A few weeks later, Rick still had yet to figure out how to track down the mystery cop. But fate (in which he firmly believed) must have been on his side, because when he showed up at his buddy Roy's regular poker game, to his amazement, there she was.
He stopped in his tracks halfway through the door, a greeting to Roy's wife dying on his lips when he caught sight of the woman. She was wearing plain clothes this time, but he would have known her anywhere.
As if she could feel his gaze from halfway across the room, the cop turned fully toward him, their eyes locking again, with that same jolt of ineffable connection he had felt before.
Evelyn Montgomery nudged him out of the doorway to close the door behind him. "Can I take your coat, Rick?"
"Huh?" Manners belatedly kicked in and he tore his gaze away from the young woman, giving Evelyn an apologetic smile. "Right, sorry. Sorry."
"Rick!" Roy Montgomery crossed the room toward him, wearing a big smile. "I forgot to tell you, Bob and the judges have some kind of fundraiser shindig tonight, so I invited some of my best detectives to round out the table." Glancing between Rick and the mystery woman, Roy's gaze sharpened. "Have you and Detective Beckett already met? Kate," he called to her, "you know this clown?"
"Not really, sir," the woman answered, approaching them. "We just met briefly. It's nice to see you again, Mr. Castle," she added politely.
"You too," Rick murmured, momentarily mesmerized all over again by her inscrutable eyes. He forced himself to snap out of it, turning back to Roy to explain. "Yeah, we were at a Halloween party at the park, and I lost sight of my daughter for a minute, and Detective Beckett, uh-" He paused. "Wait, Detective? Not Officer? You were wearing the uniform..."
"Uniform?" Roy repeated, cocking his head curiously.
"Halloween costume," Detective Beckett explained.
"Oh... okay." Rick supposed that made sense, though Roy seemed to find it quite amusing.
"Interesting choice," the captain chuckled.
Beckett shrugged. "It was handy."
"Anyway," Rick went on, "Detective Beckett and her dog helped me track down my kid. I'm very grateful to her and Mickey."
"Mickey?" Roy turned to his detective, looking surprised. "You still have that dog, Beckett? He must be ancient by now. Didn't you already have him when you started at the Academy?"
Beckett's expression was as cool and blank as a new sheet of paper. "He's not as young as he used to be," she said, "but he still gets around fine."
"Hmm," Roy said. He still looked a bit confused, but just then a new group of guests arrived, and it was time for the poker game to begin.
Rick had to make an effort not to stare at Kate Beckett throughout the game. She joked and laughed comfortably with the other cops, and held her own at the table; she won a few big hands, lost a few more, and several times took advantage of Rick's distraction to call his bluffs and take his chips.
He felt lost at sea, dazed and confused. He'd never been so far off his game, so flustered by the mere presence of a woman. There was just something about Beckett (Kate, he thought over and over, Kate, although the other cops simply called her Beckett), and he hated how vague and banal that sounded; he, a professional writer, author of how many best-selling novels, acclaimed master of the written word, yet the best he could do was there was something about her? It was maddening.
Meanwhile, if she was as affected by him as he was by her, she was doing a damn good job of hiding it - although Rick noticed that she was avoiding eye contact, so subtly he was sure no one else had noticed.
Before long, the evening wore to an end; the cops began to bow out one by one. When Beckett rose, murmuring something about calling it a night, Rick did the same, and kept his tone light and casual when he said, "Walk you out?"
A wry twist to her lips told him that she saw right through him, but she didn't object, and within a moment they had their coats on, walking side by side down the short path from the Montgomerys' front door to the sidewalk.
"I think you got the better of me," Rick said, pushing his hands into his coat pockets. At her lifted eyebrow, he added, "That last hand was my chance to break even, but you pulled it off."
"Ah." She nodded, quirking a half-smile. "Can't be a good cop if you don't know how to bluff."
"Oh. Right."
Rick cleared his suddenly dry throat. He was at a loss for words, and that never happened. It wasn't that he didn't know what came next; of course he did; this was the moment where he would ask Kate for her phone number, maybe even go so far as to ask her out. He had done it dozens of times, with an extremely respectable success rate; he was smooth, he was charming; he knew, in short, how to talk to women.
And yet, here and now, the words wouldn't come. His mind was a blank.
For some reason he was hearing in his mind Kate's voice from that night at the park, the words she had spoken to Alexis: I'm a witch... I'm also a policewoman.
He couldn't figure out why that, of all things, was the part that got stuck in his head, here and now.
They passed through the gate onto the sidewalk, and Kate gave him another cool, polite smile. "Goodnight," she said, and turned away.
Wait, Rick thought, the word ringing urgently in his mind, but somehow he couldn't get it past his lips.
She rounded the corner and was gone.
Rick unlocked his car, got in, put on his seatbelt, and sat staring at the darkness beyond the windshield.
