Fic: Serendipity (2 of 2) | WMC | Lindsay/Cindy | R
Title: Serendipity (conclusion)
Author: liz_estrada
Fandom & Pairing: Women’s Murder Club, Lindsay/Cindy
Summary & Author’s Notes: A recuperating Lindsay is drafted to squire around an actress doing research for a project. No show spoilers here, just thirteen thousand words of dorky, fannish jive written to kill time while the WGA fights the good fight. Tempo is sorta leisurely, since there’s no central case driving the action.
Rating: R (for language)
******
“Yes, I understand Ms. Paar and her guest are gone.” Cindy crowded the Zuma maître d' back against his podium. “But how long ago did they leave?”
His beady eyes locked on the steel cane gripped in her fist. “A few minutes. Five, perhaps.”
“Did anything seem wrong? You know - strange?”
“I know strange,” he said. “This was not strange. They seemed very… close. Physically.”
Cindy tried to imagine such a thing, but the picture wouldn’t coalesce. “That. Is not possible.”
The maître d' looked on her with pity. “Few things are impossible for those who pay with Amex Black. Please, I have patrons to attend.”
Cindy clenched her teeth and backed toward the door. She tried calling Lindsay’s cell; for the second time, the call went straight to voicemail. After adding that to the cane forgotten at their table, and the witness accounts of two waiters who saw a rangy brunette drunkenly leaning all over the pretty blonde actress as they exited, Cindy Thomas got a spooky, sick feeling. Hoping they’d gone back to the Hall, she lit out of the restaurant toward Vikram Roy’s car, parked two blocks away.
******
It felt like dancing on a conveyor belt, all the walking, with Griffin’s arms around her. Laughing over nothing. Whispering foreign words into her ear. Wetly kissing her neck.
To a casual observer, they must have looked like lovers, joined at the hip. Lindsay understood the ruse, and wanted to shout, to bite, to fall down - anything to attract some attention and disrupt whatever bad thing was happening. Her traitorous body would not comply. She moved where Griffin moved her, and was mostly quiet, her voice barely audible. She wanted her gun, now tucked down the back of Griffin’s jeans, but suspected she wouldn’t be able to hold it. Her hands felt alien and indistinct, like flippers grafted onto her wrists.
“What’d you give me?” Lindsay whispered, as they entered the garage elevator. It took a long time to get the words formed and out.
“It’s a custom time-release I cribbed from a German chemist. Think roofies fused with ecstasy, but vegan. Tastes great in coffee.” Griffin pressed her against the car’s back wall by her shoulders and grinned broadly, happy to elucidate. “It all breaks down to natural compounds in a few hours, so there’s no red light on a tox screen. Act One: The Marionette. Disorientation and extremity dissociation, lasting eight to fifteen minutes. Just enough time to set position.”
The elevator clunked its doors shut and began to climb.
******
Special Agent John Ashe, double-parked on the street, waited for the Mustang to exit the parking garage. He was at the tail-end of several unhappy minutes, which began after Lindsay Boxer crossed the street with an interloping blonde actress wrapped around her waist.
A recognizable redhead cutting through sidewalk crowds caught his notice. He cranked the engine and thought to follow. Boxer hated it when he got too close, but he couldn’t risk anything happening to her or her friends. A lover’s quarrel, pedestrian as it might be, could churn this peaceful day into a mess. He nosed the Crown Vic into the automated garage entry lane, took his ticket, and waited for the gate arm to rise.
******
Ding. Open doors, stumbling through the garage, belted down in the Mustang… Lindsay swept along like a branch in a flood. It was happening too fast - and to someone else - while she floated above and watched, helpless.
Griffin zip-cuffed Lindsay’s hands and feet. She took her badge and handcuffs, pulled up her pants leg and snatched out the .22 Magnum backup piece, popped the battery out of her phone, and dropped everything into a mesh bag on the floormat. Bound and stripped bare of all defense in twenty seconds flat, Lindsay was rightfully alarmed. Paar’s economy of movement signaled practice and expertise. She had done this sort of thing before, and gotten away with it.
“I’ve been studying you all morning,” Griffin explained, “and I have to say I’m disappointed. All those write-ups about the intrepid Inspector Boxer versus the depraved Kiss-Me-Not killer, then you win a throwdown with a seven-foot beast man? I thought you might be the one, that maybe you’d take a hard look at me and know that I was just… wrong. Shit, I had to drug you before you even let yourself think it.”
