he'd been wrong. She was a ginger girl, all right, and born in tempestuous April at that.
After a moment, she set her mug down on the glass coffee table, and turned to look at him, her blue-gray eyes serious. "We've had fun, haven't we?"
"We have," he said. He felt sense of lightening relief. "And hey, didn't I save you from being robbed? That was pretty cool, no?"
She smiled. "Very cool." Her smile wavered, and fell. She was finding this genuinely hard.
"Dev, it's okay. Go have fun with your people. You're right. We've had fun."
He kept stroking her ringlets, thinking he'd miss the feel of them under his hand, and she leaned back again. "Will you still let me know when your games come up? I'd like to come watch. You're pretty good out there."
"I will." he said, and leaned forward to kiss her bright crown. She turned her face to his. He kissed her mouth, softly, and then with deepening hunger. Her hands tugged at his shirt until they slipped underneath, and she raked her nails lightly over his skin to make him hiss in pleasure. They were so damn good at this together.
"One for my baby?" he asked against her lips, with a smile in his voice.
"And one more for the road," she agreed. She stood, and taking his hand, led him for the last time to her bedroom.
He rode the subway home that night with the unsettling sense of things falling into place, rather than apart, but he wasn't going to think too much on that just yet.
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Send a uni for Rikki Sandoval, or give them more time? Tell Mac I'm worried for Danny's stability out there, or try to talk some sense into him myself?
He nearly jumped when he heard her voice.
"Hey. Thought you were off today," she said.
"Yeah, I was. Something came up with Danny. It's...a long story."
Jess took that as a signal to cross her arms and settle in.
"How about I tell it to you over an Irish coffee?" he temporized.
The unsmiling lady detective vanished, and there was just Jess, taking in his tight shoulders and worried frown. It was obvious that she realized he was at some remove from okay, but wasn't going to ride his ass about it. He liked that Jess didn't mind leaving him alone with his thoughts. She knew how guys processed things. It made it much easier to talk to her later on. And once they'd finally gotten around to talking, they'd been doing a lot of catching up.
"Think I know just the place," she said in an undertone, the seriousness of his voice registering. She was about to say something more when his Messer-sense triggered, and he looked up to see Danny escorting Rikki, uncuffed, through the front doors.
So Jess would get to see the third act for herself. He wasn't sure if it would make it any easier to explain to her why he'd given Danny so much rope. Enough rope, in fact, to hang them both. Danny hadn't reported his gun was in the hands of an EDP, who was his neighbor and God only knew what else. And he'd taken a couple of solid swings at a smarmy-mouthed petty thief. And he, Donald Jr., had assisted Danny in his insane pursuit, and then let them all go. It was blind luck that there hadn't been any cellphone-toting civilians nearby, grabbing each precious second and uploading it to the Twitterverse on the way home.
Rikki looked as though she was about to vomit from nerves, however, and Danny was near catatonic with fatigue and grief. As involved persons, neither he nor Danny could place Rikki under arrest. At least Messer kept a couple of wits to rub together, he realized. Of course Rikki had to come in on her own two feet. Once I started being his friend and not a cop, he had to either call someone else to arrest her, or talk her into turning herself in.
Which left Jess, blissfully unaware of the great favour she was about to do them. Rikki was ready to talk, and Jess was a good listener. Danny would only be listed in the case file as a friend who convinced her to return his service weapon and turn herself in, though technically, he could have his wrist smacked for leaving his gun unsecured in his residence with a civilian present. Flack had set out all the legal processes, and pulled a couple of strings with the arraignment judge and bailiff. Rikki would come through all right. All Jess had to do was book her and start the ball rolling.
"Jess, would you take her inside?"
Jess nodded, and her glance said clearly: You so owe me. He sighed, and hurried to catch up with Danny.
* * * * *
"...and you know the rest. That's when they turned up at the precinct."
She hadn't said a word since he began the tale, and she'd kept her expression carefully schooled throughout. Lessons learned at her father's knee, probably watching her brothers being grilled.
"Another round?" she asked, her inflection neutral. He nodded and got up. They'd ditched the coffee in favour of plain Irish after the first round, when it became clear that stronger medicine was needed.
"Same?"
"Yeah. Single, rocks. Please and thank you."
He wasn't sure if she wanted a moment to clear her head, or to get him good and loaded for medicinal purposes, or just wanted him to turn his back so she could bolt. But when he came back with the drinks, upgraded from Jameson to twelve-year-old Dunville's, she was smiling at him, and had obviously been smiling at him for a while.
"What?"
"You're a good friend. Danny's lucky to have you around."
He sat down and slid her glass across the table. "But I forgot which badge I was supposed to be wearing, huh?"
Her long fingers slipped momentarily against his as she took it, and he thought he saw the smallest flicker of the dimple in her cheek.
"Well, I mean, of course you should've put out an APB as soon as you knew she had it. We don't exactly need more guns in the hands of emotionally disturbed people. And it should have been a file assigned to someone else, not some Don-and-Danny cowboy show. But I gotta say, if it had been me and my old partner, and some friend of his was in trouble, I might have done the same. And I do see that you didn't have time to spare."
She trailed her finger in a patch of condensation on her glass, and lifted it for a sip. He watched, impressed, as she exhaled slowly and acknowledged what he'd brought her, savoring the burn and the flavor.
She went on, regardless: "So now you two have dragged me into your sordid exploits, I'm supposed to sit on the fact that he, and you, never reported his gun being stolen?"
Flack accepted the truth of her words with a grimace and a sigh, and knew he was lucky to get off so easily. Being a Flack, he'd had a certain insulation from criticism, except from his superiors and senior colleagues, but Jess felt no such hesitation. He found he actually relished the sensation of being called to the mat by a peer. It spoke of a deep respect between them, and a promise to keep raising the bar.
"...which means you can't have given your 20 to Dispatch. You weren't even on the board! You were supposed to be off-duty. What if you'd needed help?"
"Jess, I know. This is why I wanted to tell you in person."
He watched Jess' face for her reaction, but she just took another sip of her whiskey and shook her hair back off her face. He definitely didn't notice how her soft loose curls bounced on her collarbones, peeking out from the drapy neck of the dark red top she wore, and he absolutely definitely didn't wonder how they would feel against his skin.
"Relax," she said, "The situation was lousy, but it turned out okay. Mrs. Sandoval's back home, she's got court-ordered therapy and a very reasonable suspended sentence, considering the circumstances. Honestly, it's Messer I'm worried about. He could use some court-ordered therapy himself."
"Monroe's getting as bad. She's a mess. And I'm pretty sure Danny's...I'm keepin' my eye on both of them."
"Don't overload the lifeboat, Don. Or everybody drowns."
Her eyes were fixed on his, liquid-dark and kind, as she leaned forward slightly on the table. The world contracted to contain the two of them alone. This had been happening more often lately, he thought muzzily. It was just the devil himself in the works, because after three and a half drinks, Flack thought that if he opened his mouth, something meaningful might emerge, but because of those drinks, he knew better than to try. He had no idea of what he wanted to say to her, anyway.
He blinked, she looked down into her glass, and the moment slipped by. He glanced at the clock on the bar and noted it was nearing midnight.
"Think this'll be the last," he said, with real regret.
"Make it count, then," she said, which might have meant something, or nothing at all. He reached out his glass and gently clinked the edge of hers, and they finished their whiskey in agreeable silence.
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He gave her roses on Valentine's Day, mostly by accident.
An investigation had gone into overtime, as they sought to unravel a love triangle that ended in one murder by stabbing and one assault. Jess wasn't surprised at the long day, given the severity of the crime and the three complicated histories.
"Valentine's Day is to lover's quarrels what Christmas Day is to suicides," she observed, walking shoulder to shoulder with Flack down the antiseptic-smelling corridor of Beth Israel Hospital. The girl who had escaped with only a black eye and badly slashed arms had asked to talk with them again, in person. "All these raised expectations, all the hype - someone's bound to have an old grudge set off."
Flack agreed. "At least it isn't a full moon for another week, or we'd really be in it."
"Funny how so many people insist that's just apocryphal, until they ask a cop. Or a paramedic."
"Self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe? Who knows. You have plans for tonight?"
She gave a quick snort. "Not likely."
He glanced at her in some confusion. "I just meant, you know, I can probably handle one sedated girl on my own, if you wanted..."
"What? Oh - sorry. No, I...let's see what she has to say."
It took a good hour, and was obviously deeply painful for the girl, but by the end of it, a clearer picture had emerged. She was the innocent in the mix, unaware that her loving boyfriend really was too good to be true. At first she thought she was somehow to blame, for not being all he needed her to be, or for not being able to haul a much stronger woman with a carving knife away from him. But now that she'd had time to think, she'd realized there might have been more women, and she wanted to make sure they were okay. She didn't have much to identify them, but she gave them the few thin details she recalled.
Jess handed the girl a card as they prepared to leave. The hospital would keep her overnight, and she'd be able to talk to someone in the morning about what would happen next.
