Disclaimer I own very little, especially not CSI NY.

Notes Chapter 17: Thanks SO much to everyone for all previous reviews! I hope you enjoy this chapter too. Please continue reviewing - I love to know what you think - welcome at any time, for any chapter, and always replied to if logged. Thank you to Fat Kat and Juliette for your reviews. I'm sorry some of my replies were delayed - internet access is a bit of a problem at the moment : (

Lost Letters: Chapter 17

7th August

… We're beginning to run low on food, but I think we've got enough for a couple more days. I still haven't managed to find any work, and Social Security are not going to want to know about me, so no dollars there. I'm beginning to think I've gotten myself into more of a mess than I realised. Maybe I should have just stayed where I was, maybe moving here was a mistake. But I guess I've only been here a few months, and I've made some good friends. The kindness of friends and strangers gets me through…

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As Flack, hurrying with an eye on his watch and the early hour of the morning, neared Danny's room, he saw two men standing by it. One was, he presumed, a doctor, given the white coat he wore; the other was a stocky man wearing a football jersey and a baseball cap. Both were talking in a rapid, and in the case of the doctor, agitated undertone. He did not look at Flack, but the man in the football jersey did, and a glance from under his cap, which he felt in its intensity, swept over him.

Flack made his own scrutiny of both men. Something struck him about the doctor, no, he corrected himself, the man in the white coat. White coat didn't mean doctor, any more than a badge and uniform meant a cop. Anyone could wear them; it was what was underneath the cover and the skin that counted, something he'd learned a long time ago. But it was still an easy judgement trap to fall into.

The closer he looked the more he would swear that this was someone who had never taken the Hippocratic oath; apart from there being no stethoscope or name badge for instance, there were things that identified him as not a doctor in Flack's mind; his hands were black around the fingernails, and somehow his stance and demeanour were not right. Nothing he could define, just a feeling that he, and others, were being misled.

Flack paused with his hand on the doorframe, and decided to pose a question, using the smattering of medical knowledge he'd picked up from hanging out with Hawkes and Hammerback,

"Excuse me, Doctor, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind answering a question I got about my buddy's condition? Fact is, I don't know any medical jargon myself, but I've been told he has a thoracic haematoma. Means nothing to me. Could you explain that in plain English?"

Flack knew exactly what it meant, and that any junior grade doctor should be able to give him an explanation. The two men suspended their conversation and there was silence for a moment. From inside the room, he could hear Lindsay's, and what sounded like Adam Ross's voice, talking in lowered tones.

"Th - thoracic haematoma?"

"Yeah, what he said. You got a translation?"

The man looked at his companion in the cap, bypassing Flack's gaze. His hands were clenched at his side, and damp with perspiration.

The reply came hesitantly and in a voice that held no specific markers to origin: there was a trace of The Bronx, and Flack heard some of Danny's intonation in there, but there was also an undercurrent of the Mid Western states, and a Texan roll of his vowels. An accent from anywhere and nowhere.

"I, uh, I - that's not my area of expertise. I work in, uh, paediatrics, sorry. And I don't know who your buddy is, so I can't comment on his condition. I'm, uh, about to head home, just finishing my shift, y'know… Sure someone else can answer your question though."

Glass beads of sweat had appeared on the man's forehead. A trembling hand wiped them away. The other man remained silent, outwardly disinterested, but Flack felt watched; felt his eyes and mind pried open and felt creepers penetrating; searching out information.

Trying to maintain nonchalance, he let his gaze drift over the white coat, "No problem. I see you're busy. I'll ask another doctor. Maybe you could point me in the direction of one? Or maybe you could tell me when it's likely my buddy's doctor's going to make his rounds?"

The man was standing with his back against the wall. There was a bulge under the back of the coat, something concealed. It could be something innocent, it could not be.

He flicked his eyes downwards, and to his companion again, before his next sentence jolted out of him as his hand moved to swipe hair out of his eyes, and his head turned; jerky, marionette movements; strings pulled that Flack couldn't see but had a sudden intuition about. The other man stayed motionless at his side, still staring.

"No, uh, I don't know. This ain't - isn't my area like I said, different round times. Only came up here to meet my, uh, friend, before I left…"

Flack was suddenly aware of every sound around him; of every squeak on the floor from the man's sneakers as he shifted about; of the murmuration of voices further down the corridor. Under his palm, he felt the painted wood of the door, and under his eyes, he felt the gaze of the man in the baseball cap, peeling away all his layers.

So casually as to appear almost accidental, Flack lifted his arm to rub the back of his neck, and revealed his holster and badge.

"Uh huh. Well, thanks anyhow. Guess I'd better not keep you any longer." He raised his eyebrows as neither man moved, and hitched his thumb in the direction he had come, "Exit's that way."

The man in the white coat moved convulsively forward, "Yeah, yeah, sure, thanks. Uh, hope you find out what you need to. Sorry, I gotta, y'know…"

"Sure." Flack weighed his next movement carefully, and tipped the balance at waiting to see what transpired next. Lindsay and Adam's voices had died away now.

