CHAPTER TWO

Kate stared at her occasional father-in- law in a state of shock. "What!" She shook her head in denial. "No, I saw the photos, there is no way anyone in that car could have survived."

Jackson's expression was blank. Like it had been chiseled out of granite. "Richard was lax in his use of the seat belt. He was thrown from the car."

Kate shook her head. "No, there was a body mashed into the remains of the Ferrari. They even took some pieces of Rick from the wreckage which were cremated and were buried in his coffin at the funeral." Kate had tears rolling down her cheeks. "Why are you doing this to me?"

Someone else might have tried to comfort Kate, but that wasn't who Jackson Hunt was.

"I take it no one thought to check the DNA. The remains found in the car were from one of my people." His voice held no trace of emotion. "He was bringing Richard to me for a meet."

Kate continued to shake her head. "I don't believe you. Rick never said anything to me about going to meet you."

Jackson shifted his gaze to the floor. "It's complicated."

Kate shot him a glare that would melt steel. "I'll bet." She took a moment to calm herself. "If he's alive, where is he? I want to see him…now!"

Jackson waved his hand in the 'this way' gesture and began to walk toward a sheetrock wall that was obviously a recent addition to the concrete block warehouse. There was a single door framed into the improvised wall.

When he opened the door for Kate she was greeted by bright lights and a lot of medical equipment. There were a couple of gowned and masked men standing over a mobile surgical table and another person, this time a woman, standing nearby watching over some monitors which had feeds over to the operating platform.

She didn't have a good view of who was on the table because of the people dressed like doctors blocking her vision, but she assumed it was Rick.

Kate is biting on her bottom lip as Jackson steps closer. "How are things going?"

One of the doctors turned and faced Jackson. "We've just finished the final surgical procedure. We will keep him in an induced coma during the recovery process, then we'll have to deal with the accommodation time."

Jackson nodded. "How long will that take?"

There was a shrug from the man in white. "Hard to say. Much of this is ground breaking experimental procedures. With healing from the surgery, then the learning curve on his new prosthetics at least a month to six weeks."

The doctor stared at Hunt. "Then there's the final surgery to be performed after he's healed enough and is strong enough to accept it."

Hunt waved his hand. "I'll deal with that, you just finish up what you were working on."

Kate ignored the medical people standing around and walked over toward the operating table. She stopped a couple feet away, and the tears began to flow again. His body showed bruises and cuts all over. He had been thrown out of the car. But both legs and his left arm were incased in what appeared to be soft casts of some type. His head was also heavily wrapped in bandages.

Suddenly Kate felt a hand grabbing her arm and gently pulling her away. It was Jackson.

"Come on. You've seen him. He's alive. Now he is going to need time to heal."

Kate reluctantly let herself be reluctantly led out of the make shift operating room.

Once they had closed the door behind them she stopped and glared at the aged spook. "Why? Why is he here? Why isn't he in a real hospital? I would assume that he would have been taken from the crash site to the nearest facility. How did you get him out of there?"

Jackson just shook his head. "You don't want to know."

Kate had her hands clenched in a tight fist. "Why is he here? What are you hiding?"

Jackson led her over to the other end of the old warehouse and indicated that she should sit in one of the two folding chairs that she hadn't noticed when she came in.

"Sit down, Kate. You need to listen to what I have to tell you."

Kate was clenching and unclenching her hands. "So tell me."

Jackson stared her up and down for several moments. "You need to know why Richard is here."

"I thought he was here for you to use all this experimental surgery on him."

Jackson shook his head. "He was on his way to see me when he had the accident. He had none of those physical injuries at the time we set up the meeting we were supposed to have that evening."

Kate frowned. Why couldn't people just come out and say what they had to say instead of talking around the subject before they get to the point?

"Okay, why was he coming to see you?"

"Because he did have a medical problem that only I could help him with."

Kate glared at the infuriating man next to her. "So what was this problem, that he never mentioned to me, his wife, but he'd call his absent father whom he only sees when there is trouble knocking on his door."

Jackson cracked the slightest of smiles. "He needs a heart. More accurately, he needs my heart."

