Treading Water
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Kick the Ballistics 4x04
Giving Philip Lee a good deal for bad information? That's just another win for Jerry Tyson... Jane Herzfeld deserves justice... No deals. We'll get 3XK. And we'll do it right.
Damn, Castle. Look at you, thinking like a real cop.
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Beckett flees.
As soon as it's possible to abandon them, she does. She just—she has nothing left and there's this terrible urgency rising in her throat like bile.
By the time she's locked herself in her apartment and shed her coat, sweat has soaked through the t-shirt and her hands are clammy and shaking.
Same sensation she had first day back. Facing a guy with a gun. Same awful paralysis.
The threat of Tyson out there, making plans for them, to fuck with them, to murder at his leisure and make sure they know it—
It's just too much.
The sniper who shot her, and now Jerry Tyson with his evil genius, his ability to twist everything up.
Becket paces away from the front door in a prowling path to the kitchen, yanks open a cabinet and grabs the lone bottle.
Scotch.
It's not the good scotch Castle drinks when they meet up, but it will do the job. She just needs the edge off.
(God, she sounds like her father. No, she shouldn't have another. They had toast in the bullpen before they took the kid into Witness Protection, a couple of swallows that turned into three or four fingers' worth, enough alcohol to wind her up rather than relax her. Going back to the battle feels more like her father's coping mechanisms than her own.)
But she hesitates putting the bottle away. Her brain is bumping thing to thing, worst case scenarios piling up (what if not taking that deal is part of Tyson's plan, what if the plan is already in the works, what if he's here in New York). Her hand is still affected with tremors. She needs this.
No.
No.
She cannot do this.
Beckett shoves the bottle to the back of the cabinet and slams the door shut. Dishes rattle with the force of her denial. Repudiation. She's not her father.
She can't call Castle either. No drinking tonight. She needs to power through this. She needs to not self-medicate. This is a dangerous path and she knows where it leads.
She calls her therapist's emergency line instead.
It's not him, it almost never is; he doesn't do many on-call shifts. But she knows this woman, Cynthia, hair in short twists on top of her head, fathomless eyes, was a cop for a decade before going for her counseling degree.
She can talk to Cynthia. This woman gets it.
Beckett sinks to the floor to put her back to the cabinets (to put her below the level of the windows, hidden, safe).
"It was a case," she croaks out. "Not a regular one. A guy we never caught. Coming back to haunt me."
Cynthia makes a soothing noise, something about I'm sure that was terrorizing for you all, and Kate manages to agree, forces out a synopsis of her emotional state, even as she presses her head back against the silverware drawer, the handle digging into her skull.
The force of it, the pressure, the near-pain... does something for her. Her head clears, her voice sounds strained but less shredded. Cynthia asks her to go through the day with her, and already Kate feels a bit ridiculous for blindly calling, for not just waiting a few minutes to ride it out.
"I'm okay, I'm okay now."
"Do you have someone there you can talk to?"
She almost says no. But she knows how this works. "Yeah, yeah, I can call Rick."
"That's your partner, the one from the shooting that day?"
"Yeah, yeah, he's had a standing invite... I mean, I do. I have a standing invite."
"To a coffee shop, or to his home? Are we talking someplace neutral or charged, Kate?" Cynthia is making notes; Becket can hear the scratch of her pen.
"Um. It's a bar usually. His bar. He owns it."
Cynthia hums concern. "Let's try a neutral meeting ground. For the sake of maintaining a steady—"
"Yeah, you're right, you're right." No drinks tonight. "Coffee shop."
"A neutral place. Not somewhere you usually go."
"Yeah, I can do that." She can do that. Just text him a location and he'll show. He never says no to her.
Beckett feels her cheeks flame and presses a hand to her face, astonished by the thought, the truth of the thought.
He never says no to her.
He did once. He told her to set aside her mother's case, for a while, a little while. For her own mental health. For his.
So she wouldn't get fired.
"Kate? Can you call him tonight?"
"Oh, yes. I'll call him." She won't call him. He never says no to her. He deserves a chance to not have to hold her hand. "After I get off the phone with you."
