A Life in Orange Segments

(Or, a Guide For The Instinctive (Distinguished) Criminal, By N. Caffrey)

(Or, Could You Vague That Up For Me? It's Been Awhile)*

*Authors' Notes Below.

Disclaimer: No Copyright Infringement is intended. Borrowed for entertainment purposes only.

Beata'd! By the Awesome Elrhiarhodan. All other mistakes and grammatical errors are mine. Constructive Crit' welcome.

Neal was a very caring and clever boy. And clever caring boys always wanted to find the ones they love happy.

Three o'clock in the afternoon was seven-year-old Neal Caffrey's favourite time of day. School let out at three and on most days he would run as fast as he could to the little house he shared with his father. (At one time, though he couldn't really remember, he and his father had shared this house with a laughing woman who may have had dark hair, like his). He would run as fast as his legs would let him, tripping over broken cement and recklessly through traffic and over fences, enjoying the feeling of going downhill too fast, and knowing when to twist past garbage bins and rubbish piles, finally careening into the back yard and through the door, swallowing his pants for air and water, and making every effort to look as though nothing could be less important than being-home-from-school. His dad was always home at three-thirty, sitting at the table with his papers and his smokes, head bent in concentration. Neal would join him, tugging out his homework or sketchpad, feeling grown-up and mature, that he could work seriously, and (more importantly) quietly like an adult. Sometimes Neal's dad would get frustrated with his papers and swear, clouds of cigarette smoke bursting from his lips like the exhaust from the big diesel train engines that Neal was forbidden to go watch.

Neal knew that any rules outside the house were always harder to follow. He liked trains.

Everyone once in a while, Neal's dad would swear loudly and fling those papers across the room, thump his fists on the table and curl his lip cruelly. Neal would always be very still and try not to breath too loudly when his father would do this. Normally, his dad would storm out of the house to the bar and stay there until morning. Neal knew then to pick up the papers and pile them as neatly as possible back onto the table, finish his homework or put away his scribbles (he thought they looked like trains), and go to bed.

Neal's school had a breakfast program, he knew better than to ask what time dinner would be.

Sometimes though, his dad would swear in a peculiar way, and Neal would leave his scribbles or his homework and run from the table, out of the house and into the evening, and it would be him that wouldn't come back until morning.

The first time Neal picked a pocket, he was eight and starving, and another boy took pity on him and showed him how. "It's easy," said Paul, Who Was Eleven and Therefore Wise, holding a woman's wallet casually in his grubby fingers. "The trick is to not care. You can't get nervous and get caught if you don't care."

Neal found he was very good at picking pockets.

During summer vacation when Neal was nine, he was leaning his face on his fist and scratching his pencil across his paper, watching his father idly out of the corner of his eye. Unthinkingly, he glanced at the paper his dad was staring at. The signature on the page full of numbers was long and light and filled with loops and curls. It reminded Neal of clouds. His pencil moved and twirled and Neal thought nothing of it, until three days later, when his father held the page in front of him and asked how he did it. "It's just pictures, Daddy, I didn't see any words." His Dad stared at him, then laughed roughly, dropping a hand on his shoulder and steering him toward the table. He turned his paper upside-down and ruffled Neal's hair asking him to do his 'trick' again. Warm and glowing from the unexpected affection, Neal smiled.

Two years later Neal was very aware of what fraud was, but that didn't matter, Dad was pleased when funds and booze was plentiful, and Neal didn't need to pick pockets for money for food, just for practice.

In the fall one day when Neal was eleven, he went on a class trip to an art museum, where they all stared at paintings of flowers and women and buildings, and even some of pictures that seemed to be nothing that Neal could recognize, although they all made his chest tighten in a funny way.

A girl, one Neal didn't like, made fun of the paintings. "I've seen somma' these at the department store. S'not important," she sneered

The nice lady who took them around (Neal found out she was called a "Curator") smiled and said that the department store only sold poster copies, and that these painting were the originals. She said the history and talent and feelings were the important part, the things that made the scrotty old canvas worth much more than ten dollars and some tacking tape. Neal stared at a Basket of Bread* and wondered.

