fic: [chuck] we made out like bandits {devon/sarah, casey/sarah}
Title: We Made Out Like Bandits
Fandom: Chuck
Characters/Pairings: Sarah; Devon/Sarah, Casey/Sarah
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,570
Warnings: Character Death.
Author's Note: Accidentally inspired by my brain on drugs and this. I have never actually been to these places. Though The Plaza Hotel really is probably haunted.
Summary: AU. It's a Tuesday morning and her eggs are runny; the red smear on the table isn't ketchup. No one screams.
people are fragile things, you should know by now
be careful what you put them through
(munich; the editors)
It’s a Tuesday morning and her eggs are runny; the red smear on the table isn’t ketchup.
No one screams.
(We’re getting ahead of ourselves.)
-
Sarah’s got her legs up on the dash, sun on her face, when Casey drops the six pack of beer into the backseat and scowls. Audibly, so there’s a growl involved there too. She keeps her eyes closed beneath her sunglasses, takes a deep breath and lets it out, almost zen-like, and it just makes him slam the door that much harder when he climbs into the front seat.
Asks, “Did you get lost?”
“What do you think about leaving Ivy League’s ass here? We’ve got the keys, the money, and the car,” he says, less like he’s joking and more like he’s actually considering it. When he turns the keys in the ignition and the radio comes to life, a Top 40 Hits station that requests that she drop it to the floor, she decides he’s more than just considering it.
“We’ve got enough people looking for us without him calling the cops and giving them the license plate number of our getaway car.”
“How do we know that’s not what he’s doing right now?”
“Because we’re sitting in the middle of a dead zone,” she digs her phone out of the pocket of her shorts and tosses it to him, “and we’re thirty feet from the only pay phone here. Just give him a minute.”
The wind picks up at her back, blowing sand and rustling through the newspapers in the stands near the door, USA Today and The Santa Fe Times, the blues and reds of their logos faded by too much exposure to the sun and the settling dust that makes the pages look old and tea stained.
There’s something about this place that makes her feel dirty.
“He isn’t Ivy League,” she says, after a minute, pulling her legs off of the dash of the convertible and curling them under her. “Played football at UCLA.”
“Can’t shoot but at least he can tackle,” Casey grumbles and she smiles wider than she ought to.
-
“I’m driving,” Casey says, not two minutes later, Devon back from the gas station bathroom with a clean shirt on, t-shirt instead of a button down. She thinks he would look good in suit. She thinks he would look good out of it too but these are things she tries not to think about in light of this being, above all, a temporary arrangement.
How it ends is still up for discussion.
Devon folds all six feet and three inches of himself into the backseat of the convertible and only just gets the door closed before Casey steps on the gas.
-
“I was going to be a surgeon,” Devon says, another empty stretch of sandy road and Casey quiet in the driver’s seat.
There’s this awful country station playing on the radio now, the only thing that doesn’t come in as a static-filled mess, and she imagines men wearing cowboy hats from their accents and the liquid of their voices, the old west and gunslingers coming to mind without much effort. This place feels steeped in history, and it’s not just the Aztec Ruins they passed a few dozen miles ago, but the look of it, the smell of it.
It’s almost suffocating.
“Yeah?” She unscrews the cap of her water bottle, finds lukewarm water even less appealing than the lukewarm beer in the back, but downs it anyways. The air conditioning conked out before they crossed state lines and, while it’s a dry heat, they’re still pushing towards one hundred degrees with the sun directly overheard and not a cloud in the sky. “What made you change your mind?”
“Football injury,” he answers, without elaboration. She’s seen his hand twitch, at cash registers and across the table at all-night diners. Had thought stress reaction, nerves instead of nerve damage, only the other is looking more likely now. Can’t operate without a steady pair of hands.
Can’t shoot a gun either.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and thinks she means it too.
-
They’re headed for Las Vegas.
Not the one you’re thinking of either.
Las Vegas, New Mexico, in San Miguel County, right on top of the Gallinas River. Her and Casey had sat down with a map back in utah, decided Mexico or bust in light of the rock and a hard place they’d found themselves in. Travel across the border is discouraged by the US government, the product of rival cartels and an uptick in crime, heads on stakes lining highways and bodies found in caves just outside of popular resorts. It makes for an easier time crossing it, with Mexico hurting for tourists and the federales turning a blind eye towards everything but the drug trade and turf wars.
It’s always easier getting in than out anyways.
-
“We’re in outlaw country now,” Casey says, when they pass the one mile marker, exit 343 on your right.
Devon thinks he’s kidding.
-
They get separate rooms at the Plaza Hotel, ones that will fall in line nicely with their eventual covers. Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell, a young married couple - him from California, her from Texas, Sarah slipping into a Southern accent to sell it - doing some sightseeing on their way to a wedding in Abilene, and Mr. Hamilton, who shows up half an hour later, and doesn’t say where he’s from or what he’s doing or, really, anything at all.
They both pay in cash.
“Sure you can handle him, Walker?”
She cocks her hip with one hand on the doorknob.
They’re in the older wing of the building, floor to ceiling windows with heavy dark green drapes pulled back, too much lace and dark wood, like stepping into the Victorian era, save for the flat-screen television. Her suitcase is packed full of leather and guns, more ammo and weapons in the trunk, hidden where the spare tire should be. They’re bulls in the china shop, only the destruction is both imminent and intentional.
“I handle you just fine,” she replies, unintentional double entendre that has him laughing quietly to himself. Sarah doesn’t bother to clarify. “I’ll see you later.”
“Count on it.”
-
There’s tequila.
Devon’s already nursing a beer with the local news on just loud enough to be heard over the A/C as it kicks on, when she gets out of the shower. He’s a big fan of looking over his shoulder. Sarah’s been doing this so long she’s forgotten what it’s like to care that much.
“You have family?”
She switches his beer for a shot glass and downs her own. He tears his eyes away from the television; they’re talking about salmonella in the cucumbers and Devon’s a health nut so this, this she can understand.
“My parents,” he tells her, brows drawn, ten kinds of hesitant. He’s been with them for three weeks but she’s yet to do any digging of a personal nature.
It’s a courtesy; he’s essentially a semi-willing hostage. They needed a car after theirs dropped its transmission thirty miles inside of the state line back in Colorado, and he was the first gullible individual with a car that wasn’t either falling apart itself or a hybrid that Casey would rather blow up than drive. They were just going to hijack it and be on their merry way, except Devon looks the part of the dumb jock more than he acts it and Sarah had liked him.
Likes him.
“No girlfriend?”
“I was engaged.”
“What happened?”
“Her brother went crazy, wound up institutionalized. Said he saw things that weren’t there.” She settles on the edge of the king bed, leans back on her hands and his eyes linger on her legs, shorts riding up her thighs as she stretches. He shakes it off after a beat. “Between that and her job, I kind of fell by the wayside.”
“I’m sorry,” she offers, not for the first time today, and it covers up the realization that he hasn’t cut and run yet because there’s nothing for him to go back to quite nicely. She should feel bad, pity at the very least, sadness at the very most, but there’s a nagging voice in her head that won’t stop reminding her that this is good for him. No one will notice that he’s up and disappeared. No one is looking.
“Yeah,” he sighs, “It was…not awesome.”
This time, she abandons the shot glass, takes a swig straight from the bottle. Offers it to him from across the room.
He accepts.
Their fingers brush and there’s the same kind of electricity in the air that all bad decisions seem to start with.
-
“He doesn’t like me,” Devon says, half of the bottle gone, and she can’t remember if it was full when they started or not. He’s left the couch in favor of the bed, his body stretched out lengthwise next to hers, shoes kicked off and the television having fallen silent long ago.
