Fic: Harmless Observation 5/?, Reese/Fusco
It’s a few weeks after the incident and things are still bad, which is the best he could have hoped for, under the circumstances. Things could be much worse, after all. They do see each other on rare, sober occasions, but it’s cold and painful and nobody knows what to say. They stick to the basics: who needs what from whom by when. Reese doesn’t come up to Fusco’s apartment and Fusco doesn’t ask him to. They don’t fight; they don’t joke; they don’t flirt. Reese maintains a respectful distance of about four feet at all times, and it’s not getting any smaller.
This, Fusco thinks, can only be a good thing. But he feels like he’s losing out, all the same. More and more often, he catches himself wanting to close the gap between them.
He doesn’t get that itch anymore, that feeling like he’s being watched. But it doesn’t mean anything. One thing he’s figured out since this awkwardness began is that he isn’t really that good at knowing when he’s being tailed. Reese just wanted him to know.
He wanted him to feel safe.
He thinks maybe they both need help.
***
Fusco doesn’t want to do this hands-on kind of work again, but he’s got an understanding that this is just how it has to be. Someone has to get close to HR. If that means sitting idly by, letting something awful happen on the other side of the door he’s guarding so that one day it’ll never have to happen again, well, he can do that. He doesn’t have to like it.
A savage crack of bone on metal and an agonized wail slips through the locked door and echoes off the walls and ceiling of the warehouse, and Fusco flinches and clenches his hands on his knees.
The plainclothes detective sitting in the metal folding chair across from him grins. “Delicate constitution?” he asks. “Come on, guy, I heard you’d been doing this since the Bush administration.”
The detective’s name is Novak. Fusco doesn’t really know Novak that well, outside of the fact that he works Vice, he’s in HR, and he’s not even trying to hide it. That’s got to be a five hundred dollar watch peeking out of Novak’s cuff. The suit’s more subtle, but it makes him look more like a hitman than most of the hitmen Fusco knows. And Fusco knows a few.
Fusco’s inclined to go on not knowing Novak, because if Fusco was in the habit of making snap judgments about people based on a very brief acquaintance (and he is), he’d say that Novak’s a skinny, vicious, mean little fucker who wouldn’t know loyalty if it popped him in the kneecap. Even when he was still on the take for real, he wouldn’t have wanted a guy like Novak anywhere near him. Guys like him make bad situations worse.
But Fusco has been doing this since the Bush administration, and he knows what he’s doing, and he knows that he needs to be friends with Novak. Fusco has been infiltrating this organization on years and years’ worth of loyalty and good faith. He’s a lousy liar and he’s never been able to completely stop whatever he’s thinking from showing on his face plain as day. But he’s got his reputation.
He’s Stills’ ex-partner.
Simmons’s friend.
He’s the most loyal son of a bitch you’ve ever met.
He’d never snitch.
The guys in HR who know Fusco, the ones who are his friends, or friends of friends; they know this. Novak doesn’t. Fusco barely knows the guys who are behind the door, making some poor son of a bitch scream and cry. Fusco’s only here because Simmons wanted someone he can trust looking in on this, which means all Fusco’s got to protect him right now is the secondhand word that Simmons thinks he’s OK. This is not enough protection for Fusco’s tastes. This makes him nervous. This makes him vulnerable.
Novak is watching him expectantly. Fusco has to answer.
“Never really got used to it,” he says, allowing a small smile. “The noises, you know? It always sounds worse than it looks.”
Novak shrugs. “I don’t get that. Never bothered me, not any of it.”
Of course it doesn’t bother you. Why would it? It’s not your face getting pounded in.
His smile holds steady. He’s getting better at this. “Some people are just made for it, I guess.”
Not for the first time, Fusco misses Stills. Sure, on the rare occasions when he’s completely honest with himself, Fusco can admit that Stills was a monster of sorts. That, like Novak, seeing people hurt never bothered him. Maybe it even got him off a little, hearing people beg for their lives. Fusco knows that’s a lousy thing to think about a dead friend, but he only thinks it because it’s probably true.
