Numb3rs : Doorways and Maxwell’s Demon
Title: Doorways and Maxwell’s Demon
Author: Avari (sunlesslands)
Pairing/Characters: Billy/Don, Colby/Don
Rating/Category: R Slash
Spoilers: Colby’s past from Trust Metric
Summary: It’s about trust; it’s about the truth and all the lies in between. Don is dead and Charlie asks Billy to investigate. At the end of the day, it’s a love story, too, because love is about control.
Notes/Warnings: Character death, AU of Trust Metric
1 October 2007.
Los Angeles is always hot, a remorseless kind of heat that never lets you forget that the City of Angeles was built smack dab in a damn desert. It’s worse when it rains. All the moisture that’s been kicking around for eons, recycled water that’s really dinosaur piss or whatever the scientists say, comes falling down with all the smoke and smog and filth that makes the LA sky so spectacular; I’m always amazed when the water runs clear on my skin. But then, that’s LA too, always full of surprises. Like getting a call from your ex-partner’s kid brother, a man that you’ve met once in your life, and thoroughly believed - right to the marrow - that there was no way in hell he could be related to the man you shared a gas station restroom with. But that’s how my day started, with a phone call from Charlie Eppes.
First time I hear his voice in two years and it’s to tell me that his big brother’s dead. Well, that’s fugitive recovery for you; it’s all about losing touch with-people, places, time. Only way that I know how to do the job, though, the way that I learned it, leave everything of me, myself, behind and crawl so deep into a fugitives head that I’m not chasing someone else, but I’m hunting myself. That’s the way Don did it. Hell, I think that’s why he did it.
So maybe I’m right, maybe Charlie Eppes isn’t related to the man I shared a gas station restroom with and maybe I never knew his brother. But apparently my number was still on his speed dial and one meeting is enough to make a good impression on a mathematician.
I didn’t recognize the voice when I picked up the phone, he says “Agent Cooper?” and his voice is pitched just a bit too high at the end for a normal question. The kind of pitch normally reserved for questions about terminal disease and execution dates.
“Who’s this?” I know what I sound like: rough and quiet, most people think I’ve got a pack a day habit or, one woman in a bar in Arizona, thought it was damage to my windpipe from an underground fighting ring. Don fell off his bed when I told him about that, clipped the night table on the way down and had to get stitches just above his ear.
“This, ah, this is Charlie - Charles Eppes,” and the fraction of a second pause while my brain comes up with a relationship, but not a face. “Don’s brother?” And in that question, two words, his voice cracks and I think about terminal diseases and execution dates and wonder which it was that finally took down Don Eppes.
I should have wondered why his brother was calling me.
“Yeah, yeah, I remember you. What happened?”
“Don-” he breathes and I know that breath, where you’re sucking in air but it can’t make it past the wet lump in your throat. I wait because I’m not anybody’s shoulder to cry on. “There, um, there was a shooting and Don-the FBI’s closed the case but there are still-there are still variables unaccounted for and-”
“You want me to look into it.” Everything finally clicks and I finally remember Charlie Eppes; I’m too awake to deal with a math lecture.
“Just-if you could, yes, I’d like that. It’s just that the FBI’s analysis of events leaves several unanswered-”
“I’ll meet you at the FBI offices in an hour.”
I hang up before he says anything else and hurl the phone onto the bed, within seconds it’s been sucked between the twisted layers of blankets and into the sogging mattress.
6 November 2001.
Don buys me a white trench coat for my birthday.
I walk into the motel room we’re sharing - not even a Motel 8 or Best Western because the FBI won’t spring for a chain, not for fugitive recovery - and take one look at the bag, with its design of reindeers and snowflakes and the corner of a sales sticker still left, that he couldn’t quite scrape off, and know that it’s over. We don’t buy each other gifts, though occasionally he gets some from his family, but they always get left behind. We travel fast. We travel light. There’s nothing in the pair of duffel bags tucked in the back of the SUV that isn’t essential and even the essentials get left behind sometimes. That’s part of the job, losing things; mementoes don’t matter much when you can’t keep them.
So seeing the bag, his best effort at wrapping, I don’t need to hear the formal announcement. I just pull out the coat - because that’s what you do - and try it on. The thing fits fine and maybe, just maybe, I’m a little happy that he remembers all the bitching and moaning I do when we get caught in the rain. As to why it’s white, well, I know that; it has to be white, impractical as that is in our line of work, because that’s what all the detectives wore in those old movies he likes. So it’s a bit of him and a bit of me, a memento for my birthday, for our last case together.
