Ghosts That Haunt—40
"What did you tell your sister, Chuck?"
Mariah had rarely been this angry in her life, but she was damned if she was going to tolerate what Ellie had told her that morning "out of concern" for her and for Victoria. Any sympathy she had felt for Chuck because of what he'd had to do to Manoosh evaporated when she finally realized what Ellie thought. As soon as the other woman left, she retrieved her car keys and Victoria's diaper bag before she dumped their daughter with John and sought out Ellie's brother.
Now that she stood before him on the Buy More sales floor, Chuck looked completely confused, and Mariah's temper ratcheted up another tick. "Mariah, I—"
She could tell he had no idea what she was talking about. "Ellie came to see me an hour ago," Mariah ground out. "She wanted me to know that there's an Al-Anon group that meets at the Methodist church on Wednesdays and that she would go with me if I felt like I needed support." She stepped closer and glared up at him. "So I ask again, Chuck. What did you tell your sister?"
"Mariah, we had to cover for Awesome."
It was Mariah's turn to be confused. Ellie had come to her with a story full of vagaries about John and problems and about how difficult it could be to see such problems when one lived too close to it, how soldiers, especially, were prone to issues that only made things worse. Mariah thought the woman had finally snapped, especially when she rushed on the way she did, her face tinged with pink, and then the penny had dropped for Mariah when she said, "Devon did what he could, but you need to help John to make sure something like this doesn't happen again." Well, that and having pamphlets on alcoholism shoved into her hands along with the offer to go with her to Al-Anon meetings. Now she knew why Ellie had spent so much of that shopping trip asking about John's health: she believed Mariah had married an alcoholic, and given what she had thought after the night of that ball John had dragged her to, the other woman probably believed her husband was an abusive drunk.
That didn't entirely explain why Ellie thought Chuck and Devon had been "helping" John, but Mariah was pretty sure John hadn't willingly let her believe he was an alcoholic. That left Chuck or Devon to explain, and since Devon Woodcomb was on duty, Mariah decided to hunt down Chuck and find out exactly what was going on.
"Cover how, Chuck?" she snapped out. He did his imitation of a landed fish, his mouth opening and closing, his eyes wide as he tried to think.
He dropped his voice. "You know about Sydney?" She nodded curtly. John had told her about Devon being mistaken for Chuck by the Ring and how they had to use him over Chuck's objections. She was also aware he shouldn't have told her, and while they had agreed before they married that she was officially out of the business, in this case, John figured it would be in all their interests if Mariah knew so that if she saw something, if someone approached Ellie and none of the others were around, she might be able to do something. "We had to cover why Devon was gone all night when she had him snatched. He told a lie Ellie would never buy, so I kind of told her Casey had been arrested in Griffith Park for being drunk and disorderly."
"Is that all?" she asked, furious. Somehow she doubted Ellie would have bothered to say some of the things she had if that were all. When he said nothing, she skewered him with the hardest, angriest stare she could aim at him.
"Devon might have said something about him exposing himself," Chuck said meekly.
She reached up and took him painfully by the ear, dragged him outside where they were unlikely to be overheard. "He's my husband, Chuck!" she ground out. "Ellie's my friend. What the hell do you think your sister is going to do the first time we socialize and John takes a drink?"
Chuck's shoulders hunched defensively. "I didn't think—"
"No, Chuck, you didn't. Is this how you repay John? Me?" She growled in frustration, and Chuck looked at her oddly. "What do you think she's going to do the next time I have to leave Victoria with him?"
"Look, Mariah," he began, but she was too angry to listen.
"No, you look, Chuck," she told him. "You make this right. I don't care how you do it, but you do it. Not only that, but you have to tell John."
He went pale then. "Couldn't you tell him?" She crossed her arms and glared at him. He sighed. "No, I guess not." He frowned. "Mariah, I don't think you understand what's at stake here."
She narrowed her eyes. She knew what was at stake, she knew all too well, and she knew it wasn't all to do with what Ellie now thought about John. She just didn't care beyond what he and Devon had done to her husband and, by extension, to her and to their daughter. "You defamed my husband, Chuck. You may have irreparably damaged him with your sister. John has put his life at stake for you again and again and again, and you just repaid him by doing the one thing that would hurt him the most—you stained his reputation. You fix this—because he isn't the only one harmed by it."