“Casey?”
Sarah turns her head as she best she can while lying flat and he’s looking at her, let me stare deep into your soul looking at her, and it leaves her mouth dry. She licks her lips, a simple unconscious act, but it draws his eye, and his hand makes to reach before he reigns himself back in, restraint quietly waning with the night.
She looks away. Supposes that’s the responsible thing to do, if not the desirable one. Says, “He just doesn’t trust you. Don’t feel bad; he doesn’t trust anyone.”
“He trusts you,” he replies, decisively, and he’s not telling her anything new. She knows, feels it in her bones, even if it’s just a feeling, an assumption based more on actions than verbalization, because he’s never said it and neither has she but, then, there’s never been reason to doubt it. History runs deep and, eventually, it runs you down as well. Devon isn’t a part of that and therein lies the draw.
He’s damaged, somewhere underneath the exterior of the easygoing guy’s guy with a taste for long runs at dawn - he told her once, by way of explaining why his internal clock has him up at seven, at the very latest, even if the activity itself is out of the question when they’re moving on every three days or so and it’s best to keep a low profile, keep out of sight entirely if you can - and the kind of chivalry that comes off as cheesy on men who aren’t him, ones who are trying instead of acting on instinct. But it isn’t damaged she caused or had a hand in. It isn’t something she experienced or ever will experience.
It doesn’t make him anything like her.
“He thinks you’re going to screw us. That’s why we share a room. He thinks you’ll bolt otherwise,” she tells him, answers an unasked question that’s been hanging in the air for some time now.
“Not cool,” he says, and she laughs without meaning to, the frat boy phrasing breaking into the middle of an otherwise serious conversation sends her into fits, and she curls in on herself, onto her side and her forehead bumps his arm before she settles, closer than she was a moment ago.
She keeps forgetting to move away.
“Would you?”
“No,” he says, a long note of hesitation ringing out before it. It’s the answer she thought she’d turn up; it’s also the one that she finds the hardest to believe, no matter how clear and steady his voice is. No matter how genuine it sounds. Sincerity is easily feigned and there’s no such animal as a sure thing.
She wants to believe he’s smarter than this, and a smart man would be on the first bus out of the city the minute she turned her back.
“You should,” she tells him, and then she kisses him.
-
This is a city divided.
East and West Las Vegas and the river splitting them right down the middle. Rival school districts and football teams hearkening back to the days where the divisions were drawn a little more clearly in a peculiar mix of sand and blood, where the west was settled, clean, and the east was in a state of constant turbulence, filled at one time with men that would become synonymous with legends a century later, Jesse James and Doc Holliday, Hoodoo Brown and Billy The Kid.
Outlaw country.
The hotel itself is a small scale reflection of this, handily divided into old and new, split in a way that’s not perfectly centered yet obvious nonetheless. You can walk down a hall, turn into the next, and the insides of it will transition from dark woods and lace canopies to simple white linens and cushy sofas, time passing in the span of a few feet.
Their rooms are on the old side.
A wealthy CEO by the name of Arthur Compton checks in sometime the morning after they do, visiting some old friends. Turns out he’s from here. Turns out he has some business to do here and the man stalking around the lobby later on that day isn’t a patron - he’s security.
It’s not hard to guess which side he’s on.
But they don’t know this yet.
-
She wakes up sprawled across the bed, on top of the comforter. Her hands are sticky from spilled tequila, the bottle on the nightstand, and one edge of the canopy is tickling the underside of her foot, making her toes curl, her knee draw towards her chest and away.
Devon’s at her back, four inches of space between them but for the hand that’s along her back, like he meant to throw an arm over her waist, her hip, and missed, fell back to the mattress and now it’s just warm fingers at the hem of her t-shirt, the twitch of them in his sleep.
She sighs and arches away from him, her last stand.
His hand follows.
-
“The guy in the elevator was armed.”
Casey turns in his chair, antique writing desk and a map spread across it, their target and getaway mapped out in red marker. His gun is loaded, safety on, next to the phone. He doesn’t look surprised, more impressed. He shouldn’t look that way and it eats at her.
She crosses her arms. “You think they’re onto us?”
“They would’ve already paid us a visit if they were,” he says, what she already knows or should know, because it’s the U.S. government that they’re running from, their former employer, and they aren’t fans of the waiting game, of biding their time while her and Casey inch closer to the border, to potential freedom, to another fight with a whole new cast of characters but a lack of history all the same.
Rome. She’d wanted Rome. Or Tahiti. Instead, it’s Mexico and lawlessness, a place with bigger fish to fry than a rogue CIA operative and a former sniper turned NSA agent. The vendetta against them is personal and it’s rooted in this soil and they can shake it free, probably, maybe, if they could just get out of here via any means less suspicious than a plane.
“Never known you to worry, Walker,” he chides but there’s an edge of concern to it. He taps his gun with two fingers, the others wrapped around that red marker and there’s a smear of blue ink on the side of his hand. She bites her tongue instead of her lip. “Unless it’s not you and I you’re worried about.”
“He’s a good guy, Casey,” she tries, and then stops herself, looks away from him, before she can catch the raised eyebrow, that hard look he gives her after that.
“He’s expendable.”
Because Casey isn’t concerned about anyone outside of the two of them, not when they, realistically, can’t afford to. It doesn’t mean he wants him dead, it just means that Devon doesn’t figure into their long term plans and so it falls onto her to worry, to care.
“After Santa Fe, he’s out. If he bails on us and tries to go to the cops, we shoot him. If he doesn’t - and I don’t care if he just keeps his mouth shut for a few days to give us a nice head start - then that’s that. We don’t tell him where we’re going, we don’t tell him how, and we don’t tell him when. He’s just a guy who had a nice vacation for a few weeks. Got to see the sights.”
“And if someone recognizes him? Which, by the way, isn’t out of the question since surveillance footage has a habit of popping up and we aren’t exactly wearing masks?”
“Then the airport can be his first stop. But he isn’t coming with us.”
She tries not to think about what Devon’s got ahead of him when they kick him to the curb in Santa Fe.
Tries not to think about how they’ve all but ruined his life.
-
Casey says nothing when he leaves.
All explanations double as reminders, each one sounding more patronizing than the next, and he has more respect for her than that.
The hand that he reaches out to brush her hair from her face as he passes by somehow winds its way to the nape of her neck, thumb scrubbing over the curve of her jaw. She turns her head inwards, a reflex that compels her to look down, look away, only she’s too close to him and instead it’s her cheek against his wrist, his forearm, bone and tanned skin, veins in sharp contrast, raised and blue.
“Dammit,” she breathes, and his pulse thrums.
-
“I learned how to shoot when I was nine,” she says, sometime later, her feet tucked under her on the small sofa that’s more ornamental than comfortable she’s found. Their bags are packed by the door, ready for a nine o’clock check out, and Devon had seen her check the safety of her gun before she set it on the nightstand next to the gold earrings that’ll match her shoes tomorrow. Just another accessory.
He’s been a combination of unsettled and curious ever since. It’s her casual indifference, she thinks, that leaves him wide-eyed, in awe of the gravity of this thing she holds in her hands like it’s an iced latte. It’s a reaction that she can identify but it isn’t one she can sympathize with any longer; the years have worn her down to the point that she can no longer remember what it was like to be wary of guns that weren’t pointed at you.
She was always eager, fingers itching for the feel of it in her hands. Before she had to take a life anyways.
The shock of that dulls too, over time and with practice.