He lets me fuck him; the coat’s forgotten in a pile on the floor and Body Heat plays in short bursts between the white noise of the tv in the corner. I’m rough, my nails dig into his hips and there’ll be bruises there in the morning. We don’t kiss, not anywhere; it’s teeth or tongue but nothing else and we’re quite, except for the harshness of his panting and the slap of skin.
1 October 2007.
I’m not an investigator; I don’t know if Charlie realized that or not when called. Probably not, but I was the only available agent that he knew, who hadn’t been involved in whatever had gone down on that boat in the first place. Not much of a recommendation, actually, but anyway, Don was the investigator. But me? I don’t do clues-leads-whatever they get called; I hunt.
“So, run the sequence of events by me one more time.” I’m staring across the table at Colby Granger; he’s got bruised eyes and dark circles damn near tattooed underneath them. I can smell the aftershave and see a speck of bright red on the curve of his jaw. Creature comforts, a shower, a shave, a new pair of socks. Lock a man up and let him loose, he’ll always go for what makes him human first, maybe even before his hands are quite steady enough for what he wants.
“I told you; I was unconscious for most of it.”
“Actually, the report says that you were dead for most of it.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve never been good with details.” He slouches a bit in the chair, all wide legs and folded hands in his lap, not grinning but not somber. I’m not going to see somber out of him; he doesn’t want me asking questions, wouldn’t be in this room if it weren’t for Charlie, because he’ll do anything for the brother of the man that died for him.
4 April 2000.
Don tackles the guy on top of the grave; I can see the way his - the con’s - head cracks against the tombstone and there’s a rose stuck to Don’s arm by a line of thorns. I keep the gun on the con and watch him trash as Don tries to keep on top and keep the arms pinned and get his handcuffs and get them around the guy’s wrists to put a stop this landed guppy routine.
In the end, he cracks the con’s head against the stone one more time and the guy goes still; there’s drops of blood on the wife’s name as Don cuffs her killer. I holster my gun - I should take the guy off Don’s hands, it’ll take both of us to deal with the dead weight. Instead I pluck the rose from it’s lodged in Don’s biceps and wave it under his nose.
The flower finds its way back to our hotel room that night, a white rose in a plastic cup of water.
1 October 2007.
“So it says in the report that you went in after Don, Agent Sinclair?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” He’s the only agent that I know from my previous case with this office, with Don’s team. There’s a tremor in his hands now as he holds the coffee mug; I haven’t seen him take a drink in over an hour, it’s stone cold. He’s just holding on.
“So you tell me what happened,” I say and it isn’t a cop voice or an investigator voice. It’s just stone and, after a minute, he starts.
“We boarded the vessel about twenty four miles out,” he says to the stone-cold-coffee, “Don went up first; I covered him. Megan was bringing in a team from the other side. There was… we heard a gunshot. Don made entry into the cabin; Dwayne Carter had a gun, Don shot him. Lancer was dead-Carter must’ve killed him-Don went to check on Colby,” he breathes; there’s a tremor to that, too. “Don went to check on Colby, I heard a noise outside, so I went to assist Megan and her team. I’d left the cabin when I heard a gunshot-Don was down.”
He finally looks up from his coffee and I think that there might be something left of the man that I met two years ago. And that just makes me smile, a little, like when I’ve got a fugitive on the roof and it’s him and me and a long way down. Don always called it a rattlesnake smile, after the con that fell from the roof of a warehouse we’d cornered him on. “You got EMS there. Got Granger out before the ship went down.”
“We didn’t have time to go back for Don’s-we didn’t have time to go back for Don.”
18 July 1999.
Don doesn’t say a damn thing about running into his dad while we’re in LA. He just grips the wheel of the car and doesn’t ease off the gas until we’re clear in Nevada and onto the next hunt.
I don’t know why the hell he called his old man anyway, if it was going to end like this, and one look at their hand shakes at Starbucks had been enough of a warning that it’d end like this. All I’d done was nod at Alan Eppes and taken my chai tea latte outside to have a smoke; Don had looked at me funny - eight months together and he knew damn well what my vices were and weren’t - but I don’t think I crossed Eppes Sr.’s mind after that.
Another two hours into the drive and I slide my hand into Don’s lap, the silence is wearing thin and his jaw’s been locked since we got in the damn car six hours ago. He doesn’t say anything, just pulls to the side and kills the lights.
