fic: Easy Money, 5/7
Title: Easy Money.
Rating: PG.
Characters/Pairings: Nathan, Claire, Matt, Peter/Simone + a cast of thousands.
Word count: ~32,000.
Disclaimer: Nope, not mine.
Summary: Nathan is a conman with a habit of getting in too deep, and this time is no different. While he's recklessly trying to reach the prize before anyone else, Claire attempts to keep him safe from the gangsters that are always two steps behind them, Matt tries to get the upper hand on Nathan, and Peter just wants to get married in peace.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
There's not a lot to do in prison but read books and think. Well, there is, but she's trying to better herself here, do some of that learning that she never did at school, and pick up skills that don't involve guns and doubletalk.
Meredith is trying to make herself a better person, and she's succeeding, mostly, but she still has to keep in touch with her old world. She has a one hour visit once a month and it's there that she's Meredith Gordon, con artist, again, and not Meredith Gordon, rehabilitated con artist. She's told about Flint and his gang and the trouble they're getting into, and she sighs and shakes her head and waits until next month to be told the same things all over again.
But today is different. Today she sits down, and Sandra says to her, “It's Nathan.”
She shoulda known. She should have known the day she first laid eyes on him that he was bad, bad news, and not like her daddy, or her brother, or all the men she'd conned before. Nathan was smooth, he was pretty, he talked nice, dressed nice, wasn't violent, wasn't aggressive - at least not in the way she knew. Maybe she was caught by that for a time, the glamour of something new. She was only seventeen when she got pregnant, fresh out of group home hell and worried about her brother. Nathan wasn't going to stick around with all that going on, wouldn't have even if it wasn't. He didn't do small town cons, didn't hold guns to people's heads and steal their stuff; he thought big. To him, his crime was art in motion. And to be frank, she was relieved when he left. Maybe she did know, somewhere inside, that she'd get lost in Nathan's world, in Nathan's head.
So she taught her daughter not to trust, not to rely. She told Claire that her daddy was nice enough but wasn't around and she didn't need him to be, anyway. They didn't see him once when they were in New York, and Claire never asked.
She raised Claire happy and strong, taught her the trade. And she taught well. When the bank robbery went wrong (such obvious mistakes she made there, she reflects), Claire ran for her life. Flint fled the scene too, and the only one the cops ever found was Meredith, holding a sack of money and a gun.
Nathan got her a good lawyer when he heard. The guy got her tagged and out on bail instead of locked up until sentencing.
Claire said, “I'll tell them I was involved. I held that bankteller up, if they know it weren't just you, maybe the sentence won't be so bad.”
But no, no no no, not her little girl, she wasn't ending up in juvie, with people like Flint and his friends. Meredith wouldn't have it, and, when she looked at Flint and Jesse and Knox and the others, she realised she couldn't have this either. Her girl couldn't be here with them, them with their all night binges and their plans to rob the next armoured truck coming into town, not learning a thing from their mistakes.
Night before sentencing, she called Nathan. She sat on the step outside with her cigarettes, and she said, “She's your daughter. She's your daughter, and she needs a parent. If she can't have a mom, then she needs a dad. You pretend to be lawyers and politicians and naval officers, can't you pretend to be a father?”
Claire had cried, she'd pleaded, she'd shouted, but Meredith made her go with him because it was the best way out that she could find. It was better than leaving her with Flint; there was entirely too much of daddy in him.
And now this. She can't contact Claire because that would put her in more danger, and she can't because Claire doesn't strictly exist. That's probably against the law, somehow. All she can do is sit across the table from Sandra, lay her hand over her friend's while the guard isn't looking, and say, “help.”
She hates to rely, but sometimes there's not a choice.
-
This plan made Claire anxious in all the wrong ways. Mom had always said that a healthy dose of fear was what kept people breathing; guys like Flint wouldn't make it to fifty because they would always think they were toughest guys in the room, and one day they'd be wrong. Nathan is rarely, if ever, the toughest guy in the room, and he doesn't think he is, violence never really being his thing. What he thinks is that he's the smartest guy in the room. Even when he gets things wrong, gets arrested, gets shot at and beaten up, he still thinks he's the best because he always manages to escape danger. His success is gonna be his downfall.
Nathan wants to find out more about Angela's fake company and the double life she led that he was somehow unaware of - he's more than a little confused at how he failed to notice that his mom was running operating a serious underground crime ring. He knew she was a criminal, sure, couldn't really miss that, but he had no idea just how much of a criminal. She told them that she kept it from him and Peter for their protection, but that's bull; she hid it because she didn't want Nathan getting in on it. She hated him being successful. Or at least that's what he says.
They go back to Odessa, to look for new clues. They left, in point of fact, at six in the morning - because wasn't it always crazy plans like this that got him motivated? - and she's exhausted.
“I'm going to get coffee,” she says, “if you don't need me.”
“Uh huh,” Nathan replies. She takes that as permission.
Odessa is a sedentary little place with a disgusting amount of pep, centring around Union Wells High School. Even out in Kermit, she'd hear all about the football players and the cheerleaders, and how amazing and pretty and oh my god! they were.
Maybe she was a little jealous.
She picks a café at random - there's a surprising array. She sits outside because it's hot and she can at least pretend that she could get a tan. The coffee is pretty bad, but the accompanying donut is nice and fresh, it being so early and all. She slips her sunglasses on and leans her head against the wall behind her, content to zone out for a few minutes before tackling Nathan and his mommy issues again.
“You know what this is about.”
She opens her eyes at that, immediately on alert, but the speaker isn't speaking to her. In fact he's whispering, only his whisper is more of a stage whisper. She slants her eyes sideways to the table next to her, not moving from her reclined position. Three guys: a blond kid, a skinny dark haired guy, and a big guy - football player, she'd say if she had to guess. They don't make a convincing group of friends out for a cup of mediocre coffee disgustingly early in the morning, that's for sure.
