SPN FIC - Journey (Chapter 7, part 1 of 2)
JOURNEY started here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/9849.html#cutid1
Moving on to Chapter 7!
Journey
By Carol Davis
Seven
Little Boys and Girls
“I was serious,” Sarah said to Dean’s back.
Dean, with a rolled-up sleeping bag under each arm, stopped walking halfway up the front steps of the church and huffed out a small sigh. “I know you were. But I’ve got cops after me for enough kinds of crap without adding ‘discharging a firearm in a residential neighborhood’ to the list. Maybe when this is over - have Sammy take you out somewhere and you can shoot bottles off a fence.” When she made a face at him, he sighed again. “That’s how I learned. How Sam learned.”
He went on into the church without giving her a chance to question him further. That gave her no option but to turn to Sam.
“It’s not something you can shoot at,” he told her, not quite meeting her eyes. “When they’re not…inhabiting a body, they’re like smoke. Black smoke. Shooting at it wouldn’t do anything.”
“Then is there something that keeps it away?”
“Not that we’ve found.”
“Swell,” she muttered.
Sam sank slowly down onto the steps and buried his face in his palms. “Sarah…I wish I could make this better for you,” he said through his hands. Bring her tea and say I’m sorry drifted through his mind and he grunted at the stupidity of it. How do you make this better? How can you even imagine you could make this better? Her silence made him look in her direction. She was looking the other way, down toward the Impala. “I came here because you asked me to,” he said heavily.
“But I didn’t.”
“I understand that.”
“It’s not like somebody swiped my car, Sam.”
The words created a hollow ache in his gut that in its own way was worse than anything he’d felt in months. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you here?” she asked. “In Brooklyn.”
“Job,” he managed to say. “Something killed a couple of street kids a few blocks from here. There are traces of sulfur where one of the bodies was found. We want to find the thing that did it before it hurts anybody else.”
“Is it the same demon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are there a lot of them?”
“I don’t know that either. Maybe.” Sam pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a moment. “There might be…I can’t even guess. Dozens. Thousands, maybe.”
“And how many hunters?”
“Not thousands. Maybe…I don’t know.”
“Sam…I’m sorry about your father.”
That was genuine enough, but there was a rasp in her voice - one he recognized from hearing it in his own on more than one occasion. Give me a reason and I’ll go right into orbit. Her expression was pinched, artificial, strained. Not that many hours ago, Sam thought, the two of them had been as physically close as it was possible to get. Now she was at one side of the steps and he at the other, with a couple of yards of cement between them. For a second he was glad Dean hadn’t taken her up on her request for a gun.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
“My father doesn’t know I’m here. He thinks I spent last night drinking with you and Dean.”
Sam blinked at her. “He what?”
“He thinks I should marry a guy who works at the bank. But I’m…here. And you’re telling me you think a demon took over my body.” Sarah’s eyes squeezed shut. When she opened them again, she said, “Do I get to wake up from this? Maybe this is all some really fantastic hallucination. Maybe I’m in the hospital, on some kind of medication.”
“Sarah -“
“The guns are a bad idea. I’m not Lara Croft, you know? I couldn’t shoot anything that looks like it’s breathing, let alone something that looks human. But I can do something. Give me something to do. Seriously, Sam.”
“Your father thought you were drinking with me and Dean.”
“Right now, getting seriously stinking drunk seems like a good idea. I want to help you get this thing, Sam.”
He didn’t bother to disagree.
His pad of scribbled notes was where he’d left it, on the seat of the front pew. To his surprise, the laptop was sitting beside it, not much the worse for wear aside from the piece of plastic missing from its front left corner.
“Guess they build ‘em sturdy,” Chaz told Sam.
Sam nodded his thanks to the boy. Standing up, Chaz looked even more frail than he did sitting down - really, it was a wonder he could stand up at all. There was a light in his eyes that hadn’t gone out yet, though, and he seemed pleased with himself for having put the computer back in place. Something else in his expression said he would have loved to do some online surfing if he hadn’t been more concerned with restoring everything to its proper place.
“Do you know how to use one of these?” Sam asked.
“Sure. Some.”
The boy’s shivering interrupted Sam’s train of thought. The air in the sanctuary wasn’t cold; if anything it was warm and a little stuffy, but Chaz was obviously chilled. Sam left the boy’s side long enough to locate his duffel in the pile of belongings he and Dean had brought in from the car, and pulled out of it a gray hoodie that had shrunk so much in the wash that it fit Sam like spandex. “Doesn’t fit me anymore,” he told Chaz.
Even so, it was huge on Chaz; he could have wrapped it around himself twice. “Thanks,” he mumbled.
