Author's note: So I'm posting this now in order to cheer myself, and potentially some of you, up after the latest, heaviest installment of "Knowing Better." And lest you think I have no life, given that I have three stories on the go simultaneously, well, I don't. Plus traveling solo for a few months gives you a lot of time for writing.
On to part one, featuring full-figured burlesque dancers, nicotine deprivation, a Jungian playground in the form of Gerry's dreamscape, and honeycomb pieces. Also, I hope, some laughs.
Rafferty's Revenge
Part One: The Ultimatum
February 2011
"Five thousand quid?" Gerry Standing squawked, his light eyes bugging out to an alarming degree. "For a rubbish bin? Was it made of solid gold and cleverly covered over to look like a hunk of plastic?"
"Five thousand quid for the rubbish bin plus smoke and water damage, and what's listed here as 'miscellaneous damage.'" Sandra Pullman's humorless gaze zeroed in on Gerry as she transferred it from the sheaf of papers clutched in her left hand. "Apparently that last item pertains to the conveyor belt, but I'm sure you don't know anything about that either." She delivered this piece of information in the flat, clipped tone that told her colleagues she was too angry to shout – never a good sign. "Gerry, was Brian involved in this at all?"
Brian's trainers shuffled against the floor, but before he could speak up out of the misguided desire to help his friend out of hot water by the expedient of boiling with him, Gerry said, "Absolutely not. He was in the toilet, as a matter of fact."
"Too many chocolates," Brian admitted reluctantly, shamefaced.
"What, only chocolates, no honeycomb pieces?" Sandra dumped the papers in Gerry's lap, where one affixed itself to his hot buttered crumpet. "You'll have to make a statement, but the Met has agreed to settle out of court. The amount will, of course, be deducted from the UCOS budget, which means it comes right out of your salary. Congratulations."
Gerry gulped as he averted his eyes to peel page 6 sub-C off his breakfast. Fan-frickin'-tastic. At least she hadn't said anything about giving him the sack. The chocolate factory incident had taken place months ago, and he'd congratulated himself on having escaped unscathed. He'd forgotten that the wheels of insurance companies ground even more slowly than the wheels of justice.
Suddenly two livid, very determined electric blue eyes insinuated themselves directly into his line of sight as Sandra bent at the waist to bring her face level with Gerry's. It was like meeting the gaze of a king, or in this case queen, cobra: potentially fatal, but interesting nonetheless. "In the meantime, you're being issued an ultimatum."
Oh, shit, he'd known he was getting off too easily. "From Strickland?" he asked with as much dignity as he could muster.
"No, worse."
"All the way from the top man?" Jack asked, wincing, from his position near the marker board, where he'd frozen when Sandra had charged through the double doors like a detective superintendent scorned.
Sandra slowly returned to her full height, never allowing Gerry's gaze to deviate from hers. "No, Jack, much worse than that."
Oh, shitting sodding shit.
Brian cringed with terror, making himself look uncannily like a constipated gargoyle.
"From me," Sandra explained very softly, saying what Gerry had already guessed. "Gerry, for your own health and for the fiscal health of this unit, you have got to stop smoking."
"Or what, you'll fire me?" Gerry demanded, crossing his arms and letting the legal documents cascade to the floor, where they landed between his highly-polished loafers. "You can't do that. It's a violation of my civil rights." He permitted himself a grim smirk.
"Oh, I didn't say I'd sack you." Sandra's smile perfectly matched his. "I was thinking more along the lines of desk duty. Permanent desk duty."
"You can't do that," Gerry argued, beginning to feel a tingle of panic at the distinct possibility that she not only could, but would. "I passed me physical."
Sandra's perfect smile widened, amping up the evilness quotient by approximately 275%. "So I'll give you another physical, and I guarantee you'll fail this one."
Gerry felt a shiver run down his spine, but he wasn't sure whether it was due to the thought of being forced to leave off the habit of a lifetime or of his governor giving him a physical.
Sandra fisted one hand against her hip. "Where are your fags?" she asked, all business, extending her other hand palm-up.
Gerry stared at her for a full thirty seconds, but it was a contest he was doomed to lose. He fished in his blazer pocket for the slightly crumpled soft pack of Marlboros and slapped them into her waiting palm.
"The second pack too," she specified, her glare holding him captive.
Sod it. Gerry envisioned a twenty-pound note going up in a puff of smoke as he handed over the spare pack he kept in his overcoat.
"And the ones in your desk."
Bloody hell, was a man allowed no dignity?
"Excellent." Sandra threw all three packs into the bin, where they landed with a disheartening cellophane crinkle. Her eyes flashed dangerously. "Welcome to the non-smoking world, Gerry."
2.
Two weeks later: March 2011, the Monday following the fateful Excellence in Policing Gala as chronicled in Rafferty Returns.