From the console came a gleaming Spyderco knife, half-smooth, half serrated. A brutal little instrument with a sideview like a gator’s head. Griffin fingered the serrations with the pad of a thumb, while her other hand smoothed over the cowrie shell necklace.
“I’m so tired of carrying this around. Hiding. My ego is such that I can’t just give myself up, you know? That would play like some wretched plea for attention. I need someone to dig me out, to see me, but it’s taking for-fucking-ever. Profilers, spies, marshals, cops... for ten years, I’ve put myself squarely beneath the law’s collective nose and no one smells eight rotting bodies on me? God, that’s depressing.”
“I think I’m finally ready to accept the why - see, there’s no such thing as a real-life Sherlock Holmes. You’re mostly just ordinary people, with personal issues compelling you toward this shitty line of work. It’s not your fault you don’t see me,” she mused, with a pensive smile. “Evil doesn’t cock around in bright plumage, either; evil looks like a youth minister. It looks like everyone. Monsters pass for average, trustworthy people, every day.”
“Now, in the quest to get caught, my basal failing is passivity - I’ll grow old and croak waiting for someone to link Missouri crowbars, New York hangings and California overdoses. In order for my luck to give out, I need to push it harder. A lot harder.” She pointed the knife, gestured back and forth as if it were merely a pen. “I mean, after you vanish, they’ll have to put me under a microscope. Maybe after a while, when they back away, they’ll finally distinguish a pattern beneath the noise. Like a stereogram.”
Lindsay’s head lolled impotently sideways. She felt intensely feverish and knew it for more than anger or fear. Sweat broke out under her arms, down her back, along her hairline. Griffin noticed. She untucked the hem of Lindsay’s shirt and laid a palm on her belly; heat pooled beneath her hand as if summoned.
“Act Two: The Human Plasma Ball,” she said. Her fingers tented and wandered, sparking spidery trails of acid warmth under Lindsay’s skin. “It gets so, so much better. You’re not even close to peaking. We need to leave soon, find some privacy for the really good part.”
Her hand retreated and rose to stroke Lindsay’s cheek, then steadied her head so their eyes met. “Look, you’re a decent person. You have great friends and, from what Jill and Claire said, a pretty solid new relationship. You still get along with your ex. You adopted an orphaned dog. You probably would have been a great mom. This is nothing personal.”
The grateful tears Lindsay Boxer fought down three times yesterday rolled free, now sour and hot. She knew all her recent good fortune came at a price, though she had not imagined payment coming due so quickly, or that the collector would take such innocuous form. No gunshot, no pursuit collision, no theatrical, fractured fairy-tale ending at the hands of a faceless ghoul. This was low-key and sneaky and so fucking pointless it made her want to explode; dying to foment the self-destruction of a gutless, hollow lunatic.
“I promise, there won’t be any pain - I don’t need that from you.” Griffin turned away and started the engine. “I really do wish you’d been the one.”
******
Just after hanging up with Claire, who nervously confirmed she hadn’t talked with Lindsay since they left the restaurant, Cindy heard an angry, throaty rumble echoing around the parking garage's eighth floor. The hair stood up on her forearms, up the back of her neck.
“Can’t be,” she said aloud.
The engine revved again and her mind’s eye conjured up Steve McQueen in a black turtleneck sweater. She threw Vik’s Subaru into park, opened the sunroof and stood up on the seat. Wind whipped through the garage, blowing hair across her eyes. Brake lights. There, just down and around the corner.
“Green Mustang. Jackpot.” She squealed the tires in reverse, and again in drive, lunging forward to block the Mustang’s rear exit path with the Subaru’s passenger door. She parked it and yanked up the emergency brake.
If nothing’s wrong, give Lindsay the cane and go back to work, she told herself. And if something is wrong?
As Cindy exited the car, her left hand clutched the cane and the right crept into her coat pocket. The Mustang’s horn blared once, like a warning shot, and Cindy spasmed like an exploding popcorn kernel. By that point, she was nearly hyperventilating.
“Stupid this is stupid I’m being stupid,” she whispered. She cleared her throat and tried to project her voice above the car engines. “Excuse me? Could you help me? Maybe? Please?”
Seconds ticked eternal as the Mustang growled and the brake lights glared. Cindy didn’t move. She tried to see inside the car, but couldn’t make out details in the gray shadows, only the familiar silhouette of Lindsay’s profile. She took a step forward and the brake lights blinked off; the driver’s door opened.
Out stepped Becky Huston from Into Each Life. Cindy knew a single, starstruck moment as Griffin Paar smiled at her… and she smiled back.
