"I can't believe this," Yuffie was pacing, and if Reno had known her personally for more than an hour he would have realized how out of character this was. Instead, he simply watched with mild interest from the bed on which he sat, a half eaten piece of jerky clenched in his hand, his EMR lying temporarily forgotten beside him on the bedspread. You didn't need to interact with the Wutain girl on a regular basis to tell she was upset, and so the red haired man kept all of the dozens of sarcastic remarks that were running through his head tightly in cheek. "I should have knocked you out and turned you into my father as soon as I could."

That set off alarm bells, and with a slight frown Reno quickly scanned over the current situation in his mind, wondering what exactly could have set off such an off topic sentence. "Excuse me?" he asked, when no reasonable solution presented itself, and briefly he wondered if he should have punctuated that question with a quick blast from his nightstick. It didn't matter that he really had nowhere to go, or that the grown up form of Yuffie Kisaragi had legitimately impressed him, when someone started lamenting not locking you up it was time to get on the move.

"Like you don't know," the thief snapped at him, and continued pacing.

Indignation flared in Reno. He didn't care so much that she didn't deem him worthy of an honest answer- or a dishonest one, at that- but the fact that she didn't even stand still to let him know how the situation stood was going a bit far. He had, after all, been courteous enough not to bash her brains out with his EMR the second he had snatched it from her hands, and he'd even stayed with the body while she went to alert the authorities. Not that was such a big thing, Reno often preferred the dignified silence of a corpse to the mindless prattle of the living, but a favor was still a favor. "I don't," he responded angrily.

If nothing else, that stopped her in her tracks, but the look she shot him wasn't exactly full of sudden kinship. She was seething. Reno didn't think he had ever seen her so mad, even back when she was tramping around with the vigilante gang and it had become clear that the majority of his offense was dedicated to trying to knock that stupid looking arm guard off of her. He considered withdrawing his statement, but figured nothing good would come from replacing a two word exclamation with a lie.

"You don't know what?" Yuffie snapped at him, her eyes glittering dangerously, and Reno found himself glad that she had dumped off most of her fighting gear when they had stepped through the doors of her home. "You don't know what sort of weapon your fucking friends used? You don't know how long it took for him to go down, how much it hurt? What don't you know, Reno!?"

Yuffie paused, realizing she was shouting, but figured that if there was any time to pursue the issue it was this. Something seemed to be genuinely confusing her seemingly uncaring captive, and there was a good chance that she could press that to get some information. He opened his mouth to answer, apparently used to or otherwise unfazed by being screamed at, but Yuffie cut him off with a quick wave of her hand. "This is so stupid!" she yelled, practically shrieking. "Why are you even still here? I've turned my back on you a dozen times, even left you alone with Shake, and your still sticking around? What, are you supposed to report back to your boss what affect the hit had on me? Were you sent to distract me while this went down, and your waiting for some sort of signal to call you back?"

As she spoke, Reno's eyes grew progressively wider, and as she began to wind down he lept to his feet, holding his hands out in front of him like a shield. The piece of jerky dropped down to the ground as he began to speak, softly at first, but getting louder until he managed to override her tirade. "Woah, woah, woah," he said, "*woah*. How 'bout we back up, here? That guy... Shake?... was shot with a handgun. It wasn't quite a .44 Magnum, but it was close enough that it doesn't really make a difference. Its basically a compact cannon. The basic laws of gravity dictate how long it took for him to go down, and for how much it hurt... well, it didn't. The bullet hit him in the back of the neck, blew his spinal chord apart, and went at an angle up and through his jugular. It took a while, but he shouldn't have felt much of anything as he died."

He took a step forward towards Yuffie who seemed to be frozen, looking as if she was about to be physically ill. She had her hands raised as if she had meant to claw his eyes out if he said the wrong thing, and he gently grabbed her wrists and lowered them down to the standard waist level. "Now," he said, practically whispered, but all of the sudden he was the one with an edge in his voice. "What's all this bullshit about me distracting you, and a boss I'm supposed to be reporting something to?"

"Bullshit?" Yuffie asked, after she took a moment to regroup from Reno's rather gruesome details about what had befallen her friend. "Is that what you call this? Bullshit? Is that all this means to you?"

"Is that all *what* means to me?" Reno cried, genuinely rattled, sick of having no idea what the thief was talking about.

"You killed someone!" Yuffie exploded, putting both of her hands on the man's chest and shoving. Caught by surprise, Reno stumbled a step back, but steadied himself on the bed post before he went tumbling to the floorboards. He narrowed his eyes, but left his EMR untouched on the bed as he crossed his arms over his chest.

"Yes," Reno said cooly, "I have. But not Shake. Think about it, brat," he said, going with the label he had slapped on her even in this tense situation. "You found me in the market place. When we found your friend, he wasn't even cold. Even if I was stupid enough to go out into public after I... what? Hid a gun, changed clothes, washed up? Even if I was stupid enough to go out after all that do you really think there would have been enough time to get arrested, and drug back here before he stiffened up?"

Again, Yuffie recoiled at his graphic terms, but recovered much quickly this time. "I'm not stupid, you know!" she hissed at him. "Don't you think I know that you don't work alone? I don't care if you didn't pull the trigger, you know who did and you're still a murderer!"