Kate's jaw dropped once again as Jackson briefly turned away, then turned back so that they were facing each other.

Kate shook her head. "I don't understand, Hunt. What are you talking about? I'd have known if Rick was experiencing heart problems."

Hunt leaned his arms on his thighs, and folded his hands together. "It was a recently diagnosed problem. He thought he had time to talk to you about it when he worked up the courage to do so."

"Courage! Why would he need courage to tell me something like that? I'm his wife, and I love him. I would be there for him all the way." Her outrage temporarily slowed the flow of her tears. "And how is it that you know about this heart problem?"

Hunt lifted his head and gave Kate a sad smirk. "I always know what's going on in my family's life. I may not be able to be with them, but I do watch over them."

Kate frowned, because she knew that was true. Hunt had stepped up and was mostly responsible for getting Alexis back from her kidnapping. Of course it was a kidnapping aimed at getting back at Hunt.

"I had asked him to come. He was on his way to see me, when he was involved in the accident." Jackson ran his hand through his white hair. "I was going to tell him that he could have my heart."

"What?" Kate shook her head. "Are you sick? Or some other problems?"

Hunt chuckled. "My only illness is that I'm getting old, and I'm tired. For an old coot I'm in pretty good shape, kidneys are beginning to fail and I don't heal up as fast as I used to, but the heart's still strong, and should last Rick for a while."

Kate reached up and grabbed at her hair, only to find her fingers had nothing to grab onto.

"I'm having trouble understanding this." Kate stared at her father-in-law. "Are you saying you are going to volunteer your heart for a transplant even though you aren't someone who's terminal?"

Hunt smirked. It looked so like Castle's. "Kate, you could say I've been terminal since I joined up with the Agency. People like me don't ever retire to a rocking chair in front of a warm fireplace. It's all just a matter of time. I'm just exercising an opportunity to choose how I go out and why."

Kate was crying. "Is it even legal to do what you are proposing?"

"I figured there was no reason to tell anyone. If suddenly I'm not calling in one day, the agency will just assume I finally caught the bullet with my name on it."

Kate ran her hands over her brushy head as she kept shaking it. "But, what about the accident?" She waved her hand over toward the improvised operating room a few feet away.

Jackson frowned. "I'm hoping that he will heal enough, soon enough, to be able to survive the rigors of such an operation. It's going to take a while, because his injuries are significant."

Hunt took Kate's hand in his and gave her a wink. "And, if he heals the way the doctors think he will, you might be surprised. I think you'll find that Rick will not only be good as new, but he'll be better. Much, much, better."

Kate got up and paced back and forth. "I'm having trouble wrapping my head around all this. I don't understand how all these secret medical procedures come about? Where did you find them, Surgeons Are Us?"

Jackson leaned back in his chair. "Come on, Kate. You know that a person like me knows a lot of people who have skills and talents that they can't exactly advertise in the medical journals."

Kate dropped her head. "Oh god, Rick is being operated on by a bunch of back room mad doctors."

Hunt waved at the empty chair. "Sit down, Kate. You need to listen to what I have to say."

She frowned but walked over and sat on the folding chair again.

"We're both involved in a very delicate situation." He jabbed his thumb back toward the makeshift operating room. "It Rick had gone to a legitimate hospital and was seen by the best in the business. It was doubtful that he'd ever walk again. The big shots at the top medical facilities would stand around patting themselves on their backs while you would have had to push Rick out in a wheelchair that he would be in for the rest of his short life."

"I don't understand." Kate was getting tired of saying that.

Hunt just shook his head. "Kate, we've already established that I know people. People who don't necessarily conform to the niceties of polite society. And that includes persons on the fringe of just about anything, including medicine."

Kate's eyes got big. "You didn't! You actually put Rick's life in the hands of some mad scientist?"

Hunt shrugged. "There's at least one more to go yet. I know of a person who will do the heart transplant surgery. She was a brilliant cardiac doctor, but she always had problems with those pesky rules and regulations."

Kate flopped back into the chair. "Well at least it's not Dr. Joshua Davidson, then I would have had to shoot you."

