![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardDo you know what today is? It's Tuesday. And you know what that means? It means the band barbecue is today. And you know what THAT means?
IT'S MARCHING SEASON AGAIN!!!!!!!
You have no idea how this excites me.
*pause* Oh, there's also fic. Alas, we have returned to the plot.
“Hey, Danny,” Aiden crowed.
He glanced around for her, saw her standing over him on one of the catwalks grinning like an idiot. “What?” he demanded, tipping his head back as Flack’s hand brushed lightly along the small of his back before he left for his desk among the other homicide detectives.
“You’re late,” she said.
“Train got delayed. Anythin’ else? It can’t just be that; you’re smirking like the cat got into the cream.”
She brushed a thick lock of black hair deliberately back behind her ear. “Mac wants to go. And we have a date at court in an hour. Rae Clayton. Don’t forget.”
“Mac, huh?” Danny asked her back, but she didn’t bother turning around.
He turned his eyes toward Mac’s office. It was dark and empty – Mac wasn’t there, which boded ill for the proposed meeting. Never mind it wasn’t Danny’s fault he hadn’t been able to find him; Mac would blame him because he hadn’t sat on the front step of his office all day and waited for him to make an appearance. Danny directed his steps toward his office, figuring he’d check his inbox then swing by Mac’s office again.
Alas, no such luck. He ran straight into Mac and Stella escorting an uncuffed Joey Sforza through the halls, and before he could duck into an empty lab to hide, Joey had spotted him.
His, “Hey, Danny,” was cordial enough. It was the stern look Mac gave him that made Danny want to cower.
He swallowed. Couldn’t deny he’d ever seen them, since it was a narrow hallways and there were just the four of them in it, and couldn’t pretend he’d gone temporarily deaf, because knowing him, Mac would probably make him go in to a doctor and get his ears checked out. “Joey,” he said warily, and nodded to his uncle’s consigliere. He glanced at Mac, who was staring determinedly off at one of the other doors in the hall, and continued after a moment, “Mac decide you didn’t do it?”
Joey grinned cheerfully. “Hard to charge with the death of someone who isn’t dead,” he said. “You talk to your uncle lately? He’s been worried about you?”
“I’m sure,” Danny said through clenched teeth. “Well. When you see him, and I’m sure you will in the next twenty minutes, tell him I can take care of myself, thanks.
Joey’s grin turned into a slight frown. “You do realize he’d put a little more faith into that belief if you, I don’t know, showed it? Because you haven’t been doing real well recently.”
Danny ground his teeth. “Yeah, well, I don’t need the Mafia to watch my back, I got the cops for that. Both of ‘em doing it at the same time wouldn’t go so well, I think.”
“Well, that all depends on whether or not both sides know the other one’s watching,” Joey said. “But I will pass your words along to Val, and I’m sure he’ll be glad to know you’re acknowledging his existence –”
“Joey,” Danny said flatly. “Screw you. And Val, while you’re at it.”
“Kind of hard to come up with a comeback to that one, isn’t it?” Stella said to Joey, looking happier than she had five minutes ago. “Morning, Danny.”
“Morning, Stella,” he nodded. “Morning, Mac. Aiden said you wanted to see me?”
“Yes, actually,” Mac said. “My office in five minutes? We just have to kick Mr. Sforza loose, and then –”
“Five minutes, sure,” Danny interrupted. “I can’t take long though, Mac, I’m sorry, Aid and Flack and I gotta get down to the courthouse to interview a suspect in –” he glanced at his watch “– fifty-four minutes.”
“That’s all right, this shouldn’t take long,” Mac said, glancing at his own watch.
Danny nodded again and edged past them. “Well, let me just go check my inbox, see if anything interesting came in, and I will see you –” He resisted the urge to break and run, and caught the grin Stella threw at him briefly over her shoulder.
*
“Have a seat, Danny,” Mac said, patting a few errant pieces of paper straight. Danny resisted the urge to sink down into his seat and cower – in his experience, nothing good ever came of being called into Mac’s office – and instead gave Stella a curious look. She was perched on the edge of Mac’s desk, playing with the little puzzle thing he kept there. Mac wasn’t going to fire him with Stella there, was he? He wouldn’t do that – if Mac was going to fire him, he’d make a big production of it, or do it as quietly and impersonally as he could –
Danny realized he hadn’t heard a word Mac had just said and tried to pull himself back to the real world. “Sorry, Mac, didn’t catch that. What’d you say?”
