[Fic] The Mangoes and Limes Job (2/2)
(Part one and header information here!)
The Mangoes and Limes Job
(part two)
It's easier than it should be for Parker to slip into the hotel.
There was a time four years ago that she would have considered doing something similar for completely opposite reasons.
That part of her brain is still active, whirring in the back, plotting out a perfect plan. While the staff is busy with being taken hostage, certain things would probably be left unguarded. Like the manager's discretionary fund safe. Hotels like the Back Bay always held at least three hundred thousand dollars in cash for... unsavoury incidents.
Sophie's told her before of how she used to make an easy million by finding a more reliable Grifter (not that Grifter really came in many varieties of reliable: before Sophie, Parker thought they only came in 'will stab you in the back' or 'will wait for you to turn around before stabbing you' varieties) and going half on a disturbance scam. The Grifter pretends to be a millionaire. Sophie pretends to be a hooker who's been attacked by them. The hotel manager pays her fifty thousand dollars to sign a document saying she'll not report it to the cops and bring the hotel's name into disrepute.
Parker's held her tongue more than a thousand times, because it really is much easier just to set a fire in the lobby and then crack the safe. You don't risk getting stabbed and you take way more money. Hotel managers, usually desperate to keep their jobs, just explain the money away easily, as if a disturbance scam has taken place instead of a simple theft.
Parker of the past would have climbed up one of the neighbouring buildings, grappled across, found an empty room, and either gone down the elevator shaft or maybe taken tools and cut downwards through the floor itself to get down a floor to avoid the guys on the emergency stairwell. Then she'd have grabbed the money from the safe, and gotten back out before anyone knew she was there.
Crime scenes in progress were sometimes the best opportunities for theft you could get. It was like some of her best pickpocket techniques. Distraction. Make the eye go one way while your hands are going the other. Parker thought it was magic the first time Archie showed her. Then he showed her how, taking the magic away. And then she learned how to do it even better than he could, and learned that when others took magic away... sometimes she could bring it back.
She still remembers the job where she was Nate's magician assistant fondly.
Sophie's been teaching her about that. That sometimes when you learn a lesson, sometimes you get to practice it literally too, and vice versa. Her pickpocket hands move in the same way as a magician's hands do, only this way, working Nate's way, the magic she creates is better than what real magic might do.
Seeing the face of someone who they've helped, putting that emotion into their hearts and expression onto their faces...
Parker's pretty sure of where the team's strengths lie. She can steal anything concrete, anything real. Hardison can steal ideas, and money that's not real, just numbers. Eliot steals your breath or your consciousness. Sophie steals your soul. Nate steals their desire to use these techniques for anything but good.
Together, they steal from bad guys and give it to good guys. It doesn't mean they're good guys themselves. Parker likes to think of herself as... Well, it's just like with her pickpocketing. She used to provide a diversion, something to distract the mark while she stole from them. And now she is a diversion-diverting success to its rightful owner.
Although they're all picking up each other's skills, Parker's Grifting is shady at best. She can't pick and change identities as a whim, and needs to fall back on a handful of carefully crafted personas that are shallow and flimsy enough in a pinch without Sophie in her ear.
She doesn't have anyone in her ear. She hadn't wanted anyone's voice in her head on this date with Hardison. Her own voice is confusing enough.
So she has to go with a persona she's played before. One where she won't be seen as a threat to the hostage-takers. One where she can get close enough and be enough but not too much of an ass to get to be the one to make the list.
Drunken socialite it is, then.
It doesn't take long after Parker's stashed some hotel stationery up her shirt for a man with a balaclava and gun to find her. He barks something into his walkie-talkie, and another man shows up and manhandles her towards one of the larger halls.
"Woah," Parker says, as the man pushes her roughly through one of the swinging double doors, "hands off the merchandise, buddy, I'm a Laughlin, of the Maysville Laughlins, don't you know what that means?"
Her eyes scan the hall quickly. Ten guys in here. One up near a window with a rifle. The side of the building facing out on where Hardison was. Fifty-four hostages sat around tables. One guy clearly in charge. No balaclavas in here. There's definitely some sort of political or moral reason for this, then. Some other reason that wanting money. Parker swallows. Peggy's on a table near the guy in charge. She looks terrified. She's right to be. If the hostage takers don't expect to get out alive... Then they don't expect the hostages to live.