“You know how to do a Google search?”
“I guess, yeah.”
The moth to Chaz’s flame, Babykay inched toward them. She still had chocolate frosting smeared above her upper lip from the cupcakes she’d eaten a while ago. When Chaz noticed it he tapped his own lip and grinned when Babykay’s tongue snaked out to locate the frosting.
“Can you play games on that?” she asked Sam.
He’d intended to ask Chaz to do some work for him, thinking it would let the boy accomplish something more, a contribution he could be proud of. But Chaz’s eyelids were drooping, despite his having taken a nap a couple of hours ago. Smiling - and trying to keep it clean of the regret he felt - Sam crouched in front of the laptop long enough to open up the Polar Bowler game program. “Here,” he told Babykay. “You do this, see, and aim the bear at the pins.” A brief demonstration left her giggling with pleasure. She and Chaz moved in quickly to take Sam’s place when he stepped away, and within a few seconds they seemed to forget he had ever been there.
Sarah, Dean, and Will Hanson were standing together near the doorway that led to the stairs, waiting for him. “Where’s Lemon?” he asked as he moved to join them with the notepad in his hand.
“Smoking,” Dean said.
“Outside?”
“Still light out. You got anything useful in there?”
Sam glanced at his notes. “Nothing that fits the pattern. I went back a month. No street kids. No other unusual deaths anywhere in Brooklyn. If you want to assume the demon, or entity, or whatever it is, is traveling - no deaths involving dismemberment or flaying anywhere within a hundred-mile radius. There was only one weird death involving a kid, and he wasn’t homeless.”
“Hit me.”
“Local police think he was experimenting with ‘satanic rituals.’ Trying to summon something.”
“And it worked?”
“Sounds like it.”
Another giggle from Babykay made them all look in that direction. She and Chaz were sitting side-by-side on the floor in front of the laptop, engrossed in their game. “Frickin’ kids thinkin’ they’re gonna be badass,” Dean sighed. “We’re gonna have to go to the cops. See what they’ve got that’s not on the damn Internet.”
“Is ‘we’ a good idea?” Sam asked.
“It’s always ‘we,’ Sam,” Dean scowled. “Okay, so we’re not in East Flapjack. We’re not gonna be there that long.”
“Is there a problem with the police?” the minister asked.
“There’s a lot of problems with the police.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t go,” Sarah offered.
* * * * *
The detective’s name was Paul Gianelli, and he looked more like a game show host than a cop - a game show host who’d been tossed into law enforcement head first and had had his last circuit blown by the hours and the boredom and the gore and the frustration of it a long time ago. He’d been a little reluctant to meet with Sam and Sarah, muttering that he’d been on his way out, headed home for the evening, but had caved without much of a fight when Sarah turned on the tears.
“My brother,” she told him, in between big hiccupy gulps. “I came all the way down from Utica when I saw in the paper…”
She’d laid it on with a trowel - but knew when to stop laying and start smoothing the edges. With an admiration he was careful to keep off his face, Sam figured that she’d gone through most of her life with her father wrapped around her finger like a rubber band.
“Kid had dark hair,” Gianelli said, shifting as if he couldn’t find a way to be comfortable in the well-broken-in chair behind his desk. “Brown eyes.”
Sarah’s hands fluttered in her purse and came out with a wallet-sized picture that she held out to Gianelli. “Here,” she said bravely.
Gianelli studied the picture for a moment before handing it back. He had that vaguely Botoxed look of keeping his face expressionless while he formulated what he was going to say - which wouldn’t be what he wanted to say. “Ms. Connors…” he began.
“Is it him?”
“It’s hard to tell. That isn’t a recent picture, I take it.”
“Well…no. It’s a few years old.”
Sam, standing with one hand on the back of Sarah’s chair, looked down at the picture as she held it cupped in her palms. A cousin, maybe, or a friend’s son. Cute kid, a little pudgy in the way Sam had been as a middle-schooler.
Gianelli looked like he wanted to throw himself out the window. “It -“
Sam caught the flash that went through the detective’s eyes and knew it for what it was. It might be him. There was more: Gianelli would love nothing more than to make an I.D. on the kid who’d been found in pieces in the Dumpster behind N.Y.’s Best Dogs, but not this way. Not with a woman on the raw edge of hysteria asking him, “Is it my little brother?”
“We heard there were two,” Sam said.
“Uh-huh,” Gianelli grunted. “The other one was blond. Name was Jack Curtis. We got a positive ID on him.”
“I don’t know why he would have come here,” Sarah said, keeping it a couple of notches below a wail. “Why he would want to live on the street. He said he couldn’t stay at home, that he had to get out. But he could have stayed with me. Why would he come here?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” the detective sighed.
