The Rewind Job, Chapter 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Leverage, the characters, Lucille, or a Sig Sauer weapon.
Recap:
"Where's my piece, Ford?"
"What?" Nate now genuinely looked confused.
"My Sig, man." The hitter checked his waistband again. "I was carrying it….that's a $1200 gun man. What'd you do with it?"
"Whoa…whoa…" Nate tried to placate the hitter, knowing this could go from bad to terrible any minute. The other three team members stared on in shock. "I don't have it, ok. You think I'd be crazy enough to try to take a gun off you. Those guys…the guys that did this to you must have taken it," Nate improvised.
Chapter 5
Nate's quick thinking and persistence finally convinced Eliot that no one on the team had taken his weapon off of him or had any idea where it was. The hitter finally calmed down and now sat with his head leaning back against the van wall, apparently asleep, several bloody gauze pads resting over the cut in his hairline.
"Nate," Sophie whispered. "Why would Eliot think he should be armed? I realize he's confused but he doesn't even like guns."
Nate watched the man in question closely. He was fairly certain that Eliot would not allow himself to sleep while injured and in the presence of four virtual strangers, at least strangers to this Eliot. The hitter was probably listening to every word and movement around him, which might not be such a bad thing because Ford didn't lavish the thought of openly explaining to Eliot what was really going on. He spoke, not as quietly as one might expect, to the rest of the team. "I don't know. The concussion is pretty bad. I think he's somehow lost the last seven or eight years." At their confused looks, he continued. "Eliot may not like guns now, but early on….when I first met him…chased him….he always carried."
While Parker and Hardison didn't really look surprised, Sophie looked ready to protest, but thought better of it, asking, "So why do you think he's lost 7 or 8 years?"
"It's because of Dublin, isn't it?" Parker interjected. "That seemed to be fresh on his mind."
Leave it to Parker to pick up on that. Ford mused, before telling the story of one of his earlier interactions with Eliot. "Eight or nine years ago, Eliot 'retrieved' a very valuable Celtic cross for an Irish mobster. It just happened to be insured by IYS, so I was sent after it. By that time, Eliot had a reputation. He'd just recently taken on a whole squad of Yakuza to free a Japanese tycoon's young son. I knew how dangerous it would be to try to take him down and I had Maggie and Sam to think about. Sam was just a toddler. So I waited until the cross was delivered and arranged to "take" it back from its new owners. It was totally unexpected, which is probably why the mob boss assumed that Eliot had double crossed him. "
"Oh" Parker chirped, aware of the implications of such a misunderstanding.
"Yeah," Nate continued, "The boss sent his crew after Eliot….worked him over pretty good trying to get the location of their merchandise from him. In fact, I was kind of surprised that Eliot didn't come after me once he recovered. I never really considered that Eliot might be blamed or what might happen to him."
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Eliot leaned back against the van wall, eyes closed, feigning sleep. He needed time to figure out what was going on with Nathan Ford and this motley crew he seemed to be working with. The blonde, Parker, seemed harmless enough, but he was sure the one called Sophie was a grifter and he'd never trusted grifters. The driver…Ford had called him Hardison….was a total unknown. Even more perplexing was why Nathan Ford, who'd always been straight as an arrow, was associating with them and more concerning, why Eliot couldn't' remember anything after his last job in the Yucatán.
Listening to the discussion that was ongoing served only to confuse him more. He wondered why Sophie would think a retrieval specialist would have something against guns. Guns were a given in his profession. And Ford seemed to genuinely believe that he was having some sort of memory lapse and kept referring to him as Eliot, like they were good buddies, rather than Spencer as he had called him during their past interactions. To Eliot's knowledge the Dublin incident happened a little less then two years before, as evidenced by the fact that his right shoulder still throbbed whenever he stressed it. It was throbbing now, in fact. Ford had been correct about the damage done by Sean O'Cain's goons. Eliot spent eight days in the hospital in Dublin, before he was forced to flee to escape an attempted hit by one of his many enemies that had gotten wind that he was incapacitated. He'd had to hide out for six weeks afterward to regain his strength so that he wasn't an easy target.
Ford was right about another thing too. Eliot had come after him. He was scoping out Ford's house from across the street when he saw the insurance agent come out of the garage, pushing his young son on a tiny red tricycle. The boy's beaming face and high pitched laughter took Eliot back to a time when he was too little to pedal his own tricycle. The memory of his older sister pushing him across the yard while he squealed in delight warmed Eliot's heart and he decided to give Ford a pass, this time.
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Disclaimer #2 – Sean O'Cain is a fictional character and has no relation to any real Sean O'Cains.