Mac frowned at him. “As I was saying, our case has a number of variables that neither the NYPD nor the FBI has files on, or if the FBI has files on them, they’re not allowing us access. Given your – ah, your acquaintance – with the Constantine Family, I was hoping –”
“Wait,” Danny said. “This is about my relatives? I haven’t been in touch with any of ‘em for years now. I mean, I – well, okay, I’m pretty up to date on mob gossip and stuff, but it’s not like I’m, like, intimate with Astra Pagliuca or Luca Dellacroce or anything. Because I’m not. And the Dellacroces hate the Constantines almost as much as the Patrisos do, so it’d be kind of a Romeo and Juliet thing, except for the – well –”
Mac dropped a pile of folders a foot thick in front of him, and the desk shook for a moment. “Reading through all these is the alternative,” he said. “And these aren’t even the complete files; these are the edited ones. They date back almost a century.”
Danny picked up the top one and nearly dropped it. Brasi-Dellacroce, it said in neat black letters on the side. “Uh-huh,” he said thoughtfully after a moment. “You’re dealing with the Dellacroce now? I thought it was just the Pagliuca and the Constantine you were dicking around with.”
Mac fixed him with a steely blue glare. “Everything’s connected,” he said. “And it seems to hold doubly true for the Mafia. I was reading through those last night. You can’t get through half a page without running into a footnote a page long in and of itself about one of the other families.”
“That’s true,” Danny admitted. “Pretty much because the Mafia’s all inbred, and if we’re not screwing each other, we’re screwing around with each other, or better yet, screwing each other over. You know, Val knows more than me."
“He refused to tell us anything,” Mac said, looking dismayed about this fact. “Or at least, he refused to name names.”
Danny sighed, pushed his glasses up to rub at his eyes. “Omerta,” he said.
Mac blinked. “What?”
“Omerta. The Mafia code of honor. It means you don’t talk, no matter what. You don’t be a rat. Constantine might not be one of the Families, but they’re going to hold to that no matter what. Constantine’s old school when it comes to honor. Not like most modern goodfellas, who are all too happy to talk just on the off chance they might get, I dunno, a movie deal or a book deal or a television gig. Constantine doesn’t need that.”
Stella set the puzzle down and gave him a long look. “Are you going to hold to that?”
Danny froze, thought this over. “I don’t know,” he said finally.
“You don’t know? What the hell kind of answer is that?”
“A life-saving one,” he snapped. “Because if they find out I ratted them out, my life’s not worth a red penny. Not that it’s not already that way, but at least only one of the Families wants me dead, not all five. So you know what? I don’t know. Seriously. I guess it depends what you ask.”
Mac stared at him for a long moment. “All right,” he said finally.
Stella turned an incensed look on him. “ ‘All right?’ What the hell is that supposed to mean? Danny, you’re a cop, your first allegiance should be to the NYPD –”
“And it is,” he said, thumping a fist down on Mac’s desk. “It is, okay? Seriously. I told you I’d never rat the department out, and I wouldn’t. I haven’t. Never even thought about it. But ya know what? Val – Constantine – they’re my family. Blood’s thicker than water and all that. Val’s the one that took me in when my dad kicked me out of the house after Tanglewood. I owe something to him, even if I never followed him into the Mob. I think silence is the least I can give him, you know? Make an attempt to not give out information that would land him in jail. Or any of his contacts, ‘cause you know what? That peace, the one between Constantine and the Families – it’s thin. Real thin. He loses one person in the Families, that whole mess could come tumbling down, and ya know what that would mean? Open war. That thing with Patriso is bad enough, but that’s not his fault because he didn’t start it. Fat Freddy did, and Fat Freddy’s fucking insane, and everyone on the Commission knows that, so I don’t have a fucking clue why they don’t throw him out. But war between Constantine and the Five Families – that’s like planting bombs all over New York and watching them detonate. It’s not gonna be just made guys getting killed, it’s gonna be innocent people and cops that are just caught in the crossfire. The Families don’t want that, but they’ll do it if they have to. Constantine doesn’t want that, but if the Families start a fight, they’re gonna finish it, because backing down’s a fucking death sentence as much as fighting is. And I sure as hell don’t want that, because I don’t give a fuck about the wise guys out there, but I do care about the NYPD and the civilians.” He sat back with another thump and crossed his arms, waiting for Mac to yell. Or throw him out. Or something else that wasn’t too good.