"It's a good job Madame's not makin' you foot the bill for all the damage you caused Friday night at the gala," Jack commented with fiendish amusement, regarding his friend from above the front page of the morning's Telegraph. "You'd never see a pay check again between that and the candy factory fiasco."
Brian chuckled gleefully in the direction of his computer monitor, but Gerry only stretched his arms above his head, seemingly to better exhibit his cobalt and lavender tie, and smiled beatifically, even more self-satisfied than usual.
"How much did that frock set you back?" Jack asked.
"She said she'd bring me a bill."
"And she did," Sandra confirmed, bustling in with a chocolate croissant in one hand. She plopped it down on Gerry's desk as she shrugged out of her light grey jacket, but turned back in time to slap his hand when he reached for a piece.
"Good morning, guv'nor," Gerry greeted her benignly, the cheeky chappy at his most charming.
She fixed him speculatively through narrowed feline eyes. "Is it?" she murmured, and then resumed her normal volume. "Monday morning, boys. Shop's open. I need everything you've got on the Colson investigation by noon, but don't bother typing up the reports. Gerry will be happy to do that."
"Thrilled," he affirmed stoically.
"Merely a taste of things to come if you so much look sideways at a cigarette," Sandra assured him smugly. "An amuse bouche, if you will."
"I'm not bleedin' smoking," Gerry growled through clenched teeth, his good humour no match for this onslaught.
Sandra actually leaned down and sniffed him, and Gerry's eyes flared. "Good. Keep it that way. Or else."
No, Gerry hadn't been smoking. He was in enough trouble after the show he'd put on Friday night for the benefit of the entire Met.
But when he woke up in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday morning, he sure as hell wished he had.
His lungs were going to burst with the strain of dragging air into his body, but there was something wrong, because no matter how much he sucked in he couldn't breathe, and he was light-headed from lack of oxygen and the painful hammering of his heart against his ribs. His lungs and his chest were two sizes too small, his skin tight and tingling, and as he lifted a hand to shove his hair back, he realized the digits were trembling as if he'd been seized by palsy.
A dream, he told himself as his heart rate slowed marginally, just enough that he no longer feared he was in acute danger of having a coronary. Not a dream; a nightmare. If he was totally honest with himself, he'd have to admit that it was the nightmares that were the last straw during his previous effort to kick the habit too. He vividly remembered waking up slick with sweat and queasy with horror.
4:52, the numbers on his bedside alarm informed him in their digital green glow. Bugger. No way was he going to be able to sleep for the next hour and a half. He would've killed for a cigarette right then, but when Sandra found out she'd kill him, and he had no doubt that she would find out. The woman had some sort of freaky ESP when it came to Gerry and his bad habits.
The thought of Sandra induced a visceral shudder and his chest tightened again. He squeezed his eyes shut automatically and was rewarded with an image of tousled golden hair and blazing blue eyes that instantly had him prying his eyelids wide apart. What the hell?
Right. Sandra had been in his dream. Not all that surprising. The details were fuzzy – scratch that, nonexistent – but if his dreaming mind had decided to conjure some stomach-twisting near-fatal peril, of course it would plop the detective superintendent in the middle of it. It wasn't every Joe off the street with whom you shared experiences like being held at gunpoint, after all.
It could've been worse, he reassured himself as his feet made contact with the chilly hardwood floor and he winced. He pursed his lips and resolutely produced a jaunty whistle to cover his jangling nerves.
He could've been dreaming about Brian.
3.
"Someone's chipper," Jack observed scathingly with his usual early-morning gloom and doom as Gerry entered the office promptly at 8:30, still whistling.
One of Sandra's perfect eyebrows arched as she looked up from the report she was reading, lines of deep suspicion marring her features. "Come here, Gerry," she ordered, interrupting the chorus of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." For a crazed split second, as her spread fingers came to rest flat on his crisp grey button-down where it covered his sternum, he thought the gov was going to plant one on his freshly-shaven cheek. Instead she leaned in and inhaled, and he was treated to an up-close-and-personal view of her scowl and narrowed eyes. "If you're smoking, I will find out."
"Oi, can't a bloke be in a good mode?"
"It just makes for a change of pace, Pollyanna," Jack retorted drily, looking over his computer monitor, and Sandra spared him a quick smirk.
"Oh ye of little faith," Gerry responded, migrating to that obligatory first stop on his workday journey, the kettle.
"What, did you have a hot date last night?" Brian asked, disgusted, as he and his bicycle joined the party.
"We don't want to hear details," Sandra said brusquely before Gerry could admit there weren't any, and produced a small square of paper. "I tracked down Dawn Wilson. You can ring her and make an appointment, as you're such a ladies' man."