Forty-five minutes later and I’m driving, there’s some bluesy shit on the radio and every time Don looks over, I lick my fingers.
1 October 2007.
I don’t bother hunting down Reeves. I just go straight to Don’s apartment from the FBI offices. Charlie’s given me all the addresses, files and facts that he could press into my hands before I walked away. Just because he’s right, doesn’t mean I have to listen. His expressions might cut down on the legwork-probably do, if I’m going to be fair-but that’s what a hunt is, the legwork.
I don’t have the feel in my legs for this until I open the door to Don’s bedroom; it’s all clean lines and sparse like a better class of hotel than he and I ever stayed at. There’s two night tables, one on each of the bed, and I head towards the left, sit down on the nice, dark blue comforter because there’s no one there to tell me not to and then it’s way to easy to just… sprawl. I roll a little to the side and bury my nose in the pillow and the first thing - the first thing - that I can think is, this must be how Don smells now, real shampoo and soap.
Three years of bad motels when we could get them and whatever rest stops we could find otherwise and Don always smelled like sweat and cheap shampoo or industrial strength cleaner to me. But what’s left on his pillow is a hell of a lot softer. Some things are the same, though. Looking back at the night table, it’s so clean that it could be mine. There’s the lamp, in each reach, and a watch with its face towards the bed - the side with the eight is on top, the way that I leave my watch, not Don - and there’s a neat stack of coins to the side. The day Don died, he apparently had forty-two cents in his pocket.
I look at the night table to the right, even though I can’t seem to move from Don’s pillow, and it’s a jumble. There’s an alarm clock - a big, loud digital alarm clock like all motels have - and a James Ellroy paperback and a collection of fishing lures and a photograph of Don and Colby, shoulder to shoulder, propped against the lamp. I have to smile a little at that. Seems a little redundant to have a picture of you and the man you’re fucking propped on the night table next to your bed.
But maybe that’s the trade off of being a triple agent for so long; can’t help but to over establish back story, leave clutter of yourself everywhere to prove that it is you.
I stretch out again and take another look from the bed that I can’t bring myself to leave. Don’s side is closest to the door. With the night tables, that’s established, no rotating like we did. He’s the first line against anything that goes bump in the night. I stretch again and stare up at the ceiling in between staring at the insides of my eyelids.
This was Don’s world. LA really had been good for him.
Stretched out on his clean blue comforter, I can’t keep my eyes open and, hell, there’s no one to tell me otherwise or remind me that I am, really, falling asleep in my dead partner’s bed.
I can do that on my own. And I do, I close my eyes and breathe in and Don’s so much softer than I remembered.
14 June 1999.
Don is washing the blood off his hands with the pink soap that’s a staple at every gas station restroom in the country. I think that we’re both just glad that it’s there.
A week into the chase and we lost the con going over a fence, but Don’s got nice souvenirs of how close we came; the wires bit into his hand as he followed and the blood rises in a crisscross over his hands. He’s scrubbing hard, working the pink soap into the red lines along his skin until the bubbles start to drop down onto the floor. That’s when I stand behind him to turn off the sink. And he gives me his hands to dress, layers of anti-septic and gauze and bandages.
It’s the only time we kiss.
2 October 2007.
I wake up the light is different, pink and red, a Los Angeles dawn where the sun has to set the filth on fire to get a little light. It takes me a minute longer than it should to read the watch on the night table with the six-side up and when I do, I’m gone.
I find things, mostly people in my line of work; I don’t do clues and leads and investigations. All I do is hunt.
There’s a motel in Los Angeles just off the 210; it’s called Shangri-La and a long time ago, Don and I laughed about that. It doesn’t matter which room you check into, all the beds are saggy and the televisions all play more static than classic movies.
I don’t kick down the door, I don’t have to, but I do kick it shut behind me. I toss the watch to the bed, next to Don, who only raises an eyebrow at seeing it.
“You were in my apartment.”
“Yeah.”
He takes a closer look at me, “you slept in my bed.”
“Yeah.”
“Now what?” It’s almost not a question, the way he asks, smooth and even, despite the sling on his arm and the bandages on his chest. There’s a dot of red, growing bigger on the gauze taped to his jaw line. I grab the trench coat from the chair and drop it over him, drop myself gently down into the uncomfortable arm chair, all wide legs and folded hands.
“Now? Now you’re dead, Don.”
