-I could say that this would make more sense if you've read my other stuff, but that would imply that I make sense at the best of times. It's safer to just nod and smile. Welcome to the AnJLverse. Please check your sanity at the front desk. I haven't abandoned my other fic, I just got attacked by plot-bunnies. I think one of them wore a trenchcoat...-
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Slightly Scarlet
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Teresa Lisbon doesn't really do formal occasions, black tie events. She's wondering how she let herself get talked into this one. Relief that she can still get into her Little Black Dress.
"You're going to have to help me with the zip...the other way, you monster."
The man responsible for her present predicament grins, places a kiss on the back of her neck.
"Do we have to go out to this thing?"
"It was your idea..." She turns round, and sees him properly.
Patrick Jane. In a tuxedo. Ah, yes, that would be why she agreed...
...When Minelli had called Jane into his office, Lisbon had automatically gone with him. She usually found herself called in to either mediate, explain or apologize at some point, so it seemed easier to be there from the get-go. Minelli hadn't even blinked, just looked resigned.
"Call from the Mayor's office. Seems that one of his cronies has received a little note from someone indicating that they have some damaging information."
"Blackmail." Her lip curls. "I hate these cases."
"Oh, they have the men involved. But neither of them had the stuff on them."
"So, you're saying that there's...a third man?"
"He's the only one who knows where it is." Minelli growls. "And he's wise to being watched."
Jane starts to grin.
"So they want me to watch him and see where he's put it?"
"That would seem to be the idea. According to City Hall, you're already notorious." Minelli shoves a folder over the desk. "Your mission, should you decide to accept it..."
"The Wigan Ludgate Gallery of Modern Art?" Jane looks up. "We'll need two tickets."
"Two?"
"I never go anywhere without my supervising Agent." Presents the logic cheerfully. "She certainly wouldn't trust me not to get myself into trouble."
Minelli, about to ask how much trouble Jane could find at an art gallery, reconsiders. It's Jane, after all. The possibilities are frightening.
Jane looks at Lisbon.
"C'mon, we'll dress up, go out, and make fun of some rich people."
Put like that, she knows she will have to go with him. Otherwise, he's going to get himself thumped. Minelli comes to the same conclusion.
"Lisbon, you are to accompany him, and that's an order."
Lisbon looks less than delighted, which gives Minelli a little hope that he isn't going to have to take notice of something he really doesn't want to know about.
A hope that would be rather dashed had he heard the conversation that then took place in Lisbon's office.
"What are you really up to?"
"I'm trying to get you into a party dress and heels, and drunk on champagne." He says, matter of fact.
She narrows her eyes at him. That sounds horribly plausible. Jane just grins...
Jane is now looking at Lisbon's little off the shoulder dress, and planning to make it an off the shoulder and right onto the floor dress before the night is out.
"Where do you hide your gun in that outfit?"
"Oh, I never carry weapons after business hours." She flutters her eyelashes. "I'm completely defenceless."
So is Jane when she does that to him.
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The exhibition is Modern Art of the most avant-garde and conceptual kind...
They both look up at the tank.
"What is it?"
"I think it's a mutated cow." Jane tips his head. "Yep, cow. We had something like this in one of the carnivals." He sighs. "The wonders of show business."
"That's disgusting."
"Sean would like it."
"Yeah, but Sean likes you. Which is not necessarily a recommendation."
"Meh, your brother is a man of taste and discernment." Pouts at her. "Anyway, I thought you liked me?"
"I put up with you. That's different." Grins at him.
They steer their way between something that seems to be a pile of ripped and stained cardboard, and a stack of small boxes containing miscellaneous bits of junk. Another piece consists of an old Triumph TR6 Trophy, enmeshed in barbed wire. Jane eyes it wistfully.
"That's a sweet bike..."
"No." Lisbon tows him away from it with a firm hand.
(Last time Van Pelt had ridden her Rapide to work, Jane had begged, pleaded and basically hopped from foot to foot until she had let him ride it round the block. The fact that Jane had nearly mown down Sam Bosco arriving back at the front door had only increased his blissed-out grin.)
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Lisbon really doesn't get conceptual art. As far as she can see, it consists of pretentious people making fun of other pretentious people by putting a load of random garbage into piles and charging a huge amount of money for it. Or, in this case, filming the people watching the piles of garbage, and then playing the images back through a pile of broken televisions. Cameras on gantries and telescopic arms swerve and track across the crowd, controlled from a desk within a nest of cables and broken scaffold, a surreal contrast to the pristine white space around it.
Jane is talking to someone. Or rather, he's being talked at. An intense young man in black, all big hand gestures, words tumbling over themselves, dark eyes wide, black curls over the bridge of his nose.
"...all about the context, art within art, make the audience connect with a piece..." Trails off, and just stares at her with his mouth open.
"Manfred, this is Teresa. Teresa, meet Manfred Asbach, creator of the work before you."
He's quite sweet, in a scruffy, over-caffeinated sort of way. She can't decide if he needs sleep or a shave more. She offers her hand, then wishes she hadn't, as she has a little difficulty in getting it back. Jane taps him on the shoulder.
"You can let go of her now, Manfred."
"Oh...oh, right, yes, sorry, I just...hello, hi, wow...I, um...do you like art?"
