New York Minute 8
May. 14th, 2005 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardArgh, finally. Only two scenes, but Aiden suddenly got very talkative and paranoid, and Flack has issues.
Oh, and guess what my computer did again? Shut down the Internet.
“I’m Detective Taylor, these are Detectives Messer and Flack,” Mac said, waving absently at Danny and Flack behind him. “Detective Burn is on her way.”
The stranger detective held out his hand. “Detective Davenport,” he said, shaking Mac’s hand firmly. “Manhattan Homicide. Call me Kyle.”
“Mac.”
“Danny,” Danny introduced himself, leaning around Mac to shake his hand. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s Flack.”
Flack folded his arms, didn’t make any move to acknowledge Davenport’s existence. “We’ve met,” he said, glaring at him.
Davenport’s smile faded slightly from the bright glow it had had before, then he turned his attention back to Mac. “Thanks for coming out on such short notice,” he said. “They didn’t trigger any of the alarms – if it hadn’t been for the guards doing a routine sweep that was implemented last week after some pretty credible warnings, nobody might have known until morning.”
“What was taken?” Mac asked as he led them through the hallways.
“Some pretty valuable canvases,” Davenport replied. His voice echoed slightly in the empty hallways. “My partner’s running down the museum curator, but the rough estimate we’ve gotten back says the value’s somewhere in the millions.”
Mac raised his eyebrows. “What pieces?”
The detective shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. The bodies are this way.” He led them down a side hallway. “Two security guards. They’be been shot. There’re security cameras.”
“Flack, take care of that,” Mac tossed over his shoulder.
The thin line that was Flack’s mouth relaxed slightly. “Yeah, sure, Mac,” he said, and veered off. Danny watched him weave in and out of display cases and down the hall with a small frown on his lips.
“Mac,” he said, hurrying to meet pace with Mac and Davenport. “The bodies are mine.”
Mac half-turned to frown at him. “What?”
“Our vic from the Starbucks case, Shannon Akers?” Danny said. “She was a thief. Her fingerprints came up from a bunch of museum robberies. If you won’t give me the bodies, then at least get me the bullets. I wanna compare them to the ones recovered from the scene.”
“That’s a long shot, Danny.”
“Yeah, I know. I wanna try anyway. So…bullets?”
“You can have the bullets,” Mac said. His eyes misted over briefly. “Stella –” he began, and stopped. His throat worked silently for a moment, then he lowered his head. Davenport threw them both odd looks.
“Hey, Mac,” Danny said softly. “She’ll be okay.”
He wasn’t sure if Mac heard him.
*
“Aw, Christ,” Aiden said, hissing between her teeth. She tossed her hairbrush aside and lunged for her cell phone.
“Burn.”
“Hey, bitch,” an arrogant male voice said.
“Who is this?” Not hard to remember another call where it started out like a prank and degenerated into something much more serious. Curly Sassone’s voice cold and slick in her ear, and the white, scared look on Danny’s face when he snatched the phone from her hand. The spatter of blood across Flack’s face. The bullet that could have made chicken noodle soup of her lower body. Danny, in the hospital, his skin pale and unnaturally still, and the bandages on his arm and shoulder. The man who’d called himself Danny’s uncle, who’d come in when Aiden and Stella were waiting and Danny and Flack were both out. Dark hair and dark velvet eyes, and she might have thought him FBI if it wasn’t for his silent redheaded shadow, who looked at her with nightmares in his blue gaze and the still-movement flick of his hands everytime anyone even breathed.
Aiden pulled open the top drawer of her nightstand and reached for her spare gun. She checked the magazine with her phone clenched between her shoulder and her ear, fingers quick and sure, only the faintest twitch of terror behind them.
“How’s it feel to be livin’ your last week on Earth, you useless cunt?”
She clicked the safety off the revolver and laid it down her knee as she dropped into a seat on the bed. Aiden kept her hand on the butt of the gun. “How’s it feel to be talkin’ to an NYPD detective, punk?”
“How’s it feel to be talkin’ to the man that’s gonna kill you?” the caller returned without even waiting for a flicker of rational thought. “Gonna fuck you, bitch, slam deep into you until you sceam, but you won’t be able to. Gonna wrap my hands around your neck and squeeze until you wanna beg for mercy, but you can’t get the voice out of your throat. You’re gonna die naked on your back with my come runnin’ down your legs and your eyes wide open, like Delia Shelley and Anne Beaman and Sissy Placido. Just another dead cop in the Bronx.”
Aiden’s finger twitched on the trigger. “Fuck you,” she said concisely and slammed the phone shut. She threw it fiercely at the wall, where it hit with a sickeningly crack and slid down to huddle in a mess of white-lined black plastic on the floor.
Someone hammered on the door.