Neal would go to the park on Sundays and watch the art students painting sceneries. He was calm and polite and most students enjoyed having a curious audience, much more engaging than pigeons. Later, Neal would go home, and copy brush strokes and hand movements, lips pressed in concentration.

Neal was always very careful about the cheques he forged (Signatures were easy, but could he recreate a blank cheque?). During the summer, Neal would take long walks through wealthy neighbourhoods on early Saturday mornings, a push lawnmower in one hand and a stack of flyers in the other. Many of the home owners were older and retired marks, and were very pleased to have a charming young man to do the work they would rather avoid on sunny weekends. They were usually more than willing to let him in for a glass of water or to use the washroom, smiling naively and returning to their newspapers and radio stations. Neal's father thought that this careful searching for wealthy victims and chequebooks with high balances was a little excessive, but Neal loved the thrill and his father always lacked in creativity, but the would cash the checks anyway, because criticism had no involvement in profit.

Neal's Father once stole one thousand dollars from a bank account of a family Neal knew, and Neal couldn't look them in face for months, after they'd been evicted. Neal knows everyone can steal from anyone, it takes skill to thieve with integrity.

When Neal was fourteen he ended his partnership with his father. Neal had been pick-pocketing (a hobby, really) for years, and secretly mailing the wallets back to the owners, (after replicating any useful information), cash and all. His father found him one-night, head bent over three wallets (an hour's work!), paper filled with expertly forged signatures and fake driver's licenses. His father had laughed and said a new angle was the perfect thing, boy; and Neal agreed, reluctantly. Business can only grow, after all, and a growing business meant expansion meant associates. His father had been talking. A drinking buddy, Bruce, wanted a cut in the deal in exchange for leg work and promotion (even criminals need a pitch line.). The partnership only lasted six months, because Bruce had a loud mouth and a small brain, and Neal's father was an easy fool after a free bottle of whiskey. Neal knew about the gangs whose work they infringed upon, and tried to explain, to avoid, to warn, but greed was arousing and money always left you with the feeling of invincibility. He came home one evening (an exhibit on Picasso's sculptures, all the pieces were copies made to scale, but informative, nonetheless) and paused outside the back door of his house, listening to raised voices. There were a couple of thumps and a loud sharp bang.

Neal loved to dabble with the complexities of the rich but he knew where he was from, what a gun sounded like. Simple. Final.

Neal waited until the front slammed shut, and quietly entered his home. Bruce was lying on the floor, eyes glassy. He rounded the body and looked down the hallway, into the bedroom, his father's shadow bouncing. His sneakers made a squelching sound on the worn carpet. Dad was a mess of frantic energy, fuelled by the whisky in his left hand and the dead man in his living room. Glancing up at Neal and throwing clothing into a worn laundry bag. "Get your shit, boy, we've hit some trouble, time to move." Neal watched him silently. There had been some blank canvas in the other room, he hadn't planned to use red on it.

"No." The older man looked up, scowling. Neal blinked slowly. "You played it to close. I told you." Worn hands grabbed his collar and hauled him forward to meet bloodshot eyes. His toes scrapped against the floor. Neal held his breath.

Later, after the fighting was done and Neal was curled in a ball in a deserted alley would he let himself breath again. The gunshot hadn't alerted any police but the shouts and crashing did (the landlord was a stickler for property damage). He had just enough time to grab his duffel bag, shoving fake i.d.s and loose cash into any empty pockets, a few narrow seconds to scramble out his window and run into the evening. Neal knew then that was the last time he would ever see his father - handcuffed and white-face as a police officer knelt in blood to check for a non-existent pulse.

He was alone now. Neal picked agitatedly at tear in his denims and wondered. The bus stop was a twelve minutes walk away from this grubby town and Neal was a very clever boy. Lots of possibilities. In the dark and dirt and the thick muggy air he'd grown up choking on, Neal Caffrey stared out at the alley stretched before him paved with a history of someone else's intentions, and slowly, widely, with no emotion whatsoever, he smiled.