"Look, I'm sorry, but—"
She cut him off. "No. You fix this, or I'll see you live to regret it—deeply, painfully regret it." Mariah could tell he was going to object, so she played what she admitted was the petty revenge card. "I would really hate for Ellie to learn that it was you—or maybe her husband—who got caught in Griffith Park without his pants," she said with a quiet viciousness.
He looked shocked. "You wouldn't."
"Don't try me, Chuck," she warned, and then she baited the hook with a very plausible possibility. "I have the contacts to produce police reports to prove it, too. I dare say I could produce photographic evidence as well."
The landed fish look was back.
"Fix it." She gave him a hard stare and then turned and stalked away.
Walker let her in, and she found John in Castle, cleaning weapons while his daughter slept in her seat on the table next to where he had disassembled an assault rifle. He looked up, set it and the cleaning rod down, and asked, "Get what you needed done?"
Mariah didn't answer, checked to see Victoria was still asleep, and then leaned in and kissed her husband. "Hopefully."
He raised his brows. "Mind telling me what it had to do with Bartowski?"
She wasn't deceived by his deceptively calm look, and she'd noticed the Buy More surveillance was on the screens at the foot of the table when she came down the stairs. It was, as she had long ago learned, all in the eyes, and John's currently held easily read suspicion. "Chuck will tell you—and if he doesn't, I'll be going rogue."
John slipped his arms around her and pulled her between his knees. She rested her hands on his shoulders before bending down to kiss him again. "I'd hate to have to kill my wife for trying to eliminate the moron," he said.
"It won't be for trying," she promised. "It'll be because I did it." He kissed her this time.
"You do remember the part about my assignment being to protect him, right?"
She let him see her anger. "I think when you find out what he's done, you'll look the other way when I kill him—assuming you don't just kill him yourself."
His expression went concerned. "Riah, I think you'd better tell me what's going on."
"No, John, I think you need to hear it from Chuck." She kissed him one more time and then shouldered Victoria's diaper bag and picked up her carrier seat. John stood, took it from her, and walked her out. Walker was polishing the counter when they entered the storefront. She raised her brows at them, but said nothing.
John secured Victoria in the back seat of Mariah's Subaru and then eyed her. "You sure you don't want to tell me first?"
She smiled, but it wasn't a pretty smile. "No, but when you decide to kill him, I want to watch."
-X-
Casey waited for Bartowski to spill whatever it was that had pissed Riah off. After a couple of days, he cornered the kid and said in the kind of soft, tight voice that made Bartowski practically piss himself, "What did you do to make my wife want to kill you?"
Bartowski looked like a stick of chalk. Casey wondered if the kid had even seen real sticks of chalk as he glared him into submission. He grumbled silently about the wimpy liberals who had made them take blackboards and chalk out of classrooms because kids were allergic to goddamn everything these days (probably because they lived in sanitized worlds slathered in antibacterial cleansers). He narrowed his eyes as the kid's color ran quickly to the other extreme, and Bartowski obviously sought some way to get out of this conversation.
It tumbled out of the kid, and Casey amped up the glare, let him babble. When Bartowski finally ran out of words, he took a few minutes to find his own.
He understood completely Riah's fury, felt it himself, mostly because he was going to have to disappoint her. It had become obvious Ellie was suspicious since she had suddenly taken to looking at him like he might at any moment take it into his head to rape and pillage, and it was obvious that exploding even this myth for her might bring down the rest of the lies she'd been told for her own protection. It might have been possible to correct her erroneous belief before Woodcomb pulled the obedience bullshit on his own wife, but now Casey was just going to have to live with Ellie believing him a deviant.
That didn't mean he couldn't take his own frustrations out on Bartowski.
"Riah's going to have to get in line," he said on a low, rough growl. He got some satisfaction from watching the kid blanch. "I get to kill you first."
