Author's Note: Thanks to Biftec for excellent editing and hand-holding. Written for LizMarcs' Dark Xander Ficathon.
Credit: Partially inspired by Dashiell Hammett's book The Glass Key. Writing style is intentionally imitative of Hammett, and should be considered a tribute. With all due apologies.
A telephone rang, loud and tinny in the silent bedroom. Xander Harris rolled over in bed, fumbled blindly for the receiver, and answered, squinting toward the window with his one good eye. Outside, only a silver-gray blur of early morning fog was visible.
He was a young man, but his face looked older than his years. There were lines around his mouth and his hair was sprinkled lightly with gray hairs, despite the fact that he was still on the soft side of thirty. The corner of his left eye drooped a little, and a close observer might notice that one eye was glass. It was the face of someone who'd done some hard living: years of running and battle had left their mark.
"Hello?" he said, sleep muffling his voice.
"Harris, I'm calling from the County Jail," a female voice said. She sounded nervous and shaken, without her usual bravado.
"Faith?" Xander asked. He did not wait for an answer, and she did not give one. Reaching into the nightstand, he pulled out a scrap of paper and a pen. On the pad he wrote County Jail. "What happened?" he asked, awake and alert.
"Amy Watson is dead," she said in a flat voice that conveyed no emotion. "They picked me up on suspected parole violations, said they want to ask me questions about the girl." He wrote Amy and parole on his pad.
"Got it," he said. "Listen, I know it's tough but stay there. I'll check it out and see what I find. You need anything?"
"Nah," she said. "I know the drill." Her voice was steady, but Xander felt a pang of concern for her nonetheless. He knew she could take care of herself. It was still his job to worry.
He said goodbye and hung up the phone. Taking his pad, he went to stand by the window. It was near dawn in San Francisco, which meant that the fog had acquired a silvery tone instead of the overnight smoky gray. The curtains hung open and he could see only a little bit of the street below before the buildings and cars were swallowed up by mist. There was a Korean market across the street with metal grates over its windows, and a bar whose neon signs were all turned off by this hour. Two blocks up the hill was a diner with good coffee and soggy French fries. The room behind him was oddly neat, two sets of clothes folded up and put away. There was one bed, but only half of it had been slept in.
He looked at his notes, but they didn't say anything new.
Xander went into the bathroom and shaved and brushed his teeth, then dressed quickly and left the room. He went up the hill to the diner and ordered a ham sandwich and a piece of pie, and sat there eating them as the sun came up. The fog stayed put, but the darkness lifted, and cars and streetlamps acquired shadows. When he was done eating, he went out on the street and hailed a cab.
"City Morgue," he told the driver. The car moved slowly through the gloom, climbing the steep hills with a loud grinding of gears that sounded as though the engine would fall apart soon. Xander smiled. It reminded him of Africa, and old cars with engines clogged by desert sand, running on fumes and anything else the owner could find. They pulled up in front of the ugly office building that housed the morgue, and Xander gave the driver a ten-dollar bill, climbing out of the cab without reaching for his change.
A sign on the door said San Francisco City Morgue, open 24 hours. Xander opened the door and went in. Cleveland and Sunnydale had round-the-clock morgues, too. It was a bad sign. Inside, there was a bored-looking girl chewing gum and reading a tabloid.
"Amy Watson?" he asked her.
"Recent arrivals, basement three," she said, without looking up.
In the basement, a guy was wheeling a sheet-covered gurney across the room. "Hey, Ken," Xander said.
Ken looked up at Xander and nodded. "Just a minute, man," he said. Xander watched as he transferred the body to a refrigerated drawer and copied the information on the toe-tag onto a label for the outside of the drawer. The blue scrubs he was wearing were nearly the same shade as his skin.
When he was done, he moved down the room toward Xander, but stopped about halfway and pulled out a different drawer. Pulling back the sheet, he uncovered a face, pale and slack with death. "This who you're lookin' for?" he asked.
"Yeah." Xander looked down at the girl. Her blonde-streaked hair lay around her head, looking much as it had when she was alive. Her suntanned skin, though, looked weirdly hollow. Only yesterday -- no, the day was already well into morning now, it had been the day before -- he'd been sitting with her in her living room, talking urgently about evil and demons and fighting and being Chosen. Her skin was mottled with bruises, and there was a cut across her chin, brown with dried blood. He looked up at Ken. "Anything strange?"
