"You didn't tell us we were looking for your nephew," Darien began, swinging into his preferred chair in front of The Official's desk.
"You didn't need to know," The Official replied.
"If you'd told us, we could have gone straight to your sister's house, told her who we were and gone through all that a lot faster," Darien persisted, and was surprised when Hobbes actually supported him.
"And Fawkes might have avoided getting bitten," Hobbes supplied.
"Getting bitten by a dog was your own fault," The Official said, just as if he'd been there and seen the whole thing, "And if you'd told her you were working for me, Mary would probably have thrown you out."
"About that," Hobbes ventured, "That thing with the dolls. What kinda brother does that?"
"You obviously never had a little sister," The Official replied flatly.
Darien shook his head, "I can't believe your parents had you, looked at that and went 'yeah sure, let's have another.'"
"For your information, I was an adorable baby," The Official said.
"I doubt that," Darien remarked.
"It's true," Eberts interjected, having returned from taming the tinsel, "I've seen his baby pictures."
"Shut up, Eberts!" The Official demanded, before Eberts might offer to show Darien and Hobbes those pictures, which he probably kept in a filing cabinet somewhere.
Darien tried to picture The Official as an adorable baby. Failing at that, he tried to picture The Official as a baby. Realizing his normally expansive imagination could not manage this, he gave up and admitted to himself that -to him- The Official would never be anything other than a middle-aged bureaucrat in a cheap suit sitting behind a desk and denying Hobbes a raise and Darien his freedom.
"Just so we're clear," Darien said, changing the subject, "You did call off the detective, right?"
"What detective?" The Official asked, but there was a merry twinkle in his beady eyes that said he knew exactly what detective, and Darien was unhappy to find that set his mind at ease on the matter.
To his further displeasure, Darien found, creeping into his imagination unbidden, an image of The Official all dressed in red with white fur trim, an enormous beard and crimson cap; beside him loyal Eberts dressed as an elf all in green and carrying a sack over his shoulder the size of himself, in which -no doubt- were a number of the Agency skeletons that Eberts so industriously hid in closets.
Hobbes, clearly not troubled by any such visions, asked another question, "I don't suppose you have any idea who would want to kidnap your nephew?"
"Very few people know he's my nephew," The Official replied stonily, "And I prefer to keep it that way, otherwise the answer to that question would become 'yes.'"
"Ah," Hobbes said, taking the hint with a nod, "Of course."
"But you understand, now, how important this is," The Official said, his voice gaining a threatening edge, "I want that boy found and returned to his mother in the same condition he was stolen in."
Across Darien's mind, there flitted a question as to whether they were to put a dirty diaper on the baby if his diaper had been dirty at the time he was stolen, but he figured if he wanted any counter-agent for Christmas that was something he was better off not asking.
"If you don't find this child," The Official continued menacingly, "You'll be fired so fast it'll make Superman look like a taxi in New York during rush hour, and I don't have to tell you that neither of you could get a job as dishwashers if that happened."
"No sir, you don't," Hobbes agreed, standing up to go, "We'll find Nicky in no time, right, Fawkes?"
"Well it might take some time," Darien replied, getting up more sedately, "After all, we won't get very far if we go around violating traffic laws."
The Official gave him a hooded glare, but Darien for some reason felt less threatened than he had earlier. Maybe it was his recent altercation with something that had real teeth. Maybe it was that he was annoyed that The Official had made him put in more work than was absolutely necessary. Maybe it was just that now he could see -or imagined he could see- a faint hue of fear in the small eyes of his boss.
His conscience roused itself, which annoyed him. As was ever the case when The Official's power was in some way diminished and vulnerability showed itself, Darien failed to be as cold-blooded as he always wanted to imagine himself to be. Despite his unwonted position here, he'd feel compelled to act to The Official's advantage, and restore the balance of power. The Official was now showing weakness, and Darien was stirred to pretend not to notice, and not to lord it over his unloved and unwanted employer, who was often a great deal more like a master than a mere boss, and a miserly one at that.
"We'll find Nicholas," Darien heard himself say almost against his will, "And we'll bring him home."
It was neither the first, nor the last time Darien would come to The Official's aid for a reason greater than his own self-interest, and The Official had never failed to recognize it before. By the slight narrowing of his eyes as anticipated a final line of mockery and then their widening when it did not come, it was clear The Official had recognized it and was -as ever- surprised.
The Official, Darien would bet money, was seldom troubled by a conscience.
Considering where his conscience had gotten him so far, Darien felt that morality was overrated, and whoever had invented that inexplicable sense of right and wrong ought to have been shot. Not in the heart or in the head, but maybe in the hand or something, just to give them an idea of what sort of torment that sort of invention was apt to inflict upon a youngster who was a rebellious thief at heart.
Ever it was clear to him that those without conscience seemed to get the better deal, for they inevitably landed in power, whereas everyone else got arrested, experimented on and used to find family members that didn't belong to them just when everyone else was getting to take a holiday.
