Chapter 7 - Fault Line
"Ben!" Meg called out, not loudly, but clearly enough for him to hear.
"He's down here. He's alive. He must have fallen or been pushed down the stairs." Fraser said. "Try the door. I imagine it's locked."
Meg ran back up the stairs and threw herself against the door. It was, in fact, locked.
"It's no good." she said. Do you think you can help me break it down?"
"No, I'm afraid I got a look at the hinges and the lock on the way in. It's a lot sturdier than that outside door. I don't know what they used to store down here, but we can't break it without some kind of ram."
"Don't you have matches, or anything?" Meg said.
Fraser thought. He didn't, but Ray might. But first he had to make sure that Ray was going to be all right.
"Hold on a moment." he said. He gently checked Ray's airway with his fingers, and when he was happy that there was no obstacle to Ray's breathing, he took off his shirt and rolled it up, placing it around Ray's head to keep it immobile and cushioned. Then he turned Ray onto his side to make sure he could keep breathing.
After that was done, he felt through Ray's jacket pockets, quickly finding a book of matches. He struck one of the matches and looked down to see a nasty bump on the side of Ray's head that accounted for his current state.
Just then, Ray stirred, his eyes blinking open.
"Oh, thank god." Fraser said. "Meg, he's conscious."
Meg was busy trying to get a signal with her cell phone to call for help. She made a frustrated sound. "Listen, we need to get out and get help for him." she said briskly. "He must have called you from upstairs, there's no reception here. We need to break down the door. Look around and see if there's anything we can use."
Ben was grateful for her taking charge. He had been shaken up by believing Ray was dead. He lit another match after the first one died, and with the flickering light, looked around.
"Augh. Headache." Ray said quietly. Fraser kept a hand on his shoulder, firmly but gently keeping him from trying to move.
"Sorry, Ray, it appears that you took quite a fall." he said. "We're looking for a way out."
"Loman." Ray groaned. "Pisser."
"Hmm." Fraser said. Well, Ray seemed cognitively perfectly fine, if not happy.
Fraser struck a third match. He was wasting them, but it had been worth it to hear Ray talk. He felt like the little match girl, conjuring miraculous visions out of the tiny light. Of course, she'd died alone in the cold, so perhaps that wasn't a productive line of thought. Lines of thought like, "What is that large cylindrical object over there, and could I use it to break in a door?" were better.
"Ray, I have to leave you for a moment. I'll be right here, but I have to see if we can't break the door down. Diefenbaker's right here by you. All right?"
"Uh. Yeah." Ray said. He wasn't exactly sure what was going on. He did know he'd been following a lead on Loman. He had no recollection of anything after leaving the station that morning. But he knew his head hurt like a bitch, his left arm felt like it was bent at the wrong angle and was sending stabbing messages of agony back in to central command, the wolf was lying cozied up to him like he needed some sort of canine nursemaid, and Benny was talking to him like he was in preschool, so it couldn't be great.
Fraser conserved matches, moving unerringly through the gloom to where he had seen something that looked like the right size and shape to do the job. He felt around it. It was apparently a discarded fire extinguisher, quite sizeable. He hefted it up. It was worth a try. Leverage would be difficult. And there was the small matter of a certain nagging injury. But they couldn't afford to wait to get Ray medical care. Who knew how long he'd been unconscious?
Fraser carried the extinguisher to the base of the stairs. He skirted carefully around where he knew Ray lay.
"Meg, could you please come down here and look after Ray? There's not room for both of us on to stay on the stairs while I try to break down the door. I found a fire extinguisher."
"Hmm. I don't think so." Meg said. "You give me the fire extinguisher, you stay with Ray, and I'll break the door down."
Her tone was openly authoritarian.
"I have greater upper body strength." Fraser argued.
"And you have a mess of stitches that you'll probably yank right out if you try."
Ray laughed. It wasn't a strong laugh, but it silenced the arguing couple.
"Benny, she's right, stop trying to be a gentleman and give her the damn thing." he said.
Diefenbaker chimed in with two short barks and a whining growl. Ray could swear it was just as if the wolf was agreeing that Fraser needed to stop trying to be a tough guy and let Meg get on with it. Hanging around with the Mountie was warping his brain.
"Oh." Fraser said. Somehow he felt that this was a portentous moment. It was possible that any time he tried to do anything even moderately risky in the future, he'd have his lover and his best friend and his wolf allied against him implacably. But at least that meant they were all getting along. What a strange situation it was. He passed the fire extinguisher up to Meg and went back to sit next to Ray.
