LuceTuesday. 3:32 a.m.
Brian's phone rings; the display flashes a San Francisco number. Not a familiar one. Someone, apparently, is skilled at finding every last living pay phone in the city.
Brian HayesIt took several rings for Brian to answer the last time his cell phone rang at some ungodly hour of the night, but it had been New Year's Eve, and he had been otherwise occupied. When he answered, there was a party blaring in the background. When he answers tonight, there is expectant silence, the pause of a man who has just been dragged from sleep and is not oriented to place or time yet, before he groans and manages to produce speech.
"Agent Hayes," he says, his throat gravelly with several hours' disuse.
Luce"Agent Hayes," a woman's voice. She cannot be familiar enough that he might know her voice in his ear, attenuated by distance, by a cellular connection and phone lines. There's noise in the intermediate distance, the low throb of a bass. That, however, is mediated by a wall. Echoed voices, the sort that ring off tile. A bar somewhere, near the back. Close to the bathrooms.
"I did not mean to wake you." A sharply drawn breath. Her voice floats away from the mouthpiece of the phone. " - you should give me another number. One you need not answer in the middle of the night."
Brian Hayes"... Luce?"
She can hear him inhale, deeply, perhaps propelling himself up on an elbow to turn on a bedside lamp, resigning himself to wakefulness.
"No, no, it's fine, my alarm's going off soon anyway." A beat. "Unless you're calling for no reason, then it's not fine. What's..." A pause. He's scrubbing his face, bidding himself wake up. "What's going on?"
LuceShe makes some noise of affirmation in the back of her throat. So the voice is not immediately familiar; who else in San Francisco would call him at this hour. With that voice.
Then a pause; this feels sharp. Poised as she makes some decision. Her breath comes in a rush of static against the mouthpiece. "Someone followed me tonight. I - " her voice thins as she pulls away from the mouthpiece. " - in a bookstore. Acted like he was hitting on me. Insisted on buying my book. But it was more than that.
"I think he's one of them. I gave him a phone number. He called. He wants to meet tomorrow night."
Brian Hayes"Okay."
If he wants to know what led to the someone hitting on her, what she was doing in a bookstore so late that she is calling him at three o'clock in the morning, what led to this improbable occurrence, well, occurring, the part of him that is incorrigibly a father remains silent.
This is his work cell phone, after all, not his personal cell phone. It sleeps in the bathroom of the hotel room where he is staying while he tries to find an apartment that the requisitions department will not burst a blood vessel attempting to finance. She does not have that number.
"What time?" he asks, and then: "Did you get his name?"
Luce"Alex. That's all." Her voice is spare; the throb of the beat has changed, from insistent to desultory, but it is still there in the background, the noise pushing itself through the connection. "9:00 p.m., tomorrow. This café in the Mission.
In a moment, her voice resolves, her mouth returns to the receiver. "He paid with cash. Otherwise I would've snagged the receipt. I don't - " That sharp, interstitial interruption of her voice; as if she were holding something back; or forcing herself to move forward.
"I don't think you should get involved." Her voice is lower, then. There's less girl to it. She's clear on that point, all low and in a rush. "But if you want to, I'll be at the ice rink in front of Macy's at Union Square. 7:30.
"I need to go. I need to get out of here." The throbbing bass has stopped; the screech of feedback in the distance replaces it. "I shouldn't've called you. I half-hope you won't be there."
Then the receive clatters onto the box; there's a moment when he can hear the bartender calling LAST CALL. LAST CALL FOR AL CO HOL. before the handset slips home and the line goes dead.
Brian Hayes"L--"
But she hangs up, and he hears the severance of the connection, and pulls the phone away from his ear to peer at the display to confirm that she has, in fact, hung up. She's gone, and he could go into his call log and retrieve the number of the payphone from which she rang him, and call her back. Brian does not do this. What Brian has is a time, a location, and a 90%-full progress bar in finding Darryl Pennington and his compadres.
He also has a half-missive not to show up.
"Christ," he says, and lays back down to sleep for another fifty-five minutes before his alarm screams to wake him up.
----------
He's there, at Macy's, at 7:27 the next night. This may possibly be the stupidest thing he's done in the last three months, but he is there.
LuceHe will find her sitting on the spine of a park bench, her feet planted on the seat. There's that youthful insouciance to her posture - that bonelessness, as she leans forward, forearms elbows planted on her thighs, a messenger bag tucked beneath her booted feet. The night is bright and cool, the suggestion of the moon lost in the fog that has rolled up from the bay and begun to embrace the streets, creeping on slow feet through the darkening streets. The Christmas crowds are gone; a certain austerity lingers in their wake. The big Macy's seems nearly denuded without its mantle of Christmas lights, and the ice rink will not stay open much longer.
There's a cool, sharper feel to the ear this close to the manufactured ice; the sound of a few skaters cutting their way across the surface, that hiss-hiss of the blades against the ice.
She is dressed in something dark - dark jeans, a dark fitted jacket, military style - over an unzipped hooded sweater, a dark shade of teal, the hood splayed open across her back, and - beneath - a tiered tank in white eyelet lace, which makes. She has a book open on her lap, tucked beneath her body, and is leaning over reading in the low light, though her sharp gaze sweeps upward now and then, watching the other shoppers with a faint spillover of nervous energy evident in the movement of her heel against the worn planks of the bench. Thumpthumpthump. And again, thumpthumpthump.
Brian HayesBrian is not a conspicuous presence. Without any effort exerted whatsoever, without making use of cloaking devices or dampening measures, he can move through the populace without drawing attention to himself because he dresses quietly enough, because his handsomeness is a quiet sort that requires extensive study to appreciate.
When he appears tonight, his hair has been trimmed, shorn closer to his scalp than it was a week and a half past. Though he wears the near-forty years of his life in his frame, his face weather but not old, it retains a boyishness that leads to a question as to whether he is even capable of growing stubble, let alone a full beard.
He's never made the attempt. The military, and the government that employs the military, frowns upon unnecessary hair. It is unprofessional. From his black work boots to his jacket, his button-down shirt tucked and belted into a pair of sturdy jeans, he's on the clock but does not scream FED. Murmurs, perhaps, if one stops to read him. Civilians do not wear short, dark trench coats.
Hipsters do. Brian could not possibly be mistaken for a hipster.
That said, they are not in a museum, where his footfalls will echo on the marble floors. This is asphalt, and it mutes the impact of his boots until he is several feet away from her bench.