“Yeah, and what would that be?” the big guy says. She can hear the sneer in his voice.
“We know what you did, Brody. To five different girls. You need to go.” The dark-haired guy taps his finger on the table.
“I don't know what you're fucking on about. And isn't your friend like a junior in high school or something? Does he talk at all? What the hell do you think you're doing?”
The blond kid stands up, and even with him standing and Brody sitting, she can tell that he's at least four inches shorter. He drags his chair round and sits back down next to him.
“Lyle finds that talking is overrated,” the dark-haired boy says, and his tone has changed, becoming an almost leisurely drawl.
Lyle stares at Brody for a few long seconds - unblinking, unsmiling - then puts his arm around Brody's shoulders. There's an unmistakable flick of a switchblade popping open, and my, Claire thinks, suddenly everything has gotten very interesting.
She stays leant back, doesn't even change her breathing pattern, as Brody trips over his words, turning from threatening to pleading in mere seconds.
“I've got tape of you,” the dark-haired boy murmurs, leaning across the formica table, “and maybe the police won't take any notice of it, but we have, and if you're not out of town by this evening, then Lyle's going to have to do something that you'll regret.”
Brody's gone in the blink of an eye. Then so are Lyle and his friend, leaving a ten dollar tip with their half finished coffees. Claire follows them shortly after, wondering if she'd misjudged this podunk town. She never heard that it was this fun here.
A car follows her as she walks away.
-
Nathan is still going through files when she returns. Well, 'going through' them might be a stretch - he's pulled random boxes from the shelves and emptied them on to the floor, and now he's picking through the remains.
“Have you found anything?”
“Here and there,” he says. “I think my parents used to deal drugs.”
“Wouldn't surprise me.” She crouches down next to him and picks something at random. Pages and pages of semi-incoherent ramblings, and some childish drawings signed 'Elle' in shaky, swooping letters.
“In fact, I think that was their main source of income. This is a contract of work for Mr Ahmadi.”
She snatches it from his hand. “The Mr Ahmadi? Holy shit, this is serious.” Too serious, maybe. Nathan smiles. He looks excited. “Nathan,” she begins, warningly, but is cut off by a sharp thump coming from somewhere above them. It sounded like a rubber sole on a metal door.
“Somebody's broken the door in,” Nathan says.
“Yeah,” she replies. “Stay here, I'll check.” She slips her shoes off and creeps up the stairs out of the basement despite his protests. Lifting the corner of the blind an inch or so, she peers out. In the hallway, carrying what she identifies as semi-automatic machine guns, four big guys in suits do what she can only describe as loom.
“Shit,” she whispers. And then quieter when one of the men swings the butt of his gun towards the door. He is bald and angry looking.
She takes the stairs two at a time, skids over to Nathan and grabs his arm. “You need to hide,” she hisses, dragging him down the endless rows of boxes.
“Who's out there?”
“Danko's men,” she says, “and Danko.”
“What? How did they find us?”
She spots a closet and darts toward it. “Come on,” she urges, pulling him along with her. They stumble into buckets and mops, bumping elbows and knees into the shelves lining the walls. The closet goes dark as she pulls the door closed.
“They've been following me,” she whispers, ear against the door.
“They've been following you? How long have they been following you? Why the hell didn't you tell me?”
She puts a finger to her lips. “Shut up.” She drops her voice to a barely audible level. “I didn't tell you because you'd do one of two things. One, you'd go on like nothing was wrong, probably act even more recklessly, and get yourself killed, or two, you'd try to do something heroic. Which has never worked out before.”
“Well,” he murmurs and says nothing more. Outside, there's a thump, and a crash, and a crack.
“Gunshot,” he says.
“Why are they shooting at each other?” she asks, although she already has an idea. There's a metallic clatter, and three sharps bangs. Then a yell.
“They're not.”
She opens the door a crack and watches a struggle between one of Danko's suited men, minus one machine gun, and a guy wielding said machine gun. “Who's that?”
Nathan peers over her head. “Oh, hell. We need to get out of here.”
“Why?”
“That's Noah Bennet, and René.”
She squints. “That's one-shot-to-the-head Bennet? How are we going to get out?”
“Like this.” He waits while Bennet passes by the door, gun held loosely in his hands, stepping over a prone body. He seems perfectly calm and self-assured, and she's never seen that from anyone who's gone head to head with Danko. He, incidentally, seems to have fled. Nathan grips her arm tightly, and kicks the door open. Bennet's gun is on them instantly, but Nathan's feet hover off the ground an inch, and he shoots past, Claire skidding behind him. They run up the stairs, out into the ground floor hallway to find two more bodies, and crash through the front door. He grabs her by the waist and swings her up into his arms as he kicks off from the ground.
“That was a great plan?!” she yells. “Run really fast?”
“It worked didn't it?”
“You could have gotten yourself ki-” She's cut off by a boom. She looks down. “Did that factory just explode?!” she shouts.
“Fucking Bennet,” Nathan curses. “I dropped my sunglasses in there.”
-
Peter has been on the clock since five am, but he's been awake since midnight, and he only slept a couple of hours yesterday anyway, so the three cups of coffee he has laid out before him in the back of the ambulance are absolutely essential. Hesam is in the front in the cab, listening to the game - Peter's not sure what game, but he pretended like he did.
The gurney looks alluring to him as he drinks his first cup - they just had an overindulging clubber throw up on it, but it's clean now, and he could use the rest before they get another call. He's considering if he could do it without Hesam noticing, and trying to calculate how much more coffee he should drink if he wants to take a nap when he hears the first bang. It sounds like a car backfiring, at first, but then almost immediately turns into the unmistakable sound of a gun. Unmistakable because of the rat-a-tat-tat along the side of the ambulance, leaving bullet shaped dents in its wake.
