"Jerry… wake up, sleepy head."
Something was wrong with that. He frowned, trying to clear his head and work out why it was wrong. His head ached.
He was in bed. Wearing navy blue cotton pyjamas. Those didn't seem quite right either, and then there was the cast. His left leg was in a cast which ran from his ankle to the top of his thigh. That definitely didn't make sense. He couldn't remember such an injury. Surely he would remember that.
Samantha had explained it all, but it still didn't feel right. He didn't want to ask her again though, there was something in her pale blue eyes that scared him.
Her eyes were blue. That was wrong.
She was sitting down on the bed, she had a large tray with breakfast on it. Her hip brushed his and he tried not to shrink away. It was important not to make Samantha angry.
She was smiling at him. "Here, drink your juice."
He didn't want to drink it, but he was weak and lethargic, with a strange heaviness to his limbs; so he wasn't able to resist when she put her hand behind his head and raised him up. Slumped against her he obediently took a sip of the juice. He didn't want to. Every time he drank the juice he felt worse. More disconnected, his vision would blur and there was a cold sick feeling in his stomach.
His vision blurred again.
She let him fall back to the bed as her cell rang in her pocket. "I just topped up, he wouldn't recognize his own grandmother." Then she moved away and he couldn't hear anymore.
Some primal instinct told him he had to get away, but he could barely move. His ached all over, he curled up as far as his helpless body was able. It was an effort to move his hand, but he slid his left hand up his right arm, pushing the sleeve up, if he squinted he could see it, the tigers, he didn't belong here, he belonged to someone else. He just didn't know who.
He didn't know who he was or where he was, or why he was lying in this bed with his leg in a cast, he just knew this was all wrong, and he needed to figure out how to get away from there.
The sheet was already covering the body as Carter left the car, she looked around, saw Fusco hovering on the edge of the cordon. It was the look of confused distress on his face that stopped her in her tracks.
She looked down at the sheet covered body. NOOOOOO… She crouched, and stretched a tentative hand out towards the sheet.
It wasn't him. She was almost giddy with the relief that rocketed through her. Although he looked enough like John that it might have been him. Black hair, graying at the temples, tall and lean, about 6'2", John's height. The resemblance between the two men startling.
Their floater was dressed in navy blue pyjamas, with a mangled, stained plaster cast around his left leg running from ankle to the top of the thigh.
"No ID. No distinguishing features." Fusco glanced at his pad. He seemed at a loss.
"Looks just like my guy." Carter finished quietly.
Fusco nodded. John had been gone almost ten hours. Finch was frantic. And the person that they were pursuing was a false name.
Jocelyn Carter knew that this was connected. A man, John's height and build and physical description, dead in the East River. John missing. Not the CIA this time. Something was up with the woman that John was chasing, and if this man was dead, John's life was probably in danger.
Feeling sick with fear was a luxury that she could not afford.
The woman he knew as Samantha was back again. She was talking on the phone and she sounded agitated. He lay very still on his side and pretended to be asleep. Whatever was in the juice that she kept forcing down his throat was some kind of narcotic. If he could keep her from drugging him again, he might be able to get away.
There was the question of the cast on his leg, but that seemed to be a fake. He didn't know what this was all about, he just needed to escape.
"I've spent too long setting up the Jerry and Samantha Sanders' identities to stop now. Now it's not dangerous. I just need him to be able to sign the paperwork, and then we can finish him off." She was pacing now. "The cops are clueless. He'll be dead and gone before they know what hit them."
Finch dug and dug. His back and neck were agony, the only thing keeping him in his seat was the certainty that John's life was at stake. He knew he could send John out in the world and that one day he might run into a physical situation that he would not be able to handle. But this number. This time. He knew now that the reason their previous information did not quite add up, was not anomalies in the system, or someone trying to kill their number, but that this number was a killer. A serial killer.
So Finch began to look for patterns. When you broke it down, everything was just patterns.
The pattern that slowly emerged from the mass of irrelevancies was so cruel and twisted in nature that Finch felt physically sick. He had put John within reach of this woman's evil.
If Reese died now, Finch would never forgive himself.
So he popped a pill, ignored the pain and continued his quest for the elusive Mr Reese.
He closed his eyes. He was hurting all over, whatever was in that mickey that she kept slipping him was causing some serious impairment to his motor functions.
He thought he heard her go out, but that might have been his imagination, however, he wasn't in a position to waste time. He might never have another chance. He was weak and dizzy, but he wanted to live, he was getting out if he had to crawl.