Yeah, Stills was a monster.
But at least he had the decency to keep it under wraps. At least he tried to look legitimate. At least he stood by Fusco, trusted him every time, because Stills may have been a sadist but he knew what devotion was. At least Stills was good to his wife and kids, the gawky teenager and the blonde five-year-old girl.
(Fusco and a few other guys still stick a little money in an envelope every month and drop it at the Stills residence, unmarked. The other guys do it because it’s the right thing; Fusco does it because it’s the only way he knows how to say, “I’m sorry I buried your dad.”)
Stills at least understood that there were laws you didn’t break. Friendship. Family. Partnerships. He got it like these thugs with skinned knuckles never will. Like the guy in the suit never will.
That’s not fair to think. He can’t know anything about the guy in the suit, not really. He tries and tries, and sometimes he thinks he does; he sees it all in black and white, but then he thinks, That can’t be it. Because it can’t be. Anyway, Reese barely comes to him for information anymore; Fusco hasn’t seen him once in the past month or so. He guesses that whatever the two of them had, it’s done with. So he’s given up on understanding the guy in the suit.
When he feels himself starting to miss Reese, he tries missing Stills instead. It’s not perfect, but it helps.
There’s a sort of satisfying thwock from behind the door, and then silence. “What’d that guy do, anyway?” he asks Novak, by way of conversation.
Novak rolls his shoulders, lets the bones crack and pop. “Blackmail. Tried to shake one of our guys down.” He’s smirking a little at some private joke that Fusco isn’t interested in hearing because it’ll probably just make him want to hurt Novak even more.
“Oh,” Fusco says. “Well. That’s fair.”
“I thought so,” Novak agrees cheerfully.
The door swings wide with a groan, and the two other guys emerge, ruddy with exertion and shaking out sore knuckles. They’re called Brody and Mason. Where Novak’s this small-boned, compact guy, these two are basically gorillas. Broad shoulders, big arms, a hell of a lot taller than Fusco, like that’s an accomplishment. They’re both beat cops. In uniform, they’re probably pretty intimidating. In street clothes, they look like your good old ordinary meatheads. Add about a pint of blood splashed on their hands and arms and shirtfronts and faces, and they cycle straight back around to terrifying.
“So how’d it go?” Novak asks, completely unfazed.
“Not too bad,” Mason tells him. “He’s keeping the negatives in a safety deposit box. Dumbass kept the key on him and we beat the number out of him. No problem.”
“Nice,” Novak says. There’s a friendly pause there where they all nod a little and silently congratulate themselves on a job well done. Fusco just plays along.
He opens his coat, indicates the gun strapped to his side, just against his ribs. “You want me to…?” he begins, jerking his head towards the open door, the prone man bent facedown over the table.
Brody follows his gaze. “Oh, no thanks,” he says. “That guy’s done. Thanks for offering, though.” He smiles a little. Brody’s got a face like a kid.
Fusco lets his coat fall shut and tries not to look relieved. Reese told him once that if he ever hurt another innocent person, Reese would kill him. Fusco believes that and he’s glad of it, because it strengthens his own desire to never drive a stranger to their quiet, unjust death again. But because conscientiously objecting marks him as the odd man out in HR, he has to offer up something. This is his one thing: a quick, painless end for those who are already doomed. Still, he’s happy to not have to do it.
Mason is fishing something out of his jacket pocket, a large brown envelope, thick with contents and covered in bloody thumbprints. He holds it up and waves it at Novak, then tosses it to him like a Frisbee. Novak catches it neatly and thumbs it open. “Oh, yeah,” he says, smile creeping across his face. “This is it. Good job, guys.”