“Do you have -“ Sam began. When Gianelli cocked an eyebrow at him, he continued quietly, “Pictures? Of…you know. That we could…”
“Crime scene?”
“Yes. Sir.”
“You don’t want to do that, son.”
“Then is there another way to” - Sam made his voice hitch - “identify the, uh, who it is?”
There was, but the sun would have come up in the west before Gianelli would suggest popping over to the M.E.’s office to look at a bunch of body parts in plastic buckets. Gianelli spent a long minute sizing Sam up before he pulled a manila folder out of the mess on his desk, got up from his chair and beckoned.
Sam dropped a hand onto Sarah’s shoulder and squeezed it, mostly but not entirely for Gianelli’s benefit. He had a painfully clear idea what he was going to be looking at, and as he walked across the scuffed floor in Gianelli’s wake he repeated to himself what Dean had taught him when he was about the age of the kid in Sarah’s picture. Special effects. That’s all it is. Like a dummy they made for the movies. Wax and stuff, with hair glued on. Plastic eyeballs.
“Who would do this?” he murmured when Gianelli stopped alongside an unoccupied desk on the other side of the room.
“What?”
Sam painted on a wobbly smile.
“Hell if I know,” Gianelli said. “I’ve been dealing with this shit for half my life and I still don’t know what drives these people.”
“It’s sick.”
“‘Sick’ doesn’t even begin to describe this son of a bitch, kid. You sure you want to do this?”
Sam’s head tilted up. Down. Back to center.
Gianelli laid the manila folder on the desktop and flipped it open. He had to shuffle through the photos inside to find the one he needed. Color and digital and high resolution. “That him?” he asked, not without sympathy.
“No,” Sam squeaked.
“You sure?”
“Yes.” To Sam’s relief, Gianelli shuffled the pictures back into the folder and closed it. Once the photos were out of sight, Sam asked, “But…what do we do about Peter? What if this crazy person is - I mean, these serial killers keep at it, don’t they?”
The cop grunted at him. “Son, two doesn’t make a serial killer.”
“Peter,” Sam said.
“The best I can tell you is, leave the picture and we can keep an eye out for him. But I’ve gotta tell you, Mr. -“
“Mason.”
“Mr. Mason. These kids are slippery. Lot of ‘em don’t stay in one place, especially if they know somebody’s looking for ‘em and they don’t want to be found. Just because she got a call from him from around here a couple months ago doesn’t mean he’s still here. He could be in Brazil by now.”
“I understand.”
“Just be glad it’s not -“ Gianelli nodded at the folder.
“We are. Thank you.”
Five minutes later Sam and Sarah were back out on the sidewalk, headed for the Lexus she had parked a couple of blocks from the police station. She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes until they were inside the car.
“Sarah Connors?” Sam said.
“That’s the name you used, the day you and Dean came to the auction house. Connors.”
Sam chuckled softly. “Linda Hamilton, in ‘Terminator’ - all three parts. Although without the ‘s’ - just Connor.”
“I thought it sounded familiar.” She waited for Sam to close the car door before she pulled a folded sheet of paper out of her purse, opened it and passed it to him. “I may not be an action hero, but I figured watching a thousand reruns of ‘Law & Order’ had to be good for something. This was on his desk. Looks like a list of all his open cases.”
“That’s what it is.”
“Then I get a gold star?”
He was already engrossed in the list. “I’d give you two if this helped at all.”
“It doesn’t help?”
“Nothing here I didn’t already know about. But that’s okay,” Sam said minus any enthusiasm at all. “It means I didn’t miss anything.” Sarah’s disappointment made him add, “We have the same problems the police do. I watched my father do this job for a long time before I started doing it myself. Sometimes things just fall apart. The trail goes cold. You chase your tail for weeks, or months, and it doesn’t accomplish anything. Sometimes,” he said softly, “you chase it for years.”
“And sometimes you never -?”
“Find an answer at all. Yeah. Like the cops.”
“How much trouble are you in, Sam? You and Dean.”
He went on looking at the list as if something useful would appear there - or as if his name and Dean’s would show up as one of Gianelli’s open cases. “There was a problem in Baltimore. The police found Dean kneeling next to the body of a woman, with her blood on him. They arrested both of us.”
“But they let you go?”
“It’s a long story. They already…Dean was already wanted for murdering two people in St. Louis.”
She didn’t ask “Did he do it?” Didn’t even look as if she was wondering privately whether he’d done it. She’d only been with Dean for a few hours last fall; other than that, she had only her conversations with Sam to use as criteria for judging Dean Winchester. That must have been enough, Sam thought. Enough - and she hadn’t even heard what he’d said about Dean back at the Marriott.
