AUTHOR: Mnemosyne
DISCLAIMER: Any familiar characters or situations used in this story are the property of Columbia/Tristar Pictures, Sony, Flower Films, et al. Any new characters or situations are mine. No money is being made from this story.
SUMMARY: The dead walk again, and he comes to Dylan bearing new evidence from an old case. SPOILERS for "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle."
RATING: PG-13, with possible R in later chapters
CATEGORY: Action, mystery, and a little romance (Dylan/Thin Man) :-D
NOTES:
This story derives from my discontent with the end of the second film. Darn it… The Thin Man rocks! There's no way I'm going to sit by and watch as my beloved Crispin Glover plummets to his death with a sword sticking out of his chest. Uh uh, nooooo way. What little screen time he and Drew Barrymore shared was electric, and I'm determined to see that explored. If TM could survive an exploding castle in the first film, he can survive a lethal sword wound and a deadly fall in the second, and that's that. *firm nod* No ifs, ands or buts about it. I'm also intrigued by "Anthony's" shadowy past, and just WHAT he might have been trying to say to Dylan prior to that horrific fall. In light of all the above, this story was born. Mind you, this is my first "CA" fic, so please go easy on me. :-D I hope you enjoy!
'Cause you're working,
Building a mystery,
Holding on, and holding it in.
Yeah, you're working,
Building a mystery,
And choosing so carefully…
-Sarah McLachlan
"Building a Mystery"
Dylan Sanders knew something was wrong the instant
she stepped through her front door and hit the light
switch.
Nothing happened.
Most people would assume this meant a bulb had blown, or perhaps a fuse had fried itself. They certainly wouldn't drop into a fighting stance, hands poised in a Tai Chi defensive position, alert green eyes scanning for any sign of conspicuous movement in the dark recesses of the apartment. But then, most people weren't one of Charlie's Angels, and even fewer were Dylan Sanders, formerly Helen Zaas, H.A.L.O. protected member of the Witness Protection Program.
Hyper-active senses on the alert now, Dylan noticed a few key things out of place in her apartment. For one, the sliding door at the far end of the living room, which led out to her 10th story balcony, was open, allowing a cool evening sea breeze to blow in off the California coast and rustle her gauzy curtains. Secondly, the Spongebob Squarepants nightlight she kept on in her bathroom 24/7 was turned off - probably unplugged all together.
Thirdly - and strangest of all - the entire apartment was utterly, completely, spotlessly CLEAN.
It was as if some Guardian Angel of Cleanliness had swooped down from heaven, fluttered his/her/its wings and set every off kilter and untidy thing in her apartment to rights. The AC/DC poster behind her sound system had been straightened after months of being hung at an off-center angle. The stack of pizza boxes that had been growing beneath her wall-mounted plasma TV were gone, revealing a potted plant she'd forgotten she owned. The clothes that normally covered every available piece of furniture were missing, and the entire room had been given a thorough dusting and - judging by the raised pile of the carpet - a good vacuuming, too.
"I've been burgled by Mary Poppins," Dylan muttered under her breath as her gaze took all this in. Then she smelled it: cigarette smoke.
Fresh cigarette smoke.
"Mary's smoking expensive tobacco," she murmured, then tossed herself forward in a tucked somersault as a hand snuck out of the blackness behind her and grabbed for her hair. Only taking a moment to recover, she sprang back to her feet, spun around with a wheeling kick and lashed out at the attacker. Her foot caught nothing but air before colliding with the open door and slamming it shut with a resounding BANG! "OUT of the shadows!" she demanded, assuming a defensive stance as her eyes tried to adjust to the complete darkness of the coat nook behind her door. "Out NOW!"
There was no movement that she could discern; just a slow, shuddering breath and the red flare of a cigarette, illuminating a pair of pale, milky blue eyes in deeply shadowed sockets. Just as quickly as it had come, the light faded into shadow again; but the breathing continued.
Dylan's head was spinning. There had been something about those eyes; something familiar that made her spine tingle. She recognized the sickly sweet smell of that tobacco; knew that it tasted much like it smelled. She knew that if she could reach out towards the figure in her coat nook, perhaps touch his hand, it would be a thin, nearly emaciated hand, attached to an equally wiry arm, attached to a body that was covered in lean muscle and not an ounce of fat. He would be dressed in a neo-'30s era pinstripe suit, with hair arranged around an immaculate part down the center, revealing a pale, smooth forehead above those haunting, pinprick eyes.
