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A Mother's Love - Part Twenty One
Oct. 21st, 2011 10:39 pmSilas Pike adjusted his expensive shades and settled down in his car, prepared for a long, long wait. He could see Adele Armando from where he had parked his car up on the side of the road, but not her companion. He knew it was Peck though, it had to be, and it made him both edgy and excited to know that tonight could see the end of his long awaited culmination of his plans.
He had never been that close to his brother, Brock was the typical oldest child, thought he knew everything, resented Silas hanging around, took every opportunity to humiliate him in front of his friends, but that had all changed once Silas had followed him into the army, stayed in Spec Ops while Brock had left to work for Black Forest. Then, suddenly he was a useful ally, with his contacts and his information, for the first time in his life, Brock actually valued him for something and Silas loved it.
Then Brock told him of his plans, about these printing plates, and how, after he'd got hold of them and then sold them on, he was going to set up in business somewhere, casinos maybe, import/export perhaps, and he wanted Silas to come and work with him. For him had been the actual phrase, but Silas knew that’s not really what would have happened, he was the one with a college degree in business, Brock had joined up at seventeen, their parents only too pleased to get him and his temper out of their house. Silas knew that together, they would have made an impressive team.
But that’s not quite what happened. Somehow, even though Silas had fulfilled his part of the deal and quit the army, started looking around for the right ‘opportunity’ for them to buy into, the whole business with the plates had blown up, literally, along with half of LA docks, and Brock had vanished off the face of the earth.
At first Silas had blamed that little CIA weasel, Lynch, and had set out to track him down. Six months it had taken him and then, when they had had the chance for their little ‘chat’; Lynch had told him something very interesting indeed.
Seems that Lynch hadn’t cut Brock out of the deal at all, had actually retrieved him from DOD custody and brought him back into play. Then, when the container ship had docked in LA, the plan had all gone to hell thanks to Smith and his team, all the players had scattered, Brock had gone after Peck, Lynch had seen him, hunting the bastard down between the fallen containers strewn over the dockside, but then, the unthinkable. When all the dust had cleared and Lynch had been taken into CIA custody for ‘de-briefing’ he’d heard that Brock was dead, his neck broken, killed by the bare hands of someone trained that way, a Ranger. Templeton fucking Peck. It was at that moment, that Silas’ plan had changed.
He let Lynch go, the CIA had him on a pretty spiky leash anyway, there was nothing he could do for Silas and vice versa, and instead turned his attention to Peck.
It wasn’t at all easy, the damn A-Team as they called themselves were as slippery as a Vaselined eel, and every time he thought he’d got close, they were off again, disappearing into nothing once more. He needed a way in, a guaranteed back door that wouldn’t set off all their alarms, and then, in his searching, he’d stumbled across Eddie Charring.
Eddie was a third rate private detective who had been hired by Adele Armando to permanently erase any link between herself and Templeton Peck. Silas was intrigued, and when he’d investigated further, he just couldn’t believe his luck, she was his mother, his actual, real life, honest to god, mother. But, and here was the first problem, she wanted absolutely nothing to do with her long lost son.
Silas dug a little deeper and found out some very interesting facts that explained just why. Three years previously, Adele had married Nari Armando, investment millionaire, who had promptly died after six months of marriage. Of course Adele was his sole beneficiary, he had recently amended his will to leave her everything, not a penny for his two sons and their families who had helped him run the business for years, or even his ex-wife who was in ill health. Everything for Adele, and so, obviously, the family had contested the will.
Silas had never quite managed to find out the ins and outs of the proceedings, but he did know that all Nari’s assets had been frozen and Adele given a very paltry allowance to live on while the case was worked out in the courts. He also discovered that the Armando boys had some fairly weighty evidence on their side and lots of influential friends. Talking to Luca Armando, Silas had actually heard the man promise that he would not rest well at night until he got every one of his father’s dollars away from ‘that woman’.
So, no wonder Adele was trying to bury her relationship to Peck under ten tonnes of concrete; being the mother of a notorious escaped convict would hardly do her reputation any good in such times of uncertainty. But that’s not what Silas wanted at all, oh no, he wanted her to embrace her once abandoned son, to draw him out of hiding so that Silas could execute his plot. He needed to persuade her, and obviously family ties were not going to work, so what was? Well, even without ever meeting her, he knew exactly what would have her eating out of his hand – money. Now all he had to do was work out exactly how much she would need to be promised in order to basically pull a con on her only child. Silas had taken a gamble on ten million dollars, any more and it might look too good to be true, but she had agreed so readily he knew he could have actually gone quite a bit lower.
