Most of the characters and situations in this story belong to Alliance Atlantis, CBS, Anthony Zuicker and other entities, and we do not have permission to borrow them. All others belong to us, and if you want to play with them, you have to ask us first. No infringement is intended in any way, and this story is not for profit.
By Cincoflex and VR Trakowski--Cincoflex at aol dot com and VRTrakowski at gmail dot com
Spoilers: through Season 3 at the moment.
Chapter 4
BRASS
The first thing I notice when I get out of the car is a familiar smell, one that makes me think of summertime and hamburgers. Smoke and chemicals. I wonder what the neighbors think, somebody grilling at dawn, but then I remember--it's Vegas. They probably don't even blink.
And then I have to wonder if they know what Heather does for a living. It's a weird thought, and not completely comfortable. Do they think she's just another night-shift pit boss? Or do they keep their kids away from her yard?
She doesn't come the first time I press the doorbell, and a touch of uneasiness tickles my spine. I know, I know, sometimes you don't hear it the first time, or you're in the can or on the other side of the house or whatever--I've heard 'em all a million times just serving warrants. But hey, I'm a cop. I can't help thinking of the times when nobody comes to the door because there's nobody there who can.
But I thumb the bell a second time, and a few seconds later the door opens, and there she is, smiling up at me. Her cheeks are a little pink and she's got her hair in a ponytail, and I can't help smiling back. "I'm sorry," she says, a little breathlessly. "I was out in back. Come in."
Unlike last time, she turns and walks towards the kitchen, leaving me to shut the door behind myself. Which tells me she trusts me.
I follow her into the kitchen, taking another quick look around her place. The living room's about as normal as you can get, with photos and a big-screen TV that would give Nick gadget envy; the kitchen's brighter, set up for actual cooking, not for show. As we hit the kitchen I dig in my jacket pocket. "Here."
She turns, and her eyebrow goes up, but she takes the little box anyway. "Jim, you did it again?"
"Can't fight my early training."
Heather makes a little snorting noise, but her lips purse when she opens it and sees the almonds inside, and I know she's pleased. She'd mentioned before how much she enjoys good-quality smoked almonds, and for some reason they're not easy to find, even in a place like Vegas.
"You're a dear." She lays a hand on my arm, and before I know it she's leaned up and planted a quick kiss on my cheek. Before I can so much as blink, though, she steps away and puts the almonds down.
A glass pitcher of iced tea is sitting on the counter, next to a big platter covered with skewers of chicken and vegetables--tomatoes, onions, zucchini, and something I have to squint at before I recognize as artichoke hearts. She gets a glass out of the cupboard and fills it. "Dinner should be another half-hour or so."
Heather hands me the glass and I take a gulp, and it's just right--cold and fragrant and the slightest bit bitter, the way iced tea should be. "Would you like sugar?" she asks, and I shake my head.
"This is fine."
She smiles again and picks up the platter. "Come out and talk to me," she invites, and I grab the pitcher of tea and follow her again, back through the living room and out the sliding glass door.
The patio isn't very large; half of it is taken up with the hot tub, nothing but a low-walled circle under a cover. The grill is open and smoking, and Heather puts the platter on the round picnic table next to it and starts laying the skewers out.
A few bugs are circling the light, but the sun's starting to come up, and it feels comfortable, almost like I can pretend the sun's sinking instead and that we live actual day lives like normal people. I have a seat on one of the curved picnic benches and set down the pitcher, taking a moment to study Heather as she adjusts the skewers like their placement means the fate of the free world.
I'm almost sorry her hair isn't down again, but I guess if you're working with open flame it makes sense to keep it back. She's wearing a T-shirt and shorts this time, with a sweater, and I let my eyes linger on the curve of her ass and follow her legs down. I've seen 'em before, flashing in and out of one of those floaty skirts she wears to work, but this is different. Now they're bare, and...she's not using them, not for display.
It makes a difference.
Her feet are bare again too; her toes are painted a different color this week, some kind of dark red, and she has a shiny little chain around one ankle. What do they call those things these days? Ankle bracelets? Shouldn't they be anklets?
Heather puts the lid on the grill and I look up again, not wanting to be caught staring this time either. She swings one of those long legs over the other bench and sits down across from me, picking up the half-empty glass that's already on the table and draining it. By the time she puts it down I've already got the pitcher, and I fill her glass again with a rattle of ice cubes while she smiles at me. "Thank you, Jim."
She's smiling a lot tonight. And I have to admit I like it. "Have a good night?" I ask.
"Very." She looks satisfied, and clinks her glass against mine. "I need more bandwidth for the site, which is a good thing. You?"
I shrug. "Kind of quiet, actually. Chased down a few leads, talked to a few witnesses, interrogated a suspect or two. Nothing major." A lot of police work is dead boring, even to the police, and confidentiality issues keep me from going into detail on some of the more exciting stuff. "One thing about being on the night shift--you tend to get more weirdos as colleagues. Makes life more interesting."