Bartowski ran. He zipped around Casey—who let him—and took off as fast as he could go. Casey gave him a fair head start then went after him. He didn't even appreciably elevate his heart rate before he slammed the kid against the wall of the Buy More's hallway.
He couldn't kill him, of course, not unless he wanted to face treason charges, but he could make Bartowski squirm. He fully intended to make the kid do exactly that. After all, if he and Riah were going to have to put up with letting Ellie think what she did, her little brother could simply suffer right along with them.
"You may have mastered telling some kinds of lies, Bartowski, but you'd damned well better master some that don't humiliate my wife."
"It wasn't my lie!" the kid yelped. Casey wrapped his hands around Bartowski's throat, refused to be affected by Chuck's wild-eyed stare. "Devon! It was Awesome!"
Casey knew he didn't have to say a word, knew the kid would crack faster if he stayed silent because the kid couldn't take an angry, silent grown up staring him down. He just had to fill that silence, and Casey just had to wait for it to start. Still, he leaned in, growled in the kid's ear, "Woodcomb might have started it, Bartowski, but you finished it, and my wife is paying the price." He squeezed, not enough to leave bruises or kill the kid but enough to make him think he might. "Teach Woodcomb to lie, or I'll let Riah kill you the next time you do something this stupid."
"If you let her kill me—"
"Your body will never be found." Casey gave a connoisseur's slow inhale. "My wife is very well trained, Bartowski. I've seen her work. Besides, I'll buy her enough time to dispose of your skinny carcass so that no one ever knows what really happened to you." He reinforced the lie with a good, hard stare, one that worked on overgrown kids even if it didn't work on infants. "Find a way to keep Ellie from flipping out when I watch my daughter."
He didn't wait for an answer, simply released Bartowski and walked away.
To his amusement, Bartowski tried to buy his good graces by forwarding a picture Emma had sent him at Christmas. Casey looked at the image of him kissing the hell out of his wife on the church steps Christmas Eve and considered cutting the kid a little slack. Then again, that picture was vivid evidence of why fucking with his marriage was a very, very bad idea.
Meanwhile, Casey's wife was mad as hell that they wouldn't be setting the record straight, and he was once more subjected to the silent treatment. Sometimes he wished she was the type to simply blow, the type who yelled and screamed—threw things, even—so they could just get it over with. She did that sometimes, but when she felt especially hurt, she shut down for a while, did a sort of passive-aggressive thing that made him want to break things before she was finally over it.
It was the waiting for her to get over it that always got to him, especially this time when he agreed with her in principle but knew they would just have to live with it.
On the other hand, he thought with a smile as he took pleasure in being Bartowski's cock-block with the new girl yet again, it had paid some very nice benefits when Riah finally got over her mad this time.
As far as Ellie Woodcomb was concerned, his wife took him to twelve-step meetings each Thursday night to deal with his problem. Either Ellie or Grimes kept Victoria for them, and Riah and Casey enjoyed several hours alone in one of Beverly Hills' more famous hotels—no interruptions from their daughter, no national security emergencies so far. It was like karma made the bad guys lay off so he could get laid without any distractions.
One of those nights when Riah was stretched out naked on top of him, he ran a hand over her bare skin and pointed out, "This is weirdly like having an affair."
Riah's smile was broad, and her eyes held a hint of mischief. "As long as you're having it with me, I don't mind."
He ran his hand down to her bottom, let his other hand join it, and squeezed. She kissed him, and he told her, "Well, as long as my wife doesn't find out . . . ."
"Mmm," she said as he rolled her over and began to nibble his way down her body, "I think you should worry more about my husband finding out."
"Yeah?" he asked against the slope of her breast.
"He's a gun-nut," she told him, and he licked her nipple, made her moan, and wondered if that characterization should piss him off since he was not a nut. Enthusiast, maybe. But nut? No. Then again, he thought as he kissed her other breast, he was enthusiastic about his wife's body, too, and he was definitely nuts about her. "He also has a short temper," she added on a gasp that made him grin against her skin.
"He should meet my wife," he said against her stomach.
When he looked up, she had lifted her head and cocked a brow. Then she grinned. "Let me guess. She has a short temper, too?"