His cup is crushed in his hand, spilling hot coffee down his arm, but he barely notices, knocking the other cups over as he scrambles to the cab. “Hesam, get down!” he shouts. Hesam is already on the move, though, hitting the button to roll the cab windows down, and jumping out. He slams the door closed and ducks down as bullets whistle around and towards the ambulance. Then he returns fire, shooting through the open windows, a gun in each hand.
“Get out of the ambulance, Peter!” he shouts. He keeps up the volley of gunfire as he walks backwards, and Peter knows that that is harder than it appears on TV-- and oh god, why does Hesam have two guns, let alone one?
He pushes Peter ahead of him as they run across the parking lot and into the hospital. They run past patients and nurses, and there's a lot of screaming, mostly from them but also from Peter a bit as they go. Hesam pulls his cell out and holds it to his ear, his gun still hooked around his finger and laying flat against his head. “They're here,” he shouts, then snaps it closed.
He grabs Peter's wrist and breaks left, darting into a recovery ward. The patients watch in silent surprise as they tear past, towards the window, which is quickly smashed because windows in this hospital don't open all the way. Peter cuts his hands as he climbs through it, blood smearing all over the wall outside.
A car pulls up alongside them, but-- “Did that car just drive itself?” he shouts. There are more gunshots, and Hesam tells him to shut up and get in. Three guys in suits stand in the alleyway behind them, spraying bullets towards the car. Before Hesam manages to get him by the collar and pull him in, he sees a small black-clad figure flip two of them onto their backs in one clean sweep.
“Who's that?” he says, craning his neck to see as they screech away.
“Doesn't matter. Put your seatbelt on.” Hesam takes a sharp right and mounts the curb before cutting across into another lane of traffic. From his glovebox he pulls a police siren and places it on top of the car.
“Are you a cop?” Peter asks quietly. Oh God, what has he told Hesam? He's been so careful to never reveal too much, but what if he said something about Nathan? What if he's an accessory? What if he gets put in prison? What if Simone does?
“No, I'm not.” Hesam laughs like it's a joke. “I... work for someone who feels it's in their interests that you stay alive.”
“Why wouldn't I stay alive?”
“Your brother,” Hesam begins, and Peter throws his hands in the air. Didn't it always come back to Nathan? “Got in some trouble. That's why he left for Mexico, as you know. The guy he got in trouble with was a gangster, Danko. Not a very nice guy. He wants to kill Nathan, and you and anyone else who gets in the way. And now there's this sword, which has complicated matters further.”
“Sword? What sword?”
“The piece of paper,” Hesam says, taking his eyes off the road a second to look at Peter. “It's the prize, and it's kinda worth a lot of money, and prestige. Whoever gets it in the end will be the fairest of them all, as it were.”
Peter has nothing to say to that, other than why is this sword which means nothing to him suddenly ruining his life, but he doesn't expect that Hesam would know the answer to that. Instead, after a few minutes of silence, he asks, “But we've been partners for months, and this has only been going on for a few weeks. Are you even a real paramedic?”
“Let's say my employer has good foresight. And yeah, I'm a real paramedic, did you see me trach that guy yesterday? I just do this too.”
“Oh.” Peter looks down at his coffee stained clothes. “Shit, I ruined another uniform.”
-
Nobody stops Emma from going on break early, in fact her boss doesn't even really respond when she asks. Not that she would have paid any attention if she had been told not to leave: she's cleared out her desk, removed her file from the filing cabinet, and Micah is wiping her information from the computer system even as she takes the back way out. Police are swarming all over the hospital, and her time there is now over.
A hand touches her shoulder lightly: Monica signing, The car's a couple of streets away. She has a black hoodie tied around her waist.
What did you do with Danko's men? Emma asks. Monica points to the ambulance.
I strapped them to the gurneys, and injected them with sedative. Won't last long, they were like bulls. Did Peter get away all right?
Yes, Hesam got him out of there, Emma replies. He's been on this case the longest, when this was a simple one man protection gig requested by a worried mother. What do we do now?
Monica shrugs. Get coffee. Wait for Micah to call.
-
“What the fuck? What the fuck, Nathan?” Claire slams around the kitchen, searching for something to eat. There's nothing but his mother's expensive hors d'œuvres and health food; she growls and kicks the cabinet, hard enough to leave a crack.
She's been like this since they got back to New York - the whole fly over she was silent, and now she's turned up to eleven, screaming and shouting and hitting things. “Please calm down,” he says. “You're scaring the staff.”
She snatches up a packet of stale cookies with a kind of triumphant anger, and storms past him. “This is never going to work! We have to go. We've got Danko and Bennet on us now, and we all know guys like that don't stop till you're dead. Angela's involved with Mr Ahmadi, Parkman's going to put you in prison the first chance he gets, and Peter's not going to be any help after you ruined his life! It's time to give up!”
“Claire. Claire.” He follows her back through the house. This isn't the first time she's been angry at him - they fought almost solidly for a year after he took her in, but never like this, and never for something so minor. Things like him being a terrible father, a terrible person, ignoring her, crowding her, sure, but this, he doesn't understand. “Where are you going?”
“To pack,” she says, taking the stairs two at a time.
He follows her to her room. “We're so close, we can't stop now. Would you quit packing your bras for a second, and listen?”
“I always listen to you, Nathan, I always hear you, but you never hear me.” She drops a pile of socks into an open bag. “We aren't close, and this isn't going to work. This is just another one of your insane schemes that's going to blow up in your face. Only this time it might literally blow up.”
“I honestly don't understand why you're so angry all of a sudden,” he says, sidestepping everything else that she's said, because, well, he doesn't know how to answer all those things. “We've been on this for weeks, and it hasn't been a problem before.”
“It's always been a problem, it's just becoming more of problem now. You are going to get yourself killed.”
“If you don't want to get involved, you don't have to, I can do this on my own.”
That's certainly the wrong thing to say. She throws the last of her underwear onto the bed, and stares at him for a moment. “Nice,” she says, before picking up a jacket and pushing past him. “I'm going out.”