"Yourself excepted, of course," Heather says, pursing her lips again and laughing at me without a sound.
"Hell no," I retort, and we both laugh out loud. "'Normal' and I are barely nodding acquaintances by now."
She runs a finger down her glass, wiping away some of the condensation. "In my experience, there's no such thing as normal."
The sun's edge is just clearing the horizon, and the light's making her hair look redder than usual. The chicken's starting to smell delicious; I read garlic, soy sauce, a few other things I can't identify. For an instant the smell takes me someplace else, and it's sunset instead, and the air's humid; it's trees instead of flowerboxes and there's a little girl who looks like a princess swinging on the swingset, yelling to ask me when her hot dog is going to be ready. Then I blink, and normal is gone. If it ever really existed.
"Just varying levels of freak, huh?" I ask, and Heather frowns, her eyes going cold.
I groan, and rub my eyes with my hands. "Sorry," I apologize. "Bad memory."
"It's all right," she says, and while her voice is cool, I can see the flash of anger fading. "You look tired, Jim."
"Long week." I shrug. "Some days I just don't sleep well."
"Do you want to take a rain check?" she asks softly, which surprises the heck out of me. "We can, you know."
Her face is all sympathetic, and that makes me feel good in an embarrassed sort of way, but underneath that is a hint of that wistfulness, and I would have to be a whole lot tireder to give up and leave now.
"No way," I tell her, and watch her shoulders relax a little. "I've been looking forward to this all week."
That turns her cheeks pink again, and she shakes her head, which makes a few bits of hair come loose and float around her ears--very cute.
HEATHER
He does look tired.
Jim's not a classically handsome man; his face shows the effects of decades in a hard job, of dealing with--hackneyed phrase, but appropriate--the underbelly of society. Lines radiate out from his eyes, and his close-clipped hair is growing thin. But if there's one thing I've learned over time, it's that a pretty face means very little. What makes the difference is the kindness in his eyes, the humor around his mouth. This morning that humor is half-lost under exhaustion. Something's troubling him.
I debate with myself over drawing him out. It's one thing to read a client, but it's another to read a friend. It's very easy to go too far, to reveal too much, and I don't want to see him pulling back and shutting down. I really don't want that.
So we make small talk for a while, and I watch him relax, though his gaze still travels over my yard from time to time as though something about it bothers him. When the chicken's done I go back in the house for the rice and fruit salad, ordering him to stay put, and he obeys me with the eye-roll that says "look how henpecked I am" and the tiny grin that tells me he enjoys it.
I think I surpassed myself on the marinade this time. Jim slides the food off his skewer, tumbling it about in the rice, and with the first bite he makes that faint grunting noise that I've come to realize signals deep appreciation. "Okay, what's in it?" he asks as soon as he swallows, and I have to grin.
"Garlic, ginger, sugar, soy sauce--the good kind. I get it at the Far Eastern market over on Baker Street." I take a mouthful of zucchini and it's just right, not too soft and shot through with flavor.
He raises his brows. "That's it?"
I wipe my mouth with my napkin. "It's the proportions that matter. And the time to marinate."
"Well, it's terrific." He slices into a tomato, and I scoop up some rice, satisfied. Cooking for one is boring. Cooking for two is stimulating--particularly if the other person truly appreciates a well-constructed meal.
Some of the strain eases as we eat, and I know the food's doing him good--I expect his blood sugar was pretty low. But in between bites his mouth is still drawn down. When he takes a second skewer but just stares at the food on his plate, I reach over and brush my fingers over his arm. "What's the matter?"
He blinks, and picks up his fork again. "That obvious, huh?"
I simply look at him, and after a moment he shrugs. "My ex called today," he says, and the weariness in his tone makes my throat tighten a little. "She does that from time to time. Usually when she's had a fight with whoever she's hanging with."
He stuffs a bite of banana in his mouth, as though to stop his words.
"How long have you been divorced?" I ask. An expected question; a neutral one.
He swallows, and looks up and back, into memory. "About fourteen years, I guess." He laughs a little, but the sound carries no humor. "Longer than I was married, that's for sure."
His eyes narrow, as though closing something out, and I get up to shut off the patio light. The sun's well up now, and the air's warming quickly; Jim strips off his jacket and drapes it over the bench he's sitting on. This time I pour him more tea.
"Guess you see a lot of that?" I blink and sit back down, a little puzzled by his question.
"See a lot of what?"
He waves his fork, but his eyes don't meet mine, and I can tell he's a little embarrassed. "Marriage problems."
I hesitate. Partly because of the confidentiality that my business demands, but partly because the question seems so out of place for him. "From time to time, yes," I answer finally. "Couples do come to the Dominion for help. But marriage counseling isn't our focus."
