A/N: Thank you for the number of reviews on the last chapter. This story is just fun to write. As before there is a lot going on in this chapter. Will our heroes unravel the mystery before it unravels them?

"LaSalle! I can't get out!"

Flames sprinted up the bathroom door, as Brody grabbed a towel from the rack and desperately tried to beat them out. Bright orange flames and black smoke quickly filled the small room, assaulting her nasal passages and lungs as the fire quickly spread, forcing her to abandon her plight and head for the window.

Cough

Cough

Outside, Chris touched the hot door, quickly recoiling his hand. He knew better than to just try and open the door outright but what choice did he have with his partner trapped inside?

"Hold on, I'll get you out!"

Doubling back to the kitchen, he grabbed the fire extinguisher from the laundry room and gave the bathroom door a fierce kick, splintering the wood, praying he hadn't just killed Brody by creating a backdraft. Flames leaped out at him in a fury, forcing him to take a step back. The flames were so hot that he felt his skin burning without even coming into contact with the raging fire.

Inside, he could hear Brody coughing, gasping. The smoke was choking the life out of her.

"Chris, hurry!"

Activating the fire extinguisher, he moved the short hose from side to side creating enough fire retardant foam so that he could step inside. Smoke burned his eyes and mouth as he called out to his partner; secondary flames had now begun to climb the walls.

"Brody!"

Cough

Cough

"Over here!" The agent wheezed, desperate for oxygen as the smoke danced around her lungs, clogging her throat. She was in standing in the bathtub, directly underneath the small window, trying to make the opening big enough to escape.

Chris yanked down the flame retardant portion of the shower curtain, throwing it over her, his hand circling around her waist, helping her step out of the tub.

Ragged coughs emerged as they both gasped for air, running for the door. They had just made it through the jam when a small explosion erupted, throwing them half way across the living room.

LaSalle hit the floor first but quickly recovered pulling Brody back onto her feet, helping her rest of the way outside.

"Ya okay?" he asked looking at her soot covered cheeks, as she gave a series of coughs. He continued to hold her until her coughing jag subsided.

"I'm good, you?" she asked looking up at him with watery eyes from where she hadn't been able to catch her breath.

"Fine," he returned in usual tone as his partner began to glare at him hard.

"We both know that is not true. So let's just agree to stop staying that! Your house is on fire! Someone just tried to kill you! There is nothing fine about it!"

"It's nothin' that hasn't happened before." He shrugged, pleased that she was able to raise her voice. It was a sign that she was going to be ok.

Living in the Quarter, he had gotten quite used to noises and disruptions. It had only been since Savannah's death that they had started to bother him. "An in case yer wondering it's not the first time somethin' like that has come through my window."

Disgusted, Brody shook her head. "It's definitely time you moved."

"Really?" he grinned largely at her as she started to cough again. "Fire, gunshots ripping through the windows and the walls, to tell ya the truth, I'm kind of into the extra excitement."

Though Brody was happy to see the return of his trademark grin she was absolutely infuriated with him. "I mean it, Chris. You can't stay here. It's not safe."

"Got nowhere to go." He returned as the fire department and an ambulance arrived on the scene.

"Oh, yes you do," Brody reached for his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. "You're coming home with me."

Chris pulled his lips into a thin line shaking his head. "You never give up do ya?"

"Not when it's someone I care about, no." Brody smiled up at him, watching his cheeks turn to a rosey shade of red, underneath the black soot that partially covered his face.

"Well, if it's all the same, I think after we're done here I'll head on into the office and start goin' over the evidence again, in case there's anything we missed."

"Suit yourself," she sniffed a bit put off as the EMS workers started to huddle around them, ready to check the agents for smoke inhalation.

Since Savannah's death he constantly pulled away from her. She expected him to treat Percy that way because she was new, but his partner of over a year, the one he shared a common bond of grief? For months now, she had desperately wanted to reach out and tell him about all of the little things that had helped her move on from losing Emily, but every time she tried, he shut her out. She supposed it had something to do with being a male and wanting to deal with his grief by using meaningless sex to deal with the pain, instead of opening up like a rational human being. But like Pride, she knew his methods of trying to deal were only a temporary fix. It bothered greatly that her friend had become so reckless, that his actions had become such that he landed himself in this situation.

Agent Sonja Percy stood with her hands on her hips watching as firefighters worked to put out the moderate blaze that was LaSalle's home.

"Two major catastrophe's in less than a year? Your insurance adjuster is gonna love you."

"Don't rub it in." LaSalle was sitting on the back bumper of the ambulance occasionally inhaling from an oxygen cannula. For the most part, the paramedics had been satisfied releasing the agent. Not that he would have gone to the hospital had they thought otherwise. That might involve sleeping and remaining idle, and that wasn't something he was willing to do at the moment.

"How's Brody?" he asked looking past the petite, fiery, agent to the second ambulance.

