The Other Tampa Job
Title: The Other Tampa Job
Characters: Sawyer, Miles, Kevin, Hibbs, Duckett.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for Outlaws, I Do and Recon.
Summary: Written for gottalovev, who requested best friends forever at lostsquee Summer Luau. In the sideways universe version of the Tampa Job, three men were arrested, however the fourth, Hibbs, escaped to LA. Now Sawyer, Miles and Kevin must team up to bring him down before he can con Duckett out of his recently acquired inheritance - if only Kevin can get Miles and Sawyer to start talking again.
If you’d asked James before their big argument, he’d never have admitted that he’d actually miss Miles - well, not to his face, anyway. But he did; he missed the way they were able to bounce ideas off each other, missed the easy rapport they used to have. Hell, he was even finding he was missing Miles’s constant hints about finding him a woman, and he certainly never thought he’d miss that!
There was no fear of anything like that with the new guy he’d been landed with as a partner; Kevin Callis, a new transfer from Florida. When another of the guys, Detective Walton, had made some joke with him about women, Callis had just glared at him, muttered something about how he certainly wouldn’t be having anything to do with them for a while and quickly changed the subject.
Not for the first time, James began to wonder whether he would have been better off just telling Miles the truth. Hell, he probably wouldn’t even have had to tell the real reason for being in Australia if he didn’t want to; all he’d have needed to have said was that he was there for a vacation and Miles would have probably accepted it.
But even as he thought it, James realised that actually, he wished he had told Miles all of it earlier. He knew why he never had; it had always just been easier never to tell people any of it after he and Uncle Doug had moved to California when he was fifteen. He could just be James Ford, not “that kid whose daddy went nuts and shot his mommy,” as he’d been to just about everyone else he’d known (and some that he hadn’t) back home. That, and the fact that he’d always found it easier not to get too close to people anyway since it had happened, just in case he had to lose them again.
Damn stupid thing to have done, James thought now, since by not telling the truth, he looked like he’d lost Miles’s friendship anyway. It was Miles, for God’s sake, his best friend. They had enough of a history now that Miles was always gonna see him just as James, not the other thing. But it was probably too late now, since when James had tried to talk to Miles the day before, Miles had just walked away without a backward glance.
“Hey, Ford.”
James glanced up listlessly to see Callis standing behind him.
“I need to talk to you. Meeting room 4, now. I’ll be with you in 5 minutes.”
James was about to ask why, but Kevin cut him off with “I’ll explain when you’re both there,” before walking away.
“Both?” James asked, wondering who Kevin meant, when all of a sudden he heard a familiar voice behind him.
“What the hell is he doing here?”
“Look, I don’t know what happened that meant that you two stopped being partners, Miles,” Kevin began. “And to be honest, I don’t care. I just care about this case. And if you two think you can’t work together, then you know where the door is.”
Miles and James looked at each other for a moment, but neither of them moved.
“Good. Okay, so you both know that I transferred here from Dade County, Florida.”
Your point being? James thought. He glanced at Miles, and knew that Miles was probably thinking the same thing, but he didn’t roll his eyes at him as he might once have done.
“There was a case I was working on right before I transferred. We called it the Tampa Job. Bunch of guys running a con where they’d call people up telling them they were entitled to these compensation payments for what happened to their relatives during the Holocaust, all they had to do was give their account number so they could wire them the money. We got three of the guys, but the fourth, a guy by the name of Hibbs, escaped. Our last known information indicated that Hibbs was in Los Angeles.”
Kevin flipped a switch on his projector; the image of a man filled the screen.
“That’s him.” He gestured towards the photograph. Weird, James thought. He could have sworn for a moment that the man looked familiar, but he couldn’t think why. He knew he’d never met this man in his life.
“And that’s why I brought the two of you in here today. Because you’re the team I need with me to bring him down. We know where he’s likely to be tonight,” Kevin continued, naming a local inn. “But I can’t go there. He knows me by sight; it’s gonna need you two to go in there undercover. I need one of you to go in there, build up some kind of rapport with him, work your way into his inner circle, gain his trust so next scam he tries to pull, you’ll be right there with him. The other one will have your back. That’s why I chose you two for my team, because I know you’ve got form in undercover work before, and I know you guys always had each other’s backs. So, what do you think? Think you can do it?”