Meg swung the fire extinguisher against the door in an awkward arc. It hit with a hollow thud that wasn't pleasant to hear, especially not for Ray who felt like his head might as well be between the extinguisher and the door. The next swing caught it closer to the lock, and the swing after brought a splintering sound along with the thud.
This chorus of noise was joined by the blessed sound of sirens.
"Welsh must have found us." Fraser said, "You'll be out of here soon, Ray."
"Yeah, and then someone can tell me how I got in here."
With a final crash and clatter, the door tore loose from the lock and Meg kicked it part way open. The muted light from above shone into the basement.
Footsteps came toward the door. Meg peered around it and then pulled back, flattening against the wall.
"Loman," she hissed. "And the girl."
Fraser was up the stairs quickly and quietly within seconds. The arrival of the police must have driven the fleeing Loman back into the building. If he was armed, they had a potential hostage situation. More to the point, they were potentially hostages.
Fraser poked his head around the door quickly. Loman had his back to the door, fortunately, or he'd have noticed they'd broken it open. He was arguing with the bleached blonde girl that Fraser recognized as Camilla Dawson.
"Rush them?" Thatcher whispered in his ear.
"On three." Fraser agreed. It wasn't a great plan, but with Ray Vecchio in need of urgent medical care, they didn't have time for the situation to devolve into a standoff. Thatcher considered telling him to take the girl down, she'd get Loman. After all, Loman tried to have her killed. But that would end up in a time-wasting argument.
"One, two, three." Fraser said, and with that they charged forward. Loman turned, but he didn't have time to draw his weapon before Fraser was on him. Meg wasted no time punching Camilla in the jaw. Camilla collapsed weakly, holding her jaw and crawling away from the fray as Meg grabbed Loman from behind.
"I've got him." she said. She was not about to tolerate Fraser getting hurt again, even if Loman was old enough to be his father, and not nearly as strong as Fraser. There was some irony in the fact that the man who'd caused them so much harm was neither physically imposing, nor, without the protection of money and status, much of a threatening presence at all.
Fraser wished he were in uniform. The lanyard would have come in handy. But bizarrely enough, even on the run Loman was wearing a tie. Fraser unknotted it quickly and bound his hands behind his back.
"Police! Come out slowly with your hands where we can see them." A voice boomed from outside.
"Go on then." Meg said to Camilla, not too unkindly, helping her to her feet. The girl wasn't really guilty of anything but bad judgement. Fraser grabbed Loman and dragged him upright and pushed him out of the building. Too bad the police couldn't see Loman's hands. Probably they wouldn't shoot him, Fraser thought, the vengeful feeling surprising him. Loman should never have threatened Meg's life.
Uniformed police placed Loman under arrest, replacing the necktie with handcuffs. Fraser told them that there was an injured Chicago PD detective in the building, in need of assistance. Then he turned and ran back in. He'd left Ray with no-one watching over him but Diefenbaker for too long for his comfort. It didn't take long to reach Ray's side again.
Meg climbed down the stairs and sat beside Fraser. At least this time it wasn't him bleeding out, and Ray seemed lucid and so far wasn't complaining of other injuries, although she could see that Ben was still worried about the detective.
His fault. Fraser was pretty sure that Ray was lying at the bottom of some stairs, with a nasty looking bump on the head, waiting for an ambulance, because he'd let him down.
Not his fault. Ray could tell just from the quality of the silence that surrounded Fraser that the Mountie was off on a wave of guilt and self-loathing. It didn't take much for him to blame himself. It wasn't his fault that Ray had - well, Ray was pretty sure, he couldn't remember, but he was pretty sure it wasn't Fraser's fault that he was here. He did remember the reasons why he'd gone out alone, and although Fraser's sabbatical was one thing, Ray knew he could have had Welsh assign him someone to go along when he left the station to look for Camilla that morning. But he'd been in too much of a hurry.
"Benny, it's not your fault." he said.
Meg looked surprised. Did Vecchio really think Ben was blaming himself for the situation? As far as she could tell, Vecchio had rushed in heedlessly and got himself into this mess. Not that she didn't feel for him, but how could it be Ben's fault?
"Well, Ray, I don't quite see it that way." Fraser said. "I'm your partner. I'm supposed to be there for you." He wasn't ready to tell Ray that they'd thought he was dead. But Ray could hear something grim in his voice.
"What happened?" he demanded. "What actually happened?"
