Who Are You?

By

UCSBdad

Disclaimer: Do you own Castle? I don't. Rating: M Time: The future

Chapter Seven

Kate pulled her Harley up in front of the Roll Bar and carefully scanned the bikes parked outside. None of them were the rentals Vince Peake and his friends rode. Kate had changed into skin tight leather pants, a tight black tee and a black leather, hip length jacket. She removed her helmet and shook her hair out.

Alexis also got off the back of Kate's Harley and took her own, borrowed, helmet off. "I don't see their bikes."

Kate nodded. "It's a quarter to one. They show up between one and two. Then again, maybe they decided to have lunch someplace else." She glanced back at her step-daughter. "Ready?"

"This isn't like the place I went to, is it?" Alexis asked, somewhat unsure.

"I talked to a couple of cops who ride. They say the clientele here runs to stockbrokers and lawyers. In their own way they can be as dangerous as outlaw bikers, but I'll protect you." She grinned at Alexis.

The redhead grinned back. "Kate Beckett against a gang of ruthless stockbrokers? Sounds like an action film."

"I'll let Schwarzenegger do that one." Kate smiled back.

The two walked into the bar. Once inside, they stopped and looked around. The place was jammed with the lunchtime crowd. Peake and his friends, if they were here, could be anyplace in the packed bar.

"It's awfully busy for a bar at lunchtime, isn't it?" Alexis asked.

"The cops I talked to say they have good food here. I think they were right." Kate and Alexis pushed their way through the crowd. Kate suddenly stopped. Someone was squeezing her ass and squeezing it hard. She whirled around ready to throw a punch, but stopped when she saw who it was. "Josh." She said coldly. "Get your damned hand off of me or I'll take it off."

Josh just laughed. "I can remember when you liked that." From his breath, Josh had been drinking.

"And I remember that I'm married now. I suggest you do the same." She slapped his hand away.

That brought a laugh from several men behind Josh. Since they were dressed in surgical scrubs as Josh was, she assumed they were friends of his. "She doesn't seem to be as friendly as you said she was, Josh." One called out, to more laughs.

Josh's face turned red. "Yeah. I heard you finally trapped your millionaire. How'd you manage it? Get knocked up and force him to marry you? Was it his?"

Kate took a step forward and pushed her face into Josh's. "You want to play nasty? Would you like to see how nasty I can be?"

Josh laughed. "Baby, I used to fuck you. Not that you were that good in the sack." Suddenly his eyes lit on Alexis. "I know you. You're the writer's little slut. Maybe you'd like to see what a good time with a real man is like?"

"Josh, I'm warning you."

"Hey! I'm, just talking to the redhead here." He stepped towards Alexis and put his arm around her waist. "There's no law that says I can't talk." He turned back to Alexis. "What about it, Sweetcheeks?"

"Go away." Alexis said shakily.

"Who's going to make me?"

A voice from behind Kate answered. "Who knows? Someone might."

Trying to keep an eye on Josh, Kate turned slightly. From Alexis' description, the five newcomers must be Vince Peake and his friends. All were dressed much the same. Boots, tight jeans, black tees, leather jackets, sunglasses and helmets. Peake stood there. Smiling and shifting his helmet from hand to hand. In a bar full of would be tough guys and faux outlaw bikers, these five men stood out. They were dangerous. Big, muscular, tough and dangerous.

Josh laughed and looked back at his friends. "You, sonny? Don't make me laugh." Josh was probably too drunk to realize he was getting himself into trouble.

Peake shrugged. "I'd rather make you cry. Like a little girl. Like a whiny little bitch. Maybe you could be my bitch. You look like the type. You want to be my bitch, don't you?"

Josh's face turned red again and he stepped towards Peake, throwing an overhand punch at him. Peake batted Josh's fist away with his helmet, stepped forward and drove his fist into Josh's stomach. Josh collapsed, sitting on his butt. Then he vomited all over his front. "You prick!" He managed to gasp.

Josh's friends started to move towards Peake. Kate found herself pushed aside as Peake's four friends got in front of her and Alexis. She heard a metallic click from her right. Not a gun. She thought. Probably a switchblade. She reached for her badge and tried to push her way between Peake and his friends and Josh and his.