She hadn’t been the one who’d asked, “Does he know how much you love him?”
If it’d been a demon who’d talked to him at the Marriott, then it had some seriously weird kind of agenda.
“Maybe he feels trapped,” Sarah said.
Startled out of his reverie, Sam raised a brow, asking for more.
“Maybe he feels like he’s getting backed into a corner. You’re not just out on the road, fighting the good fight any more. Losing your dad, and knowing this demon is after you, and always looking over your shoulder because of the police…”
“It was never a good fight,” Sam told her. “Never.”
“Saving people?”
Dusk was settling around them, filling the inside of the car with shadows. “We help a few. But it never seems like enough. We couldn’t help your friend Evelyn. You don’t know how it feels, to get there too late. Or to get there and not know what to do. Or -“
It crept up on him: pressure at the back of his neck, sliding up into his skull. He winced and shook his head hard as if that would make it go away. Sarah looked at him with concern and rested a hand on his arm, but as the pain got worse he had to brush her hand away and shrink into the seat, head bent, eyes jammed shut.
“Sam?”
Light so bright it was agonizing flared into the blackness he was looking at. Where is this? Why can’t I see anything?
Is this what…
A cry of pain came up from deep inside his gut.
“Sam? Are you all right?”
So dark.
He felt motion, and some part of him understood that it was the car moving, that Sarah was taking him back to Dean.
* * * * *
It was cold, but not the kind of cold that made your nose run. Not sure how far out Daddy meant by “outside,” Dean went halfway across the lawn and stopped, his arms wrapped as tightly as they would go around the warm bundle of blankets that was Sammy. It wasn’t a game, he didn’t think; Daddy’s voice had been too serious.
Confused, Dean turned to look back at the house just as Daddy came running out the front door. What…? slithered through his mind as Daddy reached him, grabbed Dean and Sammy together up into his arms and kept running in long strides, almost to the edge of the lawn.
Something went whuuuuuumMMMPPP! behind them, something hot and pushing.
Daddy’s legs tangled and they went down, all three of them, Dean and Sammy underneath Daddy for a second and Sammy letting out a shriek that said he objected to being squooshed on the bottom.
Daddy lay very still for a second and Sammy’s shriek got louder.
“Daddy?” Dean ventured. “You’re hurting me.”
Then he thought, maybe Daddy didn’t hear him. It was very loud out here, and very hot in a way that wasn’t right.
Dean’s gaze went up, and up, to where the heat seemed to be coming from.
Fire?
“Daddy?”
Slowly, Daddy pushed himself around and crawled to his knees. He gathered Sammy into his arms, tucked the blanket tightly around him, then grasped Dean by the hand and helped him to his feet. By the time Daddy could stand up, people were coming out of all the houses in the neighborhood, some of them running, some of them pointing. Chris, who lived next door, scooped Dean up into his arms and pressed Dean’s face into his chest.
He smelled like Snuggle, Dean thought.
“Mary,” Chris said. “John, dear God, where’s Mary?”
Daddy didn’t say anything.
But Chris said, “Sweet Jesus,” in a voice that sounded like he was going to cry. With some difficulty Dean got his face out of Chris’s chest and turned so he could see his father.
Daddy was crying, big, shiny tears that ran down his face and dripped off his chin onto Sammy’s blanket.
“Daddy?” Dean murmured. “What…”
Sleep let go of him with a snap that made his head connect with the back of the pew. And skull smacking solid oak was never a good thing. “Shitfire,” he muttered, pushing himself up so he could sit with the now-throbbing side of his head cupped gently in his hand.
Sleeping in the pew hadn’t been a good idea to begin with. His back ached, his shoulder was protesting being jammed in an unnatural direction, and his left foot was asleep.
And those kids were staring at him, all three of them, like he was a sideshow freak.
“Quit it,” he grunted.
“They need you,” Chaz said.
“What? Who?”
“Your brother and his girl. They’re outside. He doesn’t look too good.”
He was on his feet an instant later, yelping when his weight landed on the still-asleep foot. The pins-and-needles burning made him limp until he was halfway down the aisle; when it stopped he broke almost into a run and hit the door with both palms, shoving it open.
Sam was sitting on the top step, face buried in his hands.
“Sammy?” Dean said.
Sarah stood arm’s reach from Sam, close to the railing. “It started outside the police station. He won’t talk to me.”
Nodding dismissively, Dean dropped to a seat beside his brother and wrapped a hand around Sam’s bicep. “Sammy? It’s okay. It’s me.”
“Dark,” Sam murmured.