"So what happens next for us?" she asked, back in the corridor, shrugging on her jacket and flicking her hair out from under the collar with a brisk impatience. "We're into hour twelve here. Do we follow up on these leads, or send out the unis?"
"Let's get the boys on it," he said. "Doubtful anything comes up, but if it does, they'll call."
"I can just e-mail all this to the Watch Clerk. Carmody and Timothy drew the grave tonight." she said. She shook her head and went on: "I'd say let's just call it a night, but - "
"Pizza, is what I'm thinking," Flack stepped in. She perked up at that. They dealt with this sort of case not infrequently, but they didn't have to go home hungry and fed up with people.
So they ended up at a pizzeria near the hospital. She paused as they entered. She should have realized that an Italian-run joint would dress up for the holiday of romance. There were tall glass sacred-heart candles and single red roses at every formica booth, and schmoozy light opera playing softly. Around the door, tiny red and white Christmas lights had been pressed into Valentine's duty.
Oh, well, she thought. Embrace the irony.
"Benvenute, benvenute," called the resident nonni behind the counter, waving them inside. "Sit, sit, sit."
They did. Nonni yelled something behind a curtain, and a younger girl came out from the back room to take their order. Out of the corner of her eye, Jess saw Nonni reach under her counter and bring up a bottle of wine. The girl murmured "Polizia," as she went back to the kitchen, and the bottle disappeared. Jess smiled despite herself, and for a moment, considered giving her a free pass. She and Flack could probably both do with some vino.
"So." Flack said, over his iced tea. "You wanna tell me what's up, or should I not ask?"
She sighed. All right. If he wanted to know, she'd tell him. "There's a lot that comes with this job that's not exactly easy for anyone else to take on board. And I'm okay with that. Mostly."
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
"And sometimes I wonder if I've just got myself on this freaking pedestal, like I'm trying to hold up the banner for detectives everywhere - "
"And your father." Flack slipped in, so smoothly she barely noticed.
"And my father, and it's no wonder everyone feels like I keep them at arms' length, and then a case like today's comes up, and there's no winners, just one girl going to jail for murder, and another one who's going to have to explain the scars to anyone...if she even lets herself be with anyone again."
"And most of the time, it seems better to be alone, except for some days, it's just..."
"Yeah. And this is one of them. Go figure. I like to think I'm immune from all the Hallmark holiday BS, and then this happens. And you know what? This side of me annoys the piss out of me. I'm sorry."
"Hey, whoa - " he said. "What's that about? You were on a roll. I get it. You could've been talking about me."
"What, you have days like this?"
"Sure I do. What'd you think?"
She stared for a moment. "What about you?" she asked. "You didn't have plans?" Flack never seemed to have difficulty finding a date if he wanted one, and surely not for Valentine's Day. He surprised her by shaking his head.
"Too many expectations," he said. "I don't want to hurt anyone. And I don't..." he looked into his drink and fumbled for a polite phrase, "I mean, there was a time, yeah, but...I don't just wanna fill in the gaps, you know?"
She grinned. Interesting, she thought, hardly for the first time.
"Sure you do," she returned. "You're just not going to, is all. Commendable, really."
She got a half-blush out of him at that.
"God knows my dad and I don't see eye-to-eye on a lot," he went on, "but we do on this: at the end of the day, it's either worth it, being a cop, or it isn't. All the personal stuff, I mean. If it's worth it, we get up and do it all over again. If it isn't, we re-think."
"And we're all closet masochists meanwhile."
"You got a hobby I don't know about, Detective?"
"Idiot," she grinned fondly. "You're right, though. And it's not like I don't know all that. Some days just get to you."
"Yeah, they do. But you don't have to hide them. Not from me."
"Or me." she reminded him. He nodded thoughtfully.
A small silence settled. She looked at him with a renewed glint in her eye. "Fill in the gaps, Flack?" she taunted him, "What the fuck is that?"
"What d'you want me to say, 'get laid, say goodnight and take a cab home' ?"
"Hey, isn't accuracy in reporting the first thing they taught us?"
After a half hour of their usual bracing cop humour and a particularly tasty thin-crust Genovese Salami with mushrooms, she felt like her old self again.
"Don, thanks," she said, licking crumbs daintily off her finger. "This was exactly what I needed."
"Same goes. And Jesus, will you stop doing that?" he batted her hand away before she started in on her fingertips. She giggled and sucked them clean anyway, putting on a little show, laughing outright as he mock-glowered at her.
They were the last two customers in the place, and as they were finishing up, Nonni went around the tables collecting the roses. She wrapped the stems in a clean tea-towel with a map of Lucca on it, and thrust them at Flack, beaming, and pointing to Jess.
"Prendere queste e dare loro da vostra ragazza," she said, gesturing vividly.
The grand-daughter poked her head out from behind the curtain. "She says, you should give them - "
"Yeah, I got it," Flack said, blushing furiously now. "Thanks. Grazie." He took the bundle of roses awkwardly in his hands.
"Well, uh," he said holding them towards her, "Happy Valentine's."
Funny, she thought, how they could go from crass teasing to shy in the space of an instant. She had a disconcerting sense of tears prickling behind her eyes.
"Thanks," she said softly.
She wasn't the sentimental type that hung her flowers up to dry, but when they finally withered on her hall table, she felt a pang.
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Jess drove, which was fine with him. He enjoyed listening to her occasional "Tabarnak'! Sacr'ment!" as couriers and cabs wove too close. Not many cabs out tonight, but then, nobody was taking cabs anymore. There hadn't been any new leads in a week, and frayed squad room tempers were the least of their problems. It was a relief to get some air and follow up on a sighting of a wanted wannabe druglord who had, according to cellblock gossip, gunned down a rival.
He'd have enjoyed the drive more if it weren't for the wannabe who now sat in shackles beside him. It was bad luck that Jess had spotted him before one of the circulating paddy wagons had. The back of a wagon would have been a better place for him, but once they had him cuffed, they couldn't wait around. He had to come back with them. Flack actually wished they'd picked up one of the flashy pimped-out dealers that at least had some self-respect. Roland hadn't bathed in what smelled like a month.
"All right!" Jess pulled up in front of the precinct. "One down. Not a bad way to start a shift, eh, Roland?"
"Speak for yourself," Flack muttered, as she hopped out. He was going to need to change his suit. Jess opened his door, since the rear locks were disengaged from the inside, and he gasped for air, shaking himself. "Augh! He's nasty. His breath smells. Makes Prom night in the back of my father's Caddy with Bianca DiFaizio seem like it never happened."
It was payback for the story she'd told him a few days earlier, about losing her dress on a beach in the south of France, the summer she'd graduated high school. At his dazed silence, she'd snickered and taken pity on him, explaining: "Someone swiped it while we were swimming. So my friend and I just wandered around the market stalls till I found something to wear back to the hotel. We were in one-pieces, for God's sake, in France. Might as well have been wearing old-fashioned bathing dresses. I doubt anyone even noticed us."
He'd doubted that most sincerely.
"The back of your father's Caddy?" she grinned at him, catching on.
He shrugged nonchalantly, hoping she'd find some way to grill him about old Bianca before the shift was over. Which, of course, was the whole point. And he'd never tell her exactly what happened, no matter how much she pestered, because after all, he was a gentleman. "C'mon Roland. Time to make the donuts. Yeah, it was either that or my Pontiac Sunbird."
She smiled and shook her head, and he realized she was way too cool to take the bait. So much for driving her nuts -
Roland shoved him in the midsection, hard, and Flack winced and stumbled, taking the hit right on the mass of scar tissue under his ribs. He staggered for a moment, and saw Jess' flying form kick Roland back against the car. Flack leaped and grappled with him, unable to twist his arm back because of the cuffs. What was the cracked-out headcase even thinking, this close to the stationhouse door?
"Flack!"
He felt her almost before he registered his name. Her shoulder caught him under the armpit, knocking him off-balance, and in the next instant she'd grabbed him around the waist and spun with him down to the ground. He landed in an ungainly heap on his back, somehow avoiding landing on her with his full weight, and tried to breathe as a yellow cab skidded into the precise spot he'd been standing in.
The back door of the cab was opened, and a body was dumped in front of him before the cab shot away.
As the body rolled once and lay still, Flack scrambled to his feet. He was tearing down the busy street after the cab before he could think, barely aware of his feet hitting the ground. There was no way he could close in on a moving cab on a straightaway, but maybe there'd be some obstacle ahead. He prayed for one, because his lungs were bursting. The cab veered left into a pedestrian walkway, sending up a shower of sparks as it scraped along the curb. A late-night walker swore and dove out the way. There was no license plate, and two layers of tinted glass between him and the driver. The numbered visor light was darkened and illegible. Flack lost the few feet he'd gained and dropped back, cursing a mantra of invectives in his head.
He bent over and sucked in a breath, and then jogged back to where Jess was standing over the body. At least half a dozen unis had materialized, and radios were crackling all over.