"You'll strain your eyes," he says, by way of greeting. His hands are in his pockets. His coat is unbuttoned.
Luce"I won't," she returns, voice rich with the automatic confidence of youth. Brimming with it. As if there could be no question that anything about her, anything of hers, could ever be ruined. Still, she shuts the book with a certain snap, her index finger left inside to hold her place, her, and straightens abruptly, kicking out the bag, to tuck the book inside. Each movement fluid and thoughtless, as her eyes touch his, then drift down over his attire. The short trench, his hands in the pockets.
The light loves her features; smooths over the flared cheekbones, highlights the engaging pallor of her skin. Catches out a half-dozen shades of goldenrod and honey and amber in her hair, pulled back from her face tonight, twisted into a loose little chignon, the sort tied against its own weight.
"I'm sorry I called you so late." Her eyes are clear; her features sober. There's something searching about the look she gives him, both intent and taut. A brief, sharp little half-smile accompanies the apology. "I'm half-sorry I called you at all. I can still blow him off. The odds of him finding me again are - "
A faint, modest little shrug, her narrow shoulders rising and falling like a breath beneath the straight lines of her Napoleonic jacket. " - pretty minute." And higher than anyone thinks.
Brian HayesShe's sorry she called him so late. Brian gives her a consolatory closed-lipped smile, the dismissal in his eyes. It's in answer to her half-smile, as though he senses the intent to speak further, and he drifts nearer to the bench, keeping his hands in his pockets and his shoulders straight. Holsters have a tendency to force the wearer to keep his posture close enough to perfect to fool a drill instructor. Something about being armed creates confidence, oftentimes false. Confidence alters the way one presents himself to the world.
When Brian looks at her, she has no inclination that he is thinking of anything but what lies immediately ahead. Whatever happened the last time they met, in the time between now and then, is out of his mind. Should she look back, she can see he is focused yet near-preternaturally aware of their surroundings. Though he looks right at her, he does not have the muddled gaze of one who is bewitched.
"Stop apologizing," he says. "If I didn't want you calling me I wouldn't have given you my card." A beat, no time for her to respond, before he continues, "Do you want me here with you, or, ah... should I hang back? We got--"
He checks his watch.
"--ninety minutes before you said he was going to show."
Luce"Better if he only knows my face," she returns, lifting her chin, holding his gaze. Or rather, holding her own gaze steady on his face as he checks his watch. This quickly, supple little half-smile near the end of it. " - don't you think? I figure it's a fifteen minute - twenty minute drive to the café."
The book slides into her messenger bag, nearly soundlessly, and she twists the strap around and around her right hand, then pulls the weight of it up onto her lap, slipping it shut and securing the straps wrapping it.
"They teach you surveillance FBI school?" Here a grin, not a half-smile, that curls like smoke from her mouth. Never quite reaching her eyes.
Brian HayesIf Luce had first been introduced to Brian twenty years ago, if she met him again now, the difference in his personality would be staggering. It is no wonder that his marriage is a sham, that the woman to whom he was married has no predilection to or purpose for pretending to have an interest in spending time with him, let alone pretending anymore.
His kids do not find him boring. When they see him, he is on vacation, does not have other obligations that distract him from them. He wears trainers and clothing that suits him rather than, well, suits, will play pickup basketball with his son or drink beers with his daughter.
That isn't the man that his wife knows, and that isn't he man that Luce knows, either. The man Luce is beginning to know is quiet, repressed, purposeful. It's near pathological, how intent upon his work he is.
She asks if they teach surveillance in FBI school, and he snorts, idly rubbing his lower lip with his thumb as though to brush away the beginnings of a smile.
"I was Navy intel before I joined the FBI," he says, as though he is both aware of there being potential for a joke and balking at walking right into it. "Came pre-trained." A beat. "Why?"
Luce"I have no idea what that means," she tosses back to him, her half-smile lingering at the corners of her mouth, briefly beatific. " - but I think it was a yes."
Untwisting the straps, she lifts her messenger bag over her shoulders, slipping the strap so it bisects her torso from her right shoulder to her left hip. Adjusting the bag against her narrow frame, she slips neatly off the park bench and stands. She's wearing flats, tonight. And ordinary, opaque clothes with enough fabric that they conceal rather than reveal the sharp lines of her lithe frame. Still, the girl is an inch or two taller than he is, even without the heels that usually have her towering-tall.
"I figure. You watch from someplace. Right? When he leaves, we can see where he goes. I mean, it's a public café. I don't think he'd try anything there." Her shoulders are curved forward; there's that bright, nervous air about her again. "I suppose he might try to follow me, too. But he just seemed so arrogant. I - I mean, he didn't seem like the sort who would imagine that he might be found out, you know?"
Brian HayesLuce claims to have no idea what Navy intel means, and though Brian stifles an amused snort, he does not elaborate on what it is that translates to in civilian speak. He doesn't tell her that he used to know how to fly a jet, that just before he was shot down he was on a track that would have resulted in a commission and ever-expanding security clearance.
That he was swept up by another organization for which the idea of clearance is a thing of the past he does not mention, either. She has seen his aura, but it means nothing to her. That is just as well.
She figures surveillance has him watching from someplace, and Brian listens, as though her plan is novel to him. When she speaks of the arrogance of the creature who hit on her, that typical flinch of laughter leaves his sinuses, and he nods.
The man had barely reacted when faced with a vicious predator intent upon consuming more meat, yet when it was over, when it settled on him and he had no audience, Brian had let himself be human and retroactively terrified. This is not a world to which he has become acclimated, and that may spell hope for him. If there ever comes a time when he becomes numb to the horror the world is capable of producing, it is entirely possible his acceptance will owe its existence to the irreparable fracture of his sensibilities.
"Let him keep thinking that," he says, then indicates the street with a tilt of his head. "C'mon, I'll give you a lift there." Whether she chooses to stand to follow him or not, the nervous battering of her heels against the bench has stopped. She's standing. He takes the opportunity to ask: "What's your objective, here?"
Here: in luring this arrogant guy out into public, in following him, in calling Brian. Brian wants information on Pennington's whereabouts. That doesn't mean they are on the same page.
Luce"My objective?" she gives him a sidelong look, faintly incredulous. The glance is matched by her tongue, the shadow of laughter underneath her breath. It is possible that she has never been asked such a question, and there's a substrate curl to her mouth, some living awareness of irony, there, which she breathes out all at a go as she steps into pace beside him.
