Author's Note: Per request of Writer's-BlockDP who would like some blanks filled in. This part is about the car ride Neal and Peter take to the hotel Neal stays at for a few hours. Because of a few mistakes I made in the first writing of this part I updated this and the third part also. Thanks to Yllek and Ursula4x for catching my mistakes - I have only the pilot fully once, and I just assume the Marshals came in and put the anklet on him.

Disclaimer: I do not own White Collar, nor am I making any money off of this.

~oOoOoOo~

He had to admit, Peter Burke drove a nice car. Of course, Burke probably got paid more since the first time he'd caught him - most likely because he had caught the great Neal Caffrey and received a promotion.

Yeah, that was it. Neal gave a side glance to the agent as he drove towards God knows where. Burke had become head of the entire White Collar crime unit; now instead of doing the leg work and digging for information himself he ordered other, lesser agents to do it for him, meaning that Neal basically had a "boss" now along with a "supervisor" and, dare he say it, "owner."

Neal mentally shuddered. The last time the conman had had a boss of any sort had been back when he was fifteen (he'd lied about his age) and working at a small retail store (not one of those cheap ones, mind you; he would never find himself working at one of those officially) in his hometown, and that hadn't exactly worked out so well. It was one of many reasons why Neal liked to be his own boss.

He looked down at his left ankle. The newly placed tracker was just visible underneath the brim of his expensive pants. His leash. He had been a little surprised when the U.S. Marshals sauntered into the holding room and said he would be wearing it for "security reasons," as they put it. But then, he also wasn't surprised - he had just broken out of a maximum-security prison. And he'd been caught - again. By Burke.

That sort of thing was a blow to a conman's ego.

Part of Neal hated himself for staying at his and Kate's old apartment long enough for Burke to find him. He should have done a once-through of the apartment, grabbed the bottle and run. The overwhelming pain that had engulfed him when he had seen the empty space and no sign of Kate in sight, however, made him sink to the floor and forget about everything except his own misery.

And now, Neal Caffrey - world-class thief, forger, liar and an overall genius - was both miserable and trapped. He was wasting time in this car when he could be wasting it looking for Kate. Knowing her she could be halfway across the world by now - she'd had a good enough head start for it.

Neal was pulled rather violently from his thoughts when Burke turned onto what must be one of the poorer neighborhoods of New York. At first he thought the federal agent was just making a detour but when he parked outside a shabby looking hotel at the end of the street he began to think otherwise.

Getting out of the car and following Burke to the front door Neal found himself beginning to wish he was back in prison.