Between a Rock and the Hot Place

By Colleen

Disclaimer: Nope, still don't own them. For full disclaimer please see Chapter 1.

Chapter 3

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

-- Edgar Allan Poe

Johnny pulled into Fort Worth just as false dawn was giving way to the real thing.

Man he couldn't wait to get home and pass out in his own bed for a change. It had been so long since he'd slept on anything better than a motel bed ( and in the last six months he'd slept on a lot worse than that) that he'd forgotten what a real bed felt like. Traffic was still light at this time of morning, so it took little time to make his way through the outskirts of town and only a little longer to get through the slightly increased traffic as he reached the downtown core.

The towering buildings of Fort Worth's business area were still several blocks away from the quiet corner of Down Town Fort Worth that Johnny called home. The old brick warehouse looked much the same as it did six months ago as Johnny shut down Grace's engine and started to push her towards the freight elevator. Not that it should surprise him that it still looked the same; after all he'd been away on tour lots of time and never even considered that it should look different.

Of course that was before Mack had died here.

Johnny stopped for a moment and hung his head, remembering his best friend and mechanic. It was most definitely some sort of cosmic irony that the man who'd seemed to spend most of his time trying to talk Johnny out of the daredevil's more dangerous jumps had ended up being killed before him.

Sometimes Johnny wished he could punish Blackheart all over again.

"Ah, enough introspection." Johnny said again, a line that was quickly becoming as much a personal mantra to him as 'you can't live in fear' was.

He unlocked the elevator to his loft, something he didn't usually have to do because he'd generally just left the thing open, but since he hadn't known how long he was going to be away he had actually locked the thing when he'd left.

Mack would have been so happy, he'd complained about the elevator to Johnny every time he'd come over and found it unlocked.

Johnny snapped the door to the freight elevator opened with more force than he needed and wheeled Grace in, vowing to stop thinking about Mack. Once he secured Grace he closed the elevator a little more gently and hit the up button.

Opening the door at the top Johnny started at the lack of motorcycles lined up in his garage area before forcibly reminding himself that he'd sold off a number of them before heading off on his trip.

He used to have about a dozen bikes up here but now, aside from Grace there were only three left, and one of them was still trashed from the last time he'd crashed during a jump.

"I'm going to get some sleep." He told the motorcycle as he placed her in her own spot, thinking once again about how strange it would look to anyone else to see him talking to it. Of course that just meant they didn't know anything about Grace.

"Give me eight hours and something to eat and then I promise to spend the rest of the day giving you a tune up." The bike started up and gave a rev of agreement before shutting down again. Johnny gave her a sleepy wave and headed towards his bed, stripping off his riding leathers as he went.

--------000--------

Stanley Goodspeed stared sleepily out the window of the plane as they circled over Fort Worth waiting for landing clearance. He hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, what with the packing and the exuberant goodbye his wife had give him that night as well as a long explanation to his daughter Kelsey over why daddy had to go away sandwiched in-between. He'd also gone down to his basement office and done a little of his own special research for the case before heading to bed but two hours of going through those files hadn't turned up anything he could use. There was a lot about JFK's stay at the Hilton-Fort Worth yes, but little else.

Sometimes, no matter how unusual his personal files were they still didn't have all the answers.

He thought back, as he often did, to the day he'd come into ownership of those files. Had it really been over ten years since he'd followed Mason's instructions on his and Carla's wedding day and found the microfilm that held some of this countries most dangerous secrets from the first half of this century?

When he'd originally gotten hold of that expensive piece of film (it had cost Mason his freedom for most of his life) he had mostly seen it as a source of interesting trivia. Over the years he had come to realize just how dangerous some of this knowledge was and he'd been very careful about how he'd used it.

A few items that he felt would continue to do more harm than good by not being made known he'd managed to anonymously leak to the proper authorities.

However some things were better left buried and on top of that he was FBI himself and the thought of betraying that didn't sit well with him. So far any secrets that had involved the FBI as a main player he had left alone. Besides many of them were so far out of date that the only people who still cared were the conspiracy buffs.

