The camera caught everything.
At first there's almost 10 minutes of nothing but empty warehouse. Kate pushes fast forward, her fingers shaking, and then, abruptly, there they are. The blood leaves her head all at once as she and Castle appear, walking away from the camera. She has her gun trained on Bauchman, and Castle is behind her, less than an arm's length away.
Almost immediately all hell breaks loose. Bachman jerks back, hit by a bullet from an unseen gun. He slides down the wall, his hands empty, Castle still standing, as nearly simultaneously Kate-on-the-video drops bonelessly to the ground, Castle grabbing her arm.
Kate sinks to her living room floor, lightheaded, as the scene on TV becomes surreal. It's like a movie, men dressed like ninjas appearing from nowhere, dragging Castle away from her, turning him to the entrance, unwitting facing him directly at the camera.
There's a roaring in her ears. She's on her knees in front of the TV, the floor unsteady beneath her, gripping the edge of the table so she won't collapse.
She watches Castle's face as they shoot him, how he mostly seems surprised, even as he loses consciousness. She watches his blood spread across the floor, creeping towards her own out-flung hand.
As if from far away Kate hears Ryan calling her name. She senses Esposito moving up beside her right before the screen clicks to black, and with a rush and start she comes back to herself.
"What are you doing?" She reaches for the start button but Esposito grabs her wrist.
"Beckett, no, that's enough." Esposito is faintly green under his sudden pallor.
"We'll watch the rest," Ryan adds, and Kate turns at the break in his voice. His eyes are wet, and her heart thumps, hard, at how much they love her. At how much they loved Castle.
"No." She shakes her head, her words trapped, unable to explain that nothing is stopping her now. "Play the rest."
The picture on the screen has faded to static but Kate can't move.
She feels tilted, twisted, the very taste of the air different, as everything she thought she knew is blasted into bits, the debris settling around her in a new pattern, a new reality where Castle wasn't killed by a cornered and panicked suspect. A world where Castle was targeted, taken out.
"Holy shit." Ryan keeps swearing. "Holy, holy shit."
"Maybe…" Kate can barely scrape the words out. She's afraid to articulate the thought nudging at edge of her consciousness. It's an idea too dangerous even to think, because it can't really be true. "The men who shot him… they were trying to save him… maybe he wasn't…" Her throat sticks around the very impossibility.
"We don't know he's not dead," Esposito croaks out. Kate can't tell if he's talking to her or himself. "We just know he didn't die the way we thought."
"I know. I just…" Kate tastes salt along her lip and realizes she's crying. She absently pushes at the tears, and even the pads of her fingers against her check are too rough in this hard, glaring reality where someone took Castle from her on purpose.
Her vision is blurring, but it doesn't block the images of Castle falling to the ground, inches from her own prone body. Castle being surrounded by men in black, men who administer medical attention immediately, only to melt into thin air when she begins to move.
"I wasn't in a fugue state." The thought hits her with a cold shock of clarity. It was hard to see on the grainy footage, but she'd grabbed her neck right before she'd dropped to the floor.
Castle had half caught her, but one of the men in black jerked him away. She'd watched him try to hold on to her deadweight, her body heavy and unresponsive.
She was unconscious before Castle was shot.
"I must have been drugged. I didn't just black out." She hadn't blacked out. Kate doubles over, her forehead to her knees, the relief hitting her so hard she can barely breathe. Her throat burns with a fresh surge of tears because maybe, maybe, it isn't all her fault.
It isn't her fault that she doesn't remember the bullets tearing into Castle. It isn't her own hateful frailty that left Castle alone to pass out from pain and blood loss on that cold warehouse floor. She'd failed to stop him from being shot because someone had purposefully taken her out first.
Kate slowly sits up and pushes her hair off her face. The floor is hard against her knees and ankles, sharp points of pain that help to clear her mind, narrow her focus.
Castle would've loved this case, its mystery, the twists and turns, how the whole picture, the very landscape of the puzzle has altered.
Everything looks different when the perspective changes from grief to revenge.
"Okay, okay." Esposito is pacing back and forth in front of her couch. "We need to take this to Gates."
"No." Kate shakes her head, adamant.
"What?"
"Beckett…" Ryan sounds sick.
"She'll never let me keep the case."
"And that's a bad thing?" Esposito looks incredulous and Ryan is staring at her the way he did last spring, right before she forced him to choose between loyalty and her life. She knows what they're thinking, but this isn't like before. Except…
"I know you're thinking this is like my mother." Kate clenches her hands and closes her eyes to see a man in black spinning Castle around to take a bullet to the chest. She opens them again. "And maybe it is. But you know what? I wasn't wrong then, either. I was right, and look, I don't know what's going on." She tries to pull in air without her breath hitching. If only she can stop crying she might be able to convince them. "But this goes deep. We don't know who's involved, we need to keep this to ourselves."
