A/N I'm afraid my kidnapping and car chase got hijacked by something very silly. Don't let it distract you from all the angst and heartbreak.
Thanks to all of you who left comments and favorited my little story. It really means a lot to me. I have lots more where this came from.
Flashing lights drew Carina's attention to the front windows. "Uh, Walker?"
"Bartowski!"
"Fine. Bartowski. You've still got a policeman standing outside your door."
"Answer it, will you? Without your usual havoc, please."
"First untwist, then put 'em on, Blondie," said Carina far too loudly, and then she opened the door. He was male, he was in uniform, he was blushing.
"Mrs. Bartowski?"
She leaned against the doorframe, eyeing him up and down. "Why, no, Officer, I'm delightfully single."
"Is Mrs. Bartowski available, Miss Single?"
"Oo, I like a man with wit."
He leaned in close. "Do you like a man with handcuffs? 'Cause if you interfere with me in the performance of my duties one more time, I'll show you those too."
She made a slight shrug with her eyes. "Maybe next time." She turned her head back toward the room. "Hey, Blondie, haul ass!"
Sarah marched out of her bedroom fully dressed, pulling her hair back into her usual 'if you get in the way of my peripheral vision one more time you will regret it' ponytail. With a well-placed elbow and boot she displaced Carina ("Hey!") and took her position. "Can I help you, Officer…Davis? I'm Mrs. Bartowski."
"Your husband is one Charles Irving—?"
"Better not be two, that's bigamy."
"Shut up, Carina. Yes he is, officer. And he drives a Matrix."
"With or without a big 'Nerd Herd' decal on the side?"
"Shut up, Carina."
"You know," said Davis, "I could arrest her for you, if you'd like. Just part of the service."
Sarah smiled, but shook her head. "No, thank you, Officer. She's family. We'll torture her ourselves."
"See how we take care of each other?"
"Shut up, Carina," said Davis. "We found your husband's car—"
"When and where, officer?"
"Ten minutes, that way." He gave her an address that was only about five minutes away, but then, she probably drove a lot faster than him.
"Good," said Sarah, although it was anything but. "Here. Take this card, call the number, and when they answer, say 'Dustbin.' They'll help you file your report appropriately. Have a good day, Officer." She smiled and closed the door, leaving officer Davis on her porch, wondering what the hell just happened. Then the garage door opened, and Sarah drove out in her Porsche, already going faster than the posted speed limit.
Davis stared. The Porsche Blonde! He ran back to his cruiser. "The blonde!" he said to himself, disbelieving. " I met her, spoke to her!" He propped up his clipboard and grabbed the radio. "The guys at the precinct will—" He saw the card, clipped automatically on his board. Dustbin. "—never hear about this." A man with wit, indeed.
"I still say you should have let me tranq him."
"Sorry, Carina, my need to have this incident kept quiet trumps your need to have a cute man in uniform forget your first meeting."
"Ha, you thought he was cute too."
"Shut up, Carina. I'll make it up to you. When we find Chuck, I'll let you kick their asses."
"Whose asses?"
"The guys who took Chuck, of course. And they're gonna need it too."
"That fake detail. He must have made them. To get where he was when he did, he had to be using an evasion pattern—"
"Which they defeated anyway." A very good driver? Multiple cars? Who could say, but they'd taken her Chuck, always a mistake. She pressed a button on her GPS. Heading north by northwest. "Dammit." She hit speed dial on her phone.
"Kaleidoscope, secure."
"That's Casey's voice…"
"Telescope, unsecure."
"What the hell happened, Telescope?"
"Eagle Eye's been intercepted by at least one group of unknown hostiles. Signal reads heading north but I've got a stop to make first."
"You mean to tell me that an unknown group of bozos managed to blow through all our layers of security and get away with the target? How'd that happen, Telescope?"
"Carina showed up."
A grunt of disgust. "That'll do it."
"Are you in motion or not?"
A pause. "Yeah, I'm in motion. I hope you left her handcuffed to a bed. In Prague."
The two women shared a smirk. "That's a negative, Kaleidoscope."
"Oh hell, she's there with you, isn't she? What's the plan? Ejection seat?"
"Wrong car."
"Tranq her?"
"The trunk isn't very big, and it'd take too long to jam her in there by myself. I'm thinking we may have to read her in on the project. Let her make hash of someone else's plans for once. It's her skill set."
"Bartowski, that's harsh. Can't you just shoot her?"
"That's a kindness?"
"It is to us."
"You're forgetting the paperwork."
"Oh, yeah." He sighed loud enough for them to hear him over the phone. "Fine, I'll call Beckman." Sarah stabbed the 'End Message' screen before it went black on its own.
