Chapter Ten: Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind

Author's Note: In "Undead Again"—an AMAZINGLY ROLLICKINGLY FUN episode, for the record—Beckett says that if she could be a supernatural creature, she'd be Van Helsing…a vampire slayer. If I ever needed further proof that the Slayers would have adopted Beckett as a spiritual sister, I need it no more. And yes, I did pause the episode on Hulu to laugh hysterically. I like getting things right.

For Your Information: I deliberately made an effort to finish this chapter before I watch "Always", since I strongly suspect that episode will make me want to either cry or throw things…or both simultaneously, which is detrimental to writing. I will watch it on TUESDAY when Hulu posts it online. Unfortunately, my beta-reader is inexplicably absent today, so this chapter is 100% Le'letha. I suspect he's got that AP exams stuff to worry about. Wish him luck.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

If the demons that appeared out of the darkness of the tunnel in front of them had been planning to take them by surprise, they failed to do so. Buffy had been expecting their attack from the moment she'd learned that they were deep underground, and had not dropped her guard all the time she had been talking to Castle about the reasons for Steph's murder. Although the denizens of the tunnels had been attempting to be quiet as they approached, there were too many of them to be entirely silent.

In retrospect, she admitted to herself, this might not have been a good thing.

She didn't think about what she was doing as her body moved to block the first attack and retaliate, reacting on instinct and years of training. She'd learned years ago that she didn't have to think about each punch and lunge; she could be bleeding to death, drugged and hallucinating, or utterly amnesiac, and she would still be able to fight. It was what she'd been born, chosen, and trained to do.

Some of her friends would be able to look over the demons moving to the attack and name species, traits, weaknesses, and more. Buffy generally only worried about that if she had time and, preferably, somebody else to do the research. When it mattered, all she saw were enemies, targets on their bodies that would probably hurt, disable, or kill, and movements that told her where they were going to go next and what they were going to do when they got there.

As she fought, she tossed glances back over her shoulder at Castle and Beckett, knowing that she couldn't easily stop what she was doing to protect them if necessary. This didn't throw her off much; she'd been protecting the people she patrolled with for years too. Before all her attention was taken up by the pack of attacking demons, she saw Beckett draw and aim her gun and Castle assume some sort of martial arts pose, yelling something that was probably meant to sound intimidating and only managed to sound panicked. She briefly hoped he wasn't just imitating something he had seen on TV once. From the yelling, which was only a note or two away from being screaming, it sounded like it.

All thoughts of Castle were immediately set aside as the creature putting its full weight on her arm snarled at her, its breath stinking hotly against her face. She snarled back at it—a bad habit, she had to admit—confusing it until she cleared matters up by stabbing her knife through the underside of its jaw, dragging the blade downwards through soft throat, and kicking it into its friends. The rest of that lunge went into the demon next to it, knocking it across the tunnel. She heard something snap satisfyingly.

Willow's gift was proving even more useful than either the witch or the Slayer had thought; the bright light overhead was disorienting some of the demons, which had probably not seen daylight—or anything almost as bright—in a good long while. If Buffy and her companions had been depending on flashlights, they probably would have been in a lot of trouble by now.

Granted, Beckett and Castle might have argued that they were in a lot of trouble now. And she did have no idea how many enemies she was facing, how many were left, and in most cases, what exactly they were. The only breed of demon she really recognized was the distorted features and fangs of a vampire, which promptly exploded into dust and vapor as her instincts took over and stabbed the hardened wooden blade of her knife into its chest. The close quarters of the tunnel forced something vaguely reptilian to leap at her through the dissolving vampire, a strategy that backfired immediately as she was still in the perfect position to stab it too, putting as many holes in its thick skin as she could manage in only a few seconds.

That turned out to be a little messier and a lot louder, as it screamed and flailed and hit everything in range, including her.

Buffy was forced to take a step backwards as the reptile fell almost on her feet, unintentionally giving the remaining creatures a chance to regroup. As they milled in momentary confusion, howling furiously, something that sounded remarkably like a bullet ricocheted off the tunnel wall, too close for comfort.