This fic was written for the Angst vs Schmoop Challenge at numb3rswriteoff. After you’ve read the fic, please rate it by voting in the poll located here. (Your vote will be anonymous.) Rate the fic on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the best) using the following criteria: how well the fic fit the prompt, how angsty [or schmoopy] the fic was, and how well you enjoyed the fic. When you’re done, please check out the other challenge fic at numb3rswriteoff. Thank you!
Author: Avari (sunlesslands)
Pairing/Characters: Billy/Don, Colby/Don
Rating/Category: R Slash
Spoilers: Colby’s past from Trust Metric
Summary: It’s about trust; it’s about the truth and all the lies in between. Don is dead and Charlie asks Billy to investigate. At the end of the day, it’s a love story, too, because love is about control.
Notes/Warnings: Character death, AU of Trust Metric
1 October 2007.
Los Angeles is always hot, a remorseless kind of heat that never lets you forget that the City of Angeles was built smack dab in a damn desert. It’s worse when it rains. All the moisture that’s been kicking around for eons, recycled water that’s really dinosaur piss or whatever the scientists say, comes falling down with all the smoke and smog and filth that makes the LA sky so spectacular; I’m always amazed when the water runs clear on my skin. But then, that’s LA too, always full of surprises. Like getting a call from your ex-partner’s kid brother, a man that you’ve met once in your life, and thoroughly believed - right to the marrow - that there was no way in hell he could be related to the man you shared a gas station restroom with. But that’s how my day started, with a phone call from Charlie Eppes.
First time I hear his voice in two years and it’s to tell me that his big brother’s dead. Well, that’s fugitive recovery for you; it’s all about losing touch with-people, places, time. Only way that I know how to do the job, though, the way that I learned it, leave everything of me, myself, behind and crawl so deep into a fugitives head that I’m not chasing someone else, but I’m hunting myself. That’s the way Don did it. Hell, I think that’s why he did it.
So maybe I’m right, maybe Charlie Eppes isn’t related to the man I shared a gas station restroom with and maybe I never knew his brother. But apparently my number was still on his speed dial and one meeting is enough to make a good impression on a mathematician.
I didn’t recognize the voice when I picked up the phone, he says “Agent Cooper?” and his voice is pitched just a bit too high at the end for a normal question. The kind of pitch normally reserved for questions about terminal disease and execution dates.
“Who’s this?” I know what I sound like: rough and quiet, most people think I’ve got a pack a day habit or, one woman in a bar in Arizona, thought it was damage to my windpipe from an underground fighting ring. Don fell off his bed when I told him about that, clipped the night table on the way down and had to get stitches just above his ear.
“This, ah, this is Charlie - Charles Eppes,” and the fraction of a second pause while my brain comes up with a relationship, but not a face. “Don’s brother?” And in that question, two words, his voice cracks and I think about terminal diseases and execution dates and wonder which it was that finally took down Don Eppes.
I should have wondered why his brother was calling me.
“Yeah, yeah, I remember you. What happened?”
“Don-” he breathes and I know that breath, where you’re sucking in air but it can’t make it past the wet lump in your throat. I wait because I’m not anybody’s shoulder to cry on. “There, um, there was a shooting and Don-the FBI’s closed the case but there are still-there are still variables unaccounted for and-”
“You want me to look into it.” Everything finally clicks and I finally remember Charlie Eppes; I’m too awake to deal with a math lecture.
“Just-if you could, yes, I’d like that. It’s just that the FBI’s analysis of events leaves several unanswered-”
“I’ll meet you at the FBI offices in an hour.”
I hang up before he says anything else and hurl the phone onto the bed, within seconds it’s been sucked between the twisted layers of blankets and into the sogging mattress.
6 November 2001.
Don buys me a white trench coat for my birthday.
I walk into the motel room we’re sharing - not even a Motel 8 or Best Western because the FBI won’t spring for a chain, not for fugitive recovery - and take one look at the bag, with its design of reindeers and snowflakes and the corner of a sales sticker still left, that he couldn’t quite scrape off, and know that it’s over. We don’t buy each other gifts, though occasionally he gets some from his family, but they always get left behind. We travel fast. We travel light. There’s nothing in the pair of duffel bags tucked in the back of the SUV that isn’t essential and even the essentials get left behind sometimes. That’s part of the job, losing things; mementoes don’t matter much when you can’t keep them.
So seeing the bag, his best effort at wrapping, I don’t need to hear the formal announcement. I just pull out the coat - because that’s what you do - and try it on. The thing fits fine and maybe, just maybe, I’m a little happy that he remembers all the bitching and moaning I do when we get caught in the rain. As to why it’s white, well, I know that; it has to be white, impractical as that is in our line of work, because that’s what all the detectives wore in those old movies he likes. So it’s a bit of him and a bit of me, a memento for my birthday, for our last case together.
