3. Can't Get Off this Ride

He wasn't used to being watched. People ignored him until they needed him. As he stood in the lobby signing out on Thursday, he heard the receptionist say his name into the phone and he stopped to listen. "Dr. House? Yes, he's a very good doctor. Yes. No." She glanced at him. "I believe so." He mouthed Don't be so sure. "If you think your mother has a medical problem you can bring her in to our clinic. I can't promise Dr. House would see her. His clinic hours?" She rattled them off from a list and hung up. "Someone's very interested in your daily whereabouts," she informed him. "A woman."

Cuddy had come up behind them. "I hope you told her the clinic hours Dr. House is listed for have no basis in reality. Maybe he has a new girlfriend who feels the need to check up on him." At his how-dumb-is-that look she shrugged. "I know – it's the police." She drew him away from the wide-eyed receptionist and lowered her voice. "Just what problem do you have with CA, House?"

"They've discovered my cane is a nuclear device."

"Is all this investigation of you going to cause trouble for my hospital?"

"Only if the cane goes off."

On Friday evening he parked the bike in front of his apartment and leaned for a moment on the handrail that led up the steps to the door, rolling the bottle of Vicodin between his fingers, studying the label as though he had never seen it before. Contemplating his next move. The smoky scent of autumn choked the air, chimneys lit somewhere. It was the same choking sensation he felt inside. The memory of Nealy and the burns on his chest that wouldn't get out of his head. Detective McCullough's eyes, frightening and fascinating in turns. A breeze made him tug his coat tighter and helped him decide.

He toed his way back down the steps, ignoring the pain that had seemed to double in the past week, and crossed the street to the dark-blue Escort parked there. The tinted window on the driver's side rolled down as he approached.

"Look," he told her and then didn't know what to say. We've got to stop meeting like this sounded trite. "We've got to stop meeting like this." McCullough wore a sheepskin jacket, the collar pulled up to frame her face in delicate shadow, her blond hair in a thick braid again. Styrofoam cups littered the dash. The smell of cold coffee from inside the car mingled with something sweeter, her natural scent perhaps or a subtle perfume. She didn't seem alarmed in the least that he had spotted her. "I know I'm fascinating and all, just the eighth wonder of the world, but I'm not going to lead you people to any terrorists."

"You shook off my driver on Saturday." She sounded vaguely bored. He leaned closer into the window and her hand came up, almost a reflex to ward him off, then rested on the door. "Why, Dr. House? Where did you go?"

"I wanted to expose myself to six-year olds in the park, my usual Saturday routine, without you guys interfering."

It eeked a smile from her. "You should have just said. Sexual perverts are Vice's problem."

"I didn't do anything on Saturday you wouldn't have approved of, Adolf."

"By your logic, that means I can drive away now because you really really promise not to go anywhere else tonight."

The thought that she might drive away depressed him. Another gray-on-gray evening spent with his piano seemed suddenly worse than any threat of torture. "Actually I'm nipping around the corner for a drink. Why don't you come with me?"

Her look was indecipherable. Surprise, well-hidden. "You have got to be kidding."

"No, really. I'm not doing anything tonight –"

"When you're right, you're right."

"Consorting with the enemy has a long tradition. If you want to find out more about me, plying me with drink's about the best route you can go. Plus the lack of Styrofoam in your car other than coffee cups tells me you haven't had dinner." When her eyes were wide they seemed softer. She was still shaking her head slightly in disbelief. "This Korean place around the corner makes kimchi so hot it'll nuke the top of your mouth off."

"You really shouldn't be making references to nukes in your position."

"And you really should stop shining me on."

Her sudden nod – matter-of-fact, as though snap decisions were her modus operandi - shouldn't have made him as happy as it did. "All right. Hop in."

"Leave the car," he told her. "Exercise those jackboots for a change."

On the sidewalk she slowed her pace when it didn't match his limp. As they passed his building he leaned for a second on a dirty white van with Kemmer Plumbing printed on the side, then bunched his fist and banged loudly on it twice. "You peons can take a break," he yelled, then moved to the back of the van and threw open the door. Detective Chase and another man with headphones connected to an impressive console of eavesdropping equipment stared like deer in headlights. McCullough came up behind him, grinning. "Go on," she told them. "Take the night off."