Esposito shakes his head. "This doesn't make sense. Nothing on that tape makes any sense."
"They were after, Castle, Espo. The whole thing was a setup. They wanted us in that warehouse." It's so clear now, the inconsistencies, the lack of information, Kate doesn't understand how she didn't see this from the beginning.
"Why would they want you in the warehouse? I don't understand." Esposito sounds bewildered, lost, finally confronted with evidence he can't rationalize away. He grips her wrist, his fingers too tight. "Why would anyone want to kill Castle?"
Kate is silent, the truth suddenly breaking over her. So obvious.
This case is like her mother's. Just like her mother's. Because it's still the same case.
Her entire stomach is inverting, trying to turn itself inside out, and she can feel the sweat, cold and damp, on her neck and palms. The relief of seeing that there was nothing she could have done in the moment to save Castle is washed away by the realization that whole case comes back to her.
Why would anyone want to take Castle? There is no reason. No reason but one.
"Me. They took him to break me."
She's wrong. This is her fault.
"We don't know it's Bracken, Beckett." Esposito is leaning forward in the passenger seat, his seatbelt pulled taut, ready to leap over the armrest and take the wheel at her first sign of a breakdown.
Kate sits up straighter. She puts on her blinker and carefully executes a turn to the right, hand over hand. "Who else could it be? This whole setup, the obvious cover up. The Bauchman case is almost exactly like when Bracken set up the mayor. I can't believe I didn't see it before."
"There was nothing to see." Ryan sounds so anxious, afraid. Afraid of what she might do.
"We have to keep calm, we can't do anything crazy." Esposito huffs when Kate says nothing. "That means we're not confronting U.S. senators until we have more information."
Kate keeps her still-gritty eyes on the road, her knuckles white against the steering wheel. She can't debate this with Esposito right now. She has to concentrate on the next thing, the next step, and right now that is Carl the lying paramedic.
Carl, who texted Esposito fifteen minutes ago, changing the location of their meeting and moving it up two hours. Kate hustled everyone into the car without asking any questions, intent only on answers.
Esposito sighs, his eyes worried. "Look, we just have to talk to Carl, take it from there."
"I know that. That's what I'm doing."
"Then why can I practically hear you planning your interrogation of Bracken?" Kate doesn't answer and Esposito sighs again, runs his hand through his hair. "We'll look into him, I promise. But we have to be smart about this."
"I know that, too."
"We have no reason to think Castle's not dead." Esposito repeats.
Kate's knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. He's right. She knows he's right.
But.
Whoever those people are, they'd tried to save Castle. They'd shot him and then tried to save him. They hadn't wanted him dead, at least not right away.
It had all been a lie, a trick, but why? He hadn't been dead. Not yet.
Her breath is coming short, catching in her throat. Something is pressing against her ribs and Kate tries to stop it. She tries to fight it back, but it surges up anyway, swelling in her chest, tingling behind her eyes. Hope, hard and bright.
Disastrous hope.
"He's late." Kate checks her watch for the millionth time and peers out the window of the Crown Vic at the nearly deserted playground where they're supposed to meet Carl.
"Maybe he's already here. You want me to check?" Ryan moves to open the back door, his need to do something to help her almost palpable.
"No, man. We'll see him," Esposito mutters, his eyes roving the playground. He checks his own watch. "I don't like this. He changes the meeting place at the last minute and now he's ten minutes late? Something's not right."
Carl's text had changed the meeting place from a coffee shop in Sunset Park to this half-abandoned playground on the edge of a decaying neighborhood. Coming from Kate's apartment they'd barely made in time.
There were a few teenagers camped out on the rusted jungle gym, playing hooky. A minute ago a scruffy guy in his mid-twenties had meandered over to the broken bench toward the back and was just hanging out. He kept glancing over at the Crown Vic, obviously nervous but trying to be subtle. Kate's pretty sure they're interrupting his drug deal.
"There he is." Esposito points down the sidewalk. Carl is coming into view, skittishly looking in every direction at once and generally being the opposite of inconspicuous. Kate thinks she can see the sweat on his face from here. "Beckett –" Esposito starts.
But Kate barely hears him. She's already out of the car, barreling down the sidewalk. Carl sees her coming and stops, his hands in the air in an almost comical imitation of a stick-em up.
"Who hired you?"
"I don't know, I swear, all I ever got was a phone call. I never got a name."
"Not good enough, man." Esposito steps up beside them, in Carl's face, backing her up, but Kate lays a hand on his arm.
All at once everything seems hard, and bright, and calm. Kate forces herself to pull back, because she knows who's behind this, and Carl is her chance to prove it. She can do this. "Why did you want to talk to us, Carl?"
