Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Contains spoilers for S1 and S2.
It was two weeks before curiosity's belled cat came calling again, slinking around the soft, rounded edges of his resolve and patting at its fissures with sly, insistent paws. He tried to tell himself that it was Flack's fault, that if he didn't want him wondering about his business, then he shouldn't be so secretive, but deep down, he knew it was just a bullshit excuse. Shame burned in the pit of his stomach like an ulcer, but he wanted to know, and so he watched and waited and told himself that he was just looking out for a friend.
Flack had withdrawn from him completely since the night at Sullivan's. He spent most of his time at his desk at the precinct, and when he was called out, he kept his head down and spoke to him only when professional courtesy demanded it. Danny had asked him over for pizza and a ballgame, but he'd shaken him off with a vague promise to hook up later, and Danny had not asked again.
Mac had noticed the quiet and had taken to watching him and Flack from the corner of his eye whenever they worked a scene together. His concentration never wavered; Mac would never compromise a scene through inattention, but Danny could always feel the scrutiny, a gentle weight on the nape of his neck and in the hollow between his shoulder blades, a maddening itch he could never quite reach. It made him nervous and irritable, and only the knowledge that it would be a stupendously bad idea kept him from rounding on Mac and demanding to know what the hell he was looking for.
You should be used to it by now, him breathin' down your neck, said Louie. He's been doin' it since Minhas got his dirt all over your service record, ridin' your ass every chance he gets and waitin' for you to fuck up and endanger his precious lab again. It got worse after your ghosts turned up in someone else's grave. He tells you he never believed you were a murder, but you know he's lyin' 'cause he never looks you in the face when he says it. He's always lookin' at your shoulder, searchin' for the tattoo you never had the balls to get, but that itches beneath your skin all the same.
He should have been used to it, but he wasn't, and he wasn't ever going to be. His wounds never really heal; they simply fade into the subcutaneous layers of his skin and linger there. He hadn't seen the black eye Louie gave him for asking about Sonny and Atlantic City since four days after he got it, but he knew it was there. He could feel the tender, swollen flesh there if he prodded it with his fingers. The same went for his lips, which his old man had bruised and split on numerous occasions. His mouth perpetually tasted of blood. If he bothered to look into a mirror, it would tell him that the bruises and scars were no longer there, but the mirror lied, and it did not live inside his skin.
So, he went through his days with all his scars hidden beneath his skin, and the ones left by Mac hurt the most. They throbbed and wept without end, and they were the easiest to raise to the surface again. Mac was the first guy to ever believe in him. His father and his brother had written him off as a loser, and most of the cops in the precincts and at One Police Plaza had figured him for a bad apple who'd wash out within a couple of years, but Mac had seen something in him worth looking twice at and had recruited him for the lab over the objections of the department bigwigs. Fuck if he knew what had caught Mac's eye. In truth, he was afraid to find out in case it turned out he was just a reclamation project, but he'd never forgotten that Mac had given him his first real shot at doing something useful, something that made more of a difference than rounding up skels on Friday night and seeing them on the street again Saturday morning.
So he'd busted his hump for Mac, done his best to do right by him. On the night before his first day in the field, he'd sat up all night in his tiny apartment kitchen, organizing and inventorying the contents of his field kit, and when he'd finally gone to bed in the wee hours of the morning, he'd had nightmares about opening his kit next to a vic, only to find it empty or the swabs covered in blood. He'd double-gloved that first day out, and he'd still worried about the possibility of cross-contamination because his hands were sweating so badly. The gloves had come away with a gelid, sucking sound when he'd peeled them off later, and he'd flushed with embarrassment as he dropped them into the metal trashcan marked Biohazard in forbidding, black letters.
It had gone okay for a while. More than okay if he showed modesty the door. They had, in fact, been fucking great. The science of murder fascinated him, and Mac was consistently impressed with his work. Instead of hearing what a fuck-up he was, there were pats on the back as Mac passed him in the lab and quiet "Good work, Danny"s after he gave a report. The world had felt a little more solid under his feet, and then Mac had told him that he was on the promotion grid. Mac had sounded so proud, and he himself had been over the moon. Finally, he was on his way up.