"We got a new one," the man holding Parker says.
"Well thank you Captain Obvious," Parker slurs, turning around and poking him in the chest. The guy yanks out his gun.
"Gowen, no," the guy in charge barks. The guy-Gowen-narrows his eyes. Parker eyes him smugly. "Get her seated and go back to patrol. There could be more wandering tourists."
Gowen mutters something.
"You in charge of this shindig?" Parker says, whirling on her feet and spreading her arms and heading closer to him. She mentally clocks his appearance like he's a shopping list. American accent with faint Canadian twang. Dark eyes. Nearly six foot. Thick hair. Scar through left eyebrow. Distinctive scar of a bullet wound on his neck. "'cause I've got com- com- replaints? Yeah, some of those. I paid money. Real live money, fella and I'm not made of money, I'm made of fleshy blood stuff. Zombie food. That's me. So I paid money and I want it back, I don't want to have a gun pushed in my face, and-"
"Shut up or I'll do more than point it in your face," the main guy says, cocking his gun and pointing it at her. Parker shuts up, stat. These guys know how to hold their guns. Obviously some sort of military background. Guys who were trained to hold guns knew you didn't point at something you weren't willing to shoot.
It's why Parker had felt super jumbly seeing Nate point that gun at Dubenich. But he didn't really know the gun rule. Eliot did. It's why he broke them into pieces, flung them as far away as possible. Eliot knew the gun rule better than anyone, it was clear in his eyes.
Pushing her luck, Parker does a self-indulgent, melodramatic twirl and manages to land in a seat just next to Peggy. She smiles widely at Peggy and doesn't wink, because Gowen is glowering over at her from the door, and Parker doesn't like provoking men who have guns too much.
Especially in scenarios where she's had to leave her taser behind.
Parker looks around, clocks the numbers and the layout of the room, mentally notes the best position for her and Peggy should wild shooting start (under the table, and then wait for a lull-there's a heavier banquet table they should be able to tip and hide behind if they have maybe 10 seconds of quieter gunfire.)
While the main guy is distracted talking to one of the other guys, Parker slides out the hotel stationery, a small pad saying Welcome to the Back Bay Hotel and looks around. Just like she suspected, the Caipiroska cocktails were for here. Peggy's mentioned before how she's been learning to make cocktails for her fancier catering contracts.
Parker carefully starts sliding her hands over the tablecloth toward the nearest glass of Caipiroska. A lime, cut neatly into quarters, is exactly what she's looking for.
"What are you doing?" Peggy hisses.
Parker frowns at her. "Spy stuff," she murmurs, after a moment, and snags one of the glasses.
Just in time for the main guy to turn around and glare at them, probably because Peggy spoke. Parker picks up the glass defiantly and takes a huge swig. The vodka burns down the back of her throat, but she just about manages to hold in the cough that her unprepared body wants to let escape.
She's been pretending to be drunk, after all. Looking surprised at the burn of the vodka would raise the guy's suspicions. Parker thanks Hardison mentally again for the sandwiches. The butter should line her stomach, and stop the amount of alcohol she's mentally preparing herself to drink from affecting her mentally.
The main guy looks across at his second-in-command and says something too quietly for any of them to here. But Eliot's been teaching Parker how to lip-read.
Make that drunk blonde write the list of demands, he tells the other one. Our fingerprints won't be on it and she's much too stupid to put any sort of secret message on.
Parker hides her smile and looks up petulantly when the guy comes over and snatches one of the hotel pads from the table that Parker dropped. He eyeballs her suspiciously, flicking through the pads, and ripping out a random sheet that he lifts to the ceiling, squinting at it through the light, as if somehow Parker's written a secret message on it.
It's blank. Of course it's blank. When Parker had access to the stationery, she didn't know the information she wants to smuggle out. The guy's a complete idiot for checking now.
He doesn't sniff the paper. If Parker takes her time, this is going to work.
No one expects a drunk person to write fast.
"You write what I say," the guy says. His voice doesn't have the same accent as the guy in charge. This one's from somewhere Southern. Parker's not as good with accents as Sophie is. She makes a mental note to ask Sophie to teach her how to recognise them, and tries not to smile at the feeling she gets when thinking something like that.
Having someone in her life that she can turn to on a moment's notice is still something that feels to Parker something like a miracle.
"Write what I say and only what I say," the guy says again, and Parker squints and grabs for one of the pens.