And now she was on board, and so, unfortunately, was that fool Charring. But they had managed to locate Peck, and, even better, tonight, get him away from the rest of his damn team. All Silas had to do now was wait for Adele to leave, and then he would make his move. Tonight Brock’s murder would be avenged and Silas really couldn’t wait.
__________________________
The internet was a wonderful thing, and one that Murdock used regularly and for all sorts of reasons. He had a blog for starters, anonymous of course, his alias being ‘Sky Surfer’ and in it he blogged about a wide range of topics, the type of things that threatened to get him all wound up inside. He found that if he wrote them down or talked about them, then they weren’t too bad anymore, they didn’t try and fry his brain quite so much, and in order to save the rest of the team from his more random ramblings, he often chose to write them down. Over the past month he’d blogged about alien abductions, why there is always so much dust at the bottom of the cereal bag, whether or not it was actually possible to roll a helicopter in mid-air and how come you can buy pineapple jello mix when everyone knows that pineapples stop jello from setting. He had quite a few people who regularly checked back and commented on his blog. Lucy’s Mum101, who he imagined was a lovely dark haired thirty something in Detroit, Del Boy, who just had to be a fifty something from London, Skipper, who either stayed up all night to post or lived in Australia and Scipio who Murdock knew damn well was Face even though he’d never admitted to it.
In addition to blogging, he thought that the internet was great for shopping, especially those harder to find Lego sets and T-shirts with the classier logos on them, recipes, keeping up with the lives of old buddies on Facebook (even though he didn’t have his own account), reading classy fan fiction and, of course, tracking down imaginary doctors who were listed on obviously forged medical documents.
After three hours of meticulous research, Murdock was quite convinced that none of the ‘Dr. Anthony Prowitt’s' that he had found on line were the one who had signed Adele’s original letter of diagnosis; one was retired, one a specialist in male impotence in Quebec and one dead. He was also secure in the belief that St. Mary’s Hospital in New York City, whilst most certainly existing, had not only never had an employee called Dr. Anthony Prowitt, but, in being centre for paediatric care, had never had Adele Armando through its doors as a patient, either.
He went off to get himself a coffee and as he watched the milk slowly circulate in his pan, he thought about his next move. Whilst the efforts of this afternoon had proved without doubt that Adele’s records were manufactured, what they hadn’t proved was that she was definitely not dying of leukaemia. That was his next step, and for that, Sky Surfer had to be prepared to do some serious hacking.
____________________________
Silas sat up straight and watched with mounting tension as Peck and Adele slowly walked along the pavement towards his parked car. Adele was talking, her hands gesturing as she spoke but Peck wasn’t looking. His face, hidden by the peak of his cap, was pointing down at the ground, his entire posture screaming of tension. Eventually they stopped next to a taxi that had arrived only moments before they appeared and Silas watched with baited breath, hoping that Peck wouldn’t climb in with his mother.
It must have been Silas’ day, as with a clumsy kiss on his mother’s artfully presented cheek, Peck turned and walked back down towards the entrance to the bar, not turning to look as the taxi peeled away and headed back from the coast. Silas continue to watch carefully as Peck climbed up to sit on the fence just along from the entrance, checking his phone briefly as he did and then settling down with his eyes on the top of the road where his mother’s taxi had just disappeared.
Silas was in motion almost immediately; it was obvious that Peck was waiting for a lift, and so he knew that he had to make his move immediately before whichever team member it was turned up and spoiled his plans. He checked his gun, examined the suppressor carefully and then slid it into his suit pocket, the one he’d had made with the hidden flap in the front, perfect for keeping the lengthened barrel hidden but still very much in use.