"Too soon to tell, but she's pretty beat up," Ken answered. He rubbed his neck with one hand and looked uncomfortable. "Truth is, you shouldn't really be here at all, what with Faith in lockup."
"You know about that, huh?" Xander asked. "She didn't do it," he said.
Ken shrugged and said nothing. Xander handed him a plain card, embossed only with his name and a cell phone number. Underneath the card were a couple of bills, folded over so they fit neatly in a man's palm, or a demon's. "Give me a call if you turn up anything strange, all right?"
He hesitated, looking unsure. "I won't come back here and try to mess with this one," Xander said. "I just want the information." The guy's blue face relaxed.
"Sure, man. No problem."
Xander turned to go and took three steps toward the door before he turned back. Ken had covered Amy's face with a sheet and was about to slide the drawer back into the wall.
"One more thing --" he said. "Any bite marks?"
The morgue attendant looked sadly at Xander for a moment before he seemed to take pity on him and answer the question. "No, man. No bites. I looked."
"I know you do," Xander said. "Thanks."
He walked up the hill, wishing he'd thought to settle in a town with less of them. He hailed another cab and gave the driver an address in Berkeley. It was still early morning, and the sun hadn't broken through the fog yet. This was the worst part of his job, but it wouldn't get any easier if he waited until afternoon.
Amy's parents lived in a Victorian row house off Telegraph that was in need of a coat of paint. Next door was a headshop with bongs in the window, and across the street was a vegan restaurant. The house looked like it was in bad shape, but Xander knew it had to be worth big bucks. Her mother answered the door in a terrycloth bathrobe. She had a cup of coffee in her hand, and her curly hair fell down her back in stringy, graying clumps.
"Can I come in?" he asked.
"No," she said. "You were here the other day, filling Amy's head with all kinds of ridiculous trash, and I had a hell of a time talking her out of it."
Xander raised one eyebrow. This was some speech, coming from the woman with the Mother Earth and Free Leonard Peltier bumperstickers all over her car. Usually these hippie types were only too happy to believe his speeches about demons and vampires. "You... talked her out of it?" he asked.
"You're damn right I did. She was all ready to go haring off to Cleveland and fight fairies and hobbits until I got some sense in her. We need her here."
"Of course," Xander said, shifting into grief-counselor mode. "Which is why I--"
"Listen," the woman said, her voice suddenly hard-edged. "Don't come around here again, you understand? Leave Amy alone or I'll make sure you regret it." Something in her tone told Xander she meant the threat.
"Understood," he said, nodding. "I'm sorry to have disturbed you." He stepped back and walked away, feeling her eyes on his back the whole way. He went two blocks before he stopped and turned around, ducking into the little headshop in front of the Watsons' house. Pretending interest in the shimmering glass bongs and black-light posters, he waited until the other two shoppers had left the store before approaching the counter.
The clerk behind looked up with heavy-lidded eyes and waited for a question.
"Hey," Xander said.
"Hey," the clerk replied easily.
"Listen, this is a little weird, but..." Xander rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, trying to look embarrassed. "Do you know the girl that lives over there?" He tilted his head to indicate the back of the store, and by extension the house behind it.
"Amy?" If he was surprised that a man easily ten years her senior was asking about Amy, the clerk didn't show it. He looked wide awake now, as though he were deciding how much to say. Eventually, having apparently reached a decision, he looked up at Xander. "Yeah, man, I know her. We used to be real tight. She would come over, we'd smoke out in the back room sometimes." He stopped and suddenly narrowed his eyes. "You're not a cop or nothin'?" Xander shook his head. "Yeah, man, we used to be real tight," he repeated. "But not now. She's bad news now, that girl."
"Bad news?" Xander repeated. He thought about Faith in her jail cell, and the things people said about Buffy in high school. Bad news didn't even begin to cover it.
"Yeah man, bad news. And my mom thought I was hangin' out with a bad crowd. Man. That's fuckin'--"
The bell on the door jingled and a couple of girls in flip-flops and bead necklaces walked into the store. The clerk looked at them and back at Xander.
"Thanks," Xander said, stepping back.
"No prob," the guy said, already turning away toward his customers.