He covered the last ten feet cursing himself some more, because Jess had just saved his ass twice in the space of thirty seconds while he'd been distracted by thinking about hers.
"I lost him," he said trenchantly.
"Don - " she held out a police wallet, with a look of regret. "Jersey City PD. Think it was him? The Cabbie Killer?"
Jesus Christ. "Well, if it was, he just upped his game. Son of a bitch killed a cop."
He didn't see Jess until dawn, after that, not until he'd spent the rest of the night excoriating himself for not getting a single shred of useful detail that might identify the cab or its driver. Mac and Stella were professional but grim-faced, and he'd walked away from them rather than blow up in public. Danny was sympathetic, which was just as bad. A healthy dose of ripe Italian sarcasm, or even a show of anger would have made Flack feel as if he'd made a forgivable fuckup. Supportive politeness over something as serious as missing the Cabbie Killer by a few inches probably meant that Danny was either deeply disappointed in him, or wanted to take him out back and swing at him.
It was a few hours before he calmed down enough to realize that not only had Jess, a good eighty pounds lighter than he, body-checked him out of the path of the cab, but had had the presence of mind to roll out of his way, and stick her arm out to cushion his head as he crashed onto the pavement with her. He hadn't even needed to wonder if she'd finished getting Roland inside and booked. Roland was probably still nursing a set of bruised ribs from where she'd taken the sole of her boot to him. And if he mentioned these things, she'd only look at him strangely and ask what else he'd expected.
Damn, Jess.
He'd realized some time ago that she was by far the toughest girl he'd ever developed a thing for. Her particular blend of pragmatic cop mentality, earthy, easy humour and classy good looks was bad enough, but the fact that she could take him on, verbally or physically, any time of day or night, was lethal. Between that and their status as colleagues, he'd been far more careful about his interest than he ordinarily was - but this was a woman, he thought, who was worth a long wait. His initial gut reaction was right: Underneath it all, Jess was the sort who gave her heart completely, and for good. Not someone to mess around with unless a guy was entirely serious.
He'd been thinking about that a lot, lately.
He realized, too, that Danny wasn't so much annoyed with him, as exhausted and pre-occupied. So was Lindsay. It was only to be expected, given the insane hours CSU was working lately. However, it had been a long time since Lindsay came to work smelling of Danny's soap.
So maybe he wasn't the only one who was having his priorities reassembled by this case.
* * * * *
There were no solid leads on the missing cab all morning, and he was exhausted, having managed only a few restless hours of sleep. He kept himself sharp with self-reproach, honing the bitter edge of his tongue during interviews with the shifty-looking Five Brothers cabbies, and cold coffee, because it pissed him off and wasn't in the least bit comforting. He opened up other case folders, stared at them, and closed them again.
Stella called him around eleven o'clock. "Hey, sunshine. Guess what?"
"Stel', unless you've found the freakin' cab - " he growled.
"We found the freakin' cab," she said.
He shot upright in his chair. "Where? Sweet. I'll grab Jess."
Jess grabbed him instead, having come up behind without him noticing. She tossed him the car keys and scooped up her evidence camera from her desk as they sprinted past.
Volunteering himself to get his suit grubby doing a visual inspection under the cab didn't redeem nearly losing it early that morning, but it made her smile and roll her eyes, and the day began to brighten a little.
He texted Mac a heads-up, as the tow truck began to haul the cab away, and wondered if there was any work to do that would keep him near the lab. He hated being apart from the action, especially on a major case. Not when they were so close to the finish. He knew the sensation of the net tightening, and it gave him a kick of renewed energy. But where to go from here? Everything was in the hands of CSU now. There were no new leads until the team found something.
Which they had to. They absolutely had to. A skin flake, a partial palm print on the steering wheel, anything.
"So what now?" Jess sighed, echoing his thoughts, and drumming her fingers on the passenger door handle. "We just drive in circles till we spot someone frantically waving in the back seat of another cab?"
"Cases have been cracked on less," he replied. "Sometimes it's the stupid things that lead to a break."
"Let's just go home," she said, and Flack knew she didn't mean her apartment. "Spread everything we got out on the war-room table, get everyone to look with fresh eyes. Maybe find a connection. Anything new comes in, we'll be right there."
It was better than doing nothing, he thought. "I'll call Sythe on the way."
* * * * *
He put a lamb donair in her hand and parked her in the spare chair at his desk, munching along with her as Hanover, Timothy and Sythe organized the war-room into a sort of Cabbie Killer museum the likes of which nearly rivaled Mac's office. After he finished eating, she smiled a little thinly, and pointed to her courier bag.
"Small pocket on the left."
He found a bottle of caffeine and potassium pills, and swallowed two with a sip of iced tea. The equivalent of two more cups of coffee, without the sour belly, but he'd pay for it later in nerves and gritty-eyed insomnia. He passed her two, and she shot them back dry.
"Next time we all sleep," she pronounced. "We're going to sleep well. Because this trou du cul will be in high-security holding for the rest of his days. Did you sleep last night? You don't look it."
"Not a lot. I'm fine. You?"
"For now. It's easier to stay sharp in daylight anyway."
"Got anything stronger than those pills?"
"Maybe Roland dropped a baggie in the car," she said. "Should we check?"
He surprised himself by laughing out loud, and Jess joined in. She reached out and laid a hand on his wrist, a gesture so natural that he didn't even think before turning his hand over and squeezing, right there in the middle of the office. Her hand felt cool and strong in his, and he quickly let go.
"Today's it. Today's the day we bring this bastard down." he said. "I can feel it."
They joined the team in the war-room, and Hanover brought Mac in over Skype. At least the impromptu conference confirmed that everyone was working off the same information, but until Danny and Lindsay finished with the cab, it was all old information. Mac was as exasperated as Flack had ever seen him.
Two hours later, word came down that Mac's stepson was, quite possibly, the Cabbie Killer's next victim, and CSU had a bead on a possible location. The bullpen turned into an anthill, and Grierson tossed a pair of freshly-charged secure radios at them as they headed once again for the parkade.
* * * * *
Many hours later, he unlocked the door of his apartment. He was too weary even to eat. He'd send out for something after a bit of sleep, but he badly needed a shower first. He was grimy and grumpy.
It was always like this after a major case was closed. The adrenaline let-down and the lack of sleep and anything resembling regular meals. It was hard to adjust to having nothing left to do. After personally marching Chiron's psychotic avatar into the precinct in shackles, and scratching out his field report for Carmody to polish up, there was nothing more to be done until morning. Even Mac had texted everyone,"Good work, people. Get some rest." from Reed's hospital room.
Under the hot spray, his eyes closed, he admitted to himself that the case closure had little to do with his mood. He'd done well, and earned a damn good sleep to kick off his weekend.
He'd just hoped to see Jess one more time. Even though they'd spent almost twenty four hours together. He didn't have a reason, except that they'd both been invested a hundred and twenty percent in the case, and had kept each other at full momentum until the finish. He wanted to talk to her. Battle comrades debriefing, decelerating. But she'd taken off while he was having a final check-in with Mac at the hospital, and he probably wouldn't see her for a couple of days.
He was a little jarred at the thought that he'd expected her to touch base with him before leaving. They were good friends, and yeah, there was that...something...but it didn't mean they automatically sought each other out.
Yeah, right. Of course he did. He just didn't like the feeling that she might not be as compelled do the same. Donnie's got a crush, his brother's voice singsonged in his head. Okay. He could admit to that. He could even admit that in a different situation, he'd have made a concerted effort to get to know her better. A lot better.
Really, a lot, a lot better. Maybe even right here in the shower...
He emerged some minutes later and began to towel off, and his phone buzzed in his room. He made a wet dash, and then grinned and stood dripping on the carpet as he read her message.
"I'm supposed to get shipwrecked and comatose all alone?" she demanded. "The Old Hastings Inn on 74th. Hurry up."
So she wasn't out celebrating, he realized. Cops all over New York City would be out knocking one back. But Jess had gone home, and then to a quiet pub near her apartment. Interesting.
At least, since he could hail a cab again, he'd get there pretty quick. "Stoke me a clipper." he typed back. "I'll be there in 20."
Sleep could wait a while longer.
There was a Guinness on the table when he arrived, and Jess was playing with her wine-glass and watching the news ticker scrolling under a college football game. "NYPD NABS MAD CABBIE", said one headline. "FARES TIPPING BIG TONIGHT IN NYC" read another. On another screen, a family of ultra-right whackjobs were getting free airtime by thanking the Cabbie Killer for punishing America for its sins, luckily on mute.
"Not out with the gang?" he asked, by way of greeting.
"No," she said simply, and smiled.
While one drink lasted through their shepherd's pie, they were both near to comatose by the end. He saw the utter exhaustion in her body contrasting with the dark lights dancing in her eyes, when he hugged her goodnight outside her apartment building. Somehow he managed not to kiss her before climbing back into the cab.