Mac beat his fingers slowly on the wood of his desk. “How about this, Danny,” he said. “Any information you give me I won’t give to the FBI, or the Organized Crime Division, or any other department that would use it in a way that’s detrimental to any of the Five Families or Constantine. All I want is to solve my homicide. Anything else I’ll keep to myself, and so will Stella.”
“The hell I will,” Stella grumbled, but she gave Mac a limpid, innocent look when he glanced at her.
“I don’t like making deals,” Mac said flatly. “And I don’t like letting criminals go free. But the Mafia is in the FBI’s perview, not mine. What I want to know is who killed my vic, and why. That’s all. If closing this case means that I have to arrest someone in the upper echelon of the Mafia, then so be it. But I want justice for my vic and his family. Is that clear?”
“It’s clear,” Danny said reluctantly. “Are you sure about that? I mean –”
“I want to close my case,” Mac said. “I want to solve this homicide, and that’s all. So?”
Danny swallowed. “I thought you said your vic was Darin Pagliuca.”
Stella shook her head. “DNA was a bust, and Darin’s in the system. He’s down as a John Doe. Darin’s missing, though. That mean anything to you, or change anything?”
Danny shook his head slowly. “You guys talked to Nicky Pagliuca yet?”
“He’s out of town,” Mac said, leaning forward. “We haven’t been able to get a hold of him. The only relative we’ve spoken to is Astra Pagliuca.” He shot Stella a quick, unreadable glance, and she looked down at her hands.
Danny beat a slow tattoo on the edge of Mac’s desk. “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. What do you want to know?”
IT'S MARCHING SEASON AGAIN!!!!!!!
You have no idea how this excites me.
*pause* Oh, there's also fic. Alas, we have returned to the plot.
“Hey, Danny,” Aiden crowed.
He glanced around for her, saw her standing over him on one of the catwalks grinning like an idiot. “What?” he demanded, tipping his head back as Flack’s hand brushed lightly along the small of his back before he left for his desk among the other homicide detectives.
“You’re late,” she said.
“Train got delayed. Anythin’ else? It can’t just be that; you’re smirking like the cat got into the cream.”
She brushed a thick lock of black hair deliberately back behind her ear. “Mac wants to go. And we have a date at court in an hour. Rae Clayton. Don’t forget.”
“Mac, huh?” Danny asked her back, but she didn’t bother turning around.
He turned his eyes toward Mac’s office. It was dark and empty – Mac wasn’t there, which boded ill for the proposed meeting. Never mind it wasn’t Danny’s fault he hadn’t been able to find him; Mac would blame him because he hadn’t sat on the front step of his office all day and waited for him to make an appearance. Danny directed his steps toward his office, figuring he’d check his inbox then swing by Mac’s office again.
Alas, no such luck. He ran straight into Mac and Stella escorting an uncuffed Joey Sforza through the halls, and before he could duck into an empty lab to hide, Joey had spotted him.
His, “Hey, Danny,” was cordial enough. It was the stern look Mac gave him that made Danny want to cower.
He swallowed. Couldn’t deny he’d ever seen them, since it was a narrow hallways and there were just the four of them in it, and couldn’t pretend he’d gone temporarily deaf, because knowing him, Mac would probably make him go in to a doctor and get his ears checked out. “Joey,” he said warily, and nodded to his uncle’s consigliere. He glanced at Mac, who was staring determinedly off at one of the other doors in the hall, and continued after a moment, “Mac decide you didn’t do it?”
Joey grinned cheerfully. “Hard to charge with the death of someone who isn’t dead,” he said. “You talk to your uncle lately? He’s been worried about you?”