Miles said something in response, but James barely heard him. He was too busy staring at the picture of Hibbs, trying to work out how he could possibly recognise him, why even just looking at the man made rage bubble up in his chest, why he had clenched his fists as though to flex his fingers around the man’s neck.
“So which of you is going to volunteer to go undercover with him?” Kevin asked.
James raised his hand. “I will.”
The name “Sawyer” seemed apt to James when he shook the hand of the man named Hibbs and introduced himself, after all, it felt in a way like he was becoming the man he’d hunted all these years every time he pulled one of these undercover jobs.
“Sawyer, huh?” Hibbs growled. “Yeah, I guess it suits you.”
James clenched his fist again, hoping the revulsion he felt both for this man and the whole idea of that man’s name suiting him wasn’t showing on his face. For two cents, he’d grab this guy by the neck and shove him right up against the wall.
Now, if I’m not mistaken, I’m fairly certain I said I’d kill you if I ever saw you again.
James frowned. Where did that come from? Miles, sitting across the room with a pint, trying to appear inconspicuous, started to rise from his seat, as though he suspected something was wrong. James shook his head and gestured for him to sit back down again. Hibbs didn’t appear to have noticed anything; he just made some casual remark to James and the two continued chatting. James tried to ignore Miles behind him, knowing he was feeding the information back to Callis; He’s made contact. Hibbs seems to be buying it.
Even knowing he’d made progress with the man, it was a relief to leave Hibbs behind, to escape from the bar into the fresh air, even knowing he was about to face the awkward debrief with Miles that was to follow. There he was, coming up to him now, probably all ready to let him have it for his slip earlier.
“Who’s Sawyer?”
Okay, that wasn’t what James was expecting.
“It was the name in the file, the one that Charlotte saw.” Miles continued.
“Shoulda known she wasn’t telling me the truth when she said she didn’t read any of it,” James muttered, thinking to himself that he should also have known that Miles would have put it together.
“Whoever the hell this guy is, he’s obviously someone important to you. I think all Charlotte really saw was the name. But she couldn’t understand, neither of us could, why it upset you so much. We’re supposed to be partners, James.” James noticed that Miles had used the present tense, rather than the past, but didn’t have chance to think any more about it before Miles continued “So who is he?”
“He’s the reason I became a cop.” James admitted at last, “Not that Bullitt crap. You know my parents died when I was nine, right? He’s the reason why. He was a conman, like that guy Hibbs in there. He conned my parents, he had an affair with my mother and took all their savings. My father shot my mother, and then he killed himself. So that’s why I became a cop. To get all the other Mr. Sawyers off the streets, to stop them screwing up anyone else’s lives. And if I ever find the original Mr. Sawyer, and I’ve got a name, so it’s only a matter of time, then I’m gonna kill him.”
“So why did you never tell me any of this before?” Miles asked.
“Because it had always been easier for me when nobody around me knew, so I wouldn’t be ‘that kid whose daddy shot his mommy’ like I always was before we moved away.”
Miles punched him lightly on the arm. “Nah, you’re the guy whose ass I always used to whoop at Tetris when we were in the academy together. You’re my wing man. You’re the only guy who’s ever managed to drink me under the table. You’re the guy who’s always had my back. And this is getting mushy, so I’m gonna stop there. But you know what I’m saying, right?”
James nodded. He did know. He also knew that the chances were, they were never going to mention that conversation again. But it didn’t matter. He had his friend back, he was on his way to nailing another con artist…life was pretty darn good.
In a way, it became easier for James to endure the company of Hibbs, to gain his trust to the extent that Hibbs would be willing to cut him in on his latest scam, knowing that he had his friendship with Miles back. He’d got to know Kevin better, too, over the last few months of working with him, and understood why bringing Hibbs down had become as important to Kevin as it was to James - Kevin had explained the real reason why he’d reacted so badly to Mike Walton’s joke about finding him a woman, about his marriage to a woman he’d known as Monica, which wasn’t her real name. The marriage had gone belly-up around the same time as Kevin had been investigating the Tampa Job, and James and Miles both understood now that Kevin still associated his failure in apprehending the fourth man from the Tampa Job with the failure of his marriage, and working so hard to bring down Hibbs was his way of dealing with that.