He fell asleep too quickly, trying to hold onto the memory of her, slim, warm and triumphant, returning his tight embrace.
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He’d just decided to bring Danny into his plans to cause a little grief for Lindsay, after her stunt with the RealDoll, when Jess breezed towards his desk and planted herself on the edge.
"So, I hear congratulations are in order," she said.
"Eh? What for?"
"The new girlfriend. The one that doesn't put a dent in your city salary over dinner. Pity she can't cheer for you at your games, though."
"Aw, shit." he shook his head. "Monroe told you about that?"
"Oh, no, no. Very upset elderly witness called in to report a couple was having a fight outside a restaurant, and one of them was hauling away a dead body on a handcart. Since no one here had any idea what was going on, I thought I'd better check it out myself. Lucky for you, there were a couple of patrons there with a clue, and one of them gave me, I gotta say, a very accurate description of you. So I called Bonasera, and everything fell into place."
He groaned. Had he offended the Sisterhood lately? He was going to get no peace for a week. "Jess, listen -"
"Listening," she said, leaning against the side of his desk with her arms crossed and her mouth twitching.
"What, you gonna rough me up over this?"
"Maybe. So far the circle is very small."
"Oh, what is this, an extortion racket? You know, it's not that big of a deal. And why am I even - " he raised his hands in a gesture of defeat. "It's the CSI's who gotta do all the...you know, poking and prodding. I got nothing to do with that. I just carried the warrant."
"And then you got taken for a knife-wielding maniac, or something, with a shrieky wife and a dead body. If that ain't comedy..."
"Hey, it's not like she was - "
"She?"
"It. Whatever. Not mine, is my point."
"Don?"
"What?"
She levered herself off the desk and walked behind him, as if she was heading out of the bullpen. But she leaned forward and murmured, right into his ear so that every nerve down his backbone stood at attention: "You're all flustered."
Before his mouth was closed, she was striding down the aisle between the desks, and calling to Sigurdson to come see her about his strangled college kid out in Queens.
The smell of her shampoo wafted around his mind all afternoon.
It was undeniable now.
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Les traductions / Aistriúcháin:
"Garda Síochána na hÉireann"
- The police force of the Irish Republic. Literally, "Guardians of the Peace of Ireland". (And probably the peas of Ireland, too.)
"...au revoir, tu me manqueras..."
- Farewell (literally: to the next sighting), I'll miss you
"Tabarnak'! Sacr'ment!"
- Quebécois swear words, based on the Catholic Church terms Tabernacle and Sacrament. Taking the Church in vain was considered especially heinous in old Quebec society, so naturally some terms became used for cussin'.
"trou du cul"
- Asshole (literally: orfice of the bum)
"Slainte"
- Your health.
Continue to Chapter Three, Genie in the Bottle
AUTHOR: fixomnia
PAIRING: Flack/Angell
RATING: English-style "tea" - strong but sweet. (And always warm the teapot first.)
SPOILERS: Various Flack/Angell scenes from Season 3-5, and Flack's season 6.
Chapter Summary: Rollercoasters start so slowly...
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Chapter Two
Surveillance and Covalence
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...and just between you and me,
I think she'll soon have you temptation bound.
Now here she comes, here she comes...
- Bonnie Tyler, "Here She Comes"
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Surveillance could be a mindless slog, but the day was slipping by faster than she wanted.
It was serendipity and a quirk of scheduling that found them together on a bright, brisk afternoon, sharing eyes duty in a patrol car. With not much else to do but wait for their mark, a socialite promotions magnate, conversation once again came easily and quickly. She found herself intrigued. Maybe it was the private, enclosed space he liked? He did come to life in the interrogation room...
"Soon as I turned nineteen," he said in answer to her query. "Never planned on doin' anything else." He took the upgrading courses and seminars offered by the Academy at regular intervals, and didn't see the point in investing in college until, and unless, there was a specific need for it.
"Nineteen, too, after freshman year." she told him. She'd gone to college for a year, to appease her mother, before entering the Academy. Then, as soon as she'd made Detective and had a little more control over her work hours, she'd begun taking one or two night classes at a time at CUNY, taking advantage of the tuition incentive program offered by NYPD. She was working towards a Crim degree, minoring in Sociology. Eventually, she planned to move into Criminal Intelligence Analysis, working with the reams of information that the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies gathered, and making predictions and resource allocation recommendations.
As much as she loved the puzzle-solving and physical demands of being a Detective, there came a time when the body and soul began to wear down.
"I don't want to be forty-five years old and chasing after some dealer in a dark alley. Or get pushed up the ladder by default. And if - someday - I ever have a family to come home to, I'm not gonna want to be pursuing high crimes on the streets of New York. So I'm planning ahead. At the very least, I come out of it with a degree."
"Impressive," he nodded. "From what I hear, you'd be great at that kind of thing."
"Why? What do you hear?"
"That you're good at seeing patterns, and that your case reports show great perspicacity."
" 'Great perspicacity'? Who talks like that?"
"Taylor. The one from CSU, not Victim's Assistance."
"Oh, that makes sense. I thought you meant Sythe."
"No, he just thinks you're a good return on investment. His words."
She cracked up at that, and he grinned back, watching her with open enjoyment. "Well, it's good to know where I stand." she said at last.
"So where is this broad?" he muttered, still smiling, checking his wing mirror for any sign of Amber Stanton.
Unlike Timothy, he didn't pester her for advice about his girlfriends, and unlike Sig, he didn't act as though every moment was a potential international event. And unlike many, many cops with whom she'd shared a car on a New York afternoon, with the late summer heat rippling off the teeming pavements and glass-sided buildings, Flack seemed to smell better as the day wore on. But she wouldn't tell him that.
He still didn't have a lot to say about himself, though. "So I know you're a second-gen Blue, too." she asked eventually, trying put him at his ease. "Does it go any farther back? Any more Flacks in the department?"
"Not really," he said. " 'Course you know about my dad. He came straight from Ireland. Garda Síochána na h-Éireann to NYPD, back in 72. My mom's dad owned a transport security company here in Manhattan, though, so he did his bit for the law. My older brother does something at the Stock Exchange, and nobody really knows what my little sister wants, so I'm it for the family...not that some basic training wouldn't do Sammy some good. I think she's an actress this year. Between waitressing gigs."
Jess made an understanding moue.
"What about you?" he asked. "Besides your old man, any other Angells in blue?"
"No, I'm it for the family, too. None of my brothers ever wanted it, and Dad never pushed. Rick's an EMT, here in New York. Jean-Richard, but don't call him that. He says I have a cushy job next to his, and I actually have to agree. He moved down from Montréal a few years after Mom and Dad and I did. Dominic and Jerome stayed up in Canada and moved to the National Capitol Region. They're public servants, like every second person you meet in Ottawa."
"Okay, Montreal explains the French." he nodded. "And the hockey. How'd you end up here?"
"The usual way. Dad was a Staff Sergeant with the RCMP in Québec, and the NYPD offered him a step up, with the works. By then, the boys were either safely in university or already out, and I was only ten, so Dad and Maman figured what the hell, they'll pretend they're a young family again. Next thing you know, it's au revoir, tu me manqueras, and I'm leaving one set of nuns for another - same order, same habits, different faces."
"No way. A convent girl? I would not have...really? With the sports and the...?"
His reserve dropped, he sounded so thoroughly taken aback that she sent him a slightly dangerous eyebrow. "Bless this, Detective."
"Hey, I'm not being a jerk, I'm just sayin' - I got the nuns, too."
"Ah. My bad. Irish Catholic?"
"I was. Now, not so much."
"Same. Well, French Catholic on mom's side. Dad's English Protestant. Me, I'm, I don't know. I sort of miss some parts of it all, but it stopped working for me a long time ago."
He nodded in understanding. Jess thought privately that the whole conversation - the whole afternoon - had taken a turn for the surreal. She'd been curious to learn something more about him. Discussing their early religious upbringings, however, hadn't been on the agenda.
A line from an old favourite poem sprang into to her mind: "I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints..." and she shivered, quite as if, she thought, a ghost had indeed walked over her grave.
She blinked and focused on Flack once more.
"Oh, I get your brothers' names now." he was saying. "Saints' names, all three. And yours."
"And Martin, too. He's in Jersey now, with his family. He's the oldest."
"Four older brothers...and a Detective Sergeant for a father?" He looked at her. "Your old man dust you for prints when you came home from a date?"
He would if he could have, Jess thought, and I can hardly blame him. She gazed into the rear-view mirror.
With an eight-year gap between Jess and her nearest brother, she was often referred to as the late-entry, or, when her brothers were being cruel, "The Accident". Their mother, Chérie, insisted they were just a good Catholic family who left it up to God. Jess took it all with mostly good humour. Her brothers treated her like a life-size action figure and her father called her "Sarge". She put up with wearing her St. Ignatius' gym slip because it was uniform, but the moment she was home, she was into her brothers' well-worn hand-me downs and out into the backyard for some catch practice before dinner. Life was a romp, and she grew up sturdy and dimpled, more boy than girl, to the quizzical relief of her parents, who knew boys best.