He nibbled along her hipbone. "She's also a damned good shot," he told her. "They might have some things in common." Then he opened his mouth over her and applied himself to making sure she didn't have anything else to say.
Neither of them talked for a good long time.
Casey was kept fairly busy other than those Thursday nights. He'd explained to Beckman about the lie Bartowski and Woodcomb had told Ellie, and she agreed that it was necessary to allay Ellie's suspicions, so she allowed him to be out of pocket for those hours he'd begun to look forward to each week. It was rare that he had his wife not only entirely to himself but without the likelihood they would be interrupted.
He still had his suspicions about Shaw, though, and those he kept to himself for the most part. Occasionally he and Walker spoke of their individual discoveries, and Casey waited. Shaw was playing a not-so subtle game of divide and conquer, but Casey wasn't sure what the real endgame was—splitting up the team, cutting Casey and Walker out of the Intersect project so Shaw could move up the CIA food chain, or getting Walker. There was an endgame, Casey knew, but this would be easier to negotiate if he had a clue what it was. Shaw, so far, was playing his cards close enough to his chest to make it difficult to get a handle on.
Shaw was, strangely, a showoff. It wasn't so much that he was stupidly flashy on the job but more that he liked the drama of the reveal when it was just them. He supposed the other man was trying to impress Bartowski and Walker, and to a certain extent Casey wrote it off as inexperience or ego. Bartowski, meanwhile, sided with Shaw since he thought he was more valued by the other man—until it became obvious Shaw was after Walker.
Then came the moment when Casey realized that those things he thought would never come to light just might. He stood in that bar with Bartowski and the two wiseguys, one of whom he knew but had mostly forgotten. Casey considered the fact that he might have to tell his wife about one of the darker parts of his past. When he found the wiseguys dead and plugged Gruber—proving he really was one of the world's best, not that he needed to—he decided once again to leave that part of his past buried.
Unfortunately, somewhere in that mess, Bartowski broke up with Hannah, whom Casey had to admit was a sweet girl, one who would have made Bartowski a good companion—if Walker hadn't been the better fit with the man he'd become. Of course, Casey considered his own life, considered his own secrets, and wondered if he'd be where he was if he'd made different choices years earlier.
As he usually did, though, he pushed those thoughts aside, went home to his wife and daughter, and appreciated the place he'd wound up.
He couldn't, though, escape the feeling that it was going to all go wrong. Hearing that name, the name Casey thought was long behind him, come out of that wiseguy's mouth had raised specters Casey wasn't sure he would survive, but he hoped the fact the kid hadn't retrieved all the data when he flashed meant no one else would, either.
Predictably, things did go wrong, just not the way he expected, and he might have wondered why they had used Woodcomb as a decoy if he hadn't been distracted by yet another seemingly vital catastrophe that would lead to Bartowski's exposure.
From the moment he entered that Malibu hotel room and realized they'd been set up to get them away from Castle, he knew this went deeper—and he had his first suspicions that the Ring might not be behind it, that the rat responsible really was one of their own because the assignment had seemingly shifted from protecting Bartowski to protecting Shaw.
Casey figured that if Shaw wanted to be the super agent he claimed to be, he could protect his own damn self.
The incident left Casey with a lot of questions, and the events—or non-events, as it turned out—didn't stop him from asking those questions as they shut down operations at the hotel even though he didn't ask them out loud. One was who else knew about Castle? Sure, enough of the enemy had figured out something was not right at the Buy More, but anyone who had figured out the rest was in a place where no one else would learn that particular secret—or was dead. Casey's suspicions centered on Shaw, who very definitely knew all about Castle, and even when he stepped back from his own resentment at the man's usurpation of his position, he still came away convinced Shaw was the reason bad things were happening to Bartowski and this particular assignment.
It was damned convenient, after all, that Bartowski wasn't flashing because his lady-feelings interfered, especially since the kid's panties were in a twist over Walker's apparent preference for Shaw. That she was simply exploiting Bartowski's infatuation with Hannah and Shaw's apparent desire for her never occurred to the kid. Casey had been afraid Walker might crack and tell him just to get that sad-sack look off him, but she was a pro, knew Bartowski would give them away if he knew what she was up to.