He didn't mean it like that, but he lets her go, because he doesn't think she'd listen, and he doesn't want to get into it anyway. He kneels down to pick up her stuff, now that her room looks like a hurricane has hit, and listens to her stomp down the stairs. A moment later a door slams, and Peter's angry voice travels through the house. “Where's Nathan?”
“Upstairs,” Claire snaps, and then the door slams again.
Nathan gets the feeling that he's going to be yelled at a lot today.
-
Hesam dumps the car at the side of the road, unlocked with the windows rolled down, a few minutes after dropping Peter off at home. Then he ducks into a McDonalds and buys a milkshake and fries, and gets a window seat.
According to news sources - the car radio and his BlackBerry - the hospital is now on lockdown because of an as-of-yet undisclosed incident. There's no mention of any persons of interest, and he hopes that after he's let things cool down, Micah will have spun some story that paints Hesam in a good light. Something to do with saving children or small animals, ideally.
Out on the street, a car pulls to a stop on the side of the road, flashes its headlights twice. The sign; Emma signs, Did he get home safe? and Hesam nods as casually as he can, taking a pull of his milkshake to cover the movement.
This is the first time he's met Emma and Monica, and it's not like he's actually meeting them now. He's used to working alone: the only reason he works for Micah (a kid at least twenty years younger than him, man) is because the CIA don't take kindly to having their rookie agents suddenly cut out on them. Keeping an eye on Peter was as far as this was supposed to go, until he got a call from Micah telling him it was 'going further' and to get ready for the 'long game'. Kid loves these phrases he hears on stupid crime shows.
All Hesam knows is that Emma and the kid's cousin were 'dispatched' to do 'groundwork' on this 'operation', and that Hesam should mind out for federal criminals.
The kid doesn't kid around. Outside, Emma slips on oversized sunglasses, and Monica starts the car.
Hesam has twenty four hours of hiding, and a boxset of Alias in his future.
-
Las Vegas is a small town wrapped in a big city, and gossip runs rife all over. There are people all over who will tell you their neighbours' secrets if you pay them right, which is normally a lot less than the information is actually worth, because if they knew that, then they'd be using it themselves.
Ando is never more than a one step behind the competition, and he can easily overtake.
“Shame you don't get any respect around here,” Daphne says. She's lying back on their bed next to him, red satin sheets twisted around her legs. It's all very decadent, a leftover from the Montecito's previous owners, but if he's being honest, he likes it. The canopy bed, the plush carpets, the flocked walls. It's exactly how he imagines a casino hotel should be.
“Stop fidgeting,” he says, sliding his laptop further from her feet so that she can't take a swipe at it. Because she would. “Plenty of people respect me.”
“You better not be looking at porn. Name one person who respects you.”
He isn't looking at porn, actually, because he wouldn't dare do that with her anywhere in the vicinity, not unless it had already passed her inspection. He's sending a strongly worded email to their alcohol supplier about rate hikes. “The staff.”
“The staff think Charlie is in charge.” Which is fair: she does take on a lot of the administrative stuff. Not everyone can be a human database.
“Our competitors.”
“The one's who are terrified of losing a game of poker to Hiro? And frequently call you Andy?”
“Fine. Hiro respects me.”
“Mm,” she says. “Did he even bother telling you where he was going before he left for his two week jaunt to wherever?”
“Oh, whatever,” he says, and she laughs, darting in for a kiss. She climbs onto his lap, giving no time for arguments, and his strongly worded email is, for the moment, forgotten. Until his phone rings.
“Why?” he groans. Daphne wriggles down to lie against him in all the most unhelpful ways, and he can only grunt his irritated greeting to the person on the line. But then, “Oh,” he says. “Okay, thanks.”
She rocks back on her haunches, still trying to take advantage of his arousal, though the effort is less concentrated now. “What was that?”
“I think I've just cashed in one of my favours. Maybe I'll get Hiro to listen to me this time.”
-
Las Vegas is shiny and sparkly, and Elle doesn't know how anyone could sleep in this city. But then, maybe they don't, maybe everyone here stays up all day and all night and looks at the sparkly buildings and gets trapped in the cycle of winning and losing and winning and losing again until they die.
Adam says that's pretty much on the money.
They've been all over the country since that rude flying guy came to visit, going to all Adam's hiding places and collecting his things: papers and maps and pocket watches and other funny little trinkets. He keeps them in lots of different boxes in lots of different states, and it's a treasure hunt to find them all. He says that they'll have to leave when they find the sword, so he'll need some of his things in case he can't get back to them again. He's been retired for years, there's a lot to find.
Elle hasn't minded, she likes treasure hunts, and Adam is a treasure hunt all of his own. Her daddy sent her out to find him, and she did - the only one who did - but she decided she didn't want to come back. She was tired of being a contract killer, and Adam had things to teach her and treated her nice. This sword, though, she's been hearing about it her whole life. She wants it so bad.
They check into a hotel, Caesars Palace, and sit in the restaurant drinking tea. She wants to play on the slot machines, but he stills her with a hand on her knee. “Wait,” he says.
They wait. He has a salad and two more cups of tea, complaining all the while about how it's just 'not quite right', she has a burger that she smothers in ketchup and ranch dressing, and a coke. Tea tastes like weird flavoured water. She doesn't know what they're waiting for.
“Ah, here we are,” Adam says, leaning forward. He hands her a napkin. “Clean yourself up, dear, we have company.”
A man approaches. A little man, a vague roundness about him, kinda cute. “Adam Monroe?” he asks.
“I knew you'd find me. Please, sit down, Mr Nakamura.”
The man sits. He's wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon character on it. “Call me Hiro. My father told me a lot about you.”
Adam smiles; it's his friendly-shark smile, which is less dangerous than his actual-shark smile. Somewhat. “A little too much, probably,” he amends. “Now, what's all this I've been hearing about Kensei's sword?”