Then, as puberty hit a year after their move to the States, her parents were broadsided by a tall, willowy girl who wailed about everything. Suddenly, the girls at school were horrible, she hated New York, her kilts were too short, and her parents were hopelessly clueless. Being hauled out to buy her first brassiere was nothing short of traumatic. By her fourteenth year, though, she'd developed a taste for the attention she was getting, and Chérie found herself having to put the brakes on her tomboy daughter's sudden transformation into a young Claudette Colbert.
Girls with whom she had nothing in common before were now the keepers of her secrets. The local boys were stunned into silence at the reality of their old playmate's encounter with full-on early sex appeal. She was gentle with them; she let them take her to the movies or for burgers and fries on the weekend, and she was patient as they figured out how, and when, to kiss her goodnight. Growing up surrounded by protective males and eavesdropping on her father's police shop talk had served her well. She maintained a sort of buffer around herself, never committing, always slightly remote, and wary of anyone who might be trying to catch her with her guard down.
That didn't stop her from sneaking out the basement door to meet boyfriends for breathtaking midnight trysts, though, or later, from being smuggled into her first lover's college dorm room at not-quite seventeen. And it didn't stop her from coolly defending herself to an outraged, horrified Cliff, when he caught her returning home one night, reminding him that he'd raised her to always take care of herself, and to set her own terms.
And she had. A year in college, still living at home, had only sharpened her original desire to follow her father and become a cop. Overtaken by a bone-deep sense of purpose and of returning to her original self, she'd been grateful to have gotten her kicks out early. Except for a couple of low-key romances after she'd graduated from the Academy, she'd only dated casually.
The tattoos around her wrist and down her spine, and the scars all over her body from a competitive athletic childhood and a hold-nothing-back police career, told the continuing story of her life, but it wasn't one that many men cared to hear in full. She'd played so hard to be one of the boys that she'd beaten them at their own game, at every level. They seemed to regard her either as a sister or an unapproachable lust-object, with little in between. It was ironic, she thought, that she'd never allowed herself to date a fellow cop, who might appreciate her fully, knowing all too well the blue line gossip that would hound her entire working life.
"If it was up to them, I wouldn't have known boys existed until I was twenty-one," she replied wryly to Flack, still watching the mirror for Stanton. And they'd certainly have preferred that I not get behind a badge.
"I'm sure the boys knew you existed."
There was a wistfulness in his voice that made her pause in her memories and look up. She heard a shadow of some long-ago teenager who believed himself to be undistinguished, without much hope of having his affections returned. She wondered if he'd heard his own words, the way they slipped out.
"Was that a line, Flack?" she shot back, aiming for levity. Flack-the-adult had his own groupie issues, and was never short of female attention, but if rumor was correct, some rich strawberry-blonde had been recently parading him on her arm all around the philanthropy-as-foreplay scene. Had that come to its inevitable end already? "Did you just bust out your game on me?"
Flack avoided her gaze, grinned sheepishly and seemed to be casting around for a reply, though his ears and then his throat flushed an interesting shade. Oh, good grief, she thought, taking a closer look. I was joking. I think. This just got interesting.
"It was, wasn't it? Look at you, you're blushing."
"C'mon, game? Game? I have no game. If I did, that's probably as good as it gets."
He was entirely in earnest. In some respects, at least, Detective Flack Jr. regarded himself as a bit of a dork. She felt a warmth welter up inside. "I thought it was pretty good."
She was just deciding whether to say anything further, or see where he jumped next, when there was a tap on the window.
Oh, shit. Her stomach shriveled.
If there was anything worse than being made by a mark, it was being made by an unpleasant, power-mongering, saccharine-tongued mark.
"Detectives," Amber said brightly. "Oh, I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"
My own stupid fault for not watching, thought Jess, knowing Flack was thinking the same. They sat and let Amber breeze her charming way through her hissy fit, and by silent accord, snapped back into work-mode as soon as she exited the car.
"That woman pisses me off," Flack growled. Jess nodded mentally, and watched as Flack got out and began looking over the back seat.
"What are you doing?"
"Looking for anything that'll help me put her in handcuffs next time I see her."
And not the fun ones, her brain added helpfully.
He triumphantly held up a single hair, and she passed him a paper bindle from the glove box.
"Not bad for a guy on a city salary," she ventured, slyly.
"Thank you," was his demure response, and he blushed again. So Don Juan de Flack could dish it out, but didn't know how to take it?
Interesting.
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The thing with Devon lasted a month longer than he'd thought it would. The truth was, they liked each other. They made each other laugh, and they were from such different worlds that there was a mutual fascination.
She'd placed herself in front of him, sweaty and dishevelled as he was, after an NYPD / NYFD hockey game fundraiser for the New York Veterans and Families Association, and introduced herself. She liked what she saw, and it didn't occur to her that she wouldn't get it. That was all right. He liked what he saw as well. Devon might have been a trust-fund kid, but her head and her heart were in the right place, as incidentally was every curve on her well-tended body.
She liked hearing about the gritty underbelly of New York. He enjoyed her stories from her Swiss boarding school childhood, and meeting the glittering citizens she now called her New York circle. She introduced him as "my Detective", and had him painted as a sort of knight-champion in her mind. He saw an opportunity to open her mind to the more basic reality of the city and its people, not served by any charity society. And sex with Devon rocked his world. He had no illusions that they were remotely well-matched for the long term.
She let him off gently one evening in early December, as the inevitable discussion of Christmas plans drew near. Her apartment had a fireplace, and she'd built a small fire, which went perfectly with rum and eggnog at the end of a snappingly cold day
"Donnie," she said, leaning back against his knees, "My parents want me to go skiing with them over the holidays. In Switzerland."
Must be swell, he thought. "Sounds nice. You gonna go?"
"Yeah," she said, hesitantly. She looked into the flames. She didn't ask him if he could go, or if he wanted to. She knew his job. He'd never get the time off in the holidays, and even if he did, she'd have to pay for him. And I don't belong in that world.
"You planning on coming back?" he asked. He knew where she was going with this. He played with a strand of her hair. He'd assumed she'd chosen the colour herself, but he'd been wrong. She was a ginger girl, all right, and born in tempestuous April at that.
After a moment, she set her mug down on the glass coffee table, and turned to look at him, her blue-gray eyes serious. "We've had fun, haven't we?"
"We have," he said. He felt sense of lightening relief. "And hey, didn't I save you from being robbed? That was pretty cool, no?"
She smiled. "Very cool." Her smile wavered, and fell. She was finding this genuinely hard.
"Dev, it's okay. Go have fun with your people. You're right. We've had fun."
He kept stroking her ringlets, thinking he'd miss the feel of them under his hand, and she leaned back again. "Will you still let me know when your games come up? I'd like to come watch. You're pretty good out there."
"I will." he said, and leaned forward to kiss her bright crown. She turned her face to his. He kissed her mouth, softly, and then with deepening hunger. Her hands tugged at his shirt until they slipped underneath, and she raked her nails lightly over his skin to make him hiss in pleasure. They were so damn good at this together.
"One for my baby?" he asked against her lips, with a smile in his voice.
"And one more for the road," she agreed. She stood, and taking his hand, led him for the last time to her bedroom.
He rode the subway home that night with the unsettling sense of things falling into place, rather than apart, but he wasn't going to think too much on that just yet.
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Send a uni for Rikki Sandoval, or give them more time? Tell Mac I'm worried for Danny's stability out there, or try to talk some sense into him myself?
He nearly jumped when he heard her voice.
"Hey. Thought you were off today," she said.
"Yeah, I was. Something came up with Danny. It's...a long story."
Jess took that as a signal to cross her arms and settle in.
"How about I tell it to you over an Irish coffee?" he temporized.
The unsmiling lady detective vanished, and there was just Jess, taking in his tight shoulders and worried frown. It was obvious that she realized he was at some remove from okay, but wasn't going to ride his ass about it. He liked that Jess didn't mind leaving him alone with his thoughts. She knew how guys processed things. It made it much easier to talk to her later on. And once they'd finally gotten around to talking, they'd been doing a lot of catching up.
"Think I know just the place," she said in an undertone, the seriousness of his voice registering. She was about to say something more when his Messer-sense triggered, and he looked up to see Danny escorting Rikki, uncuffed, through the front doors.
So Jess would get to see the third act for herself. He wasn't sure if it would make it any easier to explain to her why he'd given Danny so much rope. Enough rope, in fact, to hang them both. Danny hadn't reported his gun was in the hands of an EDP, who was his neighbor and God only knew what else. And he'd taken a couple of solid swings at a smarmy-mouthed petty thief. And he, Donald Jr., had assisted Danny in his insane pursuit, and then let them all go. It was blind luck that there hadn't been any cellphone-toting civilians nearby, grabbing each precious second and uploading it to the Twitterverse on the way home.