It all hit Reno in a flash, and he would have laughed out loud if it wasn't for the painful barrage of images the realization brought to him. Pictures, voices, little memory movies from over a year ago, and any time in the decade before that. The Turks, Shin-Ra, Rufus, a hundred people he'd killed, a million crimes he'd committed, pools of blood that had either been spilt by his hand or by his orders. The life that got away, except he had been the one who had left it. And then he thought of Avalanche, of Spike the farm boy and Tits, that brunette Rude had been so fond of. And then he thought of Yuffie, who had at the time been nothing more than a slip of a klemptomaniac, and came full circle to the present.

"So you think that just because I'm in town and something bad happens, the Turks are responsible for it?" Reno asked quietly. Inwardly, he was surprised that the organization still had enough fame to its name that their very presence brought on thoughts of crime. "Well I have a news flash for you, brat, that's not my gig anymore. Hasn't been for a long time. I left the blue suit behind over a year ago."

That gave Yuffie legitimate pause, but she came right back at him, teeth bared like an animal ready for battle. "Oh, please," she growled, "you really expect me to believe that? You just happen to be in town when your old colleagues pull a hit, less than two miles from the crime scene? Haven't I told you how stupid I'm not?"

Reno's mind worked. She had made a good point, but there was something missing here, some broken link that made the whole thing absurd. Then it came to him, his second bolt of inspiration in the conversation. "Aren't you forgetting something?" he asked, surprised that he was actually relieved to have come up with a good counter to her accusations.

"What am I forgetting?" Yuffie demanded, acid practically dripping from her voice.

"You think the Turks did it because I'm in town," he started, "and you think that I'm still a Turk because I was in town when they did it. The only problem here is, since I'm not on their line up anymore, there's nothing even connecting them to this!"

Well, Reno reasoned, at the very least she looks off her guard. The problem was, she wasn't afflicted with the sudden stunned revelation that he had provided for her, and instead seemed to be trying to work out whether he was lying, crazy, or both. Usually that sort of question about himself would make Reno grin like a Cheshire cat, but he was currently in no mood for games.

"I don't think that the Turks did this because of you, you arrogant prick," Yuffie suddenly burst out, "I think they did it because you... *they*... admitted it."

"...what?" Reno asked slowly, hoping the single word would be enough to carry over the dozens of other questions he had in mind for the situation. She'd found Tseng, Rude, and Elena? Talked to them? When? And why in God's name had they been stupid enough to confess to murder? It had been with absolute admiration that Reno had watched Tseng deny, without blinking, that it had been him who had stolen a katana from the local weapons shop *while he held it in his hands*, and they'd come clean for this?

"They left a fucking calling card!" Yuffie cried, producing a soggy piece of paper from inside her clenched fist and answered all of Reno's questions in one fell swoop. Technically, it was a business card, or had been when any of the information on it was accurate. The Turks had used these back when their office was in the Shin-Ra basement, before Meteor had caused Shin-Ra to cease having a basement. It was soaked in sticky red blood that now stained Yuffie's palm. "This was pegged to the inside of his damn door!"

Reno continued to read the card, over and over again, in disbelief. Names, a phone number, address of the Shin-Ra building but no specific co-ordinance given. "It's bullshit," he finally managed, shrugging his shoulders as if seeing the card hadn't shaken him up half as much as it had. Talk about ghosts...

"What's bullshit??" Yuffie demanded.

"That card," he responded. "Even if we... they... still stayed in that building. Even if we still had that phone number. Fuck, even if we could still afford to have something like that printed up... we wouldn't. Do you really think I'd still be alive if we made a habit of broadcasting every job we did?"

"So, what," Yuffie asked, "someone is trying to set the Turks up?"

"Set them up for what?" Reno asked bitterly. "Any big elaborate joke anyone wanted to play on the Turks reached its punch line a long time ago. Ha, fucking, ha. Anyone who hated us... them... would get a bigger laugh out of watching us swim in the piss of the slums than rot in jail."

"Things are that bad?" came the response, a surprised question.

"Probably worse, now," Reno muttered, shrugging and turning his back on her as he walked over and returned to his spot on the bed. "I didn't exactly leave a forwarding address when I walked out, and the funny thing about downward spirals is that a you aren't going to be waiting the problem out."

"So who *would* leave a card like this?" Yuffie asked, then quickly amended her statement. "Not that you've really convinced me I was wrong in the first place."

"Jesus," Reno exclaimed, "why don't you just give me a badge so I can do your police forces job for it?"

"You aren't doing anyones job," Yuffie snapped menacingly, "you're keeping your ass out of a prison cell by offering a reasonable alternative."

"Good point," Reno said, then thought it over for a moment. "Smoke screen. Whoever tacked the card up apparently realized that you people would be gullible enough to believe the simplest answer was the correct one. So when you go over a group of people who might not even work together anymore, they skip country and go fuck some foreign broads."

The word 'foreign' seemed to spark some curiosity within Yuffie. "Where are you from, anyway?"

"Born and bred in the slums, baby," Reno replied, and then snapped at her. "Why?"

"Well," she said, rising to meet his tone, "I need something to fill in on your arrest file."

"Cute," he muttered, but when she didn't crack a smile Reno decided to go another way. "Do you know what I'm going to do for you?"

Yuffie snorted, as if she didn't believe him capable of helping her out in any way, shape, or form. But, of course, like everyone in the world when faced with a random offer of aid, she was interested, and eventually her inner indignation won over. "What? What are you going to do?"

"Exactly what I said earlier," he said with a smirk. "Your police force's job."

"Oh, what," Yuffie demanded, "you're going to find out who killed my friend?"

There was no sense of a joke in Reno's next words, no hidden mirth or even hint of mockery. "Yes," he said simply, "I am."