He lets me fuck him; the coat’s forgotten in a pile on the floor and Body Heat plays in short bursts between the white noise of the tv in the corner. I’m rough, my nails dig into his hips and there’ll be bruises there in the morning. We don’t kiss, not anywhere; it’s teeth or tongue but nothing else and we’re quite, except for the harshness of his panting and the slap of skin.
1 October 2007.
I’m not an investigator; I don’t know if Charlie realized that or not when called. Probably not, but I was the only available agent that he knew, who hadn’t been involved in whatever had gone down on that boat in the first place. Not much of a recommendation, actually, but anyway, Don was the investigator. But me? I don’t do clues-leads-whatever they get called; I hunt.
“So, run the sequence of events by me one more time.” I’m staring across the table at Colby Granger; he’s got bruised eyes and dark circles damn near tattooed underneath them. I can smell the aftershave and see a speck of bright red on the curve of his jaw. Creature comforts, a shower, a shave, a new pair of socks. Lock a man up and let him loose, he’ll always go for what makes him human first, maybe even before his hands are quite steady enough for what he wants.
“I told you; I was unconscious for most of it.”
“Actually, the report says that you were dead for most of it.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve never been good with details.” He slouches a bit in the chair, all wide legs and folded hands in his lap, not grinning but not somber. I’m not going to see somber out of him; he doesn’t want me asking questions, wouldn’t be in this room if it weren’t for Charlie, because he’ll do anything for the brother of the man that died for him.
4 April 2000.
Don tackles the guy on top of the grave; I can see the way his - the con’s - head cracks against the tombstone and there’s a rose stuck to Don’s arm by a line of thorns. I keep the gun on the con and watch him trash as Don tries to keep on top and keep the arms pinned and get his handcuffs and get them around the guy’s wrists to put a stop this landed guppy routine.
In the end, he cracks the con’s head against the stone one more time and the guy goes still; there’s drops of blood on the wife’s name as Don cuffs her killer. I holster my gun - I should take the guy off Don’s hands, it’ll take both of us to deal with the dead weight. Instead I pluck the rose from it’s lodged in Don’s biceps and wave it under his nose.
The flower finds its way back to our hotel room that night, a white rose in a plastic cup of water.
1 October 2007.
“So it says in the report that you went in after Don, Agent Sinclair?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” He’s the only agent that I know from my previous case with this office, with Don’s team. There’s a tremor in his hands now as he holds the coffee mug; I haven’t seen him take a drink in over an hour, it’s stone cold. He’s just holding on.
“So you tell me what happened,” I say and it isn’t a cop voice or an investigator voice. It’s just stone and, after a minute, he starts.
“We boarded the vessel about twenty four miles out,” he says to the stone-cold-coffee, “Don went up first; I covered him. Megan was bringing in a team from the other side. There was… we heard a gunshot. Don made entry into the cabin; Dwayne Carter had a gun, Don shot him. Lancer was dead-Carter must’ve killed him-Don went to check on Colby,” he breathes; there’s a tremor to that, too. “Don went to check on Colby, I heard a noise outside, so I went to assist Megan and her team. I’d left the cabin when I heard a gunshot-Don was down.”
He finally looks up from his coffee and I think that there might be something left of the man that I met two years ago. And that just makes me smile, a little, like when I’ve got a fugitive on the roof and it’s him and me and a long way down. Don always called it a rattlesnake smile, after the con that fell from the roof of a warehouse we’d cornered him on. “You got EMS there. Got Granger out before the ship went down.”
“We didn’t have time to go back for Don’s-we didn’t have time to go back for Don.”
18 July 1999.
Don doesn’t say a damn thing about running into his dad while we’re in LA. He just grips the wheel of the car and doesn’t ease off the gas until we’re clear in Nevada and onto the next hunt.
I don’t know why the hell he called his old man anyway, if it was going to end like this, and one look at their hand shakes at Starbucks had been enough of a warning that it’d end like this. All I’d done was nod at Alan Eppes and taken my chai tea latte outside to have a smoke; Don had looked at me funny - eight months together and he knew damn well what my vices were and weren’t - but I don’t think I crossed Eppes Sr.’s mind after that.