She doesn’t tell him about an uncle in the backwoods of South Carolina who was just this side of irresponsible once he had a few beers in him, and she doesn’t tell him the truth either, that her father was - maybe still is -- a con artist, that she knew, that the threat of jail time filled her less with fear and more with a strange sense of acceptance that comes from growing up far too fast. That learning to shoot was a necessary evil.
Instead she asks, “Have you ever…?” and watches him shake his head vehemently. It’s not surprising. He won’t hold them - which is just fine by Casey, not to have the hostage-slash-rookie waving a gun around - but there are well-trained men and women who’ve accidentally gotten off a shot that landed in an innocent bystander or, worse, a kid, who act the same. Devon’s the kind of guy who would shoot a deer and then spend the rest of his life terrified of doing it again, of killing something else.
Casey’s right; he can’t survive in this line of work, even if they wanted to take him along.
“We should go to bed,” she says, and this is where she starts counting down the days until Santa Fe is in their rearview, until they’ve separated, left him at a bus station with a smile and good luck before speeding down the highway. She needs him gone. She needs him not to be her problem anymore.
She hadn’t anticipated this two-for-one deal on guilt and longing.
And it’s strange that she spends the three seconds it takes to cross from the couch to the bed thinking that she phrased it like a proposition, go to bed instead of go to sleep, something better suited to old high society ladies with their cups of tea and quiet talk of living in sin. It’s strange that when she sheds her shorts, stripped down to just her underwear and a t-shirt, he smiles at the pattern of multi-colored hearts - this is where not being able to consistently do your laundry gets you - something almost child-like to his expression, and she finds it endearing instead of misguided.
She finds herself on her knees cutting across the bed and his mouth under hers instead of pulling back the covers and slipping underneath them. That too is strange, a broken resolution falling dead at her feet like this is January first and she’s just looking for an excuse, any excuse. Hands grapple with the back of his t-shirt and she pulls him down, down, down, on top of her and he goes willingly, stupidly, and they’re not even drunk, not even buzzed enough for her to look back at this moment and tell herself it was logical at the time. That it was right.
It’s not right. She’s going to leave him in a matter of days but he doesn’t know that. For all he knows, he’s with them until Mexico, with them until he gets smart and runs, and that’s the intention. Blind side him and maybe, just maybe, he’ll get all the way back to California on autopilot before he’s done processing.
She’s going to screw him, and he’s going to get screwed, but first she’s going to fuck him.
And there’s nothing right about that at all.
-
Her hair is a mess and the insides of her thighs feel damp, afterwards.
Devon kisses a trail from her neck to her collarbone, salty skin and faint red marks, and she listens to the heavy footsteps that pause outside the door, a five second beat before they start up again.
Jerks instinctively, hand reaching for her weapon, but she’s too far away and so she’s left with inches of mattress space and him, her breath catching in her throat.
It’s terrifying in all the ways you don’t hear about.
-
Casey won’t stop shaking his head.
The scent of perfume on the third floor sees her out.
(“You know this place is haunted?” Devon had asked, yesterday morning, her laptop and a Wikipedia page.
He’d sounded amused. She’d been more amused that the hotel had internet.
A city with as much history as this one is bound to have more than a few ghosts.)
-
Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell are looking into setting up an account at the bank of Las Vegas. Devon wears a suit and Sarah crosses her legs beneath her white dress, folds her hands over her knee, and talks boisterously, over-exaggerated accent and mannerisms to distract from the way Devon starts to stumble over himself when he can’t remember his lines. This is a performance, nothing more and nothing less.
She squeezes his hand underneath the table, smiles even brighter at the banker.
Arthur Compton is up front depositing too much money into a savings account and the teller is making noise at her manager about it. His bodyguard is wearing a leather jacket in ninety-two degree weather with the sun overhead and no breeze; even with the A/C, it’s ridiculous, but there’s a gun underneath it and Sarah knew that as soon as they walked in.
Casey doesn’t.
This is why, as the banker hands them paperwork to start filling out, there are five shots instead of four. This is why, amid the screams and the people hitting the floor, Devon’s hands on her shoulders pulling her down with him reflexively, her stomach knots.
The carpet is scratchy under her knees, her elbows, and Devon’s still got a hold on her, breathing too shallow. The fingers of his right hand are trembling against her bare skin and it does little to reassure her. There were only supposed to be four shots for four security cameras.
There’s a sixth and then Casey’s voice, loud and clear, “anyone else want to try?”
-
She’s the hostage.
He catches her around the waist, gun at her neck, and she makes for a pretty little damsel in distress, all wide eyes, tears in the corners of them that never fall and pleas that stutter to a stop when he tells her to shut up, when he presses the barrel of the gun tighter to her skin. It’s quite a performance when she’s the safest person in the room.
She nearly stumbles over the bodyguard’s body, finds the security guard unarmed, his gun tucked into the waistband of Casey’s jeans. Guesses that fifth shot, the bodyguard’s presumably, didn’t land. Not much of a bodyguard.
Devon starts protesting right on cue, trying to get Casey to aim that gun at him - what all good husbands do when their wives are in danger, when they want to look like the hero - and Casey uses him as the go between so he never has to take the gun off of her, never has to take his attention completely away from the security guard who won’t stay still for long, weapon or no.
It’s a ten minute robbery, in and out with the money they came for. The bodyguard is incapacitated, not dead as it turns out, and when Casey walks out with the hostage in tow, using the husband as a mule, no one bats an eye.
Someone pulls the alarm but they’re clear long before the sirens wail on approach.
-
“That’s enough, right?”
She doesn’t say for Mexico and she doesn’t talk in amounts. Keeps it vague, like he asked, even if she’s alternating glancing at him and at Devon in the backseat. He looks catatonic. He isn’t but he looks the part, eyes glazed and unfocused, not a word uttered since they sped off. This is only his second time around, the first back in Colorado. They’d held up a bank there too, come up short, and local LEO’s had been more concerned by that than the government had. They were already actively pursuing her and Casey; a bank robbery was just the icing on the cake.
The laundry list of combined charges already includes murder, probably treason, and it’s what they’ve got on the man who’s ascended to the top of the CIA food chain that makes them the most dangerous. Armed robbery is right up there with kidnapping and car theft, things to be kicked under the rug before anyone has the nerve to question why there weren’t any dead bodies left behind after the first one, why two agents with reputations such as theirs just decided to go rogue one day on a whim.
“Yeah,” he says, “we’re good.”
She catches the wince he gives on a sharp right turn, finally sees the blood spreading at his side, dark red against black cotton fabric, a moment later. Presses her mouth to her closed fist without knowing what she’s trying to bite back.
-
It’s a graze, easily treated with the first aid kit and a few shots of whiskey. She makes him settle back onto the bed in a motel room in Santa Fe, threatens to finish the job if he doesn’t shut up and let her do this, and he growls something about maternal instincts and candyasses that makes her want to punch him, but she thinks that’s the point.
“You’re not supposed to be sleeping with the hostage,” he tells her.
She presses a little too hard on the wound when she’s smoothing out the bandage. He grimaces. “And you’re not supposed to get shot. So I guess we both fucked up.”
He doesn’t argue with her, for once.
-
Devon’s on the edge of the bed when she gets back. Just sitting there in the dark, no television, no bedside lamp, just the yellow and green lights from the parking lot outside seeping in through the slats of the blinds. They’re in a rundown motel just inside of the city that takes cash and doesn’t ask questions, the kind of place that suits people like them.
He asks, “Is he okay?”
She doesn’t mean to laugh. It’s not funny.
“I could take a look,” he continues, unhindered. “I did go to med school.”
Sarah had forgotten. Forgotten him entirely in the moment, while digging for the first aid kit and trying not to look as frantic as she felt, still high on adrenaline and that momentary burst of fear that she likes to lie to herself about and claim she’s grown past.