Rikki looked as though she was about to vomit from nerves, however, and Danny was near catatonic with fatigue and grief. As involved persons, neither he nor Danny could place Rikki under arrest. At least Messer kept a couple of wits to rub together, he realized. Of course Rikki had to come in on her own two feet. Once I started being his friend and not a cop, he had to either call someone else to arrest her, or talk her into turning herself in.
Which left Jess, blissfully unaware of the great favour she was about to do them. Rikki was ready to talk, and Jess was a good listener. Danny would only be listed in the case file as a friend who convinced her to return his service weapon and turn herself in, though technically, he could have his wrist smacked for leaving his gun unsecured in his residence with a civilian present. Flack had set out all the legal processes, and pulled a couple of strings with the arraignment judge and bailiff. Rikki would come through all right. All Jess had to do was book her and start the ball rolling.
"Jess, would you take her inside?"
Jess nodded, and her glance said clearly: You so owe me. He sighed, and hurried to catch up with Danny.
* * * * *
"...and you know the rest. That's when they turned up at the precinct."
She hadn't said a word since he began the tale, and she'd kept her expression carefully schooled throughout. Lessons learned at her father's knee, probably watching her brothers being grilled.
"Another round?" she asked, her inflection neutral. He nodded and got up. They'd ditched the coffee in favour of plain Irish after the first round, when it became clear that stronger medicine was needed.
"Same?"
"Yeah. Single, rocks. Please and thank you."
He wasn't sure if she wanted a moment to clear her head, or to get him good and loaded for medicinal purposes, or just wanted him to turn his back so she could bolt. But when he came back with the drinks, upgraded from Jameson to twelve-year-old Dunville's, she was smiling at him, and had obviously been smiling at him for a while.
"What?"
"You're a good friend. Danny's lucky to have you around."
He sat down and slid her glass across the table. "But I forgot which badge I was supposed to be wearing, huh?"
Her long fingers slipped momentarily against his as she took it, and he thought he saw the smallest flicker of the dimple in her cheek.
"Well, I mean, of course you should've put out an APB as soon as you knew she had it. We don't exactly need more guns in the hands of emotionally disturbed people. And it should have been a file assigned to someone else, not some Don-and-Danny cowboy show. But I gotta say, if it had been me and my old partner, and some friend of his was in trouble, I might have done the same. And I do see that you didn't have time to spare."
She trailed her finger in a patch of condensation on her glass, and lifted it for a sip. He watched, impressed, as she exhaled slowly and acknowledged what he'd brought her, savoring the burn and the flavor.
She went on, regardless: "So now you two have dragged me into your sordid exploits, I'm supposed to sit on the fact that he, and you, never reported his gun being stolen?"
Flack accepted the truth of her words with a grimace and a sigh, and knew he was lucky to get off so easily. Being a Flack, he'd had a certain insulation from criticism, except from his superiors and senior colleagues, but Jess felt no such hesitation. He found he actually relished the sensation of being called to the mat by a peer. It spoke of a deep respect between them, and a promise to keep raising the bar.
"...which means you can't have given your 20 to Dispatch. You weren't even on the board! You were supposed to be off-duty. What if you'd needed help?"
"Jess, I know. This is why I wanted to tell you in person."
He watched Jess' face for her reaction, but she just took another sip of her whiskey and shook her hair back off her face. He definitely didn't notice how her soft loose curls bounced on her collarbones, peeking out from the drapy neck of the dark red top she wore, and he absolutely definitely didn't wonder how they would feel against his skin.
"Relax," she said, "The situation was lousy, but it turned out okay. Mrs. Sandoval's back home, she's got court-ordered therapy and a very reasonable suspended sentence, considering the circumstances. Honestly, it's Messer I'm worried about. He could use some court-ordered therapy himself."
"Monroe's getting as bad. She's a mess. And I'm pretty sure Danny's...I'm keepin' my eye on both of them."
"Don't overload the lifeboat, Don. Or everybody drowns."
Her eyes were fixed on his, liquid-dark and kind, as she leaned forward slightly on the table. The world contracted to contain the two of them alone. This had been happening more often lately, he thought muzzily. It was just the devil himself in the works, because after three and a half drinks, Flack thought that if he opened his mouth, something meaningful might emerge, but because of those drinks, he knew better than to try. He had no idea of what he wanted to say to her, anyway.
He blinked, she looked down into her glass, and the moment slipped by. He glanced at the clock on the bar and noted it was nearing midnight.
"Think this'll be the last," he said, with real regret.
"Make it count, then," she said, which might have meant something, or nothing at all. He reached out his glass and gently clinked the edge of hers, and they finished their whiskey in agreeable silence.
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He gave her roses on Valentine's Day, mostly by accident.
An investigation had gone into overtime, as they sought to unravel a love triangle that ended in one murder by stabbing and one assault. Jess wasn't surprised at the long day, given the severity of the crime and the three complicated histories.
"Valentine's Day is to lover's quarrels what Christmas Day is to suicides," she observed, walking shoulder to shoulder with Flack down the antiseptic-smelling corridor of Beth Israel Hospital. The girl who had escaped with only a black eye and badly slashed arms had asked to talk with them again, in person. "All these raised expectations, all the hype - someone's bound to have an old grudge set off."
Flack agreed. "At least it isn't a full moon for another week, or we'd really be in it."
"Funny how so many people insist that's just apocryphal, until they ask a cop. Or a paramedic."
"Self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe? Who knows. You have plans for tonight?"
She gave a quick snort. "Not likely."
He glanced at her in some confusion. "I just meant, you know, I can probably handle one sedated girl on my own, if you wanted..."
"What? Oh - sorry. No, I...let's see what she has to say."
It took a good hour, and was obviously deeply painful for the girl, but by the end of it, a clearer picture had emerged. She was the innocent in the mix, unaware that her loving boyfriend really was too good to be true. At first she thought she was somehow to blame, for not being all he needed her to be, or for not being able to haul a much stronger woman with a carving knife away from him. But now that she'd had time to think, she'd realized there might have been more women, and she wanted to make sure they were okay. She didn't have much to identify them, but she gave them the few thin details she recalled.
Jess handed the girl a card as they prepared to leave. The hospital would keep her overnight, and she'd be able to talk to someone in the morning about what would happen next.
"So what happens next for us?" she asked, back in the corridor, shrugging on her jacket and flicking her hair out from under the collar with a brisk impatience. "We're into hour twelve here. Do we follow up on these leads, or send out the unis?"
"Let's get the boys on it," he said. "Doubtful anything comes up, but if it does, they'll call."
"I can just e-mail all this to the Watch Clerk. Carmody and Timothy drew the grave tonight." she said. She shook her head and went on: "I'd say let's just call it a night, but - "
"Pizza, is what I'm thinking," Flack stepped in. She perked up at that. They dealt with this sort of case not infrequently, but they didn't have to go home hungry and fed up with people.
So they ended up at a pizzeria near the hospital. She paused as they entered. She should have realized that an Italian-run joint would dress up for the holiday of romance. There were tall glass sacred-heart candles and single red roses at every formica booth, and schmoozy light opera playing softly. Around the door, tiny red and white Christmas lights had been pressed into Valentine's duty.
Oh, well, she thought. Embrace the irony.
"Benvenute, benvenute," called the resident nonni behind the counter, waving them inside. "Sit, sit, sit."
They did. Nonni yelled something behind a curtain, and a younger girl came out from the back room to take their order. Out of the corner of her eye, Jess saw Nonni reach under her counter and bring up a bottle of wine. The girl murmured "Polizia," as she went back to the kitchen, and the bottle disappeared. Jess smiled despite herself, and for a moment, considered giving her a free pass. She and Flack could probably both do with some vino.
"So." Flack said, over his iced tea. "You wanna tell me what's up, or should I not ask?"
She sighed. All right. If he wanted to know, she'd tell him. "There's a lot that comes with this job that's not exactly easy for anyone else to take on board. And I'm okay with that. Mostly."
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
"And sometimes I wonder if I've just got myself on this freaking pedestal, like I'm trying to hold up the banner for detectives everywhere - "
"And your father." Flack slipped in, so smoothly she barely noticed.
"And my father, and it's no wonder everyone feels like I keep them at arms' length, and then a case like today's comes up, and there's no winners, just one girl going to jail for murder, and another one who's going to have to explain the scars to anyone...if she even lets herself be with anyone again."
"And most of the time, it seems better to be alone, except for some days, it's just..."
"Yeah. And this is one of them. Go figure. I like to think I'm immune from all the Hallmark holiday BS, and then this happens. And you know what? This side of me annoys the piss out of me. I'm sorry."
"Hey, whoa - " he said. "What's that about? You were on a roll. I get it. You could've been talking about me."
"What, you have days like this?"
"Sure I do. What'd you think?"
She stared for a moment. "What about you?" she asked. "You didn't have plans?" Flack never seemed to have difficulty finding a date if he wanted one, and surely not for Valentine's Day. He surprised her by shaking his head.