"Stop that!" Buffy yelled unreasonably as Beckett adjusted her aim and put a nice neat hole in the front of an unlucky demon and a nasty messy hole in the back of it. Buffy didn't like guns much. She'd never learned to use one and she generally didn't like people who did.

"Not unless you've got a better idea," the detective called back, commendably calmly. She sounded fairly stressed, but that was understandable. In contrast, Castle was sounding ever more panicked as he flailed at a pair of demons who had cut him off from Beckett and were circling him in a deliberately predatory fashion. His far-too-random movements were keeping them at bay for the moment, but they were going to move in any second now.

Now that she knew Castle was one of the good guys, he was starting to remind Buffy of Xander, just a little bit, and anyway Beckett would probably be upset if Castle got eaten, so Buffy grabbed the creature that was most in her face and tossed it away, yelling, "Pull!"

She couldn't remember, right at this moment, where they'd picked that up or what it had meant in the first place. It had probably meant the same thing she meant to say now, which was along the overly wordy lines of, "I don't have time to deal with this thing that I am throwing, deal with it for me would you?"

The demon she'd thrown off balance stumbled in the general direction of Spike, who had acquired something that looked awfully like a mace from some unfortunate creature and was using it to great effect. Buffy's discarded opponent immediately folded around the weapon. It made a crunching sound that would have made anyone else wince and did make Spike laugh.

The Slayer was not even remotely about worried about him. At least one of them, she thought ruefully, was having fun; Buffy might have been too if she didn't have the detective and the writer to worry about.

Trusting Spike to cover her back as she turned on the demons attacking Castle, Buffy kicked out the knees of the bigger one before leaping to put her knife into where neck met hunched shoulders on the other. At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately, her boot encountered kneecap instead of joint and the demon failed to fall whatsoever.

Okay, so this thing's knees went the other way. Oops. At least it was only relatively bigger; living in tunnels didn't encourage tallness. Although there had been some terribly big and nasty things that had hung out in the Sunnydale cave and sewer systems.

Castle gaped at her with something between relief and absolute terror as the creature she'd kicked roared with rage, turning on her and abandoning its attack on the writer. Ignoring him, she ducked its first blow, rolled across a floor she didn't want to think about, and came up slashing at the other demon, which was only just catching on that it was facing more than an unarmed—he was, wasn't he? she realized—mystery writer.

She briefly wished for a bigger weapon, maybe a sword, and immediately realized that she didn't have room to swing it anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the demon with the backwards knees gear up to take another swipe at her. Even if it missed, it was going to go through Castle on its way down, so she lunged past reaching arms to drive her knife into the smaller demon's shoulder. Her own arm rang as blade met bone and something cracked.

It wasn't in her body, so she didn't worry about it, wrenching the knife out of the unfortunate demon's shoulder joint and rapidly punching out into the wound she'd just inflicted, a move so rapid that she still had time to deal with the other demon.

Spinning to put herself between the limping demon and Castle, Buffy glared up at it and raised her fist meaningfully. Demon blood dripped into her sleeve, and she mentally wrote off yet another perfectly good jacket. She was always ruining them. One day someone was going to invent a fabric that didn't take stains, and when they did, she was going to replace her entire wardrobe with the stuff and never, ever, spend another perfectly good afternoon trying to get grass or mud or blood or slime (or all of the above combined) out of her clothes.

Its massive paw halfway through an arc that would have started around the ceiling and ended somewhere in either her head or Castle's rib cage, the demon apparently thought better of tangling with the Slayer and took a few steps backwards before lowering the offending limb and turning to shamble off back into whatever pit it had come from.

That was probably the plan, anyway; the side of its head exploded outwards before it could negotiate the tricky problem of wading through the now severely discouraged attackers, and a bullet embedded itself in a crack in the tunnel wall.