Jackson chuckled. "No, I know who Josh Davidson is. And he is too much of a goody two shoes to be involved with something as important as this." Hunt cracked a smile. "Also, the last I heard was he came back from his last Doctors without Borders trip with a particularly nasty venereal disease."

Kate just stared at the man sitting in front of her. It took her several moments to regain her composure. At lease enough to continue their conversation.

Kate wave her hand, taking in all that this once abandoned warehouse represented. "So, do you have some large stash put away somewhere? How are you even paying for all of this?" She tried to push some hair, that wasn't there, behind her ear. "You can't have access to that many secret black ops funds."

He smirked again. "I can put my hands on a goodly amount of cash, but no. Nothing like this is going to eventually cost." He captured her eyes with his. "That's where you come in. I'm going to be having a lot of expenses coming due real soon. I'm going to need you to supply that cash."

Kate gasped. "Me! What makes you think I can get that kind of money?"

"Your name."

"What?"

"Your name. Your name is officially now Katherine Castle. And I happen to know that aside from the trusts that Richard created for Martha and Alexis, he's worth more than 200 million dollars, and that's all yours now."

"But I…" She sat there with her mouth hanging open.

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After talking with Jackson for a while longer, Kate knew what she had to do. She had to save Rick no matter what she had to do, or how much it cost. If they had to spend the rest of their lives scraping by, like most people have to do, she would do it. Hell, for Castle she would live in a box. As long as it was private.

She was nervous as the precinct elevator slowly moved its way up to the fourth floor. She felt bad because she'd showed up back to work just this morning and now she was going to have to take a lot of time off, to deal with Castle's recovery and then his heart surgery. She wasn't sure she was going to be strong enough to survive if she wound up losing him again.

She stepped off the elevator and moved quickly over to the boys desks. She put her most apologetic expression on her face.

"Oh, oh," Esposito said as soon as he saw Kate. "Someone's going to give us some bad news."

Kate dropped her head for a moment, then lifted back to look both her friends in their eyes.

"I'm sorry guys, but I need to take some more time off. I thought I was ready to come back, but I'm not. I need to work some things out."

Kevin gave her an understanding nod. "You do what you have to do. We'll be here if you need us for anything."

"Yeah, just ask, and we'll be there." Espo added.

"Thanks guys." She turned and walked over to Gates' office and knocked on the door frame.

"Come in, Detective. What's on your mind?"

Kate walked in, not meeting her Captain's eyes. "I was wrong, sir. I'm not ready to go back to work. I can't concentrate on anything. I thought that the diversion of a case and the familiarity of being back working would help. But Castle is supposed to be here with me, and he's not."

Gates nodded. "I can't say I know what you're going through, Kate. But you do what you have to do. I'll put you down for a leave of absence. And you can let me know when you think you'll be able to come back in to work."

Kate chewed on her bottom lip. "Thank you so much, Captain. If it gets to be too long, I'll call and let you know so you can fill the spot."

Gate's looked surprised. "Are you considering quitting, Kate?"

"I don't know." Kate sighed. "That's the problem. I don't seem to know anything right now. I know I have a lot of legal hassles ahead, and I could really use a full night's sleep without having to drug myself."

Gates stood up and came round her desk and gave Kate a hug. "Whatever you need Kate, just call. If the 12th can help you in any way we will. "

Kate wiped away a tear. "Thank you, sir. I will keep you informed as best I can." Which she knew was a lie.

Kate turned and left her captain's office. She waved at her boys as she got onto the elevator.

She didn't know why, but it almost felt like she was leaving for good.

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Kate was nervous entering the law office of Rick's personal lawyer. Henry had been looking out for Rick's investments and various accounts for years. In fact, Henry had quit the firm he used to work for, and had officially retired. Except he didn't. He just took over the management of all Rick's financial dealings. For Henry it was a good gig as a part time job and part time retirement.