He slid from the car and set off at a measured pace towards Peck, hand securely around the butt of his gun, finger on the trigger and his plan clear in his mind. This was not about a quick bullet into the head, oh, no, most certainly not. If it had been he would never have needed Adele, could have hidden on any number of rooftops and shot Peck through the eyes without even raising a sweat. No, this was about much, much more than that, and the gun was only a tool at this stage, just something to persuade Peck that he really needed to get into the back seat of the car with Silas. Once they were there, the hypodermic needle, duct tape and picnic blankets would do the rest of the job, just until Silas had driven back to his carefully prepared warehouse site, and that’s when the fun could really start.
But he was no fool here, Silas knew damn well that Peck was dangerous, hell, he had to be if he had managed to better Brock in hand to hand combat. So, if there was any trouble, any at all, then Silas would use the gun, three silent shots to the stomach he figured would do it and then he would turn away and leave Peck to bleed out all over the sidewalk. Maybe not quite as satisfying as Plan A, but it would suffice.
He looked up at his target who was still perched on the fence, idly toying with his phone as he continued to stare up at the road and Silas took a deep calming breath as he approached the twenty meter mark. He could see it all in his head exactly as it would play out, how he would pretend to be walking on by, but then feint in at the last second, let Peck feel the gun in his gut and they would turn back to walk up to Silas’ car looking to the whole world as if they were just two mates heading back home after beers on the beach. If Peck protested and tried something stupid, or if his lift arrived before they’d reached the safety of the car, then Plan B would come into action immediately. Silas could already feel the solid thump of the recoil as the gun spoke silently from his pocket, one, two three, times, see the look of stunned horror on Peck’s face as he realised he’d been shot, even feel the heat of the blood as it rushed to leave its host. Beautiful.
Ten meters, and the door to the Bar opened but Silas ignored it, no one would see anything suspicious here, he needed to stick with his plan and get Peck back to his car before the cavalry arrived.
“Oh, hey! Hi!” Despite his focus, Silas jumped at the voice and frowned in annoyance as the waitress from the beach suddenly appeared at Peck’s side, looking annoyingly delighted to see him sitting there as she pulled a thin jacket on over her work clothes, Silas slowed his pace, hoping she would disappear just as quickly as she had arrived and kept on walking.
“Talia, hi,” Peck smiled the type of stupid grin that girls always seemed to find enticing and Silas felt his dislike of the man grow exponentially.
“You not gone with your mom then?” the waitress asked and Silas cursed her to hell as he now had to walk past them both, knowing his window of opportunity was closing all the while.
“Nope,” Peck replied, stupid smile still firmly in place, “waiting for my buddy to pick me up.”
“Oh.”
Silas frowned at the crestfallen expression on the girl’s face as he walked out of ear shot and then turned, pretending to stand and watch the waves whilst surreptitiously watching Peck and the girl out of the corner of his eye. Their conversation dragged on as his impatience grew and he could feel his trigger finger itching to get this over and done with. He was just wondering if it would be too obvious to shoot them both where they stood when a beaten up old Chevy pulled up alongside Peck and he saw him slide down from the fence, smiling apologetically at the disappointed looking waitress as he went. Silas stood and tried not to glare as Peck opened the passenger door and climbed in, raising a hand in farewell as the Chevy pulled off immediately, did a neat three point turn and disappeared back up the hill taking his quarry with it, but it was hard, almost as hard as sliding the safety catch back onto his gun as he turned and headed back to his car.
______________________________
Hannibal had been pleased when he’d first seen Face perched on the fence as he drove down towards the beach. He’d been on tenterhooks the whole time Face had been with Adele, worrying about the state he would be in when Hannibal got him back, but as soon as he saw him, sitting there in the sun, flirting with the girl standing at his side, Hannibal relaxed.
But then Face had climbed into the car, letting out the world’s longest breath and tipped his head back in the seat, eyes closed and silent. Hannibal flicked him a concerned glance as he turned the car, and then they were on their way, the quiet like an oppressive blanket around them.
“You okay?” Hannibal finally asked into the silence, adding a, “How’d it go?” when Face hadn’t answered.
“Alright,” Face muttered, eyes still shut tight.
“Did you talk about...?” Hannibal trailed off, uneasy about how to phrase his question.
“The dying business?” Face offered, “Yeah, we did.
“And?”
At last Face turned and looked at Hannibal, his eyes tired and a headache just building at his temple. “And she said she never thought to renew the insurance when her husband died and that there are treatments available but only at a hugely prohibitive cost. She can’t afford them, so the docs have told her she has about three months left that’s all.”