With a complete lack of expression, the man in the baseball cap blinked at Flack, who had the unnerving sensation that his photograph had just been taken; shutter open, lens exposed, a flash from dark eyes. Then the man turned and began to walk away, at the back of his companion, propelling him forward.

Flack also had every last pixel of the two men stored in his memory; from the marbled green and yellow bruise along the jaw of the white coat man to the manicured hands of the baseball cap man.

Hands were important: how you used them, whose you knew. Flack knew that and always noted them. He took good care of his own, though never to the extent of a manicure. He cared only that his hands were clean and functioning the way they should, and had a certain pride in the fact that he had never bought hand cream in his life; although some friends swore by it.

The hands of those you associated with gave away more than anything you disguised your own with. He thought of Lindsay with her hand on Danny's, and all the unconscious touches they gave one another when he worked a scene with them.

He thought of Stella, with Mac's hand on hers, not letting her go. As Mac had not let him go. It was the first sensation Flack remembered, after the explosion, after he had lost every other feeling in his body. The grip that he had responded to was when he first began to realise that he was alive, and might just stay alive.

He thought of someone else's hands, and how they felt on his own, and the sensation of their proximity. He remembered the first time he met Jessica Angell, soon after he had returned to work following his injury, when she had walked right up to him, and taken hold of his hand; introduced herself with a smile in her dark eyes and a shock in the strength of her grasp. And Flack felt somehow that since that moment she had never let go of him.

Thoughts passed in seconds as Flack stood framed by the doorway, watching the two men walk away. It occurred to him that he might have let them pass too easily out of his hands.

Why were they outside Danny's room? Coincidence?

Flack had little faith in coincidences. He pushed himself away from the door, calling out, "Hey! Wait up a second."

The almost inevitable happened. They ran.

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Lindsay heard the shout; she and Adam had been listening for the last few minutes. Once she had established it was Flack outside the door, and that there was something odd about the discussion, she had motioned Adam to silence, and they both strained their ears to listen. Then she heard the running. Both of them jumped up.

"Something's wrong…"

She manoeuvred past Adam, "Wait here with Danny, I'll go check out what's happening."

Before he could argue, she was high-tailing down the corridor behind Flack.

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"Oh for…!"

Flack sprinted after the two men, and suddenly the corridors began to sprout people, as he shouted.

"NYPD, stop where you are! I want a longer conversation!"

They didn't stop, of course, so he kept running, closing the gap, his hand on his Glock. They ran on, blundering through a contingent of nurses, through people in uniform, through patients. Flack followed, dodging everyone in his path, with much-practised gymnastics of pursuit.

He pulled his radio out, shouted for back up, and yelled to a startled nurse to call hospital security.

The corridor was a long one, with obstacles coming up; chairs against the wall; a porter pushing a gurney along; more people. People that could be hurt.

Flack zig-zagged past everyone stopping, staring, seeing, no doubt, only a man running, not the danger they could be in. He had a suspicion, borne out of too many previous experiences, of what might be concealed under that white coat he was chasing.

They were nearing the end of the corridor, double swing doors ahead, he was only fifty yards or less behind them. They glanced back. Flack saw it coming as his mind leaped a few seconds ahead, and he dodged the chair they knocked into his path, barely losing his pace.

"Armed police officer, I'm ordering you to stop!"

In answer, the white coat was flicked back and the truth Flack had suspected was revealed. A handgun. In the wrong hands. Hands that yanked the safety off, and fired the weapon in his direction.

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Her hands covered her face as she lay back on the pillows.

"Stella, I'm sorry…" Mac waited until she lifted her fingers away, uncovering eyes jewelled with tears, "I'm sorry."

While she gathered her composure, he let his hand rest, palm down, against her side, not knowing what else to say, or to do. Because he was sorry; sorry that because of one man pulling a trigger, days had been taken out of her life; that she was now lying in a hospital bed; and that he had just had to tell her she was not the only one who had suffered harm at the hands of one man.

He had answered Stella's question first; how long she had been unconscious, then he told her the bare facts of the missing days; not everything yet. She had added a few words of her own in his pauses, and questions which he had tried to anticipate, to save her the effort he could see it was costing her to talk.

Mac had not wanted to tell her about Danny, but she had asked; almost immediately, she had asked if anyone else had been hurt. Stella knew him too well for him to lie. But he had hidden some of the ugliness of the truth from her, for now, saying only that Danny had also been injured, and was recovering slowly. He had not been able to prevent his eyes from flickering away from her, and he knew that she realised there was more to know.

"Stella, Danny'll be okay…" Mac drew her eyes back to him, but before he could continue, his cell phone interrupted. He pulled it out, recognising the number flashing, and stared at it for a moment.

Stella gave him a piercing look, "You going to… answer that?" .

He did, frowning, "Flack? Everything all right?"

The answer was loud enough for them both to hear.

"No. We got ourselves a problem, Mac."

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Flack stared at the scene as he spoke to Mac, "A big problem. Listen, I'm assuming you're still with Stella, so stay there, and unless you're absolutely certain of their identity do not let anyone else into the room, you got that?"