"No...," Dylan whispered, squinting into the darkness as though she could somehow see more of him. The moonlight filtering through her open balcony door was enough to give her the vaguest outline of his tall, slender form. Another drag on the cigarette gave her one more look at his unwavering raptor eyes. "No, I saw you die. I saw you FALL. You can't... You couldn't still be alive." She let her hands drop and backed slowly away from the door, shaking her head. "It's not YOU."
He stepped out of the shadows, and now that the moonlight didn't have to sneak around corners, it fell full on his lean, narrow face. Bringing the slender cigarette to his lips again, he inhaled deeply, then pinched his fingers around it in trademark fashion and took it from his mouth, before exhaling a long breath of smoke into her face. Dylan coughed, waving her hand to dispel the smoke. It was all he needed. He grabbed her flailing wrist, pulled her hand towards him.
"Let me go!" she demanded, ashamed of the note of panic in her voice. Despite his superior height, she was certain she weighed more than he did. She could take him down if she had to. //Keep telling yourself that,// she reminded herself humorlessly. //You don't have a chain handy this time.//
The Thin Man ignored her anyway. Placing the cigarette in his mouth once again, he took a deep drag as his fingers delved into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Dylan winced, wondering what he was reaching for. He dropped something soft into her palm, then pinched the cigarette out of his mouth, exhaling the smoke again, but to the side this time.
Dylan wrapped her hand around whatever the Thin Man had given her and stumbled backward a few extra steps, bumping into the back of her sofa as she did. Never taking her eyes from the tall assassin, she snapped, "What's this, a dead mouse? A rabbit's foot? Huh?" Keeping one eye on him - though he didn't seem to be moving - Dylan slowly unfurled her fingers to see what was nestled in her palm.
It was a lock of hair. More than that, it was a lock of HER hair. She recognized the trademark auburn even in the milky moonlight pouring over her shoulder. He'd tied it with a black velvet ribbon, the ends of which dangled over the sides of her hand.
Her eyes snapped up. "Where did you...?" she began to demand, then let her voice trail off. She knew exactly where he'd gotten it. "You've kept this... all this time?" she murmured, softer this time.
Nothing. Not so much as a nod. He just kept staring at her.
Her free hand went unconsciously to her head, massaging her scalp as she stared back at him. "That was four months ago," she murmured. "You've been dead for FOUR MONTHS. What... How did you survive? Where have you BEEN?"
He didn't answer her. Instead, he walked past her into the living room. She saw he had a slight limp - very faint. It would have been hardly noticeable if she weren't so familiar with his normally fluid gate. He stopped, reached into his pocket for something, and dropped it with a CLINK! on her glass-topped coffee table.
Watching him warily - she wasn't used to dead men rising from the grave - she circled the sofa and went to the coffee table, careful to keep it between herself and the assassin. Kneeling slowly, her eyes trained on his face, she reached out to pick up what he'd dropped.
It was a ring. A perfectly round, smooth ring; too broad to be particularly fashionable, especially on one of her slender fingers, but passable for a man. It was incredibly light, and the interior was ridged in geometric patterns, but she didn't need to examine them to know what they were.
Her eyes flicked up again, wide with shock. "How did you get this?" she asked breathlessly, holding up the ring. "This is supposed to be at the Department of Justice! This is a H.A.L.O. ring!" She stood up, squeezing the ring in her fist. "You died because of this!"
He nodded, and a moment passed.
Then Dylan's eyes widened even further. "Oh God," she breathed, staring at him. "Where's the other one?"
"Why the hell did you cut the phone lines!"
After her initial shock faded, Dylan took control of the situation quickly enough. Yes, the Thin Man should have been dead and buried, but here he was, and she'd just have to deal with him. The problem of the H.A.L.O. ring was far more troubling; she had assumed that case was long gone and over with. But then, she'd assumed the Thin Man had been killed in the fall from the roof of the Los Angeles Theater. Assumptions were dangerous things.
Right now, she was staring at the frayed end of the wire that led from her wall to the phone in the kitchen. It felt good to fume, especially when she had someone to fume AT. "You knock out my power, kill my phone lines... What next? Boil my bunny?"