"Do you want to grab some dinner some time?" he said aloud to the empty air. "Can I buy you a drink? I'd like to see you again." He groaned and dropped his forehead to the steering wheel. Why were the words coming now, when it was too late?
Sighing, he lifted his head and started the car. As he pulled away from the curb, he heard himself say, "Can I give you a ride home?" He gave out another grunt of frustration and twisted the wheel, zipping back around the corner in the direction Kate had walked. But when his car turned the corner, he saw no sign of her. It was too late.
He sighed again and pointed the car toward home.
A few days went by, and then stretched into weeks. Rick found himself thinking about Kate Beckett at odd moments: her fathomless eyes, her honey-low voice, the softness on her face when she looked at or talked about her dog.
Every week when he went to Roy's house for poker, he braced himself, wondering if she would be there; but she never was. Every week, he told himself to just ask Roy for her number, it would be that simple; but somehow he never did.
Gina was hounding him for the final edits on Storm Fall, and he often worked late into the night, after Alexis was asleep. And some nights, when he'd had enough of Storm, he closed that window on his computer and switched over to a new one, where he wrote feverishly until the wee hours of the morning, fleshing out a new character. One he couldn't get out of his mind, no matter how hard he tried.
Nikki Heat, he called her, and he strove in vain to bring her to life on the page.
Sometimes, in his dreams, a huge black shape stalked him, muscles rippling in the shadows, thick fur muffling the sounds of its paws on the pavement. But it never attacked.
Christmas passed, his favorite time of year, in a whirlwind of festivities with his mother, daughter, and various friends; and then the dead of winter, and the edits were done, and the promotions for the new book began. There were TV interviews, convention appearances, signings, readings, photo shoots - all carefully scheduled around Alexis's school hours.
Finally, one glittering cold March night, the new book was released, and Kate Beckett came back into his life once again.
"Mr. Castle?" and he spun around, Sharpie in hand, but not lifting it, because as soon as he heard his name from behind him he knew who it was; it was her again, the voice that he would never forget.
"Detective Beckett," he breathed, hoping at the last minute that it had come out charmingly surprised, not desperate. "How nice to see you again."
"Sorry to bother you," she said, and made eye contact hard and fast, no shock of electricity this time: he saw in an instant that this was Kate Beckett in work mode, the depths of her mystery cloaked over with hard purpose. "I need to ask you some questions about a murder that took place earlier tonight."
He blinked in surprise, managed to recover. "Uh... okay, sure. Let me just call the babysitter."
Another surprise when they emerged from the hotel at street level and she led him to her police-issue vehicle: Mickey the dog was sitting in the back seat, tongue lolling. He perked up when he saw them, crowding his bulk into the space between the two front seats, tail wagging.
"Down, Mickey," Beckett said calmly, and the dog subsided, stretching out on the back seat, keeping his eyes on Rick. He felt the back of his neck prickling under that stare.
"You always bring your dog along when you're working?" he asked, studying Beckett's profile as she drove.
"Not always," she answered, which was less than illuminating, and she resisted all his attempts to draw her into small talk until they arrived at her precinct.
When they got out of the car, Mickey stayed behind, calmly lounging with his chin on his paws.
In short order Rick learned that two people had been killed recently, staged to resemble two of his books; it was shocking, distressing, and he agreed immediately to Beckett's request to look at his fan mail. In fact, he pulled out his phone immediately and called Gina, who was still at the release party and pissed off by his sudden departure, but he rolled right over her complaints and made her agree to get the fan mail packed up and sent over first thing in the morning.
The next few days passed in a whirlwind; Rick had no trouble convincing Roy to allow him to help with the case, although he could see that Beckett was not at all happy about it. She kept her shields up the whole time, her eyes hard and shuttered, no hint of the connection they had made (or he thought they had made) in two previous encounters.
And because she had that armor on, Rick couldn't resist teasing her; he fell easily back into his goofball persona, taking enormous delight in every fleeting twist of her lips that showed he was getting to her. Even when she pinched his nose or ears as punishment, it was worth it; all worth it, to know that she wasn't impervious to him after all.
Before he knew it they had solved the case, working together in tandem; they were in an alleyway, with Harrison Tisdale cornered, and oh yeah, he had a gun to Rick's head, but that was barely a bump in the road as compared to the euphoria of having figured out a real-life murder mystery.
Rick was talking, Harrison was talking, Beckett was pointing her gun at them and trying to maneuver for a shot, when suddenly, out of nowhere, a huge black shape came barreling around the other side of the van, heading straight for the killer's legs.
"Mickey, no!" Beckett shouted, but the momentary distraction was enough to bring Harrison's arm up, the gun pointing to the sky, and Rick operated purely on instinct, his elbow jabbing up into the other man's face, the gun falling into his hands as neatly as if he had choreographed it.