"What the hell is going on here?" Bellowed a voice. The newcomer was no more than six feet tall, but massively built, with arms like tree trunks. His long grey hair was in a pigtail and his tee shirt proclaimed him to have been with the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam. "What's the beef here, damn it! Tell me!"

Josh pointed up to Peake. "He hit me! She's a cop! She should arrest him." Josh tried to get up, but slipped in his own vomit and fell back on his ass. By this time everyone was watching and everyone laughed.

The bartender, or whoever he was, turned to the back bar. "Sissy! Check the damned security cameras. Check 'em all."

Sissy turned out to be tall and willowy, dressed in hooker heels, painted on black spandex pants with a midriff baring cropped top that barely contained her obviously fake D cup boobs. Her skin was white, as if she never saw the sun and her hair was long and black as night. A slash of red lipstick provided the only color on her face. She wiggled over to the bar and got behind it. She fiddled with something behind the bar, then stuck her head up. "We got the fight on four cameras, Pauly. Mr. Barf on the floor there definitely threw the first punch. The other guy blocked the punch and hit him exactly once." Her voice was straight out of Brooklyn.

Pauly glared down at Josh. "I got too many guys who think there tough in here as it is. You and your friends are all 86'd. You ever come in here again, I'll toss your asses out. Way out. And I won't bother opening the damned door first. Now get out!"

Josh picked himself up, and left with his friends, making eye contact with no one.

"What about you, Slick. You gonna cause any trouble?" Pauly turned to Peake.

Peake looked surprised. "Us? Do we look like troublemakers to you?"

Pauly nodded. "Like you got a big neon sign around your neck saying trouble. Big trouble."

Peake shook his head vigorously. "Not us, Pauly. We don't want to meet your accountant."

Pauly gave all and sundry a glare, then looked at Kate. "You a cop?"

Kate showed her badge. "Detective Kate Beckett. This is my step-daughter. We want to talk to Mr. Peake here. But it's personal, not police related."

Pauly gave Peake a hard look, then shook his head and walked back behind the bar. The place gradually got back to normal.

"Alexis and I would like to talk to you."

"Alone." Alexis added.

Peake shrugged, then turned to his friends. "I'll be over in the booth in the corner. I doubt this will take long."

As he passed the bar, Peake called out, "Sissy. Three beers in the corner."

"I'm on duty."

"I really don't want any." Alexis added.

"Just my three beers, then, Sissy."

Kate shook her head, but sat down with Peake and Alexis.

"What was that about his accountant?" Alexis asked, before Kate could say anything.

Peake accepted three beers from Sissy, who gave both Kate and Alexis a look.

"Kimo is Pauly's accountant. He's your basic three hundred pound Samoan. If he'd been a step faster, he'd be in the NFL, but he wasn't, so he's an accountant. Likes to arm wrestle a bit, I hear. And other things." Peake quickly changed the subject. "Why are you here, Castle?"

Kate replied. "You keep hanging around with those four and you'll get in trouble. Like Pauly said, it's like you have a neon sign around your neck. I can help you, if you'll let me."

Peake laughed and drank some beer. "Trouble? Been in trouble. If I keep hanging around with them, I'll probably end up dead."

"Is that what you want? I'm a homicide cop. I've seen the dead. I see them every day. That is not what you want."

"You know what I want, Detective? I want to do what I want to do, okay?" He turned to Alexis. "Why is it you can't stay out of my personal life all of a sudden, Castle?"

Kate had a momentary flashback to saying the something similar to another Castle.

"Vince, we were never good friends in school…"

"We hardly knew each other is a little more accurate."

Alexis took a deep breath. This was not going as she had planned. "Vince, you're smart. You got accepted at Rutgers."

"And didn't go." He quickly added.

Alexis gestured to Vince's four friends who were all in another booth on the other side of the bar, but closely watching Vince past the customers in the crowded bar. "You're not like them. You're not."

Vince laughed. "I sure as hell look a lot like them. I act like them, too. Actually, I'm more like them than I am like you."

Kate wasn't happy about how this was going either. "Look, we're trying to help you, but we can't help you if you don't want to be helped. This is something I know from personal experience. If you really don't want our help, tell us and we'll just leave."