Part 6
Rating: PG.
Characters/Pairings: Nathan, Claire, Matt, Peter/Simone + a cast of thousands.
Word count: ~32,000.
Disclaimer: Nope, not mine.
Summary: Nathan is a conman with a habit of getting in too deep, and this time is no different. While he's recklessly trying to reach the prize before anyone else, Claire attempts to keep him safe from the gangsters that are always two steps behind them, Matt tries to get the upper hand on Nathan, and Peter just wants to get married in peace.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
There's not a lot to do in prison but read books and think. Well, there is, but she's trying to better herself here, do some of that learning that she never did at school, and pick up skills that don't involve guns and doubletalk.
Meredith is trying to make herself a better person, and she's succeeding, mostly, but she still has to keep in touch with her old world. She has a one hour visit once a month and it's there that she's Meredith Gordon, con artist, again, and not Meredith Gordon, rehabilitated con artist. She's told about Flint and his gang and the trouble they're getting into, and she sighs and shakes her head and waits until next month to be told the same things all over again.
But today is different. Today she sits down, and Sandra says to her, “It's Nathan.”
She shoulda known. She should have known the day she first laid eyes on him that he was bad, bad news, and not like her daddy, or her brother, or all the men she'd conned before. Nathan was smooth, he was pretty, he talked nice, dressed nice, wasn't violent, wasn't aggressive - at least not in the way she knew. Maybe she was caught by that for a time, the glamour of something new. She was only seventeen when she got pregnant, fresh out of group home hell and worried about her brother. Nathan wasn't going to stick around with all that going on, wouldn't have even if it wasn't. He didn't do small town cons, didn't hold guns to people's heads and steal their stuff; he thought big. To him, his crime was art in motion. And to be frank, she was relieved when he left. Maybe she did know, somewhere inside, that she'd get lost in Nathan's world, in Nathan's head.
So she taught her daughter not to trust, not to rely. She told Claire that her daddy was nice enough but wasn't around and she didn't need him to be, anyway. They didn't see him once when they were in New York, and Claire never asked.
She raised Claire happy and strong, taught her the trade. And she taught well. When the bank robbery went wrong (such obvious mistakes she made there, she reflects), Claire ran for her life. Flint fled the scene too, and the only one the cops ever found was Meredith, holding a sack of money and a gun.
Nathan got her a good lawyer when he heard. The guy got her tagged and out on bail instead of locked up until sentencing.
Claire said, “I'll tell them I was involved. I held that bankteller up, if they know it weren't just you, maybe the sentence won't be so bad.”
But no, no no no, not her little girl, she wasn't ending up in juvie, with people like Flint and his friends. Meredith wouldn't have it, and, when she looked at Flint and Jesse and Knox and the others, she realised she couldn't have this either. Her girl couldn't be here with them, them with their all night binges and their plans to rob the next armoured truck coming into town, not learning a thing from their mistakes.
Night before sentencing, she called Nathan. She sat on the step outside with her cigarettes, and she said, “She's your daughter. She's your daughter, and she needs a parent. If she can't have a mom, then she needs a dad. You pretend to be lawyers and politicians and naval officers, can't you pretend to be a father?”
Claire had cried, she'd pleaded, she'd shouted, but Meredith made her go with him because it was the best way out that she could find. It was better than leaving her with Flint; there was entirely too much of daddy in him.
And now this. She can't contact Claire because that would put her in more danger, and she can't because Claire doesn't strictly exist. That's probably against the law, somehow. All she can do is sit across the table from Sandra, lay her hand over her friend's while the guard isn't looking, and say, “help.”
She hates to rely, but sometimes there's not a choice.
-
This plan made Claire anxious in all the wrong ways. Mom had always said that a healthy dose of fear was what kept people breathing; guys like Flint wouldn't make it to fifty because they would always think they were toughest guys in the room, and one day they'd be wrong. Nathan is rarely, if ever, the toughest guy in the room, and he doesn't think he is, violence never really being his thing. What he thinks is that he's the smartest guy in the room. Even when he gets things wrong, gets arrested, gets shot at and beaten up, he still thinks he's the best because he always manages to escape danger. His success is gonna be his downfall.
Nathan wants to find out more about Angela's fake company and the double life she led that he was somehow unaware of - he's more than a little confused at how he failed to notice that his mom was running operating a serious underground crime ring. He knew she was a criminal, sure, couldn't really miss that, but he had no idea just how much of a criminal. She told them that she kept it from him and Peter for their protection, but that's bull; she hid it because she didn't want Nathan getting in on it. She hated him being successful. Or at least that's what he says.
They go back to Odessa, to look for new clues. They left, in point of fact, at six in the morning - because wasn't it always crazy plans like this that got him motivated? - and she's exhausted.
“I'm going to get coffee,” she says, “if you don't need me.”
“Uh huh,” Nathan replies. She takes that as permission.
Odessa is a sedentary little place with a disgusting amount of pep, centring around Union Wells High School. Even out in Kermit, she'd hear all about the football players and the cheerleaders, and how amazing and pretty and oh my god! they were.
Maybe she was a little jealous.
She picks a café at random - there's a surprising array. She sits outside because it's hot and she can at least pretend that she could get a tan. The coffee is pretty bad, but the accompanying donut is nice and fresh, it being so early and all. She slips her sunglasses on and leans her head against the wall behind her, content to zone out for a few minutes before tackling Nathan and his mommy issues again.
“You know what this is about.”
She opens her eyes at that, immediately on alert, but the speaker isn't speaking to her. In fact he's whispering, only his whisper is more of a stage whisper. She slants her eyes sideways to the table next to her, not moving from her reclined position. Three guys: a blond kid, a skinny dark haired guy, and a big guy - football player, she'd say if she had to guess. They don't make a convincing group of friends out for a cup of mediocre coffee disgustingly early in the morning, that's for sure.