"I don't have enough bullets; we need to get out of here!" said Beckett, now sounding far more panicked than merely stressed, as she reloaded her gun. Her eyes were very wide.

"Seconded," Castle yelped. "Look, there!"

He was pointing at a passageway they'd walked past mere seconds before they were attacked. At the moment, there was nothing in between him and the tunnel, which was probably most of its appeal.

"We don't know what's down there," Buffy snapped at him.

"And all too well what's here! Come on!"

Castle made a dive for the side tunnel, fumbling for his cell phone and activating the flashlight app, with Beckett only a step or two behind him. "We can't stay here," the detective said quickly as she passed Buffy, "we're outnumbered!"

The Slayer muttered a word under her breath that she was fairly certain she was not meant to know. They didn't trust her, she realized. She knew that between herself and Spike, they could have protected the two humans, taken down most of the creatures stupid enough to attack them, bullied whatever was left into getting them back to the surface, and then probably gone out for a drink and come back to round up and thrash whatever was left alive down here. But Beckett and Castle didn't know that, not really.

Speaking of… "Knew we were short some running away screaming," grumbled Spike, retreating to her side reluctantly as she stared down the tunnel at the flickering phone light that was Beckett and Castle. Behind him, commendably few demons were still on their feet, and some nasty fluids were beginning to creep their way downhill across the filthy tunnel floor. From the looks of things, most of it had gotten backed up in a small depression in the elderly concrete, but that was going to overflow any moment now.

"They're not actually screaming," she commented absently.

"Not anymore."

"We'd better go get them."

"And we were just about to win, too."

He had a point. Almost everything left in the tunnel was dead or getting there; the living had run for it. It made a very messy roadblock, but nothing that they couldn't have gotten past.

They were not immediately pursued down the new tunnel, but it did have a distinctly 'down' component that was not particularly desirable. It was only a few moments before they caught up with Beckett and Castle, who had emerged into a large, open, and above all empty space and stopped there, looking around with their flashlights. Castle's surprised shout of "Hey!" echoed off the high ceiling.

As the floating light spell followed Buffy out of the tunnel and automatically sought out the highest point in the room, they could all see that this space had once been a subway station; there were broken parts of benches scattered across the floor and structures that might have been ticket booths and turnstiles in previous lifetimes. If the walls had ever been decorated, those markings had long since been obliterated beneath dark and disgusting-looking stains that outlined strata of floods and encroaching mold.

"You do realize we're now more surrounded, right?" Spike hailed them in a snarl. "And that we were winning?"

Castle turned around, trained the phone-turned-flashlight on the vampire, yelped, and almost dropped the phone in rapid succession. Then his brain caught up with his instincts as he figured out that the unfamiliar demonic features, wielding a bloodied mace, belonged with the familiar voice.

His first attempt at a reply ended up as more of a squawk. His second attempt actually managed to sound like "What?"

"Look around you, Castle," Buffy snapped at him. She waved at the multiple tunnels that led into this room. "We were actually safer in the tunnel. Now I don't know where they're coming from."

"Yeah, but now we're not being attacked," protested Castle.

"We ran away." As he spoke, Buffy could hear the moment her mate's features shifted back to his more human appearance; there were some sounds that just weren't suited to fangs. "What's left of that lot are going to go round up their friends, and then they're going to come back."

"Not going to take them long, either. Look." The Slayer pointed at a tunnel off to her right, where she'd seen movement in the shadows.

Beckett was the only one who didn't look. She kept her gun and her eyes trained on a tunnel off to her own right. "There too," she said shortly. "Something moved."

Castle looked between tunnels and faces anxiously. "So now what do we do?"

"Actually going to do what I say this time?"

He glared at her. "Hey, how was I supposed to know you had things 'under control'? 'Cause it really didn't look like it."

"Shut up," Spike interrupted him, and glared back when Castle took offense. "They're coming. Listen."

Everyone shut up and listened.

"I can't—" said Castle after a moment.

"I said shut up."

Castle shut up.