Chapter 7 concludes here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/16744.html#cutid1
Moving on to Chapter 7!
Journey
By Carol Davis
Seven
Little Boys and Girls
“I was serious,” Sarah said to Dean’s back.
Dean, with a rolled-up sleeping bag under each arm, stopped walking halfway up the front steps of the church and huffed out a small sigh. “I know you were. But I’ve got cops after me for enough kinds of crap without adding ‘discharging a firearm in a residential neighborhood’ to the list. Maybe when this is over - have Sammy take you out somewhere and you can shoot bottles off a fence.” When she made a face at him, he sighed again. “That’s how I learned. How Sam learned.”
He went on into the church without giving her a chance to question him further. That gave her no option but to turn to Sam.
“It’s not something you can shoot at,” he told her, not quite meeting her eyes. “When they’re not…inhabiting a body, they’re like smoke. Black smoke. Shooting at it wouldn’t do anything.”
“Then is there something that keeps it away?”
“Not that we’ve found.”
“Swell,” she muttered.
Sam sank slowly down onto the steps and buried his face in his palms. “Sarah…I wish I could make this better for you,” he said through his hands. Bring her tea and say I’m sorry drifted through his mind and he grunted at the stupidity of it. How do you make this better? How can you even imagine you could make this better? Her silence made him look in her direction. She was looking the other way, down toward the Impala. “I came here because you asked me to,” he said heavily.
“But I didn’t.”
“I understand that.”
“It’s not like somebody swiped my car, Sam.”
The words created a hollow ache in his gut that in its own way was worse than anything he’d felt in months. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you here?” she asked. “In Brooklyn.”
“Job,” he managed to say. “Something killed a couple of street kids a few blocks from here. There are traces of sulfur where one of the bodies was found. We want to find the thing that did it before it hurts anybody else.”
“Is it the same demon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are there a lot of them?”
“I don’t know that either. Maybe.” Sam pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a moment. “There might be…I can’t even guess. Dozens. Thousands, maybe.”
“And how many hunters?”
“Not thousands. Maybe…I don’t know.”
“Sam…I’m sorry about your father.”
That was genuine enough, but there was a rasp in her voice - one he recognized from hearing it in his own on more than one occasion. Give me a reason and I’ll go right into orbit. Her expression was pinched, artificial, strained. Not that many hours ago, Sam thought, the two of them had been as physically close as it was possible to get. Now she was at one side of the steps and he at the other, with a couple of yards of cement between them. For a second he was glad Dean hadn’t taken her up on her request for a gun.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
“My father doesn’t know I’m here. He thinks I spent last night drinking with you and Dean.”
Sam blinked at her. “He what?”
“He thinks I should marry a guy who works at the bank. But I’m…here. And you’re telling me you think a demon took over my body.” Sarah’s eyes squeezed shut. When she opened them again, she said, “Do I get to wake up from this? Maybe this is all some really fantastic hallucination. Maybe I’m in the hospital, on some kind of medication.”
“Sarah -“
“The guns are a bad idea. I’m not Lara Croft, you know? I couldn’t shoot anything that looks like it’s breathing, let alone something that looks human. But I can do something. Give me something to do. Seriously, Sam.”
“Your father thought you were drinking with me and Dean.”
“Right now, getting seriously stinking drunk seems like a good idea. I want to help you get this thing, Sam.”
He didn’t bother to disagree.
His pad of scribbled notes was where he’d left it, on the seat of the front pew. To his surprise, the laptop was sitting beside it, not much the worse for wear aside from the piece of plastic missing from its front left corner.
“Guess they build ‘em sturdy,” Chaz told Sam.
Sam nodded his thanks to the boy. Standing up, Chaz looked even more frail than he did sitting down - really, it was a wonder he could stand up at all. There was a light in his eyes that hadn’t gone out yet, though, and he seemed pleased with himself for having put the computer back in place. Something else in his expression said he would have loved to do some online surfing if he hadn’t been more concerned with restoring everything to its proper place.
“Do you know how to use one of these?” Sam asked.
“Sure. Some.”
The boy’s shivering interrupted Sam’s train of thought. The air in the sanctuary wasn’t cold; if anything it was warm and a little stuffy, but Chaz was obviously chilled. Sam left the boy’s side long enough to locate his duffel in the pile of belongings he and Dean had brought in from the car, and pulled out of it a gray hoodie that had shrunk so much in the wash that it fit Sam like spandex. “Doesn’t fit me anymore,” he told Chaz.
Even so, it was huge on Chaz; he could have wrapped it around himself twice. “Thanks,” he mumbled.
“You know how to do a Google search?”
“I guess, yeah.”