James had been working undercover with Hibbs for eight weeks when Hibbs told him of a new mark his friend Gordy had put him on to: a man named Frank Duckett who had recently been working in Sydney, Australia, running a shrimp stand, until he’d recently come into an inheritance and returned to the US to claim it. “You’re good at this kind of scam,” Hibbs had said. “Set up a meeting with him and the two of us, give him the whole spiel on the investment opportunity, show him the money, really turn on the old Southern charm thing - he’s Southern himself, he’s bound to trust you because of it.” James had nodded, played along, watched Hibbs smiling approvingly as he laid it on thick about the too-good-to-be-true oil deal and set up the date, yet all the time he was thinking Duckett? Feels as though I heard that name somewhere before, too. But he didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. He could have come across a different Duckett, or since he’d recently returned from Sydney, maybe James had even met him there.
So he parted from Hibbs, promised to be at the rendezvous, then he made another couple of calls. One was to Miles and Kevin, to let them know where Hibbs would be for the bust. The other wasn’t normal procedure in undercover operations like this. But James felt a curious responsibility in this case, one that he couldn’t even explain to himself, and he knew that this was the right thing to do.
“Well, I gotta say to you,” Frank Duckett said as he read the contract, “this all sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?”
“No catch.” Hibbs smirked. “You buy one share, then once you’ve invested, the state of Texas will triple your investment in two weeks. What’s not to like about that? Are you gonna sign on the dotted line or what?”
Duckett pretended to think for a minute. “Am I gonna sign? Let me think….No, I don’t think I am.”
“What?” Hibbs frowned, face slowly turning purple. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I think it’s perfectly clear what he meant,” said Kevin, approaching behind him with Miles.
“You!” Hibbs exclaimed, recognising his former foe.
“Me,” Kevin smiled. “Yes, we meet again. And you, my friend, are under arrest.” As Kevin and Miles led a loudly protesting Hibbs away, Duckett reached out and placed his hand on James’s arm.
“Thanks for tipping me off,” he said. “I really appreciate what you did for me.”
“It was nothing,” James shrugged. But he knew it wasn’t. Whatever debt he’d felt he’d owed Duckett, it had been repaid. James shook the man’s hand one more time before going to catch up with his friends.
Characters: Sawyer, Miles, Kevin, Hibbs, Duckett.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers for Outlaws, I Do and Recon.
Summary: Written for gottalovev, who requested best friends forever at lostsquee Summer Luau. In the sideways universe version of the Tampa Job, three men were arrested, however the fourth, Hibbs, escaped to LA. Now Sawyer, Miles and Kevin must team up to bring him down before he can con Duckett out of his recently acquired inheritance - if only Kevin can get Miles and Sawyer to start talking again.
If you’d asked James before their big argument, he’d never have admitted that he’d actually miss Miles - well, not to his face, anyway. But he did; he missed the way they were able to bounce ideas off each other, missed the easy rapport they used to have. Hell, he was even finding he was missing Miles’s constant hints about finding him a woman, and he certainly never thought he’d miss that!
There was no fear of anything like that with the new guy he’d been landed with as a partner; Kevin Callis, a new transfer from Florida. When another of the guys, Detective Walton, had made some joke with him about women, Callis had just glared at him, muttered something about how he certainly wouldn’t be having anything to do with them for a while and quickly changed the subject.
Not for the first time, James began to wonder whether he would have been better off just telling Miles the truth. Hell, he probably wouldn’t even have had to tell the real reason for being in Australia if he didn’t want to; all he’d have needed to have said was that he was there for a vacation and Miles would have probably accepted it.
But even as he thought it, James realised that actually, he wished he had told Miles all of it earlier. He knew why he never had; it had always just been easier never to tell people any of it after he and Uncle Doug had moved to California when he was fifteen. He could just be James Ford, not “that kid whose daddy went nuts and shot his mommy,” as he’d been to just about everyone else he’d known (and some that he hadn’t) back home. That, and the fact that he’d always found it easier not to get too close to people anyway since it had happened, just in case he had to lose them again.
Damn stupid thing to have done, James thought now, since by not telling the truth, he looked like he’d lost Miles’s friendship anyway. It was Miles, for God’s sake, his best friend. They had enough of a history now that Miles was always gonna see him just as James, not the other thing. But it was probably too late now, since when James had tried to talk to Miles the day before, Miles had just walked away without a backward glance.