Kate had met Henry a couple of times, once just before the wedding where she had to sign a bunch of postdated paperwork. Henry didn't want to have to bother the new couple during their honeymoon to get the legalities wrapped up. Especially in case, god forgive, that anything should happen while they were on their vacation in the Galapagos. So, she knew that she was legally the head of Richard Castle Enterprises and had power over anything that hadn't been designated for Martha or Alexis, by his will. Castle had also been smart enough to make sure there would be no time lag from the time his death had been certified and Kate's ability to have access to any and all of those assets.

Kate had talked again with Hunt and he mentioned to her that between the less than above board operations that had already been done on Castle. And the very special prosthetic enhancements that had been already surgically implanted. He figured she owed in the neighborhood of 45 million dollars already, and the heart surgery hadn't even been scheduled yet. His best guesstimate was, before all was said and done, she'd be on the hook for about 60 million dollars.

Kate shook her head. Talk about inflation. Steve Austin only cost the government 6 million dollars. Of course, that was only a TV show. The six million dollar man, fat chance of that.

She shook her head again. It didn't matter. If it cost her every dime that Rick had, and everything that she had, she would pay it gladly for a chance to get him back.

"Kate, these are not the circumstances that I had hoped to see you again, but you are certainly welcome. Please come in." Henry escorted Kate into his modest home office.

The elderly lawyer had a nice loft of his own in another part of Manhattan. He had an office/den set up to 'do what he did so well' for Castle. It was in one corner of his apartment so if needed, he could conduct business in private. He indicated she should sit in the one plush chair in the office.

Henry was widowed, but he had a couple of children who lived in outstate New York. He was still very connected even if he was only now working for R.C.E. It was enough to keep his mind sharp, but didn't put undue pressure on him anymore.

As Kate sat in the comfy chair, she found herself chewing on her bottom lip. It was a nervous habit of hers, and she was certainly nervous. She was so far out of her depth that she craved for the innocent ignorance that had been hers just a few weeks ago.

Henry set a few things in order on his desk and turned toward Kate.

"So Kate, what can I do for you?"

Kate really wasn't sure how to word what she had to ask. She couldn't' come out and tell Henry that Rick was really alive under medical care. She needed to work under the assumption that the money she needed was hers to use.

Kate gave him a weak smile. "Well, I don't know if you knew about how Rick had certain, I wouldn't call them friends, more like connections. Connections that he'd use to find things that you couldn't exactly find in the local yellow pages."

Henry rolled his eyes. "If you mean his off the grid, slightly less than legitimate individuals who would on occasion provide him with what he wasn't able to find by more conventional means?"

Kate made it all the way to a smile. "Yeah."

"I understand." Henry nodded. "I take it he left you with a few past due bills?"

Kate tried to scrape her hair behind her ears, to no avail. "Something like that? Is there some way to get a lot of cash without causing any obvious trouble?"

"It depends." He shrugged. "It's all his, or actually, yours. But depending on how much we're talking about. It might not be easy to get what you need quickly."

Kate nodded. "I figured as much."

"So, how much are we talking about? Rick kept a significant amount of 'mad money'." He used his fingers to form the quotes. "I think there was about 25 million in that account. He said it was his disappear and start over fund. But anything more than that will take some time."

Kate was embarrassed to look Henry in the eye. "From what I've been told, I'll need all that, and probably 30 or 35 million more."

Henry brow raised, but he didn't say anything. "That will take some time. I'll have the mad money fund for you by the day after tomorrow. I'll look into how to get the rest and I'll be in touch once I have a plan as to how to free up that much."

Kate wanted to cry, but she couldn't. She needed to put on a strong front. "Thank you, Henry." She was about to get up, then sat back down. "Don't you even want to know why I want all that money?"

"Frankly Kate, it's none of my business. It's my job to manage your wealth, not tell you how to spend it." He sighed. "But, if you need a friend to unburden yourself to, I'm willing to listen."

Kate stood up and moved over and hugged the older man. "Thank you, Henry. And I hope against hope that I will be able to tell you in the not too distant future."

He stood and put his hands on her shoulders. "I hope for that too, Kate."

While wiping the tears from her eyes, she quickly exited the lawyer's home office.

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A/N: When I came up with this idea I asked Google how much would Steve Austin, the six million dollar man have cost in today's money. It was in the billions. Of course that was government spending.

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