Long-legged and sure, her gait, particularly when freed of the constraints usually (self)-imposed by her penchant for heels. As they walk, she tips her head back, then reaches up and snags the hood of her sweater, pulling it forward to cover her gleaming hair.
"I'd like to be safe. Here. In the city. I'd like to be able to duck into a bookstore without having one of them follow me. The first one, I could say, maybe he didn't see me. I just have to be careful, lay low a bit. The second - " here she curls her shoulders in a shrug, the movement faint, though not precisely helpless. "I can't say that anymore. You understand?"
Brian HayesSo they start to walk, and Luce is astounded by the question that comes out of the man's mouth. He does not look the sort to ask things like what her objective is, looks as though he's more inclined to ask after the character of men who are pursuing her in bookstores and what time she believes she will be home upon leaving to meet such a creature. It is difficult to gauge his motivation in asking such a thing.
Perhaps if he had phrased the question in a manner that is not at all appropriate for public consumption, his motivation would be clearer. If he had asked whether she had any interest in keeping this particular individual alive, if he was simply here as a security blanket, it would have been clearer, maybe.
Brian has his hands in his pockets as they begin to walk across the plaza back, presumably, to where he has parked his car. His boots do not clatter against the ground, and the weapon he has concealed beneath his jacket does not jostle in its holster.
The X-5 protector is made entirely of composite material and will not trigger a metal detector. Its ammunition is caseless and made from polycarbonate, making it as invisible as the gun itself. It is fitted with a laser sight, and he has the capable of equipping the revolver with any type of ammunition he decides is suitable for the given situation. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that he could simply stun a target by sending a gas or explosive shell firing near to him, rather than hitting him in the chest or head from a distance with a hollow-point round.
This is what is going through Brian's head when he asks, though as they walk, as Luce speaks, for all the world knows he is simply asking because he has no other earthly notion of how to carry on a conversation.
"Alright," he says, and pulls his car keys from his pocket. A silence then, pregnant, as he gathers his words, but he does eventually say: "I don't know if you're going to get 'safe' anywhere other than the middle of the woods, this day and age, but I can sure try. Tonight, anyway."
LuceShe has no weapons. No weapons at her back; none in her bag. Nothing that will defeat a metal detector, nothing she can use to pick off prey from a distance, or stun them into subservience. Or prick them with a jolt of electricity that might set teeth humming in their sockets. Just this lean frame, tall and narrow. Nearly fragile, and a bag full of - what? books, like as not. Or perhaps shoes - slung across her boyish torso, settled at her hip.
Her eyes are darting; this enlivened awareness of the space, the faces of those slipping by them in the ordinary stream of humanity, snatches of other lives touching theirs, the elements of other conversations, which she takes in with this expansive but liminal sense of space as they walk. The jingle of car keys draw her gaze back to him. Our here on the sidewalk, her eyes are darker, somehow. She meets his gaze. Gives him this quick, darting little grin that just imprints itself on the shape of her eyes.
Maybe that's his reward for I can sure try.
Tonight, anyway has her making some noise in the back of her throat, subvocal and self-aware. Bemused, perhaps, though not at his expense. At the world's.
She circles the car, waits patiently at the passenger's door while he chirps off the alarm, then lifts her bag over her body as she opens the door and ducks inside. That grace again, that certain sense of her body's balance as she fits herself to the seat, tucking the messenger bag beneath her legs.
The silence extends. Until he has fit himself into the driver's seat and the engine hums to life. If the radio comes on, she reaches out. Turns it down to a peripheral hum of white noise, her fingers fine, gentle on the nobs, skin luminous in the dashboard glow.
"Brian." Touching him - so lightly - for emphasis. On the wrist or the thigh; whichever is closest. The touch deepens a moment, until she feels his eyes on her profile. Only then does it lift. "Can we make a deal. You and I?"
Brian HayesIt is a rental car that he drives, or at least some sort of vehicle that is logged somewhere and for which he is responsible but that he does not own. The license plates are atypical, do not match the other plates of the other drives in the other parts of California; the fact that the word GOVERNMENT is not, in fact, punched into the metal at the center-top of the plate makes no difference. It is a sedan, it is dark gray, and it is so new that it is a wonder it does not reek of chemicals when Brian unlocks the door and opens it to let her inside.
When Luce ducks down to sit, Brian is not watching her form. His eyes, blackened by the darkness same as hers but no less attuned to their surroundings, are on the world around them instead. The door claps shut like a mouth that has decided it has nothing more to say, and he walks around the vehicle to get in, himself.
This is the same car in which they drove on New Year's [Eve] when he picked her up several miles from here, in a shitty part of town when he had been drinking and she had needed a ride. He is married, and they kissed, and yet he has made no mention of it, is not looking at her as though it would be or not be acceptable for the occurrence to repeat itself. He had not looked at her as though he wanted to kiss her that night, either, and yet.
There is no music when the engine turns over. Console lights blink on, and a seatbelt sensor chirps until it is engaged, but nothing comes blaring out of the speakers to greet them. He is reaching up to adjust the rearview mirror--people are shorter at night than they are upon awakening; gravity compresses the spaces between the vertebrae--when her fingers find his clothes, just barely exerting pressure, and Brian looks over flicker-quick, eyebrows raised in silent inquiry.
He takes a breath, registering the touch, and then she wants to make a deal.
After he clears his throat, Brian says, "Depends on the deal."
LuceIt takes her longer than most to note the seatbelt censor; to understand that that annoying little noise is insistent that she pulls the belt home across her body. But she does. And then she touches him, lightly, and then he says, Depends on the deal.
That has another half-smile chasing itself across her fine features, in this way that makes her well-made little mouth go suddenly wide. Flashes - so briefly - little white teeth behind her glossed lips. The hood she has flicked up over the crown of her head casts darker shadows across her face; bisecting the smooth line of her cheekbone, but the console lights still flare, reflect in the liquid darkness of her eyes.
"I won't ask you why you're doing this. Why you think you have to do this. Or how." She is looking away then; out through her passenger's window, staring at the city through the ghost of her own reflection, darker voids at the eyes and mouth in that moon-pale skin. Her voice sounds wistful, or - drawn somehow.
"If you don't ask me how I know what I know." The touch deepens. Not sexual, just human. Some human connection. "Or why. Will you do that for me."