“Hey, Ford.”
James glanced up listlessly to see Callis standing behind him.
“I need to talk to you. Meeting room 4, now. I’ll be with you in 5 minutes.”
James was about to ask why, but Kevin cut him off with “I’ll explain when you’re both there,” before walking away.
“Both?” James asked, wondering who Kevin meant, when all of a sudden he heard a familiar voice behind him.
“What the hell is he doing here?”
“Look, I don’t know what happened that meant that you two stopped being partners, Miles,” Kevin began. “And to be honest, I don’t care. I just care about this case. And if you two think you can’t work together, then you know where the door is.”
Miles and James looked at each other for a moment, but neither of them moved.
“Good. Okay, so you both know that I transferred here from Dade County, Florida.”
Your point being? James thought. He glanced at Miles, and knew that Miles was probably thinking the same thing, but he didn’t roll his eyes at him as he might once have done.
“There was a case I was working on right before I transferred. We called it the Tampa Job. Bunch of guys running a con where they’d call people up telling them they were entitled to these compensation payments for what happened to their relatives during the Holocaust, all they had to do was give their account number so they could wire them the money. We got three of the guys, but the fourth, a guy by the name of Hibbs, escaped. Our last known information indicated that Hibbs was in Los Angeles.”
Kevin flipped a switch on his projector; the image of a man filled the screen.
“That’s him.” He gestured towards the photograph. Weird, James thought. He could have sworn for a moment that the man looked familiar, but he couldn’t think why. He knew he’d never met this man in his life.
“And that’s why I brought the two of you in here today. Because you’re the team I need with me to bring him down. We know where he’s likely to be tonight,” Kevin continued, naming a local inn. “But I can’t go there. He knows me by sight; it’s gonna need you two to go in there undercover. I need one of you to go in there, build up some kind of rapport with him, work your way into his inner circle, gain his trust so next scam he tries to pull, you’ll be right there with him. The other one will have your back. That’s why I chose you two for my team, because I know you’ve got form in undercover work before, and I know you guys always had each other’s backs. So, what do you think? Think you can do it?”
Miles said something in response, but James barely heard him. He was too busy staring at the picture of Hibbs, trying to work out how he could possibly recognise him, why even just looking at the man made rage bubble up in his chest, why he had clenched his fists as though to flex his fingers around the man’s neck.
“So which of you is going to volunteer to go undercover with him?” Kevin asked.
James raised his hand. “I will.”
The name “Sawyer” seemed apt to James when he shook the hand of the man named Hibbs and introduced himself, after all, it felt in a way like he was becoming the man he’d hunted all these years every time he pulled one of these undercover jobs.
“Sawyer, huh?” Hibbs growled. “Yeah, I guess it suits you.”
James clenched his fist again, hoping the revulsion he felt both for this man and the whole idea of that man’s name suiting him wasn’t showing on his face. For two cents, he’d grab this guy by the neck and shove him right up against the wall.
Now, if I’m not mistaken, I’m fairly certain I said I’d kill you if I ever saw you again.
James frowned. Where did that come from? Miles, sitting across the room with a pint, trying to appear inconspicuous, started to rise from his seat, as though he suspected something was wrong. James shook his head and gestured for him to sit back down again. Hibbs didn’t appear to have noticed anything; he just made some casual remark to James and the two continued chatting. James tried to ignore Miles behind him, knowing he was feeding the information back to Callis; He’s made contact. Hibbs seems to be buying it.
Even knowing he’d made progress with the man, it was a relief to leave Hibbs behind, to escape from the bar into the fresh air, even knowing he was about to face the awkward debrief with Miles that was to follow. There he was, coming up to him now, probably all ready to let him have it for his slip earlier.
“Who’s Sawyer?”
Okay, that wasn’t what James was expecting.
“It was the name in the file, the one that Charlotte saw.” Miles continued.
“Shoulda known she wasn’t telling me the truth when she said she didn’t read any of it,” James muttered, thinking to himself that he should also have known that Miles would have put it together.
“Whoever the hell this guy is, he’s obviously someone important to you. I think all Charlotte really saw was the name. But she couldn’t understand, neither of us could, why it upset you so much. We’re supposed to be partners, James.” James noticed that Miles had used the present tense, rather than the past, but didn’t have chance to think any more about it before Miles continued “So who is he?”