"Wow, Walk-Bartowski, you'd put me in the trunk after you knocked me out? How thoughtful."
"The least I could do, and a whole hell of a lot better than that carry-on I had to squirm out of that time."
Carina shrugged. "You're more flexible than me, and it saved you airfare, so I don't know what you're bitching about. Doubt I could do it today, Mrs. Domestic. It's supposed to be carry on, not forklift on."
"I am not fat!"
"You're fatter, and that's what matters."
"This is the way Chuck likes me."
"And whatever Chuck wants, Chuck gets?"
"Of course."
"So why aren't we riding to the rescue?"
"I have to disable the rocket launcher in the Matrix, and the self-destruct. The kids in this neighborhood are monsters."
Chuck woke up in darkness, felt his own breath. A hood, and not one with a thin strip in front that he could see out of, either. Tied to the chair like he was, he wasn't going to be taking it on his own either.
A man with a strong accent asked, "Who's this fella? I sent you lot out to bring me my Sheila back!"
A man with a Midwestern accent answered. "She was going into a house, boss. We figured she knew him, we could probably make a trade."
"How'd you figure?"
"We saw them talking. He was coming out, she was going in. He smiled at, he frowned a bit, and then he walked away like he'd been insulted."
"Yeah, he knows her all right. What's this?"
"His picture, boss. I took it while he was dazed from the crash. This way we don't have to take the bag off his head."
"But I like taking the bag off, the way their eyes bug out in fear—!"
"I know you do, boss, but remember, Americans do those things on TV for dramatic moments, not because they make sense. You take the bag off, we have to kill him, and we don't want to kill him."
The boss sighed. "No, I suppose not. Good thinking. This whole operation was supposed to be under the radar. Damn that Sheila for mucking it up!"
"Damn Sheila."
"Don't you talk that way about my wife!" Flesh hit flesh. "Now go establish a perimeter, or whatever it is you guard types do."
Chuck heard lots of feet in motion away from him, and a chair being drawn closer. Someone was sitting in front of him and it didn't take a genius to figure out who. He kept his head down, in case the bag came off by accident. "You shouldn't have hit him, you know, he was just following orders."
"It was an oath, not an instruction."
Chuck shrugged. "Thanks for not wanting to kill me."
"No worries, mate. It's her I'm after, but the boys are right, she'd have been too hard to grab. You know my little woman, then?"
Chuck shrugged. "A little, She's really my wife's friend, but after what she said today, I don't know how long that'll last."
Accent-man laughed. "She's got a razor tongue, doesn't she?"
"You sound like you approve."
"A razor tongue can be useful, in my line of work, as long as I keep it pointed at someone else."
"And when there's no one else around?"
"I wasn't plannin' on makin' conversation, mate."
Trophy, distraction, bedwarmer. No wonder Carina had such a low opinion of marriage. "Perhaps if you'd talked to her more you wouldn't be in the trouble you're in."
Accent-man's voice got rock hard. "And what do you know about the trouble I'm in?"
It was a lot easier to put up a brave front when he couldn't see all the blustering. "Kidnapping random strangers isn't most people's default reaction to a parking ticket, 'mate.' She either is or has something you want back."
"Yer a smart one, ain't ya? Yeah, I want her back. You're right I should have talked to her more but…I wanted her to love me for me, not let a little thing like my job get in the way of it. You know?"
"So you lied to her, got her to marry you under false pretenses, not to mention the wedding night—" no way Carina would pass up a chance at a wedding night "—hoping that all this water under the bridge would help her choke down the fact that you commit crimes on a major scale for a living? Is that about right?"
"You know, put that way it sounds kind of dumb."
"Believe me, baggage like that they want to know about beforehand. It's not exactly carry-on, is it? She'd have to rent a forklift to get that down the aisle."
"Yeah, well, it's the baggage I'm after. I gave that girl everything, everything! The keys to my castle. And what does she do but take the first thing she can carry out of my vault and high-tail it to Witness Protection!"
"Ah, so you want it and her to come back before she does something she can't back out of."
"I can't lose her, mate, I just can't. You seem like a nice guy and all, and I'm really hoping I don't have to torture you, but you have to understand my position here!"
Boy did he. "I know exactly what you're going through. You have my complete sympathy."
"Wish me luck, then?"
Sure. "Good luck." For all the good it'll do you.
A heavy hand clapped Chuck on the shoulder, almost knocking him out of the chair he was tied to. "Thanks, mate." A brief pause. "I hate these stupid phones, my fingers are too big for the numbers. There we go." Another brief pause. "Hello, smooshie?"
A/N2 Yes, I stole the Witness Protection idea from Armadilloi's Lies of Omission. Sue me.