Brian and Jack snickered, and Gerry opened his mouth to say something about how tracking down a three-hundred-pound stripper didn't strike him as a great feat of detective work, but instead he froze for an instant before removing the paper from Sandra's grasp so quickly that he crumpled it and succeeded in giving himself a paper cut. He no longer felt like whistling as he took welcome refuge behind his desk and looked down to hide his suddenly flaming face. What the hell had that been?
Gerry stared sightlessly at his desktop as Sandra and Brian carried on a conversation. The murmur of their voices lapped against his eardrums but Gerry was afraid to look up, afraid to move. The bolt of heat that had raced up his arm before lodging itself in some very interesting places at the simple brush of Sandra's fingertips had left him shocked and embarrassed. Literally shocked: he felt as if she'd zapped him with a cattle prod.
Now his chest was uncomfortably tight again, his palms itching, and he couldn't stop the disjointed images racing through his mind. Yeah, Sandra had definitely been in his dream last night, but it hadn't been a nightmare, not according to the conventional definition of the term. Shit.
Those manicured nails tapped on his desk, startling him so badly that he sloshed scalding hot tea down the front of his shirt, which at least provided a distraction as Sandra icily asked, "Taken up meditation, Gerry? Daylight's burning."
"Shit! – Yeah, yeah, all right," he returned eloquently, dabbing at the mess. Great. Now he felt and looked like a prat.
The ribald remarks his colleagues tossed after him bounced around the corridor as Gerry fled half an hour later to keep his appointment with the talented Ms. Wilson. Little did they know that he was supremely relieved to put as much distance as possible between himself and Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman. He wouldn't go as far as stuffing a hundred-pound note inside that extra-large g-string, but he might go in for a hug and a kiss at a discounted rate.
He had been in Ms. Wilson's presence ("Call me Dawn, sugar") for less than five minutes before he was being forcibly reminded why you should never, ever say, or even think, "At least things can't get worse." Because, in his experience, they'd always find a way to do exactly that.
As if reading his mind, Dawn leaned in, giving Gerry an eyeful of ample cleavage as he sat paralysed on her sofa. "I bet you like full-figured women, don'tcha, darling'?" Her red-varnished nails dug in slightly as her palm came to rest on his knee.
Gerry was not having a good day, and he had only himself to thank. Well, himself and Sandra. This whole anti-smoking campaign was her diabolical progeny. He couldn't blame Dawn, who clearly believed that Gerry had been enslaved by her charms. He knew he was giving her that impression, and he couldn't help it, because as he tried to question her about Laurel Millican's disappearance back in 2003, his mind kept wandering.
Wandering? he thought, and felt his mouth twist into a sneer. The verb was far too gentle. It was as if his brain was chained to an express train, relentlessly jerking him along in its wake. The results had delivered him to the brink of disaster.
Even as Gerry tried desperately to focus on Dawn Wilson's brassy bouffant, he saw smooth, ice-blonde locks, felt them sliding through his fingers and tickling his skin. Dawn's thickly-lined eyes were deep chocolate, but the ones Gerry saw were blue, and instead of Dawn's honeyed southern drawl he heard a familiar voice, husky but clipped, speaking to him in the liquid tones of not-quite-received-pronunciation. What she was saying – Sandra, not Dawn – when his dizzy brain finally managed to process it didn't even make sense: "This is not happening. This never happened. Do you understand?"
Well, hell, of course it wasn't happening, Gerry thought, frowning in confusion. It was a bleedin' fantasy. What did it say about him that even Dream Sandra insisted on informing him that she'd never really have it off with Gerry Standing?
He had to get out of there. His perplexity and the awful, ludicrous situation were doing nothing to dampen his body's enthusiastic response to his little mental peep show. He needed to escape before Dawn Wilson either jumped his bones or filed a harassment suit.
"We'll continue this later," Gerry said, rising abruptly, still strategically holding his jacked at waist-level. The stripper – wait, she preferred 'burlesque entertainer' – gaped at him. He was pretty sure he'd interrupted her in the middle of a sentence, but he was desperate. "I'll, ah – That is, one of my colleagues will be in touch. Th-thank you for your time," he stammered, and bolted for the door.
His hands didn't stop shaking until he was several miles away in the privacy of the Stag. "Bollocks," he swore aloud, removing one hand from the wheel to scrub it over his face. His palm was still unpleasantly clammy. Congratulations, Gerald. You've just achieved a new all-time career low.
As if quitting smoking wasn't already hard enough. The last thing he needed was for other parts of his – uh, life – to decide to be hard as well. His disgusted groan filled the car's interior.
He swallowed enough sleeping tablets to drug a horse before he climbed into his bed that evening, having postponed the inevitable until half one. As his heavy eyelids drifted closed, he said a little prayer, pleading for dreams of a serial killer or a psychopathic clown or, hell, Jack and Brian.
