A/N: More story.
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy
Chapter Eight: Burlesque
Sarah sat up on her bed and wiped her eyes.
Chuck had not just gotten into her apartment and left a charm — she was now sure it was him — he had cleaned her apartment. A deep, thorough spring cleaning.
She told Beckman she knew Chuck. So, what was all this? Chuck cleans when he is upset. And I know he is upset. She looked around her.
The apartment gleamed with Chuck's anger. His anger had a lemony scent.
Her pocket vibrated. She pulled her phone out and looked at the screen. Bryce. Shit. I don't want to talk to anyone.
"Walker, secure."
"Larkin...bwaa-haa-haa-bwaa...secure!" Bryce was cackling crazily.
Sarah was annoyed. His laughter rubbed her misery the wrong way. And she was still angry about before, his conversation with Shaw.
"What?!"
"You need to come to Shaw's. He's been...attacked." Bryce disintegrated into peals of laughter.
"What the hell?"
"Shaw got home and his apartment...Well, you have to see."
Sarah ended the call and stood up, putting the phone in her back pocket. She slipped the charm in one front pocket. Closing her suitcase, she rolled it into her barren closet.
A moment later, she was in her Porsche, on her way to the address Bryce texted to her as she got in the car. Despite Shaw's frequent invitations, Sarah had never been to his apartment.
When Sarah pulled in at Shaw's apartment building, she noticed a nondescript gray van in the lot, so nondescript that Sarah knew instantly it was a CIA clean team's van.
She got out and went into the building, taking the stairs, since Shaw's apartment was on the second floor. She knocked on Shaw's door.
Bryce opened it. He looked like he had been crying — from laughter. He started cackling again. "Shaw's place was booby-trapped!"
Bryce stepped aside. Two cleaners in Hazmat suits were beginning to squeegee the floor. There were mounds of what looked like bath bubbles or shaving cream everywhere, not just on the floor, but the walls and furniture too. Bits of flesh — no, flesh-colored rubber — were everywhere too.
And then Sarah saw them: blow-up dolls hanging on the walls, stationed in chairs, their rubber mouths open, their rubber breasts unnaturally pert.
Sarah shook her head; it was so bizarre. She could not believe her eyes. A massacre, a bloodless...massacre.
Bryce started laughing again. The hazmatted cleaners were squeegeeing piles of foam, Bryce sidestepped to get out of the way.
"I don't...What the hell, Bryce?"
"When Shaw got home and clicked on the lights, he set something off. Each of the...ladies...here was attached to a small, supercharged oxygen tank and filled with a chemical that knocks a person unconscious on contact — the shaving-creamy stuff. Shaw hit the light, stepped inside, and the blow-up dolls...blew up! He was covered in the creamy stuff and out like a light..."
Bryce was almost dancing with mirth.
"But how did anyone find him, know?"
"Another electronic trip switch. One of the ladies has a camera in her mouth. She...um...took a photo and emailed it to Beckman. Shaw covered in that creamy stuff, conked out in the middle of a D-I-Y orgy. Beckman called me, and texted me the picture, and sent me over, then called the cleaners. Told me to call you."
Bryce wiped his eyes, bubbling with laughter still, and surveyed the scene again, as if trying to commit it to memory. "Chuck! You wanna see the picture? God, I am so glad she sent it to me!"
"You think this was Chuck?" But Sarah knew it was before she asked the question.
Bryce rolled his eyes. "He was the best at pranks back...at Stanford." When he said 'Stanford', Bryce's mirth began to leak out of him, and he started to sag, resembling the deflating rubber ladies.
Sarah changed topics. "Did Shaw...regain consciousness?"
"No, out like a light. Still out, Beckman says. Oh, C'mere. The bathroom!"
Bryce led her around piles of creamy foam down the hall, past the bedroom, Shaw's bed covered in uninflated dolls, and into the bathroom.
Shaw's apartment was as bare as Sarah's, as dusty as hers had once been.
On the bathroom mirror, written with the edge of a bar of soap, the bar on the sink, was a message:
This town ain't big enough for the both of us, Daniel. Take the ladies and run.
Bryce yielded to his desire to jig, a soft-step, unable to contain his delight. He took his phone out and photographed the mirror.
Sarah wanted to laugh. And cry. And scream. "Doesn't Chuck understand how dangerous Shaw is? He has the upgraded Intersect. Chuck is...just Chuck."