"You went to see the girl's mother." Meg said. "She sent you here but she called her daughter and it was an ambush. When Ben tracked you to the mother, the daughter had told her that you were-"
She didn't get the last word out, because Fraser made a choking sound and grabbed her hand, squeezing it.
"Dead, huh?" Ray said, laconically. "Well, I'm not. Benny, I'm fine, and it sounds like it was my own damn stupid fault. It sounds like I walked right into this one!"
There was a commotion at the top of the stairs, and then Welsh's voice.
"I agree, Detective. Next time, you call for back up, and you wait for it to arrive. That would also apply to certain Canadians I see here. You all want to rush off heroically and get yourselves killed, go do it in Canada."
He came down and squatted beside Vecchio. "Anything broken except your thick skull, Detective?"
"Eh. I wouldn't want to say." Ray said. He was pretty sure his left arm was. But Fraser wasn't the only one who could conceal pain. Let the paramedics sort it when they got there. "How'd you find us?"
"You got lucky. Those Feds who you've been pissing and moaning about were not too pleased that you'd taken off to follow a lead without informing them this morning. As usual, you left paperwork all over your desk. Whitman found the bank record you dug up yesterday. I heard an earful about that, Detective. We'll talk about that later. Anyway, while you hit the pavement, Thoreau and Whitman hit some kind of national database, found the address where the girl and her mother were living. They had the decency to let me know that before they lit out after you." Welsh's voice was decidedly acid, but evidently softened with some regard for the state of his detective's head.
"They saw Constable Fraser and Inspector Thatcher questioning the girl's mother. When these two came in here and didn't come out, Whitman called me for backup." He did not tell them how relieved he'd been to receive that call, coming on the heels of Fraser's disturbing call suggesting Ray was in danger. All told, he wasn't very happy with either the detective or the Mountie for rushing headlong into this one, but at least, thank god, Vecchio wasn't too badly hurt.
"Sorry, Vecchio, the Feds are probably going to get the credit for the Loman collar, even though it was your legwork." Welsh concluded. "But hell, I'm glad enough to see the back of them that I might not remember to stay mad at you for coming in here alone."
As the paramedics came downstairs to take care of Ray, Welsh pulled Thatcher aside.
"Does Constable Fraser need to get checked out? Ray told me he was having a rough recovery."
Thatcher smiled at the concern in the Lieutenant's gravelly voice.
"No, I think he's all right. He also has exceptionally sharp hearing, so I know he can hear me now when I tell you that if he does anything to so much as tug one stitch loose in the next week, he'll have to answer to me, and I won't be pleased."
Welsh broke into a grin. Wow. She could still muster the dragon lady voice for the Constable as a romantic partner. He wasn't sure if he envied the young man or pitied him; either way their relationship shouldn't be devoid of fireworks of one sort or another.
Sitting in the hospital waiting room while Ray was taken care of, Fraser leaned back against Meg. A nurse had given him a blanket, since he had used his shirt as a pillow for Ray's head, he was now clad only in a thin sleeveless undershirt over his jeans, and he held the blanket close around him against the cool air conditioning. Diefenbaker was curled under his seat, not supposed to be there, but no one was going to point it out.
"He's really going to be all right, isn't he?"
"Yes, sweetheart." Meg hardly realized the endearment she'd used. It just came naturally. "He's going to be fine. We got there in time."
"But I should have been with him."
"You can't change what happened. It's all right. Everything's going to be all right."
Who had ever held Benton Fraser and told him that? No one in a very, very long time. He closed his eyes and felt the soft touch of her hands stroking his shoulders soothingly. He had this, but because of this, he hadn't been there for Ray, and Ray had nearly died. He wondered if he could ever do enough to deserve to be loved. All he had loved, he lost. Those he loved got hurt. He had Meg's comfort, but could he afford the cost? What would be taken from him?
"Everything's going to be all right. I'll make sure of that. Trust me." Meg said, softly, into his ear. She knew that after this there was no way that he could sit out a couple of months on the sidelines. Even though Ray Vecchio would be off active duty a while, the minute he was back out on the streets, Ben would need to be there with him. Which meant it was time for her to figure out what her side of the bargain was. She'd said she'd fight for their -their love, she admitted to herself, it was love - and now it was time to follow through.
Author's Note: Hope that was worth the wait. There is one more chapter to go, in which there may very well be a happy ending. Thanks for reading, and as always, thanks so much for the constructive feedback.