Then that scumbag, Minhas, had leaped out of the closet like a bogeyman, and everything had gone to shit. IAB had looked at him long and hard for the murder of a fellow cop, and Mac had refused to look him in the eye anymore. He'd simply called him into his office and told him in a flat, mechanical voice that he was off the promotion grid. No "I'm sorry to tell you this, but-," no "We'll get you through this," just the calculated, pitiless pronouncement of his fate. The fall from grace had been quick and ruthless, and nothing had been the same since.
Prodigal son or not, he knew Mac well enough to know that he wasn't just going to sit on the sidelines and watch forever. Right now, he was being a good Marine and taking in the lie of the land, but when he was ready, he was going to ask hard questions, questions to which he had no answers.
And what're you gonna tell him when the questions come, huh, Messer? That you think good, dependable, solid, commendations-out-the-ass Flack has a story he'd prefer not to tell? That you think he had a relative he lost that he doesn't wanna talk about? That you two are fightin' like a pair of teenage girls 'cause he doesn't wanna let you in on the dirty family secret? The level of irony there would be too rich for his blood, considerin' you been hidin' Louie for years.
He shrugged unconsciously as he strode in the direction of the evidence room. He wouldn't know what to tell Mac until he knew what he was dealing with, and there was no guarantee that he was going to tell him squat. Right now, this was between him and Flack and his insatiable curiosity.
He turned into the evidence room and ambled to the registration window, hands stuffed into the pockets of his labcoat.
"Hey," he said to the grizzled cop behind the counter. "You got the evidence for a case 60-H-1093, a Flack, Diana E?"
The man grunted in response and shambled into the labyrinthine warren of dusty evidence boxes and crumbling, yellow file folders, scratching the sagging seat of his uniform pants as he went, and Danny wondered if he was getting a glimpse into his own future. The thought made him shudder.
The man returned with the box and shoved a clipboard through the window. "Sign here," he muttered. Then, "'S funny, you know? Eight years, and Detective Flack's the only guy who ever checks this box out, and now you're here."
"That right?" Danny replied as he scribbled his signature on first available line of the logbook. His tone was casual, but his ears pricked to attention.
"Oh, yeah," the clerk replied expansively, and tugged on the waistband of his pants. "Used to come here four times a year like clockwork. Now, it's all messed up. Comes all the time." He pushed the box across the counter.
Danny dropped the pen and took the box. "Four times, huh?"
"Yeah. Lemme see-January 15th, March 12th, October 31st, and December 25th. He drops by on Christmas even when he ain't on the duty roster."
"Yeah, well, thanks." He put the box beneath one arm.
"Sure, sure," the clerk said amiably. "Hey, lemme know what's so goddamned interestin' in that box."
"You bet," Danny replied vaguely, with no intention of doing any such thing. His mind was racing.
I know January 15th. That's his birthday. Every year, me and Stella take him out to Sullivan's for drinks to celebrate. He always goes with a smile, but he's never completely there, never tuned in to the conversation. He sits at the bar and sips his pint, and sometimes he laughs at a joke, but his eyes are distant, turned in another direction entirely. Like he's lookin' at somethin' that happened a long time ago. Or that he wished had happened but never did. After a couple hours, he always slides off the stool and says he's gotta get home, but I don't think that's where he goes. I think he follows ghosts.
Christmas is easy, too. Everybody remembers the dead on Christmas. But I don't get March 12th or October 31st.
He had planned on reading the file there in the evidence room, but the desk clerk was peering avidly in his direction like an undercover looky-lou, one horny finger lazily massaging the side of his nostril with the intimate promise of deeper contact. So he fled the unwanted scrutiny and headed for the unwelcoming, stone belly of the file room, a scraped and carved hollow in the bowels of the building that had somehow escaped the razing claws of the remodeler's chisel. Along the way, he stopped at a vending machine and bought a Fig Newton in a hand-me-down wrapper and stuffed it absently into the front pocket of his labcoat.
The file room was cramped and dark and smelled of mold and rotting paper. Boxes were stacked into teetering, dangerously-listing towers in every corner. They spilled out into the middle of the room in a haphazard jumble, and many had disgorged their moldering contents onto the floor, disemboweled and faceless corpses giving testimony and confessions that no longer mattered. Here and there, the fleshless, steel skeletons of industrial shelving jutted from the darkness like bones, and a single, seventy-watt bulb dangled from the ceiling like a jaundiced uvula.
