Not The Nine O'Clock Meeting

"Fecaloid, criminally deficient imbecile with not an atom of so much as sub-standard intelligence between the..."

O'Neill blinked. After several years of listening to Doctor Daniel Jackson when in a full-flown snit, he would have sworn he'd heard all the words that could and couldn't hurt you, but this Ezra Simpson certainly had a way with the vocab...

"You don't talk about Charlie le Guerch that way," he growled.

Simpson, the shady, slippery, over-educated but still small-time criminal who they had been sent to ask a few discreet, 'friendly' questions, glared at him. "Ah'm not," he snarled in a molasses-thick Southern accent. "Ah'm talkin' about you,sir." His glare shifted to Makepeace, who looked like he'd give up his P90 to be able to throttle the man. "Sirs."

"Oh."

Now that, Jack thought, was pretty damn unfair. It hadn't been any of SG1 or SG3's plan (or Hammond's when he insisted that two highly trained units could handle one second-rate shyster) to start an all-in fight in Charlie le Guerch's roadside bar just off the Denver-Colorado Springs highway - they'd just wanted to ask a patron a few friendly questions. Nor had they started the shooting when the police turned up. In fact, he had a hazy idea that Simpson had been involved in all of this... but he'd been too busy trying to haul Carter and Daniel out of the whole mess, and then bolting for the door, to worry about that.

He was planning to blame the jarheads anyway. And the locals.

Oh yeah, and Simpson.

Now the four of them were stuck out here in the decaying half-shell of an ex-hotel, with the sounds of a full-scale riot in the carpark over the road - and the really, really bad country music from inside - still echoing through the evening air. Makepeace was concussed and furious, Daniel had been nicked in the leg by a random slug, Carter and the rest of SG-3 were god knows where (and had better be sending for backup), Ezra Simpson was making their lives hell...

And what the hell did 'fecaloid' mean? He'd have to ask Daniel.

Sometime.

Right now he was more interested in trying to stop Daniel's leg bleeding, and wondering how the hell the guy had gotten hold of what he damn well knew was an SGC-issue gun.

Or guns. He was holding two, both Berettas, and had a Sig tucked into his belt. The fuckin' man was a pickpocket as well, it seemed.

"Look, Simpson, this would never have even happened if you had just listened -"

"The dead - unsanctified or not - will rise from their graves before Ah cooperate with the ephemeromorphous likes of -"

"Look." From behind a wall of Colonels in rather battered mufti, Daniel spoke up, shakier than usual but still with that patented tone of sweet reason that almost always worked miracles... well, except against NID. And Goa'uld. And the odd stinky monster. And lowlifes at Charlie Le Gurch's. "You may not believe it, but we're trying to help."

"Really." Okay, so it didn't work on lowlifes here, either.

"Honestly." Realizing that that was not going down at all well, Daniel hurried on. "And we do realize that we may have interrupted your, umm, business dealings," such as they were, Jack thought, nice way of putting it, "but as Jack said, we just need to know where your friend Maude de Saussure is. Urgently. Really, really urgently."

"As Ah told the noxious creodonts you call your acquaintances -"

"Hey!" Maybe he should let Makepeace throttle the man.

"- I know no one of that name. So why the hell are you still hounding me? "

"I vote for Plan B," Jack grunted as he wrapped the makeshift bandage around Daniel's leg. "let's just shoot him till he talks."

Daniel gave him a fuzzy but sarcastic look. He didn't have to say it, Jack already knew.

Simpson had most of the guns.

Shit happens, Jack knew that all too well. But this time, he grumbled to himself, it was all the Tokra's fault.

And Daniel's. And some idiot friend of Catherine Langford's named Wingo, who had an obsession for antiquities and apparently an even bigger one for blondes. And the blonde, Maude... de Saussure or whoever she really was, because Ezra Simpson wasn't admitting anything.

And the goddess Muffie ("Mafdet", he could almost hear his archeologist murmur) whose name was apparently on the Ancient Egyptian jewelry Wingo had bought - probably illegally, according to the SGC's outraged archeologists - and this Maude de Saussure had then acquired from Wingo.

By acquired, Jack meant swindled.

By Ancient Egyptian jewelry, Daniel meant "a pectoral and two bracelets, gold and inlaid stones, probably 8th Dynasty or earlier going by the iconography and stylistic variations," and so on and so on at the usual appalling length, "oh, and the Goa'uld writing on it says something about wrath of the goddess and... I think, no, definitely bringing an eruption of death and fiery despair to worlds without end. Yes, that's probably Goa'uld for a bomb."

And by "the goddess" the Tokra mean... "a minor Goa'uld, scarcely a footnote in their history," in the usual droning, superior way that made his teeth ache, "and probably long dead, but it appears that she was another who did not leave Earth before the Stargate was buried, so the Tokra believe that you must investigate and recover what may only be decoration but may be some form of disguised technological..."

And fuck it, the stuff wasn't even nice-looking.

So they'd put the Air Force's second-best geeks onto finding the woman. They'd been remarkably unsuccessful until one of Wingo's people recalled a phone call they'd overheard, to someone called "mah darlin' boy." Someone else had managed to unearth the call records to a cell phone bought by a two-bit criminal on the very edge of a drug and guns supply ring in Denver - the same two-bit criminal named Simpson who the geeks had located and they'd followed to what had turned out to be a dive to end all dives twenty minutes out of Denver.

They could now hear sirens, the sounds of the brawl over the road breaking up, more shooting.

Nice people this guy spent time with, but that wasn't his problem, he had enough already.

~oOo~