“He’s fine,” she says, artificial smile, and when her eyes fall to her feet, the carpet underneath, she sees blood on the hem of her pristine white dress.
-
“And you weren’t scared?”
“No.”
As pillow talk goes, it’s not her best. It’s also far from her worst.
Sarah will take what she can get.
“He had a gun on you.”
“The thing is, you have to trust your partner. If you don’t, you’re dead anyways.”
-
In the morning, she brings him coffee from the machine in the lobby. It’s watery and lukewarm but habit all the same and she sips it while she cleans the gun she hasn’t yet used, while he showers, hums through thin walls. It’s just the monotony she’s looking for.
Casey shows up before she can get too comfortable.
“Want to get breakfast?”
She raises an eyebrow. “The coffee?”
“Makes the stuff at the gas station seem like gourmet.”
Sarah bites back a smile. “Meet you outside in twenty.”
-
The diner’s called the Tune-Up Cafe.
She’d noticed it on the way in, the hour or so drive in leaving her more tired than she had any right to be and queasy in a way that had nothing to do with car sickness. But it had caught her eye, turquoise window frames the only thing that stood out against the old adobe building. The kind of hole in the wall place where they wouldn’t run into any trouble.
The waitress’ name is Karen and she smiles like a morning person, blindingly bright and cheerful in a way that only Devon can mimic. Not even Casey’s grumbling puts her off.
Sarah orders the eggs.
-
There’s something to be said for tying up loose ends.
Know this: the first time John Casey ever shot someone and left them alive, it was an accident. He was young and overconfident and he caught a bullet in the thigh for it before he got around to finishing the job.
The second time was in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Time to pay up.
(This will be the last time.)
-
Devon’s handsy with her, under the table where Casey can’t see.
He woke up in a good mood, lighthearted despite the ordeal that was yesterday, and she thinks this is how he’s chosen to cope. Acting like an earlier, far more innocent, version of himself as a form of denial. It shows up in the easy smile on his face and the playful, almost teasing twist to his words. The way his hand falls to her knee, fingers curving against the muscle of her thigh just above, like this is how they behave, have always behaved, will continue to behave.
Natural.
It feels weird to her. Makes her nervous because maybe she likes the warm weight of his hand there. Maybe it makes her smile and maybe it makes her feel something, something indescribable and oddly freeing, but that’s not a feeling that she can hold to for long. It’s one that she’ll have to let go of sooner rather than later and it makes her insides turn.
She’s about to excuse herself to the bathroom in the back, her appetite all but gone, when the door opens, ushering in the breeze. Casey takes his customary glance at the new face and she gives Devon’s hand a squeeze as she moves it off her leg, getting a grin from him for her troubles. Casey mutters something under his breath about fools and puppy love that he thinks she can’t hear and that Devon isn’t paying any attention to.
That’s when the shooting starts.
-
Four hours outside of Santa Fe, in an agricultural town called Clovis, she locks the bathroom door, runs the water, and sits in the bathtub until her fingers and toes prune. Washes twice, scrubs her skin red with a loofah, careful around the place where her shin was skinned against the rough edge of the table back at the dinner.
Listens to pacing outside the door and the sticky sound surgical tape makes when you peel it off the roll.
Casey knocks four times in the span of five minutes, staggered and weaker by a mile each time, before he just solves his own problem. Picks the lock. She doesn’t bother with threats, doesn’t have the energy for it, so she just leans her head back against the rim of the porcelain tub and waits for the inevitable click and the sound of his feet on the tile.
He never looks anywhere but at eye level. She wouldn’t care if he did, the foamy mixture of soap and water just hitting the tops of her breasts, and the modesty beaten out of her during wardrobe changes in the backs of cars and shared hotel rooms. So he sees. So he’s seen.
“I was thinking of burning them,” she says, stretching one long leg out of the water, her heel just grazing the other side of the tub, fully extended. There’s a line of soap underscoring a red patch of skin that stings when exposed to the cold air. His eyes follow that movement that would be called graceful if her toes weren’t dripping soap onto the bathroom floor. “The clothes. All of it, I just…but then I remembered we left half of our stuff at the motel.”
“Nothing that isn’t replaceable,” he says, it’s not like we don’t have the money a joke that he elects to leave on the cutting room floor. Casey isn’t known for his sense of humor.
She doesn’t know whether that’s true or not, hasn’t stopped to take stock of what she left behind in material goods. In memories. There’s a Swiss Army knife that used to fit neatly into a dead man’s hands, her grandfather’s hands, and a photo that’s seen too much wear and tear and weather. More recent things, memorabilia of her time at the CIA, of a partner that’s more likely to be in the ground than otherwise.
The footprints she leaves behind are filled with the dead and the dying.
Devon is one in a line and she hates the way it sounds, hates the way it summarily negates his brief existence in her life - just one of the others, each as interchangeable as the rest.
“He had a fiancée. Ex-fiancée. And parents.”
“Nothing you can do about it,” he tells her, hands braced on his knees as he sits on the closed lid of the toilet. His boots are half unlaced and the harsh lighting gives her a good look at the bruising along his jaw. He’s had worse. That graze at his side worries her more, high pain tolerance or not.
“I feel like I should call. So someone would know that he didn’t just disappear.”
“Maybe it’s better that way.”
“You would know.” She doesn’t catch herself in time and his expression hardens. Sarah doesn’t offer an apology, knows he wouldn’t accept it, would rather play it off as nothing, but she’s touched a nerve and knows it. She half reaches one soapy hand out to cover his own but withdraws, curls it back to her and sinks further down until the water’s up to her shoulders, warmth radiating through her.
He recovers deftly. “We have to go back. Give things a few days to blow over but then we’ve got business to attend to.”
Santa Fe wasn’t just a rest stop. They’ve driven thirty-six hours straight before, in shifts; nothing is without its purpose except, of course, this. Four hours out of their way to lick their wounds and regroup for a day or three. They ditched the car in Santa Rosa, traded it in for an inconspicuous four-door sedan that doesn’t go as fast as Casey wishes it would, and the guy behind the front desk barely even looked at them when he gave them their room keys, ear pressed to the phone and an irate woman screaming at him from the other end.
It’s a temporary sanctuary, if there is such a thing for people like them.
“I told him to leave, you know,” she catches his eye, and yes, she’ll tell a secret a dead man took to his grave and, yes, she’ll do it while looking straight at him because a lot of things scare her but fear of reprisal isn’t one of them. “It was a few nights ago - we were drunk - and I told him there was an envelope full of money in the glove compartment, that he should just take it and run. But he didn’t want to. He wanted to stay. It wasn’t even that he got off on the constant danger aspect of it, I don’t think, he just…he wanted to stay. And now he’s dead and it still feels like my fault.”
“Walker - “
“Don’t tell me it’s not my fault. Don’t sit there and - just don’t.”
The air goes out of the room and he looks to be following it, rising in one smooth movement that isn’t hindered by the grimace that she expects. She looks away, half angry, half hurt. At what and by what are anyone’s guess. She’s just feeling right now; she’ll overanalyze later when she’s wide awake at three a.m. while he sleeps silent next to her. She used to think he’d be the type to snore, to toss and turn and fight in his sleep; she’s known better for far too long.
“I keep losing people,” she says instead of thinks and maybe she meant for him to hear it, just to see if it would give him pause. It does. One foot out the door and his back to her.
“Don’t we all,” he concedes.
Her stomach drops.
“But I won’t go easily and neither will you, so I guess we’ve got that going for us.”
-
She sees the body on the news.