Following his gaze, Percy turned her head so that her female partner was in her line of view. "She's okay, bout the same as you. I think they're a going to take her in though just to be sure. One of the paramedics said something about possible inflammation in her lungs."

LaSalle nodded, staring pensively. Someone had just hurt his friend, his partner, sweet Merri Brody, who had shared her sister's most treasured necklace with him.

"Brody's going to the hospital," Pride appeared beside Percy. "That's exactly where you should be headed."

"I'm fine, King." Right now all he cared about was nailing the bastard who had hurt Brody, and killed Alexandria Hale.

Pride took a step towards his young friend, hoping to get him to see reason. "You have not been fine in a very long time."

"He's right Country Mouse," Percy added. "Ever since that Mermaid of yours passed you've been-"

Eyes, blazing and nostrils flared, LaSalle lit into Percy. "I told ya before, her name is Savannah!"

"Her name was Savannah." Percy countered, pointing a finger as LaSalle lunged forward. "The sooner you accept that, the sooner we call all stop tip-toeing around you!"

"Chris," Pride remanded blocking his best friend of eleven years from going after the sassy and at times caustic agent.

LaSalle gave the senior agent a heated glare, shrugging Pride's hands off of him, legging it toward the fire marshal standing across the street, while Percy stood seething behind the older man.

"I'm tellin' ya Pride he's getting ready to crash and burn. When he does, he's going take all of us down with him."

"No, he won't." Pride averted his eyes, looking down at his newest agent. He had raised LaSalle to be a better agent than that. He knew that somehow, Chris would come through all of this o.k.

"Wish I had the same confidence," Percy sniffed, eyes casting daggers into LaSalle's back as he hopped into his F-150 and sped away from the curb.

Pride looked at her pathetically, before giving her shoulder a squeeze. The new agent still had a lot to learn before she understood the way that they did business. "It's not about confidence, it about years of working together as a family."

Pausing for a moment, Pride closed his eyes constructing his final thought on the matter. "I'm going to say somethin' and I want you to listen. In this family, we don't belittle each other with insults that tear each other down. We work as a team, supportive, caring, we lift each other up. Ya hear me Sonja?"

The former ATF agent, looked down at the ground, it was all she could do to keep from rolling her eyes at her new boss as he stood there staring down at her before going to heading off to the hospital to be with Brody.

LaSalle parked the truck in front of the office and threw his head against the seatback, concentrating on settling his anger. He was angry, probably angrier than he'd been in a long while, Savannah's death, Percy and the maniac that had used him to murder an innocent woman. It was all starting to weigh down hard on his already battered soul.

He was also physically worn out. The bite marks in his side had started to itch unmercifully, his nasal passages burned from where he had inhaled the heat from the smoke and then there was his head. It felt like it was going to explode again, every muscle ached from sheer exhaustion and the stress of not sleeping. Peeling open his eyes, he looked into the rear view mirror, noting they were still dilated, like before only now they were dilated in a contrast of a highway of red wavy lines that took up what little white space he could see.

He needed to finish this, before it finished it him. But first he needed to deal with the text that he'd been sent.

"So what have you got for me this time?" Patton Plame quizzed as a haggard looking LaSalle entered the computer specialists man cave, that doubled as the technology lab.

"I got a text right before someone threw a Molotov cocktail through my window." LaSalle passed his phone to Patton hoping that his friend could work some magic.

"Ya think it came from the same person who sent the picture?" Patton asked curious.

"That's what I'm hoping you can find out." Chris pulled up a chair and took a seat next to Patton as the computer whiz connected the phone to USB cord that uploaded everything on the agent's phone to the mainframe. After deleting all of the extraneous information Patton narrowed it down to just the picture of Savannah and the text, placing them side by side on his computer screen.

"This could take a while," Plame said meeting eyes with LaSalle.

Taking the comment as a hint, Chris pulled to his feet. "Ya want anything from the kitchen? I'm gonna make me a sandwich and grab a beer."

"Pastrami on Rye, with light mustard and no onion. My stomach's already rumbling from Pride's sriracha style jambalaya, but then again it could have been that extra side kick of ribs I had. Patton grinned as thousands of numbers began to dance in a rhythmic fashion across the screen. "And I'll take a cold one too."

"You got it," LaSalle shuffled off to the kitchen, and promptly downed a beer before calling to check on Brody. Using his god given charm he conned a nurse in the ER, into telling him that Brody was being treated for minor smoke inhalation but that it looked like she was going to be released. Somehow this should have made him feel better but it didn't.

After making the sandwich, he headed back into Patton's lair, where he found the agent gazing at a blank screen.

LaSalle recognized the look. It was the one that Patton often reflected when he had nothing good to say. "Ya found something?"

Patton let out a long sigh. "My man, you don't want to hear it."

Chris let out a sigh of his own, "Look, whoever it is may have just hurt Brody. Not to mention killed an innocent woman."

Hesitating, Patton pursed his lips what he was about to say was going to tear his friend apart. "The picture and the text came from a number belonging to Savannah Kelly."