"Show Teresa how your art works, I'm sure she's interested."
She glares at Jane, but saying 'no' to Manfred would be like kicking a puppy, even if she could get a word in edgeways.
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He's still sniggering when he rescues her a long five minutes later, putting a drink in her hand.
She eyes the cocktail glass.
"Tell me that's not..."
"I'm getting into the spirit of things." He hitches an eyebrow, and she laughs at him.
"Of course...You drive like a lunatic, you're good at cards, you've got a smartass line for every occasion..."
"...I'm with a beautiful woman." Takes advantage of the moment to steal a kiss. "I like this cover story business. Let's do this more often."
"Behave yourself." A futile request. He's looking particularly devilish. "You're supposed to be working."
"I'm mixing business with pleasure." Speaks right into her ear. "Our man is starting to look spooked."
"Dammit. How many of the 'undercover' surveillance have you spotted?"
"All three of them. It's the shoes."
"We can't arrest him until he makes the pick-up."
"Or until we have the goods."
"You know where it is, don't you?" Lisbon looks at his smug grin, follows his eye-line. "Oh, you are kidding..."
"I'd ask you to ruminate on the problem, but I think you get my drift."
"How do we get it out?"
"In case of emergency, break glass..."
"Jane, you can't..."
It's Jane. He can.
She has one horrified moment to realize exactly what he plans to do, and then he's stepping back up onto Manfred's little platform, and selecting a random length of metal.
"Someone's compromising your artistic vision with sordid crime, Manfred. Are you up for a little piñata?"
Manfred gives a manic grin, and holds his hands above his consoles.
"Bring it on bring it on."
The camera rig scythes by.
Jane hooks an arm, swings himself up onto the beam. Lisbon actually hears herself giving a girly little shriek as he crouches up... and then he's riding the damn thing over the crowd. People duck and scream, and scramble out of the way, with varied success.
"He really understands about bringing the art to the audience..." Manfred's fingers dance over the controls as he swings his cameras to catch reactions. "Oooh, this is the very best violence..."
Lisbon watches Jane wreak total havoc amongst the great and the good. An act of pure lunacy, inappropriate, dangerous, irreverent...
"Can I get a copy of this?" she breathes.
Jane drops neatly down, the length of pipe in his hands. He's sizing up his swing, even as a couple of security scramble over the cordon to try and intercept him. One man finds a camera boom coming at him way too fast, and gets a close-up he's not ready for. Manfred cackles, and zooms in his shot, just as the metal bar makes contact with the glass monolith. Edited in slow-mo, maybe a little Strauss – it has potential...
"Awesome. Totally awesome...really connected with the piece..."
Harry Welles is having a bad night. His partners are under arrest, and he's twisting in the breeze. He's just seen their invulnerable hiding place hit out of the ball-park by someone who is either a secret agent, or an art critic. He looks wildly for a way out. On the one hand, there's a grinning lunatic with a length of piping. The other way, there's nobody between him and escape but one small woman. There's maybe thirty-nine steps to the doorway, and he's free...
It's the wrong choice. Manfred nearly passes out in delight as Lisbon happens to a man not expecting it. Wonders if he can persuade her to model for him. Maybe with some gold paint involved.
"Why can't we ever have a quiet evening out?" She grouches. Smacks the man with the butt of her Kel-Tec. "Stay. Down. This was my best dress, you bastard."
"Whenever Lisbon hears the word couture, she reaches for her gun." Jane eyes her nervously. "Where did you have that stashed?"
"You don't want to know." So a thigh holster isn't exactly standard issue. An evening out with Patrick Jane always has the potential for mayhem.
Security have to release Jane, who straightens his jacket. Manfred, having gleefully participated in the destruction of his own sculpture, has no desire to press charges. With this footage, he's already got his next piece conceived. In fact, he's already ranting excitedly about a new direction in participatory art to the assembled press. One of the photographers pops up and nearly blinds Jane with a flash.
"Everything's gone red." He complains.
Lisbon steers him away quickly. Jane and the press have a...fun relationship.
In amongst the debris, glass and fluid and basic gross dead animal, one of the undercover op's pokes wincingly around.
"You're absolutely sure it's there?" Lisbon hisses at him. Jane looks wounded.
"I'm not sticking my hand up a dead cow. This suit was a very expensive rental." Raises his voice. "Try the second stomach. You've got a one in four chance."
"How did you work out where he'd hidden it?" The exasperated and rather relieved op withdraws a malodorous plastic bag from the depths.
"Alimentary deduction." Jane grins horribly. "Do you really expect me to tell you?"
The man looks at the debonair figure in the tuxedo, and recalls all the stories he's heard. Sighs.
"No, Mr Jane, I expect you to lie..."
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She relaxes under the shower, later, and reflects that he really is a complete psycho...
"So, what do we call this case? The Maltese Holstein? Dead Cows Tell No Tales? Dial M for Moo-der?"
He's liberated a bottle of champagne from somewhere, and he's propped in the doorway, with his bow-tie hanging loose, and two champagne flutes in his fingers.
Patrick Jane. Licensed to thrill. She sighs happily. Sometimes you just have to go with the narrative...
"Oh, shut up, and take me to bed."
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