Nothing happened for almost two minutes. Although she was not going to admit it aloud, Buffy was starting to get worried; not by the delay, but because she was no longer confident in Beckett and Castle's ability to protect themselves. She'd fought alongside non-Slayers for years—hadn't had a choice about it for most of that time—but they'd all at least been armed, even if they hadn't always known how to use those weapons very well, and mostly there by choice. No doubt Castle could hold his own against one or two human opponents, but he wasn't used to the supernaturally violent world she lived in. Worse still, she'd heard Beckett say only a few minutes ago that she was running short of ammunition. She hoped the detective wouldn't say so again. Best to give the impression of being as armed as possible.

Three minutes. Three and a half. And then something just out of sight spoke.

"Hellsbane," it said. Buffy could hear fangs in the word, so she was betting on vampire.

Unsurprisingly, Castle broke the 'shut up' rule. "What's that mean?"

"That's her."

Snarking at vampires. Buffy could do that. "Hey," she purred, playing up what she'd been told was a California girl accent. "Look at that. I get any more famous, I'm gonna have to get some sunglasses and a hat."

Behind her, Castle said, "They don't work," almost involuntarily.

She rolled with it, grinning at the darkness and hopefully at the speaking demon—spokesdemon?—within it. It was a disturbing grin. She'd worked on it. It didn't have fangs, but it looked like it should. "Hear that? Guess I'll just have to kill everyone that calls me that instead. Then either nobody will recognize me, or everyone will leave me alone in case I kill them too. Whadda you think?"

"Not welcome here, Hellsbane," it growled back. "Get lost."

Her jacket was already ruined, so Buffy took the opportunity to clean the blade of her knife off on the sleeve of the irreparably stained fabric. "Yeah. About that. Funny story."

Whatever it was, it wasn't amused. She could pull off the smile, but that growl was still beyond her.

"We're leaving. No problem. You guys haven't swept down here in ages. Last time I saw somewhere this messy, it was my sister's room that time she lost her favorite lipstick." A lie. Dawn's room had been slightly less chaotic, and had smelled substantially better. It had also been easier to get out of, and there had been slightly fewer edged weapons. "We're just gonna wander around until we find the way back to the surface. Might take us a while, though, and whatever gets in our way next isn't going to do any better."

"I bet we run out of demons before we run out of tunnels," Spike added. He didn't sound terribly unhappy about the prospect. "Maybe the last one will finish putting up 'way out' signs before we get to 'im."

The snarl sounded more and more like a vampire. "Traitor! You're not getting out of here!"

He'd been called that before and it didn't bother him much. "Hey, we can't all be good little boys and girls who play by the rules all the time."

Buffy laughed aloud as the 'spokesdemon' practically choked itself with rage. It—almost definitely he—didn't have a comeback for that.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Beckett said quietly, clearly worried that the new plan seemed to involve pissing off as many enemies as possible. Buffy glanced back over her shoulder to check on the detective and did not like what she saw. They needed to get the humans out of here and quickly, or they wouldn't get very far at all. It was just not their world.

To be fair, it wasn't hers either, but she spent a lot of time in it.

The demons still hadn't gotten close enough to show themselves in the light, which Buffy considered a good thing. Unless they had guns or bows—unlikely in tunnels, where you couldn't get a clean shot at anything—as long as they were out of reach she and her friends were safe. Still, she kept moving, pacing back and forth by a few steps in order to keep the mouth of each tunnel in her field of view. She resolved to call Willow the minute she got back to the surface and tell her just how useful her birthday gift had been. Well, maybe the minute after she got out of a shower and got some clean clothes on.

Buffy had almost forgotten Beckett's question. "Yeah, mostly," she replied absently. A moment later, she corrected herself. "Yes. I mean, yes. We know what we're doing."

The detective didn't seem very reassured. Castle, for reasons she couldn't understand, was paging through his phone's options, the flickering light only serving to highlight how wide and panicked his eyes were. Maybe he was looking for an app that might be useful, although she doubted he'd find one. Maybe it just made him feel better. Smartphone apps were about as human as it got.

