Never Again (& Other Lies We Tell Ourselves), Chapter 21
Title: Never Again (& Other Lies We Tell Ourselves), Chapter 21
Author: mm_thibault
Rating: T for Language and Implied Adult Content
Summary/Author's Note: Mary calls in a favor from an unlikely source and the rest of the team starts gets a clue as to what they're up against.
Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || Chapter 5 || Chapter 6 || Chapter 7 || Chapter 8 || Chapter 9 || Chapter 10 || Chapter 11 || Chapter 12 || Chapter 13 || Chapter 14 || Chapter 15 || Chapter 16 || Chapter 17 || Chapter 18 || Chapter 19 || Chapter 20
Last time in Never Again (& other lies we tell ourselves):
“Hello, Mike, it’s Mary. I need a favor.”
Mike Faber loved a favor, loved the nature of them. Most importantly, he loved having people owe him. It didn’t matter what he had to do for someone else, the bottom line was always that, in the end, they always were in his debt. So when Mary Shannon called with those words, he couldn’t help but be smug about it. She’d spurned him in Mexico, kicking him to the curb unceremoniously the morning after a perfectly lovely night of tequila and nakedness, leaving him with a week of nothing to do but hotel masseuses. In all, not the worst vacation ever, but certainly not the one he’d planned on.
“Kitten, how good of you to call. I knew you’d be back,” he said on a low chuckle. “They always come back.”
Her frustrated growl over the phone line was nothing new. He’d grown immune to it over their truncated vacation in Cabo. “No, that’s herpes.”
“Oh, such charm and wit. Why aren’t we still sleeping together?”
“Eh, it might have something to do with that lifeguard you banged in the cabana, but I could be reaching.” He heard the chime of an open car door and then the slam as she gunned the engine. “Your bloodwork came back from that ok, I trust?”
Surely she wasn’t still mad about that miniscule indiscretion. “You ask for favors by implying I have a venereal disease? I’m surprised that your one-man entourage hasn’t tutored you in manners yet.”
“Compared to being blown up or beheaded, you’re already faring substantially better than most of the men who’ve come into my orbit recently. Besides, Marshall’s not here. I’m on my own for the moment. Now, can we cut the bullshit and get to the favor?”
Mike sat up in his chair, uncrossing his ankles as he took his feet off the desk. Blown up? Beheaded? “What? No foreplay? I thought that was a woman's favorite part.” He continued the joke even though there was nothing humorous about her situation. A solo Mary was a lethal Mary, and he pitied whatever fool she had in her sights, because she didn’t miss. He woke up his computer and closed his game of solitaire.
“It is, just not with you. If you can’t give me what I need, then we’re done here.”
He heard her take the phone away from her mouth before she stopped speaking and knew he had to act quickly. “Wait! I’m here. What do you need from me?”
“Robert O’Conner formerly of the New Jersey field office. Your people. “
Whoa. “You want me to get you info on Special Agent Robert O’Conner.” While it did make it easier to find out info on the one hand, it was a whole new circle of hell if anyone found out he was researching one of his own. There were favors and then there were favors. “Are you serious?”
“If you only knew.” She chuckled but he could hear no humor in it. “I need you to do some backdoor research on O’Conner, everything you can dig up on him. Absolutely everything. I need a weakness to exploit and I need it yesterday.”
He refrained from commenting about giving her some backdoor action because he could tell she was in transit and he didn’t want her magically appearing at his door with a Howitzer and a grudge. “Wow, you want me to buy you naming rights to a star while I’m at it?”
“Hey, if you can’t do it…” Her voice full of disappointment and derision, a tone he’d come to know quite well from her.
He already had the computer up and running through as much info as he could pull on one Robert O’Conner. He had ways of remaining anonymous, for those times when he wanted to research fresh young interns without drawing too much attention, but this was the first time he’d used his powers for good. “What’s this? Robert and Maura O’Conner… interesting.”
“Maura. His wife?” She sounded eager and like she was shaking a cup of ice.
“What are you doing?”
“My Big Gulp is empty. Is that pertinent to your search?” Her sullen meanness could grow on a person, like gangrene.
“I put in O’Conner and got both names. Maura’s apparently his aunt, but looking at her picture, and her age, I’d say that was a convenient cover.”
“Cover for what?”
“Looks like she could be his mom.” Hell, he looked like he could be Mary’s brother, but Faber didn’t want to rattle her cage any more than necessary.
“Go on…” The sudden brightness in her tone was chilling.
“What are you going to do with this info?” He suddenly needed to know like his very soul was in peril from it.
Mary was quiet for a long time, subjecting him to a lot of road noise and the occasional lyric from a Fleetwood Mac song. “At the risk of repeating myself, is that pertinent to your search?” She enunciated each word slowly, like she was calmly firing torpedoes into an enemy submarine.
He knew right then he preferred Bombastic Mary to Professional Killer Mary, either way, they both knew where he lived. “Not at all. May I ask where you’re going?”
He heard a snort followed by a quiet laugh that stiffened his spine. “East, my friend. I’m going to solve a problem.”
East…. Like to Miami, Maura’s home base, according to her file. “I’d like to go on record as saying that whatever you have planned, it can only end in tears.”
“Duly noted. Now put your conscience back in the basement where you normally keep it chained to the wall and find me what I need.”
He smirked. “Demanding little minx. I don’t seem to recall you being half this demanding in bed.” He went back to the humor because hearing the naked viciousness of her voice was really starting to concern him.
“The last thing that I demanded was that you get the hell off me and out of the hotel room. This Maura have an address?”
/\/\/\/\/\
“So then the cartel isn’t responsible for the bombings?” Stan was wearing a path in the floor of the kitchen from the sink to the table and back again.
“That is the direction the investigation seems to be taking.” Eleanor got up from her chair and collected all their breakfast plates. She paused, shifting the dishes to one hand, and laid her palm on Marshall’s forehead. “You’re warm. Take your meds and go lay back down.”
Marshall appreciated the motherly touch, but shook his head. He wasn’t going anywhere until they figured out what they were going to do about his missing partner. “Someone went to a great deal of trouble to make the bombing look like a Sinaloa hit. What about the beheadings? Are they related to the cartel or the bombing or are they separate as well?” He looked over to where Bobby was hunched over a pad, taking copious notes as they talked.
“All looks to be tied together, but not to the cartel. This is personal, revolving around Mary.” Eleanor put the dishes in the sink and ran water over them before returning to the table. She pushed the pill bottles towards Marshall with an expectant look.
“Do we have any word yet on your car?” Stan turned to Bobby. “I mean, don’t you guys lojack your fleet?”
Bobby snorted but didn’t look up from his writing. “Are you kidding? The FOP voted that down years ago. GPS tracking interferes with certain folks with brass on their collars and their need for on-duty booty.” The whole room turned and blinked at him in shock. “What? It’s not like I’m lying.”
“Great, so we have no idea where she could be headed and she has no protection.” Marshall gave in to Eleanor and the hairy eyeball that she had been giving him and took his pills. He knew he had about fifteen minutes before the effects rendered him incapable of contributing meaningfully to the case.
Stan’s phone rang, bringing the room to a standstill. The conversation was quick, and too quiet for the rest to hear, though the way his shoulders hunched and he rubbed the back of his neck, it couldn’t have been good. As soon as he hung up, he had four words for them, “Mary’s ex-fiancé is dead.”
Before Marshall could put his feelings into words, his phone rang. No one but Mary had the number and he scrambled to answer it, only the voice on the other end wasn’t hers. “Hello, Faber.”
Take it away, papillongirl!