Neal spent two more years working on his craft, his forged cheques were undetectable and his other financial instruments – stocks and bonds - were improving. Corporate security was growing swiftly and becoming more complicated in ways that seemed almost impossible to con. Almost. Neal was enjoying the challenge, but he also had problems. He was sixteen and a half now – man-sized - and he looked it. He was no longer small and disarmingly innocent-looking, his freckles had long faded and there was nothing refreshingly charming about worn Converse sneakers, body hair and urgh, sweat. Neal was going to have to change his angle. Old avenues would have to be detoured. His mind briefly flitted back to that night in an alley, with all of its potential.

He considered himself, his body, what he could mould around his around himself and eventually settle into. After a two days of trial and error with a straight razor (just the sort thing, He decided, this new man would like) he went out and stole four thousand dollars from a retired attorney, and bought himself a new wardrobe.

An angel's smile and two hundred dollar tie do a lot for business opportunities.

The day Neal turned eighteen he pulled off his first art theft. Admittedly, it was an easy job to pull, a painting left in the elegantly furnished rooms of a wealthy private collector's summer house that stood vacant several months out of the year. It was also his first forgery and he was very proud. He sat in his ill-furnished motel room and stared for hours at a lost slice of Americana and its almost perfect duplicate, eyeing the canvas as if he could discover the secrets to the universe.

A clatter of noise from the hallway made him blink and stand, moving noiselessly to open his door and peer into the dim light of the hallway.

There was a turtle wrestling a bear underneath a bare light bulb.

Neal blinked again and determined that the turtle was actually a small man in unreasonable neckwear and the Bear was…a genetic throwback from the modern day Grizzly. In leather.

Years later, he would wonder what had made him do it, but at the moment he was holding an empty bottle of wine (chipped and filled with wax and burnt matchsticks, an impromptu candleholder) and the bear was within striking reach (something about successful thefts that make you feel invincible, despite any evidence to the contrary). There was the dull thunk of glass hitting skull, and sharp yell when Neal's second swing missed the bear and clipped Turtle-Man in the shoulder. Another half-second of confusion, and then Bear swayed dangerously and fell rather gracefully to the ground. The next thing Neal knew he was slamming his room door shut and lamenting the loss of his candle holder. "Hey, Thanks man." Neal turned, Turtle-man was looking back at him, curiously. "What-What did you do..." Neal asked, voice cracking annoyingly; "…to piss endangered animals off?".

"Not important." Turtle-man…cheeped. "You know these biker types…always so sensitive about their tattoos…and bank accounts...Are grizzlies endangered?"

"That one might be…" Neal was slightly at loss, it had been a long time since he'd in the same room with someone he wasn't conning (in one way or another) and he just realized he let a completely unknown variable (and very likely a criminal, which…okay, irony.) into his room with a stolen painting worth thousands.

Neal knew then that he was very, very, smart. Only geniuses do things this spectacularly stupid.

If he was lucky, the strange man was a low-ball scammer and wouldn't know a painting from wall paper if it bit him in the- "Hey-is that a Hopper?" Neal sighed inwardly, feeling his fingers start to tingle with fear and the shame of getting caught by a-by a- "You know, I almost can't tell the difference, you need to age yours a bit more, I think. I owe you from back there…I don't suppose you have an oven?"

It turned out that Mozzie was what one would call a "connoisseur of the criminal craft." He was also a great teacher and an entertaining accomplice. It may have been and odd partnership at first. Mozzie was an awkward, socially maladjusted introvert compared to Neal's slick, debonair persona, but both of them had love of "The Game," pulling off heists and forgeries not because of the reward's value, but the challenge it took to win it.

Although, If Neal was to be honest, the bigger the challenge the better the payout,; and wasn't that just a little addicting?

It was just Neal and Mozzie for almost four years, before Kate entered the painting. Neal was twenty-one and studying the Pre-Renaissance Era, under the alias, Wally Bronte. Kate was a whirlwind of aggression and fire, working trick rolls at a high-end hotel where Neal was watching for a Matisse. Traveling exhibits were easy-pickings for even amateurs. Neal almost pitied them, but he knew the exhibit's curator was siphoning off more than his fair-share of the profits…and some things did just come down to Bad Karma. Kate had figured out his angle a lot faster than Neal had expected (which was not at all) and insisted on getting a cut of out the profits.