“Something wrong?” asked her high school idol, who carefully blocked Cindy’s view of the passenger seat, one hand behind her back.
Cindy’s heart rate rocketed. Something was very wrong. She took another step forward and held out Lindsay’s cane. “The maître d' at Zuma said you left this.”
Paar took a step forward as well. “Did he?” She looked around the deserted garage floor. “How did you find me? Way up here.”
“I was parked right up there,” Cindy pointed, working the doe-eyed innocent thing for all she was worth. “I saw you go in the restaurant and I went down… to get a picture? For my Facebook? But he said I missed you. And then… well, that’s pretty much everything up to now.”
Sharp blue eyes skimmed Cindy up and down, peeled the skin off her words. Paar smirked, cocked a hip; the hand behind her back shifted. “You must be the girlfriend.”
Busted. Just that fast. Cindy heard Jill Bernhardt’s voice in her head - worst. liar. ever. - and gulped down her nerves. If the Bambi routine wasn’t going to fly…
“Fuck it. Whatever! I have HAD IT with you, Lindsay!” she railed, yelling toward the silent, unmoving passenger. “Like it’s not bad enough you’re FUCKING JILL behind my back! This? Kissing some Hollywood whore in the MIDDLE of the goddamned street? LAST STRAW, BITCH!” She advanced on Griffin, edged just far enough around to catch a glimpse of Lindsay’s frantic, darting eyes, and it nearly broke her. Cindy dropped the cane at Griffin’s feet. “Last straw. Take her. Good riddance.”
Cindy spun back toward the Subaru. In her peripheral vision, she saw Griffin stoop to retrieve the cane, and she made her move.
The range is only fifteen feet, so gauge your distance best as you can, Lindsay had instructed just before Christmas, when the Kiss-Me-Not threats emerged.
She stopped twelve feet away. Pulled the TASER C2 from her coat pocket, aimed it at Griffin Paar, and fired.
If the probes get within two inches of skin, they make a circuit and zappo! Instant incapacitation.
Paar screeched and fell over, twitching. Her empty hands flailed and clenched. Lindsay’s 9mm pistol lay nearly under the back tire.
The cartridge only fires one set of probes, and the continuous charge lasts for thirty seconds. If you discharge this thing, you drop it and run like hell for help. Promise me. Run.
Cindy had promised, but she didn’t run. Her hands trembled as she held the TASER tight and picked up the pistol. Distantly, she heard the approaching shriek of tires on concrete.
She looked into the car and saw Lindsay bound hand and foot, clearly in an altered state. On the driver’s seat lay a folding knife; she picked it up and carefully cut off the zip cuffs. Time was running out fast. Thirty seconds for the continuous charge…
Worst case scenario. You discharge the probes at an attacker, but you can’t get away. If you can touch them with the leads on the C2, it works like a regular contact stun gun. Pops maybe fifty more times. Go for the head, the neck. Cook ‘em good.
Cindy laid the pistol in Lindsay’s lap. She took out her cell phone and dialed 911. Griffin Paar stopped thrashing around, groaned softly. Cindy knelt down and stabbed the stun gun toward her ass, delivering another scream-inducing shock. The 911 operator came on the line and asked what her emergency was.
She didn’t really know what to say. It was all a bit too surreal, and the words weren’t coming. Fortunately, Agent John Ashe of the FBI leaped from his car about then, surveyed the situation and slapped some cuffs on Griffin Paar. Cindy silently handed him her phone; he could deal with the bleating operator. She ducked back into the Mustang, sat down and cut the engine. She stared straight ahead, numb and vibrating at once.
Lindsay’s fingers uncurled from the butt of her gun. She flexed her hands a little; some small measure of control had returned, proving out Griffin’s efficacy timetable. She laid her left hand, palm up, on Cindy’s leg.
“Better late than never,” she breathed.
Cindy took her hand and crumbled into tears.
******
With resurgent muscle control came the slow return of her voice. Lindsay explained as much as she could to Agent Ashe, relaying all Paar had told her about previous crimes and locations, her desire for discovery, everything.
“You should go to the hospital,” he advised. “God only knows what she gave you.”
“She didn’t give me anything,” Lindsay insisted. “Because if she did, then anything she said to me would be written off as delusional bullshit. I'll say I have this anemia thing and it made me dizzy for a few minutes. She took advantage.”
He crossed his arms, looked askance. He couldn’t dispute her cagey logic. “They’ll ask why you didn’t take a drug test, just to rule it out.”