Aiden’s finger slipped on the trigger again and the gun kicked lightly in her hand as it discharged with a sharp crack into a pile of pillows and bedding, sending feathers and fabric flying all over her.
There was a slightly panicked yell from beyond the door. “Aiden!”
She gave the pillows and bedding one last look, ignored the pound of music from next door and the roar of baseball or basketball or some sport involving balls up above and slid off the bed.
“Aiden!”
She had one hand on the door handle and one hand on her gun when she pulled the door open. Danny leapt back, looking panicked.
“Aiden, what the hell –”
She slumped back against the wall next to the door, clicking the safety on. Danny knelt down beside her. “Aiden, what the hell?” he said again, pushing the door shut.
“Aw, Jesus Christ,” Aiden said fluently. “I almost fucking shot you.”
Danny shook his head, shaking a little. “Fuck, Aid, that’s twice in one month. Are you all right? I thought I heard a gunshot –”
“You did,” Aiden said, shaking her head. She let her revolver fall from her hand. “Shot the hell outta a couple of innocent pillows. Jesus Christ. I coulda killed you, Danny.”
“No shit,” he breathed. He rubbed his fingers absently over his right shoulder, then flicked them aside, as thought getting ghost blood off his hands. “Aiden, what happened? Are you all right?”
Aiden looked up at him. “Are you?” she asked bluntly.
Danny’s eyes went wide. “That kinda depends on your definition of ‘all right’, Aiden.” He hesitated a little. “But no, I’m not all right. I’d be surprised if I was.”
Aiden glanced down at the gun between her splayed legs. “I have nightmares,” she said suddenly.
Danny’s eyes flickered to her curiously. “Nightmares –”
“About last month.” She let her head drop back against the wall, staring at the ceiling. If you stare at it long enough, the dots form pictures. She’s named them, like constellations in the night sky. The Rat. The X-Chromosome. The DNA Strand. The Corpse. “I’m dreaming, and we’re back at Black Meridion. DiCarlo fires at me but this time I’m not wearing my vest. The bullet punches through me. It’s not a through-and-through; the bullet lodges on a rib. The rib breaks and punctures a lung.” She stared blankly at the ceiling, aware of Danny hovering just at the edge of her vision. I shouldn’t be telling him this, she thought, but she needed to tell someone. Vampires need to be invited in, and fear is an invitation.
“It’s always the same,” Aiden whispered. “I’m lying on the floor, tryin’ to hold my guts together and coughing up blood. It’s red.” That’s important, she thinks, with a vague sense of disconnection. Here, in the shadows, she’s jus another dead cop. She just doesn’t have the sense the sense to stop fighting yet. “Sassone shoots Flack first. Right in the head, but it’s a clean shoot. No stippling, no rim burn. Minimal blood spatter. He bleeds blue. Sassone walks forward, sorta lets Flack fall, and shoots you through the kneecaps. Bang bang.” She makes a shoot motion with her hand. “You fall forward, but you’re on your back. Sassone takes your glasses off and breaks them in half. Then he shoots you in the chest. Nine times. Sassone and DiCarlo go out through the front. Somehow I manage to get up. I’m still holding my guts together. I follow them.” She swallowed, closed her fingers around the butt of the gun in front of her. There was nothing more comforting to a scared cop than cool metal against the palm of their hand.
Aiden’s voice came out in a dull croak. “I find Mac first. He’s in a Marine dress uniform, but all his badges and medals and stuff are NYPD. He’s been shot twice in the back of the head, but you can’t see it. He looks happy.” There, she thought. Can’t I stop now? Hasn’t Danny had enough problems? But she couldn’t stop.
“Stella’s out front. The son of a bitch cut her throat. There’s blood all over the place, and there’s too much of it to be Stella’s. I kneel down beside her. Lividity’s fixed. It wasn’t a body dump. She died here. That’s when I realize the blood’s mine.”
“Aiden –” Danny breathed.
“That’s when I wake up,” she interrupted. She grabbed at the collar of his shirt. “Why, dammit? Tell me why. Why us?”
Danny closed his eyes. His throat worked silently, as though trying to get the words out, then he shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”
“Tanglewood,” Aiden said barely. “Why you? What did you do, Danny?”
Danny put his hand on her wrist, just holding, not making any move to tear her hand away. “Some secrets are meant to be kept,” he said softly.
I am looking forward the season finales of CSI: NY and CSI with far too much glee.
Oh, and guess what my computer did again? Shut down the Internet.
“I’m Detective Taylor, these are Detectives Messer and Flack,” Mac said, waving absently at Danny and Flack behind him. “Detective Burn is on her way.”
The stranger detective held out his hand. “Detective Davenport,” he said, shaking Mac’s hand firmly. “Manhattan Homicide. Call me Kyle.”
“Mac.”
“Danny,” Danny introduced himself, leaning around Mac to shake his hand. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s Flack.”