The silence fell once again as Hannibal let all that information swirl around in his head while Face closed his eyes once more.
“Shit, kid, three months, that sucks...” he eventually muttered.
“Yeah,” Face agreed. “I said I would look into some things for her, see what I could do.”
Hannibal frowned, “What sort of things?” he asked quietly and watched as Face shrugged in the corner of his vision.
“You know, fake i.ds, that sort of thing.”
They slipped into silence as Hannibal crawled through the busy streets, his mind in a whirl. “Face,” he asked eventually, carefully, “Has she asked you for anything?”
Face cracked an eye at him, “Asked me for something?” he frowned back at Hannibal’s expression, “No. Why would she?”
Hannibal fixed his eyes on the road, “No reason,” he muttered but Face continued to stare at the side of his head.
“You think all of this is just because she wants something from me?” he asked.
“No,” Hannibal replied instantly, wishing he’d never started this, “of course not, forget I said it.”
Face thought for a moment. “You do,” he insisted. “And what have I possibly got that she would ever be interested in?” Hannibal remained silent, “She’s dying, boss, how can I help her with that?”
Hannibal reached across and squeezed Face’s thigh through his jeans, “I’m sorry, kid,” he said as sincerely as he could. “Forget it, I was just thinking out loud.”
Face looked at Hannibal for a second longer before turning away, closing his eyes and lapsing into silence once more while Hannibal looked out at the road as his mind continued to churn around the different possibilities he could see.
“Are you seeing her again?” Hannibal tentatively asked after another five minutes of driving.
“Yeah,” Face sighed, “tomorrow night. She seemed fairly keen so I tried to put her off, told her I was going to the Angels game with Murdock.”
Hannibal looked over at his still closed eyes.
“And?”
“She said that was okay, she liked baseball and she would come too.” Face replied flatly.
“Oh.” Hannibal said, unsure how else to reply and went back to his driving. Adele at the baseball game was hard to imagine. Something about all of this just didn’t sit right and he was very keen to see if Murdock had come up with anything concrete in those medical notes. It was infuriating, the way he knew Adele was lying, but couldn’t for the life of him work out why she would do that. It was a riddle he didn’t have the answer to and the whole situation was as frustrating as all hell. Perhaps that was why he didn’t see the black Cadillac four cars back that was following their every turn...
Next
He had never been that close to his brother, Brock was the typical oldest child, thought he knew everything, resented Silas hanging around, took every opportunity to humiliate him in front of his friends, but that had all changed once Silas had followed him into the army, stayed in Spec Ops while Brock had left to work for Black Forest. Then, suddenly he was a useful ally, with his contacts and his information, for the first time in his life, Brock actually valued him for something and Silas loved it.
Then Brock told him of his plans, about these printing plates, and how, after he'd got hold of them and then sold them on, he was going to set up in business somewhere, casinos maybe, import/export perhaps, and he wanted Silas to come and work with him. For him had been the actual phrase, but Silas knew that’s not really what would have happened, he was the one with a college degree in business, Brock had joined up at seventeen, their parents only too pleased to get him and his temper out of their house. Silas knew that together, they would have made an impressive team.
But that’s not quite what happened. Somehow, even though Silas had fulfilled his part of the deal and quit the army, started looking around for the right ‘opportunity’ for them to buy into, the whole business with the plates had blown up, literally, along with half of LA docks, and Brock had vanished off the face of the earth.
At first Silas had blamed that little CIA weasel, Lynch, and had set out to track him down. Six months it had taken him and then, when they had had the chance for their little ‘chat’; Lynch had told him something very interesting indeed.
Seems that Lynch hadn’t cut Brock out of the deal at all, had actually retrieved him from DOD custody and brought him back into play. Then, when the container ship had docked in LA, the plan had all gone to hell thanks to Smith and his team, all the players had scattered, Brock had gone after Peck, Lynch had seen him, hunting the bastard down between the fallen containers strewn over the dockside, but then, the unthinkable. When all the dust had cleared and Lynch had been taken into CIA custody for ‘de-briefing’ he’d heard that Brock was dead, his neck broken, killed by the bare hands of someone trained that way, a Ranger. Templeton fucking Peck. It was at that moment, that Silas’ plan had changed.
