Fandom: Naruto
Pairing: SasuSaku
Summary: "So, we have your wife. You get her back for two billion yen. Cash." The caller's confident Sasuke will find a way to get the money. If he loves his wife enough. Sasuke does. He has sixty hours to prove it, and he'll pay a lot more than two billion yen.
Disclaimer: Naruto © Masashi Kishimoto. The Husband © Dean Koontz.
Courage is grace under pressure
– Ernest Hemmingway
Call #5: The Unanswered Call
I'd rather you didn't answer that
"Nice house you got here," Detective Nara Shikamaru commented lazily. "I love old neighbourhoods like these."
Lieutenant Hyuuga Neji nodded in agreement.
Sasuke lips were parched. He licked them before asking, "Do you live around here, Detectives?"
"No," Neji said. "We were just driving around and happened to be in the neighbourhood."
Sasuke surveyed the two men before him. Shikamaru was a man who would feel it much too bothersome to stop by someone's place even if he was 'in the neighbourhood'. As for the Lieutenant? Neji wasn't a man who just happened to be anywhere. If he ever went sleepwalking, even then he would have a purpose, a plan and a destination.
"Something's come up, Uchiha-san," said Shikamaru, his expression suddenly serious. "And since we were nearby, it seemed as easy to stop in as it was to call. Can you spare us a few minutes?"
If Neji — and Shikamaru by proxy, Sasuke reasoned — was not one of the kidnappers, if his conversation with Sasuke was taped without his knowledge or consent, then allowing him into his threshold would be reckless. In his small house, the living room and the kitchen were only a few steps apart.
Sasuke knew there was a flaw in the kidnappers' 'insurance'. For one thing, when the crime scene was thoroughly inspected, detectives down at the CSI laboratories would determine the clotting time. Since Sasuke was being questioned by the police when the 'murder' was committed and then chauffeuring Naruto back to his apartment straight after, he had his alibi.
But what if they spilled the blood just before he came home? They knew he was in the kitchen. This meant that there were probably cameras all over his house, and that someone was tailing him at all times. Sasuke remembered the black Cadillac SUV. They were fast, professional and efficient. One of them could have easily followed him and called his friends when Sasuke was nearing his house, giving the signal to set up the crime scene.
Even if they didn't, the evidence was damning, and would have Sasuke detained and questioned for at least a day. Of course the detectives would doubt his story if he told them. No matter what those TV programs said, you were guilty until proven innocent in the real world. And it would take hours, maybe even days, for the results of the blood clotting time to come back to prove Sasuke's innocence, time which Sasuke didn't have.
"Of course," Sasuke replied quickly. "But my wife came home with a migraine. She's lying down."
If the detectives were also the kidnappers, if they knew that Sakura was being held hostage elsewhere, they didn't betray their knowledge by any change in their expressions.
Sakura had said they were professionals.
"Why don't we sit out here on the porch?" Sasuke offered.
Sasuke pulled the door shut behind him and the three of them settled into the white wicker chairs.
Shikamaru clasped his hands behind his head and rested against them.
"I had a porch like this when I was a kid," he said nonchalantly. "I used to just sit there watching the clouds go by. If there were no clouds, I'd just watch the traffic."
Sasuke didn't trust himself to say anything. He eyed Shikamaru warily. Behind the laid-back attitude was a genius, Sasuke knew. He couldn't be in his profession if it were otherwise.
Neji had brought a nine-by-twelve white envelope along with him. He placed it in his lap, unopened, once he had sat down.
"Does your wife use ergotamine?" he asked.
"Use what?"
"Ergotamine. For the migraines," Shikamaru elaborated.
Sasuke had no idea whether ergotamine was an actual medication or whether the detectives had simply invented it as they were walking up to his house.
"No. She toughs it out on aspirin."
"How often does she get one?"
"Two or three times a year," Sasuke lied. Sakura had never had a migraine since he had met her when they were twelve. She rarely suffered headaches of any kind.
"I have ocular migraines," Neji said. "They're entirely visual though. I get the glimmering light and the temporary blind spot for about twenty minutes, but there's no pain."
"I've always told him; if you have to have a migraine, that's the type to have. They're not as bothersome as the others," Shikamaru added.
"The doctors will only prescribe ergotamine if you have them at least once a month."
"Well, Sakura only has hers two or three times a year," Sasuke repeated. It was just rotten luck that these detectives knew so much about migraines.
"Hey, Uchiha-san. What does your wife do?" Shikamaru asked.
"She's a receptionist in St. Minato's. But that's only her day job. She's studying to become a doctor."
"That's handy," Neji commented.
Shikamaru agreed.
Their small talk unnerved Sasuke, and he was very aware that his shoulders were tense and his posture stiff. He tried to relax them to no avail.
Of course, the two detectives had no doubt long grown accustomed to people being wary and tense with them, even innocent people, even their mothers.
"There was a dog nearby," Shikamaru said after a long pause.
Sasuke had been avoiding both detectives' eyes, but at that information, he looked up.
"I do remember seeing a dog run past, and the man chasing after it," Sasuke recalled.