Brian HayesOne of the surest ways to ensnare the interest of one with the mind of an academic is to present an equation whose solution cannot be attained, to say with certainty that there will never be certainty. She may very well be beginning to believe that Brian has a fire lit inside of him, that for being as regimented and boring as he is there is a purpose to the things that he does, that he is driven forward in pursuit of something even if she cannot, yet, sort out what it is.
They're on similarly uneven ground, then, because he cannot figure out what she is, at all, other than unusual. In certain narratives, this would create a magnetic attraction for him, would have him yearning for her presence and becoming enthralled even without the touch of blood to his lips, but Brian is not infatuated. Even as they sit in the dark, the engine running, his eyes cast across the cabin at her, he is not staring. There is no lust in his gaze.
The way Brian looks at Luce is the way he looks at the printed word, at crafted marble, at something he can understand in a matter of seconds if he obviates other distractions. Even without distractions, though, understanding eludes him.
"And what happens if I ask?"
Johnny[BRB]
LuceThat has her darkened eyes darting back to him; a moving gesture of her head, which pulls the soft fabric of her sweater taut against the long, curving line of her head and neck. Her eyes are still; her mouth too. Some faint curl to it tastes like regret. Bitter almonds; cigarette ashes.
She smells like cigarettes, like tobacco spiked with spices. Cinnamon or clove. She smells like Chanel No. 5 underneath it, clean and arctic, if he inhales deeply enough.
"Then you hunt them alone." That little smile lingers at the edges of her fine mouth. And she pulls back her hand, slips it across the border that is the console. Wraps the straps of her messenger bag around her fingers. "And I get hunted alone."
She looks like the printed word. Like crafted marble; her loveliness an uneasy thing, shaped rather than made, and not for men's pleasure. Too fine and too stark for ease.
"Which is it?"
JohnnyThe ghost of a reflection, marred by a blur of black stepping out from behind a brick wall, on the way to disappearing before it was every really born. Just an idea. Just an intrusion on her perfect image. The bricks make the shadow jagged like tiny steps for the brief moment that it's there. Neons cover it up -- neons drown everything.
Movement outside the vehicle, deliberate movement. It isn't hidden by subterfuge or stealth, just noise, just running shoes on concrete and a long coat flapping. It's those sounds -- the wavering images -- it creates information that isn't even there. His coat is moving along with his hair, it's windy outside.
Suddenly there's a fist rapping against the window beside Luce's head, a heavy fist, the sort of fist she didn't feel when she touched Brian's hand. A face is peering into the car, eyes crystalline blue and searching. His hair is swept to one side by the wind, half of it sticking up, half of it falling down. Clean shaven. He doesn't blink or do much more than look for a few seconds, like he's on the other side of a one-way mirror.
The coat is tan, like he could be a detective. He looks too young to be a detective.
Brian Hayes"Jesus Christ."
Brian does not flinch, if only owing to the fact that he damn well sees the tall blond man in the tan coat stepping out of the darkness and approaching the car. His figure blots out the jaundiced light from the nearby street lamp, splashes black across the windshield and onto Luce's sculpted face. That is the first time he looks away from her in several seconds, and he sounds as though he is attempting to remember what it is normal men feel when they are interrupted by their clients.
Irritation is what he's going for. A first-year theater student who has forgotten his line could have delivered the annoyance with far more conviction than he does.
"It's okay," he tells her, should she start; a hand on her upper arm is the second tier of calming her, if necessary. With Luce's window facing the sidewalk and traffic flying past Brian, he cannot beckon the young man around to his side of the vehicle.
Rubbing his lower jaw, Brian looks for a moment as though he's considering driving off. He does not.
"Alright," he says, "deal," and then rolls down the window enough to speak with the young man.
"Yes, Jonathan, what can I do for you?"
Luce"Who is that."
Her reaction is instantaneous. Pulls her immediately and instinctually away from the window, which rattles in its track with the reverberation of Johnny's fist. There's a honed note of alarm in her voice, low and intense. A stark note of betrayal in her voice, whipslender and absolute as the lashing glance she directs at Brian.
Her visage is ghostly through the darkened window, swimming with reflected like. Dark eyes in a pale wash of a face, framed by the dark sweep of a hood whose color is lost in the deep gray shadows. Fine mouth forming a narrow line. She shifts her narrow hips in the seat, away from the glass, the question lost to a sotto voce hiss. His reassurance does nothing for her, and so when the window is rolled down, the 'parole officer' has his hand on the 'girl's' upper arm. Tension bleeding through the layers of her clothing.
There's this sinuous twist to her body in the passenger's seat. Like a mobius strip - the taut sweep of her shoulders turned protectively away from the opening window, her pale face and - in this light - huge, dark, vaguely feral eyes - lilting back, watching Johnny. Staring at him with a compressed suspicion that makes itself felt with every sharp little breath she takes.
Johnny"Johnny," he corrects Brian, his voice sounds like generic slang, like an Italian Deli in Los Angeles. "Who's the broad?" He asks him, a light brown eyebrow lifting beneath blond hair. The sound of cars passing by creates a crescendo of a hiss, as if in answer to Luce's own reaction. The street fighting back subconsciously.
"This your wife?" He asks -- "Nah, can't be. Way too cute."
A step back from the window and he's no longer hunching, shoulders raised and back straight. Not a detective any more. Now he's a soldier.
His left arm has been hanging by his waist -- it hasn't moved.
"I broke something," he says to Brian.
Brian HayesHis hand has not left Luce's upper arm, but it is not closed around her limb vice-like and threatening. For being as quiet as he is, everything about his demeanor and appearance suggesting that his worst-case scenario involves accusation of exercising anything other than strict professionalism, he cannot be described as cold. Remote, perhaps, but more akin to an island in the South Pacific than Antarctica.
That hand on her arm has dried tears and stopped bleeding. It can be reassuring, if he lets it. With Johnny appearing outside her window, caging her in, Brian does not realize that, to the other man, he has to look terrified.
He's trapped in a car with a monster. He does not know she is a monster; he has to suspect; subconsciously, he has to expect that when she whips around to look at him again, the betrayal in her eyes will turn him to stone.
Johnny is faced with a feral young woman too gorgeous to be Brian's wife, and his parole officer sitting wide-eyed and hypervigilant behind the wheel.
He mouths Broad? with confusion knit into his eyebrows, and does not look at Johnny's arm until he says he broke something.