4.
"You look like shit."
"Thanks, mate," Gerry grumbled wryly, accepting the cup of tea Brian automatically handed him.
"Feel like it too, don't you?" Brian's matter-of-fact tone was softened by empathy. "The nightmares have got you again, haven't they? Remember, I've been there."
"You could say that." Gerry certainly wasn't going to say anything else. The reality was exponentially worse than anything Brian could have imagined. The tablets weren't buying Gerry anything but heavy eyelids during the workday, reproaches from his colleagues, and the inability to wake himself from his increasingly vivid dreams. The whole thing looked dead hopeless, and Sandra was pissed at him for his inexplicable refusal to finish interviewing Dawn Wilson. Gerry was sleeping just enough to be tortured by dreams but not enough to feel rested, and he was becoming increasingly edgy and desperate. Something had to give.
"You do look like shit," Sandra chimed in as she strode into the office and peeled off her coat. She eyed Gerry critically. "Dawn Wilson says hello. She told me the two of you really hit it off, so I gave her your mobile number."
Gerry's eyes flared with alarm. "You didn't. Tell me you didn't."
"No, I didn't, but it would serve you right. You've been bloody useless all week."
"There's medication you could take," Jack offered, trailing Sandra. "And patches, chewing gum –"
"I've tried 'em," Gerry responded gruffly in an end-of-story tone.
"Physical activity might help," Sandra suggested calmly, and Gerry strangled on his cheese and pickle sandwich. She looked askance and thumped him on the back, which didn't help.
"Physical activity?" Jack scoffed. "Gerry?"
"Well, you've got to do something," Sandra told him firmly, and Gerry didn't miss the evil twinkle that appeared in her eye. "Hypnosis, maybe. Some people say it really helps."
Jack guffawed, Brian tittered, and Gerry merely scowled. Sandra grinned.
"You should consider it," Brian offered as he stuffed his face with salad. "We already know you're susceptible."
Jack snuck a quick look at Sandra. "The less said about that the better, I think," he put in hastily, and Gerry did his best to look suitably blank. It shut Sandra up, anyway, and she went about removing her own lunch from the refrigerator and placing the plastic containers neatly on the table. Gerry couldn't help watching her. She was precise and methodical. Orderly.
The Sandra in his dreams was methodical, too, unswervingly focused on driving him crazy.
If he thought it would've done any good, Gerry would've gotten down on his knees and begged for the return of the old nightmares. He never bargained for these incredibly vivid dreams about doing very inappropriate things with his guv'nor, each one seemingly more realistic than the last. In his dreams, the heat of her skin, the taste of her sweat, the sound of her low hum, had all become so familiar that Gerry had to keep reminding himself it was all imaginary.
And he'd been so pleased with himself for seeing Frank's projected grand coup at the gala as a shining opportunity to relive what his conscious mind had missed out on all those years ago. It had seemed harmless; what Sandra didn't know couldn't hurt her.
It could hurt Gerry, though. That kiss had to be the root of the present evil. One little taste, and his idiotic dreaming mind had gone raving mad. Sandra would flambé him if she had so much as an inkling of where his mind went when it wandered off. Smoking would be the least of his problems.
"I think the heating's stuck on again," Sandra said abruptly, and stripped her blue jumper over her head, revealing a black sleeveless top that left little to the imagination. "Brian, call maintenance, will you? You've finished your lunch."
She lifted one hand high to smooth her hair and Gerry's gaze zeroed in on the soft inner curve of pale flesh under her arm. His senses were assaulted with a vision of himself running his tongue over that same curve, and he jolted upright in his chair, his loafers smacking against the floor.
"I'm willing to try it."
Her brilliantly blue eyes met his and she blinked. "Have it your way. Gerry, call maintenance – unless you'd like to arm-wrestle him for the privilege, Brian."
"I meant I'll try hypnosis."
Even as he said the words Gerry figured he'd probably lost whatever was left of his mind, but at this point he'd try anything, and it made a certain crazy kind of sense. These dreams about Sandra were bound up in the results of his first experience with being hypnotized. Maybe if he let himself be put under again, the hypnotist could wipe that away, just like taking an eraser to the marker board. He didn't think that was the kind of help most people sought from hypnotists when they wanted to stop smoking, but hell, he wasn't most people. If he didn't manage to obliterate those tortuous dreams soon, there'd be nothing left of Gerry Standing but a little pile of ashes and a few threads of polyester.
What will happen when Gerry undergoes hypnosis? Will he spontaneously combust and leave his impressive collection of neckwear to the 1970s section of the Museum of the City of London, or will he get himself sorted? Will he finally kick the habit? And when the heck is Rafferty going to come into play again? If you want to know, R&R!
