BUZZ.
The iPhone vibrated, screen glowing greenish-white in the dark.
BUZZ
In the bed beside the device, a dark-haired man shifted briefly in his sleep, then settled back against his pillow without waking.
BUZZ
The phone jitterbugged across the top of the lacquered cherry-wood bedside table, then stopped cold.
David Rossi startled awake and grabbed the phone from the table. Not bothering to switch on the lamp, he peered at the screen.
No name showed, just a phone number and an anonymous grey silhouette where the caller photo should be.
Three-six-zero? He read silently, then aloud "Who the hell lives in a three-six-zero code?"
He thought briefly about placing the now-silent phone back on the night-table, but paused.
He waited, staring at the screen. Running a hand over his mouth, unconsciously smoothing down his sleep-skewed beard, he checked the phone's Messages page.
No voice mail. He checked the clock; twenty past three. In the morning.
Who the hell would call and not leave a message at three in the freaking morning?
Realization dawning, Rossi swore softly and sat up, and pushed the "Call Back" option. The line skittered, connected, rang once. There had been a similar call several months earlier, a brief three-word message. When Rossi frantically tried to return the call, the number had been disconnected.
Rossi nervously ran a hand through his hair.
I hated this idea, I hated it from the start. Too many variables. It's not safe. It's not fucking safe.
It seemed to take forever for the second ring.
Oh my God, I should should have made them stay. I should have put my foot down and just insisted, just fucking demanded , that they stay. Here. With me. Where I can keep an eye on them.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Rossi fended off the nudging guilt.
If anything happened to him, to the kid... if anything has happened, it's my fault. This is my fault.
On the other end of the line, a click, a connection and a quiet voice answered, hesitantly.
"Dave?" the voice almost whispered.
Rossi closed his eyes, heart pounding, crossing himself almost by rote. A thousand questions flooded his brain, but caution overrode his fervent desire to bombard the caller with them. He knew that someone, anyone could be listening in, tracing the call. Tracking the caller.
He chose the most vague, yet most important query.
"Hey... is everything... okay?" Rossi asked, not exactly sure how to phrase the question. He held his breath, as if by not breathing, he could stop time, stop harm.
Stop the horrible thing he feared had already happened.
"Um... yeah." the voice answered. The thousand answers crowded in behind that reply, and Rossi could almost see them, queuing up to be spoken. But not yet. He blinked, staring hard into the darkness of his bedroom, willing everything to stay still, stay safe.
The quiet voice continued.
"Look, I didn't want to... scare you or anything. I just..." the voice paused; in his mind's eye, Rossi could see the caller, biting his lower lip as he did when he was unsure about a situation, eyes shifting to the left, always left. Rossi used to tell him, jokingly, that was the sign of someone being untruthful; the eyes cutting left, but the man on the phone wasn't a liar. He was honest, painfully honest, even to his own detriment.
Rossi waited, listening for a clue, any sign that there was trouble.
What is it? Is something wrong?
Of course there's something wrong, you idiot, his brain spat sarcastically.
"You just... ?" Rossi prompted, waiting for the caller to finish the thought, the question, the plea. He gripped the phone so hard his hand was throbbing, his pulse pounding through the phone line.
"I... " the caller paused, clearing his throat of welling emotion that Rossi could hear from god knows wherever a three-six-oh area code was.
Rossi broke the silence, knowing well that, in the best of times, the caller wasn't terribly effusive in conversation.
"What's going on?" Rossi wanted, more than anything, to reach through the phone and grab the man, shake him, scold him, and clutch him to his chest, murmuring platitudes and apologies.
The caller took a shaky breath. Rossi could hear it, ragged around the edges, tight with fear and worry and unspent tears. A flutter of fear in Rossi's stomach tried to work it's way up his throat, but he forced it back down.
"I'm ... I just needed..." the caller swallowed, stopped, screwing up his courage.
The pause was so long, Rossi was half afraid that the caller had hung up. He tried a different approach.