Santa Fe beckons once more.
-
fin.
Fandom: Chuck
Characters/Pairings: Sarah; Devon/Sarah, Casey/Sarah
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,570
Warnings: Character Death.
Author's Note: Accidentally inspired by my brain on drugs and this. I have never actually been to these places. Though The Plaza Hotel really is probably haunted.
Summary: AU. It's a Tuesday morning and her eggs are runny; the red smear on the table isn't ketchup. No one screams.
people are fragile things, you should know by now
be careful what you put them through
(munich; the editors)
It’s a Tuesday morning and her eggs are runny; the red smear on the table isn’t ketchup.
No one screams.
(We’re getting ahead of ourselves.)
-
Sarah’s got her legs up on the dash, sun on her face, when Casey drops the six pack of beer into the backseat and scowls. Audibly, so there’s a growl involved there too. She keeps her eyes closed beneath her sunglasses, takes a deep breath and lets it out, almost zen-like, and it just makes him slam the door that much harder when he climbs into the front seat.
Asks, “Did you get lost?”
“What do you think about leaving Ivy League’s ass here? We’ve got the keys, the money, and the car,” he says, less like he’s joking and more like he’s actually considering it. When he turns the keys in the ignition and the radio comes to life, a Top 40 Hits station that requests that she drop it to the floor, she decides he’s more than just considering it.
“We’ve got enough people looking for us without him calling the cops and giving them the license plate number of our getaway car.”
“How do we know that’s not what he’s doing right now?”
“Because we’re sitting in the middle of a dead zone,” she digs her phone out of the pocket of her shorts and tosses it to him, “and we’re thirty feet from the only pay phone here. Just give him a minute.”
The wind picks up at her back, blowing sand and rustling through the newspapers in the stands near the door, USA Today and The Santa Fe Times, the blues and reds of their logos faded by too much exposure to the sun and the settling dust that makes the pages look old and tea stained.
There’s something about this place that makes her feel dirty.
“He isn’t Ivy League,” she says, after a minute, pulling her legs off of the dash of the convertible and curling them under her. “Played football at UCLA.”
“Can’t shoot but at least he can tackle,” Casey grumbles and she smiles wider than she ought to.
-
“I’m driving,” Casey says, not two minutes later, Devon back from the gas station bathroom with a clean shirt on, t-shirt instead of a button down. She thinks he would look good in suit. She thinks he would look good out of it too but these are things she tries not to think about in light of this being, above all, a temporary arrangement.
How it ends is still up for discussion.
Devon folds all six feet and three inches of himself into the backseat of the convertible and only just gets the door closed before Casey steps on the gas.
-
“I was going to be a surgeon,” Devon says, another empty stretch of sandy road and Casey quiet in the driver’s seat.
There’s this awful country station playing on the radio now, the only thing that doesn’t come in as a static-filled mess, and she imagines men wearing cowboy hats from their accents and the liquid of their voices, the old west and gunslingers coming to mind without much effort. This place feels steeped in history, and it’s not just the Aztec Ruins they passed a few dozen miles ago, but the look of it, the smell of it.
It’s almost suffocating.
“Yeah?” She unscrews the cap of her water bottle, finds lukewarm water even less appealing than the lukewarm beer in the back, but downs it anyways. The air conditioning conked out before they crossed state lines and, while it’s a dry heat, they’re still pushing towards one hundred degrees with the sun directly overheard and not a cloud in the sky. “What made you change your mind?”
“Football injury,” he answers, without elaboration. She’s seen his hand twitch, at cash registers and across the table at all-night diners. Had thought stress reaction, nerves instead of nerve damage, only the other is looking more likely now. Can’t operate without a steady pair of hands.
Can’t shoot a gun either.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and thinks she means it too.
-
They’re headed for Las Vegas.
Not the one you’re thinking of either.
Las Vegas, New Mexico, in San Miguel County, right on top of the Gallinas River. Her and Casey had sat down with a map back in utah, decided Mexico or bust in light of the rock and a hard place they’d found themselves in. Travel across the border is discouraged by the US government, the product of rival cartels and an uptick in crime, heads on stakes lining highways and bodies found in caves just outside of popular resorts. It makes for an easier time crossing it, with Mexico hurting for tourists and the federales turning a blind eye towards everything but the drug trade and turf wars.
It’s always easier getting in than out anyways.
-
“We’re in outlaw country now,” Casey says, when they pass the one mile marker, exit 343 on your right.
Devon thinks he’s kidding.
-
They get separate rooms at the Plaza Hotel, ones that will fall in line nicely with their eventual covers. Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell, a young married couple - him from California, her from Texas, Sarah slipping into a Southern accent to sell it - doing some sightseeing on their way to a wedding in Abilene, and Mr. Hamilton, who shows up half an hour later, and doesn’t say where he’s from or what he’s doing or, really, anything at all.
They both pay in cash.
“Sure you can handle him, Walker?”
She cocks her hip with one hand on the doorknob.
They’re in the older wing of the building, floor to ceiling windows with heavy dark green drapes pulled back, too much lace and dark wood, like stepping into the Victorian era, save for the flat-screen television. Her suitcase is packed full of leather and guns, more ammo and weapons in the trunk, hidden where the spare tire should be. They’re bulls in the china shop, only the destruction is both imminent and intentional.
“I handle you just fine,” she replies, unintentional double entendre that has him laughing quietly to himself. Sarah doesn’t bother to clarify. “I’ll see you later.”
“Count on it.”
-
There’s tequila.
Devon’s already nursing a beer with the local news on just loud enough to be heard over the A/C as it kicks on, when she gets out of the shower. He’s a big fan of looking over his shoulder. Sarah’s been doing this so long she’s forgotten what it’s like to care that much.
“You have family?”
She switches his beer for a shot glass and downs her own. He tears his eyes away from the television; they’re talking about salmonella in the cucumbers and Devon’s a health nut so this, this she can understand.
“My parents,” he tells her, brows drawn, ten kinds of hesitant. He’s been with them for three weeks but she’s yet to do any digging of a personal nature.
It’s a courtesy; he’s essentially a semi-willing hostage. They needed a car after theirs dropped its transmission thirty miles inside of the state line back in Colorado, and he was the first gullible individual with a car that wasn’t either falling apart itself or a hybrid that Casey would rather blow up than drive. They were just going to hijack it and be on their merry way, except Devon looks the part of the dumb jock more than he acts it and Sarah had liked him.
Likes him.
“No girlfriend?”
“I was engaged.”
“What happened?”
“Her brother went crazy, wound up institutionalized. Said he saw things that weren’t there.” She settles on the edge of the king bed, leans back on her hands and his eyes linger on her legs, shorts riding up her thighs as she stretches. He shakes it off after a beat. “Between that and her job, I kind of fell by the wayside.”
“I’m sorry,” she offers, not for the first time today, and it covers up the realization that he hasn’t cut and run yet because there’s nothing for him to go back to quite nicely. She should feel bad, pity at the very least, sadness at the very most, but there’s a nagging voice in her head that won’t stop reminding her that this is good for him. No one will notice that he’s up and disappeared. No one is looking.
“Yeah,” he sighs, “It was…not awesome.”
This time, she abandons the shot glass, takes a swig straight from the bottle. Offers it to him from across the room.
He accepts.
Their fingers brush and there’s the same kind of electricity in the air that all bad decisions seem to start with.
-
“He doesn’t like me,” Devon says, half of the bottle gone, and she can’t remember if it was full when they started or not. He’s left the couch in favor of the bed, his body stretched out lengthwise next to hers, shoes kicked off and the television having fallen silent long ago.
