Part Two
Sara's day was slow in the sense that she never left her desk throughout the entire eight hour period unless it was for coffee and/or food. With Jake gone, she was left with the mountains of paperwork which they had been putting off constantly. Her hands were cramped, her head pounding and her vision was becoming blurry by the time 17:00 rolled around. Releasing a breath of relief, she stretched her hands above her head, wincing at the popping of her back.
There was a knocking on the door, and Vicky Poe popped her head in. "Hey, Pez."
Sara rose to her feet, brushing her hair out of her eyes. "Hey, Vick. What's up?"
The medical examiner gave a mischievous little half smile, and Sara's hackles rose. "Well, from the look of things you've had a long, hard day at the office, with no breaks, no excitement, no—"
"Oh God," muttered Sara, pulling on her jacket and picking up the helmet and keys for her bike.
"And what better way to finish off a stressful day than a night of dancing, alcohol and men?" Vicky grinned.
Sara closed her eyes and tried to ignore the little voice in the back of her head that was telling her to just kill her friend and end the torment. "I don't know, Vick, I've got a lot of work to still catch up on…" She made a show of stuffing as many papers as she could find into her briefcase.
"Don't lie to me, Pez, it won't work."
"I've got to do laundry!" Sara exclaimed.
"Again? Wasn't that last night's job?"
Sara cursed silently. She knew her friend meant well, but she honestly had no interest in a new romantic intanglement at the moment, and was not in the mood for any sort of bar or club or anything else that the over-enthusiastic woman had in mind. Danny popped up behind Vicky. Sara tried not to jump.
"You promised," he reminded her, lifting one eyebrow challengingly.
She frowned, trying to remember what she had promised her best friend. It came to her almost immediately. "Gabriel!" She snapped her fingers.
"What?"
"I promised my friend Gabriel I'd go see him," she told her.
Vicky's eyes lit up. "Really now? And why haven't I heard of this friend before now?"
Sara glared. "Shut up. Not that kind of friend."
"Uh huh?" Vicky arched an eyebrow disbelievingly.
"Uh huh." Sara snapped her briefcase shut with a sharp click. "I'm leaving now."
"Have fun with Gabriel," Vicky sang.
"Bye, Vicky," Sara said pointedly, and brushed past her to the door. "Shoo," Sara told Vicky. The other woman trailed Sara to the doors of the precinct.
Sara exited, but Vicky called her back. "Oh, Pez?"
"What!" Sara clenched her teeth, restraining her violent urges.
"I want details."
Sara let the door slam behind her, trying to ignore Vicky's hysterical giggles which trailed after her retreating form.
XXX
She arrived at Gabriel's shop after much deliberating, and a great deal of prodding from Danny. "This is going to be fun," she muttered sarcastically, standing outside the door of Gabriel's shop.
"Could it be?" her dead partner mocked. "The great Sara Pezzini afraid of a guy?"
"I'm not afraid of him," she said irritably. Danny shrugged innocently.
"I do hope this habit of talking to yourself doesn't manifest itself in front of others, Sara." She spun around, coming face to face with Ian Nottingham.
"Damnit, Nottingham! Stop sneaking up on me!"
He smiled into his beard. "I apologize."
"What are you doing here?"
"I was walking past and saw you. Certainly one is allowed to say hello to a friend on the streets of New York?"
"We're not friends," she retorted. "And somehow I doubt that you were just walking along and happened to see me and thought 'Oh, I think I'm going to go stalk Sara for a while!'. So what are you actually doing here?"
"I came to see your little friend."
Her eyes widened. "Fuck. Gabriel! What did you do to him? If you've hurt him, I swear to God I'll—"
He held up a hand. "We had a very civilized conversation. No blood was shed."
She backed into the door and pulled it open, not taking her eyes off of the man in front of her. "Gabe?" she called into the interior of the shop.
"Hey, Sara," He sounded shaken up. She glared at Nottingham and stepped backwards inside, closing the door in his face.
Gabriel was leaning against the counter, his face a few shades paler than was healthy. It was only then that she remembered his earlier comment about Nottingham having "spoken" to him before.
"Sorry," she blurted.
He blinked and looked at her. "For what?"
"She is taking it upon herself to apologize for events which were entirely out of her control," Nottingham said from too close behind Sara. She took a few steps forward, trying not to crowd Gabriel. Behind her, Nottingham followed her example, moving forward towards her. She glanced from one to the other.
"Didn't you just leave?" Gabriel demanded of Nottingham over Sara's head.
"Sara is here now."
"Huh. And here I thought it was the Easter Bunny."
Sara prepared to defend her young friend against Nottingham's impending wrath; however the other man merely smirked. "I do not think yellow is her colour."
"Sara," Gabriel whined. "Make your boyfriend go away. He's scaring me."
She stared at him. "Uh…"
"If I leave, so does she," Nottingham told Gabriel calmly.
"Excuse me!" Sara turned on him. "I am not going anywhere with you."
Gabriel took that opportunity to move around to the other side of the counter, putting it between himself and Nottingham. "I can not allow him to continue to give you information about the Witchblade," Nottingham explained to Sara. "It is either that or I kill him."
"She does carry a gun," Gabriel pointed out, looking around nervously.
"Easily remedied," Nottingham replied. His hand shot out, and came up with Sara's gun held aloft like a prize.
"What the hell?" she snapped.
"It would be so very, very easy to shoot you now and get it over with," Nottingham commented to Gabriel, pacing around the counter slowly.
"And yet, you won't, because of my charm and good looks," the younger man said, backing away from the approaching assassin.
Nottingham shook his head. "You're not my type."