"How's... the kid?" Afraid to say his name aloud. He wasn't even sure what name he used now. Hell, it had been a year; the kid was, what, thirteen? Almost in high school.
The caller sighed. Again, Rossi could picture him, touching a hand to his forehead, then pushing the always-unruly dark hair back. He wondered briefly if he still kept the courtroom-ready short haircut or if he had gone "native", altering his appearance.
"He's okay, Dave. Of course.. he misses... everyone. Especially, well... you know... not having..." the voice trailed off. The caller cleared his throat then continued. "He's sort of stuck with the old man for a while."
"Kid's a trooper." Rossi agreed.
There was a brief moment, nearing an almost-electric tension. Rossi could feel it through the phone, across the god-knows-how-many-miles.
"He shouldn't have to be," the caller said tersely. A pause, then "Dave?"
"Yeah, kiddo... I'm here." The repeated use of Rossi's first name was worrying; the caller was clearly disassociative and was frantically trying to reestablish a personal connection. The name was almost a security blanket, a touchstone, a mantra for normalcy.
"Dave?" he asked again, stalling. Rossi knew what the next question would be.
"Dave, am I... did I make a mistake? Am I doing the right... thing?"
Rossi rolled the edge of the bed sheet between his fingers. Fear, grief, anger; they churned in his chest, threatening to force their way up his throat, a primal scream when no words could give sufficient voice to the storm roiling inside.
He desperately wanted to say "You've made a terrible mistake. You fucked up, you took bad advice, you weren't thinking straight. Come back home. Come home come home come home
But he fought it down, hating that he had to lie to his best friend, hating that this horrible chain of events had effectively destroyed a very good man's life.
"There is no 'right thing', kiddo. You did what was best at the time."
The caller was silent, digesting what Rossi had said. Then he spoke.
"You know, Dave... you know how much I hate lying. It makes me sick to my stomach to introduce myself as "Dan Reilly', because I'm not that guy. I lie every time I speak to someone. Even worse, I ask my son to lie every single day. I tell him to forget who he was, who he is. I told him all his life that honesty, integrity was everything a man could ask for. Then I ask him to forget it, and lie and run away when trouble shows up. Run away like a coward." The voice, having raised as the rant continued, paused, then spoke again in a low, almost-snarl.
"I'm no better than my own father." In the background, Rossi could hear footsteps, the sound of the caller pacing back and forth in a small area, the clink of a bottle on a counter top.
"Hey..." Rossi tried to interrupt, but the voice continued.
"I'm a bad father, Dave. I don't hit my son, could never do that... but really?" Liquid pouring into a glass, no ice, then a moment as the drink was tossed back.
"I tear him away from the only life he's known, to go on the run, across the country, no friends, no family, no... he can't even have a dog, Dave. He wants a dog, and I can't even let him ..."
Clink, slosh, swallow.
"A kid ought to have a dog, Dave."
Twelve months on the run, and somewhere, Aaron Hotchner was unraveling.
"Aaron?" Rossi said.
The man on the other end of the phone closed his eyes, relief washing over him. No one had called him that in months. He wanted to go home so badly, back to D.C., back to his job, back to his friends, back to his family. He was so tired of being alone. He ran a shaking hand across his eyes.
"Dave?" the voice whispered, pleading. "Dave, do you think... is it really any safer out here? I'm... just … I'm really... alone." The voice, almost childlike, broke on the last word.
Screw the Bureau, screw witness relocation, screw everything. Fuck it all. Fuck 'em. Fuck the bosses who made this shitty decision. Fuck the people who thought they could break this man.
I won't let this go on.
This stops now.
Right goddamned now.
Rossi threw back the quilt and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Still holding the phone to his ear, he retrieved the jeans he had dropped to the floor a couple of hours earlier. He spoke calmly, with authority, more certain of this decision than any he had made in his entire career with the FBI.
"Get your stuff together, kiddo. I'm coming to bring you both home."