He let Lynch go, the CIA had him on a pretty spiky leash anyway, there was nothing he could do for Silas and vice versa, and instead turned his attention to Peck.
It wasn’t at all easy, the damn A-Team as they called themselves were as slippery as a Vaselined eel, and every time he thought he’d got close, they were off again, disappearing into nothing once more. He needed a way in, a guaranteed back door that wouldn’t set off all their alarms, and then, in his searching, he’d stumbled across Eddie Charring.
Eddie was a third rate private detective who had been hired by Adele Armando to permanently erase any link between herself and Templeton Peck. Silas was intrigued, and when he’d investigated further, he just couldn’t believe his luck, she was his mother, his actual, real life, honest to god, mother. But, and here was the first problem, she wanted absolutely nothing to do with her long lost son.
Silas dug a little deeper and found out some very interesting facts that explained just why. Three years previously, Adele had married Nari Armando, investment millionaire, who had promptly died after six months of marriage. Of course Adele was his sole beneficiary, he had recently amended his will to leave her everything, not a penny for his two sons and their families who had helped him run the business for years, or even his ex-wife who was in ill health. Everything for Adele, and so, obviously, the family had contested the will.
Silas had never quite managed to find out the ins and outs of the proceedings, but he did know that all Nari’s assets had been frozen and Adele given a very paltry allowance to live on while the case was worked out in the courts. He also discovered that the Armando boys had some fairly weighty evidence on their side and lots of influential friends. Talking to Luca Armando, Silas had actually heard the man promise that he would not rest well at night until he got every one of his father’s dollars away from ‘that woman’.
So, no wonder Adele was trying to bury her relationship to Peck under ten tonnes of concrete; being the mother of a notorious escaped convict would hardly do her reputation any good in such times of uncertainty. But that’s not what Silas wanted at all, oh no, he wanted her to embrace her once abandoned son, to draw him out of hiding so that Silas could execute his plot. He needed to persuade her, and obviously family ties were not going to work, so what was? Well, even without ever meeting her, he knew exactly what would have her eating out of his hand – money. Now all he had to do was work out exactly how much she would need to be promised in order to basically pull a con on her only child. Silas had taken a gamble on ten million dollars, any more and it might look too good to be true, but she had agreed so readily he knew he could have actually gone quite a bit lower.
And now she was on board, and so, unfortunately, was that fool Charring. But they had managed to locate Peck, and, even better, tonight, get him away from the rest of his damn team. All Silas had to do now was wait for Adele to leave, and then he would make his move. Tonight Brock’s murder would be avenged and Silas really couldn’t wait.
__________________________
The internet was a wonderful thing, and one that Murdock used regularly and for all sorts of reasons. He had a blog for starters, anonymous of course, his alias being ‘Sky Surfer’ and in it he blogged about a wide range of topics, the type of things that threatened to get him all wound up inside. He found that if he wrote them down or talked about them, then they weren’t too bad anymore, they didn’t try and fry his brain quite so much, and in order to save the rest of the team from his more random ramblings, he often chose to write them down. Over the past month he’d blogged about alien abductions, why there is always so much dust at the bottom of the cereal bag, whether or not it was actually possible to roll a helicopter in mid-air and how come you can buy pineapple jello mix when everyone knows that pineapples stop jello from setting. He had quite a few people who regularly checked back and commented on his blog. Lucy’s Mum101, who he imagined was a lovely dark haired thirty something in Detroit, Del Boy, who just had to be a fifty something from London, Skipper, who either stayed up all night to post or lived in Australia and Scipio who Murdock knew damn well was Face even though he’d never admitted to it.
In addition to blogging, he thought that the internet was great for shopping, especially those harder to find Lego sets and T-shirts with the classier logos on them, recipes, keeping up with the lives of old buddies on Facebook (even though he didn’t have his own account), reading classy fan fiction and, of course, tracking down imaginary doctors who were listed on obviously forged medical documents.
After three hours of meticulous research, Murdock was quite convinced that none of the ‘Dr. Anthony Prowitt’s' that he had found on line were the one who had signed Adele’s original letter of diagnosis; one was retired, one a specialist in male impotence in Quebec and one dead. He was also secure in the belief that St. Mary’s Hospital in New York City, whilst most certainly existing, had not only never had an employee called Dr. Anthony Prowitt, but, in being centre for paediatric care, had never had Adele Armando through its doors as a patient, either.