“What is it?” Fusco asks, surreptitiously leaning over to catch a glimpse, but it turns out he doesn’t have to sneak because Novak just hands it to him. It’s a stack of photographs, glossy hard copies. Each picture is furtive, snapped in secrecy, from behind obstacles or over great distances. He recognizes some of the people in the photos as cops, guys he knows are in HR. Picture after picture of these guys palling around with known drug dealers, taking dinner with mobsters. Fusco’s trying to remember them all so he can tell Reese if Reese ever decides to talk to him again, but there’s just too many.
“Fella in the room back there is an investigative journalist,” Novak tells him as Fusco flips through the stack. “Started following anyone with a connection to HR, taking pictures. They’re pretty good, actually. If he’d just published his story, he’d have done us some serious damage. Good news for us, he’s an idiot trying to turn a profit. He sent us some samples, a sum, and a meeting place, and…well, we met.”
Fusco flips a photo of a respected police captain and a working girl in what someone more polite than Fusco would call a “compromising position” to the back of the pile, and the one underneath makes his mouth go dry and his heart sink to somewhere around his knees.
He sees his car, parked in the gravely shadow of the underpass. He sees himself pressed back against the car door, Reese pinning him there, the camera catching this perfect profile of the two of them nose to nose, staring each other down, and Fusco can remember the exact moment, the exact context and his mind scrambles and all he can think is, “Oh, God, it’s not what it looks like.”
Novak peers over, taps his index finger against the photo. “Yeah, I thought that one was interesting too,” he says. He’s smiling that private joke smile again, and this time Fusco thinks he knows the punchline. “He actually sent us that one as a sample. I guess he recognized the other guy. He should; we’ve been tearing apart the city looking for him. So he thought, ‘A cop and that guy who shoots out kneecaps, all jungled up together under a bridge? Gotta be worth something.’ And he was right!” Novak’s disinterested veneer is lit through with something sharper, brighter, more insidious. “’Course, he didn’t know that HR’s looking for that guy just as much as the straight cops. Maybe more.” Novak cocks his head to one side. “So, Fusco, you want to explain this picture?”
He’ll come up with something. He has to come up with something. But he keeps sitting there, with what he knows is a stupid, horrified look on his face, but his brain keeps spinning its wheels in the mud, and he can’t make himself say a word. Out of the corners of his eyes, he can see that Mason and Brody have moved much, much closer.
Fusco exhales slowly, and accepts that he’s just not very good at coming up with lies.
The blow to the back of his head is almost welcome.
This, Fusco thinks, can only be a good thing. But he feels like he’s losing out, all the same. More and more often, he catches himself wanting to close the gap between them.
He doesn’t get that itch anymore, that feeling like he’s being watched. But it doesn’t mean anything. One thing he’s figured out since this awkwardness began is that he isn’t really that good at knowing when he’s being tailed. Reese just wanted him to know.
He wanted him to feel safe.
He thinks maybe they both need help.
***
Fusco doesn’t want to do this hands-on kind of work again, but he’s got an understanding that this is just how it has to be. Someone has to get close to HR. If that means sitting idly by, letting something awful happen on the other side of the door he’s guarding so that one day it’ll never have to happen again, well, he can do that. He doesn’t have to like it.
A savage crack of bone on metal and an agonized wail slips through the locked door and echoes off the walls and ceiling of the warehouse, and Fusco flinches and clenches his hands on his knees.
The plainclothes detective sitting in the metal folding chair across from him grins. “Delicate constitution?” he asks. “Come on, guy, I heard you’d been doing this since the Bush administration.”
The detective’s name is Novak. Fusco doesn’t really know Novak that well, outside of the fact that he works Vice, he’s in HR, and he’s not even trying to hide it. That’s got to be a five hundred dollar watch peeking out of Novak’s cuff. The suit’s more subtle, but it makes him look more like a hitman than most of the hitmen Fusco knows. And Fusco knows a few.
Fusco’s inclined to go on not knowing Novak, because if Fusco was in the habit of making snap judgments about people based on a very brief acquaintance (and he is), he’d say that Novak’s a skinny, vicious, mean little fucker who wouldn’t know loyalty if it popped him in the kneecap. Even when he was still on the take for real, he wouldn’t have wanted a guy like Novak anywhere near him. Guys like him make bad situations worse.