The Thin Man looked around, as if expecting to find a rabbit near at hand, and Dylan growled in frustration. "I'm not being literal!" she barked in exasperation. "What did you think you were doing? This is MY apartment, not yours. You had no right to do ANY of this." She paused, and shrugged. "Okay, the cleaning thing is a bonus. Thanks for that. But still!" She ran a hand through her hair. Her head was starting to pound. "Well, you're an assassin. I suppose I have to chalk it up to old habits dying hard, huh? Fine. Whatever. Don't do it again. Where the hell's my cell?"
She began rifling through the pockets of her light jacket in search of her cell phone. She'd had it earlier that afternoon, at the beach with Nat and Alex. "Dammit," she muttered as she turned out both outside pockets and the inside ones as well. "You've got to be kidding me. I did NOT lose it." But it certainly looked like she HAD lost it. All her search turned up was an old gum wrapper, half a lottery ticket and a rumpled five dollar bill. "GodDAMMIT!"
A beep from the Thin Man's vicinity made her head snap up. In one skeletal hand he held her cell phone, it's four-color digital screen glowing. This was what had made the beep. His other hand held a note.
"Give me that," she snapped, reaching for the phone. He shook his head, and offered her the note again. "I'll read the frigging note in a minute. Right now I want my cell phone. If you don't want to die again, you'll give it to me. Got it?"
His eyes hardened, and quite deliberately he dropped the phone to the floor and stepped on it, grinding it under the heel of his polished wingtip.
"HEY! Bastard!" Flinging all care to the wind, she hurtled towards him, colliding with his chest and pushing him backward to slam into the wall. "That was private property!"
The Thin Man wheezed and went limp against the wall. Dylan backed off instantly, anger forgotten in a rush of concern. "Are you-" she began, but stopped as he slid down the wall, breathing heavily, clutching his chest over his heart. His eyes were squeezed shut, thin lips pressed together in an almost invisible line.
"Oh... shit," she stammered, dropping to her knees next to him. "Sorry," she apologized with a wince. "I... forgot. About the sword." His eyes opened slowly, fixing her with a gaze that cut like a knife. "I'm sorry! I just apologized, didn't I?" Guilt gnawed at her. "Come on." She grabbed his elbow, trying to pull him to his feet. He didn't budge. "I said come ON." She tugged again. "Let me look."
He stared at her distrustfully.
"If I wanted to hurt you, all I'd have to do is punch you, right?" she asked. He didn't answer. "Right. Well, I'm not hitting you. Guess that means I don't want to hurt you. It's this thing people do, called being NICE. You should take lessons. It'd do wonders for your social life." She heaved on his elbow again, and managed to drag him up the wall into a standing position. "And while you're at it, get a tan," she suggested as she pulled him towards the couch. He was leaning heavily on her, but she accepted the weight. "You look like a vampire or an accountant or something."
She got him settled on the couch, sat next to him, and began loosening his tie. Immediately, his hand grabbed her wrist, pulling it away from his throat. "Hey, relax, all right?" she said softly, trying to soothe him a bit. She was starting to feel guilty for having been so snide with him. "I just want to make sure I haven't reopened anything life threatening." She paused, then added. "You want to do it instead?"
The Thin Man stared at her for a moment, then slowly began loosening his tie. Dylan nodded and sat back, letting him unbutton his jacket and the shirt beneath. He didn't go all the way - just far enough so she could pull the fabric back to reveal the left half of his chest. Like the rest of his flesh, his torso was pale as a ghost. The only thing marring the smooth white skin was a jagged red scar of raised flesh about five inches long that was set just to the right of his heart. A few inches the other way, and he would have been dead even BEFORE he fell over the side of the building, his heart skewered on the brutally sharp tip of his own sword.
Dylan hissed in sympathy as she looked at the scar. It had obviously been stitched up by a hasty hand; she could see the crosshatching where skin had grown over some of the sutures, giving the scar a Frankensteinian appearance. "Oh God...," she murmured, reaching up to run her fingers down the thick red line. The Thin Man stiffened under her touch. "Didn't you go to a doctor?" she asked, looking into his face with real concern. He didn't answer, but she wasn't expecting one. "It was bad enough you'd been run through. What if this had gotten infected? I'm amazed you're still alive." She shook her head. "I'm amazed anyway, but even more so now."
He felt like a panther ready to bolt under her fingers, so she pulled her hands back and carefully covered him with his shirt again. Immediately, he began refastening the buttons. "You'll live," she confirmed as she watched him. "Though the way that was stitched up, it's no wonder it still hurts. It must have taken forever to heal. I bet you kept ripping it open by accident, before the stitches could actually DO anything. Am I right?"