“Casey?”
Sarah turns her head as she best she can while lying flat and he’s looking at her, let me stare deep into your soul looking at her, and it leaves her mouth dry. She licks her lips, a simple unconscious act, but it draws his eye, and his hand makes to reach before he reigns himself back in, restraint quietly waning with the night.
She looks away. Supposes that’s the responsible thing to do, if not the desirable one. Says, “He just doesn’t trust you. Don’t feel bad; he doesn’t trust anyone.”
“He trusts you,” he replies, decisively, and he’s not telling her anything new. She knows, feels it in her bones, even if it’s just a feeling, an assumption based more on actions than verbalization, because he’s never said it and neither has she but, then, there’s never been reason to doubt it. History runs deep and, eventually, it runs you down as well. Devon isn’t a part of that and therein lies the draw.
He’s damaged, somewhere underneath the exterior of the easygoing guy’s guy with a taste for long runs at dawn - he told her once, by way of explaining why his internal clock has him up at seven, at the very latest, even if the activity itself is out of the question when they’re moving on every three days or so and it’s best to keep a low profile, keep out of sight entirely if you can - and the kind of chivalry that comes off as cheesy on men who aren’t him, ones who are trying instead of acting on instinct. But it isn’t damaged she caused or had a hand in. It isn’t something she experienced or ever will experience.
It doesn’t make him anything like her.
“He thinks you’re going to screw us. That’s why we share a room. He thinks you’ll bolt otherwise,” she tells him, answers an unasked question that’s been hanging in the air for some time now.
“Not cool,” he says, and she laughs without meaning to, the frat boy phrasing breaking into the middle of an otherwise serious conversation sends her into fits, and she curls in on herself, onto her side and her forehead bumps his arm before she settles, closer than she was a moment ago.
She keeps forgetting to move away.
“Would you?”
“No,” he says, a long note of hesitation ringing out before it. It’s the answer she thought she’d turn up; it’s also the one that she finds the hardest to believe, no matter how clear and steady his voice is. No matter how genuine it sounds. Sincerity is easily feigned and there’s no such animal as a sure thing.
She wants to believe he’s smarter than this, and a smart man would be on the first bus out of the city the minute she turned her back.
“You should,” she tells him, and then she kisses him.
-
This is a city divided.
East and West Las Vegas and the river splitting them right down the middle. Rival school districts and football teams hearkening back to the days where the divisions were drawn a little more clearly in a peculiar mix of sand and blood, where the west was settled, clean, and the east was in a state of constant turbulence, filled at one time with men that would become synonymous with legends a century later, Jesse James and Doc Holliday, Hoodoo Brown and Billy The Kid.
Outlaw country.
The hotel itself is a small scale reflection of this, handily divided into old and new, split in a way that’s not perfectly centered yet obvious nonetheless. You can walk down a hall, turn into the next, and the insides of it will transition from dark woods and lace canopies to simple white linens and cushy sofas, time passing in the span of a few feet.
Their rooms are on the old side.
A wealthy CEO by the name of Arthur Compton checks in sometime the morning after they do, visiting some old friends. Turns out he’s from here. Turns out he has some business to do here and the man stalking around the lobby later on that day isn’t a patron - he’s security.
It’s not hard to guess which side he’s on.
But they don’t know this yet.
-
She wakes up sprawled across the bed, on top of the comforter. Her hands are sticky from spilled tequila, the bottle on the nightstand, and one edge of the canopy is tickling the underside of her foot, making her toes curl, her knee draw towards her chest and away.
Devon’s at her back, four inches of space between them but for the hand that’s along her back, like he meant to throw an arm over her waist, her hip, and missed, fell back to the mattress and now it’s just warm fingers at the hem of her t-shirt, the twitch of them in his sleep.
She sighs and arches away from him, her last stand.
His hand follows.
-
“The guy in the elevator was armed.”
Casey turns in his chair, antique writing desk and a map spread across it, their target and getaway mapped out in red marker. His gun is loaded, safety on, next to the phone. He doesn’t look surprised, more impressed. He shouldn’t look that way and it eats at her.
She crosses her arms. “You think they’re onto us?”
“They would’ve already paid us a visit if they were,” he says, what she already knows or should know, because it’s the U.S. government that they’re running from, their former employer, and they aren’t fans of the waiting game, of biding their time while her and Casey inch closer to the border, to potential freedom, to another fight with a whole new cast of characters but a lack of history all the same.
Rome. She’d wanted Rome. Or Tahiti. Instead, it’s Mexico and lawlessness, a place with bigger fish to fry than a rogue CIA operative and a former sniper turned NSA agent. The vendetta against them is personal and it’s rooted in this soil and they can shake it free, probably, maybe, if they could just get out of here via any means less suspicious than a plane.
“Never known you to worry, Walker,” he chides but there’s an edge of concern to it. He taps his gun with two fingers, the others wrapped around that red marker and there’s a smear of blue ink on the side of his hand. She bites her tongue instead of her lip. “Unless it’s not you and I you’re worried about.”
“He’s a good guy, Casey,” she tries, and then stops herself, looks away from him, before she can catch the raised eyebrow, that hard look he gives her after that.
“He’s expendable.”
Because Casey isn’t concerned about anyone outside of the two of them, not when they, realistically, can’t afford to. It doesn’t mean he wants him dead, it just means that Devon doesn’t figure into their long term plans and so it falls onto her to worry, to care.
“After Santa Fe, he’s out. If he bails on us and tries to go to the cops, we shoot him. If he doesn’t - and I don’t care if he just keeps his mouth shut for a few days to give us a nice head start - then that’s that. We don’t tell him where we’re going, we don’t tell him how, and we don’t tell him when. He’s just a guy who had a nice vacation for a few weeks. Got to see the sights.”
“And if someone recognizes him? Which, by the way, isn’t out of the question since surveillance footage has a habit of popping up and we aren’t exactly wearing masks?”
“Then the airport can be his first stop. But he isn’t coming with us.”
She tries not to think about what Devon’s got ahead of him when they kick him to the curb in Santa Fe.
Tries not to think about how they’ve all but ruined his life.
-
Casey says nothing when he leaves.
All explanations double as reminders, each one sounding more patronizing than the next, and he has more respect for her than that.
The hand that he reaches out to brush her hair from her face as he passes by somehow winds its way to the nape of her neck, thumb scrubbing over the curve of her jaw. She turns her head inwards, a reflex that compels her to look down, look away, only she’s too close to him and instead it’s her cheek against his wrist, his forearm, bone and tanned skin, veins in sharp contrast, raised and blue.
“Dammit,” she breathes, and his pulse thrums.
-
“I learned how to shoot when I was nine,” she says, sometime later, her feet tucked under her on the small sofa that’s more ornamental than comfortable she’s found. Their bags are packed by the door, ready for a nine o’clock check out, and Devon had seen her check the safety of her gun before she set it on the nightstand next to the gold earrings that’ll match her shoes tomorrow. Just another accessory.
He’s been a combination of unsettled and curious ever since. It’s her casual indifference, she thinks, that leaves him wide-eyed, in awe of the gravity of this thing she holds in her hands like it’s an iced latte. It’s a reaction that she can identify but it isn’t one she can sympathize with any longer; the years have worn her down to the point that she can no longer remember what it was like to be wary of guns that weren’t pointed at you.
She was always eager, fingers itching for the feel of it in her hands. Before she had to take a life anyways.
The shock of that dulls too, over time and with practice.
She doesn’t tell him about an uncle in the backwoods of South Carolina who was just this side of irresponsible once he had a few beers in him, and she doesn’t tell him the truth either, that her father was - maybe still is -- a con artist, that she knew, that the threat of jail time filled her less with fear and more with a strange sense of acceptance that comes from growing up far too fast. That learning to shoot was a necessary evil.