He had hoped there'd be a chair to sit in, or maybe a rickety table, but there was no table, and the only chair was a rusty, leprous folding chair whose seat was so badly warped that it reminded him of a harelip or diseased, lolling tongue. So he sat cross-legged on the floor in the bleary corona of light afforded by the dangling uvula, concealed from the door by a wall of boxes. He set the box on the floor in front of him, but made no move to open it.
That's right, Messer, Sonny sneered. Hide away in here like the rat you are. Sin is always done in secret. Ain't that what the Church fathers told you in catechism class? Well, they was right, cause here you are, sittin' in the dark and doin' somethin' perverse. You're pokin' your nose in business that don't concern you, with a fake Fig Newton in your pocket like a pack of rubbers. So go on, Messer, do your dirty deed and jerk off all over your cop friend's private life.
Since when did you become my fuckin' conscience, Sassone? he snarled, but it was impotent bravado, and his shoulders slumped as he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.
Your conscience? Nah, I just like watchin' you squirm. You do it so well.
There's still time, Louie said suddenly. You ain't done nothin' you can't take back yet. The lid's still on the box, and the secret is still safe. All you gotta do is carry that box back to the evidence room and leave it there. And while you're at it, toss that brick of shit outta your pocket before you eat it without realizin' and give yourself the runs. That's all there is to it, all you gotta do.
Except he couldn't. He'd gone too far to turn back now. The true measure of a man was whether or not he finished the things he started. His old man had told him that when he was a kid, and while most of what came out of his father's mouth was happy horseshit inspired by too much booze and a bad day at the track, that had stuck and taken root in his mind. Maybe because Louie had said it, too, and Louie wasn't a piece of shit. He swallowed with an audible click, crossed himself without knowing he had done so, and opened the box.
The smell of old paper, cardboard, and plastic hit his nose, and he blinked at the dust that rose from the box like an uneasy spirit. The papers Flack had placed on top the night Danny had found him asleep at his desk were on top. He lifted them out and set them to the side, and then he examined the rest of the contents. There were dozens of plastic bags inside, as well as small, manila trace envelopes sealed with red tape and a CSI's faded signature.
"Oh, Jesus." The words were harsh and bitter against his teeth, and they fell from his lips like pebbles, numb and disbelieving.
Not a cop. Cops don't wear lavender socks. She was just a little girl.
He lifted the socks from the box with trembling hands and held them by the edge of the evidence bag into which gloved hands had carefully packed them. The name scrawled on the seal was one he did not recognize, and it did not matter. The socks sat in the center of the bag in a gaudy, lavender lump, and in the sickly light of the bare bulb, they reminded him of an excised tumor. His gorge rose in his clenching throat, and he quickly put them down.
He sifted through the other items in the box. A silver cross. A charm bracelet. A pair of jeans. An ID. He lifted the ID to the light, and when he saw the face looking back at him, all the breath left his body. He had seen those eyes before, still saw them almost every day, as a matter of fact.
Not a wife or a girlfriend. It's his fuckin' sister.
His baby sister, if the ID was to be believed. According to it, Flack, Diana E. had been fourteen the day she died. The face in the photograph was thin and narrow, and he suspected that from the neck down, she had been gangly and awkward, Shaggy to Flack's Fred. The eyes were just like her brother's, though, deep blue and dancing with wicked sarcasm.
He cupped the ID in his palm and forced himself to breathe normally. His heart was thudding painfully against his ribcage, and his veins simmered with a mixture of confusion and affronted bewilderment. Why hadn't Flack ever told him about this?
I don't think he told anybody, if it's any consolation, Louie said. I bet you could take that box to Stella or Mac, and they'd be just as surprised. Dependin' on how she died, it ain't somethin' you talk about over beer and a ballgame.
How she died. The thought resonated inside his head like the tolling of a bell. He could find out; the answers were in the stack of papers he had set aside, no doubt, but he wasn't sure he wanted to. He knew how people died when they wound up in a box like this, and he didn't want to see Flack's baby sister with her brains splattered all over the kitchen floor or her guts smeared on the highway, and he most definitely didn't want to see her with her panties stuffed into her mouth and her genitalia mangled.
Then don't look.