He pushed the quilt back with difficulty, eased his legs down to the floor, and pushed off from the wall and sat up. The room spun a little, but he didn't have time for that. Cautiously he got to his feet, it was difficult to lever himself up with the cast on his leg but he made it.
Walking was difficult with the cast, but he wasn't going to hang about looking for a way to cut it off, his balance was all over the place, he nearly fell down the stairs, he fell over in the hallway, but then he was at the front door, and it was open, so he fell through.
Outside was bright, and cold, and the fresh air didn't seem to improve his headache. Get away, the where didn't seem important. It was wet under foot, the ground stony beneath his bare feet. He was starting to feel light-headed, like he was about to pass out.
He could hear a car coming, Her. He picked up his pace, ignoring the pain of the uneven ground under his sensitive feet and then the wet grass. He pushed his way through the bushes. Anything to get away now.
He pushed on. "JERRY!" She was at the house, surely she could see him.
Finch wished he could be sure, but he just wasn't. Something about Jerry Sanders did not fit quite right. The insurance policy was just too big.
He was taking a chance now and Reese's life hung in the balance. They were out of time and out of options and if Carter didn't run with this, the next call out she would be likely to have would be for John's body.
Harold Finch could not let that happen.
He dialed her number. "Detective Carter, I have the address for you." Quickly he gave it to her.
He wanted desperately to say something about John, how badly he needed to be there when they found John.
Joss listened to Finch's calm, cultured voice over the cell, and read between the lines. Whatever the apparent employer/employee relationship between Harold Finch and John Reese, the two men cared deeply about each other. She hadn't been privy to their conversation the night her interference had got John shot, but the intensity of the little man's glare when she caught up to them in the parking lot had seared itself into Joss's mind.
She sighed inwardly as she said it, "Where can I pick you up from?"
He named a quiet little café on a corner and she said "Ten minutes." He agreed.
She hung up, snagging her keys, and Fusco, lurking determinedly by the photocopier, trying to pretend that he didn't know what was at stake.
Joss raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
Lionel backed down and scurried to catch up with her.
Whatever she said openly, this situation really had Joss worried. The torrent of information that had found its way into her hands courtesy, no doubt of the quiet courtly little man who had pulled John from the streets and saved his life; well that information chilled her to the bone.
Joss really hoped that this lead panned out, because if it didn't John would die. And she couldn't… would never… deal with that.
He could go no further. Whatever strength he had left was draining away. He remembered his name was John, and his friend Harold had saved him. Several times.
"Sorry, Harold, I think I need you to save me again." He croaked, slumping against a tree. He slid quietly down, sitting on the wet cold ground. "Hurry." He muttered.
He could hear her in the distance, it was now a race between his friend, and the woman who wanted to kill him for the insurance. Good versus evil. He smiled a little at that, a battle for the soul he was certain he had lost, until a reclusive, secretive billionaire with a genius for computers, but not people, found him and saved him.
It was all jumbled up in his head. A pair of dark eyes and beautiful smile caressed the edge of his memory. "Joss." Her name was on his lips as he passed out.
Samantha Sanders made Joss Carter's flesh crawl. There was something hard and feral in the blue eyes, a coldness about her persona. When Joss asked about her husband Jerry, she could detect the slightest flicker of fear in the other woman.
Joss started to press the point, with a casual glance back to see where Lionel was, and Finch.
Harold Finch had got out of the car, ostensibly to stretch his legs, but in reality he couldn't sit still in comfort while John was out there having god knows what done to him.
The ground of the driveway was rough and stony, uncomfortable to walk across, doubly so if your body was as damaged as Harold's was. He toed a large sharp stone out of his path, which was when he saw it. A splash of blood. He didn't need a cop's knowledge to know that this was fresh blood. Senses sharpened, Finch looked around. There was another, then another, with a quick glance back to check to see where Carter and Fusco were, he started to follow the splashes.
They were very small, those splashes, but they led directly, if a little erratically to some thick bushes on the other side of the driveway. Then they ended. Finch nearly growled in anger. He looked around, Carter was still preoccupied with the woman, Fusco looking a little bored.
Fusco's apparent boredom vanished when Finch gestured to him.
Together they pushed through the bushes, there was a definite track of someone walking. The terrain was rough and slippery, and Finch found himself falling behind.
Lionel Fusco had not had the best of introductions to John Reese. While Reese might have been the bane of Lionel's existence, the grumpy detective knew that his continued survival and comfortable gig at Homicide, was entirely due to John Reese's ability to continually keep Lionel's ass out of the fire.