Still that didn't mean he couldn't use the information himself, when it actually pertained to the situation.

However he didn't think that he would be telling anyone else about the possible parallels between this case and what everyone else thought of as the Rowell Landing back in the 40's. Besides even his files didn't seem to have a realistic picture of what had happened that night in New Mexico all those years ago, or at least he hoped what it said wasn't the truth because if it was than the world was even stranger than he'd ever thought it to be.

The pilot announced that they would be landing shortly and Stanley felt his stomach momentarily flip over as the plane began its descent. He checked his wristwatch and found that the time was coming up on 11:00 am.

As they were scheduled to meet with the Fort-Worth Police Department at 1:30 pm it should give them enough time to get through airport security and allow them the chance to get to their hotel and unpack before they had to be at the meeting.

Best laid plans, and all that.

--------000--------

Having had reoccurring insomnia for most of his life (after all spending most of your adult years worrying about the fact that you had apparently sold your soul to the devil can do that to a man) Johnny was pleasantly surprised to get in a good seven hours of sleep. A quick shower, several glasses of water (with the Ghost Rider for a bunk mate dehydration could become a way of life if you weren't careful) and fresh jeans and a t-shirt, both black of course, almost finished the job of waking him up.

A cup of coffee would have brought him all the way to human but looking around his bare kitchen netted him a collection of forgotten condiments in the refrigerator and a half full jar of jellybeans. And as much as he liked the candy it would be a poor substitute for coffee and breakfast.

Looking at his watch he suspected he should change that to coffee and lunch. Also if he was going to stay here for the next few weeks, or even just the next few days he'd need a few groceries.

He briefly considered taking Grace with him but there was a little coffee shop/lunch counter the block over that could do him a decent cup and a sandwich and there was a little grocery store nearby that he could at least get the basics at.

"I'm going to go grab some lunch and a few groceries. I'll be back in an hour or so." He yelled in Grace's direction as he headed towards the elevator.

The bike revved once in what he'd come to take as agreement and Johnny gave her a wave as the elevator headed down.

No double about it, as much as he loved Grace he really needed to talk to some real people.

--------ooo--------

Best laid plans indeed. Airport security had been backed up to sometime last Thursday and even with FBI clearance it had taken longer than Stanley had hoped to get everyone and their equipment off of the plane and loaded into the vans for the trip to the hotel.

After fighting their way through lunch time traffic all they'd had time to do was drop their luggage in their rooms at the Hilton and head back out, thoughts of lunch forgotten.

Okay, not really forgotten, more like mourned.

In the lobby, just before they were going to leave Agent Thornton split Dr. Hunter and a couple of other agents (Ruiz and Manning if he was remembering their names right) off from the rest of the group. He handed them what was obviously a warrant and spent a few minutes in quiet conversation with them before sending them off to their vehicle.

When the caravan of agents headed out Stanley noticed that wherever Dr. Hunter and his group were going it wasn't to the Fort Worth Police Department.

--------000--------

Johnny flipped through the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the daily newspaper he'd picked up on the way to the coffee shop as he sat at the lunch counter and attempted to inhale a club sandwich. He went over the crime section a couple of times looking for anything he might be able to help with. Even after six months on the road doing little else than finding and punishing the guilty he still felt compelled to seek out evil doers where ever they might be.

He snorted at himself as he flipped another page. Just when, he wondered, had his life gone and turned into a comic book.

Well comic book or not it was his life now. And given that he had chosen this life he had better get on with the getting of groceries and Grace's tune up if he was going to hit the streets looking for the presence of evil.

He almost groaned at the thought. At this rate he was going to end up having to join some sort of support group for terminally pretentious supernatural entities.

He finally gave up on the paper and folded it up to put aside. He finished the sandwich and coffee and stood up to pay.

"I wonder what a support group like that would charge as an entry fee?" he said, thinking out loud and startling a few people in the shop. He looked around and cringed slightly at everyone looking at him.

"Ah, sorry about that, just thinking out loud."

Everyone went back to their coffee and he shook his head as he as he left the shop.

He was more out of practice around people than he'd thought he'd be.