The Dead Don't Complain
Disclaimer: One day I might own Pretender. But not today.
Author's Note: This is a rather unusual piece I wrote a while back. I've always wanted to do an epic "Miss Parker and Jarod take down the Centre" story. Epic this isn't, but hopefully it has some good moments.
Dark, quiet room. The light slanting through a curiously antique stained-glass window.
An easel and several finished and half-finished paintings are the only things in the room except for an armchair. A woman is asleep in it, one leg tucked up underneath her, the other stretched out from the chair. A mug of coffee rests on the ground near the front right leg of the chair.
Her phone rings, shrilly in the silence. She lifts her head groggily, and gets up as the phone continues to ring. She stumbles her way over to it and reaches to pick it up.
She hesitates. She knows already who is on the other end, and she desperately wants to not answer it, not give him the satisfaction. She also wants desperately to answer it, to hear his voice still so thick with hope, even though she knows it will cost her once the voice is gone. Still her hand hesitates—and not for the first time.
She decides. For the first time, she turns away from the phone. She finds the phone jack and unplugs the cord and goes to her bed, tossing and turning and finally being swept off to sleep.
"Good morning, Miss Parker."
"Sydney."
The click of too-high heels on the marble entry was the only conversation until the pair reached and entered the elevator.
"Did you sleep well, Miss Parker?"
To Parker, the question seemed loaded with accusation. She wondered who Jarod had called first. She wondered who he needed to talk to more.
"Yes, I did. For once."
They finished the elevator ride in silence.
Broots met them at the door.
"Nothing today."
"Then we'll concentrate on the latest set of "gifts" our genius left for us."
That day, Parker found herself just looking at the things Jarod had left behind at his last bolt-hole and just…listening. She stared at a small statue of St. Catherine, and she heard Jarod say,
"You."
Suddenly, all the rest of the things had Jarod's voice—it was a collage of emotion, pieces that said something just to her, although it was still unclear exactly what.
So Parker went back to the archives, and started at the beginning. His first pretend. This time the message was so simple she could not believe she had missed it.
"I'm broken and can't fly, so I'll walk instead."
It took her weeks to work through all the archives, weeks in which there was no contact at all from Jarod. Parker continued to unplug her phone at night.
Eventually, she reached the end of the archives, amazed at the subtext she had always missed before. She took another look at the latest set of clues, and understood it.
"One last try."
Sydney and Broots, who had watched the whole process in alternate waves of concern and bemusement, looked at Parker at these words, the only ones she'd spoken over the various piles of knick-knacks.
She looked back at them.
"We won't see him again."
Then she packed up that last collection of relics and walked out of the sub-level.
Later, Sydney and Broots agreed that had to have been the moment Parker truly walked out of the Centre.
Physically, she walked up to her father's office and requested a different assignment. The next day she took back her old office, and Sydney and Broots were left below, the only two still looking for Jarod, although everyone, by this time, was convinced it was futile. After a couple of months even they moved on to other projects. In the corridors they merely nodded at one another as they passed.
No one heard from Jarod.
Miss Parker thought about him, every day. She never consulted so much as a map, even though she desperately wanted to, wanted to trace the path she was now certain she had pegged.
She played Centre politics instead. Pretended to trust her father implicitly, watched her back for the other players' knives. One by one, she incapacitated them, cut them out of the running, until she was at the top, pretending to watch her father's back. She waited and she collected every proof she would need, every truth the Centre had to offer. She made three files: one for the law, one for herself, and one for Jarod.
Then, one day, Parker did not show up at the Centre. After a brief search they found her car in the river. It had obviously skidded off the road.
Although the search party found what was revealed through DNA analysis to be a large chunk of Miss Parker's skin, proving she had at least been in the car during the crash, many people in the Centre remained unconvinced of her death. After all, this was the Centre, and people routinely came back from the dead. Broots and Sydney especially found it hard to believe that Miss Parker had suddenly succumbed to her own reckless driving. They investigated, quietly, and found, to their surprise, that there had been a cover-up. They weren't surprised there was a cover-up, but they were surprised to find that it seemed Miss Parker had been "terminated" by order of the Tower. Only with this latest piece of evidence did they accept that she was, in fact, gone.
They found evidence of the file for the law, although most of the data was corrupted and unusable. They dug deeper and found the other two files as well. Sydney, on a hunch, asked Broots to recover as much of the data as he could from the file for Miss Parker.
While he did that, Miss Parker, having learned her lessons about death from Mr. Lyle, found Jarod.
She walked into his motel room at dawn, the sunrise behind her, making her a silhouette against the early cool light. She shut the door, and the light disappeared, shut out by the gloom created by the thick yellow curtains.
Jarod was asleep on the bed, and Miss Parker did not wake him. She sat down on one of the two upholstered chairs next to the rickety table and gazed thoughtfully at the bottle of scotch she found there. It was mostly empty. After a moment, Miss Parker turned her attention to Jarod.
He looked worn and haggard, at least two or three days worth of stubble on his face, and he smelled like alcohol.
She felt guilty. He had always cut her in on the secrets, on the past—especially where it concerned her mother. She had had no choice but to cut him out, and she knew she was the reason he was unstable now.
She sat there watching him for what seemed like hours. Eventually he stirred.
"Morning, genius," she said.
He rolled over and rubbed his eyes, but made no response.
Miss Parker stood up and threw open the curtains, letting the bright sunshine spill over Jarod. He groaned and shut his eyes.
She picked up the bottle from the table and took it over to the sink. Jarod heard the clink of it hitting the counter and opened his eyes. He watched as she opened the bottle and poured the remainder of the scotch down the sink.
"You always said that stuff would kill me. I don't think it can be very good for you, either."
"You're dead."
"Damn right I'm dead. As dead as anyone in the Centre."
"You bitch."
Miss Parker was honestly surprised at the epithet, but she just raised an eyebrow.
Jarod looked straight into her eyes. "Bravo, Miss Parker. You finally caught me."
Miss Parker laughed. She laughed honestly and long until tears ran down her face.
Jarod looked confused, for the very first moment of his life not related to ice cream or PEZ or children's toys.
"Jarod. I'm not here to catch you. It would almost be fitting for all the nightmares you caused me, but I'm not here to capture you. I'm here," she pulled out an envelope and tossed it onto the bed, "to help you bring down the Centre."
Jarod opened the envelope. He shook out the CD that was inside. It said, "For Jarod."
"All the information I could find about your family. It's not that much," she smiled ruefully, "but names, dates, places. That's there, and it might be a start."
Jarod fingered the disk, then put it back in the envelope and reached over and slid it into his jacket pocket.
Miss Parker tossed him another envelope. "That one's a copy of a disk I gave to the FBI. We have two weeks to make sure Broots, Sydney, and Angelo get out, or they'll go down along with everyone else."
One week later, Broots and Sydney were killed in an explosion on SL-26. It was determined that Angelo had set the explosives to take his own life.
The next week the Centre came crashing down. Myriads of arrests were made in a single day. All of the Triumvirate were captured, and most of the secondary executives as well. Most of the employees of the Centre were arrested at work, and charges were pressed upon those who were suspected of being involved in the illegal aspects of the business. Other employees turned state's witness. Hardly anyone escaped without some sort of conviction.
Everyone who was officially dead (according to the Centre) stayed officially dead, and no one is able to say what kind of ending they came up with. A long time later, one of the techs who had only been sentenced to a couple of years thought he saw the back of a familiar dark-haired head, and the flash of a leather skirt and high heels, but decided he was probably crazy and forgot about it the next day.
So maybe no one got exactly what they deserved, but the dead don't complain, and the living forget.