Oookay... so it looks like the site had a bit of a hissy fit over the past 10 days or so, but new chapter notifications are going out again along with all kinds of other weird stuff (I'm getting review alerts from 2 months ago today), so we'll give this another try. If you missed them, there were 2 new chapters posted last week while the updates/notifications were not happening. Fingers crossed!


Chapter 52

"Since when do two senior first-grade detectives get pulled in for an extra second shift on the Sunday before a major holiday when they don't have any active investigations?" Maria Baez griped as she plopped into her desk chair with a huff and a frown as she looked over at her partner who was unsuccessfully trying to look innocent while keeping a low profile away from her expected wrath. "I was supposed to be baking mantecados and polvorones for Christmas with my mother and sister this afternoon, Reagan! What did you do?" she demanded.

"Ohh, noooo… not the polvorones… the ones with the cinnamon?" he asked with a drawn out heavy sigh as he closed his eyes and licked his lips while quoting his sister-in-law. "Mm-hmm yummy yum. I love those. Did you bring me any, partner?"

"Did I bring you… Seriously? Were you not listening to anything I just said? Now, spill!" she demanded while loudly tapping the keyboard to further display her annoyance while typing in her password to log onto the system.

"Honestly, I didn't do nothing except walk by Carver's office yesterday when she was on the phone with Gormley at 1PP and he was reaming her out because our squad's closed case percentages are down for the last few months. Guess she wanted her top team to catch a few more and bump the numbers up before the end of the year since we're freed up. If you want to blame somebody, ambush that effing George Mahoy sometime… he's the one that's got the system giving everyone real-time numbers now… they got teams reviewing and entering all the data in daily at the precincts. Before that you just had to wait until they ran the audit and your CO got their ass chewed at the next quarterly CompStat meeting. The good old days before the fancy-shmancy stuff," he sighed before trailing off. "Now I see why Jamie hates that car so much."

"So basically what you're telling me is we're on twenty-four seven until New Year's?" Maria moaned and fell into a deflated heap as she put her head down on the desk. "I'll never get those cookies baked or my presents wrapped now."

"That, or until we rack up about ten more in the win column to swing the squad back into the green, but you didn't hear it from me," Danny commiserated. "Linda just about had a fit when I told her last night. I don't know what's gotten into her again. She didn't even want me running over to Jamie and Eddie's today before this to help move some stuff around and I promised to do Kaylin's soccer practice on Tuesday night on top of all that. If things keep up, we'll need this overtime, anyway. Her back's still sore, but she's gotta go into the hospital and get some hours soon or they'll put her on full disability and she'll wind up losing her shift schedule. Somehow we've gotta keep the house and kids going. Jack's learning the finer points of laundry and Sean's on kitchen floor and vacuum duty right now. Lucky for us she had a bunch of vacation time to cash in, but that's running out now."

"Wait! Then that's why were you in here yesterday?" Maria's detective brain fired and latched unto that fact. "We weren't scheduled. I knew it! You came in for OT and got us in trouble!"

"No, I didn't!" Danny insisted. "I was in here on my own time! Mike Becker finally got somewhere with that video footage from Washington, but it's a mess," he lamented. "All the time stamps are screwed up and dated with some kind of garbled numbers, and what he could decode so far wasn't saved in any kind of goddamned order… at least five year's worth of individual days from what we could guess and counting. I gotta click on each one individually and open it and try to figure out when the eff it might have been from. I got lucky because I called Mr. Garibaldi and asked when he put up the big Christmas wreath on the door and he said the day after Thanksgiving, and the light-colored bow is new this year… before it was dark. So all I gotta do is find videos with that in it and it narrows me down to about a two-week timeframe. Spend six hours here yesterday doing that. They take forever to open up on the server too."

"All you gotta do," she mocked. "How many files are there?" she asked with a sympathetic raised eyebrow.

"So far? One-eight-two-five by my count," he groaned with a glance at the tally on the top of the screen and dropped a pencil on the desk.

"Almost two thousand?! And how many did you get through yesterday?"

"About three hundred give or take," he admitted as he stopped to rub his tired eyes. "Found two with the wreath but neither of them look like the right one. Street was shut down for a while after Jamie… you know, and the ambulance must have gone through that way. Haven't come up with any gaps in the traffic pattern like that yet. Rick said they walked down that way beforehand. I'm hoping I can narrow it down and pick them out. Then I'll have my file and the right timeframe," he declared.