But Fusco has been doing this since the Bush administration, and he knows what he’s doing, and he knows that he needs to be friends with Novak. Fusco has been infiltrating this organization on years and years’ worth of loyalty and good faith. He’s a lousy liar and he’s never been able to completely stop whatever he’s thinking from showing on his face plain as day. But he’s got his reputation.
He’s Stills’ ex-partner.
Simmons’s friend.
He’s the most loyal son of a bitch you’ve ever met.
He’d never snitch.
The guys in HR who know Fusco, the ones who are his friends, or friends of friends; they know this. Novak doesn’t. Fusco barely knows the guys who are behind the door, making some poor son of a bitch scream and cry. Fusco’s only here because Simmons wanted someone he can trust looking in on this, which means all Fusco’s got to protect him right now is the secondhand word that Simmons thinks he’s OK. This is not enough protection for Fusco’s tastes. This makes him nervous. This makes him vulnerable.
Novak is watching him expectantly. Fusco has to answer.
“Never really got used to it,” he says, allowing a small smile. “The noises, you know? It always sounds worse than it looks.”
Novak shrugs. “I don’t get that. Never bothered me, not any of it.”
Of course it doesn’t bother you. Why would it? It’s not your face getting pounded in.
His smile holds steady. He’s getting better at this. “Some people are just made for it, I guess.”
Not for the first time, Fusco misses Stills. Sure, on the rare occasions when he’s completely honest with himself, Fusco can admit that Stills was a monster of sorts. That, like Novak, seeing people hurt never bothered him. Maybe it even got him off a little, hearing people beg for their lives. Fusco knows that’s a lousy thing to think about a dead friend, but he only thinks it because it’s probably true.
Yeah, Stills was a monster.
But at least he had the decency to keep it under wraps. At least he tried to look legitimate. At least he stood by Fusco, trusted him every time, because Stills may have been a sadist but he knew what devotion was. At least Stills was good to his wife and kids, the gawky teenager and the blonde five-year-old girl.
(Fusco and a few other guys still stick a little money in an envelope every month and drop it at the Stills residence, unmarked. The other guys do it because it’s the right thing; Fusco does it because it’s the only way he knows how to say, “I’m sorry I buried your dad.”)
Stills at least understood that there were laws you didn’t break. Friendship. Family. Partnerships. He got it like these thugs with skinned knuckles never will. Like the guy in the suit never will.
That’s not fair to think. He can’t know anything about the guy in the suit, not really. He tries and tries, and sometimes he thinks he does; he sees it all in black and white, but then he thinks, That can’t be it. Because it can’t be. Anyway, Reese barely comes to him for information anymore; Fusco hasn’t seen him once in the past month or so. He guesses that whatever the two of them had, it’s done with. So he’s given up on understanding the guy in the suit.
When he feels himself starting to miss Reese, he tries missing Stills instead. It’s not perfect, but it helps.
There’s a sort of satisfying thwock from behind the door, and then silence. “What’d that guy do, anyway?” he asks Novak, by way of conversation.
Novak rolls his shoulders, lets the bones crack and pop. “Blackmail. Tried to shake one of our guys down.” He’s smirking a little at some private joke that Fusco isn’t interested in hearing because it’ll probably just make him want to hurt Novak even more.
“Oh,” Fusco says. “Well. That’s fair.”
“I thought so,” Novak agrees cheerfully.
The door swings wide with a groan, and the two other guys emerge, ruddy with exertion and shaking out sore knuckles. They’re called Brody and Mason. Where Novak’s this small-boned, compact guy, these two are basically gorillas. Broad shoulders, big arms, a hell of a lot taller than Fusco, like that’s an accomplishment. They’re both beat cops. In uniform, they’re probably pretty intimidating. In street clothes, they look like your good old ordinary meatheads. Add about a pint of blood splashed on their hands and arms and shirtfronts and faces, and they cycle straight back around to terrifying.