“Yeah, and what would that be?” the big guy says. She can hear the sneer in his voice.
“We know what you did, Brody. To five different girls. You need to go.” The dark-haired guy taps his finger on the table.
“I don't know what you're fucking on about. And isn't your friend like a junior in high school or something? Does he talk at all? What the hell do you think you're doing?”
The blond kid stands up, and even with him standing and Brody sitting, she can tell that he's at least four inches shorter. He drags his chair round and sits back down next to him.
“Lyle finds that talking is overrated,” the dark-haired boy says, and his tone has changed, becoming an almost leisurely drawl.
Lyle stares at Brody for a few long seconds - unblinking, unsmiling - then puts his arm around Brody's shoulders. There's an unmistakable flick of a switchblade popping open, and my, Claire thinks, suddenly everything has gotten very interesting.
She stays leant back, doesn't even change her breathing pattern, as Brody trips over his words, turning from threatening to pleading in mere seconds.
“I've got tape of you,” the dark-haired boy murmurs, leaning across the formica table, “and maybe the police won't take any notice of it, but we have, and if you're not out of town by this evening, then Lyle's going to have to do something that you'll regret.”
Brody's gone in the blink of an eye. Then so are Lyle and his friend, leaving a ten dollar tip with their half finished coffees. Claire follows them shortly after, wondering if she'd misjudged this podunk town. She never heard that it was this fun here.
A car follows her as she walks away.
-
Nathan is still going through files when she returns. Well, 'going through' them might be a stretch - he's pulled random boxes from the shelves and emptied them on to the floor, and now he's picking through the remains.
“Have you found anything?”
“Here and there,” he says. “I think my parents used to deal drugs.”
“Wouldn't surprise me.” She crouches down next to him and picks something at random. Pages and pages of semi-incoherent ramblings, and some childish drawings signed 'Elle' in shaky, swooping letters.
“In fact, I think that was their main source of income. This is a contract of work for Mr Ahmadi.”
She snatches it from his hand. “The Mr Ahmadi? Holy shit, this is serious.” Too serious, maybe. Nathan smiles. He looks excited. “Nathan,” she begins, warningly, but is cut off by a sharp thump coming from somewhere above them. It sounded like a rubber sole on a metal door.
“Somebody's broken the door in,” Nathan says.
“Yeah,” she replies. “Stay here, I'll check.” She slips her shoes off and creeps up the stairs out of the basement despite his protests. Lifting the corner of the blind an inch or so, she peers out. In the hallway, carrying what she identifies as semi-automatic machine guns, four big guys in suits do what she can only describe as loom.
“Shit,” she whispers. And then quieter when one of the men swings the butt of his gun towards the door. He is bald and angry looking.
She takes the stairs two at a time, skids over to Nathan and grabs his arm. “You need to hide,” she hisses, dragging him down the endless rows of boxes.
“Who's out there?”
“Danko's men,” she says, “and Danko.”
“What? How did they find us?”
She spots a closet and darts toward it. “Come on,” she urges, pulling him along with her. They stumble into buckets and mops, bumping elbows and knees into the shelves lining the walls. The closet goes dark as she pulls the door closed.
“They've been following me,” she whispers, ear against the door.
“They've been following you? How long have they been following you? Why the hell didn't you tell me?”
She puts a finger to her lips. “Shut up.” She drops her voice to a barely audible level. “I didn't tell you because you'd do one of two things. One, you'd go on like nothing was wrong, probably act even more recklessly, and get yourself killed, or two, you'd try to do something heroic. Which has never worked out before.”
“Well,” he murmurs and says nothing more. Outside, there's a thump, and a crash, and a crack.
“Gunshot,” he says.
“Why are they shooting at each other?” she asks, although she already has an idea. There's a metallic clatter, and three sharps bangs. Then a yell.
“They're not.”
She opens the door a crack and watches a struggle between one of Danko's suited men, minus one machine gun, and a guy wielding said machine gun. “Who's that?”
Nathan peers over her head. “Oh, hell. We need to get out of here.”
“Why?”
“That's Noah Bennet, and René.”
She squints. “That's one-shot-to-the-head Bennet? How are we going to get out?”
“Like this.” He waits while Bennet passes by the door, gun held loosely in his hands, stepping over a prone body. He seems perfectly calm and self-assured, and she's never seen that from anyone who's gone head to head with Danko. He, incidentally, seems to have fled. Nathan grips her arm tightly, and kicks the door open. Bennet's gun is on them instantly, but Nathan's feet hover off the ground an inch, and he shoots past, Claire skidding behind him. They run up the stairs, out into the ground floor hallway to find two more bodies, and crash through the front door. He grabs her by the waist and swings her up into his arms as he kicks off from the ground.
“That was a great plan?!” she yells. “Run really fast?”
“It worked didn't it?”
“You could have gotten yourself ki-” She's cut off by a boom. She looks down. “Did that factory just explode?!” she shouts.
“Fucking Bennet,” Nathan curses. “I dropped my sunglasses in there.”
-
Peter has been on the clock since five am, but he's been awake since midnight, and he only slept a couple of hours yesterday anyway, so the three cups of coffee he has laid out before him in the back of the ambulance are absolutely essential. Hesam is in the front in the cab, listening to the game - Peter's not sure what game, but he pretended like he did.
The gurney looks alluring to him as he drinks his first cup - they just had an overindulging clubber throw up on it, but it's clean now, and he could use the rest before they get another call. He's considering if he could do it without Hesam noticing, and trying to calculate how much more coffee he should drink if he wants to take a nap when he hears the first bang. It sounds like a car backfiring, at first, but then almost immediately turns into the unmistakable sound of a gun. Unmistakable because of the rat-a-tat-tat along the side of the ambulance, leaving bullet shaped dents in its wake.