"Then what?"

"Well, I guess I'll have to see what cars it picked up coming through just after that and see if there's anything useful. Still it's a grainy picture and a longshot… I'm just out of any other leads," Danny sighed and decided to withhold the tidbit about the glass fragments unless it became relevant since the combined situations with his brother and Linda plus the strain of this wild Chevelle chase was starting to drain him. "It's been declared it a cold case in DC. They're done looking."

"That stinks, ho-ho-ho, bah humbug," Baez muttered with her head still down. "I guess I can help you until we get called out since our board is clean and we're all caught up on paperwork for the first time in… well, I think it's the first time ever. Didn't you tell the boss about this and your brother?" she asked before looking up and seeing him shake his head and remembering that due to added circumstances she was one of the few outside the family privy to that information. "How's Jamie doing by the way?"

"Eddie's up there at Columbia with Dad right now waiting for him to wake up. He was supposed to have some kind of circulation test this afternoon, then if that was okay they were going to start to bring him back out of it now that he's had a chance to rest some more," he revealed sadly and berated himself for only finding the time for that short visit the other day. "Haven't heard otherwise so I guess that's still the plan. There's not a lot of real-time communication out of there with their damn electronics ban though," he added. "Poor kid's really gone through the ringer the past couple of weeks… looks like hell and I have a feeling it's just starting to sink in."

"Jamie, or Eddie?"

"Both," he admitted. "Family's a real mess… let's… let's just not go there," he implored as he turned his attention back to the screen and sent her a link to Mike's folder of files. "Get out your glasses and start from the bottom of the list. I'll keep working down from the top. I feel like we're looking for a needle in a great big pile of... needles," he admitted as the pair got to work while the squad remained quiet for at least a few hours.

###

"How long has it been now?" Eddie asked impatiently as the five o'clock hour came and went with no outward change in Jamie's quiet demeanor as he lay in his room… stripped down to the nasal cannula once more with all the extraneous machinery, mask and tubes removed along with that constant drip of medication that had kept him unnervingly quiet for the better part of the last three days.

"We came before two… the meeting with Dr. Kenzie took about thirty minutes while they got him situated back here and stopped everything… just over two-and-a-half hours, Eddie," Frank calculated as he watched the nervous energy bubble visibly off of his daughter-in-law while she waited to be reunited with her husband once more. "It may take some time yet, sweetheart," he reminded. "They told us it was best to let him come out of it on his own."

"I know… I just don't want it to get too late so that when he wakes up we have to leave right away and then he's alone again. I want him to hear that the test was better today, and she was "cautiously optimistic" because that's what she said, right? I wasn't dreaming then, was I?"

"No, that's definitely what she told us," Frank assured with evident relief himself at the upgraded prognosis. "Just remember the first word of that combination is cautious. We agreed not to focus only on the optimistic part though because she also said the next several days were likely to be very difficult as that nerve block is finally allowed to wear off. On top of that he's going to have to transition to moving around more, wearing that brace and balancing different pain medications before he's allowed to come home for any length. Let's just take one step at a time and try not to put any undue pressure or expectations on him," he advised while reaching over for the tv remote. "Maybe things are finally looking up all around and the Jets can pull off another stunner like last week," he added hopefully until a glance at the screen showed their beloved team behind 21-3 once again at the end of the first half of their home game against the Arizona Cardinals. "Or, maybe not," he sighed. "Want me to turn it up?" he asked as he sat back in the comfortable recliner and put his feet up without looking away as the volume was fairly low. "Thinking of ordering one of these chairs for the living room at home. Best sleep I've ever gotten in a place like this," he sighed, far more content to be patient and wait for his son to wake on his own than a fellow blond-haired counterpart was.

"No, it's fine," Eddie assured as she reached over while he wasn't looking and brushed her hand deliberately up against Jamie's arm with a little pinch in a covert attempt to give him just a nudge back towards them a bit faster anyway… she couldn't help herself at this point. Her efforts appeared initially fruitful and resulted in a definite noticeable twitch of his nose and face for the first time all afternoon. "C'mon… c'mon, Reagan…" she implored under her breath, but then managed to successfully repressed the urge to offer up a deep uncontrolled sigh as there was no further progress evident.