“I will, officially, in a few hours. Paar said this stuff breaks down fast, doesn’t leave a trace. Everything else she predicted is bearing out.” Lindsay couldn’t help smiling; inside, in secret, she felt absolutely euphoric. “Wanna see if she told the truth about that, too.”
Ashe gave her a slow, serious appraisal, then nodded. “I’ll back your play. Just let me know what you need.”
“Thanks.” She casually touched his shoulder and turned away.
He stood rooted to the spot, feeling the warmth of that simple touch all the way to his bones. In the back of his throat was a bitter hint of bile, a lingering resentment over lost opportunity.
******
In Vik’s Subaru, Cindy Thomas was pulling herself together again with tissues and Visine. She did not appreciate the whole déjà vu thing, especially when the turnaround was so ridiculously quick. It seemed universally unfair to schedule one traumatic, violent incident so close to another - padding things out with a little recovery time would be much more sporting.
Lindsay Boxer didn’t seem to be holding a grudge. Against the universe in general or anyone in particular. She dropped into the passenger seat, slammed her door and immediately leaned over to kiss Cindy’s jaw. Her ear. Her neck.
Cindy shrank away after the third kiss. “What is the matter with you? How are you not totally freaked out?”
“I don’t know. I’m tripping?” Lindsay - warm, glowing, and not a little sweaty - cupped the back of Cindy’s head. “People still say that, right?”
“Dennis Hopper, maybe. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”
“Positive. You’re too far away.” She looked side to side; her right hand fumbled noisily near the door. “Do these seats go all the way back?”
The redhead’s cherub face registered high alarm. “I’m calling Claire.”
“Tell her to come to my place. With a basic med kit and lots of blood testing supplies.”
She made the call and Claire, after a fairly loud articulation of stunned wrath, agreed to Lindsay’s terms. She also graciously agreed to play grapevine, relaying the news of the day to Jill and Tom.
That taken care of, Lindsay leaned in again and blindly plowed her face into Cindy’s hair. She breathed in deeply, her voice a low, contented purr.
“I love your smell. Makes me feel good. Like it’s about to rain and I’m running home.”
Cindy turned and kissed her - how could she not? Just once, lightly, then started the car.
“I love you,” she said. “Put on your seatbelt.”
******
After Cindy peeled out, John Ashe and Griffin Paar sat quietly in his car until the parking level cleared out. He addressed the rear view mirror, the narrow band of her reflection.
“Were you really going to kill her?”
She laughed, slumped in the backseat. “I want my lawyer.”
“No. We’re past that point.”
“What do you mean, NO? This is bullshit! Boxer came onto me! We were messing around in my car, and her jealous cunt girlfriend caught us and attacked me,” Paar improvised. “Anything else they might say is bunk to cover their asses - which will get cut crossways by a lawsuit. The very worst I can expect is community service, probation and rehab, so you and your stupid hair can just fuck off.”
Ashe tucked his chin down to hide a smile. “Lindsay said you’re ten years deep in the game. Is that true?”
“Did you not hear me say lawyer?”
“I’d like to know when you started killing.” His voice was benign, free of judgment. “You’ve requested counsel and I’ve continued to interrogate you, so anything you say now is inadmissible. Just between us - why do you do it?”
“In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, fucker. Lawyer. Lawyer. Lawyer.”
He chuckled softly and eyed the shiny tiger-stripe shell resting in the hollow of her throat. “I like your necklace. The cowrie is a clever little creature. He creates his shell from the outside in so his camouflage melds perfectly with his feeding grounds. Lives his whole life hiding in plain sight.”
“I know,” she said. Their eyes met in the mirror. “Keep screwing around with me and I will wreck you. Store security at Target, if you’re lucky.”
Ashe got the message. He turned halfway round, regarded Paar with undisguised scorn. “We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire? Ooh. Aren’t you something, with your stale, cryptic little palindromes.”
She said nothing, gave up only a faint smirk.
“I wish we had more time together,” said Ashe. He exited the car, yanked her out and slammed her against the back door. “You were going to kill her. What gives you the right? You’re no one to her. You’re nothing.”
Her eyes widened and focused hard on his contorted face - the roiling reverse image of her own placid madness. In that moment, she knew him, saw him, and felt the obscene urge to kiss his twitching, burst seam of a mouth. “Peek-a-boo,” she said, laughing at him.
He spun her around and hammered the back of her head with the side of his fist - a savage, precise blow that knocked her dizzy. He held up her weight by belt and jacket and they were running, toward the front of the car and beyond, toward the four-foot cement coping at the edge of the lot, toward the hundred-foot drop.