Flack folded his arms, didn’t make any move to acknowledge Davenport’s existence. “We’ve met,” he said, glaring at him.
Davenport’s smile faded slightly from the bright glow it had had before, then he turned his attention back to Mac. “Thanks for coming out on such short notice,” he said. “They didn’t trigger any of the alarms – if it hadn’t been for the guards doing a routine sweep that was implemented last week after some pretty credible warnings, nobody might have known until morning.”
“What was taken?” Mac asked as he led them through the hallways.
“Some pretty valuable canvases,” Davenport replied. His voice echoed slightly in the empty hallways. “My partner’s running down the museum curator, but the rough estimate we’ve gotten back says the value’s somewhere in the millions.”
Mac raised his eyebrows. “What pieces?”
The detective shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. The bodies are this way.” He led them down a side hallway. “Two security guards. They’be been shot. There’re security cameras.”
“Flack, take care of that,” Mac tossed over his shoulder.
The thin line that was Flack’s mouth relaxed slightly. “Yeah, sure, Mac,” he said, and veered off. Danny watched him weave in and out of display cases and down the hall with a small frown on his lips.
“Mac,” he said, hurrying to meet pace with Mac and Davenport. “The bodies are mine.”
Mac half-turned to frown at him. “What?”
“Our vic from the Starbucks case, Shannon Akers?” Danny said. “She was a thief. Her fingerprints came up from a bunch of museum robberies. If you won’t give me the bodies, then at least get me the bullets. I wanna compare them to the ones recovered from the scene.”
“That’s a long shot, Danny.”
“Yeah, I know. I wanna try anyway. So…bullets?”
“You can have the bullets,” Mac said. His eyes misted over briefly. “Stella –” he began, and stopped. His throat worked silently for a moment, then he lowered his head. Davenport threw them both odd looks.
“Hey, Mac,” Danny said softly. “She’ll be okay.”
He wasn’t sure if Mac heard him.
*
“Aw, Christ,” Aiden said, hissing between her teeth. She tossed her hairbrush aside and lunged for her cell phone.
“Burn.”
“Hey, bitch,” an arrogant male voice said.
“Who is this?” Not hard to remember another call where it started out like a prank and degenerated into something much more serious. Curly Sassone’s voice cold and slick in her ear, and the white, scared look on Danny’s face when he snatched the phone from her hand. The spatter of blood across Flack’s face. The bullet that could have made chicken noodle soup of her lower body. Danny, in the hospital, his skin pale and unnaturally still, and the bandages on his arm and shoulder. The man who’d called himself Danny’s uncle, who’d come in when Aiden and Stella were waiting and Danny and Flack were both out. Dark hair and dark velvet eyes, and she might have thought him FBI if it wasn’t for his silent redheaded shadow, who looked at her with nightmares in his blue gaze and the still-movement flick of his hands everytime anyone even breathed.
Aiden pulled open the top drawer of her nightstand and reached for her spare gun. She checked the magazine with her phone clenched between her shoulder and her ear, fingers quick and sure, only the faintest twitch of terror behind them.
“How’s it feel to be livin’ your last week on Earth, you useless cunt?”
She clicked the safety off the revolver and laid it down her knee as she dropped into a seat on the bed. Aiden kept her hand on the butt of the gun. “How’s it feel to be talkin’ to an NYPD detective, punk?”
“How’s it feel to be talkin’ to the man that’s gonna kill you?” the caller returned without even waiting for a flicker of rational thought. “Gonna fuck you, bitch, slam deep into you until you sceam, but you won’t be able to. Gonna wrap my hands around your neck and squeeze until you wanna beg for mercy, but you can’t get the voice out of your throat. You’re gonna die naked on your back with my come runnin’ down your legs and your eyes wide open, like Delia Shelley and Anne Beaman and Sissy Placido. Just another dead cop in the Bronx.”
Aiden’s finger twitched on the trigger. “Fuck you,” she said concisely and slammed the phone shut. She threw it fiercely at the wall, where it hit with a sickeningly crack and slid down to huddle in a mess of white-lined black plastic on the floor.
Someone hammered on the door.
Aiden’s finger slipped on the trigger again and the gun kicked lightly in her hand as it discharged with a sharp crack into a pile of pillows and bedding, sending feathers and fabric flying all over her.
There was a slightly panicked yell from beyond the door. “Aiden!”
She gave the pillows and bedding one last look, ignored the pound of music from next door and the roar of baseball or basketball or some sport involving balls up above and slid off the bed.
“Aiden!”
She had one hand on the door handle and one hand on her gun when she pulled the door open. Danny leapt back, looking panicked.
“Aiden, what the hell –”
She slumped back against the wall next to the door, clicking the safety on. Danny knelt down beside her. “Aiden, what the hell?” he said again, pushing the door shut.