Alexis looked at Kate in shock, then decided that perhaps the detective was right. For a moment both women thought that Vince was going to tell them to go ahead and leave. Instead, he smiled.

"Maybe it would make more sense to you if I told you my long, sad life story?"

Both women nodded.

"I was born at a very young age…" Peake began. "No, wrong place to start." He took a sip of beer, collecting his thoughts. "My parents divorced when I was twelve and my genius sister was sixteen. It was an amicable divorce, as divorces go, I suppose. There was no shouting or throwing things, more like a prolonged strained silence. Anyway, my dad changed jobs. He moved to Palo Alto, California and went to work for BFF. That's Benton, Feinstein and Feng, a big time venture capitalist firm. They've financed half of the Silicon Valley. That was cool. I got to go visit him for the summer each year, lived in the Bay Area, saw games, hung around the Stanford campus, got to see the coolest video games before anyone else."

He took another sip of beer. "Like I said, it was an amicable divorce. My dad managed Mom's financials for her, and my sister's and my college funds. And then one day, just before I graduated from Marlowe Prep, everything turned to shit. Dad had some financial problems and "borrowed" from his company. He had more problems and borrowed more. To make a long story short, one day he transferred one hundred and sixty five million dollars of his clients' money to some off shore accounts and headed for Brazil. He took Mom's money and our college funds with him."

"We were basically broke. We moved in with Mom's parents. Grandpa is a retired insurance exec. Well off, but no rich like we had been. All the grandparents ever did was bitch about how they knew dad was a bum and why did mom ever marry him? Mom cried about being broke. All she could talk about was what she used to have. My sister bitched constantly about how she'd had to give up Yale Law School and get a job. I bitched mostly about how everyone else was bitching. No one paid any attention to me. The perils of being a younger child, I suppose."

Vince finished one beer and started on the next. He laughed. "I called my dad up a couple of times in Brazil. Each time I got some different Brazilin chick who said Dad couldn't come to the phone. I could hear the sound of a party in the background."

Alexis broke in. "Just because you got a bad break, doesn't mean you can't change things. We can help you."

Peake laughed again and finished his second beer. "It's been a lot of fun teasing you two, but I'm afraid that I eventually decided to do something stupid and dangerous. Really stupid and really dangerous." His hand dropped under the table and Kate's hand went to her gun butt. However, Peake's hand came up with just his wallet. He took out a plastic card and handed it to Kate.

"What's this?"

"It's called a Common Access Card. It identifies me as Vincent M. Peake, Sergeant, US Army." He took out a piece of folded up paper and unfolded it. "These are my orders, indicating I'm a 68 Whiskey Victor, a combat medic Airborne Ranger, First Ranger Battalion, Hunter Army Air Field, Georgia."

Peake pointed across the bar to his friends. "Every Ranger Battalion has a weapons company and every weapons company has a sniper section, three two man sniper teams. I'm the sniper section's medic. That's two thirds of my battalion's sniper section over there. Would you like to meet them? I can guarantee they're as dangerous as anyone you're likely to meet, Detective."

Kate and Alexis exchanged glances, then Alexis nodded. "I'd like to meet your friends."

Peake motioned to his friends to come over. When they were seated, he introduced them. "Francis Xavier Cao." He pointed to the Asian. "His family runs a shrimp boat out of Galveston. Since he's from Texas and his name is Cao, we call him Cowboy."

"Next is another Texan." He pointed to the heavily built Hispanic. "Alfonso Bedoya. Born in El Paso, but lived most of his life across the river in Juarez. His family moved back across the border when things got too weird in Juarez. He loves the old spaghetti westerns, especially The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We tried calling him Feo, which is Spanish for ugly, but he didn't like that, so we settled on Tuco."

The young man smiled at them.

"Next is Jaime Almagro, born in East LA, but got out while he was young. He's skinny, so he's called Flaco, skinny in Spanish. Flaco figures being a soldier is safer than living in East LA and from what he hears about his cousins still there, he's right."

"Last and least," Peake pointed to the stocky African American. "Is John Boyle, J. Boy. His dad is a Baptist preacher in Chicago. All the stereotypes you've heard about preacher's kids being completely out of control are true. J Boy won't tell us the truth, but rumor is that his dad kicked him out of Chicago all together."

J Boy just smiled.