“He’s the reason I became a cop.” James admitted at last, “Not that Bullitt crap. You know my parents died when I was nine, right? He’s the reason why. He was a conman, like that guy Hibbs in there. He conned my parents, he had an affair with my mother and took all their savings. My father shot my mother, and then he killed himself. So that’s why I became a cop. To get all the other Mr. Sawyers off the streets, to stop them screwing up anyone else’s lives. And if I ever find the original Mr. Sawyer, and I’ve got a name, so it’s only a matter of time, then I’m gonna kill him.”
“So why did you never tell me any of this before?” Miles asked.
“Because it had always been easier for me when nobody around me knew, so I wouldn’t be ‘that kid whose daddy shot his mommy’ like I always was before we moved away.”
Miles punched him lightly on the arm. “Nah, you’re the guy whose ass I always used to whoop at Tetris when we were in the academy together. You’re my wing man. You’re the only guy who’s ever managed to drink me under the table. You’re the guy who’s always had my back. And this is getting mushy, so I’m gonna stop there. But you know what I’m saying, right?”
James nodded. He did know. He also knew that the chances were, they were never going to mention that conversation again. But it didn’t matter. He had his friend back, he was on his way to nailing another con artist…life was pretty darn good.
In a way, it became easier for James to endure the company of Hibbs, to gain his trust to the extent that Hibbs would be willing to cut him in on his latest scam, knowing that he had his friendship with Miles back. He’d got to know Kevin better, too, over the last few months of working with him, and understood why bringing Hibbs down had become as important to Kevin as it was to James - Kevin had explained the real reason why he’d reacted so badly to Mike Walton’s joke about finding him a woman, about his marriage to a woman he’d known as Monica, which wasn’t her real name. The marriage had gone belly-up around the same time as Kevin had been investigating the Tampa Job, and James and Miles both understood now that Kevin still associated his failure in apprehending the fourth man from the Tampa Job with the failure of his marriage, and working so hard to bring down Hibbs was his way of dealing with that.
James had been working undercover with Hibbs for eight weeks when Hibbs told him of a new mark his friend Gordy had put him on to: a man named Frank Duckett who had recently been working in Sydney, Australia, running a shrimp stand, until he’d recently come into an inheritance and returned to the US to claim it. “You’re good at this kind of scam,” Hibbs had said. “Set up a meeting with him and the two of us, give him the whole spiel on the investment opportunity, show him the money, really turn on the old Southern charm thing - he’s Southern himself, he’s bound to trust you because of it.” James had nodded, played along, watched Hibbs smiling approvingly as he laid it on thick about the too-good-to-be-true oil deal and set up the date, yet all the time he was thinking Duckett? Feels as though I heard that name somewhere before, too. But he didn’t spend too much time thinking about it. He could have come across a different Duckett, or since he’d recently returned from Sydney, maybe James had even met him there.
So he parted from Hibbs, promised to be at the rendezvous, then he made another couple of calls. One was to Miles and Kevin, to let them know where Hibbs would be for the bust. The other wasn’t normal procedure in undercover operations like this. But James felt a curious responsibility in this case, one that he couldn’t even explain to himself, and he knew that this was the right thing to do.
“Well, I gotta say to you,” Frank Duckett said as he read the contract, “this all sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?”
“No catch.” Hibbs smirked. “You buy one share, then once you’ve invested, the state of Texas will triple your investment in two weeks. What’s not to like about that? Are you gonna sign on the dotted line or what?”
Duckett pretended to think for a minute. “Am I gonna sign? Let me think….No, I don’t think I am.”
“What?” Hibbs frowned, face slowly turning purple. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I think it’s perfectly clear what he meant,” said Kevin, approaching behind him with Miles.
“You!” Hibbs exclaimed, recognising his former foe.
“Me,” Kevin smiled. “Yes, we meet again. And you, my friend, are under arrest.” As Kevin and Miles led a loudly protesting Hibbs away, Duckett reached out and placed his hand on James’s arm.
“Thanks for tipping me off,” he said. “I really appreciate what you did for me.”
“It was nothing,” James shrugged. But he knew it wasn’t. Whatever debt he’d felt he’d owed Duckett, it had been repaid. James shook the man’s hand one more time before going to catch up with his friends.