VIII.

Blair could fix this. He really could. Not completely, you never got back anything completely, but with just a bit of luck...

Waiting around a hospital was never fun, but it was a lot less horrible when nobody was close to dying, the bad guy seemed more stupid than anything, and you had a shot at making nearly everything all right.

It was great about Bob. He probably wouldn't be using the rotary torso machine in the HQ gym for a while, but there was no reason to think he wouldn't make a full recovery. The doc had even said he could be released the next day, and able to fly immediately if he felt up to it, provided he was checked out by his own doctor in Cascade upon arrival.

Chris and his men had dispersed pretty quickly after Jim gave the okay for them to assume custody of Vin, in part to find out whether there was any precedent for the sort of search they wanted to conduct. At around 4 p.m., Chris Larabee and Vin Tanner reappeared to check up on Farnum and offer them a ride somewhere. Right, they had no car. No bed for the night, either, though that was the sort of thing which was pretty solvable.

A quick phone call got them a night at the Holiday Inn nearest the airport; might as well stay someplace with a courtesy van, though they hadn't yet decided whether they'd leave the next day or wait with Bob in case he wasn't up to traveling right away. Jim collected his cane and the four of them started back to the hospital garage, matching their pace to Jim's. A bit of a reversal after years of being left in Jim's dust.

Coming out of the elevator on the garage's third level, Jim stopped short and hissed, "He's here!"

Vin took off. Of course. Blair sprinted after him and reached Larabee's Suburban a second behind Vin. Nobody was in sight.

Chris Larabee trotted up. "Was Vassiconelli coming or going?"

"Don't know," replied Vin.

Jim, leaning heaving on his can again, rounded the corner. "Don't touch your vehicle!"

"Believe it or not, Ellison, they don't give you a lobotomy when you join the ATF," Larabee said, sounding more amused than anything.

"Well, why should you guys be different than the FBI?" Jim responded.

Jim circled the vehicle slowly, looking and sniffing. Blair wondered whether Jim could BE more obvious, but Larabee and Tanner didn't comment. "It's not explosives," Jim said. "And I don't smell brake fluid."

"No puddle," said Tanner. "They don't blind us when we join up, neither."

"Maybe he was just planning on ambushing us," said Blair.

"Fits his MO," agreed Jim.

Still, Larabee insisted the others stay back a ways when he started up. No boom.

So the question became, what should they do next? Suddenly staying in a motel didn't seem to be in the best interest of public safety.

"What about the ranch?" Vin suggested.

"I was planning on asking a few of the boys to come out, keep us company overnight," said Chris. "It'd be pretty crowded."

"Cowboy, I trust you to get out of town without a tail, assuming Vassiconelli hasn't figured out where you live already, but, come on, BUCK? Or JD? Or the two of them driving together? Or Josiah, if he gets into his CD?"

"Point taken," said Chris.

"You really live on a ranch?" asked Blair.

Jim shot him his 'you're embarrassing me' look, but asked, "You mind a few more houseguests? Wouldn't make you uneasy to have the prosecution's star witness under your roof?"

Larabee laughed. "Maybe, but I was thinking of sticking y'all out in the barn."

"Barn??" And now Blair realized he probably did sound like an eight-year-old.

"It's neat," said Vin. "From the loft, you can surveil out these cracks for miles. Much better than the house for that sort of thing."

In the end, Jim took one look at the ladder heading up to the loft and shook his head. "I might get up that thing, but I'd kill myself getting down, particularly if I was in any sort of a hurry. Chris, do you have room for all of us inside?"

"It's okay, Blair and I will stay out here," said Vin. Sounded great to Blair.

"No way in hell," said Jim.

Right, Jim. "What's he going to do, push me over the edge? Put a pitchfork through my stomach? STRANGLE me?"

Blair turned to Vin. "Sure, let's camp out out here. It'll give us a chance to connect, like we should've back then."

Jim scowled, but turned and headed for the house.


Company for dinner at least meant that Chris was able to clear some things out of the refrigerator before heading out of town. Afterwards, the kids - somehow, Blair Sandburg kept bringing out the juvenile in Vin - loaded up on munchies and sleeping gear for their slumber party out in the barn.