"Told you."

"So when do they develop," she asked with a smirk and a shake of her head as she relaxed and sat back while wondering how her father-in-law was always able to do that. "The eyes in the back of your head I mean."

"In my case, by the time Danny learned how to crawl, but for most others… by the second child at the latest. One you can generally keep in front of you, but with two it's easy to be outflanked."

"How did Mary do it then?" Eddie asked out of curiosity as she considered the fact that for the time being her responsibility level for both their children… Kaylin and this little tangerine-turning lemon munchkin had increased exponentially while her husband was facing his own consuming challenges. "One against four?"

"Well, for her it was a gift… not so much vision but radar, but even with that though I can't say we always saw everything coming. Still don't," he admitted ruefully as he considered the way the conversation with his daughter had ended the other day. "Listen, Eddie," he started before glancing back and noting her downturned face once she realized this was going to segue into a dreaded conversation about the current strife between her and Erin.

"I will not," she interrupted him softly with a sad glance down to Jamie. "I will not bring it up in front of him… not now. It's between her and me and it will stay that way until it's behind us or hearing about it won't cause him harm," she added with conviction. "He's got more important things to worry about. I know that he only agreed to sign those papers because he thought he was protecting me… what kind of wife would I be if I wasn't willing to do the same for him?"

"It's not good to keep secrets from one another either," Frank warned, although he admired her willingness to put a deep dedication to her husband over her own anger. "Don't get started down that road."

"I won't, I promise," Eddie added with another glance at her seemingly stubbornly recumbent husband as she resolved to be more patient before the first strains of a familiar tune caught her attention on the television as the halftime show was winding down with a year-end review of the top game day commercials of 2016.

No I can't forget this evening
Or your face as you were leaving
But I guess that's just the way the story goes
You always smile but in your eyes
Your sorrow shows, yes it shows

"Oh look," she deflected with an audible snort despite the somber lyrics. "Kaylin saw that Heinz Ketchup 'Wiener Stampede' Super Bowl commercial rerun with all the dachshunds in the hot dog costumes a couple of weeks ago and giggled with Jamie on the floor about it for at least an hour," she explained while laughing out loud herself at the recent happy memory from right before this whole nightmare had started. "They must have flipped back and watched it a hundred times. She begged us for days to buy her a little takeout ketchup packet costume like that little kid in the middle of all those people dressed like condiment bottles. She even put it on her list for Santa complete with the puppy so it could come live with us and kiss her nose too. I'm sure that would start World War III in the house with Bear though, right?" she shuttered with a thought of the cat's reaction to a canine invasion although Jamie had already confessed to desperately wanting a dog one day when their schedules allowed. "He told her once about that time with Renzulli when he was a rookie and had to tackle the hot dog guy… left out the part about the illegal pharmacy they found stuffed in his pockets though," she added with a smirk. "So she assumes people actually walk around wearing those costumes like clothing every day. Don't even think about it, Grandpa," she warned while catching his pensive look and twinkling eyes. "We'd never get her out of it."

"S'your fault, Ed," came the slurring, interrupting, raspy, dry voice they had been waiting to hear from all afternoon although those words stopped her in her tracks and instantly wiped the smile off her face while crushing her heart down in her chest. Frank's chair came thudding down and he quickly stepped over to steady his daughter-in-law even as Jamie remained firmly out of reach while he emerged still seemingly under the influence of one of those vivid dreams that no one but Joe had ever been able to draw him out of.

"S'all your fault."

###

"Baez, Reagan… you're up," came the call from the duty sergeant after six that evening as the pair sat back from their monitors and shook off over two hours of eye strain which had cleared another hundred or so videos from the list, but there was no joy in Mudville—the mighty Danny Reagan had struck out again, he thought ruefully.

"Where to boss?" Maria called back as she gratefully logged out of her computer and opened the drawer to grab her gun and badge only to watch her partner stop in his tracks as if flashfrozen when the gruff reply came back.

"400 block of Washington, just down from the local park. Some stiff got pumped a few times and dumped in the alley there."

"Danny, isn't that where…?" Baez trailed off with a gasp.

