[ Road Trip ]
[ Set about a week after this. ]
A white SUV with a ski rack rattling with gear makes a sudden, unsignaled turn into their lane. Castle checks the license plate, then glances excitedly at the paperwork in his lap, even as Beckett struggles to keep their squad car between the yellow lines.
"One-oh-five," he declares, "that's the prefix for Montauk. All right!" He scratches something in the margins of the paper propped up on his knee. "I don't have an 'M' yet. Doesn't matter that Montauk is already in New York, right? Oh well. I'm counting it anyway." This is the second hour of license plate Bingo and, either Castle's doing it wrong, or the cars on the freeway aren't cooperating with the spirit of the game.
It's been a week since he and Beckett found themselves living out a literal reenactment of the contents of Chapter Ten of Heat Wave; seven days since they took separate cabs to work; one hundred and sixty-eight hours since he and Beckett even recognized the fact that they'd seen each other at their worst and, after a couple of minutes of fumbling around between Beckett's sheets, at their best. It hadn't even been a matter of avoidance -- the opportunity to sit down and have a real talk just hadn't presented itself. Less than six hours after Castle left her apartment, Beckett got a new case and the two of them had spent the last week tracking down leads.
Esposito always liked to say that Beckett had a taste for the "freaky ones," and this case was no different. A wealthy patron of the New York City Ballet had been found dead in his apartment, his body covered by a pelt of tropical fire ants. It had taken CSU a couple of hours to remove the body (after several calls to Animal Control proved fruitless -- "We don't really...deal...with insects") and the amount of tissue deterioration had given Lanie a hell of a tough time determining time of death.
Now they're on the road to Philadelphia, bound for Drexel University, where the world's pre-eminent expert on the 280 different species of fire ants is their last-ditch hope for a solid lead.
Castle has taken advantage of the three-hour plus drive by starting several games of license plate Bingo, none of which have so far engaged his companion's interest.
He cranes a look out the window.
"Hey! Palm Beach!" He marks off another square on his sheet. "As in 'Florida', as in fourmis de feu -- the French term for fire ants. I swear, after this case, I'm never going to look at the menu at Le Cirque the same way again."
A white SUV with a ski rack rattling with gear makes a sudden, unsignaled turn into their lane. Castle checks the license plate, then glances excitedly at the paperwork in his lap, even as Beckett struggles to keep their squad car between the yellow lines.
"One-oh-five," he declares, "that's the prefix for Montauk. All right!" He scratches something in the margins of the paper propped up on his knee. "I don't have an 'M' yet. Doesn't matter that Montauk is already in New York, right? Oh well. I'm counting it anyway." This is the second hour of license plate Bingo and, either Castle's doing it wrong, or the cars on the freeway aren't cooperating with the spirit of the game.
It's been a week since he and Beckett found themselves living out a literal reenactment of the contents of Chapter Ten of Heat Wave; seven days since they took separate cabs to work; one hundred and sixty-eight hours since he and Beckett even recognized the fact that they'd seen each other at their worst and, after a couple of minutes of fumbling around between Beckett's sheets, at their best. It hadn't even been a matter of avoidance -- the opportunity to sit down and have a real talk just hadn't presented itself. Less than six hours after Castle left her apartment, Beckett got a new case and the two of them had spent the last week tracking down leads.
Esposito always liked to say that Beckett had a taste for the "freaky ones," and this case was no different. A wealthy patron of the New York City Ballet had been found dead in his apartment, his body covered by a pelt of tropical fire ants. It had taken CSU a couple of hours to remove the body (after several calls to Animal Control proved fruitless -- "We don't really...deal...with insects") and the amount of tissue deterioration had given Lanie a hell of a tough time determining time of death.
Now they're on the road to Philadelphia, bound for Drexel University, where the world's pre-eminent expert on the 280 different species of fire ants is their last-ditch hope for a solid lead.
Castle has taken advantage of the three-hour plus drive by starting several games of license plate Bingo, none of which have so far engaged his companion's interest.
He cranes a look out the window.
"Hey! Palm Beach!" He marks off another square on his sheet. "As in 'Florida', as in fourmis de feu -- the French term for fire ants. I swear, after this case, I'm never going to look at the menu at Le Cirque the same way again."