"What do they call you?" Alexis asked.

"What soldiers have been calling medics since forever. I'm Doc."

"You could be a pre-med when you get out. I'm pre-med. I'm sure you could do it."

"Yeah, if I hadn't reenlisted for six years." Seeing Alexis's disappointment, Vince continued." Look, I like what I do. In A-Stan, I'm usually the first doctor of any sort anyone's seen since the Russians left."

"Doctors Without Borders does that. And a lot of other NGOs." Alexis said, hoping Vince didn't know about Josh.

"Yeah." J Boy said. "I had to bag up some NGOs once after the Jihadis came through."

"We go places no NGOs go, Alexis. And that's cool. It's why I like it."

"Why were you so disinterested in telling Alexis all this at first?" Kate asked.

He laughed. "She's too easy to tease. When we were in high school, I used to think she got up every morning, looked in the mirror and said, "Everything I do today will be something that will get me into the college I want." I was never like that."

"There's nothing wrong with working for the future you want. You didn't have to lie to me." Alexis said unhappily.

Vince shrugged. "This isn't my first trip back to New York. I got yelled at enough by my family the first time to put me off seeing them for a while. They felt I wasn't helping the family. And it isn't the first time I've run into Marlowe alums. Before I went to the 'Stan this time I ran into a bunch of them. Carly West, Dave Moore, Pete Ross, Crissy Wentworth, and that whole crew from Marlowe. I was the only one not going to an expensive, private college. Everyone thought it was a shame I couldn't have done better like a Marlowe grad should." Peake took another gulp of beer. "Fuck 'em."

Vince suddenly laughed. "Do you remember Donna Wisnewski? She's quite the little anti-war activist these days. Among other things, she asked me how I could kill innocent women and children."

Alexis noticed the other soldiers smiling, as if expecting a punch line. "What did you tell her?"

"I gave her the standard answer. To kill innocent women and children, you shoot lower and don't lead them as much."

"That's horrible." Alexis said.

Vince shrugged. "Military humor tends to be kind of dark. Really dark."

"Much like police humor." Kate added. "Tell me. Why were you at El Guerrero? It doesn't seem like your kind of place. Alexis went looking for you there and…had problems."

"Castle! What the hell were you doing there?" Vince demanded.

"Looking for you." Alexis said with a glare.

Vince looked back at Kate. "A buddy of ours lost both legs when his chopper went down. He lives around there. But, he's married now, in college, and still seeing the doctors. Not much time to hang with his old buddies. El Guerrero was close so we went to have a beer or two. Not our kind of place."

"So, what are Kay Bills?" Kate asked.

"Kaibiles." Tuco said, giving it a Spanish pronunciation.

"A Spanish word for Ranger." Vince explained.

Flaco tapped his watch. "About time."

Peake nodded. "We have to be off. Got things to see and people to do."

"Wait!" Alexis said. "Take my phone number. Call me, please."

Vince smiled. "Do you want me to take you back to El Guerrero?"

"Do you want to take me back there?" She shot back.

Vince and his friends laughed.

"Give her your number, Doc. If she went looking for you at El Guerrero, she's a Ranger kind of woman." Cowboy said.

Vince shook his head. "She's beautiful all right, but she isn't deaf, dumb and blind, and doesn't own a liquor store. So she's not the perfect Ranger's woman."

"My Dad owns a bar." Alexis said, blushing at being called beautiful.

"Forget, Doc. I'm in love with you." Cowboy said quickly.

They exchanged numbers, and the men got up to leave.

"Vince, be careful, okay?"

J Boy smiled at her. "Don't worry about us. Lo, though we shall walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we shall fear no evil. For we are the evilest motherfuckers in the whole valley." Vince and his friends laughed and were gone. Kate and Alexis got up as well.

Kate sat on her Harley with Alexis on the back and looked at the five men leaving. "I'm not sure that will work out." She said to Alexis.

"Like you and Dad didn't?"

"Okay, I deserved that. But there are a lot more problems in front of you than here were for Rick and me."

She could feel Alexis shrug. "So maybe he'll just be some guy I know. Vince, actually all of them, are a lot different than anyone I've ever met. They're interesting. And he's a medic."

Kate said, "Your dad will be thrilled." But that was lost when she started her Harley.