“I’m sure,” Danny said through clenched teeth. “Well. When you see him, and I’m sure you will in the next twenty minutes, tell him I can take care of myself, thanks.
Joey’s grin turned into a slight frown. “You do realize he’d put a little more faith into that belief if you, I don’t know, showed it? Because you haven’t been doing real well recently.”
Danny ground his teeth. “Yeah, well, I don’t need the Mafia to watch my back, I got the cops for that. Both of ‘em doing it at the same time wouldn’t go so well, I think.”
“Well, that all depends on whether or not both sides know the other one’s watching,” Joey said. “But I will pass your words along to Val, and I’m sure he’ll be glad to know you’re acknowledging his existence –”
“Joey,” Danny said flatly. “Screw you. And Val, while you’re at it.”
“Kind of hard to come up with a comeback to that one, isn’t it?” Stella said to Joey, looking happier than she had five minutes ago. “Morning, Danny.”
“Morning, Stella,” he nodded. “Morning, Mac. Aiden said you wanted to see me?”
“Yes, actually,” Mac said. “My office in five minutes? We just have to kick Mr. Sforza loose, and then –”
“Five minutes, sure,” Danny interrupted. “I can’t take long though, Mac, I’m sorry, Aid and Flack and I gotta get down to the courthouse to interview a suspect in –” he glanced at his watch “– fifty-four minutes.”
“That’s all right, this shouldn’t take long,” Mac said, glancing at his own watch.
Danny nodded again and edged past them. “Well, let me just go check my inbox, see if anything interesting came in, and I will see you –” He resisted the urge to break and run, and caught the grin Stella threw at him briefly over her shoulder.
*
“Have a seat, Danny,” Mac said, patting a few errant pieces of paper straight. Danny resisted the urge to sink down into his seat and cower – in his experience, nothing good ever came of being called into Mac’s office – and instead gave Stella a curious look. She was perched on the edge of Mac’s desk, playing with the little puzzle thing he kept there. Mac wasn’t going to fire him with Stella there, was he? He wouldn’t do that – if Mac was going to fire him, he’d make a big production of it, or do it as quietly and impersonally as he could –
Danny realized he hadn’t heard a word Mac had just said and tried to pull himself back to the real world. “Sorry, Mac, didn’t catch that. What’d you say?”
Mac frowned at him. “As I was saying, our case has a number of variables that neither the NYPD nor the FBI has files on, or if the FBI has files on them, they’re not allowing us access. Given your – ah, your acquaintance – with the Constantine Family, I was hoping –”
“Wait,” Danny said. “This is about my relatives? I haven’t been in touch with any of ‘em for years now. I mean, I – well, okay, I’m pretty up to date on mob gossip and stuff, but it’s not like I’m, like, intimate with Astra Pagliuca or Luca Dellacroce or anything. Because I’m not. And the Dellacroces hate the Constantines almost as much as the Patrisos do, so it’d be kind of a Romeo and Juliet thing, except for the – well –”
Mac dropped a pile of folders a foot thick in front of him, and the desk shook for a moment. “Reading through all these is the alternative,” he said. “And these aren’t even the complete files; these are the edited ones. They date back almost a century.”
Danny picked up the top one and nearly dropped it. Brasi-Dellacroce, it said in neat black letters on the side. “Uh-huh,” he said thoughtfully after a moment. “You’re dealing with the Dellacroce now? I thought it was just the Pagliuca and the Constantine you were dicking around with.”
Mac fixed him with a steely blue glare. “Everything’s connected,” he said. “And it seems to hold doubly true for the Mafia. I was reading through those last night. You can’t get through half a page without running into a footnote a page long in and of itself about one of the other families.”
“That’s true,” Danny admitted. “Pretty much because the Mafia’s all inbred, and if we’re not screwing each other, we’re screwing around with each other, or better yet, screwing each other over. You know, Val knows more than me."
“He refused to tell us anything,” Mac said, looking dismayed about this fact. “Or at least, he refused to name names.”
Danny sighed, pushed his glasses up to rub at his eyes. “Omerta,” he said.
Mac blinked. “What?”
