A/N: We now return you to your regularly scheduled update. Hopefully
Bobby had an address for the answering service so it wasn't too hard to find the right street.
It wasn't too hard to find the right building either.
Not with the broken window and the yellow crime scene tape and the cops milling around.
Saul's heart sank.
No!
They were too late.
He didn't believe in coincidences. Not on this scale. Their latest lead and someone else had got here first. Someone else who was looking for Patrick.
Beside him, Bobby swore. "I should have come straight here," he said hoarsely. "Before I came to find you. I should have got the address first. Idiot, idiot, idiot."
Saul glanced at him, shaking his head. "There was no way you could have known," he disagreed. All Bobby had known was that he'd been out of the loop for a day and Saul wasn't answering his phone. If the situation had been reversed, he thought he'd have done the same thing. The priority was not walking into the middle of something, not disrupting someone else's plans.
"Right," Bobby said, and it wasn't agreement, not really. Rusty had just got further away from them, and Bobby was going to carry on blaming himself. But that wasn't what they had to focus on here.
"Who do you think did it?" Saul asked, looking at the damage. Who else was looking for Patrick? And what had they found out? They needed answers here; they were in a race and hadn't even known it.
"I'll find out," Bobby answered grimly, his badge already in his hand.
Saul grabbed his arm. "No," he said firmly.
Bobby looked at him.
"You said your superiors sent you away for the night, right?" he explained. "If this is about Patrick - "
Bobby snorted. Right. Like there was any doubt.
He continued. "If this is about Patrick, then your name crops up in the investigation when you're supposed to be off duty, questions are gonna be asked. You might wind up getting arrested all over again."
"Might," Bobby stressed. "It's an outside chance. And you think I care about that right now?"
"I think I need you," Saul argued. "I think Rusty needs you."
And that was unanswerable.
"What then?" Bobby demanded.
The old fashioned way. Crossed fingers and a lot of fast talking.
He took a couple of moments to look around. The cop in front of the broken window was the best prospect. He looked fresh-faced, naive eager and completely bored. Everything that Saul tended to look for in an informant.
Bobby nodded his agreement, and Saul knew he wasn't happy hanging back. Not a role that was really in his nature. But all it would take would be someone recognising a description and putting two and two together and they were sunk. No, this was his responsibility.
He strode up, projecting arrogant confidence and impatient efficiency. "Is Cooper here yet? What's the situation?"
The cop blinked at him for a second and opened his mouth, presumably planning on asking any one of a number of reasonable questions. Who he was, for example. Who he worked for. None of them particularly answerable.
He interrupted before the cop could get a word out. "Come on, we don't have all fucking day. You heard the OC mob are in trouble with the rat squad, right? Think this is a day to be keeping your head down, don't you? You want me to drop you in the shit with Cooper?"
"Uh, no?" the cop said, sounding a little like he was guessing.
"Good answer," Saul said with a smile, patting him on the shoulder. "What's your name, kid?"
The cop swelled with bemused pride. "Macintyre, sir. Officer Lewis Macintyre."
"Well, Officer Macintyre," Saul leaned forwards confidentially. "What can you tell me about the situation here?"
"We got a call from a neighbour about two hours ago," Macintyre told him. "She witnessed a bunch of armed men pulling a smash and grab job. They pulled a truck up to the front of the building, broke a window, marched inside, took all the filing cabinets out of here."
"Just the filing cabinets?" Saul checked quickly.
"Yeah," Macintyre nodded. "They left all the phones and stuff. Even left the petty cash box."
Not just a normal robbery then. Someone was looking for information. But if they were looking for Patrick's details, why take all the cabinets? As long as it would take to go searching; it would take at least as long to empty the office. That didn't make sense. Unless...
Thoughts whirling, but he had to focus on Macintyre right now. He nodded sharply, like the information was nothing more or less than he'd expected. "That fits the pattern," he mused, as if to himself.
"Pattern?" Macintyre asked eagerly.
Saul smiled at him indulgently. "Don't worry, kid. You'll get filled in in due course. Now, I don't suppose our helpful witness happened to give us any descriptions?"
"Nothing useful," Macintyre said, with an air of disappointment. "Between five and eight guys, all male, Italian American, local accents." He paused and looked at Saul conspiratorially. "I reckon it's the mob."
"Really?" Saul asked brightly.
Encouraged, Macintyre went on. "Yeah. I mean, it's not a normal burglary, right? So I guess that the owner must have been using his business as a cover and running something dodgy off the book for the mob. And then he double crosses them and so they take the information."
"Mmm." Saul pursed his lips. "You could be on to something there Macintyre. Excuse me a moment, will ya? I need to make a couple of calls."
He walked off as Macintyre beamed after him, and ostensibly he was heading towards the cop car, but the moment he was round the corner, he was sprinting back towards Bobby.
"What do we know?" Bobby hissed urgently as they turned and walked purposefully away from the answering service building. They might not be responsible, but lingering at the scene of a crime was rarely the smart move.
"They took all the files," he reported. "They were looking for information."
"Patrick's information?" Bobby frowned. "It has to be, doesn't it? But why take it all?"
They looked at each other for a long moment.
"They don't know who they're looking for?" Saul asked incredulously.
"They don't know the right fake name," Bobby corrected in dawning understanding. "They're going to have to dig through all the files, looking for...a mention of the post office maybe?"
That gave them some time, maybe. Time to find Rusty before anyone else did.
"How would they even have found out about the number?" he asked tersely.
"I asked the local cops to trace it," Bobby said regretfully. "They're leaking like a sieve. Someone must have talked."
He nodded. That made sense. And that only left the million dollar question. Who were they? "The guy said they were armed and organised."
"Vito Morelli's men," Bobby suggested heavily.
Yeah. The most likely explanation. The mob boss that Patrick had informed on. The one who must hate Patrick almost as much as Saul did.
"If he gets there first - " he began, asking the question that he already knew the answer to.
" - he won't leave any witnesses," Bobby told him in a whisper.
Saul nodded. "Right. Right."
They'd kill Rusty. They'd kill Rusty and they were closer to finding him than he and Bobby were, and they didn't have another lead.
"Come on," Bobby said decisively. "We'll talk to Danny. Look over all the...evidence...that Patrick sent us. There's got to be something we're missing."
Yeah. There had to be.
Because the alternative was unthinkable.