The moth to Chaz’s flame, Babykay inched toward them. She still had chocolate frosting smeared above her upper lip from the cupcakes she’d eaten a while ago. When Chaz noticed it he tapped his own lip and grinned when Babykay’s tongue snaked out to locate the frosting.
“Can you play games on that?” she asked Sam.
He’d intended to ask Chaz to do some work for him, thinking it would let the boy accomplish something more, a contribution he could be proud of. But Chaz’s eyelids were drooping, despite his having taken a nap a couple of hours ago. Smiling - and trying to keep it clean of the regret he felt - Sam crouched in front of the laptop long enough to open up the Polar Bowler game program. “Here,” he told Babykay. “You do this, see, and aim the bear at the pins.” A brief demonstration left her giggling with pleasure. She and Chaz moved in quickly to take Sam’s place when he stepped away, and within a few seconds they seemed to forget he had ever been there.
Sarah, Dean, and Will Hanson were standing together near the doorway that led to the stairs, waiting for him. “Where’s Lemon?” he asked as he moved to join them with the notepad in his hand.
“Smoking,” Dean said.
“Outside?”
“Still light out. You got anything useful in there?”
Sam glanced at his notes. “Nothing that fits the pattern. I went back a month. No street kids. No other unusual deaths anywhere in Brooklyn. If you want to assume the demon, or entity, or whatever it is, is traveling - no deaths involving dismemberment or flaying anywhere within a hundred-mile radius. There was only one weird death involving a kid, and he wasn’t homeless.”
“Hit me.”
“Local police think he was experimenting with ‘satanic rituals.’ Trying to summon something.”
“And it worked?”
“Sounds like it.”
Another giggle from Babykay made them all look in that direction. She and Chaz were sitting side-by-side on the floor in front of the laptop, engrossed in their game. “Frickin’ kids thinkin’ they’re gonna be badass,” Dean sighed. “We’re gonna have to go to the cops. See what they’ve got that’s not on the damn Internet.”
“Is ‘we’ a good idea?” Sam asked.
“It’s always ‘we,’ Sam,” Dean scowled. “Okay, so we’re not in East Flapjack. We’re not gonna be there that long.”
“Is there a problem with the police?” the minister asked.
“There’s a lot of problems with the police.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t go,” Sarah offered.
* * * * *
The detective’s name was Paul Gianelli, and he looked more like a game show host than a cop - a game show host who’d been tossed into law enforcement head first and had had his last circuit blown by the hours and the boredom and the gore and the frustration of it a long time ago. He’d been a little reluctant to meet with Sam and Sarah, muttering that he’d been on his way out, headed home for the evening, but had caved without much of a fight when Sarah turned on the tears.
“My brother,” she told him, in between big hiccupy gulps. “I came all the way down from Utica when I saw in the paper…”
She’d laid it on with a trowel - but knew when to stop laying and start smoothing the edges. With an admiration he was careful to keep off his face, Sam figured that she’d gone through most of her life with her father wrapped around her finger like a rubber band.
“Kid had dark hair,” Gianelli said, shifting as if he couldn’t find a way to be comfortable in the well-broken-in chair behind his desk. “Brown eyes.”
Sarah’s hands fluttered in her purse and came out with a wallet-sized picture that she held out to Gianelli. “Here,” she said bravely.
Gianelli studied the picture for a moment before handing it back. He had that vaguely Botoxed look of keeping his face expressionless while he formulated what he was going to say - which wouldn’t be what he wanted to say. “Ms. Connors…” he began.
“Is it him?”
“It’s hard to tell. That isn’t a recent picture, I take it.”
“Well…no. It’s a few years old.”
Sam, standing with one hand on the back of Sarah’s chair, looked down at the picture as she held it cupped in her palms. A cousin, maybe, or a friend’s son. Cute kid, a little pudgy in the way Sam had been as a middle-schooler.
Gianelli looked like he wanted to throw himself out the window. “It -“
Sam caught the flash that went through the detective’s eyes and knew it for what it was. It might be him. There was more: Gianelli would love nothing more than to make an I.D. on the kid who’d been found in pieces in the Dumpster behind N.Y.’s Best Dogs, but not this way. Not with a woman on the raw edge of hysteria asking him, “Is it my little brother?”
“We heard there were two,” Sam said.
“Uh-huh,” Gianelli grunted. “The other one was blond. Name was Jack Curtis. We got a positive ID on him.”
“I don’t know why he would have come here,” Sarah said, keeping it a couple of notches below a wail. “Why he would want to live on the street. He said he couldn’t stay at home, that he had to get out. But he could have stayed with me. Why would he come here?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” the detective sighed.