The Slayer looked back towards where the demon pack leader probably was. "Or we could do it a different way," she proposed. "You lead us out of here, and we don't come back. Anyone leads us out of here, and we don't kill it, and we don't come back. Leave us down here, and we kill everything, and come back later just in case we missed anyone. That's a promise."

Her words had an immediate effect, and she could hear movement and a variety of mutters, snarls, and yelps from the various tunnels that ringed the abandoned subway station. They weren't quite loud enough for her to make out the majority vote.

"Here's another promise, Hellsbane," the pack leader cursed her. "You and your friends are not getting back up topside. We're gonna—"

He stopped midsentence.

"Someone disagrees," said Spike, listening intently. "Someone really disagrees, wants us gone."

All Buffy could hear were snarls, and she said so.

"Not English. Not even a human language. Haven't heard it in a while and my accent's gonna suck, but…"

He took a few paces towards the tunnel the pack leader had been speaking from, dropping into the same demon dialect. Or at least, she assumed it was the same one; Buffy could still only hear animal snarls.

She took the opportunity he'd given her to check on Beckett and Castle. "You two all right?" she asked, looking them over. Neither of them was seriously hurt. There might be bumps and bruises hidden by their clothes, but the blood smeared across Beckett's forehead didn't seem to be hers. It had probably been transferred from her hands when she'd wiped her long hair out of her eyes. Most of the other stains were sweat and filth from the tunnel hike. They were scared, though. They probably weren't even aware that they were standing so close together; it was kind of cute.

"This is not how I expected my day to go," said Beckett softly.

A joke. That was a good sign. If Beckett were family, Buffy would make some crack about Tuesdays, but the detective wouldn't understand it, so she didn't. Besides, it wasn't even a Tuesday, although you could make Tuesday jokes on other days.

"So is that, like, your name?" Castle wanted to know, and if it helped, why not? Buffy could probably physically haul him out of this underground maze if he freaked out completely and fainted or something, but she really didn't want to if she didn't have to. And she couldn't exactly contribute anything to the argument that Spike had gotten himself involved in, because she didn't understand a word of it. Hopefully he was talking at least one of the demons out there into getting them out of there. So she might as well talk to Castle.

"Not really. When I was the only Slayer out there, pretty much everything I fought called me that, because it only meant me. Now that there are lots of us it's not just my name anymore. I don't know who started calling me Hellsbane, but it's a lot better than some of the other things I get called. It's almost a compliment, I think. It's obviously caught on."

The writer almost smiled. "Dare I ask what else you get called?"

She smiled back, to encourage him. "Most of it's unprintable, and some of it, like that—" She jabbed a thumb at Spike, who was still talking to the demons, a couple of which had ventured out into the very edges of the illuminated space. "—I can't pronounce. One or two of the more intelligent demons, that don't try to kill me just on automatic 'cause I'm there, have gotten ridiculously creative. There were these two a couple months ago that kept calling me the Lady of the End of Days. Wherever that came from."

"You know about that one?" said Spike, distracted into English. He put out a hand towards the other demons and turned back towards her, keeping an eye on them just in case they decided to attack anyway. "I didn't know you knew about that."

"They wouldn't shut up about it," she replied calmly, and then continued in a more teasing tone, "And now that I'm thinking about it, if I find out that you are the one coming up with these names, I'm going to have to seriously reconsider whether you're still wrong or not."

"What makes you think it's me? And that's not funny. Maybe I won't get us out of here." He turned his back on her pointedly.

She had been joking. She wouldn't put it past him to go behind her back and start calling her vaguely flattering and definitely annoying nicknames, but she wasn't seriously reconsidering. He was still wrong, and at the same time, he was right, it wasn't funny. She must have been more stressed than she'd thought she was.

She was also definitely not going to explain that to Beckett and Castle. "It's an ongoing argument," she said, in response to their confused expressions.