Before they headed out the door, Ellison drew Sandburg aside. Obviously not caring that Chris was but a few feet away, he said, "Be alert, chief. And I don't mean for Vassiconelli."

"You'd be having a fit if you didn't think Vin was innocent," said Blair. "I trust your instincts."

"Yeah, well, remember our track record."

Blair nodded. "Gotcha," he said.


To Vin's disappointment, Chris had already had Yosemite Smith come and get the horses. But their smell was - well, it defined the space, you might say.

Blair took a deep breath. "Wow, this is pretty intense. Jim would have been miserable spending the night out here, even if he could have handled the ladder."

Vin perched at one of the half-foot-wide slits that faced toward the main road some 200 yards away. Between several stands of trees and the uneven terrain, only a bit of road was visible, it turned out, though the view of the hills beyond was impressive, for all the good that did them. "Eli Joe comes in without lights, we'll never see him once it's full dark," he said.

"Think we'd hear a car?"

A pickup truck passed silently into and out of view, its lights already on. "That'd be a 'no'," said Vin, staying put at the slit.

"Then lets hope he hasn't been able to trace Chris," said Blair.

"Took him long enough to find me," said Vin with a shrug. "I think, if your - if Ellison was really worried, he'd be the guy keeping watch, ladder or no ladder."

Blair nodded, conceding the point.

"What - how ARE you and that guy connected, anyhow? You're not with the Cascade PD, right? You're some sort of student?"

"Yeah, well, not anymore. I was working on my doctorate at Rainier," said Blair. "I was researching the culture of urban police departments and Jim let me tag along with him."

"So you've known him a couple of months?"

"Sort of. I started in, uh, 1996."

"And you rode along for a spell?"

"Actually, I've never really stopped, though Jim's been on desk duty since getting shot."

"Some ride-along," said Vin.

"Yeah."

"So you're, whatchacallit, writing things up now?"

Blair shook his head. "Things sort of went to hell with grad school, with all that mess last month you saw in the media. I'm thinking of joining the force."

"Huh." Sandburg didn't look like a cop, and even less like Ellison. "Pardon me for saying this, but I can't see you and Ellison riding together for a couple of years without killing each other."

Blair chuckled. "It's been mostly good, really. Jim's just having a rough time right now. He's always healed really quickly, but the bullet did some real damage, and Jim won't stay off it long enough to let it heal properly."

Vin nodded and refocused on the road.

"No, really," Blair said behind him. "Jim's a great guy. He's not always so..."

"Seems like a pain in the ass to me." And, he had to say it. "Don't think I could work with him."

Blair laughed. "Actually, he's okay with the long-haired look. Just wishes my hair wouldn't clog the drains."

Did that mean, what? Sandburg and Ellison lived together? "I took over his spare room just after I started my field work," said Blair, not waiting for Vin to figure out how to form the question. "My old place blew up, and it ended up being really convenient, what with the hours Jim keeps."

A great way of answering "no" without Vin having to ask. Still, Vin had to say it. "You know, you have other options. If you, you know, don't want to keep, uh, the spare room thing going. Might not look so from the inside, but it's always true."

"Vin, look at me," said Blair, and so he did, wondering if he was going to get punched. "I'm not an abused lover, I'm a long-suffering best friend. There's a difference."

Vin nodded. "Okay, we're square," he said.

"And I'm not alone with the hard-ass friend," said Blair. "Larabee seems like he could be a challenge."

"True enough," said Vin, chuckling. "He tries, though. But I wouldn't really call him a friend." Well, actually, he would. "More like, I'm trying to be a friend, but it ain't always clear he has much room for them."

"He seems pretty tight with Wilmington," Blair observed.

"More like, Buck's tight with him," said Vin. "Chris, he just doesn't trust Buck not to screw up the big stuff."

"Really? And does Buck?"

"Not that I've ever noticed," said Vin.

"Jim, he's got his trust issues too," said Blair. "It's what it all comes down to, I think. He has a hard time believing people aren't going to stab him in the back."