"Yes," Neji said. "It was alone. There was a collar and a leash, but no owners. We had the CSIs immediately see whether the DNA on the leash was a match to the victim's. It was."
"The dog also had a microchip on it," Shikamaru continued. "They inject it between the muscles in the dog's shoulder. It's very tiny. The animal doesn't feel it. We scanned the dog's chip, and it lives a few blocks away from where it was found. Owner's name is Inuzuka."
Sasuke blinked.
"Inuzuka? As in, Inuzuka Kiba?"
"You know him?"
"He's an acquaintance of mine. He wasn't the guy that was shot, was he?"
"No, he wasn't."
"So, who was he? A family member or a friend?"
Avoiding the question, Neji asked, "If you saw the dog, Uchiha-san, I'm surprised you didn't recognise it."
"Akamaru," Sasuke remembered.
"That's the dog's name," Shikamaru confirmed.
"It didn't occur to me at the time," Sasuke said. "I mean, I thought they looked alike, sure, but since Kiba takes that thing around with him everywhere, I never would have thought that dog would be Akamaru."
"Apparently, the dog was stolen from the Inuzukas' back garden, probably around eleven-thirty. The leash and the collar around Akamaru don't belong to the Inuzukas," Neji explained.
"You mean the dog was stolen by the guy that was shot?"
This revelation has reversed Sasuke's problem with eye contact. Now he couldn't look away from the detectives.
Lieutenant Hyuuga Neji and Detective Nara Shikamaru hadn't stopped by his house just to share this puzzling piece of information. Apparently this development triggered, in the detectives' minds, a question about something Sasuke had said earlier — or had failed to say.
From inside the house came the muffled ringing of the telephone.
The kidnappers weren't supposed to call until six o'clock. But if they called earlier and couldn't reach Sasuke, they would be angry.
As Sasuke made to get out of his seat, Neji said, "I'd rather you didn't answer that. It's probably Uzumaki-san."
"Naruto?"
"We spoke to him half an hour ago," Shikamaru explained, closing his eyes. "We asked him not to call you until we had a chance to speak to you. He's probably been wrestling with his conscience ever since, and finally his conscience won. Or lost, depending on your point of view."
Remaining in his chair, Sasuke said, "What's this all about?"
Ignoring his question yet again, Neji asked, "How often do you think dogs are stolen, Uchiha-san?"
"I've never dwelled on the thought before."
"It happens," Neji continued. "Purebred dogs can be worth hundreds of thousands of yen. And as often as not, the thief doesn't intend to sell the animal. He just wants a fancy dog for himself without having to pay for it."
Sasuke raised an eyebrow.
"But Akamaru wasn't a purebred dog," he said. "He was a mongrel."
"That's why it makes no sense," Shikamaru said, having appeared to have woken up from his short nap. "Also, dogs are mostly stolen from cars. People leave the dog alone and the car unlocked. When they come back, Shintaro's gone and someone's renamed him Pakkun."
Sasuke let out a breath he wasn't aware he was holding and tried to appear more relaxed.
"Or the owners tie them to a parking meter outside a shop. One slip of the knot and the thief walks away with a new best friend."
Shikamaru paused, and looked out at the sky. It was a cloudless day. He sighed.
"It's very rare, Uchiha-san," Shikamaru said, "for a dog to be stolen out of an owner's backyard on a bright sunny morning. You'd have to have executed that theft perfectly so the owner wouldn't realise what you had done. But why would someone go to all that effort for a dog of mixed ancestry? You wouldn't get a lot of money for a mongrel. Its outright weirdness just bothers me."
Sasuke raised one hand to the back of his neck and massaged the muscles there because that seemed like something a relaxed man — a relaxed, unconcerned man — might do.
"It's strange for a thief to enter a neighbourhood like that on foot and walk away with a stolen pet. It's strange that no form of identity was found on him when the body was examined. It's more than strange that he gets shot to death three blocks later. And it's just weird — in fact, it's remarkable — Uchiha-san, that you, the primary witness, knew him."
Sasuke eyes widened a fraction.
"But I didn't know him," Sasuke said.
"But at one time," Shikamaru insisted, "you knew him quite well."
A/N:
OH DEAR, WHAT EVER WILL SASU-CHAN DOOOO? -slaps hands to cheeks-
And the whole few paragraphs about the blood-clot-whatever are there because of Miko-chan, who this chapter is dedicated to because of her brilliance. She raised that point in the previous chapter, and after reading her reasonings, I just stared at the screen for a good few minutes before laughing out loud for another good few minutes, because I was just stomped. And I didn't know how to get around that at the time and I'm astounded at her intelligence and ability to think this up, because my brain never functions that hard. Especially when writing fics.
So yes, many thanks to her for pointing out that inconsistency. And I'm so sorry that I couldn't find a more intelligent way to get around that besides the I'm late for a very important date! cliche. But seriously, it took more than a week for me to think about this, and the perfectionist in me would not continue the story until I smoothed out that particular crease. That, and it was the best I could think of.
I'm trying to imagine Neji and Shikamaru sharing an office. It makes me happy just thinking about it.
... SHINO!
Lessthanthree.