“Omerta. The Mafia code of honor. It means you don’t talk, no matter what. You don’t be a rat. Constantine might not be one of the Families, but they’re going to hold to that no matter what. Constantine’s old school when it comes to honor. Not like most modern goodfellas, who are all too happy to talk just on the off chance they might get, I dunno, a movie deal or a book deal or a television gig. Constantine doesn’t need that.”
Stella set the puzzle down and gave him a long look. “Are you going to hold to that?”
Danny froze, thought this over. “I don’t know,” he said finally.
“You don’t know? What the hell kind of answer is that?”
“A life-saving one,” he snapped. “Because if they find out I ratted them out, my life’s not worth a red penny. Not that it’s not already that way, but at least only one of the Families wants me dead, not all five. So you know what? I don’t know. Seriously. I guess it depends what you ask.”
Mac stared at him for a long moment. “All right,” he said finally.
Stella turned an incensed look on him. “ ‘All right?’ What the hell is that supposed to mean? Danny, you’re a cop, your first allegiance should be to the NYPD –”
“And it is,” he said, thumping a fist down on Mac’s desk. “It is, okay? Seriously. I told you I’d never rat the department out, and I wouldn’t. I haven’t. Never even thought about it. But ya know what? Val – Constantine – they’re my family. Blood’s thicker than water and all that. Val’s the one that took me in when my dad kicked me out of the house after Tanglewood. I owe something to him, even if I never followed him into the Mob. I think silence is the least I can give him, you know? Make an attempt to not give out information that would land him in jail. Or any of his contacts, ‘cause you know what? That peace, the one between Constantine and the Families – it’s thin. Real thin. He loses one person in the Families, that whole mess could come tumbling down, and ya know what that would mean? Open war. That thing with Patriso is bad enough, but that’s not his fault because he didn’t start it. Fat Freddy did, and Fat Freddy’s fucking insane, and everyone on the Commission knows that, so I don’t have a fucking clue why they don’t throw him out. But war between Constantine and the Five Families – that’s like planting bombs all over New York and watching them detonate. It’s not gonna be just made guys getting killed, it’s gonna be innocent people and cops that are just caught in the crossfire. The Families don’t want that, but they’ll do it if they have to. Constantine doesn’t want that, but if the Families start a fight, they’re gonna finish it, because backing down’s a fucking death sentence as much as fighting is. And I sure as hell don’t want that, because I don’t give a fuck about the wise guys out there, but I do care about the NYPD and the civilians.” He sat back with another thump and crossed his arms, waiting for Mac to yell. Or throw him out. Or something else that wasn’t too good.
Mac beat his fingers slowly on the wood of his desk. “How about this, Danny,” he said. “Any information you give me I won’t give to the FBI, or the Organized Crime Division, or any other department that would use it in a way that’s detrimental to any of the Five Families or Constantine. All I want is to solve my homicide. Anything else I’ll keep to myself, and so will Stella.”
“The hell I will,” Stella grumbled, but she gave Mac a limpid, innocent look when he glanced at her.
“I don’t like making deals,” Mac said flatly. “And I don’t like letting criminals go free. But the Mafia is in the FBI’s perview, not mine. What I want to know is who killed my vic, and why. That’s all. If closing this case means that I have to arrest someone in the upper echelon of the Mafia, then so be it. But I want justice for my vic and his family. Is that clear?”
“It’s clear,” Danny said reluctantly. “Are you sure about that? I mean –”
“I want to close my case,” Mac said. “I want to solve this homicide, and that’s all. So?”
Danny swallowed. “I thought you said your vic was Darin Pagliuca.”
Stella shook her head. “DNA was a bust, and Darin’s in the system. He’s down as a John Doe. Darin’s missing, though. That mean anything to you, or change anything?”
Danny shook his head slowly. “You guys talked to Nicky Pagliuca yet?”
“He’s out of town,” Mac said, leaning forward. “We haven’t been able to get a hold of him. The only relative we’ve spoken to is Astra Pagliuca.” He shot Stella a quick, unreadable glance, and she looked down at her hands.
Danny beat a slow tattoo on the edge of Mac’s desk. “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. What do you want to know?”