Mozzie was furious, and Neal looked at the girl, with her faux suede jacket, cold eyes and determined expression and grinned like a cat. "I'll do you one better," He told her, taking her pretty hand in the parody of a gentlemen's bow. "I'll show you how." Kate stared at him warily; and with sudden warmth, he felt the fingers in his hand squeeze gently, almost trustingly. Buoyed, Neal dropped the grin, and smiled.

The closest Neal has ever come to committing real violence was the first time he met FBI Agent Peter Burke. There are many different ways to say "bastard." and on a stormy night in New Orleans, Neal used them all.

"Hey, You just need to relax, Caffrey." Mozzie, who only ever used his last name in dire situations, cautioned. He was right, stupid mistakes made in anger were costly. Neal glared at the pissing rain in front of him and swore again, clenching his hands on the steering wheel. Kate, sitting next to him on the bench seat of an old pickup they paid cash for from a dealer that didn't run his business by asking questions smiled tightly, body tense. Neal wanted to hold her and tell her it was all right (almost as much as he wanted to yell at her for keeping a gun in her purse) that the Feds would have to work harder than that to catch them, but, Christ, there was a very expensive piece of Baroque era oil on canvas sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic thanks to those cretins. And that damned agent, standing there in the rain watching Neal drive away looking more disappointed in Neal than the fact that three fugitives got away.

Bastard. He hadn't felt likes this since- Neal carefully stopped thinking. He rolled his shoulders back and deliberately loosened his clutch on the steering wheel. "It'll be fine," he said blithely, almost cheerful. He could feel Kate and Mozzie staring at him, waiting. This was nothing, just a new level in a game he was used to. More variables to play with, to beat. If he hadn't lost the piece, this could have been fun.

"I don't want to talk about it." Neal announced, as he stepped inside Peter's house, toeing off his shoes.

"Uh-huh." Peter dropped his briefcase by the door and rolled his neck, calling out a greeting to El, who was in the kitchen surrounded by location brochures and caterer reviews with no hope of ever being rescued. Take-out, tonight then.

"I really, really don't want to talk about it." Neal reiterated, plonking down on the sofa, Satchmo wriggling happily next to his knees. He scratched the dog's ears, warily watching Peter as he took off his shoes and placed them by the door. Calmly, Neal considered the wisdom of hiding behind Elizabeth until Peter's temper cooled, but the man did silent treatment as effective as he did any lecture.

"It wasn't-"

Peter held up a silencing finger.

Neal tried again. "I didn't-" The finger became a hand. Satchmo whined pitifully. Neal looked down. "I'm sorry."

Peter sighed and opened his mouth.

"No, really!" Neal interrupted, before Peter could even start. "I didn't even want the sculpture, or the money, I figured if it went-well, missing, Jonas' wouldn't have anything to barter with, and he'd show himself."

Peter glowered

"It wasn't a bad plan, but you need to tell people ahead of time, dammit, so we can provide back-up. You could have been shot. Again."

Neal studied his feet. Regular cotton socks. Satchmo was licking his instep."Apology accepted."

Peter sighed. Neal looked up hopefully from under his lashes.

"Oh, Stop that." Peter huffed, fighting a grin.

"We caught him though," Neal hazarded, grinning slightly.

"Yeah, yeah we did. Good Job, Neal." Peter left his spot leaning by the door, walking past Neal to the house phone, giving the younger man a pat on the head. Neal scowled slightly, then relaxed and smiled, wiggling his toes for Satch.

"If it wasn't a bad plan, I guess that means it was actually a goo-'"On second thought-" Peter tossed a take-out menu at Neal, which caught him squarely in the face.

"You're buying."

Neal wasn't sure when he decided to come home. Maybe it wasn't his decision at all. But here he was.

Fin

A/N

What is this? No really, Here I was, In my own little world of somewhat off-kilter Beatnik poetry, fingers snapping to groove, man; and all of a sudden I'm completely bowled over by this frankly awesome little show. That being said, this was written on the aid of pain killers (pulled shoulder muscles, yay.), so If this only makes sense to me…then I post it here for posterity, and evidence that not only can I write something longer than forty lines long, with alleged rhythm, I can finish it. I just need two days and some over-the-counters to do it. Like that wedding speech…that one time.

Enjoy.