Casey, though, didn't have the stomach to watch her work, especially not when the kid was around, so he found other things to do—but he listened.
Funny how listening helped him recognize nuances he might not if he were seeing as well. It was why he was suspicious of Shaw's interest in Walker. He still couldn't put his finger on it. The man said the right things, made the right moves, but there was something peculiarly off about the way he said them. Casey puzzled over that, wondered if Shaw hadn't made Walker a mark in return, and wished he could get the guy's story. The revelation he'd been married, had come as a surprise, and Casey had tried to dig further, came up empty other than Eve Shaw had been murdered.
When Chuck got through to them, told them what was happening at the Buy More and that Castle had been breached, Casey's thoughts shifted to planning the assault. He knew every nook and cranny of the place, and he turned his attention to how to save Chuck again, especially since the kid was vulnerable without the ability to flash.
He changed into his Buy More clothes and crossed to the store when they couldn't access Castle through any other entrances. He was startled to find the door not only locked but barricaded. The store's idiots opened fire on him with fucking toys, and Casey nearly pulled his own gun despite recognizing this wasn't the enemy—or at least not the enemy he was after. He was furious when he bit out he wanted in, which was the literal truth, and he also told the truth when he told Patel, "Because the only thing I hate more than hippie, neo-liberal fascists and anarchists, are the hypocrite, fat-cat suits they eventually grow up and become."
God, it was so easy to get past the terminally stupid.
But their adversaries weren't, which made it all the more galling that a high Barnes had to put down the Ring operative trying to strangle him. Casey would have managed, but he'd take the assist since it got him where he needed to be that much faster.
After it was all done, Casey stayed behind to tie up loose ends, oversee the techs Beckman sent to reset the security codes, and if he ran the surveillance back, if he saw a few things that solidified his view of Shaw, well, knowledge was, after all, power. For example, Shaw had been hell-bent on destroying Castle with Bartowski inside. That made Casey wonder why Shaw seemed so intent on not just getting rid of Chuck but seeing him dead. Shaw kept putting the kid in harm's way, ostensibly to test and train him, but Casey began to increasingly think it was to actually kill the kid. He was pretty sure Walker wasn't the reason, and that said Intersect. Shaw appeared to be the kind of coldly calculating agent Larkin had been—he was the perfect candidate to replace Bartowski.
Once he arrived at that conclusion, Casey chased it, looked at what he knew about Shaw, and tested the theory.
He considered the increased targeting not of Bartowski but of Woodcomb by the Ring. He wondered if Shaw might be trying to discredit Bartowski if he couldn't kill him. Keeping the kid emotionally off-balance made the kid useless, after all, and that had been plain for the last week. If the kid wanted to credit Grimes with renewing his ability to function, Casey saw that as a good reason to keep the bearded twit out of Wit Sec, not to mention the satisfaction to be gained from watching Grimes annoy Shaw with his presence. After all, Grimes was not going to sit back and passively live vicariously through Bartowski's spy life.
Besides, Casey didn't like the idea of giving up his Thursday night affair with his wife, and Grimes played a vital role in enabling that.
There were still the competing claims about Shaw's files—one of the Ring bozos claimed to have uploaded them, but Shaw had claimed he had shut down the communication and they hadn't been able to send them on. Casey knew bullshit when he heard it, and this was grade-A prime. He wondered what Shaw gained from letting the enemy get his data, not to mention what had been in those files.
Of course, that assumed there had been files to get. Casey hadn't seen them nor, he suspected, had Walker who would have told him about them.
He decided he was going to share with Riah when he got home, see what she made of it all, but first he had a few more things to do. He took the Ring phone from the Malibu hotel out of its sound-proof box, hooked it up to see what he could learn from it, and was startled when it rang.
For a split second he considered disconnecting it, but then he decided to answer it, see who it was. After all, the other side had to have known they had taken it, but the Ring wouldn't know who might actually answer it.
When he heard a voice he had hoped never to hear again, he wished like hell he hadn't answered it. For the rest of his life, he would probably ask himself why he had.