He bit back a comment on the implications of that as they watched the van drive away. "Better be hot," McCullough murmured, and when he glanced at her: "The food."

The food didn't let them down. She seemed unfazed by the extra chilis he ordered. He had expected to see a gun holster when she took off her coat, then realized she probably kept her service weapon in the brown-leather handbag slung over the chair. It was his first chance to study her figure outside of a car since she had been in his office. Compact, would have been his word. Small for her line of work, five-five or six, yet exuding an impression of coiled strength, a calmness that came with a great deal of training in any field. A miniature Teutonic. They talked about nothing for a while, graduating only slowly to the somethings, the real reason they were sitting across from each other: how much CA had investigated him, why it was important. He learned they had contacted Stacy to find out what kind of person he was. He swallowed the thick knot of rage that threatened to burst out at that, then chased it with a Vicodin while his dinner date watched. He learned that McCullough was divorced, no mention of why, other than that her ex had not been able to come to terms with her work.

"Hey, I can't come to terms with your work," he told her.

"CA does an important job. You think another attack like Dirty May isn't possible?"

He felt the queasy start of pressure beneath his skin, always the same when he talked about politics, as though his body knew there was no true right and wrong, only shaky ground since the bombings. "I think for the past seventeen years we've been suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Seeing terrorists in every messed-up teenager that joins a Christian sect to meet girls. The sky fell once and now Chicken Little – that's you people – tells us it's just bound to fall again. Orange alerts, red alerts."

"There are reasons for those. Information we've received. The psychos are still out there, even if they're only a tiny group compared to the rest. I know most Christians aren't in it for the violence. The terrorists among them are only…an aberration within the aberration, so to speak." It echoed what Nealy had said to him. "It's those few I'm after. They justify what I do." The intensity in her voice told him she needed to convince him – or perhaps herself – that it was true.

"All I know is we've become regimented. A huge standing security force – I have to go through two checkpoints on my way to work just because the university's nearby. And that's before being felt-up just to get into the hospital. The bureaucracy – so we'll know who's who and who's in possession of what – means I can't hand a patient a urine cup without signing off on three different forms. We became a different country in 1989. Most people are so used to it by now that they've forgotten what it was like before."

"You do know what the Encapsulation of Rights Act is, don't you?"

"I know it gives people like you the power to arrest anyone anywhere without requiring reasonable suspicion. That if you happened not to like the color of my eyes you could haul me in right now."

"Then you have nothing to worry about."

It caught him off guard. She was watching him, holding his gaze. He tried to stop the warmth that spread up from his chest, and looked away. The eatery was not conducive to romance, with its harsh lights and funky deep-fried smells from the kitchen. If that was where she was going at all. The signals she gave off were as changeable as their terrorism alerts.

"Look." He met her gaze, which had flickered back down to cold. "All I'm saying is that if a government wanted a way to keep tabs on its people, exaggerating a terrorist threat would be a no-brainer. That it seems like an awful lot of money and effort just to find that small handful of psychos. Just you keeping tabs on me must cost something, and if you're looking for Christian terrorists I'm not even a lead, I'm a mislead. It doesn't pencil out."

"Have you ever heard of John Galt?"

He gave her a duh look. Aside from Michael Nealy it was the name every halfway conscious person in America associated with Christian violence since the bombings, headlining the news so often only a deaf and blind sea urchin could be unaware of it. The mythical leader of the Christian underground since Nealy's imprisonment. He remembered Nealy talking about his handpicked successors.

"What do you know about Galt?" she asked.

"That he nails kidnapped babies to crosses and regularly dumps LSD in the water supply." Her mouth fell open. "Okay, I'm not stupid. He's supposedly responsible for the bomb threats now and then that never amount to anything –"

"Because we're able to stop them in time."

"-that CA claims to have been on his tail several times and each time he's managed to slip away again." She was silent, not affirming or denying. "Mainly because those arrested from his inner circle prefer to go to prison or even die rather than rat on their beloved leader." He didn't add how much that kind of loyalty made him envious, even if it was misplaced. "That he's rumored to be living in our very midst, a regular family guy somewhere with a double life." Her silence, if possible, deepened. "That he uses the name of a character from an Ayn Rand novel who was an intellectual prig. Now that should really tell you something."