“Aw, Jesus Christ,” Aiden said fluently. “I almost fucking shot you.”
Danny shook his head, shaking a little. “Fuck, Aid, that’s twice in one month. Are you all right? I thought I heard a gunshot –”
“You did,” Aiden said, shaking her head. She let her revolver fall from her hand. “Shot the hell outta a couple of innocent pillows. Jesus Christ. I coulda killed you, Danny.”
“No shit,” he breathed. He rubbed his fingers absently over his right shoulder, then flicked them aside, as thought getting ghost blood off his hands. “Aiden, what happened? Are you all right?”
Aiden looked up at him. “Are you?” she asked bluntly.
Danny’s eyes went wide. “That kinda depends on your definition of ‘all right’, Aiden.” He hesitated a little. “But no, I’m not all right. I’d be surprised if I was.”
Aiden glanced down at the gun between her splayed legs. “I have nightmares,” she said suddenly.
Danny’s eyes flickered to her curiously. “Nightmares –”
“About last month.” She let her head drop back against the wall, staring at the ceiling. If you stare at it long enough, the dots form pictures. She’s named them, like constellations in the night sky. The Rat. The X-Chromosome. The DNA Strand. The Corpse. “I’m dreaming, and we’re back at Black Meridion. DiCarlo fires at me but this time I’m not wearing my vest. The bullet punches through me. It’s not a through-and-through; the bullet lodges on a rib. The rib breaks and punctures a lung.” She stared blankly at the ceiling, aware of Danny hovering just at the edge of her vision. I shouldn’t be telling him this, she thought, but she needed to tell someone. Vampires need to be invited in, and fear is an invitation.
“It’s always the same,” Aiden whispered. “I’m lying on the floor, tryin’ to hold my guts together and coughing up blood. It’s red.” That’s important, she thinks, with a vague sense of disconnection. Here, in the shadows, she’s jus another dead cop. She just doesn’t have the sense the sense to stop fighting yet. “Sassone shoots Flack first. Right in the head, but it’s a clean shoot. No stippling, no rim burn. Minimal blood spatter. He bleeds blue. Sassone walks forward, sorta lets Flack fall, and shoots you through the kneecaps. Bang bang.” She makes a shoot motion with her hand. “You fall forward, but you’re on your back. Sassone takes your glasses off and breaks them in half. Then he shoots you in the chest. Nine times. Sassone and DiCarlo go out through the front. Somehow I manage to get up. I’m still holding my guts together. I follow them.” She swallowed, closed her fingers around the butt of the gun in front of her. There was nothing more comforting to a scared cop than cool metal against the palm of their hand.
Aiden’s voice came out in a dull croak. “I find Mac first. He’s in a Marine dress uniform, but all his badges and medals and stuff are NYPD. He’s been shot twice in the back of the head, but you can’t see it. He looks happy.” There, she thought. Can’t I stop now? Hasn’t Danny had enough problems? But she couldn’t stop.
“Stella’s out front. The son of a bitch cut her throat. There’s blood all over the place, and there’s too much of it to be Stella’s. I kneel down beside her. Lividity’s fixed. It wasn’t a body dump. She died here. That’s when I realize the blood’s mine.”
“Aiden –” Danny breathed.
“That’s when I wake up,” she interrupted. She grabbed at the collar of his shirt. “Why, dammit? Tell me why. Why us?”
Danny closed his eyes. His throat worked silently, as though trying to get the words out, then he shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”
“Tanglewood,” Aiden said barely. “Why you? What did you do, Danny?”
Danny put his hand on her wrist, just holding, not making any move to tear her hand away. “Some secrets are meant to be kept,” he said softly.
I am looking forward the season finales of CSI: NY and CSI with far too much glee.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 01:47 am (UTC)Dude. Awesome. Can I marry your grasp of the vernacular, at least? Oh, wow. Awesome. Mother*fucker*. Aiden and her nightmare sequence, and it's deep-down wrenching, in a different way than the phone call is--it's *fear*, not hate, the gnawing things, rabbit-warrens poisoned and dying and no light left.
And also, of Danny's uncle and the guardian, "nightmares in his blue gaze" and "velvet eyes". <3
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 01:59 am (UTC)Aiden's fucking terrified, and she didn't suffer as badly as Flack or Danny did. It's pure terror, and she's been repressing it as much as she can, but the phone call brings it on. I don't know what Curly said to her when she called him, but it was bad, and the things that followed were worse. It's her deepest fears, her people dead and nothing she can do.
And also, of Danny's uncle and the guardian, "nightmares in his blue gaze" and "velvet eyes".
There was a scene where Val showed up, but I never wrote it, and hey, why not reference it? His bodyguard's Carmine in that scene, not Joey or Ace. Also, Val has the most incredible eyes ever.