The inevitable questions poured into his ear, but he shook his head, "Mac, I'm sorry; ain't got time right now to explain everything, just please, trust me on this, do as I'm asking, and I'll be up to you soon as I can, okay?"

He received Mac's affirmative, and flipped his cell phone closed; then turned back to face the corridor, and the chaos that had ensued from the chase, and gunfire.

Only two shots in the end: one from the man in the white coat, who Flack would now say without any hesitation was not a doctor, and one from his own weapon. His bullet had fired harmlessly into the doors; the other, however, had left a trail of damage.

Flack knelt down beside the woman sitting on the floor, supporting her back against the wall, legs out into the corridor. Her face was drawn, and blood streamed from her arm, but there was unmistakeable fire in her eyes, "Everyone okay, Flack?"

"Fine, and I guess I ought to thank you in part for that, Lindsay. Though I'd like to know what you were doing chasing up behind me. More to the point, how you doing yourself?"

She shrugged, then winced, "Thought I might be useful, and I'm good honestly, Flack, it's just a graze. Think the bullet kind of bounced off of me before it hit the wall…"

"And before it hit the old guy over there, I know what you did, don't overdo the modesty, okay?"

Mayhem had happened in seconds. The gun firing, Flack diving to the side, whirling round in time to see Lindsay pushing an elderly gentleman to the side, and crashing to the ground as he heard the 'ping' of the bullet zip past and into the wall. It had hit no one, only glanced off Lindsay's arm. Luck, sheer luck. Flack shuddered with the other paths that bullet could have taken, but nodded at the CSI, "Go get yourself checked out."

"I will, but I'm okay."

Flack looked her straight in the eyes, making sure she really was okay, before he got to his feet, and called over a nurse, a real nurse, to make sure that the bullet had done no more damage than Lindsay was admitting to. Hands helped her to her feet, people clustered round her, and Flack left them to it.

The two men had escaped, but he had hospital security, and his own squad after them now. And, besides the bullet, they had left a little something else of themselves; as the gun had been pulled, something had fallen from the back pocket of the man in the white coat and smacked onto the floor. With a glove in his hand, Flack picked up a much-folded, four day old copy of The New York Times, and things began to click together in his mind. If what he thought was true, then until the two men that had temporarily eluded him were caught, Mac's team were still in grave danger.

………………………………..............................

Monochrome images of two running figures appeared and disappeared across a bank of television screens; a wall of eyes that could only look, could not do. The figures ran and shoved, and scrambled until they disappeared over the edge of the last screen. All that was left in the corner of the picture was a white coat, discarded as its wearer became someone else in the world beyond the doors of the hospital.

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"So why've you not killed me yet dude? I've known you long enough to know that's how it usually ends. I've carried most of 'em out for you, so I know."

They were standing by a disused railway sidings, running parallel to the river. Tracks and rails that had been left for so long that nettles and grass had wound round and twisted them, embedding and taking re-possession of the thick steel lines, making them part of them. Transforming them into thick green pathways that no train would ever pass along again.

TJ shaded his eyes as he looked out over the river. The morning light spread blinding silver brushstrokes over the grey water, only bearable to look at for a second. He turned his gaze to a point beyond Rich's shoulder.

"Why have I not killed you? Good question, very good question, Rich. You want to know? Truth is, you're more use to me alive than dead, despite the royal screw-up you've made. I ain't taking a part of what you did back there. You screwed up. Unfortunately, that means you've screwed up for me too. However, you're the one who's gonna sort the mess out."

Rich had nothing more to say for the moment. His hands fiddled in his pocket, and pulled out a squashed pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He dropped the lighter; bent down to pick it up, and found TJ's foot crushing his hand into the dirt, smashing the lighter into useless pieces.

"Smoking's a dirty habit, Rich. Gets you into trouble, damages your health, starts fires. You'd know about that, wouldn't you?"

Rich bit back his curse of pain, he would not show weakness. Any weakness and TJ would find it and destroy him with it. As he had seen him do many times before to others, with his help.

Sun beat down on the back of his head. The boot crushed down harder, and twisted on his hand, he heard ligaments and bones crunching, felt shards of plastic puncturing his skin, and hissed in agony, "Listen… I got… I got ideas, TJ…"

"Don't want to hear 'em, Rich. So far your ideas ain't turned out too good for me. So I'm thinking it's time you took notice of my ideas."

"Sure… sure… whatever you say."

"I do say. I also say, even though you might not think so, there are other ways to get rid of unwanted witnesses than blundering into a hospital with a loaded gun, getting yourself noticed. Where did you think that was gonna get you Rich, huh?"

Another twist of TJ's foot. Rich bit his tongue, tasted blood in his mouth, spat it out onto the ground. Under the sole of the boot, he could see blood and scraped skin. Blood on his hand. He hadn't expected his own. He waited.

"Nowhere. So now we think of something else. Hospitals are dangerous places, Rich, very dangerous. All those drugs for instance, and interns with no training, no money..."

Rich risked a glance upwards. TJ's face blocked out the sun except for a nimbus of hellish light. He continued with a smile, "All very dangerous in the right hands."

I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Please review and let me know what you think! Will try and post the next one in a few days. Thank you, Lily x