Instead she asks, “Have you ever…?” and watches him shake his head vehemently. It’s not surprising. He won’t hold them - which is just fine by Casey, not to have the hostage-slash-rookie waving a gun around - but there are well-trained men and women who’ve accidentally gotten off a shot that landed in an innocent bystander or, worse, a kid, who act the same. Devon’s the kind of guy who would shoot a deer and then spend the rest of his life terrified of doing it again, of killing something else.
Casey’s right; he can’t survive in this line of work, even if they wanted to take him along.
“We should go to bed,” she says, and this is where she starts counting down the days until Santa Fe is in their rearview, until they’ve separated, left him at a bus station with a smile and good luck before speeding down the highway. She needs him gone. She needs him not to be her problem anymore.
She hadn’t anticipated this two-for-one deal on guilt and longing.
And it’s strange that she spends the three seconds it takes to cross from the couch to the bed thinking that she phrased it like a proposition, go to bed instead of go to sleep, something better suited to old high society ladies with their cups of tea and quiet talk of living in sin. It’s strange that when she sheds her shorts, stripped down to just her underwear and a t-shirt, he smiles at the pattern of multi-colored hearts - this is where not being able to consistently do your laundry gets you - something almost child-like to his expression, and she finds it endearing instead of misguided.
She finds herself on her knees cutting across the bed and his mouth under hers instead of pulling back the covers and slipping underneath them. That too is strange, a broken resolution falling dead at her feet like this is January first and she’s just looking for an excuse, any excuse. Hands grapple with the back of his t-shirt and she pulls him down, down, down, on top of her and he goes willingly, stupidly, and they’re not even drunk, not even buzzed enough for her to look back at this moment and tell herself it was logical at the time. That it was right.
It’s not right. She’s going to leave him in a matter of days but he doesn’t know that. For all he knows, he’s with them until Mexico, with them until he gets smart and runs, and that’s the intention. Blind side him and maybe, just maybe, he’ll get all the way back to California on autopilot before he’s done processing.
She’s going to screw him, and he’s going to get screwed, but first she’s going to fuck him.
And there’s nothing right about that at all.
-
Her hair is a mess and the insides of her thighs feel damp, afterwards.
Devon kisses a trail from her neck to her collarbone, salty skin and faint red marks, and she listens to the heavy footsteps that pause outside the door, a five second beat before they start up again.
Jerks instinctively, hand reaching for her weapon, but she’s too far away and so she’s left with inches of mattress space and him, her breath catching in her throat.
It’s terrifying in all the ways you don’t hear about.
-
Casey won’t stop shaking his head.
The scent of perfume on the third floor sees her out.
(“You know this place is haunted?” Devon had asked, yesterday morning, her laptop and a Wikipedia page.
He’d sounded amused. She’d been more amused that the hotel had internet.
A city with as much history as this one is bound to have more than a few ghosts.)
-
Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell are looking into setting up an account at the bank of Las Vegas. Devon wears a suit and Sarah crosses her legs beneath her white dress, folds her hands over her knee, and talks boisterously, over-exaggerated accent and mannerisms to distract from the way Devon starts to stumble over himself when he can’t remember his lines. This is a performance, nothing more and nothing less.
She squeezes his hand underneath the table, smiles even brighter at the banker.
Arthur Compton is up front depositing too much money into a savings account and the teller is making noise at her manager about it. His bodyguard is wearing a leather jacket in ninety-two degree weather with the sun overhead and no breeze; even with the A/C, it’s ridiculous, but there’s a gun underneath it and Sarah knew that as soon as they walked in.
Casey doesn’t.
This is why, as the banker hands them paperwork to start filling out, there are five shots instead of four. This is why, amid the screams and the people hitting the floor, Devon’s hands on her shoulders pulling her down with him reflexively, her stomach knots.
The carpet is scratchy under her knees, her elbows, and Devon’s still got a hold on her, breathing too shallow. The fingers of his right hand are trembling against her bare skin and it does little to reassure her. There were only supposed to be four shots for four security cameras.
There’s a sixth and then Casey’s voice, loud and clear, “anyone else want to try?”
-
She’s the hostage.
He catches her around the waist, gun at her neck, and she makes for a pretty little damsel in distress, all wide eyes, tears in the corners of them that never fall and pleas that stutter to a stop when he tells her to shut up, when he presses the barrel of the gun tighter to her skin. It’s quite a performance when she’s the safest person in the room.
She nearly stumbles over the bodyguard’s body, finds the security guard unarmed, his gun tucked into the waistband of Casey’s jeans. Guesses that fifth shot, the bodyguard’s presumably, didn’t land. Not much of a bodyguard.
Devon starts protesting right on cue, trying to get Casey to aim that gun at him - what all good husbands do when their wives are in danger, when they want to look like the hero - and Casey uses him as the go between so he never has to take the gun off of her, never has to take his attention completely away from the security guard who won’t stay still for long, weapon or no.
It’s a ten minute robbery, in and out with the money they came for. The bodyguard is incapacitated, not dead as it turns out, and when Casey walks out with the hostage in tow, using the husband as a mule, no one bats an eye.
Someone pulls the alarm but they’re clear long before the sirens wail on approach.
-
“That’s enough, right?”
She doesn’t say for Mexico and she doesn’t talk in amounts. Keeps it vague, like he asked, even if she’s alternating glancing at him and at Devon in the backseat. He looks catatonic. He isn’t but he looks the part, eyes glazed and unfocused, not a word uttered since they sped off. This is only his second time around, the first back in Colorado. They’d held up a bank there too, come up short, and local LEO’s had been more concerned by that than the government had. They were already actively pursuing her and Casey; a bank robbery was just the icing on the cake.
The laundry list of combined charges already includes murder, probably treason, and it’s what they’ve got on the man who’s ascended to the top of the CIA food chain that makes them the most dangerous. Armed robbery is right up there with kidnapping and car theft, things to be kicked under the rug before anyone has the nerve to question why there weren’t any dead bodies left behind after the first one, why two agents with reputations such as theirs just decided to go rogue one day on a whim.
“Yeah,” he says, “we’re good.”
She catches the wince he gives on a sharp right turn, finally sees the blood spreading at his side, dark red against black cotton fabric, a moment later. Presses her mouth to her closed fist without knowing what she’s trying to bite back.
-
It’s a graze, easily treated with the first aid kit and a few shots of whiskey. She makes him settle back onto the bed in a motel room in Santa Fe, threatens to finish the job if he doesn’t shut up and let her do this, and he growls something about maternal instincts and candyasses that makes her want to punch him, but she thinks that’s the point.
“You’re not supposed to be sleeping with the hostage,” he tells her.
She presses a little too hard on the wound when she’s smoothing out the bandage. He grimaces. “And you’re not supposed to get shot. So I guess we both fucked up.”
He doesn’t argue with her, for once.
-
Devon’s on the edge of the bed when she gets back. Just sitting there in the dark, no television, no bedside lamp, just the yellow and green lights from the parking lot outside seeping in through the slats of the blinds. They’re in a rundown motel just inside of the city that takes cash and doesn’t ask questions, the kind of place that suits people like them.
He asks, “Is he okay?”
She doesn’t mean to laugh. It’s not funny.
“I could take a look,” he continues, unhindered. “I did go to med school.”
Sarah had forgotten. Forgotten him entirely in the moment, while digging for the first aid kit and trying not to look as frantic as she felt, still high on adrenaline and that momentary burst of fear that she likes to lie to herself about and claim she’s grown past.