"Happen a lot?"

"Enough," said Blair. "And we aren't always on the same page, so there's times he goes all, well, insecure. And then there's no talking to him until whatever we're working on settles down."

"No talking?" He'd only known Sandburg, what, two days? But he couldn't imagine him quiet.

"Okay, so I keep at him. Because silence isn't what he needs."

"Doesn't seem right, that it's all about what he needs," said Vin.

"It isn't, always. And I was going for my degree, right? So I've had external motivation."

"But now, the degree, it's not going to happen, right?"

Blair sighed. "It's complicated."

"But it comes down to, you told the truth and you got screwed."

"Truth? No way, man, I made the whole thing up."

"Like I said earlier, they don't blind us when we join up."

"I'm not going to say that Jim isn't very good at what he does. I never said that he doesn't use everything when he's doing his job. But he doesn't have any super powers or anything. There's nothing he does that I couldn't do, if I had the focus and training."

Yeah, and Vin was a closet mathematician. "You sure you're looking all your options?"

"For the last time. We're not a couple. I'm not doing anything I don't want to be doing. And I'm profoundly grateful that Jim is out here with me, and has thrown himself behind trying to get this whole thing with you and Eli Joe straightened out. It didn't have to be him traveling with me and Farnum, but it WOULDN'T have been anyone else, ever."

Okay, they were definitely a couple, but a couple of WHAT, that was the question.


Chris Larabee considered himself a pretty decent chess player - he'd never bothered with the USCF rating system in years, but that was because he'd just been too busy to play the right games against the right people when he'd had a family, and these past few years it hadn't seemed worth the bother.

Ellison mopped up the board with him.

The first time, well, Chris wasn't really paying attention and then he'd lost his queen and a rook in rapid succession. That didn't work as an excuse for the second game. Damn, but he was rusty.

"Play a lot?" Chris asked as he put the pieces in their box on top of the folded board. Where was his good, wooden set, anyway?

"Some. Mostly against Sandburg."

"Really? You spend off time with him?"

Jim looked incredulous. "We've shared a condo for a couple of years. It would be hard not to spend time with him!"

"You two just don't seem very close."

Ellison sat up even straighter than before. "I'd say he's like a brother to me, that would be completely inadequate."

Chris shrugged. "It just looked like he bugged the hell out of you, and I could sort of see how."

Like he'd expected, this got a rise out of Ellison. "Did you SEE how he reacted this morning?" he close to hissed. "Who could have done better?"

"Then what's the problem?" Chris asked.

"Who says there's a problem?"

"I heard you warning him to be careful of Vin before they headed out to the barn. That just sounded a bit..." 'Patronizing', but he didn't know Ellison well enough to say it.

"You wouldn't have done the same for one of your men?"

"Wouldn't have had to."

"You wouldn't have had reservations about a friend, then, going out there with a guy who he might end up putting away for murder?"

Chris tried to imagine Buck, or Vin for that matter, being in a similar position. "I probably couldn't get away with being so obvious."

Jim laughed. "Blair and I stopped worrying about stomping on each other's feelings long ago."

As he had stopped worrying about offending Buck. But he didn't take it as a sign of closeness on their part. He also didn't worry too much about being frank with Vin, but that was more because Vin didn't force him to be any other way.


Blair got tired of staring into the dark before Vin did. "Think we should trade off keeping watch?" he asked.

Vin shook his head. "If I need to, I can sleep light. Since we'll hear Eli Joe before we see him, I don't think we need to keep doing this." But he didn't budge from his crevice.

So Blair kept on looking. For, maybe, 20 seconds. "Promise, no pitchforks in the gut?"

"Don't want to get on the bad side of Jim Ellison," said Vin.

"Smart move," said Blair. He drank a swig of water, punched his pillow twice, pulled up the light polyester blanket he'd claimed out of Chris's linen closest, and sank into sleep.

He woke up twice during the night, both times from Vin talking to someone below. The first time, it was Larabee, and Blair played possum. The second time it was Jim, and Blair threw some hay down as his contribution to the conversation.