"What," he asks, his words nudged by sarcasm, "your phone?" A breath, and his eyes tick to take in the appendage. He sighs the heavy sigh of a man who has spent too much time in the company of small children to vouch for his own sanity. "Alright... fuck's sake, Johnny..."
He's thinking.
LuceThe sparest sort of easing, as Johnny steps back from the window. Enough that she brings her hips below her body again, allows the sinuous curl of her spine back into something close to its native alignment. Her mouth is spare, still and set in her face, made heart-shaped by the sweep of shadows from the cross-bar of the roof and the curve of hood of her dark teal sweater. Pulled back from the crown of her head, enough to reveal more of her fine blond hair, by the recursive whip of movement in reaction to the young - detective, soldier? - man's sudden appearance.
Darkened eyes haunt his face; the search unsparing, tinctured with alarm. Take in the sudden shift of posture; that straightbacked, sharpshouldered stance as familiar to her as the blood in the back of her throat. It does nothing to reassure her.
Her gaze drops to Johnny's left hand, then darts out beyond him. Skipping over the evening's crowds, searching the shadows beyond him.
"Where is he." Her head is canted toward the window, forehead first. The searching gaze is back fixed on the man with the broken hand. Arm. Something foreign to her tone, though perhaps he cannot hear that in her voice, it deepens with the sharp edge of her anxiety. Her mouth barely moves with the words. "What sort of farce is this." Then more sharply upward, back to Johnny in a way that pulls the hood further back from the sweep of her features. "Is he watching, right now - "
JohnnyBrows crease and it's confusion. Eyes on Brian for an answer that he doesn't get any time soon, or at least not soon enough for the soldier, detective, whatever he is. The arm doesn't even lift when he steps back to half pivot and see where Luce is looking, it just hangs there limp by his waist. He doesn't even cradle it. There's no glove on his hand, just flesh. Blood drips from his sleeve to the pavement. It stinks like treachery and redemption.
"What?" Johnny asks, his head turning back to face the two of them through Luce's window. "What's she talking about, Brian?" The older man used Johnny's name, so he knows it's safe to use his. Or at least, that's how the logic works in his brain.
"Is who watching?" This directed at her. Leave Brian out of it. He doesn't know.
Brian Hayes"It's alright," Brian says again, and he does not use her name. There is nothing where it ought to be, and it leaves a gaping hole; he does not call her 'sweetheart' or 'honey' or 'darling' or anything that might imply a connection between them, doesn't talk to her like a frightened child or a spooked horse, but her anxiety does not make sense.
In the museum, she had thought he followed her. That memory is transparent, the information left lying out for too long to be battered by the elements while he stared at it. At first he had thought she meant the creatures that were popping up like pale, flesh-eating moles across the city. Those seemed to be more of an inconvenience, though, something deadly but manageable. They were not specters.
This 'he,' though, has Brian staring at the back of her head as though he can sort out what the fuck she's talking about without having to ask questions. This 'he' makes her think she is being stalked, and it is not absurd, her paranoia. Brian mutes his appearance and it screams FBI. Johnny shows up dripping dark fluid and speaking like he has been watching too many black and white noir films, knows Brian's name.
She would have to be insane to not believe them to be following her.
Johnny keeps talking, asking questions, and Brian draws another breath.
"You know," he says, "house arrest is an option if you can't follow the terms of your parole. You'd look dashing with a tracking bracelet clamped around your ankle. Maybe I could rig it to explode if you went outside after eight o'clock."
That has to be a joke. Brian is consistent, at least: it's hard to tell if he is joking.
"We'll get someone to look at your arm, alright, just go home and wait for me."
LuceThe creature's nostrils flare; she maintains her distance from Johnny. Stays closer to Brian, the known unknown, not the young man who appears out of the darkness, broken arm dripping blood. Not even the taut-drawn stiffness of pain imprinting itself on his mouth. He's just talking, hand hanging; the blood dripping off it to spatter on the sidewalk at his feet.
She watches him stiffly, the bleeding tension in her body evident in her neck; in the molar-grinding set of her jaw. The stiffness of her shoulders. Still, while they are speaking she's moving, subtly shifting her grip on the straps of her bag, kicking it backwards so it will not tangle with her long legs should she decide to shove open that door, push past Johnny and run.
And she looks like she could run; light as she is, fine as she is, her limbs are long. She looks like she could run for miles, face to the wind, eyes narrowed against the cold bite of the evening air.
"Nevermind," to Johnny, and sharply at that. Brian's reassurance barely registering in her periphery. Just this hint that she's being pulled - faintly - in his direction her only acknowledgment. She is fiddling with the straps with her right hand, nudging her bag back with the heels of her boots, "it doesn't matter." And her, a brief, winging glance toward Brian, her eyes stark in her pale face, mouth thinly set, breathing shallow. Just enough to move her shoulders beneath her jacket. "Maybe I was wrong."
"I'm sorry." Back to Johnny, her eyes dropping to his wrist. Breathing still shallow, through the mouth rather than the nose, and tainted with alarm. "You should go to the hospital."
To Brian. "You should take him to the hospital."
And both. "I should go."
JohnnyJohnny doesn't look hurt -- impassable resistance in his face. It doesn't register and she sees it; she knows it's not there, it's not just being ignored. There's a difference between the two and she sees it. She knows it. What's more is Johnny suspects she knows it because he's looking at her more than he's listening to her. Just staring.
Brian's words though, Brian's words seem to strike him somewhere he hadn't expected because he blinks and peels his gaze off the delicate breeze in the passenger seat to stare long and hard at Brian. He wants him to just go home; he doesn't care. Why should he?
"Fuck you, Brian." Says Johnny. "Fuck your department too -- no, stay." He says to Luce, it's not coupled with a smart remark or smile. Just stay. He turns to the front of the car and walks into the road. There's cars travelling, quickly too, but he doesn't stop walking even for a second. Just slips through the gaps at a steady pace. It's all calculated. The risk ratio is acceptable.
He leaves a crimson gash in his wake.
Brian HayesBrian, too, knows that Johnny is not in pain. He knows there is not a compound fracture under the jacket sleeve. He knows that whatever is wrong, he cannot take care of it at the trunk of the car, and he sure as shit isn't going to take him to a hospital.
This has to be a frequent occurrence in his life. With his right hand on Luce's arm, his left on the steering wheel still, his wedding band--it shouts every time it has an audience, shouts not of his love for the woman who put it there but the fact that it's a goddamn lie, that it's for show, because the man has nothing else about him that indicates he is capable of feeling anything for another human being--is occluded.
