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Chapter Four: Runaway (NICK)
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Airports were always crowded.
Nick had been an avid people-watcher since he was twelve and his older sister Rebecca had told him it was a lost art, but right now, he was far more interested in shoving them aside than he was in observing them. He was purposefully trying to forget why he was there, why he needed the flight, and just keep it foremost in his mind that he needed it. Lose Grissom's name entirely - - he would be better off with that out of his head. Grissom and Lizzie Zimmer and accusations and tragedies. Like he needed any of that. What he needed was a flight to Boston, for personal reasons, and yes, he would be paying cash, and yes, he needed it now, not tomorrow and not next week.
I hate airports.
He did, and today, he hated crowds, too, hated people in general.
I want to be Gil Grissom when I grow up.
He flinched away from the thought and stood in another line. He wasn't entirely sure where this one was going, but it gave him a purposeful look. It wasn't like Grissom had ever said he was worthless. It wasn't even remotely like that. Grissom had trusted him enough to send him to Boston (or to get me out of the way) and Grissom had to know that prying through past history was a dangerous and delicate operation. And where was this line going, anyway?
People-watching. A family, genus hurry-us, species exasperated. A man in a Hawaiian shirt fumbling for his wallet. A plump mother holding her children like suitcases, close at her sides, and a teenaged daughter applying a ghastly shade of pink lipstick. Nick saw two Oedipal complexes in the making when the young boys, probably twins, were bundled tight into the mother as she reached into her purse for peppermint candies and came up with big ones, pink-and-white, caught in plastic wrappers. He looked away, feeling like more than an observer. Besides, people-watching sucked. He couldn't remember why he'd ever liked it.
"Ticket?" the young woman asked him.
"I'd like one, yeah." He heard the harshness in his voice and scowled. He wasn't going to do any good - - in Boston or here - - if he went into things like that. He revised his tone and said, "Boston, please. Just one. Any class. I'd like to get there as soon as possible."
She gave him a hesitant smile and her fingers flew over the keyboard. She called up different channels and rattled off numbers as he gave her his information. "We have a flight leaving in ten minutes, one empty seat, gate twelve. Can you run?"
"You bet." He snatched the ticket-paper from her the second it was printed off.
"Any luggage?"
"Not a scratch."
"Then I suggest you hurry, Mr. Stokes."
He thanked her and bolted, looking and feeling ridiculous, like something out of a romantic comedy - - a man running through an airport in search of a girl. And the similarity wasn't entirely unfounded, either. He was chasing a girl's trail, after all. It just happened to lead to Boston, and he just happened to be the only person (expendable) reliable enough to track down the truth.
Gate twelve was just as crowded as the rest of the terminal. He forgot he was supposed to be Grissom's people-person, and shoved at random, pushing his way through. Man with a mission. Man after a girl. The helpful employee. Whatever label someone wanted to slap on him, let them go ahead and do it. He had a flight, and he had a ticket, and he was going to get on it.
He handed away his ticket and was ushered to a seat in coach. He was sweating, but apparently not enough to merit a drink offer by any of the harried-looking flight attendants. He got a small pack of airline peanuts instead - - something he had previously thought of as a myth - - and split them open and ate them almost all at once.
"Hungry?"
The man next to him was neatly-attired, clean-coiffed, and looking at Nick like he was a barbarian. It was too much like Grissom's occasionally contemptuous gaze, and made him want to squirm.
Relax. Just pretend he's committed murder and this will all go easier.
He suppressed a chuckle. "No, not hungry. I just had to run to make this flight. I'm feeling a little keyed up, you understand."
"I can see that."
Nick extended his hand, hoping that it wasn't sweaty. "Nick Stokes."
Neat, prim handshake. "Abraham Claberson." Honest Abe bent down to the pack at his feet and rummaged through it until he came up with a bottle of water, which he offered to Nick. Nick promptly decided that this guy wasn't bad at all. Abraham had just, in fact, become his new favorite person. With hearty thanks, he gulped some down and balanced it on his tray table.
"So, what's in Boston?" Nick asked as the captain began making the announcements informing them that planes were safe and that they weren't going to die on the way to their destination.
Abraham leaned over to speak quietly, as if afraid of interrupting the pilot's voice. His voice sounded softly accented - - British. "Business matters. I have a client who wants me to look into some things there." He shrugged, shoulders moving in their pinstriped chambers. "I went to college at Harvard. I'd actually enjoy the opportunity to visit. And you?"
The lie came so much easier than he would have suspected.
"My brother's wedding."
"Congratulations."