"About what?" Castle was clearly utterly unable to take a hint. Beckett, she realized, probably could have told her that. The detective, who had understood that there wasn't much point asking, was using the short intermission to reload her gun with the ammunition she had left…just in case.

"Didn't I say? Then don't ask." They'd been having the same 'argument'—it wasn't really one—for over three years now, and she had family members who still hadn't figured out what it was about.

She'd turned to face the detectives both professional and amateur as she spoke, so the hand on her shoulder should have made her jump and, considering her training, violently attack whatever was so foolish as to sneak up on her. But she recognized Spike instinctively, and her only reaction was to look back at him and smile slightly in greeting and curiosity. Anyway, if anything unfamiliar—she didn't say dangerous, he was definitely dangerous—had gotten that close Beckett and Castle would have surely noticed.

"So do we fight our way out?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Probably. But most of them have cleared out. Anything hiding down here isn't looking for trouble. We quit following our guides and wander off the path, they'll probably go for us; we follow the rules we should be all right."

"I'm impressed," she said, half teasing. "I guess you're still wrong."

"What is he wrong about?" Castle just had to know, but Beckett was a little more focused.

"Does that mean we have a guide out of here?"

"Sort of. They're scared stupid of you, pet, so they'll only lead us out if you stay as far away from them as possible."

The latest plan of escape, as it turned out, was for their reluctant demon guides to lead the way, at a very safe distance from the next person in line. The line would be strung out to a degree that Buffy didn't like at all, making them very vulnerable to attack. Apparently the word was going out that a Slayer—and worse yet, the Hellsbane—was down in the subway tunnels and looking for trouble. Supposedly, most of the demons living down here would stay out of her way of their own accord, but she knew better than to rely on her reputation. After all, it was founded on things attacking her.

She didn't have a better idea, though. Wandering around in the abandoned subway tunnels at random could take forever at best and be fatal at worst. They needed to get Beckett and Castle back up to their world so they could do what they'd set out to do in the first place—catch the man who'd killed a friend and student of hers. That he'd also put them in quite a lot of danger—more than she'd admitted to the detectives—was just extra.

Assuming, of course, that they ever found him at all. Very difficult to do from a subway tunnel.

The party down in the tunnels would have been pleased to know that Ryan and Esposito were working on that. Unable to raise Beckett and Castle on their cell phones, and having learned that the patrol officers who had gone to track down the pair's department cruiser had found it unmoved, they had decided that there was only one way to find their missing comrades.

Evidently, Esposito had reasoned, Beckett and Castle had taken off in a hurry from somewhere they hadn't finished investigating. The proof of that was that they hadn't phoned in and civilians had brought in the evidence they'd gathered. So: they'd had a good reason to leave so quickly.

Probably, he concluded, they'd found some trace of Martin Bulis and had set off to find him as quickly as possible.

And, since the boxes Jessie and Santiago had delivered contained evidence and objects of interest from the house, the clues to where Bulis had gone were probably in those boxes.

Therefore, if they could follow the evidence in the boxes to find Martin Bulis, he and Ryan would also find Beckett and Castle.

It was an excellent and logical chain of assumptions and was almost completely wrong in every respect. He didn't know that, so Esposito and Ryan decided to work outward from that conclusion, and set to taking apart and analyzing the contents of the cardboard boxes.

Ryan wiped part of the murderboard clean and started making a list of the objects. "Empty pill bottle, prescription for tizanadine…" he wrote, and looked at the spelling doubtfully. In case he'd misspelled it, he added (moxie) next to the entry.

"Bits of pottery," Esposito added, unwrapping a paper towel full of broken ceramics. "Probably part of that other statue they've got a picture of up on the board."

Statue bits, Ryan copied. "What else?"

Esposito flipped through a stack of pictures. "Lots of postcards. From all over the country. It doesn't look like he has a favorite."

"Shame. Although I hope he hasn't left for another city."

"We put the APB out almost before he knew he was a suspect, bro. If he tries to get on a plane or a bus or the subway, we'll know about it."