"Too many expectations," he said. "I don't want to hurt anyone. And I don't..." he looked into his drink and fumbled for a polite phrase, "I mean, there was a time, yeah, but...I don't just wanna fill in the gaps, you know?"
She grinned. Interesting, she thought, hardly for the first time.
"Sure you do," she returned. "You're just not going to, is all. Commendable, really."
She got a half-blush out of him at that.
"God knows my dad and I don't see eye-to-eye on a lot," he went on, "but we do on this: at the end of the day, it's either worth it, being a cop, or it isn't. All the personal stuff, I mean. If it's worth it, we get up and do it all over again. If it isn't, we re-think."
"And we're all closet masochists meanwhile."
"You got a hobby I don't know about, Detective?"
"Idiot," she grinned fondly. "You're right, though. And it's not like I don't know all that. Some days just get to you."
"Yeah, they do. But you don't have to hide them. Not from me."
"Or me." she reminded him. He nodded thoughtfully.
A small silence settled. She looked at him with a renewed glint in her eye. "Fill in the gaps, Flack?" she taunted him, "What the fuck is that?"
"What d'you want me to say, 'get laid, say goodnight and take a cab home' ?"
"Hey, isn't accuracy in reporting the first thing they taught us?"
After a half hour of their usual bracing cop humour and a particularly tasty thin-crust Genovese Salami with mushrooms, she felt like her old self again.
"Don, thanks," she said, licking crumbs daintily off her finger. "This was exactly what I needed."
"Same goes. And Jesus, will you stop doing that?" he batted her hand away before she started in on her fingertips. She giggled and sucked them clean anyway, putting on a little show, laughing outright as he mock-glowered at her.
They were the last two customers in the place, and as they were finishing up, Nonni went around the tables collecting the roses. She wrapped the stems in a clean tea-towel with a map of Lucca on it, and thrust them at Flack, beaming, and pointing to Jess.
"Prendere queste e dare loro da vostra ragazza," she said, gesturing vividly.
The grand-daughter poked her head out from behind the curtain. "She says, you should give them - "
"Yeah, I got it," Flack said, blushing furiously now. "Thanks. Grazie." He took the bundle of roses awkwardly in his hands.
"Well, uh," he said holding them towards her, "Happy Valentine's."
Funny, she thought, how they could go from crass teasing to shy in the space of an instant. She had a disconcerting sense of tears prickling behind her eyes.
"Thanks," she said softly.
She wasn't the sentimental type that hung her flowers up to dry, but when they finally withered on her hall table, she felt a pang.
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Jess drove, which was fine with him. He enjoyed listening to her occasional "Tabarnak'! Sacr'ment!" as couriers and cabs wove too close. Not many cabs out tonight, but then, nobody was taking cabs anymore. There hadn't been any new leads in a week, and frayed squad room tempers were the least of their problems. It was a relief to get some air and follow up on a sighting of a wanted wannabe druglord who had, according to cellblock gossip, gunned down a rival.
He'd have enjoyed the drive more if it weren't for the wannabe who now sat in shackles beside him. It was bad luck that Jess had spotted him before one of the circulating paddy wagons had. The back of a wagon would have been a better place for him, but once they had him cuffed, they couldn't wait around. He had to come back with them. Flack actually wished they'd picked up one of the flashy pimped-out dealers that at least had some self-respect. Roland hadn't bathed in what smelled like a month.
"All right!" Jess pulled up in front of the precinct. "One down. Not a bad way to start a shift, eh, Roland?"
"Speak for yourself," Flack muttered, as she hopped out. He was going to need to change his suit. Jess opened his door, since the rear locks were disengaged from the inside, and he gasped for air, shaking himself. "Augh! He's nasty. His breath smells. Makes Prom night in the back of my father's Caddy with Bianca DiFaizio seem like it never happened."
It was payback for the story she'd told him a few days earlier, about losing her dress on a beach in the south of France, the summer she'd graduated high school. At his dazed silence, she'd snickered and taken pity on him, explaining: "Someone swiped it while we were swimming. So my friend and I just wandered around the market stalls till I found something to wear back to the hotel. We were in one-pieces, for God's sake, in France. Might as well have been wearing old-fashioned bathing dresses. I doubt anyone even noticed us."
He'd doubted that most sincerely.
"The back of your father's Caddy?" she grinned at him, catching on.
He shrugged nonchalantly, hoping she'd find some way to grill him about old Bianca before the shift was over. Which, of course, was the whole point. And he'd never tell her exactly what happened, no matter how much she pestered, because after all, he was a gentleman. "C'mon Roland. Time to make the donuts. Yeah, it was either that or my Pontiac Sunbird."
She smiled and shook her head, and he realized she was way too cool to take the bait. So much for driving her nuts -
Roland shoved him in the midsection, hard, and Flack winced and stumbled, taking the hit right on the mass of scar tissue under his ribs. He staggered for a moment, and saw Jess' flying form kick Roland back against the car. Flack leaped and grappled with him, unable to twist his arm back because of the cuffs. What was the cracked-out headcase even thinking, this close to the stationhouse door?
"Flack!"
He felt her almost before he registered his name. Her shoulder caught him under the armpit, knocking him off-balance, and in the next instant she'd grabbed him around the waist and spun with him down to the ground. He landed in an ungainly heap on his back, somehow avoiding landing on her with his full weight, and tried to breathe as a yellow cab skidded into the precise spot he'd been standing in.
The back door of the cab was opened, and a body was dumped in front of him before the cab shot away.
As the body rolled once and lay still, Flack scrambled to his feet. He was tearing down the busy street after the cab before he could think, barely aware of his feet hitting the ground. There was no way he could close in on a moving cab on a straightaway, but maybe there'd be some obstacle ahead. He prayed for one, because his lungs were bursting. The cab veered left into a pedestrian walkway, sending up a shower of sparks as it scraped along the curb. A late-night walker swore and dove out the way. There was no license plate, and two layers of tinted glass between him and the driver. The numbered visor light was darkened and illegible. Flack lost the few feet he'd gained and dropped back, cursing a mantra of invectives in his head.
He bent over and sucked in a breath, and then jogged back to where Jess was standing over the body. At least half a dozen unis had materialized, and radios were crackling all over.
He covered the last ten feet cursing himself some more, because Jess had just saved his ass twice in the space of thirty seconds while he'd been distracted by thinking about hers.
"I lost him," he said trenchantly.
"Don - " she held out a police wallet, with a look of regret. "Jersey City PD. Think it was him? The Cabbie Killer?"
Jesus Christ. "Well, if it was, he just upped his game. Son of a bitch killed a cop."
He didn't see Jess until dawn, after that, not until he'd spent the rest of the night excoriating himself for not getting a single shred of useful detail that might identify the cab or its driver. Mac and Stella were professional but grim-faced, and he'd walked away from them rather than blow up in public. Danny was sympathetic, which was just as bad. A healthy dose of ripe Italian sarcasm, or even a show of anger would have made Flack feel as if he'd made a forgivable fuckup. Supportive politeness over something as serious as missing the Cabbie Killer by a few inches probably meant that Danny was either deeply disappointed in him, or wanted to take him out back and swing at him.
It was a few hours before he calmed down enough to realize that not only had Jess, a good eighty pounds lighter than he, body-checked him out of the path of the cab, but had had the presence of mind to roll out of his way, and stick her arm out to cushion his head as he crashed onto the pavement with her. He hadn't even needed to wonder if she'd finished getting Roland inside and booked. Roland was probably still nursing a set of bruised ribs from where she'd taken the sole of her boot to him. And if he mentioned these things, she'd only look at him strangely and ask what else he'd expected.
Damn, Jess.
He'd realized some time ago that she was by far the toughest girl he'd ever developed a thing for. Her particular blend of pragmatic cop mentality, earthy, easy humour and classy good looks was bad enough, but the fact that she could take him on, verbally or physically, any time of day or night, was lethal. Between that and their status as colleagues, he'd been far more careful about his interest than he ordinarily was - but this was a woman, he thought, who was worth a long wait. His initial gut reaction was right: Underneath it all, Jess was the sort who gave her heart completely, and for good. Not someone to mess around with unless a guy was entirely serious.
He'd been thinking about that a lot, lately.
He realized, too, that Danny wasn't so much annoyed with him, as exhausted and pre-occupied. So was Lindsay. It was only to be expected, given the insane hours CSU was working lately. However, it had been a long time since Lindsay came to work smelling of Danny's soap.
So maybe he wasn't the only one who was having his priorities reassembled by this case.
* * * * *
There were no solid leads on the missing cab all morning, and he was exhausted, having managed only a few restless hours of sleep. He kept himself sharp with self-reproach, honing the bitter edge of his tongue during interviews with the shifty-looking Five Brothers cabbies, and cold coffee, because it pissed him off and wasn't in the least bit comforting. He opened up other case folders, stared at them, and closed them again.