His cup is crushed in his hand, spilling hot coffee down his arm, but he barely notices, knocking the other cups over as he scrambles to the cab. “Hesam, get down!” he shouts. Hesam is already on the move, though, hitting the button to roll the cab windows down, and jumping out. He slams the door closed and ducks down as bullets whistle around and towards the ambulance. Then he returns fire, shooting through the open windows, a gun in each hand.
“Get out of the ambulance, Peter!” he shouts. He keeps up the volley of gunfire as he walks backwards, and Peter knows that that is harder than it appears on TV-- and oh god, why does Hesam have two guns, let alone one?
He pushes Peter ahead of him as they run across the parking lot and into the hospital. They run past patients and nurses, and there's a lot of screaming, mostly from them but also from Peter a bit as they go. Hesam pulls his cell out and holds it to his ear, his gun still hooked around his finger and laying flat against his head. “They're here,” he shouts, then snaps it closed.
He grabs Peter's wrist and breaks left, darting into a recovery ward. The patients watch in silent surprise as they tear past, towards the window, which is quickly smashed because windows in this hospital don't open all the way. Peter cuts his hands as he climbs through it, blood smearing all over the wall outside.
A car pulls up alongside them, but-- “Did that car just drive itself?” he shouts. There are more gunshots, and Hesam tells him to shut up and get in. Three guys in suits stand in the alleyway behind them, spraying bullets towards the car. Before Hesam manages to get him by the collar and pull him in, he sees a small black-clad figure flip two of them onto their backs in one clean sweep.
“Who's that?” he says, craning his neck to see as they screech away.
“Doesn't matter. Put your seatbelt on.” Hesam takes a sharp right and mounts the curb before cutting across into another lane of traffic. From his glovebox he pulls a police siren and places it on top of the car.
“Are you a cop?” Peter asks quietly. Oh God, what has he told Hesam? He's been so careful to never reveal too much, but what if he said something about Nathan? What if he's an accessory? What if he gets put in prison? What if Simone does?
“No, I'm not.” Hesam laughs like it's a joke. “I... work for someone who feels it's in their interests that you stay alive.”
“Why wouldn't I stay alive?”
“Your brother,” Hesam begins, and Peter throws his hands in the air. Didn't it always come back to Nathan? “Got in some trouble. That's why he left for Mexico, as you know. The guy he got in trouble with was a gangster, Danko. Not a very nice guy. He wants to kill Nathan, and you and anyone else who gets in the way. And now there's this sword, which has complicated matters further.”
“Sword? What sword?”
“The piece of paper,” Hesam says, taking his eyes off the road a second to look at Peter. “It's the prize, and it's kinda worth a lot of money, and prestige. Whoever gets it in the end will be the fairest of them all, as it were.”
Peter has nothing to say to that, other than why is this sword which means nothing to him suddenly ruining his life, but he doesn't expect that Hesam would know the answer to that. Instead, after a few minutes of silence, he asks, “But we've been partners for months, and this has only been going on for a few weeks. Are you even a real paramedic?”
“Let's say my employer has good foresight. And yeah, I'm a real paramedic, did you see me trach that guy yesterday? I just do this too.”
“Oh.” Peter looks down at his coffee stained clothes. “Shit, I ruined another uniform.”
-
Nobody stops Emma from going on break early, in fact her boss doesn't even really respond when she asks. Not that she would have paid any attention if she had been told not to leave: she's cleared out her desk, removed her file from the filing cabinet, and Micah is wiping her information from the computer system even as she takes the back way out. Police are swarming all over the hospital, and her time there is now over.
A hand touches her shoulder lightly: Monica signing, The car's a couple of streets away. She has a black hoodie tied around her waist.
What did you do with Danko's men? Emma asks. Monica points to the ambulance.
I strapped them to the gurneys, and injected them with sedative. Won't last long, they were like bulls. Did Peter get away all right?
Yes, Hesam got him out of there, Emma replies. He's been on this case the longest, when this was a simple one man protection gig requested by a worried mother. What do we do now?
Monica shrugs. Get coffee. Wait for Micah to call.
-
“What the fuck? What the fuck, Nathan?” Claire slams around the kitchen, searching for something to eat. There's nothing but his mother's expensive hors d'œuvres and health food; she growls and kicks the cabinet, hard enough to leave a crack.
She's been like this since they got back to New York - the whole fly over she was silent, and now she's turned up to eleven, screaming and shouting and hitting things. “Please calm down,” he says. “You're scaring the staff.”
She snatches up a packet of stale cookies with a kind of triumphant anger, and storms past him. “This is never going to work! We have to go. We've got Danko and Bennet on us now, and we all know guys like that don't stop till you're dead. Angela's involved with Mr Ahmadi, Parkman's going to put you in prison the first chance he gets, and Peter's not going to be any help after you ruined his life! It's time to give up!”
“Claire. Claire.” He follows her back through the house. This isn't the first time she's been angry at him - they fought almost solidly for a year after he took her in, but never like this, and never for something so minor. Things like him being a terrible father, a terrible person, ignoring her, crowding her, sure, but this, he doesn't understand. “Where are you going?”
“To pack,” she says, taking the stairs two at a time.
He follows her to her room. “We're so close, we can't stop now. Would you quit packing your bras for a second, and listen?”
“I always listen to you, Nathan, I always hear you, but you never hear me.” She drops a pile of socks into an open bag. “We aren't close, and this isn't going to work. This is just another one of your insane schemes that's going to blow up in your face. Only this time it might literally blow up.”
“I honestly don't understand why you're so angry all of a sudden,” he says, sidestepping everything else that she's said, because, well, he doesn't know how to answer all those things. “We've been on this for weeks, and it hasn't been a problem before.”
“It's always been a problem, it's just becoming more of problem now. You are going to get yourself killed.”
“If you don't want to get involved, you don't have to, I can do this on my own.”
That's certainly the wrong thing to say. She throws the last of her underwear onto the bed, and stares at him for a moment. “Nice,” she says, before picking up a jacket and pushing past him. “I'm going out.”
