A/N: The baddies get their screen time. This should explain things a bit.
"You're a complete idiot, Dale," Frank Donnelly roared as he paced the floor ot the bar. "You were supposed to distract her while I knocked her out."
"I know but…" Stuckey started, but Frank cut him off again.
"Then we were supposed to bring her back to Lewis and contact Stabler with the ransom note to lure him in," Frank yelled.
"But, how'd you know he was going to fall for that?" Stuckey asked. "He's only known her a couplea days."
"Because I know Elliot Stabler," Frank said. "He was my partner for 10 years, after all. And he tries to act like this big tough guy, but if there's a woman in trouble, he'll go barelling in with no thought to his own safety. Then Lewis could have had his fun with the bitch, and I could have taken out Stabler once and for all."
Stuckey scratched his temple and tried to piece everything together. He'd met Lewis by change about a year ago when they were both working some crummy line cook job. Stuckey had been trying to earn some money to put himself through community college to be a crime scene technician. Lewis had been out there on the run, traveling from city to city having his way with woman for years and never getting caught. When Dale overheard too much one day, Lewis decided to take him under his wing instead of kill him.
He'd only met Donnelley for the first time about four months ago, but these two apparently had a long history. Stuckey just couldn't remember it all.
"Now tell me again how you two know each other?" Stucky asked. "Because I forget."
"Oh my God, Dale," Lewis said. "We've been over this."
"No no," Frank said. "I'll tell it this time. Maybe he'll remember then."
Frank walked behind the bar and filled up a tall glass with whatever was on tap and then perched himself on a stool like a librarian at storytime.
"So my old man, he ran with this police gang back in the day called The Brotherhood," Donnelly said. "Stabler's dad, he was part of it too. His partner killed an unarmed kid at a bust and Stabler's dad, Joe, let Gus shoot him in the leg to cover it up. Got a combat cross for it and everything. When IAB tried to get him to flip on The Brotherhood, he refused, lost his job and his pension."
Stuckey nodded.
"My Dad passed The Brotherhood onto me when he retired, and I pulled some strings to get Elliot assigned as my partner because I figured we'd work together and carry on the legacy right? Only people who look out for cops are other cops. But I found out real fast, Elliot is nothing like his old man."
"What do you mean by that?" Stuckey asked.
"He's a goody goody," Frank said. "Probably gets it from his batshit crazy mother. Dude knocked up his girlfriend at 17 and he married her. She was the one who ended up divorcing him. The sucker held on to the bitter end."
That didn't sound so bad to Stuckey, marrying his girlfriend, raising a family. He wished his father would have stuck around and done the same.
"And he was such a bleeding heart, made me sick half the time," Frank said. "Women, children, puppies. He'd play hero all damn day. He wasn't brotherhood material. Money didn't motivate him like it motivates me. But I kept him on as my partner. I thought maybe someday he'd have some of his father in him and I could flip him."
Stuckey knit his eyebrows together.
"But what does that have to do with Billy?" Stuckey asked.
Lewis groaned behind him.
"Oh, well that's where this gets fun," Donnelly said. "You see, my big pull with The Brotherhood is money. I got the Marcy Killers, the Kosta Organization, and some of the city's biggest drug pushers on my payroll. But all my brothers, and some sisters now, they don't all deal in money. Some go for drugs, so I set them up with the Wheatley corporation. Some go for women, and Lewis is the best hunter out there."
"Right, right," Stuckey said. "Billy gets the girls for the brotherhood and then he pays you for the ones he wants to keep."
"Exactly, Dale," Frank said. "He charms them, lures them in, then delivers The Brotherhood the lot. He pays me for the ones he wants, my guys take their pick, then we send the rest of them off to Flutura at the Kosta Organization to do what they will with them."
"And Billy, you know Stabler too?" Stuckey asked.
"Oh yeah," Lewis said with a cocky grin. "I'm the reason he wound up at the 3-7."