Jim opens his mouth and then shuts it again, and I can guess what he's choosing not to say, and I appreciate his restraint. "What we do is help people understand themselves and their needs," I say gently. "Quite often this can help them in their relationships, but we tend to concentrate on the individual, rather than a couple."
"Mmm." He nods. "Like you were willing to help me with my inadequacy?" He takes a drink of tea, shooting me a naughty look over the rim of his glass, and my mouth drops open.
Only for a moment, though--it takes a lot to surprise me, even when I have my guard down. I give him my best haughty look back, but make sure the humor shows through. "Detective Brass, if you can't recognize a distraction technique when you see one--"
He chuckles. "You were plenty distracting just on your own," he says, and the faintest hint of color dusts his cheeks, but I put it down to the memory of being alone in an interrogation room with a dominatrix in full work dress. Not that I wasn't fully aware of who was watching from the other side of the mirror.
"You know, I didn't really think you were guilty," he says abruptly. I let one brow arch, and lean my elbow on the table and my head on my hand.
"No?"
Jim sets down the glass, rolling it idly between those short strong fingers. "Nah. You're smarter than that. The murders were clever, but they kept pointing back to your place. If you killed someone, there's no way we'd be able to connect it to your business."
He really does astonish me. "Jim?"
"Hm?"
"I think that's one of the nicest compliments I've been given." Backhanded and absurd as it is.
This time his face is definitely pink. It's...charming.
BRASS
Y'know, this is downright bizarre. I'm sitting in a perfectly ordinary backyard on a Vegas morning, having finished a truly excellent meal, and I'm talking to someone who is one of the most sympathetic listeners I've run into in years--and she runs a sex club. Okay, okay, fetish club. But just because they don't actually do sex there doesn't mean it isn't what the place is about.
I guess what's bizarre is that it really doesn't matter any more. She's just Heather.
"You telling me I'm not really inadequate?" I tease, and Heather gives me another moue.
"I'm sure you didn't get to be Captain by being anything less than the best," she says, and the humor drains out of me.
"You're wrong about that." I pick up the glass and take another gulp of tea. The sunlight has that peculiar clearness that comes with dawn, and I can see her eyes widening a little even though I'm not really looking at her face. "But that's a long story." I stare down at the melting ice. "Karen would agree with you. About the inadequacy, I mean." It was incompetence, actually, that got me where I am today, but I'm sure as hell not going to discuss Holly Gribbs' death today. Some ghosts just linger.
"Karen is your ex-wife?" Heather asks softly, and I know it's a prompt. She's just as good as interrogation as a cop, in her own way.
"Yep." Her voice plays in my memory again, last night's phone call, hoarse with cigarette smoke and alcohol, and whiny. I hate to say that about her, but it's true. I've heard that tone too many times to count, from half-assed petty criminals who think the world owes them a living, or victims who couldn't be bothered to look out for themselves. "I haven't actually seen her since the last time I went back to New Jersey, when my mom died. Five years maybe."
"Your daughter," she says, with that insight that's downright eerie. "That's why you keep the connection?"
"Fat lot of good it does," I mutter. I don't want to talk about Ellie any more than I want to talk about Holly.
The expected question doesn't come. Finally I look up, and she's just regarding me, those blue eyes clear and calm.
"Sorry," I manage. "Didn't mean to get all maudlin on you."
"What else are friends for?" she asks lightly, and stands up again. "I'll be right back."
She vanishes into the house, and I sit for a minute, wondering why in hell I'm talking about something I've kept under my hat since I came to Vegas. Then I sigh and get up myself. All that iced tea is hitting bottom.
The living room is still dark with the curtains drawn, but the kitchen is all lit up, and for a second I pause in the shadow and watch Heather moving around. There's the faintest smack as her bare feet hit the floor, and the graceful swing of her hips as she rounds the island; she stretches up to get something from a cupboard, and I shift a little as her shirt rides up and a stretch of pale skin appears over the edge of her shorts. But much as the picture makes my mouth water, and my hands wonder just how soft that skin is, it's a bit too much like voyeurism to stand here and watch her when she doesn't know I'm looking. So I slide the back door shut with a clack and stride forward into the pool of light spilling from the kitchen. Heather's looking inquiring, and I lift my hands. "Bathroom?"
She tilts her head towards the hallway. "Second door on the left."
"Thanks."
The hallway's dark too, and I fumble for a second before finding a light switch on the wall. The light comes on, but immediately goes out again with a pop as the bulb shorts out. I mutter a cuss word and head down the hall towards the second door. There's a couple of shapes on the wall between picture frames, and it takes a second of squinting for me to make them out as masks; it's hard to tell in the dark, but they look Asian.