Gabriel didn't flinch. Sara did. She stepped right up to Nottingham, invading his personal space. "Get out."
He was stronger than her, with a lot more training in the art of killing people. He also had her gun. She locked gazes with him, resisting the urge to poke him in the chest. Finally, after what seemed to be forever but was in reality no more than thirty seconds, he stepped back from her. "As you wish." He bowed his head, the strands of hair that had escaped from his ponytail falling in his eyes. With a swish of his coat, he had left the shop, Sara's gun lying discarded on the floor.
"He can never leave like a normal person, can he?" she muttered as she bent to retrieve her weapon.
When she looked up, Gabriel was no longer behind the counter. An icy jolt of fear stabbed through her. "Gabriel?"
"Back here," he called. He was behind the shelves, at the very back of the store, and she wondered just how long she had been standing after Nottingham's departure for him to have had the time to get all the way back there with out her noticing. She wove through the many cases and shelves until she reached him. He was moving objects off of the shelves, checking behind them, and then returning them to their rightful place.
"What're you doing?"
He didn't answer, just continuing with his search. After a moment, he grinned in triumph, and held up a tiny black object between his thumb and forefinger. "I'd rather not have your stalker listening in on our conversations."
"You think he's got the place bugged?" she frowned.
Gabriel nodded, dropping the tiny metallic object into her hand. It was a very small microphone. "Think about it. He doesn't want me giving you info, but there doesn't seem to be much he can do about that right now, for whatever reason. So it would stand to reason that he would want to at least know what I'm telling you, what information you're getting."
She nodded, because when she thought about it that was the only reasonable conclusion to which one could come. A thought emerged from the depths of her subconscious, forcing it's way to the forefront of her mind. "Fuck."
He looked at her, pausing in his methodical search. "It's not a big deal, Pez. I'll just find the mics and remove them. I mean, didn't you expect something like this when he just left like that? No protests, no 'kill you later, Bowman', nothing. He just walked out like he didn't have a care in the world. I hate to say this, Sara, but you're not quite that intimidating."
She shook her head. "If he's planted bugs here in the very brief amount of time he actually spent in the building, just imagine what he has at my apartment?"
Gabriel grinned. "You watch too many horror movies."
Sara shook her head, suddenly feeling the need for a stiff drink. "For Christ' sake, Gabe, it's a perfect way for Kenny to know what his wielder's up to. He can keep an eye on me. Find out if there's anything I'm not telling him, any new developments with the Witchblade." She almost added something about Nottingham's practically non-existent sex drive getting fuel from any tapes of her, but forced the words back.
Gabriel finished with the shelves he had been searching, and moved on to the next display case. "You may wanna refrain from referring to yourself in the possessive when it comes to Irons. I'm sure Froid would have a field day with it, but I'm also sure it says something about your conflicted morals when it comes to the blade."
She cringed. "Thank you, Gabriel, for that ever so illuminating bit of psycho-analysis."
"Any time. Just call me Dr. Phil." He paused, and then shook his head ruefully. "On the other hand, don't. I'd like to keep at least a small amount of my credibility in the world of the normal humans."
She resisted the urge to shoot back with the 'too late' that was hovering just on the tip of her tongue. This was not Danny, who had known her long enough to understand when even the most heartless verbal jabs were just in humor. Nor was it Ian, to whom she had delivered the most cruel lines in her arsenal in hopes that he would leave her alone. This was Gabriel, and no matter how much she valued him (both as a friend and as a source of information), and no matter how strongly she felt that they had known each other in previous incarnations of the blade, she still had to be careful how far she pushed him. She had lost more than one friend, as well as a succession of lovers, with her unchecked sarcasm. It was a defense mechanism, honed during her years at the police academy, where women were viewed as weaker and incompetent by the males – equal opportunity her ass.
"I should probably check for spywhere on my computer, too," Gabriel commented absently, cradling a vase done in terracotta in his arms as he peered behind it's resting place.
"Do you do this kind of check every time he visits you?" she asked.
He shook his head. "I'm not in the habit of talking to myself. It is, however, why I came to your apartment this morning and didn't call you. You're apartment's clean, by the way. I left a dampener there this morning. You'll understand if I don't tell you where." He grinned. "The walls have ears."
"Why don't you just use one here? And thank you ever so much for telling me about that after I had my horror movie freak out."
"Because the frequency it needs to kill the bugs interferes with my infrared transmissions."
She blinked rapidly. "Geek."
He sighed over-dramatically. "Sara, Sara, Sara. Infrared? For the printer and the laptop and—"
"I don't need to know. Really. I'm good." She held up her hands to ward off his torrent of technobabble.
Danny popped up beside her. She didn't even jump; she was getting used to his unexpected appearances. She arched an eyebrow at him.
"Pez, I need to talk to you. What I need to tell you—you're going to have questions, and I don't think you really want Gabriel questioning your sanity." He was making a valiant attempt to act as if the situation were casual. She could tell by the expression on his face that it was anything but.
"I'll be back," she told Gabriel. "I'm gonna make a coffee run while you clean up."
He bounded over to her, holding up a hand. "Hang on." He pulled something out from under the front counter, and pointed it at her.
"What the hell, Gabe?"
He moved it around her entire body like a metal detector at the airport. He reached the collar of her jacket, and the device beeped. He reached forward, and before she could make any move, his hand dipped inside the neck of her coat, coming out with a mic held in his grasp. She felt sick to her stomach.
"You never can be too careful with stalkers," he said in a macabre parody of cheer, and turned away. "I'll see you later, Pez. Please don't tell Ian I say "hi"."
XXX
TBC…