But he had to. The curiosity was a ravenous, ruthless creature, stronger than the appalled realization in his gut. If he didn't find out how this terrible story ended, it would never let him rest. It would follow him to his dreams and mingle with memories of Louie when he could still walk and talk. It would lodge behind his eyes like a speck of dust and color everything he saw. While the pen in his hand would write the name of a new vic left to them courtesy of the worst and rottenest of the city, his ears would hear the name of an older one by far, preserved in the eroding amber of a cardboard box and plastic evidence bags.
He picked up the file folder and set it on his lap, fingers curled around the sharp, uneven edges of paper that nipped like warning teeth. Do Not Open. Hazardous Material Inside.
Oh, Danny. Louie, soft and mournful inside his head. This is one story you never shoulda started.
"I know, Lou. I know," he answered, but he opened the folder.
The investigation from both ends had been thorough. The cops on the street had done right by one of their own and taken special care not to contaminate the scene. Interviews with witnesses and suspects had been well-documented and typed in triplicate, and some enterprising clerk had splotched the pages of the originals with liberal applications of White Out. The crime scene photos were stark and clear, yet oddly reverent, as though the finger on the shutter had been keenly aware that the body on the dusty floor was that of a department princess.
The photos of Diana were not the gruesome testimonies to savagery that he had feared. In fact, she was unmarked. Her clothes were intact, and the only evidence of trauma was the improbable angle of her neck. Had it not been so clearly broken, he would have thought her a carefully arranged doll, a modern-day Sleeping Beauty who had fallen asleep before ascending the stairs to await her prince. Kind hands had closed her eyes before the photos were taken.
It was the photos of Flack that disturbed him. They were as brutal as Diana's were gentle, stark black-and-white and glaring color. His face, pinched and shocked in the starburst of the flash, eyes wide and dazed. A purple bruise bloomed on his chin and cheek, and as Danny examined the photo more closely, he recognized the individual petals of fingers. His arms, pale and thin, but unmarked. His chest and back, broadening with the imminent threat of manhood. His belly. His thighs. His genitals. His buttocks.
It was too much, too intimately perverse, and he turned the photos facedown on the floor and clapped his hand to his dry, burning mouth. He tore off his glasses and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand, and when that made him feel no calmer, he ran his fingers through his hair and scrubbed the nape of his neck.
"They thought you did somethin' to her, didn't they?" he said weakly. "They thought maybe you molested her and pushed her down the stairs to hide what you'd been doin'."
He laughed. It was sick and perverse, but he couldn't help it. It was either that, or lose it altogether. Don Flack would no more have laid a malicious hand on his baby sister than he would have raised his hand to a woman or a child. He had carried beaten children to his squad car and wrapped them in his own coat while they waited for CPS. He'd sat with them in interrogation rooms and brought them hot chocolate or small toys to play with while they waited for their parents or worked up the nerve to tell him what Daddy had done to Mommy on Tuesday night.
You remember that case a few years back, the one where some sicko raped a twelve-year-old girl, bludgeoned her, stabbed her to death, and dumped her into the dumpster behind his building like old takeout? You and Mac and Flack got called to that one, and Flack…
Flack always went hard after scumbags who hurt kids, but that one was intense even for him. He tried to hide it while he worked the scene, but the muscle in his jaw kept twitching, and he was grippin' the edges of his notebook so tight that his knuckles were white. He went to Sullivan's that night and got absolutely hammered, and he was back at his desk six hours later, mainlinin' the swill that passed for coffee and runnin' down every lead that crossed his desk.
It took three weeks, but you and Mac found the guy through a cold hit in CODIS. The slimebag had done it before in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That little girl had been seven. You barely had time to give Flack the news before he was off to pick the guy up, lunch forgotten on his desk. Flack came draggin' the guy in an hour later, teeth bared in a triumphant snarl. Flack was too good a cop to ever blackjack a perp, but you wondered, just for minute, because you'd never seen such a focused loathing before.
You and Mac and the DNA on the little girl's thighs and underwear had the needle in the perp's arm, but it wasn't enough for Flack. Not that time. He was obsessed with a confession. He locked himself in the interrogation room with him and hounded him for hours. He paced the room and pounded the table, and near the end, eight hours after he went in, he seized the guy by the collar of his shirt and shook him like a terrier with a rat, eyes blazin' inside his flushed face. He'd screamed himself hoarse hours ago, but his rage was indifferent to the frailties of the flesh, and he just kept screamin'.