The bathroom's not as fussy as it could have been in a women-only household, but it's still cluttered with bottles and jars and brushes and things I don't know the use of--and don't want to know. Female beauty rituals are something a man leaves to mystery if he can. It smells nice, though, sort of sweet and flowery, like the way my mother's bedroom used to smell when I was a kid. The towels are red, the tiles are white and deep blue, and the shower is twice the size of a standard one. I finish my business and scrub up, but I can't resist a peek inside that big blue box.
My eyes go wide. More bottles, sure, but what gets me is the two separate shower heads on either end, and one of those detachable hoses, and a few more faucets than just "hot" and "cold." I shake my head a little and close the door gently.
HEATHER
The hallway light's burned out again. Making a mental note to call the electrician--it's the third time in as many months--I fumble in the linen closet for a fresh bulb and open Zoe's door, flicking on the light to shed some into the hallway. Normally I'd just leave the hall light until I can get it looked at, but not with a guest in the house.
Unfortunately, he's done in the bathroom before I even have the old bulb out of its socket, so he emerges to find me in a rather undignified perch on a chair, trying to loosen the bulb with one hand and balance the light cover in the other.
Jim stops short and looks up, and I look back down, blowing out my breath to push away a wisp of hair that's tickling my nose. He puts his hands on his hips, and even in the half-light I can see the amusement suffusing his face.
"It's not funny," I scold, even though I can't keep my lips from curling up.
"It sure isn't," he says, obviously trying to sound stern. "Don't you have a stepladder someplace?"
"Of course," I shoot back in my best haughty tone. "But that takes too long."
Inevitably, the chair chooses that moment to wobble on the carpet. I jerk in reflex, my free hand reaching out for balance, but strong hands close over my waist. "I've got you," Jim says, and the next instant my feet are on the floor and I'm blinking with the surprise of it.
The moment goes from movement to stillness, but the adrenaline is still there. Jim's hands are still on my waist, hot against my skin, and he's standing right behind me--not pressing, but right there. I can feel the rush of his breath past my ear, and the goosebumps it raises in its wake. For this one moment, we are totally aware of each other, and a large part of me wants to lean back against him, or better yet turn around. Turn around and...he smells so good...
No. We're friends. I remind myself of all the reasons why I should just step away, and suit actions to thoughts at the same moment he lets me go. I do turn, but not until there's a safe space between us. The cover is still clutched in my hands.
"You've rescued me again, Captain," I say, making my voice light. "Thank you."
"That's my job," he says, equally lightly. "Now, about that stepladder?"
So I end up handing him the fresh bulb from my pocket and then the cover as he perches on the ladder. "You should have been an electrician," I tease as he comes down and folds the ladder shut, and he grunts.
"Yeah--they make more money." He carts the ladder back through to the garage, and I go to throw out the old bulb.
The coffee I started before he came inside has finished brewing, and Jim asks where the mugs are and fetches down two as I get the ice cream from the freezer. It's a little solid, but that comes with the method.
I meant to go back out to the patio, but somehow we end up standing on either side of the kitchen island, sipping coffee. I spoon out the ice cream, mentioning that there's chocolate sauce in the refrigerator if Jim wants it.
"On chocolate chip?" he asks, sliding a bowl towards himself.
"It's mint chip," I correct. "Zoe's favorite."
He blinks down at the bowl, looking endearingly baffled. "It's not green."
I have to laugh. "It's homemade. I leave out the food coloring."
"Oh." For a few minutes, there are no sounds other than our spoons against the bowls, and Jim looks so blissful that I decide not to mention that outside the chocolate chips, the ice cream is sugar-free. Why ruin things?
For a while we just stand there, leaning our elbows on the counter, finishing the coffee and simply relaxing. Finally Jim sighs, rubbing his face. "We'd better get that stuff inside before the squirrels come and carry it off."
I shake my head. "I'll deal with it, Jim. Go home. You're tired."
He opens his mouth to protest, but I give him another stern look, and he closes it again. If he weren't so tired, I know he would argue with me; but if he weren't so tired, I wouldn't have told him to go home in the first place.
I walk him to my front door. "Next Friday?" I ask, and he nods and opesn the door. "Thank you again for changing the light," I add, knowing that he will understand that this includes catching me as well.
He turns in the doorway, bracing one arm against the frame, and looks down at me. He doesn't have to look far, but I am suddenly conscious of the height difference again, of the breadth of his shoulders. "Heather--" he starts, and I tilt my head, encouraging.
With a speed I don't really expect, he leans down and kisses me briefly on the cheek. "Thanks for listening," he says quietly, and then he is down the walk and heading towards his car.
I watch him go, feeling the tingle where the shadow of his beard brushed my skin, and then go out back to collect the dishes. Jim's jacket is still draped over the bench, and I almost go and call him. But he would probably turn around and come back for it, and he needs to rest. Time enough to call him later.
I need time to think, anyway.
See Chapter 5