“He’s fine,” she says, artificial smile, and when her eyes fall to her feet, the carpet underneath, she sees blood on the hem of her pristine white dress.
-
“And you weren’t scared?”
“No.”
As pillow talk goes, it’s not her best. It’s also far from her worst.
Sarah will take what she can get.
“He had a gun on you.”
“The thing is, you have to trust your partner. If you don’t, you’re dead anyways.”
-
In the morning, she brings him coffee from the machine in the lobby. It’s watery and lukewarm but habit all the same and she sips it while she cleans the gun she hasn’t yet used, while he showers, hums through thin walls. It’s just the monotony she’s looking for.
Casey shows up before she can get too comfortable.
“Want to get breakfast?”
She raises an eyebrow. “The coffee?”
“Makes the stuff at the gas station seem like gourmet.”
Sarah bites back a smile. “Meet you outside in twenty.”
-
The diner’s called the Tune-Up Cafe.
She’d noticed it on the way in, the hour or so drive in leaving her more tired than she had any right to be and queasy in a way that had nothing to do with car sickness. But it had caught her eye, turquoise window frames the only thing that stood out against the old adobe building. The kind of hole in the wall place where they wouldn’t run into any trouble.
The waitress’ name is Karen and she smiles like a morning person, blindingly bright and cheerful in a way that only Devon can mimic. Not even Casey’s grumbling puts her off.
Sarah orders the eggs.
-
There’s something to be said for tying up loose ends.
Know this: the first time John Casey ever shot someone and left them alive, it was an accident. He was young and overconfident and he caught a bullet in the thigh for it before he got around to finishing the job.
The second time was in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Time to pay up.
(This will be the last time.)
-
Devon’s handsy with her, under the table where Casey can’t see.
He woke up in a good mood, lighthearted despite the ordeal that was yesterday, and she thinks this is how he’s chosen to cope. Acting like an earlier, far more innocent, version of himself as a form of denial. It shows up in the easy smile on his face and the playful, almost teasing twist to his words. The way his hand falls to her knee, fingers curving against the muscle of her thigh just above, like this is how they behave, have always behaved, will continue to behave.
Natural.
It feels weird to her. Makes her nervous because maybe she likes the warm weight of his hand there. Maybe it makes her smile and maybe it makes her feel something, something indescribable and oddly freeing, but that’s not a feeling that she can hold to for long. It’s one that she’ll have to let go of sooner rather than later and it makes her insides turn.
She’s about to excuse herself to the bathroom in the back, her appetite all but gone, when the door opens, ushering in the breeze. Casey takes his customary glance at the new face and she gives Devon’s hand a squeeze as she moves it off her leg, getting a grin from him for her troubles. Casey mutters something under his breath about fools and puppy love that he thinks she can’t hear and that Devon isn’t paying any attention to.
That’s when the shooting starts.
-
Four hours outside of Santa Fe, in an agricultural town called Clovis, she locks the bathroom door, runs the water, and sits in the bathtub until her fingers and toes prune. Washes twice, scrubs her skin red with a loofah, careful around the place where her shin was skinned against the rough edge of the table back at the dinner.
Listens to pacing outside the door and the sticky sound surgical tape makes when you peel it off the roll.
Casey knocks four times in the span of five minutes, staggered and weaker by a mile each time, before he just solves his own problem. Picks the lock. She doesn’t bother with threats, doesn’t have the energy for it, so she just leans her head back against the rim of the porcelain tub and waits for the inevitable click and the sound of his feet on the tile.
He never looks anywhere but at eye level. She wouldn’t care if he did, the foamy mixture of soap and water just hitting the tops of her breasts, and the modesty beaten out of her during wardrobe changes in the backs of cars and shared hotel rooms. So he sees. So he’s seen.
“I was thinking of burning them,” she says, stretching one long leg out of the water, her heel just grazing the other side of the tub, fully extended. There’s a line of soap underscoring a red patch of skin that stings when exposed to the cold air. His eyes follow that movement that would be called graceful if her toes weren’t dripping soap onto the bathroom floor. “The clothes. All of it, I just…but then I remembered we left half of our stuff at the motel.”
“Nothing that isn’t replaceable,” he says, it’s not like we don’t have the money a joke that he elects to leave on the cutting room floor. Casey isn’t known for his sense of humor.
She doesn’t know whether that’s true or not, hasn’t stopped to take stock of what she left behind in material goods. In memories. There’s a Swiss Army knife that used to fit neatly into a dead man’s hands, her grandfather’s hands, and a photo that’s seen too much wear and tear and weather. More recent things, memorabilia of her time at the CIA, of a partner that’s more likely to be in the ground than otherwise.
The footprints she leaves behind are filled with the dead and the dying.
Devon is one in a line and she hates the way it sounds, hates the way it summarily negates his brief existence in her life - just one of the others, each as interchangeable as the rest.
“He had a fiancée. Ex-fiancée. And parents.”
“Nothing you can do about it,” he tells her, hands braced on his knees as he sits on the closed lid of the toilet. His boots are half unlaced and the harsh lighting gives her a good look at the bruising along his jaw. He’s had worse. That graze at his side worries her more, high pain tolerance or not.
“I feel like I should call. So someone would know that he didn’t just disappear.”
“Maybe it’s better that way.”
“You would know.” She doesn’t catch herself in time and his expression hardens. Sarah doesn’t offer an apology, knows he wouldn’t accept it, would rather play it off as nothing, but she’s touched a nerve and knows it. She half reaches one soapy hand out to cover his own but withdraws, curls it back to her and sinks further down until the water’s up to her shoulders, warmth radiating through her.
He recovers deftly. “We have to go back. Give things a few days to blow over but then we’ve got business to attend to.”
Santa Fe wasn’t just a rest stop. They’ve driven thirty-six hours straight before, in shifts; nothing is without its purpose except, of course, this. Four hours out of their way to lick their wounds and regroup for a day or three. They ditched the car in Santa Rosa, traded it in for an inconspicuous four-door sedan that doesn’t go as fast as Casey wishes it would, and the guy behind the front desk barely even looked at them when he gave them their room keys, ear pressed to the phone and an irate woman screaming at him from the other end.
It’s a temporary sanctuary, if there is such a thing for people like them.
“I told him to leave, you know,” she catches his eye, and yes, she’ll tell a secret a dead man took to his grave and, yes, she’ll do it while looking straight at him because a lot of things scare her but fear of reprisal isn’t one of them. “It was a few nights ago - we were drunk - and I told him there was an envelope full of money in the glove compartment, that he should just take it and run. But he didn’t want to. He wanted to stay. It wasn’t even that he got off on the constant danger aspect of it, I don’t think, he just…he wanted to stay. And now he’s dead and it still feels like my fault.”
“Walker - “
“Don’t tell me it’s not my fault. Don’t sit there and - just don’t.”
The air goes out of the room and he looks to be following it, rising in one smooth movement that isn’t hindered by the grimace that she expects. She looks away, half angry, half hurt. At what and by what are anyone’s guess. She’s just feeling right now; she’ll overanalyze later when she’s wide awake at three a.m. while he sleeps silent next to her. She used to think he’d be the type to snore, to toss and turn and fight in his sleep; she’s known better for far too long.
“I keep losing people,” she says instead of thinks and maybe she meant for him to hear it, just to see if it would give him pause. It does. One foot out the door and his back to her.
“Don’t we all,” he concedes.
Her stomach drops.
“But I won’t go easily and neither will you, so I guess we’ve got that going for us.”
-
She sees the body on the news.
Santa Fe beckons once more.
-
fin.