The guy snatches that from her and eyeballs it madly too.
Parker does her best not to look smug. Bad guys didn't trust smug people. Smugness steps too far into the territory bad guys want as their own.
She holds the smugness deep inside, instead. There's a lot of it to hold in. She's smug that she has an Eliot and a Hardison to learn from. She's smug that she's going to get out of here and get to go off with them, and not off to prison. She's smug that she knows a way to get a message outside without the bad guys noticing.
The bad guy hands the pen back, and Parker holds her smugness deep, deep down. He's an idiot. Because, after all, it's not the pen she plans to hack.
Jack Hurley wouldn't count himself as a clever man.
He thinks once upon a time he was, and maybe the alcohol drew it all away, like water spiralling down a drain. Sucked all the cleverness right out of his pores until all that was left was good will and a demon on his shoulder.
That's what all his AA programs since have told him. Alcohol wants him to screw up. Alcohol wants him to mess up everything good in his life, because then, if he hit rock bottom, he'd turn to alcohol as the last thing in his life. Alcohol wants Hurley to fall.
So Hurley's been doing his absolute best by Peggy. He's been treating her right. He's been going to AA. He's been trying to be as smart as he can be, considering he'd ruined most of his brains by years of alcohol abuse. He loved Peggy as much as he could, and always treated her like a lady, and she loved him too.
Sometimes it was a hard lesson that it didn't matter if you did your best, sometimes the world tried to take from you anyway, and it was how you coped with that afterwards which proved the kind of man you were.
Nathan Ford taught him that, if nothing else.
Still, Hurley's been working so hard at trying to roll with the theory that if you work hard and work as smart as you can, you get to know the good things that happen happen because of you. So it's really hard not to see this bad thing as his fault too.
Because bad things did sort of happen to him a lot.
It's thoughts like that which used to lead him to the bottom of a bottle.
Even now, his fingers itch to be holding a thick bottomed glass. So he goes for coffee instead. Cups and cups of it. Hot, strong and with enough sugar in to murder several small animals. Holding the coffee gives him something to do, and on the bonus side he can pretend he's a cop. Heh.
Hurley's so lost in his own thoughts he doesn't even notice that the precarious public bench he's perched on dips when someone sits next to him.
He only sees the FBI agent when he turns to pick up the extra pack of sugar he dropped earlier.
"Hi," Hurley says, because that's the kind of guy he is. "You're an FBI agent too, right?"
The FBI agent smiles somewhat ruefully. "You're not really supposed to know Hagen and Thomas are FBI."
"I won't tell anyone," Hurley says. He thinks about it. "I don't really have anyone to tell." He thinks about it some more. "The only person I have is in that hotel." The FBI agent's eyes widen. "The caterer," Hurley tags on, sadly, and the agent's eyes soften. "I'm Jack Hurley, by the way. There might be files on me, but I swear to the lord, it's all hyped up madness. I've only ever tried to do good-it's not my fault a nun used me to smuggle drugs over the border."
"Uhhhh," the agent says, making a sort of strangled noise. Hurley gets that a lot from authority figures. Peggy says it's because he over-shares, but one thing Hurley learned from rehab-from Rose and Tom's examples, actually-is that if you keep it all inside, like a bottle, at some point life will shake you so hard you just fizz over and you can't control it when that happens. "I'm Agent McSweeten. You can call me Todd."
"Hi, Todd," Hurley says, as brightly as he can manage. It's not his usual brand of brightness, but considering it feels like his heart has been taken hostage by a boa constrictor, he's sort of cool with the amount he manages. "I'm normally a much happier guy. But the idea of my Peggy in there, and all those guns..." He shudders like it's winter, even though Boston's been warm all day. Even though night's settling down, calm and deep blue around his shoulders, it's not bad.
Then again, Hurley's drunk enough hot coffee to heat a whole small shack, like the one he and Mr. Tacos shared for a few months while he sobered up. That's where he met Sister Lupe. Even though Hurley knows the hopefully-maybe-probably-not-a-nun played him for a fool, Hurley hasn't even found it in him to regret his two years in the sun down there-until now. Those two years he spent four and a half thousand kilometres from where Peggy lived, and thus he wasted two years where he could have already found her.
Those twelve months, he could have been with Peggy. And now it feels like completely wasted time.