Bryce gave her a hard look, his features shifting radically, immediately. "You know, Sarah...that's always been the difference between us where Chuck is concerned. I know I fucked up things...with you and with him, and, well...But I have never thought he was...just Chuck. I've always known he was anything but just Chuck.
"Is he a match for Shaw face-to-face, hand-to-hand? No. Neither am I. Neither are you. We know what Shaw is — a rolling bundle of butcher knives…" Bryce shivered against his will, "but brain-to-brain? My money's on Chuck's brain, even if Shaw's is Intersected. I sent Chuck the Intersect, remember." Bryce gave her a look, complicated but honest, jealous of Chuck but deeply respectful of him too. "Just Chuck. — Jesus, and you're supposed to love the guy!"
Sarah parked her Porsche back at her place.
Her phone dinged. She picked it up.
A text from Bryce. It was the photo of Shaw amid blow-up dolls and blow-up doll debris, covered over in foamy cream.
Sarah sat in the car and laughed for a long time. And then she cried for a long time. And then she screamed.
As she approached her apartment door, she stopped.
A photo frame was leaning, back outward, against the base of her apartment door. She checked the hallway — empty. She took out her S&W and moved cautiously toward the door.
The frame had no wires attached to it. Nothing. It was just leaning there against her door. She picked it up by a corner and rotated it. It was a wedding photo.
Shaw and a lovely woman with brown hair. Shaw looked different in the photograph. The omnipresent graveyard stare was missing. He looked...happy.
Shaw's redacted file had not contained information about a spouse, a marriage or a divorce. Sarah looked at the woman more closely. She had on a classic bridal veil with blusher.
Sarah blushed, remembering the hidden stack of Brides magazine she left in her Castle locker, kept there for long nights when she indulged in the waking dream of a life with Chuck. The veil's extra layer was in front of Shaw's wife's face, obscuring it. The face floated before Sarah like a dream, wispy, barely there.
She opened the back of the frame and looked. In a woman's handwriting was a date, and beneath it, the inscription: Daniel and Evelyn.
It took a moment to put the photo frame back together. It had been taken from Shaw's apartment. Chuck.
What are you trying to tell me, Chuck? And why can't you just tell me?
Two Days Later
The Project team had been chasing Ring connections all around DC, trying to find Chuck.
Shaw was unbearable, laser-focused, enraged. It was not helping that Bryce now called Shaw Lars constantly. It had taken Shaw a flash on the IMDb database in his head to understand, but he had stopped calling Bryce Needlepoint.
Shaw's graveyard stare was graver.
Sarah was frightened for Chuck. If Shaw found him, she was sure Shaw would kill him. Shaw would work out an explanation afterward.
Sarah went home each evening hoping for Chuck to be there, but he never was.
No new 'attacks' had occurred.
Orion was on his way back to DC, Ellie in tow. Beckman wanted to talk to them both, face-to-face. Even Beckman had noticed and acknowledged Shaw's bulging seams.
Sarah was dreading Ellie's arrival. It was hard to be shut out of a life she had once been invited into. No, not once, again and again, and again. The same way that Chuck had tried to win her, repeatedly, faithfully, until even Chuck, a hero of faith if there ever was one, had finally broken under the Job-like trial of Sarah.
Sarah had a glass of wine on her coffee table.
She had propped Shaw's wedding photo on the table. It seemed to haunt her.
If I could just get a clear look at Evelyn's face.
As Sarah sipped her wine and stared at the photograph, she heard a knock on her door. She got up and looked out the peephole but saw no one.
She opened the door slowly, her hand on her gun. No one was there.
But something was there. A pizza box.
Sarah picked it up. It was warm. She opened the lid: veggie, no olives. A note was in a plastic baggie on top of the pizza.
Sarah took the pizza inside and put it on her coffee table. The note was written in a hand she did not know, clearly a woman's hand.
Meet at Smithsonian Zoo. Noon tomorrow. By the pandas. Alone.
It was unsigned.
Sarah knew she should call it in, report it. She did not. She ate a couple of slices of pizza and drank her wine.
Maybe tomorrow would give her some answers.
She desperately wanted to talk to Chuck. She was giving up on them because he had.
But she wanted him to know how much she had wanted it, and how sorry she was to have ruined it all for both of them.
She would take her chances with the pandas, alone.
A/N: Thoughts?