Xander let himself out and walked back up the hill toward the BART station. He got on a train heading into the city. It was lunchtime, and the train was only half-full, its occupants made up of sleepy college students, a few tourists, and two construction workers carrying hard hats and speaking Spanish. It was still early in the day, and so he headed back to the little apartment, hoping to make up for the hours of sleep he'd lost when Faith called before dawn.
He walked past the building's dingy elevator and took the stairs to the second floor, moving slowly. It was still early in the day, but fatigue was already setting in. He pushed his key into the lock and turned it, pushing the door open. When it was about halfway open, there was some soft resistance on the other side.
Instinctively, he patted down his pockets looking for a stake, but found nothing. Shrugging inwardly, he pushed the door open farther.
Inside, the apartment had been pulled to pieces. The obstruction behind the door had started life as a sofa cushion. The rest of the cushions were in similar shape, pulled inside out and strewn about the floor with discarded newspapers and the few books and files they kept in the apartment. The contents of the kitchen cabinets were spread across the floor and the counter -- fortunately, this was limited mostly to beer and Chinese takeout, but it still made a real mess. Through the bedroom door, he could see that the sheets had been pulled off the bed, and the mattress was resting half on the floor.
Xander sighed and shut the front door behind him. In the kitchen, the refrigerator door sat open, empty except for one lonely bottle of Anchor Steam. He popped the top and took a sip, then held the cold bottle to his forehead. It helped a little. He looked around and shook his head, then went back out into the living room and did it again. He didn't bother to wonder who had done this -- there were so many people, human and non-human alike, who wanted them dead that it hardly mattered anymore. He was picking his way over the debris toward the bedroom when the phone rang.
"Hello?" he asked warily.
"Harris, this is Trujillo, at the Sheriff's office." Sergeant A.J. Trujillo was a rarity -- a cop who knew about demons, willing to work with a slayer if it helped keep the city safer. Xander had heard rumors about a Police Detective who used to work with Angel, but he'd never believed them until he'd met Trujillo. They'd always worked together well, in the past.
"Your boys do this, Trujillo?" Xander asked, his voice pitched low and angry.
Trujillo ignored the question. "Listen, Harris, I leave the weird stuff to you but we're talking about a child here, a real--" he lowered his voice in the din of the bullpen and all but whispered the next word, "--human child. We issued an Amber Alert, for chrissakes. I can't just let this slide, Harris, not with Faith's record."
"No one's asking you to let anything slide, A.J." Xander sat down on the edge of the cushion-less couch and rested his forehead on his hand. "Faith didn't have anything-- She didn't kill Amy."
There was silence on the other end of the phone for a moment, and it was obvious that Trujillo didn't believe him. "We'll see," the cop finally said. "Listen, Linda Atwater told me you were there today."
"Who?" Xander asked.
"The mother of the deceased."
"Oh, Mrs. Miller." Maybe that explained why she didn't seem to like him.
"Her name is Atwater," Trujillo corrected him. "You gotta stop that, Harris. Stay out of this, or it only looks worse for your girl."
"All right," Xander said dully. "Okay."
They said goodbye and hung up, and he sat there amongst the debris and finished off his beer. Then he went into the bedroom, picked up his jacket off the floor and a stake from the nightstand, and left the apartment.
He walked up the hill three blocks, and down the other side again for four more before he got to Willy's bar. Willy was a weaselly little guy, a holdover from the old Sunnydale days. When the town collapsed, he'd just packed up shop and moved his bar up the coast, along with much of his clientele.
Willy didn't say anything to Xander when he walked in, just nodded at him from the end of the bar, where he was cleaning glasses with a filthy rag. Xander slid onto a stool and waited patiently.
The bar was about two-thirds full of various demons, vampires, and more-or-less humans, a pretty good crowd for a Wednesday. A couple of purple-skinned Palum demons glared at Xander from the corner of the bar, and he saw a vampire Faith had been hunting slip out the back, but he ignored it. Willy worked his way down the bar, refilling glasses and wiping up spills as he went, demonstrating to his regular clientele that Xander was absolutely no one important in the process.
"How ya doin'?" asked Willy, sounding nervous as he always did with Xander. He flicked his rag at a spot of spilled beer on the bar and moved it around a little. The neon lights behind him reflected off his greasy hair.