"Very good. Do you want to go through the Five Things?"
"No," she says quickly. "It's not a panic attack."
"Okay," Cynthia says kindly. "Okay. You have your plan for tonight. Don't hesitate to call back if the plan falls through."
"I will."
She won't. She doesn't need a plan. She's really fine.
X
Rick Castle taps his phone against his thigh as the elevator rises towards the loft.
Since the moment ballistics came back as a match to Ryan's lost weapon, the Jane Herzfeld case has been a weight on them all. But when the elevator door slides open, Rick is feeling much lighter, like he can finally take a deep breath.
That night in the motel when Ryan lost his service weapon, when Jerry Tyson's illusion finally slipped and Castle figured it out—too slow, too late—the dread from that night has been filling his lungs with every step of this investigation.
He's not certain it's the right call, not making a deal, but he is certain the Triple Killer isn't done with them yet. So they've refused this latest wild goose chase by not giving in to the allure of the deal, but Tyson will find another way.
It's coming.
He can feel it on the horizon.
Much like her mother's case.
And just like that, his sudden lightness of being crashes back to earth.
Castle leaves the lights off in the loft and wanders into his office, the wash of night across his face. He stares through the windows, searching a landscape blocked by apartment buildings and city clutter, a far off sense of doom waiting for him out there.
An accumulation of threats, building like a thunderhead on the horizon. Jerry Tyson. The sniper. Whoever it is this John Smith is blackmailing for Beckett's protection. Amassing just out of his view, shaping towards something inevitable.
A confrontation.
Someone is going to die.
Rick shakes off that thought, turning away from the city's pink glow in the darkness. No one will die—that's the whole point of this deal with Smith. And when Kate finds out, well, he's a fast talker. He can make her understand.
Castle finds the desk lamp and turns it on, swallowing back a sudden rush of gratitude for the light. He checks his phone. No new alerts. He's not sure what he thinks he'll see, what notification he's waiting for. To have it out in his hand, gripped tightly like this.
(He ignores the pressure in his chest, because it's ridiculous. It serves no purpose. Doom? Why is he wallowing in it? Water off a duck's back, that's Rick Castle and negative thoughts. He can turn this around; he can turn her around. Aren't they already heading in a new and thrilling direction?)
She hasn't texted him for drinks after this case, like they've done before.
Oh. Well. Technically, they already have had a drink. A toast in the bullpen after the kid headed out to catch a plane. Ryan's weapon back in their possession, even if now as evidence. It's fine. It's all fine.
Really, nothing is wrong.
Castle sinks down behind his desk and opens the lid of his laptop. The soft glow of the screensaver melts into the white of the current document he left up when he got the call about the body. A couple hundred words of a scene he can't remember, can't recall the mood or tone.
He reads it again, a dinner scene with Nikki's old boyfriend. He already has nefarious ideas for this old flame, and the scene leaves a taste in his mouth that he knows comes from charged altercations with Josh which he still hasn't been able to forget. Castle can read that he needs to tone it down. It's a bit much.
He types:
Nikki told Petar about the new development in her mother's case. To his credit—for once—Petar listened intently and without interruption. His face sobered and his eyes grew hooded by an old sadness.
Because she would, wouldn't she? With Rook there acting as that wedge in the seam of her walls, Nikki would feel she needed to be direct about the momentum in her mother's case. And yeah, okay, maybe the story arc this time is more wishful thinking on his part, a way to keep hope alive for Kate Beckett. If Nikki could get some forward movement, then one day Beckett can too.
Yeah. If the novel isn't precisely a love letter, then it definitely means something. Just as she told him a few weeks ago.
He nods to himself and types quickly, the scene coming back to him, Nikki Heat speaking through his fingers, certain, purposeful, as real as Kate Beckett herself.
"Maybe I can close the case someday. But closure?" She dismissed the entire concept with the wave of a hand.
Castle pulls his hands back from the keyboard as if burned.
The cursor blinks.
He wants to delete it.
He tries to delete it.
But neither Kate Beckett nor Nikki Heat will let him.
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