He went off to get himself a coffee and as he watched the milk slowly circulate in his pan, he thought about his next move. Whilst the efforts of this afternoon had proved without doubt that Adele’s records were manufactured, what they hadn’t proved was that she was definitely not dying of leukaemia. That was his next step, and for that, Sky Surfer had to be prepared to do some serious hacking.
____________________________
Silas sat up straight and watched with mounting tension as Peck and Adele slowly walked along the pavement towards his parked car. Adele was talking, her hands gesturing as she spoke but Peck wasn’t looking. His face, hidden by the peak of his cap, was pointing down at the ground, his entire posture screaming of tension. Eventually they stopped next to a taxi that had arrived only moments before they appeared and Silas watched with baited breath, hoping that Peck wouldn’t climb in with his mother.
It must have been Silas’ day, as with a clumsy kiss on his mother’s artfully presented cheek, Peck turned and walked back down towards the entrance to the bar, not turning to look as the taxi peeled away and headed back from the coast. Silas continue to watch carefully as Peck climbed up to sit on the fence just along from the entrance, checking his phone briefly as he did and then settling down with his eyes on the top of the road where his mother’s taxi had just disappeared.
Silas was in motion almost immediately; it was obvious that Peck was waiting for a lift, and so he knew that he had to make his move immediately before whichever team member it was turned up and spoiled his plans. He checked his gun, examined the suppressor carefully and then slid it into his suit pocket, the one he’d had made with the hidden flap in the front, perfect for keeping the lengthened barrel hidden but still very much in use.
He slid from the car and set off at a measured pace towards Peck, hand securely around the butt of his gun, finger on the trigger and his plan clear in his mind. This was not about a quick bullet into the head, oh, no, most certainly not. If it had been he would never have needed Adele, could have hidden on any number of rooftops and shot Peck through the eyes without even raising a sweat. No, this was about much, much more than that, and the gun was only a tool at this stage, just something to persuade Peck that he really needed to get into the back seat of the car with Silas. Once they were there, the hypodermic needle, duct tape and picnic blankets would do the rest of the job, just until Silas had driven back to his carefully prepared warehouse site, and that’s when the fun could really start.
But he was no fool here, Silas knew damn well that Peck was dangerous, hell, he had to be if he had managed to better Brock in hand to hand combat. So, if there was any trouble, any at all, then Silas would use the gun, three silent shots to the stomach he figured would do it and then he would turn away and leave Peck to bleed out all over the sidewalk. Maybe not quite as satisfying as Plan A, but it would suffice.
He looked up at his target who was still perched on the fence, idly toying with his phone as he continued to stare up at the road and Silas took a deep calming breath as he approached the twenty meter mark. He could see it all in his head exactly as it would play out, how he would pretend to be walking on by, but then feint in at the last second, let Peck feel the gun in his gut and they would turn back to walk up to Silas’ car looking to the whole world as if they were just two mates heading back home after beers on the beach. If Peck protested and tried something stupid, or if his lift arrived before they’d reached the safety of the car, then Plan B would come into action immediately. Silas could already feel the solid thump of the recoil as the gun spoke silently from his pocket, one, two three, times, see the look of stunned horror on Peck’s face as he realised he’d been shot, even feel the heat of the blood as it rushed to leave its host. Beautiful.
Ten meters, and the door to the Bar opened but Silas ignored it, no one would see anything suspicious here, he needed to stick with his plan and get Peck back to his car before the cavalry arrived.
“Oh, hey! Hi!” Despite his focus, Silas jumped at the voice and frowned in annoyance as the waitress from the beach suddenly appeared at Peck’s side, looking annoyingly delighted to see him sitting there as she pulled a thin jacket on over her work clothes, Silas slowed his pace, hoping she would disappear just as quickly as she had arrived and kept on walking.
“Talia, hi,” Peck smiled the type of stupid grin that girls always seemed to find enticing and Silas felt his dislike of the man grow exponentially.
“You not gone with your mom then?” the waitress asked and Silas cursed her to hell as he now had to walk past them both, knowing his window of opportunity was closing all the while.
“Nope,” Peck replied, stupid smile still firmly in place, “waiting for my buddy to pick me up.”