"I know how you feel," Agent McSweeten-Todd-says. Hurley looks at him, fully intending to disbelieve him, because how could anyone be feeling like he was feeling? Like he would rip his skin off with his hands if it meant getting Peggy back safe. Like he could throw himself in front of a thousand bullets if it meant saving her. Like he was the most useless person on the planet because he was stuck out there while she was in danger in there. He intends disbelief, but Todd says, with heartbreaking sincerity, "I've got someone in there too."
Todd's gaze is fixed solidly on the building. Hurley's giant heart leaps. In this, he has found someone who is twinning his emotions exactly.
He reaches out and pats Todd's shoulder commiseratively. Todd chokes a little, and sends him a watery smile.
Peggy always said he got a bit too enthusiastic with his sympathetic back pats.
Hurley swallows down a thousand feelings, and stares back at the building.
He feels like he's going to be waiting forever. And then the brick sails out of one of the small windows, and all hell breaks loose.
Convincing the FBI and their SWAT team that the brick with a piece of paper wrapped around it is, in fact, just a brick with a piece of paper wrapped around it is surprisingly difficult. Even with the knowledge firm in everyone's head that the bad guys are going to start shooting hostages if their demands aren't met within two hours.
Hardison, Taggart and McSweeten crowd around it as soon the good guys with the guns back off from it and declare it safe.
"As I suspected," Hardison says, pointing at the demands. "These are half impossible with the time limit."
"So it's someone in there that they want the convenient excuse of shooting," Taggart says, with a heavy sigh. "So they're likely to be the first target even if we go in blazing."
"Our best shot is to know what's going on in there," McSweeten says, and stares hard at the building. Like he could read Parker's mind if he stared long enough.
Keep trying, Hardison thinks. Even with her there in front of you, and answering your questions, her mind is a jigsaw of the best kind. She's a hundred lost semi colons in code. I'll never know her 100%... but you won't ever get to know her even 1%.
And nobody will ever know her if she doesn't come out of there.
But that's not something I'm going to think about. That's what Agent McSweeten might be thinking about Agent Hagen. But it's not Hagen in there. It's Parker, and she can take care of herself.
He thinks of what was on his netbook internet history. He thinks of Caipiroska and the limes in them. He thinks of Parker saying, earlier, "sometimes pyromania can be useful. You never know when you'll need a fire."
He thinks of the lighter in his backpack.
Hardison smiles at them, slow and even, picks up the paper, and says, "We already know."
When the SWAT team moves in, Parker's prepared. She drops and rolls with Peggy, and it's all over in less than thirty seconds. The air tastes of fire and gunpowder, but all Parker can smell is the lime on her fingertips.
The lime juice she used to draw a diagram of the hall, and mark where the guys with guns were, and the victims. With the applied heat of the lighter, the carbon in the lime juice will have shown them the message.
From the fact only the gunmen are dead, Parker knows her message got through.
When Hardison follows through into the rubble, even though it's not fully cleared by the SWAT team, Parker doesn't care that anyone could be watching. She throws herself at him and he catches her, stumbling into the wall and laughing a little.
She straightens up and pulls back. "I used your eye problem to find out that the lime would do that," Parker tells him. She wonders for a second if someone normal would say thank you or I'm so glad to see you or you make my chest feel funny in a good way.
"I know," Hardison tells her. "And one day the message will get through to y'all that clearing your internet history doesn't mean nothin' to me."
She squints at him, but it's clear he knows-she meant him to look.
Parker wants to hold onto Hardison for a little longer. He doesn't look too opposed to the idea. But she has something to do first. She goes over to Peggy and extracts her from the rubble, guiding her outside to Hurley.
Outside in the bright light of multiple Boston streetlamps and the flashing lights of police cars and ambulances, Hurley staggers up from the bench and looks like maybe he got shot too. Except he's crying, so Parker worries that he's sad, until Peggy lets out a cry and buries herself in Hurley's chest, her fingers clenching, and sobbing about how happy she is and how scared she was.
"And it was Alice that saved me," Peggy says, when she finally pulls away. "Alice and all the SWAT team."
"Oh," Hurley says, "I'd like to meet Alice to say thank you, then."
"Sure," Peggy says, and points to Parker, "she's right there. Alice, I'd like you to meet my boyfriend, Jack Hurley."
"Uh," Hurley says and adds, tentatively, "Parker Alice-Rose Special Agent Hagen?"