This is reminiscent of arguments he had with his daughter when she was growing up, before she realized that her asshole of a father was not actually a robot. She could say whatever she wanted to him and he would not react.
The words that come out of Johnny's mouth do not evoke an outward response, but they are the same damn ones his daughter used to throw at him, fuck you Brian, her disrespect as manufactured as his callousness. The young man walks off, leaving blood and anger in his wake, and it isn't unless Luce looks back quickly at him that she can see he looks disgusted.
It's with himself, not with Johnny, but good luck with that distinction.
"Shit," he says, taking his left hand off the wheel and swiping it down his face. His right hand leaves her arm to turn off the engine and undo his seatbelt. He's rushing. "Luce, I am so sorry, I gotta--"
Johnny[NAH BRIAN JOHNNY IS GONESKIES]
Brian Hayes[THAT'S WHAT YOU THINK ASSHOLE]
LuceAnd that reaction; that sudden Shit from the regimented man's mouth is the first thing that draws her out of the starched, icy immediacy of her paranoia. Her intense awareness of their surroundings, the shadows beyond the kid - the boy - now darting off, weaving through traffic, his blood a trail on the pavement she could follow with her senses shunted and her eyes closed. By instinct, and without thought.
How quickly her eyes change. The pinpricked pupils dilate, softening that sense of dark immediacy to her gaze. Her eyes touch his face; follow the movement of his hand over his features, drop to his right hand as he disengages the seatbelt. There's this pressed smile on her mouth. Not really a smile, wavering rather, but bracing. Meant to push him onward. There are things you have to do.
"Go." - she tells him, with this intensity that matches his rushing haste. This vibrance to it that lives in the space of his self-disgust and his need. The same place that sworn curse came from, but deeper, wider. Wide as the ocean. "I didn't mean - "
- to what is likely lost in Brian's rush. She tucks herself more deeply into the bucket seat, tracking Johnny's weave through the traffic. "There - see?" Even helpfully, as he disentangles himself from the seatbelt. Opens his door and shuts his door. Stays there, sinking into the seat as Brian braves the traffic in Johnny's bloodied wake. Follows his progress through the traffic like a corked bottle bobble on dark swells some moon-laced ocean light.
Then - when he is far enough away that he cannot hear the snick of the passenger's door, pushes it open. Slips out the other side. Nudges it gently closed, and runs the opposite way. Leaving a half-block's worth of footprints from the smear of Johnny's blood through which she tracks, and then nothing. Nothing at all.
Brian HayesLuce disembarks from the vehicle, imparting a hug upon the still figure that remains behind the steering wheel with little more than a tensing of musculature at the contact and a wry glance over his shoulder at the pop of the door's latch and the rush of cool night air into the backseat, and Brian cracks the window if only so he can help the rental car to purge its air of the lingering ghosts of clove cigarettes.
It will do no good. The stench, though brief, will linger long after the burgeoning trust the superstitionalist populace has in him has scattered as pellets from a discharged shotgun. With no intent beyond this evening other than to track the difficult-to-track creatures that are suffusing this girl's heart with such fear, tearing flesh from the skeletons of the living and skulking in the shadows like labyrinth-dwelling beasts born from a long-dead mythos, he just sits back and watches the coffee house through the plexiglas.
Truth be told, he cannot remember ever actually smoking a cigarette in his life. He tries, but there are parts of his life that seem flat compared to others. If there was ever a time when he harbored an addiction to anything other than his work, it seems to have been repaired, spackled and repainted, so that it stands out only if one knows where to look. Brian does not know where to look, but he cannot remember when or why he began wearing a nicotine patch.
Like everything else, though, it is a habit.
Without taking his eyes from the scene before him, Brian slithers his cell phone from its holster and rests it on his thigh so he will feel it if it vibrates. The ringer has been silenced. His doors lock with a choking sound, and he waits.
Brian Hayes[Perc + Alertness DON'T LAUGH]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (1, 5) ( botch x 1 )
sigh[NIPPLE BOTCH]
Brian Hayes[I FORGOT HE HAD A BOOSTER HANG ON ROLLING ARETE]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
Brian Hayes[I CAN'T REMEMBER IF THAT IS +SUCCESSES DICE TO ALERTNESS POOL OR WHAT AND MY PDF IS 400 FEET AWAY SHIT]
Brian Hayes[OKAY ROLLING ANOTHER 2 DICE PLEASE DO NOT FUCK THIS UP BRIAN]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (7, 9) ( success x 2 )
Luce(Sneak!)
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )
LuceToreadors do it better. Dif -2 for heightened senses.
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (3, 4, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 4 )
LuceWatching.
The streets are damp tonight, from an earlier shower. The sky is cool and gray above the orange haze of the city's native glow. There's something softened at the corners, the first hint of mist coalescing beneath the streetlights. Given them a certain irridescent corona still somehow dirty with the shedding light. The lights from the coffee house - with its big picture windows and its smokers' patio outside - are big, flaring.
In the day those windows would make a show of the sidewalk, letting someone ensconsced in the corner booth curl up and watch ever businessman, every dealer, every prostitute, every street musician, every hustler and every street kid who might happen by over the edge of a book or the plastic lip of a tablet or laptop. Night, is entirely otherwise. The crowd inside so clear through the picture windows, the light blasting, brilliant. Like some sort of fission, some new source of energy.
He has the street sounds, the back and forth between the smokers huddling together against the cool night air, the wash of rain over tires and tires over asphalt. The low roar of a souped-up engine somewhere close as accompaniement, though the people inside look - like puppets, somehow. Like shadows on some paper stage, without voices to make them whole.
She cuts through the knot at the door, turns back to respond to something someone's said to her; a brief, razor brilliance of a smile cast in shadow by her position. Then she turns, casts a sharp look right down the line of the street, steps aside as a couple pushes the interior doors open. This half-frown, and a moment's consideration has her digging into that chic little clutch for some change.
She slips away from the door, somewhat out of the light, and tosses something into the upturned baseball cap of a homeless man slumped between the coffee shop and the tattoo parlor next door. A man so easily overlooked that Brian had not seen him before. Then slips back to the door, pausing long enough to drop her cigarette to the ground. It flares as it falls, then gutters in the puddle by the front door.
There is this small pause just inside that warm, bright space; then a stranger in that corner booth stands up. He's tall; wearing jeans and a blazer over a t-shirt, with a shock of dark hair long enough that he might have a part-time gig posing for romance-novel covers.