“Oh.”
Silas frowned at the crestfallen expression on the girl’s face as he walked out of ear shot and then turned, pretending to stand and watch the waves whilst surreptitiously watching Peck and the girl out of the corner of his eye. Their conversation dragged on as his impatience grew and he could feel his trigger finger itching to get this over and done with. He was just wondering if it would be too obvious to shoot them both where they stood when a beaten up old Chevy pulled up alongside Peck and he saw him slide down from the fence, smiling apologetically at the disappointed looking waitress as he went. Silas stood and tried not to glare as Peck opened the passenger door and climbed in, raising a hand in farewell as the Chevy pulled off immediately, did a neat three point turn and disappeared back up the hill taking his quarry with it, but it was hard, almost as hard as sliding the safety catch back onto his gun as he turned and headed back to his car.
______________________________
Hannibal had been pleased when he’d first seen Face perched on the fence as he drove down towards the beach. He’d been on tenterhooks the whole time Face had been with Adele, worrying about the state he would be in when Hannibal got him back, but as soon as he saw him, sitting there in the sun, flirting with the girl standing at his side, Hannibal relaxed.
But then Face had climbed into the car, letting out the world’s longest breath and tipped his head back in the seat, eyes closed and silent. Hannibal flicked him a concerned glance as he turned the car, and then they were on their way, the quiet like an oppressive blanket around them.
“You okay?” Hannibal finally asked into the silence, adding a, “How’d it go?” when Face hadn’t answered.
“Alright,” Face muttered, eyes still shut tight.
“Did you talk about...?” Hannibal trailed off, uneasy about how to phrase his question.
“The dying business?” Face offered, “Yeah, we did.
“And?”
At last Face turned and looked at Hannibal, his eyes tired and a headache just building at his temple. “And she said she never thought to renew the insurance when her husband died and that there are treatments available but only at a hugely prohibitive cost. She can’t afford them, so the docs have told her she has about three months left that’s all.”
The silence fell once again as Hannibal let all that information swirl around in his head while Face closed his eyes once more.
“Shit, kid, three months, that sucks...” he eventually muttered.
“Yeah,” Face agreed. “I said I would look into some things for her, see what I could do.”
Hannibal frowned, “What sort of things?” he asked quietly and watched as Face shrugged in the corner of his vision.
“You know, fake i.ds, that sort of thing.”
They slipped into silence as Hannibal crawled through the busy streets, his mind in a whirl. “Face,” he asked eventually, carefully, “Has she asked you for anything?”
Face cracked an eye at him, “Asked me for something?” he frowned back at Hannibal’s expression, “No. Why would she?”
Hannibal fixed his eyes on the road, “No reason,” he muttered but Face continued to stare at the side of his head.
“You think all of this is just because she wants something from me?” he asked.
“No,” Hannibal replied instantly, wishing he’d never started this, “of course not, forget I said it.”
Face thought for a moment. “You do,” he insisted. “And what have I possibly got that she would ever be interested in?” Hannibal remained silent, “She’s dying, boss, how can I help her with that?”
Hannibal reached across and squeezed Face’s thigh through his jeans, “I’m sorry, kid,” he said as sincerely as he could. “Forget it, I was just thinking out loud.”
Face looked at Hannibal for a second longer before turning away, closing his eyes and lapsing into silence once more while Hannibal looked out at the road as his mind continued to churn around the different possibilities he could see.
“Are you seeing her again?” Hannibal tentatively asked after another five minutes of driving.
“Yeah,” Face sighed, “tomorrow night. She seemed fairly keen so I tried to put her off, told her I was going to the Angels game with Murdock.”
Hannibal looked over at his still closed eyes.
“And?”
“She said that was okay, she liked baseball and she would come too.” Face replied flatly.
“Oh.” Hannibal said, unsure how else to reply and went back to his driving. Adele at the baseball game was hard to imagine. Something about all of this just didn’t sit right and he was very keen to see if Murdock had come up with anything concrete in those medical notes. It was infuriating, the way he knew Adele was lying, but couldn’t for the life of him work out why she would do that. It was a riddle he didn’t have the answer to and the whole situation was as frustrating as all hell. Perhaps that was why he didn’t see the black Cadillac four cars back that was following their every turn...
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