Of course, the lively conscience in Darien's soul cheerfully went about its work, pointing out to him that the majority of that wouldn't have happened if he'd just been a nice, law-abiding citizen in the first place and not gone about robbing people's houses. Perhaps the worst part of his undesired job was the fact that it seemed to be making his conscience louder and more articulate by the day. He hated it.
There was nothing for it but to follow Hobbes out of The Official's office, down the hall, out the door, down the sidewalk and to the parking space where Hobbes had left his van, even as Darien's conscience continued to bang around in his head, finding things to scold him about.
"So," Darien ventured, more to distract himself from unwonted introspection than anything, "I guess now we look into the babysitter and housekeeper, since those are the only leads we have."
"Wrong!" Hobbes said, slamming the driver's side door, "We have a better one."
"We do?" Darien asked, his mind scrambling, "Did I miss something?"
"Didn't you hear Mrs. Shepherd when she called off her dog?" Hobbes asked sharply.
"I guess so," Darien replied, "Why?"
"Well I guess not, my friend," Hobbes told him, "Otherwise, you'd have the same idea I do."
"Hobbes, and I mean this as nicely as possible, I have probably never once in my entire life had the same ideas as you have," Darien said flatly.
"When she called off that mutt," Hobbes persisted, "She didn't say 'no' or 'drop it' or 'leave it' or 'bad dog' or anything a normal person would say."
"No?"
"No," Hobbes replied, "She said 'aus.' Not 'out', 'aus.'"
Darien shook his head, not comprehending, "So?"
"So, that's German," Hobbes said, "She sound German to you?"
"I don't see the point," Darien confessed.
"The only people who'd teach commands like that are Germans, handlers of German imports and people who've had direct experience with military dogs."
"So?"
"That dog's too young to have come pre-trained, and the way she addressed it with even trying to pull it off you smacks of field experience," Hobbes said, "That innocent housewife act is just that. Our lovely Mrs. Shepherd is hiding something."
"Well," Darien sighed, "Maybe she's related to The Official after all."
"That's what my gut's tellin' me," Hobbes concluded, "How 'bout you?"
"Mine," Darien said, then paused thoughtfully for a second, "Mine's tellin' me we should've had lunch half an hour ago."
"No time for lunch," Hobbes insisted, then relented, "We'll get some tacos on the way or somethin'."
Even though Hobbes had found a good lead as to why Nicky might have been kidnapped, the matter of whodunnit remained. Citing this and the fact that the contact he had in military intelligence was "shy," Hobbes dropped Darien off at the strip mall where the agency the babysitter had been hired from was based. Darien suspected that Hobbes; "shy" contact probably hated him and would likely drop a healthy layer of personal abuse on top of him before giving him any useful information, and Hobbes' pride made him want to keep Darien from witnessing that.
Darien was always keen on knowing more about Hobbes' past, not only because he was so darn fun to pick on but also because each bit of knowledge Darien acquired allowed him to work that much more effectively with (or against, should the notion hit) his partner. Of course, at this point there wasn't much of relevance that he didn't know. Hobbes was paranoid yes, but he was also a damned good spy and only an idiot with a death wish would take him on in hand-to-hand or weapons combat. Some people might disagree with Darien's assessment, but most of the ones who failed to take Hobbes seriously lived to regret it only because underneath that damaged exterior in dire need of medication was a genuinely nice guy. Not that Hobbes wanted anyone to know that, or that Darien would admit it aloud.
In any case, Hobbes had overruled Darien's every argument that he be allowed to come to the secret meeting too with the simple fact that they had very little time to find this kid. So they'd split up.
Despite its being the middle of December, the temperature at this particular location was in the high fifties, with a lazy wind that seemed unsure of which way it should be blowing. One thing Darien liked about this area was that its winters were somewhere between late and nonexistent and much of the time the only snowmen he saw were of the plastic variety. Darien and cold had never been on particularly good terms and if he wanted snow, he could go on a skiing trip rather than actually live with the stuff.
The strip mall was decked out in its holiday best, including a Mexican restaurant with colorfully stereotypical chili pepper light strings. Of course, this wasn't a high class area, and the decorations were mostly cheap and entirely nailed down so there was no easy way for anyone to steal them.
Darien had never understood the whole 'stealing plastic reindeer' thing. Christmas decorations were generally cheap, not rare and a pain in the ass to transport because they were often big and cumbersome. But there were statistics on the number of snowmen stolen from a given area every year, like there was some sort of worldwide competition for stealing Christmas decorations. There were also the graffiti artists and various other pranksters who set forth in force every holiday season to make a general mess of things, as if destruction and the consequential misery of others was the only thing they knew how to celebrate. Darien liked to think he was a classier criminal than that. He liked to act out and buck authority as much as the next guy, but tormenting the neighbors and unwitting shopkeepers didn't really make a great deal of sense to him.
He hadn't been paying attention at the time Mrs. Shepherd had said which babysitting agency she'd used, but even if there had been more than one agency at this mall, Darien would still have been able to guess that Away in a Manger Sitters and Daycare Center was the one she'd used.
"You've got to be kidding me," Darien muttered to himself, looking at the sign.