Stony silence.
"You know, if you want my help, you're going to have to start communicating somehow." She sighed and slid off the couch, kneeling beside the ruined remnants of her phone. "I loved that phone," she mourned, picking up the ruined display screen and turning it over in her hands before tossing it back on the pile and looking over her shoulder at the Thin Man. "Do you mind letting me in on the big secret here? First off, why aren't you dead? Second, why are you HERE? And third, WHERE did you get that ring? And don't think I won't drag your ass to jail if you stole it, because I will."
She watched him finish knotting his tie. He moved with amazing economy - no extraneous motion was wasted on fussing with the knot. Every move he made was like a wolf, stalking its prey. Even mundane tasks, like buttoning a shirt, were subject to the same intensity. There was no denying, he was an excellent predator.
A white piece of paper fluttering past her eyes pulled her out of her study of the Thin Man's lean hands. He had tossed his note at her face, and it settled in her lap. "You could just HAND it to me," she berated him, plucking the fold of paper out of her lap and uncrumpling it.
No phones
Dylan looked at him with disbelief. "You've got to be kidding me," she said. Holding up the note in two fingers, she tilted her head to the side. "No phones? That's it? That's the extent of my Need to Know clearance?"
Moving with speed she hadn't expected, he leaned forward and snatched the slip of paper out of her hand. Producing a pen out of nowhere - it must have been up his sleeve - he bent over the coffee table and scribbled something on the back of the note, then handed it back to her. Dylan grabbed it away from him and read his reply.
Yes.
"You're not endearing yourself to me, you know," she grumbled, balling the note up in one hand and tossing it over her shoulder, in the direction of the wastebasket next to her sound system. She heard the wad of paper sink into the bin with an easy swish! Nothing but net. "Next up you're going to tell me to pack a few things and follow you to Toledo or something."
When all he did was blink at her, she let her jaw drop for a second before quickly recovering. "Oh… Give me a break! Look… Creepy, Thin Man, Anthony, whatever you want to be called. See this ring?" She held up the ring again. "This is serious shit, okay? I can't go gadding off to some non-extradition country when this is on the loose. I need to call Nat and Alex, and Bos and Charlie for that matter. We need to call the government! I don't know why they haven't called us already! Do you know what this ring IS?"
A nod.
"Then you know how important it is that it gets back into the right hands, and FAST." She shook her head again. "How did you GET it?"
No answer. He was beginning to look impatient, glancing uneasily at the clock on her wall beside the front door.
"What, you have a hot date or something? Look, unless someone else out there knows you didn't go from dust to dust, then I think we're safe." She paused, and squinted at him. "DOES anyone else know?"
He was ignoring her. Springing like a cat, he jumped to his feet, moving quickly and uneasily, pacing back and forth behind her couch.
"Calm down, okay?" Dylan said, standing slowly and reaching out a hand towards him, as though trying to tame a fractious lion. "It's safe here. You're going to be all right. I promise."
He glared at her, and she realized with sudden clarity that he wasn't tame at all; not even close. She'd been treating him like a wounded kitten, but his eyes were cold-blooded as a snake, and just as poisonous. A shiver of fear trickled down her spine.
"I'm going to get a drink of water," she said, edging toward the kitchen. Easier thought than done; the kitchen was behind her couch, and she had to cross his path to get there. But if she could just make it to the kitchen, she could get to the pager she kept in the junk drawer beside the stove. "Do you want something?"
He was watching her like a hawk, body unmoving but eyes following her every move. It was unnerving; she felt naked under that icy stare.
"Cut that out," she finally snapped, crossing her arms over her stomach and staring right back at him. "Do you think you're going to intimidate me or something? This is my apartment, buddy, not yours, and I'm not going to be bullied in my own place. Hell, I'm not going to be bullied PERIOD. What was that?"
Something had creaked outside her door.
Turning her head to look at the door, Dylan murmured, "Now what was th-"
Then there was a blinding pain on the back of her skull, followed by a telescoping blackness as the floor rushed up to meet her.
TBC….
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Okay, there's the start. What do you think so far? I don't know how long this story is going to be, but I don't see an easy end in sight, do you? LOL! Reviews are always nice, and help stimulate the creative spark in all of us, so any kind words you have for the story to this point would be most appreciated. I'll try to update as soon as I can! :-D