Stella called him around eleven o'clock. "Hey, sunshine. Guess what?"
"Stel', unless you've found the freakin' cab - " he growled.
"We found the freakin' cab," she said.
He shot upright in his chair. "Where? Sweet. I'll grab Jess."
Jess grabbed him instead, having come up behind without him noticing. She tossed him the car keys and scooped up her evidence camera from her desk as they sprinted past.
Volunteering himself to get his suit grubby doing a visual inspection under the cab didn't redeem nearly losing it early that morning, but it made her smile and roll her eyes, and the day began to brighten a little.
He texted Mac a heads-up, as the tow truck began to haul the cab away, and wondered if there was any work to do that would keep him near the lab. He hated being apart from the action, especially on a major case. Not when they were so close to the finish. He knew the sensation of the net tightening, and it gave him a kick of renewed energy. But where to go from here? Everything was in the hands of CSU now. There were no new leads until the team found something.
Which they had to. They absolutely had to. A skin flake, a partial palm print on the steering wheel, anything.
"So what now?" Jess sighed, echoing his thoughts, and drumming her fingers on the passenger door handle. "We just drive in circles till we spot someone frantically waving in the back seat of another cab?"
"Cases have been cracked on less," he replied. "Sometimes it's the stupid things that lead to a break."
"Let's just go home," she said, and Flack knew she didn't mean her apartment. "Spread everything we got out on the war-room table, get everyone to look with fresh eyes. Maybe find a connection. Anything new comes in, we'll be right there."
It was better than doing nothing, he thought. "I'll call Sythe on the way."
* * * * *
He put a lamb donair in her hand and parked her in the spare chair at his desk, munching along with her as Hanover, Timothy and Sythe organized the war-room into a sort of Cabbie Killer museum the likes of which nearly rivaled Mac's office. After he finished eating, she smiled a little thinly, and pointed to her courier bag.
"Small pocket on the left."
He found a bottle of caffeine and potassium pills, and swallowed two with a sip of iced tea. The equivalent of two more cups of coffee, without the sour belly, but he'd pay for it later in nerves and gritty-eyed insomnia. He passed her two, and she shot them back dry.
"Next time we all sleep," she pronounced. "We're going to sleep well. Because this trou du cul will be in high-security holding for the rest of his days. Did you sleep last night? You don't look it."
"Not a lot. I'm fine. You?"
"For now. It's easier to stay sharp in daylight anyway."
"Got anything stronger than those pills?"
"Maybe Roland dropped a baggie in the car," she said. "Should we check?"
He surprised himself by laughing out loud, and Jess joined in. She reached out and laid a hand on his wrist, a gesture so natural that he didn't even think before turning his hand over and squeezing, right there in the middle of the office. Her hand felt cool and strong in his, and he quickly let go.
"Today's it. Today's the day we bring this bastard down." he said. "I can feel it."
They joined the team in the war-room, and Hanover brought Mac in over Skype. At least the impromptu conference confirmed that everyone was working off the same information, but until Danny and Lindsay finished with the cab, it was all old information. Mac was as exasperated as Flack had ever seen him.
Two hours later, word came down that Mac's stepson was, quite possibly, the Cabbie Killer's next victim, and CSU had a bead on a possible location. The bullpen turned into an anthill, and Grierson tossed a pair of freshly-charged secure radios at them as they headed once again for the parkade.
* * * * *
Many hours later, he unlocked the door of his apartment. He was too weary even to eat. He'd send out for something after a bit of sleep, but he badly needed a shower first. He was grimy and grumpy.
It was always like this after a major case was closed. The adrenaline let-down and the lack of sleep and anything resembling regular meals. It was hard to adjust to having nothing left to do. After personally marching Chiron's psychotic avatar into the precinct in shackles, and scratching out his field report for Carmody to polish up, there was nothing more to be done until morning. Even Mac had texted everyone,"Good work, people. Get some rest." from Reed's hospital room.
Under the hot spray, his eyes closed, he admitted to himself that the case closure had little to do with his mood. He'd done well, and earned a damn good sleep to kick off his weekend.
He'd just hoped to see Jess one more time. Even though they'd spent almost twenty four hours together. He didn't have a reason, except that they'd both been invested a hundred and twenty percent in the case, and had kept each other at full momentum until the finish. He wanted to talk to her. Battle comrades debriefing, decelerating. But she'd taken off while he was having a final check-in with Mac at the hospital, and he probably wouldn't see her for a couple of days.
He was a little jarred at the thought that he'd expected her to touch base with him before leaving. They were good friends, and yeah, there was that...something...but it didn't mean they automatically sought each other out.
Yeah, right. Of course he did. He just didn't like the feeling that she might not be as compelled do the same. Donnie's got a crush, his brother's voice singsonged in his head. Okay. He could admit to that. He could even admit that in a different situation, he'd have made a concerted effort to get to know her better. A lot better.
Really, a lot, a lot better. Maybe even right here in the shower...
He emerged some minutes later and began to towel off, and his phone buzzed in his room. He made a wet dash, and then grinned and stood dripping on the carpet as he read her message.
"I'm supposed to get shipwrecked and comatose all alone?" she demanded. "The Old Hastings Inn on 74th. Hurry up."
So she wasn't out celebrating, he realized. Cops all over New York City would be out knocking one back. But Jess had gone home, and then to a quiet pub near her apartment. Interesting.
At least, since he could hail a cab again, he'd get there pretty quick. "Stoke me a clipper." he typed back. "I'll be there in 20."
Sleep could wait a while longer.
There was a Guinness on the table when he arrived, and Jess was playing with her wine-glass and watching the news ticker scrolling under a college football game. "NYPD NABS MAD CABBIE", said one headline. "FARES TIPPING BIG TONIGHT IN NYC" read another. On another screen, a family of ultra-right whackjobs were getting free airtime by thanking the Cabbie Killer for punishing America for its sins, luckily on mute.
"Not out with the gang?" he asked, by way of greeting.
"No," she said simply, and smiled.
While one drink lasted through their shepherd's pie, they were both near to comatose by the end. He saw the utter exhaustion in her body contrasting with the dark lights dancing in her eyes, when he hugged her goodnight outside her apartment building. Somehow he managed not to kiss her before climbing back into the cab.
He fell asleep too quickly, trying to hold onto the memory of her, slim, warm and triumphant, returning his tight embrace.
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He’d just decided to bring Danny into his plans to cause a little grief for Lindsay, after her stunt with the RealDoll, when Jess breezed towards his desk and planted herself on the edge.
"So, I hear congratulations are in order," she said.
"Eh? What for?"
"The new girlfriend. The one that doesn't put a dent in your city salary over dinner. Pity she can't cheer for you at your games, though."
"Aw, shit." he shook his head. "Monroe told you about that?"
"Oh, no, no. Very upset elderly witness called in to report a couple was having a fight outside a restaurant, and one of them was hauling away a dead body on a handcart. Since no one here had any idea what was going on, I thought I'd better check it out myself. Lucky for you, there were a couple of patrons there with a clue, and one of them gave me, I gotta say, a very accurate description of you. So I called Bonasera, and everything fell into place."
He groaned. Had he offended the Sisterhood lately? He was going to get no peace for a week. "Jess, listen -"
"Listening," she said, leaning against the side of his desk with her arms crossed and her mouth twitching.
"What, you gonna rough me up over this?"
"Maybe. So far the circle is very small."
"Oh, what is this, an extortion racket? You know, it's not that big of a deal. And why am I even - " he raised his hands in a gesture of defeat. "It's the CSI's who gotta do all the...you know, poking and prodding. I got nothing to do with that. I just carried the warrant."
"And then you got taken for a knife-wielding maniac, or something, with a shrieky wife and a dead body. If that ain't comedy..."
"Hey, it's not like she was - "
"She?"
"It. Whatever. Not mine, is my point."
"Don?"
"What?"
She levered herself off the desk and walked behind him, as if she was heading out of the bullpen. But she leaned forward and murmured, right into his ear so that every nerve down his backbone stood at attention: "You're all flustered."
Before his mouth was closed, she was striding down the aisle between the desks, and calling to Sigurdson to come see her about his strangled college kid out in Queens.
The smell of her shampoo wafted around his mind all afternoon.
It was undeniable now.
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Les traductions / Aistriúcháin:
"Garda Síochána na hÉireann"
- The police force of the Irish Republic. Literally, "Guardians of the Peace of Ireland". (And probably the peas of Ireland, too.)
"...au revoir, tu me manqueras..."
- Farewell (literally: to the next sighting), I'll miss you
"Tabarnak'! Sacr'ment!"
- Quebécois swear words, based on the Catholic Church terms Tabernacle and Sacrament. Taking the Church in vain was considered especially heinous in old Quebec society, so naturally some terms became used for cussin'.
"trou du cul"
- Asshole (literally: orfice of the bum)
"Slainte"
- Your health.
Continue to Chapter Three, Genie in the Bottle