"Mark's real pleased. And she's a sweetie," he said. Nick had come from a big family, but he mostly had sisters. His one brother, Steven, had gotten married and divorced almost twelve years ago. The last he'd heard, old Steve had been in Canada. "I'm supposed to be the best man."
"Mark Stokes - - and the name of his fiancée?"
Think, Stokes. "Lindsey Willows." He mentally made a note to apologize to Catherine for betrothing her ten-year-old daughter to his fictional brother.
Abraham tilted his own bottle of water. "To the happy couple."
"Yeah, I'll drink to that."
Abraham had the window seat, but Nick watched far more avidly than his new friend as they rose off the ground and into the delicate coating of clouds. For just a second, all the metaphors he'd read about flight were true. He was leaving Vegas behind. All the false neon lights pretending to be stars, all the crimes, that was behind him, scattered over the ground like a child's building blocks. Even Grissom was a speck from this far up in the air. It was . . . cleansing. He wasn't above them - - but he was past them. Out of their range, somehow, and Nick felt okay with himself. He was on his way to Boston. He was going to help his boss. He was one of the good guys.
It was refreshing to have that much clarity.
I should run away more often.
He shook off the euphoria and the mental snark, and thanked Abraham again, sincerely, for the bottle of water. He leaned back in his seat under the pretense of sleep, but behind his closed eyes, he started making plans. They would hit Boston in a few hours. He would secure a hotel first, get all of his nonexistent luggage stowed away, and catch a shower and maybe a catnap before heading out to the hospitals. If he was going to be doing some discreet investigation, he had the feeling that he'd have a much easier time of doing it if he didn't look like he'd just stumbled out of bed.
Shave, shower, sleep. Then Lizzie Zimmer and the myriad of problems she represented.
The idea of action, of doing something while even Grissom himself had to wait for things to be resolved, appealed to him. He could find information, conduct interviews, and maybe accomplish what the rest of his friends, in Vegas, were trying to accomplish.
He found himself actually falling asleep, and his thoughts dissolved into images. The images became uneasy dreams, just quick snatches that he couldn't quite convince himself not to believe. He remembered Nigel Crane, and that was too irresistible for his sleeping mind to stay away from, but what he kept coming back to was Pearson, the psychic, with his visions of blood and ceiling dust, crashing and dying. He felt like Pearson, and feeling like Pearson wasn't that great of a deal. The man had died, after all. At least Nick had survived. He might have been jumpy for weeks afterwards, and he might have moved house, but he was alive.
Just sleeping. It was irrational to persuade himself that he wasn't dead, just sleeping, but he found himself doing it anyway.
Brains like strawberry-swirled whipped cream. . .
Was he dreaming about that again? It had been over a year.
And you. You'd have to scoop that stuff up, right?
He slept, his jaw wired shut, because he didn't scream in his sleep, and he didn't scream on planes, and some rational part of him knew this.
Yeah, little pieces of skull and bone and brains.
Nick slept. Dreamed. Gradually, over the hours of humming flight, his grasp on serenity vanished. In his mind, Nigel Crane pulled the trigger over and over again, and the spray of blood covered Nick's face. Warm and wet, like tears. He awoke with his face pressed against the seat cushion, feeling flushed and panicky. He recovered and straightened. Abraham was dozing now, but stiffly, so that his suit remained impeccably ironed.
Clearly, Abe was one of the illustrious breed of Those People. The ones who could crawl through Hades and come out unscathed - - always neat, always with the perfect cologne, always one step ahead of everyone else, and, by the look in their eyes, always knowing it.
Nick had come from a family of Those People. He'd had more Band-aids slapped on him as a kid than the rest of the Stokes kids put together. Icky Nicky, always the one with the bloody nose and the note from the teacher about a field trip clasped in one fist, the last day before it was due. He'd calmed down in high school and become dependable almost as an apology to his parents for the hyperactivity of all the years before, but being dependable got to being a way of life.
And instead of being one of Those People, Nick became That Guy. The one you could count on. Unless the task required some flair or something that That Guy just couldn't deal with.
I don't have to think about this right now. Not here. Not with all the rest of this shit kicking around. People have got bigger problems.
Nick wiped at his forehead. His knees had banged against the tray table in his sleep and they felt bruised, almost tender. With Abraham out, the possibility for conversation was gone, and he was unwilling to take another stab at sleep. He had enough ghosts when he was awake, thank you very much.
He knew that he felt like Morris Pearson because of a vague, gnawing sensation of the future in his mind, and it made him uncomfortable. His earlier thought recurred to him, and he wondered why doing what Grissom told him to do felt so damn much like running away.
And then he wondered why he felt, irrationally, that he was better off getting out of Vegas this time.