You ain't never forgot what happened next. Flack was nose to nose with the perp, shakin' him and screamin, callin' him a sick son of a bitch, and then he said, You know you did it, I know you fuckin' did it, and you're gonna tell me you did it, you sick bastard, or so help me, God, I'm gonna break your fuckin' neck.
As soon as the phrase break your fuckin' neck was out of his mouth, everything changed. He froze, fingers fisted in the fabric of the scumbucket's shirt. All the color drained from his face, and his mouth worked uselessly. For a second there, you thought he was havin' a seizure, and then he tossed the terrified perp into his seat and left the interrogation room without another word. He disappeared into the bathroom and came out fifteen minutes later, still pale as milk, but otherwise okay again. You and Mac both asked him what the hell had happened in there, but he never answered the question, and you've always wondered. Now you know.
He felt a dull nausea in the pit of his stomach, sickened with the weight of revelation. The acquisition of knowledge had lost its furtive thrill, but his hands moved of their own volition to pick up the police reports. He thumbed through the coroner's report, which told him what he already knew. Diana Flack, born March 12, 1979, had died on October 31, 1993, of a broken neck. There were preliminary police reports and eyewitness statements, a statement from the first officer on the scene, who happened to be one Don Flack, Sr., and at the bottom, the sworn statement of Don Flack, Jr., aged sixteen.
The language was clinical and filled with police jargon, but Danny sensed the underlying hysteria, the unspoken mantra of Oh, God, it's not real; it can't be. Please, God, don't let it be real. He could see Flack in his mind's eye, sixteen and scared to death, with snot on his upper lip and blood drying on his chin from where his old man had popped him in the mouth. His palms were sweaty and his knuckles were white on the grimy tabletop.
Of course you can sense 'em. You prayed the same prayers while you sat by Louie's bedside. You and God hadn't been on speaking terms in a long time, but old grudges went out the window when it came to your brother. He might have considered you a loser and a fuck-up, but he was the only brother you had, and you would have danced with the Devil if it meant Louie had a chance. You prayed prayers only half-remembered from childhood, and on one desperate night when Flack wasn't there to distract you, you went to the hospital chapel and knelt before the altar. You cajoled and bargained and raged, and underneath all of them was the same refrain: Oh, God, it's not real; it can't be. Please, God, don't let it be real.
That first night in the hospital with Louie, Flack stayed with you. Yeah, Mac ordered him to, but he would have stayed anyway. He sat in a chair outside Louie's room, flipping through old Reader's Digests and Sports Illustrateds, and when his legs got crampy and numb from long hours of inactivity, he'd pace a lumbering circuit up one side of the hall and down the other, a soldier on watch.
Sometimes you'd leave Louie's room just to get away from the sight of Louie's caved-in head and swollen eyes and the insidious, creeping stink of plastic tubing and piss in a bag. Most of the time, Flack just let you be and pretended to give a shit about a book review fifteen years out of date, but on one particularly frenetic foray beyond the confines of the plastic menagerie, when you were rubbing your nape and trembling with the effort of keeping your guts on the inside of your skin, he looked at you and said, Hang in there, Messer, all right? It may not seem like much now, but at least you still got him, still got a chance.
He wondered, thinking back on that conversation with the skeletons from the Flack family closet arrayed in an untidy pile on his lap, if there hadn't been a wistful note in that clumsily-offered comfort, if those blue eyes hadn't darkened and turned away before the last words were finished. He couldn't be sure. So much of those first days following Louie's beating had been lost to the fog of fatigue and confusion, and the frantic, all-consuming desire to simply forget.
Would you be fuckin' surprised if there was? Louie asked. He lost his baby sister. Not only did he lose her, but for a couple of hours there, his father thought he had a hand in it. Based on those photos there, they conducted a full body search. Can you imagine bein' sixteen and standin' naked in front of your father and his friends while some asshole took pictures? Havin' to hold your balls up while your sister was on a slab down the morgue?
No, he couldn't, nor did he want to. "Oh. Oh, God," he moaned. "Oh, man, I never shoulda, I never shoulda-," He gathered the photos and the reports and stuffed them unceremoniously into the folder.