"Yeah, maybe."

"And Beckett and Castle went after him, remember? If he was out of town they'd have called in before going that far."

"Oh right. What else?"

"Ah…a hairbrush."

"A what?"

Esposito held up, indeed, a hairbrush. "Someone's been watching too much TV," he sighed. Waving the hair-bedecked brush in Ryan's general direction, the detective explained, "DNA evidence."

"Gotcha." Ryan wrote hairbrush on the board anyway.

Next up were "Packaging for lengths of surgical tubing. Much more interesting. Probably dragged out of the trash 'cause it has dried spaghetti sauce on it, but that'll wipe off. And parking tickets. Lots of parking tickets," Esposito amended, "all stamped paid."

With perfect timing, the phone rang. Seeing that his partner had his hands still buried in one of the cardboard boxes, Ryan stuck the cap back on the blue marker—Beckett got very upset when her guys let her dry-erase markers dry out—and answered it. He listened to the voice on the other end of the line for nearly thirty seconds, muttering "Uh huh," now and again, then hung up.

"Bulis' car just turned up in one of La Guardia's long-term parking lots," he said darkly, referring to one of New York's major airports. "Security cameras showed the car driving through ticket purchase at 4:39 AM, two nights ago. Paid in cash, so it didn't trigger an alert."

Esposito swore. "But he didn't try to buy a plane ticket?"

"That's the thing. If he got on a plane, he would have had to show some sort of ID."

"Could have a fake."

"Nah," Ryan decided, shaking his head. "He's not that prepared. Those friends of our vic who were here the other day? They kept saying that the police weren't meant to get involved. Anything he set up to fool an investigation is geared towards them, not us."

"Okay. So he's playing tricks."

"Airport's a bluff." Ryan was sure of it. "There are too many hoops to jump through, too many checkpoints. And like you said, Beckett would have checked in if they weren't going to stay in the city limits."

They stared at the murderboard for a minute. Esposito fidgeted with the badge he wore on a chain around his neck. Ryan picked up the dry erase marker again and capped and uncapped it rapidly, making a clicking noise.

"Tickets," said Esposito right after the minute was up.

"What?"

"Tickets," he insisted again. "They were all for illegal parking and I think—" He picked up the sheaf of official paper and looked again. "—they were all in the same area. Over months."

Ryan caught his drift immediately. "What's in that area that he kept going back even though he had to pay for it?"

Pulling the area up on a computer map of Manhattan, Esposito quickly plotted the various addresses where Martin Bulis had gotten parking tickets over the past year. "Not much," he said as he clicked keys. It consisted of several interconnected city blocks that had once contained storefronts. They'd all been closed down and foreclosed on by the city, which had never rebuilt or managed to sell them to any investors.

His partner peered over his shoulder, seeing something quite different. "You mean, not many people," Ryan corrected. "You know, if I was going to hide out in New York, I'd go somewhere like there. And anyway, we know this guy has a thing about abandoned buildings. If you can hide a dead body in them—"

"Why not a live one?" Esposito completed. "Good thinking, bro. Let's go check it out."

It was past midnight when Esposito and Ryan pulled up to the empty string of storefronts. It was also beginning to rain, but in a halfhearted way that suggested it wasn't going to last for very long and had only started to infuriate the people leaving clubs that hadn't packed umbrellas. Since he had made a crucial connection, Ryan had, for once, gotten to drive, although Esposito had joked that if this lead fizzled out, he would be driving back to the Precinct and probably everywhere else for the rest of the month.

A couple of people were wandering down the street, but nobody seemed to be going into the derelict shops. One of the streetlights had burnt out, and the two that remained didn't do a sufficient job of lighting the area.

Ryan pulled out his flashlight and waved it questioningly; Esposito shook his head no. If Bulis was holed up here, it would be better to sneak up on him and not give him a chance to run away again. He might not be so considerate as to go somewhere where he had a history next time.