"Yeah," he swallowed hard. God, he hated that particular place. It was the one area of the 5-4 territory that he tried to avoid at all costs. At the mouth of the alleyway there catty corner from a school on the opposite side of the street was where it had happened. He could still picture the dark pools of blood that once lay on the ground there. Joe's blood. It was there his younger brother had lay dying after taking four shots to the chest from the armor piercing rounds loaded in Sonny Malevsky's gun after purportedly chasing a rabbiting perp. It was an evil place, of that Danny was sure.

"You alright, Reagan?" Maria asked with growing concern as all the color had drained from her partner's face and it was obvious he was anything but that.

Gonsalves… Malevsky… Joe's effing Chevelle that Jamie kept insisting ran him down. The glass fragments that didn't dispute that claim. Now this call to that alley of all places. All of these "coincidences" his father didn't believe in. Suddenly he was afraid of what he might discover if they actually found the right needle in the needle stack. Danny's head was spinning and he would have been lying if he said the room didn't do a turn or two of its own before he righted his balance enough to to grab his coat and shake it off enough to leave for the scene. For one of the few times in their partnership he let Baez drive without objection.

What was next?

"Vic's name is Joseph O'Connor."

Danny's eyes snapped over in disbelief at the senior uniform from the first radio car on scene as they stood with Baez to the side of the prone figure lying still in the street and now covered under a yellow tarp. "Come again?" he asked incredulously as his breaths came in short gasps. "Who is he?"

"What's with you?" Officer Matt Kocher frowned at the detective's tone as he handed over an evidence bag with a license enclosed. "You look like you've just seen a ghost, Reagan. I told you; ID reads as Joseph O'Connor. According to his rap sheet he's a local low level drug dealer. Been busted more than a dozen times in this area."

"No, I mean WHO THE HELL IS HE AND WHY WAS HE DUMPED ON THIS CORNER TONIGHT?!" Danny spat. Surely the likelihood of a man with nearly the same name as his dead brother being tossed out on almost the exact spot where he had died amid everything else that was going on could only mean one thing. "There's no way this is a COINCIDENCE!"

"Hey, I don't know what the eff you're talking about, and even if I did that's way above my pay grade isn't it?" Kocher barked back as he handed a clipboard over to Baez so she could sign off on the transfer of evidence. "I've been here for all of twenty minutes. Vic bought it with four to the chest and was dumped. Last I looked you two make the big bucks. Got questions? Go detect," he gruffed before moving away.

"Danny, what the hell?" Baez demanded as she kneeled down and pulled the tarp back to reveal a twenty-something thinly built red-haired victim lying on his back staring straight up in the air with glazed over eyes and four obvious holes in a dirty white shirt. "You know this guy?"

"No… it's just… the name and everything," he stuttered with obvious stress and a nervous swipe of his hand over his head with a pointed glance around as she looked on in concern. "I'm telling you right now there's more to it than someone offing a local drug dealer," he rasped in a low voice. "I can't get into it right now but I think they've been coming after us again," he revealed as his blood ran cold and his own stomach began to twist. He felt like he had stepped into some kind of Twilight Zone episode. First the cat at Kaylin's school, Eddie's tampered with car and Jamie worst of all, then that damn badge laying in the front of his own house, the glass from an old GMC and now this dead Joseph O'Connor guy gets flung out here on this goddamned street.

"Who? Danny, you're not making any sense!" she hissed and worried that her own partner was apparently losing his grip on reality right here and now.

"We can't talk now. Let's process this scene and get this guy to the M.E. We'll meet down there tomorrow first thing in the morning, and if there's anything to this, I promise I'll explain. This was before your time," he revealed with a tight look. "And Baez," he added as he prepared to walk away for a private conversation with an old friend as he pulled out his phone. "Watch your back."


Ha, had to throw in a few little teeny minor cliffies there just for kicks or it wouldn't be me. What exactly is Jamie blaming Eddie for, and how will Danny handle things now that the pieces are starting to fall in place? Who might he be calling in for help? Someone you might never guess! Next, since it's been a while we'll check back in with Jamie in the present to see where things stand above the bridge as he waits out another hour. When last we left him up there *many, many* chapters ago (sorry!) he had a major moment of hope when the phone rang with Eddie's caller ID. Has anyone come looking for him yet? Kind of a crazy slide down for him as his mental state deteriorates before we pop back in and see how that relates to the past.

PS: if you're looking for a smile and don't remember that Heinz Ketchup wiener commercial, you can watch the extended version on YouTube, just search for aNN9nL2vppM.