“So how’d it go?” Novak asks, completely unfazed.
“Not too bad,” Mason tells him. “He’s keeping the negatives in a safety deposit box. Dumbass kept the key on him and we beat the number out of him. No problem.”
“Nice,” Novak says. There’s a friendly pause there where they all nod a little and silently congratulate themselves on a job well done. Fusco just plays along.
He opens his coat, indicates the gun strapped to his side, just against his ribs. “You want me to…?” he begins, jerking his head towards the open door, the prone man bent facedown over the table.
Brody follows his gaze. “Oh, no thanks,” he says. “That guy’s done. Thanks for offering, though.” He smiles a little. Brody’s got a face like a kid.
Fusco lets his coat fall shut and tries not to look relieved. Reese told him once that if he ever hurt another innocent person, Reese would kill him. Fusco believes that and he’s glad of it, because it strengthens his own desire to never drive a stranger to their quiet, unjust death again. But because conscientiously objecting marks him as the odd man out in HR, he has to offer up something. This is his one thing: a quick, painless end for those who are already doomed. Still, he’s happy to not have to do it.
Mason is fishing something out of his jacket pocket, a large brown envelope, thick with contents and covered in bloody thumbprints. He holds it up and waves it at Novak, then tosses it to him like a Frisbee. Novak catches it neatly and thumbs it open. “Oh, yeah,” he says, smile creeping across his face. “This is it. Good job, guys.”
“What is it?” Fusco asks, surreptitiously leaning over to catch a glimpse, but it turns out he doesn’t have to sneak because Novak just hands it to him. It’s a stack of photographs, glossy hard copies. Each picture is furtive, snapped in secrecy, from behind obstacles or over great distances. He recognizes some of the people in the photos as cops, guys he knows are in HR. Picture after picture of these guys palling around with known drug dealers, taking dinner with mobsters. Fusco’s trying to remember them all so he can tell Reese if Reese ever decides to talk to him again, but there’s just too many.
“Fella in the room back there is an investigative journalist,” Novak tells him as Fusco flips through the stack. “Started following anyone with a connection to HR, taking pictures. They’re pretty good, actually. If he’d just published his story, he’d have done us some serious damage. Good news for us, he’s an idiot trying to turn a profit. He sent us some samples, a sum, and a meeting place, and…well, we met.”
Fusco flips a photo of a respected police captain and a working girl in what someone more polite than Fusco would call a “compromising position” to the back of the pile, and the one underneath makes his mouth go dry and his heart sink to somewhere around his knees.
He sees his car, parked in the gravely shadow of the underpass. He sees himself pressed back against the car door, Reese pinning him there, the camera catching this perfect profile of the two of them nose to nose, staring each other down, and Fusco can remember the exact moment, the exact context and his mind scrambles and all he can think is, “Oh, God, it’s not what it looks like.”
Novak peers over, taps his index finger against the photo. “Yeah, I thought that one was interesting too,” he says. He’s smiling that private joke smile again, and this time Fusco thinks he knows the punchline. “He actually sent us that one as a sample. I guess he recognized the other guy. He should; we’ve been tearing apart the city looking for him. So he thought, ‘A cop and that guy who shoots out kneecaps, all jungled up together under a bridge? Gotta be worth something.’ And he was right!” Novak’s disinterested veneer is lit through with something sharper, brighter, more insidious. “’Course, he didn’t know that HR’s looking for that guy just as much as the straight cops. Maybe more.” Novak cocks his head to one side. “So, Fusco, you want to explain this picture?”
He’ll come up with something. He has to come up with something. But he keeps sitting there, with what he knows is a stupid, horrified look on his face, but his brain keeps spinning its wheels in the mud, and he can’t make himself say a word. Out of the corners of his eyes, he can see that Mason and Brody have moved much, much closer.
Fusco exhales slowly, and accepts that he’s just not very good at coming up with lies.
The blow to the back of his head is almost welcome.