“Do you have -“ Sam began. When Gianelli cocked an eyebrow at him, he continued quietly, “Pictures? Of…you know. That we could…”
“Crime scene?”
“Yes. Sir.”
“You don’t want to do that, son.”
“Then is there another way to” - Sam made his voice hitch - “identify the, uh, who it is?”
There was, but the sun would have come up in the west before Gianelli would suggest popping over to the M.E.’s office to look at a bunch of body parts in plastic buckets. Gianelli spent a long minute sizing Sam up before he pulled a manila folder out of the mess on his desk, got up from his chair and beckoned.
Sam dropped a hand onto Sarah’s shoulder and squeezed it, mostly but not entirely for Gianelli’s benefit. He had a painfully clear idea what he was going to be looking at, and as he walked across the scuffed floor in Gianelli’s wake he repeated to himself what Dean had taught him when he was about the age of the kid in Sarah’s picture. Special effects. That’s all it is. Like a dummy they made for the movies. Wax and stuff, with hair glued on. Plastic eyeballs.
“Who would do this?” he murmured when Gianelli stopped alongside an unoccupied desk on the other side of the room.
“What?”
Sam painted on a wobbly smile.
“Hell if I know,” Gianelli said. “I’ve been dealing with this shit for half my life and I still don’t know what drives these people.”
“It’s sick.”
“‘Sick’ doesn’t even begin to describe this son of a bitch, kid. You sure you want to do this?”
Sam’s head tilted up. Down. Back to center.
Gianelli laid the manila folder on the desktop and flipped it open. He had to shuffle through the photos inside to find the one he needed. Color and digital and high resolution. “That him?” he asked, not without sympathy.
“No,” Sam squeaked.
“You sure?”
“Yes.” To Sam’s relief, Gianelli shuffled the pictures back into the folder and closed it. Once the photos were out of sight, Sam asked, “But…what do we do about Peter? What if this crazy person is - I mean, these serial killers keep at it, don’t they?”
The cop grunted at him. “Son, two doesn’t make a serial killer.”
“Peter,” Sam said.
“The best I can tell you is, leave the picture and we can keep an eye out for him. But I’ve gotta tell you, Mr. -“
“Mason.”
“Mr. Mason. These kids are slippery. Lot of ‘em don’t stay in one place, especially if they know somebody’s looking for ‘em and they don’t want to be found. Just because she got a call from him from around here a couple months ago doesn’t mean he’s still here. He could be in Brazil by now.”
“I understand.”
“Just be glad it’s not -“ Gianelli nodded at the folder.
“We are. Thank you.”
Five minutes later Sam and Sarah were back out on the sidewalk, headed for the Lexus she had parked a couple of blocks from the police station. She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes until they were inside the car.
“Sarah Connors?” Sam said.
“That’s the name you used, the day you and Dean came to the auction house. Connors.”
Sam chuckled softly. “Linda Hamilton, in ‘Terminator’ - all three parts. Although without the ‘s’ - just Connor.”
“I thought it sounded familiar.” She waited for Sam to close the car door before she pulled a folded sheet of paper out of her purse, opened it and passed it to him. “I may not be an action hero, but I figured watching a thousand reruns of ‘Law & Order’ had to be good for something. This was on his desk. Looks like a list of all his open cases.”
“That’s what it is.”
“Then I get a gold star?”
He was already engrossed in the list. “I’d give you two if this helped at all.”
“It doesn’t help?”
“Nothing here I didn’t already know about. But that’s okay,” Sam said minus any enthusiasm at all. “It means I didn’t miss anything.” Sarah’s disappointment made him add, “We have the same problems the police do. I watched my father do this job for a long time before I started doing it myself. Sometimes things just fall apart. The trail goes cold. You chase your tail for weeks, or months, and it doesn’t accomplish anything. Sometimes,” he said softly, “you chase it for years.”
“And sometimes you never -?”
“Find an answer at all. Yeah. Like the cops.”
“How much trouble are you in, Sam? You and Dean.”
He went on looking at the list as if something useful would appear there - or as if his name and Dean’s would show up as one of Gianelli’s open cases. “There was a problem in Baltimore. The police found Dean kneeling next to the body of a woman, with her blood on him. They arrested both of us.”
“But they let you go?”
“It’s a long story. They already…Dean was already wanted for murdering two people in St. Louis.”
She didn’t ask “Did he do it?” Didn’t even look as if she was wondering privately whether he’d done it. She’d only been with Dean for a few hours last fall; other than that, she had only her conversations with Sam to use as criteria for judging Dean Winchester. That must have been enough, Sam thought. Enough - and she hadn’t even heard what he’d said about Dean back at the Marriott.