He didn't mean it like that, but he lets her go, because he doesn't think she'd listen, and he doesn't want to get into it anyway. He kneels down to pick up her stuff, now that her room looks like a hurricane has hit, and listens to her stomp down the stairs. A moment later a door slams, and Peter's angry voice travels through the house. “Where's Nathan?”
“Upstairs,” Claire snaps, and then the door slams again.
Nathan gets the feeling that he's going to be yelled at a lot today.
-
Hesam dumps the car at the side of the road, unlocked with the windows rolled down, a few minutes after dropping Peter off at home. Then he ducks into a McDonalds and buys a milkshake and fries, and gets a window seat.
According to news sources - the car radio and his BlackBerry - the hospital is now on lockdown because of an as-of-yet undisclosed incident. There's no mention of any persons of interest, and he hopes that after he's let things cool down, Micah will have spun some story that paints Hesam in a good light. Something to do with saving children or small animals, ideally.
Out on the street, a car pulls to a stop on the side of the road, flashes its headlights twice. The sign; Emma signs, Did he get home safe? and Hesam nods as casually as he can, taking a pull of his milkshake to cover the movement.
This is the first time he's met Emma and Monica, and it's not like he's actually meeting them now. He's used to working alone: the only reason he works for Micah (a kid at least twenty years younger than him, man) is because the CIA don't take kindly to having their rookie agents suddenly cut out on them. Keeping an eye on Peter was as far as this was supposed to go, until he got a call from Micah telling him it was 'going further' and to get ready for the 'long game'. Kid loves these phrases he hears on stupid crime shows.
All Hesam knows is that Emma and the kid's cousin were 'dispatched' to do 'groundwork' on this 'operation', and that Hesam should mind out for federal criminals.
The kid doesn't kid around. Outside, Emma slips on oversized sunglasses, and Monica starts the car.
Hesam has twenty four hours of hiding, and a boxset of Alias in his future.
-
Las Vegas is a small town wrapped in a big city, and gossip runs rife all over. There are people all over who will tell you their neighbours' secrets if you pay them right, which is normally a lot less than the information is actually worth, because if they knew that, then they'd be using it themselves.
Ando is never more than a one step behind the competition, and he can easily overtake.
“Shame you don't get any respect around here,” Daphne says. She's lying back on their bed next to him, red satin sheets twisted around her legs. It's all very decadent, a leftover from the Montecito's previous owners, but if he's being honest, he likes it. The canopy bed, the plush carpets, the flocked walls. It's exactly how he imagines a casino hotel should be.
“Stop fidgeting,” he says, sliding his laptop further from her feet so that she can't take a swipe at it. Because she would. “Plenty of people respect me.”
“You better not be looking at porn. Name one person who respects you.”
He isn't looking at porn, actually, because he wouldn't dare do that with her anywhere in the vicinity, not unless it had already passed her inspection. He's sending a strongly worded email to their alcohol supplier about rate hikes. “The staff.”
“The staff think Charlie is in charge.” Which is fair: she does take on a lot of the administrative stuff. Not everyone can be a human database.
“Our competitors.”
“The one's who are terrified of losing a game of poker to Hiro? And frequently call you Andy?”
“Fine. Hiro respects me.”
“Mm,” she says. “Did he even bother telling you where he was going before he left for his two week jaunt to wherever?”
“Oh, whatever,” he says, and she laughs, darting in for a kiss. She climbs onto his lap, giving no time for arguments, and his strongly worded email is, for the moment, forgotten. Until his phone rings.
“Why?” he groans. Daphne wriggles down to lie against him in all the most unhelpful ways, and he can only grunt his irritated greeting to the person on the line. But then, “Oh,” he says. “Okay, thanks.”
She rocks back on her haunches, still trying to take advantage of his arousal, though the effort is less concentrated now. “What was that?”
“I think I've just cashed in one of my favours. Maybe I'll get Hiro to listen to me this time.”
-
Las Vegas is shiny and sparkly, and Elle doesn't know how anyone could sleep in this city. But then, maybe they don't, maybe everyone here stays up all day and all night and looks at the sparkly buildings and gets trapped in the cycle of winning and losing and winning and losing again until they die.
Adam says that's pretty much on the money.
They've been all over the country since that rude flying guy came to visit, going to all Adam's hiding places and collecting his things: papers and maps and pocket watches and other funny little trinkets. He keeps them in lots of different boxes in lots of different states, and it's a treasure hunt to find them all. He says that they'll have to leave when they find the sword, so he'll need some of his things in case he can't get back to them again. He's been retired for years, there's a lot to find.
Elle hasn't minded, she likes treasure hunts, and Adam is a treasure hunt all of his own. Her daddy sent her out to find him, and she did - the only one who did - but she decided she didn't want to come back. She was tired of being a contract killer, and Adam had things to teach her and treated her nice. This sword, though, she's been hearing about it her whole life. She wants it so bad.
They check into a hotel, Caesars Palace, and sit in the restaurant drinking tea. She wants to play on the slot machines, but he stills her with a hand on her knee. “Wait,” he says.
They wait. He has a salad and two more cups of tea, complaining all the while about how it's just 'not quite right', she has a burger that she smothers in ketchup and ranch dressing, and a coke. Tea tastes like weird flavoured water. She doesn't know what they're waiting for.
“Ah, here we are,” Adam says, leaning forward. He hands her a napkin. “Clean yourself up, dear, we have company.”
A man approaches. A little man, a vague roundness about him, kinda cute. “Adam Monroe?” he asks.
“I knew you'd find me. Please, sit down, Mr Nakamura.”
The man sits. He's wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon character on it. “Call me Hiro. My father told me a lot about you.”
Adam smiles; it's his friendly-shark smile, which is less dangerous than his actual-shark smile. Somewhat. “A little too much, probably,” he amends. “Now, what's all this I've been hearing about Kensei's sword?”
Part 6