"I guess we just need to check every intellectual prig in the country and we'll have him. No wait, we've already started, with you."

He laid his head in his hands for a second. "Great. It begins with this Nealy wanting me to fix his heart and within a week I'm John Galt. Talk about your fast-track career path."

She laughed, startling him. It was beautiful. "No one thinks you're Galt."

"No, you just think Nealy somehow managed to convert me." From the way she looked down for a moment, smoothing her napkin, he knew he was right.

It was all a bunch of crap. The drinks, the dinner, maybe even the perfume. She was playing him. Being the good observer, keeping him in her sights by tugging at his cock.

"Ever read Freud?" he asked. She looked up at his quiet tone. "'The Aberration of Religion'. He was the first to term these sects that had survived since the Middle Ages an aberration. It was when it first started being viewed as a disease. His argument was you had to be a little insane to hold two contradictory beliefs in your head at one time. On the one hand the world the way it works, cause and effect, visible and provable, and on the other hand believing someone's up there pulling all the strings. Or accepting the fact of evil and then claiming there's a god who loves us, who won't or can't do anything about the bad stuff." She was listening so intently that the room seemed to shrink around them, enclosing them. He realized she was likely well-versed in the history behind those she persecuted. There had to be some way to make it clear to her. He shifted and the pain in his leg awoke. Yes. "Look, what I'm trying to say is - I believe in logic above all else. If I had to believe in a god, I'd – I'd go nuts. Someone who's supposed to love us all unconditionally – let's say I believe in that - and look what he does to me." Her eyes, so cold, flicked to his leg and back. She understood. "Five years ago I was going around saving lives, maybe not the nicest person in the world, but then –" (why was it so hard?). His voice was a ragged scratch. "Then this being I'm supposed to believe in sends me the worst pain I could ever have imagined and leaves me crippled."

The sounds of the restaurant rushed back in. Their waitress was standing over them, asking if there was anything else. Yeah, he wanted to say. Addiction, a girlfriend that up and left. His detective was still looking at him, a shadow of a frown on her brow. "I don't think I deserved all that bad stuff," he told her. "If a god did it, then I can't believe in him. I just want you to know that's why I'll never be a Christian." The waitress's eyes grew large and she suddenly remembered a customer at another table.

McCullough looked away, through the glass window where condensation marred her reflection. He had known many poker faces in his life but she beat them hands-down. She finally glanced at her watch and turned to seek the restroom. "I'll be right back, then I have to go." She rose. "Great sob story, by the way."

Alone he stared at his own reflection, softened in the glass by the lines of light and dark. Mushy. A man who thought he could move a woman like Ailyn McCullough by baring his soul. An idiot, made more foolish by perfume. With his thumb he drew a clown face – big nose and a crooked grin – in the thin film of wetness on the window, then rubbed his aching leg and popped another pill.

****

Don't do this.

The woman who stared back from the restroom mirror at Ailyn McCullough was a stranger.

She had the same face and nothing hair, but the stranger's cheeks were flushed, something that never happened to her, and the eyes had caught some shadow virus, haunted, blazing light and dark with shame at the knowledge that the woman behind them was falling in love.

At the heat every time she encountered him. As though his body flipped a switch inside her at a certain distance a warmth spread through her every time she came near him, warmth she could only struggle against because spying meant…spying. Not love, not even like. It meant feigning feelings, not feeling them.

It was why the eyes in the mirror, the stranger's eyes, said Don't do this. A voice crying danger.

"You're too old for this," she told the stranger and her voice echoing from the tiles startled her. Too old for the games, the intrigues that went with what she had to do. Too old to play at flirting when she really meant it.

She was channelling high-school, that was all. At thirty-five. Infatuation with the school bad boy. The whole giddy act, the force of his personality leaving her alive and tingling as though her body were waking from a long sleep. Feelings she hadn't known since Jeff had packed his vinyl collection and walked out. An act made more difficult by the tightrope walk she had to perform, the need to be stand-offish with him – the her on this side of the mirror, the real one who never let her guard down because she had too many secrets to keep – and the come-hither game she was supposed to be playing with him. What had she said? Then you have nothing to worry about. Stupid.

And yet his eyes had gone the soft of a child, if only for a second, so hungry for affection it hurt to look at.

Too many secrets.