Ashe stopped short and gave a mighty heave. Griffin Paar cleared the coping by an inch and flew for a moment, unburdened and free, before the long, silent fall.
******
Lindsay Boxer knew she was home, in her bed, hugging her mutty border collie. This reassured her the room wasn’t actually upside down. Martha was a clever dog, but she had yet to defy gravity. Lindsay had never really been high before, not like this. A few weedy joints in college and the predictable mellowing influence of alcohol were child’s play compared to the intermittent swirling trance states brought on by Paar’s designer brain twister. Moments of lucidity came now and again, allowing her to take stock of the situation beyond her melted, sliding inner world. Sometimes, she heard voices.
Claire: Her vitals are stable and Ralph says the blood panels keep coming up normal. Whatever that little bitch gave her, there isn’t a test for it yet.
Tom: So there’s nothing - we just - wait for her to come down?
Claire: I don’t know what else we can do.
Tom: If Paar wasn’t dead, I swear I’d kill her myself.
Claire: I’d help you sink the body.
Sometimes, the room was quiet, and she could feel things. The pressure of a BP cuff on her arm, a thermometer peeking into her ear, a cool cloth across her forehead. Once, she woke to a familiar weight on her chest. After a ponderous, blind journey, her hand found the nape of a slender neck and combed fingers into pale, feathery hair. It was the best comfort she could offer, that touch, and the sound of her heart beating under Jill’s ear.
“She really dead?” Lindsay asked, after a time.
“Suicide. She got away from John and jumped from the parking tower.” Jill sat up, sniffed a couple of times. “You? Are not allowed out of the house. Like, ever again. You’re frikking jinxed.”
“Depends how you look at it.” Lindsay’s eyelids were heavy as wet sandbags. Prying them open took some doing. “How did she get loose?”
“By faking a seizure. She started thrashing around and John tried to help her.”
She raised up on her elbows, glanced around the dim emptiness. Faintly, she heard raised voices in another room. There was a thought, tickling and itching inside her skull, but Lindsay couldn’t get her nails into it just yet. “Stop. Using his first name. Please.”
Jill looked puzzled. “Why don’t you like him? He was totally sweet and concerned for you on the phone. He seems really nice.”
“So did Griffin Paar.” The itching subsided; Lindsay shut her eyes and her head hit the pillow like a wrecking ball.
******
When Lindsay woke up sober, the first thing she heard was Cindy’s close voice as she lay alongside, still and easy. Blackish twilight filled the bedroom windows.
“Tom tells me you have four months of accrued vacation time. Let’s go to Hawaii for a week,” she said.
Bleary and aching something ferocious from the neck up, Lindsay took a few seconds to think it over. Two people had tried to kill her inside two weeks, and both of them were now dead - let Kiss-Me-Not suck on that for a while. Riding out of Dodge on a winning streak seemed an excellent idea. “Okay.”
Cindy, who had expected at least a token objection, rolled with it. “Cool. I’ll rent us a house, someplace private. Hana, maybe.”
“A private house. Isn’t that kinda expensive?”
“My grandmother gave me some money when I turned twenty-five. It’s a lot. A lot of money.” Cindy went quiet, let that sink in. “You don’t seem hung up on stuff like that. I never mentioned it because it didn’t matter.”
True - they’d barely discussed their families and they never talked about finances. Lindsay processed the new info pretty quickly. “That’s… great? I guess. But you really shouldn’t spend it on - ”
“Yes, I should. I never touch it. I try to pretend it’s not there, but I’m giving myself permission and we’re doing this. This will be done,” Cindy decreed. “I’ll book the house and we’ll fly out Friday. Your prescriptions run out by then, so we can get blitzed and make it on the beach.”
Though her brain nearly ruptured with pain, Lindsay wheezed out a laugh. She smiled up at the ceiling and it didn’t cave in. If the universe, tilting her way again, wanted her alive on a Hawaiian beach with a gorgeous, hard-headed rich girl, who was she to argue?
“I never expected you,” she said. “I don’t deserve you.”
“Actually, you deserve better,” Cindy corrected. “But you’re stuck with me.”
Lindsay took her by the hand. “Then it’s a good thing I love you.”
Gracious in victory, Cindy Thomas did not scream hallelujah. Rather, she entwined her fingers with Lindsay’s and grinned at the ceiling, too.
“Well. It’s not like I gave you a choice.”
END