She walks toward him; slipping neatly through the crowded tables, her sequined top scattering diamonds of smoke-blue light all around her as she moves.
Even in her heels, he matches her height. When she's close, he reaches for her as if he meant to hug her. She takes his hands instead, clasping them in her own and holding them away from her body. He extricates, reaches for her cheek and jaw, meets with a moment's sharp, tense resistence -
- before she gives, and he bends to brush a faint kiss along the line of her cheekbone. Then, only then, does he pull out her chair - and, reaching down, brushes that fine little strap that has slipped down her shoulder right back up again, as she takes the seat.
A truck washes past; this running noise, the axles, the friction of the tires against the asphalt. It cuts off his view for a stutterstep moment. When it is past, the pair of them are sitting; a waitress leaning over the table to take their orders.
And the homeless man is gone, though the hat remains.
Brian HayesBrian is not a genius. What little he manages to accomplish in the way of feats of mental prowess, he is able to accomplish through sheer force of will, it seems, or advancements in science that provide him advantages that he would not have had had he remained in the civilian populace. To say that he has a slew of common sense and street knowledge would be a goddamned lie. Anyone who is able to do anything with a computer could look up his service record, could find traces of his existence on the Internet and in publications from small town newspapers.
He is not a genius, but his eyes brought the presence of a seemingly homeless man outside the cafe into his cognizance, and a moment after the Mack truck has blown past, the man is not there any longer. Though Brian's eyes were watching the interaction between the willowy Luce and the long-haired 'Alex,' his instinct drags his eyes back to the abandoned cap on the sidewalk.
For reasons he could not explain in front of a jury of his peers, Brian draws an uneasy breath and sits up straighter in the driver's seat. With the seatbelt still drawn tight across his lap, he cannot move as easily. His right hand reaches down to undo the harness.
Brian Hayes[Perc + Alert + Booster, -1 diff because reasons]
Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 5, 7) ( success x 2 )
LuceThere street's chaotic. Some patrons are leaving the café and wandering off in pursuit of slightly more exotic pleasures tonight. Others are just leaving, cutting sharply as they jaywalk across the street. This open band of laughter unbends from the group of smokers at the door, arrives at Brian's cracked window in waves, imperfectly rendered echoes. Strange snippets of conversation.
Inside, Luce and Alex are - flirting. He's heavy handed; that arrogance she mentioned. Sitting too close, reaching for her while she holds herself apart, permitting some of it, pulling back from other assertions with a cool, gleaming sort of smile that says she has dealt with all this before. Not unlike a thousand other awkward first dates starting somewhere in the city.
Then the truck, and the man - gone. The baseball cap left behind. Brian notices this before the knot of kids at the door of the coffee shop. Though one notices quickly, laughing, goes and retrieves the baseball cap. Brian's attention slips from the couple in the shop uneasily, maybe touches on the kid picking up the baseball cap when - there - cutting across the street some twenty feet away, a man in dirty blue coveralls flares briefly too-bright in the sweeping lights of a passing car. He's shaking off something bulky - an old coat? - when the car slams on its breaks.
It nearly hits him. Comes to within a handful of inches of his shins and he turns, washed out features contorting with anger as the couple in the front seat are just beginning to unfreeze from that moment of implacable horror - that awareness that they were this close to killing someone.
His fist contracts. Brian is perhaps the only person looking directly at the plumber (the 'plumber') in just that moment. There's this terrible, sharpened moment where Brian might well be convinced that this stranger is going to slam himself forward into the hood of that car and -
- but no. He masters himself, the plumber, jaw grindingly set and pulls that arm back to himself. The oversized coat is gone, left behind on the pavement. The plumber cuts a diagonal toward the van parked in front of Brian's car.
Brian HayesThough he watches, unblinking, Brian does nothing to intervene. This is not the call that he has to answer, is not the reality that concerns him, yet his attention does not remain on Luce interminably because for once, for now, he has faith. What little faith he does have is based on fallacy, perhaps, one of the first of the fallacies being that he can trust a creature he has never met before not to attack the other woman in front of a few dozen people.
It is not until he watches the 'plumber' run out into traffic and nearly punch the hood of an oncoming car that a flickering of Christmas Eve eve comes to him. The presence of several hundred witnesses had not stopped his current target from attacking a teenage boy, from frightening Luce to the point that she did not want the short yet solid federal agent going anywhere near him.
(The notion that his employment is a lie will be shattered in a few weeks when his family name and his title are splashed across the evening news like blood from a severed artery. Tonight, there is still doubt.
Johnny sure as hell didn't help.)
He does not choose to split his attention between the man who is approaching the vehicle directly in front of his own. What he does is watch the other man until he reaches the van, then look back across the street at the coffee house. Should the activity within the warm yet dimly lit cafe be as-was, the 'plumber' is a closer and more immediate danger. He gets Brian's attention.
LuceThe plumber reaches the driver's side of the van; steps on the running board and leans inward, bends over rooting around for something; or tossing something. Brian has a vantage point on the man's legs, the coveralls damp from the wet street and no more.
Then he jumps back down with a solid thunk, now holding one of those blowtorches Brian himself might've used, once. Early in his marriage, fumbling through an instruction booklet on how to unfreeze the pipes, or how to fix solder on the S-joint of the complex of pipes beneath the bathroom vanity.
He slips the torch into place on a brown utility belt he pulls out and begins wrapping around his waist, then slams the driver's door shut with a solid enough thunk that it sends the old van rocking. Circles back to the back doors. Squeezes between Brian's car and the van proper and opens the back doors. It is dark inside, a smear of something on the upholstery near the tailgate that could be oil. Though if the Agent in the rental car behind were to imagine something else, he would not be mistaken.
The plumber shoots a careful look over his shoulder, frowning at the streetscape over the roof of Brian's nondescript sedan. Which is apparently too pedestrian to catch the man's attention, since he narrows eyes on this muscle car parked down the block. There are tools inside. Though they are more of the bludgeoning variety; a sledghammer. An old, rusting shovel. A pair of ladders have been tossed haphazardly into the interior, and Brian can see - if he strains - another pair of plumber's coveralls, stiff with dried blood, too ruined to be of use, tucked admist the detritus inside.