Carl looks everywhere but at them. "I'm nervous, man. I didn't sign up for this shit." He's breathing heavily, shifting his weight from foot to foot. "I don't know anything, I only talked to the guy who set it up. I swear I didn't even know the dude in the ambulance was Richard Castle it was until it was all over the news."
Esposito takes half a step back, wiping at his face. Carl's speaking so fast little bits of spittle are flying from his mouth, his eyes wide and rolling. "Right after it happened I got weird phone calls, texts, all warning me not to talk. But since you pulled me into the police station - and I mean, like, within the hour - I've been getting threats to my family, my mom." He turns in a circle, his eyes lingering on the kids, the drug dealer on the bench. "I think they're following me."
"Who is they?" Kate asks, but Carl ignores her. He swallows his spit and leans in closer.
"And then, right before I got here, I got this." He pulls his phone from his pocket and hands it to Kate. The screen shows a text message from 8 minutes ago. Consider this a warning.
Kate frowns. "Consider what a warning?"
"I don't know, that's the whole message."
"Shit." Ryan's eyes fly to hers. "That's not good."
Something twists in her gut. This is all wrong, wrong, and they still don't have any answers. "But what did they want you to do? What happened that day in the ambulance?"
But Carl's not paying attention. He can't stand still, his head swiveling from side to side, sweat visible along his hairline despite the cold. "Hey, can we go inside or something? This place is giving me the creeps. They could be watching right now." He nervously eyes the guy on the bench.
Esposito lets out an exasperated snort. "You're the one who wanted to meet here."
Carl starts and stares at them directly for the first time. "You told me to meet you here. You sent me a text –"
Kate's stomach bottoms out as she and Esposito exchange a horrified look.
It's a set up.
"Get in the car." Kate grabs Carl and shoves him toward the Crown Vic. Esposito whirls around, his hand already on his weapon, while Ryan yanks open the back door of the car and pushes Carl inside.
The shots ring out immediately, three sharp reports, close and loud, cutting through the chill. Ryan jerks back, falls to his back on the sidewalk, his eyes wide.
"Get down!" Esposito shouts, already on the ground beside Ryan, shielding him with his own body.
Kate dives into the front seat of the car, her hip catching on the steering wheel, her ears ringing, her heart in her mouth, because she knows. She knows what she's going to see before she pulls up just enough to squint into the back of the car.
Carl is slumped, unmoving, the upholstery and windows splattered with blood and bits of his brain.
"Beckett? Beckett!"
Kate extricates herself from the uniformed officer who seems disturbingly blasé about what he is calling a drive-by shooting, and shoves her way through the police and medical personnel swarming the scene to reach Esposito, who is hovering over Ryan as he's strapped to the stretcher and loaded into the ambulance.
Ryan's unconscious, his skin is bleached to chalk, his only color the red of his blood covering his shoulder, his neck. Just like Castle –
Kate has to grab the side of the ambulance. "He was awake. I thought it was clean through the shoulder, I –"
"He's going to be fine." Esposito palms her shoulder, his voice low and fierce, daring her to disagree. "They knocked him out for the pain. I've called Jenny and she's meeting us there. Are you okay to follow us? Shit." He rubs his eyes, apparently remembering that her ride is covered in Carl. "Can you get a cab?"
Kate nods, her eyes fixed on Ryan, the pallor of his face, his still form. A few inches to the left and Ryan would be flat-lining right about now, just like she had. Like Castle –
No. She clenches her fists and shoves down the panic that's trying to choke her. "This has to stop. Bracken. I have to stop him."
"What?" Esposito swings around to face her. "No, Beckett, we don't know this was Bracken –"
"Stop saying that." The force of conviction steadies her voice, her nerves. "We do know."
The EMT sticks her head out and waves at Esposito. "We're ready."
"Promise me." Esposito has one foot in the back of the bus while he grips her upper arm. "Promise you won't go off alone and do something stupid. Promise you'll wait for me."
"Okay." Kate steps out of his hold and swipes at her eyes. "I promise. Just…stay with him, make sure…"
"He's going to be fine," Esposito repeats furiously. He pulls himself in the ambulance and stabs a finger at her. "You just wait."
Kate nods and watches while they close the doors and blip the lights to pull out into traffic. She stands on the sidewalk until they've gone four blocks and around a corner, turning out of sight.
Then she walks two blocks the other way and hails a cab, giving directions for Manhattan. The street address for the offices of the Senator from New York.
Some promises can't be kept.
.
A/N - Thanks to Laura and Jessie for beta-ing, but some stuff had to be reworked, so any errors are mine.:) Thanks as always for reading. You guys are the best.:)