"Tell me you saw that!" he cried exuberantly at Beckett as she surged forward; but Mickey was there first, a low dangerous growl at the back of his throat, slamming both front paws down onto Harrison's back to hold the killer in place while Beckett snatched the handcuffs from Rick.
It would only be many hours later that it occurred to Rick to wonder where the dog had come from. He knew Mickey hadn't been in the car with them on the way over here for the bust, and Beckett's address (which he had finally managed to finagle out of Roy) was halfway across town, so how...? But Beckett hadn't been surprised to see her dog at all. And somehow, in all the chaos of processing the crime scene and handing Harrison over to prison transport, no one else seemed to notice.
As the dust began to settle, Rick found himself at the mouth of the alley again, facing Beckett, who gave him a sardonic smirk and a shake of her head.
"Well," she said, "that's it, Castle, case closed."
This doesn't have to be it, he heard himself saying in his mind. We could go to dinner, debrief each other. But once again, maddeningly, the words wouldn't come to his tongue.
"Yeah," was all he could manage to get out, cursing himself inwardly for the inexplicable loss of his famous cool.
Beckett watched him for a moment as if waiting for him to continue, but when he didn't, she moved her shoulders in a tiny shrug and said, "It was nice working with you, Castle." And she stepped forward, her shoulder brushing his as she passed by him and kept right on walking.
Damn it, he thought to himself, it would have been great.
And for just an instant, he could have sworn he heard Beckett's voice resounding inside his head. You have no idea, it whispered.
Giving his head a quick shake as if to expel whatever ghost was lodged in there, he swiveled on his heel to watch her go.
Half a block down the street, he saw the dog again, sitting patiently on his haunches next to Beckett's car. As Castle watched, Mickey stood up, his tail wagging at top speed, to greet Beckett.
Rick saw Beckett pause, and though he couldn't see her face, he detected a certain softness in her body language as she bent over to give Mickey a lingering scratch behind the ears. The dog flicked his head and licked her hand, and Rick caught the corner of her smile as she straightened back up again.
Rick watched her unlock the car, watched the dog and the woman climb in, watched it drive away. And as soon as they were out of sight, he said aloud, "Can I call you sometime? I'd like to be one of your conquests."
"Say what?" asked a voice from his other side. He startled, turned, and found Detectives Esposito and Ryan regarding him with skeptical expressions, for which Rick had to admit he couldn't blame them.
"Uh," he said, "nothing, sorry."
The other men still looked a bit wary, but Ryan said only, "Come on, we'll give you a ride back to the station."
By the time Rick got home, he knew what he needed to do. A few well-placed phone calls to the Mayor, the Commissioner, et cetera, were all it took.
The next day he showed up at the precinct again, and let Montgomery break the news to Beckett that Rick would be shadowing her for book research. Not surprisingly, she wasn't happy (Rick occasionally enjoyed the rhetorical value of understatement), but she had no choice but to go along. Before he knew it, they were embroiled in a new case: a young nanny found in a clothes dryer.
Rick was fully immersed in the challenge of the case, not to mention the challenge of trying to figure out Beckett. She remained elusive, at some moments seeming to play along with his humor, then at other times thoroughly annoyed by his antics. He couldn't detect any sign of the strange and powerful sparks that he'd felt between them the first few times they'd met, but he continued to flirt, and she continued to pretend (he was pretty sure it was pretend) that she wasn't interested; and so it went.
Until they were standing outside the laundry-room door, watching the killer nanny cut herself with a huge knife, and suddenly it was all much, much too real for Rick. As Beckett opened the door and slipped inside, his writer's brain showed him an extremely vivid picture of what it might look like if Chloe decided to turn that knife on Beckett. Somehow, facing down a teary-eyed young woman with a knife was much more terrifying than being on the wrong end of Harrison Tisdale's gun.
As Rick stood frozen in the doorway, he suddenly felt a nudging against his thigh, and looked down to see Mickey. Just like last time, the dog had appeared out of nowhere, and Rick gaped in astonishment as Mickey gently but firmly pushed him aside, nosed the door open, and slipped into the room.
Beckett never took her eyes off the young woman with the knife, but Mickey moved to stand next to her, his posture protective, putting his huge solid body between Beckett and the knife. And when Beckett finally managed to convince Chloe to drop her weapon, it was Mickey who moved forward first, pushing the knife away with a paw, then gently resting his chin on Chloe's knee. The young woman dropped a hand onto Mickey's massive head, scratching softly, drawing comfort from him even as Beckett was clipping the handcuffs around her other wrist.
As the other cops began to flood into the room, Mickey backed off, quietly padding out of the room. Rick watched him go, still marveling at how the dog had again managed to show up at just the right moment.
He meant to say something to Beckett about it, but somehow it flew out of his head in the chaotic aftermath of the incident, and by the time he remembered, it was too late. Anyway, the case had fired his imagination all the more, so he went home and wrote until the wee hours of the morning.