Parker pats him on the shoulder. Hurley winces. Maybe she shouldn't pat so hard. "Close enough," she tells him.
"You know her?" Peggy asks, squinting at Hurley. "How do you know a spy?"
"Ma'am," Agent McSweeten interrupts, "we don't use that word." He means that it's the CIA that are spies, but Peggy obviously interprets it as spy talk and she looks at him, suitably impressed.
"Agent McSweeten," Parker says. "A quick word?"
McSweeten nods, his cheeks going pink, and Parker takes him a short distance away.
"Agent Thomas doesn't look too happy at me monopolising your time," McSweeten says, almost jokily. "Taggart said something about him having a crush on you, but if you ask me, I think it's because Taggart's a little soft on Thomas. Don't tell Thomas I said so."
The idea burns Parker's stomach a little. The last time she felt this, she smashed a beer bottle in one hand. She doesn't have anything to smash right now. That's probably a good thing. She has the oddest sensation it might be Taggart's skull that she snaps between her fingertips. "Um. About Agent Thomas and me."
McSweeten looks instantly alarmed. "Are you okay?"
"Oh. Sure. It's just... we're getting transferred." Parker pulls a face.
McSweeten's face slackens, and his eyes go a bit moist, like Nate sometimes when they're on a con and someone is called Sam. "Where?" he asks, his tone low and serious.
"Protocol stipulates I can't tell you," Parker says, "You know that."
McSweeten swallows and smiles, but he looks sad. "Right. I'm sorry."
Parker wonders why he's apologising. Maybe in the FBI world, transfers meant a demotion. "It's okay," Parker says. "Thomas is pretty good at looking after me. Although... I think I spend longer looking after him."
"You could stay," McSweeten blurts. And then shuffles, looking embarrassed. "I mean. Your bureau work skills are highly transferable. I'm sure there are any number of places here in Boston that would hire you as a consultant."
It must be just the polite thing to say to someone who's moving, or something. Parker doesn't quite get all these social conventions. "Disneyland is nearby," Parker says. "I'm sure there's lots of terrible crime happening there. You can't trust mice, y'know."
"Right. Right." McSweeten idles a little, and shoves his hands in his pockets. "Well, maybe I'll see you there, sometime." He doesn't sound like he believes it, but... it sounds like he wants it.
Maybe too much.
Sophie's always telling her to put herself in someone else's shoes , and Parker always thinks well, Sophie's really addicted to shoes so of course her advice would be something like that, but she wonders now if Sophie doesn't mean... pretending to be someone else. If she was McSweeten, in McSweeten's shoes, and Hardison was telling her he was moving to Portland without her...
She thinks of the haiku. She thinks of the expression on McSweeten's face.
She thinks of all the things she could say that could hurt him less, but in the end... Maybes, hopefullys, probablys... They could hurt more in the long run.
"I don't think we'll see each other again," Parker says. She swallows down a weird lump that appears in her throat. "I wish you and Taggart all the best though." She reaches out, and pats his elbow-having learned her lesson, it's a ghost-soft gesture.
She doesn't know why she bothered holding back. His face looks like she hit him hard anyway.
Parker turns, and looks across to where Hardison is watching her, and thinks, soft but certain, and warm like the best kind of rush, that she's done the right thing letting McSweeten know they had no chance.
Because maybe it's time to let Hardison know for sure that they're not a maybe, or a hopefully, or a probably.
Parker's quiet when Hardison finally makes some techno-babble excuse for them to skedaddle. He spins it to Taggart that if he writes the report as if it's just him and Todd behind it all, well, a promotion is more likely.
McSweeten babbles something back about promotions meaning transfers to wherever they want. Hardison just smiles and nods, and backs out of there with Parker, Hurley and Peggy in tow.
They walk Hurley and Peggy back to Peggy's apartment, and then they make the slow walk back to the hotel suite Nate acquired for the team's last week in Boston.
"Man," Hardison says, "I won't have anyone tell me I don't take my women on interesting dates."
"Interesting use of the plural there," Parker says, shoulder-blocking him a little. Hardison takes it, winking at her.
"I'm just relieved you're okay," Hardison says. He looks straight ahead, unable to look her in the face as he admits, "My heart when I saw you go in there without a plan..."
"I knew what I was doing," Parker says. She pauses, and looks at him until he stops and turns to look at her. "I knew you'd get me out, whatever you had to do. And no one died."