"Been better," Xander said, sliding a couple of bills across the bar. "Can I get a Guinness and some change for the jukebox?"
"Sure thing." Willy took his twenties and returned with five dollars worth of beer and quarters. Xander sat and drank his beer for a while, just watching and listening to the activity in the bar, looking for anyone who seemed to want to talk. No one approached him.
After a while, he went over to the jukebox and punched in K-13 for "The Ring of Fire." The song played, Cash's scratchy voice and twangy guitar filling the little bar, and for a moment Xander knew just how Cash must have felt when he wrote it. Before he was ready for it, the song was over and the jukebox faded into something by Van Halen. Xander finished his beer and left the rest of the quarters on the bar.
When he stepped outside it was dark, and the fog was rolling in again. He heard footsteps behind him and turned around, his fist clenched around a stake in his pocket.
It was the two purple Palum demons from Willy's. One of them approached Xander while the other one hung back, just outside the circle of light cast from the streetlamp. The demon stayed a couple of steps away, and Xander didn't take his hand off the stake. They exchanged nods, but neither spoke for a moment.
Up close, Xander could see a lot more of the two demons than he could in the bar. They were both built like linebackers, with long arms that hung down nearly to their knees, and shiny purple skin like a ripe eggplant. They looked a lot alike, but the closest one might've been female. She licked her lips nervously with a blue tongue. Xander waited. Finally, the demon spoke. "Rumor has it that a new slayer got killed a couple days ago."
"I heard that, too."
"You lookin' for the guys that did it?"
"Oh, yeah," Xander said grimly. There was no reason to play coy over it, and this demon was the first one to even suggest that the killer might not have been Faith. Xander felt a small current of relief at the thought.
"Well, um..." the demon scuffed her shoe against the pavement and looked around a little embarrassedly. "Do you, ah... that is, can I..."
Xander almost laughed. And then he almost pointed out to the two huge, scary eggplants with fists that they could probably just take all his money if they wanted it. Instead, he pulled out his wallet, and removed a crisp fifty dollar bill. "Here," he said. "Why don't you have a couple of drinks on me?"
The demon took the bill with a sigh of what might have been relief. "There's a guy that she used to hang out with a lot," she said. "I'd always see them at the raves -- he was dealing, and you know, she was always with him."
"Dealing?" Xander repeated.
"X," the demon said, and Xander had to turn the word over in his mind a few times before it made sense. Right, ecstasy. Great. Meanwhile, the demon was still talking. "Listen, there's one tonight up there, on Potrero. He should be there. Just--"
"I won't say anything," Xander said. "Thanks."
"Yeah, sure." The demon backed away toward her friend, and they went back into Willy's together with Xander's fifty dollars.
Xander sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. A loud dance club was probably the last place he wanted to go, but he walked back up the hill anyway to catch a cab.
The driver's eyes lit up when Xander gave him the address out in El Cerrito, but he didn't try to talk during the ride through the dark city and over the bridge. Xander leaned back against the seat and looked out the window at the metal transoms passing by against the backdrop of the fog. He thought about Amy in the morgue, and Faith in the jail, and Trujillo in the station house. None of them were with him, though, so he just went on alone.
The cab driver let him out down the block. There were a couple of warehouses on the street, but all were quiet except for one. The low, rhythmic thump of dance music echoed from its flimsy walls, and colored lights flashed from the high windows. Outside, there was a girl and two boys about Amy's age, all in tight-fitting clothes, made up in equal measure of leather and spandex. They were smoking cigarettes and laughing, but Xander was too far away to hear the words. As he approached, a young man in a long black coat came out of the warehouse and stopped to talk to them. The man looked around and angled his body so as to block the view of what they were doing, but Xander could see one of the boys pull out some money and hand it to him, and accept a small container in return.
Xander sucked in a breath and started to run up the hill. Ahead of him, he could see the dealer clearly, framed in the pulsing pink and orange light from the door. Before he could get there, something caught his ankle and he tripped and fell forward, catching himself with his palms on the rough concrete, tearing open the skin. Footsteps thudded on the sidewalk as three young men swarmed out of the alley he'd never seen and dragged him away.