Another two hours into the drive and I slide my hand into Don’s lap, the silence is wearing thin and his jaw’s been locked since we got in the damn car six hours ago. He doesn’t say anything, just pulls to the side and kills the lights.
Forty-five minutes later and I’m driving, there’s some bluesy shit on the radio and every time Don looks over, I lick my fingers.
1 October 2007.
I don’t bother hunting down Reeves. I just go straight to Don’s apartment from the FBI offices. Charlie’s given me all the addresses, files and facts that he could press into my hands before I walked away. Just because he’s right, doesn’t mean I have to listen. His expressions might cut down on the legwork-probably do, if I’m going to be fair-but that’s what a hunt is, the legwork.
I don’t have the feel in my legs for this until I open the door to Don’s bedroom; it’s all clean lines and sparse like a better class of hotel than he and I ever stayed at. There’s two night tables, one on each of the bed, and I head towards the left, sit down on the nice, dark blue comforter because there’s no one there to tell me not to and then it’s way to easy to just… sprawl. I roll a little to the side and bury my nose in the pillow and the first thing - the first thing - that I can think is, this must be how Don smells now, real shampoo and soap.
Three years of bad motels when we could get them and whatever rest stops we could find otherwise and Don always smelled like sweat and cheap shampoo or industrial strength cleaner to me. But what’s left on his pillow is a hell of a lot softer. Some things are the same, though. Looking back at the night table, it’s so clean that it could be mine. There’s the lamp, in each reach, and a watch with its face towards the bed - the side with the eight is on top, the way that I leave my watch, not Don - and there’s a neat stack of coins to the side. The day Don died, he apparently had forty-two cents in his pocket.
I look at the night table to the right, even though I can’t seem to move from Don’s pillow, and it’s a jumble. There’s an alarm clock - a big, loud digital alarm clock like all motels have - and a James Ellroy paperback and a collection of fishing lures and a photograph of Don and Colby, shoulder to shoulder, propped against the lamp. I have to smile a little at that. Seems a little redundant to have a picture of you and the man you’re fucking propped on the night table next to your bed.
But maybe that’s the trade off of being a triple agent for so long; can’t help but to over establish back story, leave clutter of yourself everywhere to prove that it is you.
I stretch out again and take another look from the bed that I can’t bring myself to leave. Don’s side is closest to the door. With the night tables, that’s established, no rotating like we did. He’s the first line against anything that goes bump in the night. I stretch again and stare up at the ceiling in between staring at the insides of my eyelids.
This was Don’s world. LA really had been good for him.
Stretched out on his clean blue comforter, I can’t keep my eyes open and, hell, there’s no one to tell me otherwise or remind me that I am, really, falling asleep in my dead partner’s bed.
I can do that on my own. And I do, I close my eyes and breathe in and Don’s so much softer than I remembered.
14 June 1999.
Don is washing the blood off his hands with the pink soap that’s a staple at every gas station restroom in the country. I think that we’re both just glad that it’s there.
A week into the chase and we lost the con going over a fence, but Don’s got nice souvenirs of how close we came; the wires bit into his hand as he followed and the blood rises in a crisscross over his hands. He’s scrubbing hard, working the pink soap into the red lines along his skin until the bubbles start to drop down onto the floor. That’s when I stand behind him to turn off the sink. And he gives me his hands to dress, layers of anti-septic and gauze and bandages.
It’s the only time we kiss.
2 October 2007.
I wake up the light is different, pink and red, a Los Angeles dawn where the sun has to set the filth on fire to get a little light. It takes me a minute longer than it should to read the watch on the night table with the six-side up and when I do, I’m gone.
I find things, mostly people in my line of work; I don’t do clues and leads and investigations. All I do is hunt.
There’s a motel in Los Angeles just off the 210; it’s called Shangri-La and a long time ago, Don and I laughed about that. It doesn’t matter which room you check into, all the beds are saggy and the televisions all play more static than classic movies.
I don’t kick down the door, I don’t have to, but I do kick it shut behind me. I toss the watch to the bed, next to Don, who only raises an eyebrow at seeing it.
“You were in my apartment.”
“Yeah.”
He takes a closer look at me, “you slept in my bed.”
“Yeah.”
“Now what?” It’s almost not a question, the way he asks, smooth and even, despite the sling on his arm and the bandages on his chest. There’s a dot of red, growing bigger on the gauze taped to his jaw line. I grab the trench coat from the chair and drop it over him, drop myself gently down into the uncomfortable arm chair, all wide legs and folded hands.
“Now? Now you’re dead, Don.”
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