The man picks up a claw-handled hammer, and a large wrench, and slips them into the loops of his workbelt as well. Grabs something else - metallic - and tucks them into a side pocket of his coveralls, then shuts the doors firmly. Looks up, frowning over at the coffee shop, where things continue apace. Where Alex, sitting closer - is briefly pulled away as a waitress returns to their table with all the regalia of real tea, which she procedes to set in front of Luce with a certain ceremony.
Brian HayesWithout the aid of sensory dampeners, without cloaking devices or true cover of darkness to shield him from onlookers, Brian manages to remain unseen by the man moving about at the back of the van. There is enough of a buffer between their bumpers that the plumber can throw open his back doors and rummage around, but not such that Brian cannot glimpse a disarray that speaks of violence.
That is not oil. None of it is oil. Plumbers do not deal much with artificial lubricants, nor is there any reason why he ought to be wielding a sledgehammer, a shovel. In the driver's seat, Brian slides down lower, as though he can make himself invisible by ducking his shoulders lower than the steering wheel.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
He picks up his cell phone, flipping it open to thumb through his recent calls. The odds of one of them belonging to a dedicated mobile number instead of a pay phone on some corner miles away are slim, yet he finds the one that correlates with the last parlay he'd had with Luce and hits SEND, holding the phone to his ear as he remains hunkered down.
The window is still cracked. If he winds it back up, the motor will make a noise. His voice, likewise, will make noise. Brian waits for an answer to come across the connection, keeping his gaze on the man in front of him; he mouths the sequence of numbers and letters stamped into the license plate to commit it to memory.
LucePeople see what they need to see. The plumber is looking for a biker gang or a mystic; someone that strikes him as having solid threat potential. An ordinary man in an ordinary car on an ordinary street. The plumber frowns down at his reflection is Brian's windshield as the agent flips through his cell phone; circles to the driver's side and taps lightly on the window.
"Hey." There is a bit of a drawl to the man's voice. " - dude in front's got me blocked in. Gotta make a U-turn here in a few. Get the equipment back in the van. You mind backing up a few feet to let me get around ?"
His face a smear in the driver's window. Lingering for just a minute longer, long enough for a yea from Brian before walking toward the driver's side of the van.
--
The phone rings. Rings. Then someone answers, "Harry's Meat Market, what's your beef?" - someone with a New York accent announces into the phone. "Knock it off, Larry!" - from a few feet away, beneath the throbbing bass. "Uh, yeah, anyway. Gumby's! Can I help you?"
Brian Hayes"Sorry, man, wrong number."
Brian claps his phone closed, silently cursing Luce for her overly judicious caution, and cranks the key in the ignition. The engine turns over, and the console lights awaken; he sits up straight again, already having indicated to the plumber that he would move his damn car, and starts to buckle his belt when the Corolla's sensor chirps at him to do so. It will not stop chirping unless he complies.
The average person will not comply unless it is to cease an annoyance.
It is that dinging reminder that he needs to keep himself safe in the event of a collision that, somehow, has Brian doing the opposite. He checks oncoming traffic, then throws open the driver's side door and steps out of the vehicle. When he approaches the plumber--stopping beyond arm's or hammer's reach--he does so with his hands on his hips, exposing the badge clipped to his hip.
"Yeah, hey, about that equipment..."
LuceThe plumber is standing by the driver's door, waiting. Frowning. Brian climbs out of his Corolla, into the street. The asphalt is damp beneath his feet, and he walks up alongside the van, paint peeling back from its frame here and there. The logo, he'll notice then, in his peripheral vision, with one part of his engaged brain, is spray-painted on and the world plumbing is misspelled as plumping for god's sake.
Miller + Son's Plumping the sign reads.
The man in coveralls is jangling keys, distracted, frowning over at the coffee shop when Brian calls out to him. He turns around, gives Brian this frown that as him flicking a look downwards, stiffening when he sees the badge.
"Shit, dude. I didn't actually mean I was going to do a Uie. I was gonna go around the block - " low and gruff, that drawl. Then, the moment when the mention of equipment registers, a deepening of his frown; another brief glance across the street. " - equipment? There a problem, officer?"
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
Brian HayesIn the dark, it is difficult to make out the department responsible for the badge, whether he is a state trooper or a city police officer or--worse than both of those--a federal agent, yet its matted gleam in the neon luminescence betrays its authenticity. This is not a prop. Bitten down upon, it would threaten to crack an eyetooth.
"I dunno," he says, staying by his own bumper and maintaining that air of authoritative nonchalance. It's a farce. If the guy moves too quickly, he will either have a gun drawn on him or an aging man with the build of a former and successful athlete tackling him to the ground. "Got a bit of a mess in the back of your van, there. Is there a problem?"
Luce"Jack of all trades, I am." The plumber returns, with the sort of grin that is meant to be winning. Or ingratiating. The sort poor assholes give to cops. Instead, it just comes off looking pained, as if the muscles he was putting into use had not had such use for months. Years. A fucking lifetime. "Fucking economy. Do some landscaping down at the - arborterrarium."
He has his hands up now, framing his body. The incongruous tools - the hammer, the massive wrench, the blowtorch - swing from his workman's belt as he moves. "Listen, I don't want no trouble. Just trying to finish a job. You know how it is."
--
Inside the coffee shop - movement. Another couple comes out into the cool night air, two men arm in arm. The long-haired Alex is now leaning back in the corner booth, alone, toying with the regalia of the tea. The tea ball and strainer, the teapot, the saucer and spoon and - while the girl winds her way back toward the lady's room. Phone in hand. Alex is squinting, trying to see out through the glass, darkened by the glare of the interior lights.
Brian's phone vibrates with a text. Problem? - from an unfamiliar number with a New York City area code.
Brian HayesHe left his phone on the seat. Its already-muffled rattle is swallowed by the closed car door, by traffic, by the conversation he is having with the plumber. As he is given not one but three bullshit explanations for the blood, Brian's face remains immobile.
"So you don't mind if I take a look, then?" he asks, as though the guy has a choice. If it is mud, or oil, or anything that might have been caused by landscaping, surely he won't protest. If he is either Miller or Son, surely he cannot be a proud man, driving around the city with a misspelled advertisement as he is.
LuceThe plumber looks up, past Brian's shoulder. Across the street. There's that expression. That crushing burden of sudden - deep, abiding, inhuman - anger crushing across his face. Hands fist at the minds side and then deliberately uncurl. One finger at a time.
"I do mind." The plumber grits out. Scowling at the copy. "I got a job. I'll move the fucking van if its in the way - " still finger his keys. "But for the rest, you got a fucking warrant."