She hadn’t been the one who’d asked, “Does he know how much you love him?”
If it’d been a demon who’d talked to him at the Marriott, then it had some seriously weird kind of agenda.
“Maybe he feels trapped,” Sarah said.
Startled out of his reverie, Sam raised a brow, asking for more.
“Maybe he feels like he’s getting backed into a corner. You’re not just out on the road, fighting the good fight any more. Losing your dad, and knowing this demon is after you, and always looking over your shoulder because of the police…”
“It was never a good fight,” Sam told her. “Never.”
“Saving people?”
Dusk was settling around them, filling the inside of the car with shadows. “We help a few. But it never seems like enough. We couldn’t help your friend Evelyn. You don’t know how it feels, to get there too late. Or to get there and not know what to do. Or -“
It crept up on him: pressure at the back of his neck, sliding up into his skull. He winced and shook his head hard as if that would make it go away. Sarah looked at him with concern and rested a hand on his arm, but as the pain got worse he had to brush her hand away and shrink into the seat, head bent, eyes jammed shut.
“Sam?”
Light so bright it was agonizing flared into the blackness he was looking at. Where is this? Why can’t I see anything?
Is this what…
A cry of pain came up from deep inside his gut.
“Sam? Are you all right?”
So dark.
He felt motion, and some part of him understood that it was the car moving, that Sarah was taking him back to Dean.
* * * * *
It was cold, but not the kind of cold that made your nose run. Not sure how far out Daddy meant by “outside,” Dean went halfway across the lawn and stopped, his arms wrapped as tightly as they would go around the warm bundle of blankets that was Sammy. It wasn’t a game, he didn’t think; Daddy’s voice had been too serious.
Confused, Dean turned to look back at the house just as Daddy came running out the front door. What…? slithered through his mind as Daddy reached him, grabbed Dean and Sammy together up into his arms and kept running in long strides, almost to the edge of the lawn.
Something went whuuuuuumMMMPPP! behind them, something hot and pushing.
Daddy’s legs tangled and they went down, all three of them, Dean and Sammy underneath Daddy for a second and Sammy letting out a shriek that said he objected to being squooshed on the bottom.
Daddy lay very still for a second and Sammy’s shriek got louder.
“Daddy?” Dean ventured. “You’re hurting me.”
Then he thought, maybe Daddy didn’t hear him. It was very loud out here, and very hot in a way that wasn’t right.
Dean’s gaze went up, and up, to where the heat seemed to be coming from.
Fire?
“Daddy?”
Slowly, Daddy pushed himself around and crawled to his knees. He gathered Sammy into his arms, tucked the blanket tightly around him, then grasped Dean by the hand and helped him to his feet. By the time Daddy could stand up, people were coming out of all the houses in the neighborhood, some of them running, some of them pointing. Chris, who lived next door, scooped Dean up into his arms and pressed Dean’s face into his chest.
He smelled like Snuggle, Dean thought.
“Mary,” Chris said. “John, dear God, where’s Mary?”
Daddy didn’t say anything.
But Chris said, “Sweet Jesus,” in a voice that sounded like he was going to cry. With some difficulty Dean got his face out of Chris’s chest and turned so he could see his father.
Daddy was crying, big, shiny tears that ran down his face and dripped off his chin onto Sammy’s blanket.
“Daddy?” Dean murmured. “What…”
Sleep let go of him with a snap that made his head connect with the back of the pew. And skull smacking solid oak was never a good thing. “Shitfire,” he muttered, pushing himself up so he could sit with the now-throbbing side of his head cupped gently in his hand.
Sleeping in the pew hadn’t been a good idea to begin with. His back ached, his shoulder was protesting being jammed in an unnatural direction, and his left foot was asleep.
And those kids were staring at him, all three of them, like he was a sideshow freak.
“Quit it,” he grunted.
“They need you,” Chaz said.
“What? Who?”
“Your brother and his girl. They’re outside. He doesn’t look too good.”
He was on his feet an instant later, yelping when his weight landed on the still-asleep foot. The pins-and-needles burning made him limp until he was halfway down the aisle; when it stopped he broke almost into a run and hit the door with both palms, shoving it open.
Sam was sitting on the top step, face buried in his hands.
“Sammy?” Dean said.
Sarah stood arm’s reach from Sam, close to the railing. “It started outside the police station. He won’t talk to me.”
Nodding dismissively, Dean dropped to a seat beside his brother and wrapped a hand around Sam’s bicep. “Sammy? It’s okay. It’s me.”
“Dark,” Sam murmured.
Chapter 7 concludes here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/16744.html#cutid1