The guy was as tough as they come, but he was still human, and over the months of being used like a bellhop, Fusco very grudgingly admitted he had become almost fond of the big ex-soldier and his secretive little friend. Now John had fallen into the hands of someone who was violent and dangerous for completely different reasons to their normal run of cases.
Lionel was worried. He swung round in a circle trying to get a sense of where John might have gone. He almost missed it. A shapeless bundle on the ground, some cloth flapping in the wind. Lionel glanced back at Finch a few feet behind him "He's here."
John was slumped over on his side, his leg in the plaster cast stuck out at a strange angle.
"John." Lionel grabbed hold of his shoulders and pulled him up into a sitting position. "Reese, c'mon…" he patted John's cheek "JOHN… Wake up." Then Harold was there beside him.
"John…JOHN…"
The blue-gray eyes opened a slit. "You came." It was barely above a whisper, but there was the ghost of a cockeyed smile and Harold Finch realized that he had been holding his breath.
John was bigger and heavier than Finch, so Lionel stripped off his coat and wrapped it round the shivering man.
"If we help you, can you stand up." Finch tried to keep the anxiety out of his voice.
John nodded. "Yeah." He croaked.
It was a struggle to get him upright, and his tendency to stagger made progress back to the car difficult. Finch was silent, between propping his exhausted and stoned partner up on one side, and trying to figure out how they were going to keep John out of this arrest, his brain was buzzing with how it might be managed.
Joss was already putting Ms Sanders in the back of the car. Finch saw her start at the sight of the state John was in. He saw the look on her face, knew for a certainty that Jocelyn Carter was in love with John Reese. Finch was already well aware that Reese was in love with Carter.
Even considering the strange lifestyle that Finch and Reese lead, this was unconventional in the extreme. Not that John didn't deserve a chance at happiness. Finch dialed for his driver, they needed to get John back to Manhattan and into the care of Dr Tillman.
Megan had patched him up a couple of times, no questions asked.
Finch could see that Joss was torn between the need to see that John was allright, and the need to deal with the suspect.
In the end, Finch's driver arrived, and Joss helped Fusco get John into the car, so the final decision was taken out of her hands.
The four hours of questioning and paperwork and sending Samantha Sanders to lock up for the murder of her husband, the real Jerry Sanders, pulled out of the East River nearly drove Joss crazy.
She was sure her burning desire to get out of the station and over to John had to be written on her face. Lying to the CIA had become second nature, but keeping calm and carrying on in the face of what had been done to John that was something else altogether.
Jocelyn Carter had never been a clock watcher until now.
Knowing that Carter was going to want to be with John, Finch decided that one of his smaller apartments would probably be best. Megan Tillman had thoroughly examined John, he seemed to be coming down from the narcotic-induced sleep state that he had been put in. He was suffering from exposure. Together Dr Tillman and Finch had worked to get rid of the cast, strip him of the filthy pyjamas, clean him up and redress him in a pair of clean dry pyjamas. Dr Tillman treated the cuts on his feet from the stony driveway, and prescribed plenty of bed rest to sleep it off.
Reese was suddenly a lot more active, and clearly stoned by whatever had been forced down his throat. Suddenly Finch found himself dealing with a John who really had very little idea of where he was or what was going on, but knew that he wanted Joss.
Thanking the doctor for all her help, Finch tried to apply himself to keeping his large, strong and very restless partner from going out to find Joss dressed only in his pyjamas. He never believed he would be grateful for Carter's arrival on the doorstep.
From the moment Carter arrived to take over, John seemed to quiet down. Finch slipped discreetly down to the bedroom at the end of the hallway, and considered what he would need to purchase in the way of food.
Joss turned herself to looking after John. Thanking heaven that her son was with his grandmother, because she was going to stay the night. She stripped down some of her clothing, and climbed in next to John.
He moved then, curling up against her, his head resting on her hip. Joss slid her arms around him as his went round her waist. "I knew you would come" he muttered.
"What do you mean?" she was wary, he had been drugged, this could have been the narcotic still in his system.
His left hand pushed at his right sleeve, and she saw the lower edge of the tattoo, healing fast. "Tigressssss" he slurred, and pressed close to her.
Joss slid her arms around him and held on tight. When he had the tattoo done she was sure he was crazy. She didn't even like tattoos that much, and the health risks. The tigers seemed to have found the key to John's lonely soul and unlocked the door.
He had done it for her, because he couldn't find the way to say it himself. Her tiger.
Finch waited a while before returning to the other bedroom. They were curled up together, arms around each other, John's head resting against Joss's shoulder, her cheek resting against the top of his head.
Happy together, wistfully Finch allowed himself a brief dream of what might have been before numbers and the machine, and a man called John.