What's the matter there, Messer? crowed Sassone. Opened Pandora's box, and now you don't like what you see?
He tossed the folder into the evidence box, closed the lid, and got to his feet. It was going back to the evidence vault, and he was going to let it go if he had to drink himself blind to do it. He was nearly to the door when Flack appeared in the threshold.
"What the fuck you doin' down here, Messer? Mac's been lookin' all over for you."
If he'd have acted naturally, it might never have happened, but he froze. "Flack, hey, I was just, uh-,"
Flack's gaze drifted to the box cradled to his chest like stolen treasure, and his faint, perplexed smile faded. "You son of a bitch," he said conversationally.
"Look, I was just tryin-," That was as far as he got before Flack's fist connected with his nose with a solid crunch.
Pain exploded in his face as his nose smashed flat against his face and the rim of his glasses cut into the tender skin just below his eye. He dropped the box and staggered against a nearby shelf, hand clapped to his nose to catch the gout of blood and save his glasses. Boxes packed haphazardly on the rickety shelving rained down around him and exploded like bombs, blinding him with a mad, whirling profusion of paper. He slipped on a splayed manila folder and sat down hard. The jolt sent another bolt of pain up his stunned tailbone and into his face.
Fucker hit me, he thought incredulously, and his own hand curled into a fist in preparation for the next attack.
But there was none. Flack simply crouched next to the overturned box and began to pick up the contents. He paused when he saw the bulging file folder. "For fuck's sake. You couldn't even be bothered to take care'a her. You had no right, Messer, no goddamned, fuckin' right." He opened the folder and shuffled through the jumbled papers and photos, rearranging them with pained care. He stopped on a photo of his sister lying at the bottom of the stairs, and his thumb drew a gentle circle over her face.
"Her?" It was glottal, clogged with blood and ruined cartilage, and each movement of his facial muscles inspired a fresh wave of agony. "It's just a case file with pictures."
Flack's face hardened, and his expression was wooden. "It's my fuckin' sister." Each word was cold and articulated with carefully-crafted precision. He closed the manila folder with a snap and placed it inside the box. "How would you fuckin' like it if I did Louie like this? Just tossed him around like old junk?"
"Flack-,"
Flack rounded on him so suddenly that he recoiled and struck the back of his head on the hard spar of shelving. "It's all I have left'a her, Messer, all that's left'a her life is in this miserable, piece'a-shit box. She deserves better than that, better than fuckin' this." He gestured at the cluttered room behind him with a contemptuous wave of his arm. "She deserves respect, and if you can't understand that, you can go fuck yourself." Anger had brought the New York in him to the surface, and his accent was so thick it would have been unintelligible to anyone who didn't call the city home.
"Flack, your sister ain't in that box," he countered gently. "She's gone to somewhere better than here."
Flack's eyes darkened, and he pivoted away from him with a grimace. The soles of his shoes scraped the grit as he turned to the box again. "No," he said flatly to the opposite wall. "She didn't." He picked up the box and rose to his feet.
"Where you goin' with that?" he asked. He knew he should shut up, but talking was better than sitting here on his ass with a broken nose and his eyes swelling shut with every blink.
"None of your goddamned business," he snapped.
"That's evidence," he protested. "You can't just walk outta here with evidence. That's a felony. You could lose your badge."
Flack turned to survey him as he sat in a pile of papers and soft cardboard. "Who's gonna turn me in, Messer? You?" There was neither threat nor arrogance in it. It was a simple question. "'Sides, it's not evidence. Her death was ruled undetermined-accidental or…su-self-inflicted. These are her personal effects. I'm her fuckin' brother, and I can fuckin' take 'em."
"Ain't your father-?"
Flack's lips thinned. "You don't know nothin' about it."
"If it's closed, why is the box still here? Tell me that."
"That ain't your business, either." He tucked the box beneath his arm and rubbed his side before opening the door. "Leave it alone. Just visit Louie and thank God you got somethin' to hang on to." He left without looking back, and Danny noticed the limp.
He's hurtin'. He's hurtin' so bad, he thought, and Flack had been gone a long time before he rose from the pile of papers and went to tell Mac that he needed to go to the emergency room because he'd walked into a door.