The first couple of doors they tried weren't locked, but the hinges screeched with rust when they tried to pull them open. That in itself told the two detectives that no one had entered recently, let alone on the regular basis that Martin Bulis had been frequenting the area.

The fourth door opened more readily, but after a few minutes of searching they determined that there was no one inside. There wasn't even a homeless man or woman who might be using the space as a convenient shelter from the rain. Maybe, worried Ryan, anyone inside had heard him and Esposito coming and cleared out. That didn't bode well for their chances of finding Bulis.

On their fifth search, they noticed the difference almost immediately. The air was a little fresher, as if someone had been moving through it, and the dust layers on floors and broken shelves were thinner. There were even some markings in the dirt that showed black through the greyer surfaces all around.

It wasn't a very big shop, with one open space where whatever it had sold would have been offered and a countertop that separated part of the room from the main area. Behind that countertop, a door stood ajar. As they approached, a faint light flickered, as if someone had switched a camping lantern on.

Trading looks, the two detectives approached as quietly as possible, picking up and setting down their feet carefully in order not to betray their presence by stepping on the wrong patch of floor. They coordinated their movements by eye contact, gesture, and familiarity, and rounded the buying counter without incident. Placing their backs against the wall on either side of the door, they silently consulted over their next course of action. A quick exchange of facial expressions later, the partners had decided to wait and listen.

There was definitely someone in there. They could hear the rustle of something that sounded like a potato chip bag, and the light changed slightly as someone walked in front of it. From the footsteps, it was only one person.

As they waited, a cell phone rang, surprising everyone. Ryan and Esposito managed to stay still and silent, but the resident of the back room wasn't so cautious.

"Damn it!" he swore. "Stop calling me, Kevin! Leave me alone!"

Kevin's name had been on the murderboard as a friend of Martin Bulis. Ryan and Esposito grinned at each other. If they hadn't been hiding on either side of a door in the dark, they would have traded fist-bumps of success.

The jangling ring tone petered out, and the man in the back room heaved an audibly unhappy sigh. As he let it out, the two detectives set out to make his day even worse.

"Martin Bulis?" hailed Esposito rhetorically as he shouldered the door open and strode in confidently. "NYPD." Ryan followed him in, blocking the doorway entirely.

Sitting on a camping mattress against the far wall, Martin Bulis tried to jump to his feet, shedding potato chip packets and spilling over a soda bottle, which glugged its contents out onto the floor, wiping out some old chalk marks. He no longer looked much like the DMV photograph that had been stuck to the murderboard back at the 12th; his carefully trimmed goatee-and-mustache combo clearly had not been groomed in a while and his clothes were wrinkled and worn. Most of all, he looked scared.

"W-w-w-wh-wh?" Martin got out, shaken, but Esposito was having none of that.

"Martin Bulis," he deadpanned, "you are under arrest for the murder of Stephanie Amador. You have the right to remain silent…"

As his partner read Martin his rights, Ryan allowed himself a flare of triumph before realizing that they'd only achieved one of their goals in searching this place. They'd found Martin Bulis, their prime suspect for their murder case…but where were Castle and Beckett? They'd been gone far too long. If they hadn't followed the leads he and Esposito had to Martin, where had they gone? And if their partners still had to mount a rescue, where were they going to even begin?

PSA of the Day: JOSS WHEDON HAS DONE IT AGAIN! The Avengers rocks socks, then runs away laughing and never gives them back. Go see it, and then go see it again like I'm going to. It's fantastic. It's epic and hilarious and awesome. It's not The Dark Knight, but then Dark Knight transcended superhero movie and moved into some sort of 'art' category. If you judge all superhero films by it you'll never see another one (except, hopefully, The Dark Knight Rises). But Avengers is LOADS of fun and distinctly Whedon. There's this one scene…but no. You're a "Buffy" fan (or you wouldn't be reading this). You'll spot it. And probably go, "JOSS!" Aloud…yes, yes, I did, why do you ask?

PSA of the Other Day: Repairs to the review button proceed ahead of schedule and tests have confirmed its functionality.