Xander tried to twist around, to escape, and the first guy reached out very deliberately and grabbed him by the throat with his left hand, punching him hard in the face with his right. While he was holding him, the other two went to work on his torso, hitting him swiftly and efficiently. Xander reached convulsively for the stake in his pocket, even though he could already tell these were humans.
He struggled and struck out with his bleeding hands, connecting blindly with his assailants but not doing much damage. The three of them grunted and huffed with effort as they beat him. There was a cut on his head, and blood ran across his temple. Pain stabbed through his chest, and he struggled to breathe. All of a sudden it stopped. The hand withdrew itself from his throat, and Xander's knees gave way. He collapsed onto the greasy ground of the alley. A foot connected with his lower back as he fell.
Xander looked up into the face of the man he'd just seen outside the club -- the dealer. He was slim and angular, with neatly combed hair and dark, Hispanic features. Beneath the outer corner of his eye there were three small teardrops tatooed on his face.
Bad news, Xander thought, remembering what Amy's friend said.
"Got the message, eh?" he asked softly in a lightly-accented voice. His face grew fuzzy, as Xander blinked up at him. "Stay away from my girls, okay?" His sentences curled up at the end like questions, although it was clear he didn't want answers. He turned toward his three thugs, and nodded once at them. Xander slid into unconsciousness as they went back to work.
When he woke up, it was to the sound of Trujillo's voice berating him. "Goddamnit, Harris, I fuckin' told you not to get involved and what do you do? You run out here and get the shit kicked out--"
Xander moaned and rolled over, retching weakly into a pile of trash.
"Fuckin' A," said Trujillo. There's an ambulance on the way. Try not to die before it gets here."
Xander coughed and spit. "I'll work on it," he croaked out. The alley was narrow, just a small space between two buildings, piled with black trash bags and loose junk.
"If you can joke, you'll be fine," the cop responded. "All this for nothing. Shit." He was standing over Xander, looking away toward the street where his patrol car sat. The sun was shining weakly out there, but the alley was shaded by the buildings to either side.
Xander made a questioning sound and tried not to be sick again. The smell of vomit was overwhelming in the narrow alley. Probably his own fault.
"Amy Watson died of a drug overdose," Trujillo said flatly. "We sent Faith home three hours ago."
Xander groaned and slipped back into unconsciousness.
When he woke again, he was in a hospital room with an IV hooked up to his arm. Faith was sitting in the visitor's chair next to him, eating blue jello out of a cup. She was dressed in her own clothes, jeans and a black tank top, and her dark hair fell in waves around her face. A casual observer would never have known that she'd spent the last couple of days in jail, but Xander could see dark circles under her eyes and a tightness around her mouth that told him all he needed to know.
"Hey now," he said, his voice rough. "That's mine."
"I left you the green," she said with a dimpled smile. He turned his head with some difficulty and saw a tray of food, including a little cup of green jello.
"Aw," he said jokingly. "You really do care."
"Yeah," she said, looking him in the eyes. "I guess I do." She reached out and entwined her fingers with his, over the bulky bandages taped to his palm. Her fingers were rough with use and marked with scars from a thousand different fights, and her nails were bitten to the quick. He squeezed her hand in his tightly and held on. They sat there like that for a minute, until he looked up at her eyes and saw something dark and hollow there. He would recover, but there was one person who wouldn't.
"About Amy," he started, struggling to sit upright. It was his job to say something reassuring now, even if he didn't know what to say.
"She O.D.'d," Faith said flatly. She took a corner of the sheet in her hand and was worried it back and forth between her fingers.
"Yeah."
"You know," she started, looking down at the floor. "I worry sometimes about being off my game... about getting it in a fight sometime, ducking too slow or some stupid shit."
He nodded, and didn't say anything pointless like you won't. He'd been around long enough to know that someday, she probably would.
"But to --fuck, Harris-- to fuckin' throw it all away like that?" She looked up at him, her brown eyes troubled.
"Yeah," said Xander, thinking of the girl he used to know in Sunnydale, the one who lived in a cheap motel and tried to strangle him one night. "Yeah," he said again.
Faith punched the side of the mattress angrily and then leaned back in her chair. "So what now?" she asked, her brow furrowed with doubt and anger.
"Oh, I think there's still work for us to do around here," he said, turning his head to look out the window. The city was blanketed with fog, its streets and alleys obscured.