She washed the stranger's hands, straightened the stranger's blouse, took a deep breath, and stepped back out to find him mellowed, the pills that were apparently more of a crutch to him than his cane having done their chemical best. When he smiled, his eyes slid away from her. She paid, saying CA would pick up the bill, and they walked back to his street in silence.

He paused on the doorstep. "So I still haven't seen your jackboot collection." His hand lay near hers on the iron railing. "Maybe you could arrest me now for possession, Detective McCullough, just get it all over with." He rattled the Vicodin bottle. His eyes were still doing their high-rope routine. "I have a problem keeping up with prescriptions, see. That whole sob-story thing. I'm sure you could make a case out of it."

"Sorry," she told him. "That's Vice again. You'll have to talk to them." She made a mental note to find out more about the stuff he took, what effect it had, and add it to his file. The thought of work helped distract her.

"You shouldn't have called your dogs off." He gazed down the empty street where the van had been parked and his voice dropped the sarcastic lilt. "Listen, don't spend the night in your car just to watch me. It's going to be cold."

"Good-night, Dr. House."

He took it as the dismissal it was. She watched until he disappeared into the building (the cold deepening when he was out of sight), then headed back toward her car and past it, on around the corner to where an innocuous gray minibus stood parked. Chase opened the back door at her knock and she made herself comfortable on the floor beside their monitoring equipment. "So you read my signal right," she complimented them.

Chase shrugged. "Good thing you insisted we have a back-up van. You think he made us in this one?"

"Not a chance." They were both watching her. "It was a nice dinner."

Charlie Dalton grinned. "So – you got some kind of orders from on high to go at this guy, or what?"

"Better me than you." She leaned her head back against the wall and stared into space. "I learned a lot. He's bitter, lonely, a cripple in pain. A man who's never come to terms with his disability." They were silent, listening. "Emphasis on the lonely." Outside the small tinted window she could see the heads of a couple passing, unaware of them only feet away in the dark van. She made sure her voice was in control before speaking. "I don't think any woman's been nice to him in a very long time. I pretended to flirt - complimented his eyes - and he practically had an orgasm." Charlie snorted.

"And that makes him susceptible to Christianity." Chase's voice held its usual self-assurance.

"I'm – not sure about that anymore."

"It's what you said yourself. That it sounded like Nealy turned him. That the fucker's got some kind of power to do that."

She felt dreamy, out of it, and yet aware that they were listening intently. She was the team head, the mom with the big guns; they relied on her experience. "You think it's pain and sorrow that drive all these people to Christianity?" she murmured.

"I've not got the faintest idea."

"We may drop the surveillance," she told him. Chase frowned. "House is not a lead."

"But you said –"

" -not anymore than that cute little member of his medical team you had coffee with. What's her name? Allison Cameron?"

Charlie was snorting again.

Chase turned red. "I was supposed to pump her for information on House, wasn't I?"

"You were supposed to ask her a few questions, not start dating her."

"She's – nice."

"Means hot," Charlie sniggered.

"We went for coffee."

"You disappeared for three hours." Chase looked so abashed that she stretched out her leg to nudge his foot with her own. "Hey, I'm not criticizing, Robert." I'm misdirecting. She stood and opened the door to leave. "I'm just saying we need to concentrate on more vital things. They're out there, they're planning another attack. And I want to stop them." She glanced at the directional mike they had set up. "Keep an eye on House for tonight. We'll talk about it in the morning."

And she would think about it in the morning, when she was herself again and not the stranger. Sleep – that legal substance she had been getting too little of – would rewrite her thoughts and she would wake up knowing Gregory House for the ass he was, the embittered and pitiable cripple she had just described to them, not even close to romantically viable. Not the force that plucked at her thoughts, face and eyes and voice refusing to leave her head, turning her into a wire thrumming for the moment she would see him again. A good night's sleep and she would be herself again. She hoped.

****

"The dinner was…insightful."

"Another odd word." Pause. "You're having reservations, aren't you? No pun intended."

Shrug. "It's just…well, now that I've really talked to him - I don't believe he's the kind Christianity could have a hold on." Pause. "Go on. Say something. Anything."

"If you want to back out, it won't be a problem."

"No."

"That was fast." Silence. "I see."

"What do you see?"

****