"So I don't have to make that museum-replica mausoleum tonight," Hardison says. "Good to know." He nods and starts to walk again. Parker follows, like she's not entirely sure of herself.
"Earlier in our date," Parker says, a little rushed. "I didn't forget. About the burial."
Hardison swallows. His hands feel weird. He thinks about her body language when she said it before, her back straightening... He thought it looked like guilt. He thought it had been guilt for forgetting. Not guilt for bringing up a hurtful subject deliberately.
He must be shaking, because Parker wraps his hand in hers and forces him to pause. He looks down at her, unsure of what she's going to say, but letting her have the space to say it regardless. "I was just... checking."
"Checking?"
"Sometimes I wake up and remember it. Remembering you, buried underground and you sounded so scared and you've always been strong for me. And I thought I'd lost you, so..." She trails off, and then looks up at him, hard. "If you're going to be with me, you're going to have to cope with this. That sometimes I push. Prod. Shake. Because sometimes, sometimes even when you're feeling bad with me, the point is..." Parker pulls back, and her eyes look a little red. "The point is you're with me."
"I'm always with you," Hardison says.
She huffs, turns her face away a little. "Yeah," she says. "People always say that."
Hardison swallows. The tone in her voice is muffled pain, and Hardison's heart resonates with that so sharply he can almost taste it. He's hit with a desire that burns-a need for her not to feel that, not to feel she has to sound like that. Not to have suffered so much in her past for it to be colouring her even now.
"Parker," he says, earnest, slow. "I don't care where I am. Whether I'm a step away or a million miles away or scattered across space in a burning goddamned rocket." He leans in and touches one finger to her temple. "Everything I've ever told you is in there. And everything I've ever felt for you-"He takes her hands, pushes them to his own chest. "This always goes with you. Whenever. Forever. Close your eyes."
"What? No-"
"Trust me."
She does.
"Can you hear me?"
His voice is so close.
"Yes," she says.
"And now?"
"Fainter, but yes."
"And now?"
"Stronger. Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"You sound so far away. But... yes."
"Are you sure? Answer carefully. Yes? Probably? Maybe?"
"Always," Parker says, and means it. She opens her eyes, and Hardison is close to her.
"Always," he repeats.
Everything seems to make sense, all at once, all at the same time. Her universe is this small space of sidewalk, with Hardison's hand on hers, and his voice in her ear, so close she might remember it for forever and ever.
Oh. "I believe you now," she says, and Hardison's smile is like the sun.
They get back to the hotel suite a little later. Nate and Sophie are bickering over a flyer from Sophie's play. There doesn't seem to be any heat in the argument. Eliot's polishing one of his swords in the corner. Parker goes straight to the small kitchenette and pours them both some cereal while Hardison turns on the TV.
"You two get up to anything nice?" Sophie asks, coming over and snatching some of Hardison's Fruit Loops. She knows like they all do not to steal anything from Parker's bowl. It doesn't matter if it was your cereal to begin with. Once it's in Parker's bowl, it's hers, full stop. Sophie leans back and eats it like popcorn. Hardison squints at her, but isn't properly peeved. He's too full of thoughts about Parker to find anything too annoying. The glow will fade, probably when Eliot opens his mouth and says something, but for now he's revelling in it.
"Oh, you know," Parker says. "Mini-golf. Sandwiches."
"We saw Hurley and Peggy," Hardison adds. "They say hi."
"Basically nothing," Parker says.
"Sounds enthralling," Eliot says. Hardison squints, his good mood already starting to evaporate.
The news comes on, blaring about the incident at the hotel.
"Aw," Sophie says, "damn. Hostages at a hotel are a perfect distraction to pulling a disturbance scam."
"You wouldn't even need the disturbance," Eliot says, philosophically.
Sophie and Eliot start to show-off about all the disturbance scams they've been part of, swapping horror tales. Sophie explains about a pair of shoes she broke once. Eliot explains how he was once the hooker. On TV, footage of the SWAT team moving in on the hotel plays, along with a fuzzy image of McSweeten and Taggart.
"Sure," Nate says, leaning in close to Parker and Hardison, "basically nothing."
Parker smiles at him, winks at Hardison and agrees, "It was sort of everything."
And if Hardison were to pick a top one hundred list of things for Parker to say to him on a date, well... that's pretty much at the top of that list.