"I'm still telling the story," Frank said. "About five years ago, Lewis hit the motherlode on a group of girls trying to sneak their way over the border in Texas to get a new start in America. We'd been working together about three years at this point and he convinced them to come with him, and he brought them straight to me. But there were like 20 girls. It was the biggest operation we'd undertaken at that point and we needed time to sort out our logistics.
Lewis cleared his throat.
"Stabler caught on," Frank said. "Well, sort of. He could tell something was going down because I had to keep stepping away, making more phone calls. A rookie mistake really. I tried to cut him out of the loop, but the bastard followed me to the drop."
"What did you do?" Stuckey asked.
"Well, Lewis wanted to just shoot him in the back on the spot," Frank said. "But that was too messy, and one or both of us would have went down for it for sure, and the whole operation would have been over. So we decided to pull a page out of his father's book."
Stuckey cocked an eyebrow.
"I had Lewis shoot me, leaving Elliot to choose between saving me, his partner and his best friend, or going after Lewis," Frank said. "Of course he chose me, but I was fine. Flesh wound because Lewis can be a bad shot, when he wants to be."
"Russian Roulette is more my game, but you know," Lewis said.
"We played it up real big, and when Elliot got close enough to check on me, I pistol-whipped him hard enough to break his cheekbone," Frank said.
"That's how he got the scar," Stuckey said, realizing, and Frank nodded.
"See, now that was much easier to stage," Frank said. "Once he was knocked out, we framed him as being the one working with an 'unidentified trafficking suspect.' Made it look like a bust went wrong like I was the one who caught him and tried to save him and he helped this suspect get away because was working with him."
"That's pretty clever," Stuckey said.
"Oh Ed Tucker at IAB had a field day," Frank said. "He hated Stabler from day one because he'd heard all about his old man and the shady ass way he'd gotten his combat cross. We just didn't plant enough evidence to get him fired. What they had was circumstantial at best and had they let him go he could have sued the department for wrongful termination for a hell of a lot of money. So they gave him a bogus promotion and put him in charge of the land of misfits at the 3-7."
"But, if he's out of your hair now, why are you still going after him?" Stuckey asked.
"As I said, Dale," Frank said. "I know him. And I know Tucker gave him five years from the date of his reassignment to prove that he was framed. And that five years will be up in a few months. He's a damn good detective and I'm sure he's never let it go. He wouldn't. So I need to finish him before he finds the proof he needs."
"And I'm going to have that feisty piece of ass Benson if it's the last thing I do," Lewis said.
"And now that they're together," Frank said. "It's even more of a reason for the two of us to work together again."
Stuckey nodded.
"But since you didn't stab Stabler in his kidneys like you were supposed to," Frank said, slamming his beer on the bar and pulling Stuckey up by his collar into a standing position. "And instead you went all Zorro on his ass, we have to come up with a new plan to fix what you screwed up."
"I didn't mean to," Stuckey said.
"I don't really care what you meant to do," Frank said. "You set back the plan and you're going to fix it."
"How?" Stuckey asked.
"You're going to hang around the 16th precinct for a while," Frank said. "From what I know, Benson is a hell of a cop too, and she's probably going to help Stabler try to crack this thing. She's going to go back to her old squad eventually to dig up more dirt on the two of you. And when she does, you're going to alet us so we can put Plan B in motion."
"What's Plan B?" Stuckey asked.
"It's need to know," Frank said. "And right now, you don't need to know jack shit."
Frank shoved Stuckey roughly back into his seat before taking another long swig of the beer and marching out of the bar.
Stuckey felt his blood boil a little. He was just trying to help. Lewis was scary but Frank was just downright mean. Just like his stepfather. Just like all the bullies he encountered in school. But what choice did he have? He'd been given a job, and he wasn't going to screw this one up.
After a quick look and nod from Lewis, Stuckey headed out into the night to take his first watch over the 16th Precinct for any signs of Olivia Benson.
