Charlie perched on the top row of the bleachers, scorekeeping notebook balanced on his knees. The FBI team was batting, the LAPD team fielding, and David would be at the plate next. Even now he was standing by the bench, practicing his swing. Charlie had to make an effort to focus on the man actually at bat; when his gaze strayed sideways to David, David smiled and winked.
Charlie looked back to the plate just in time to see the umpire call the third strike, and that was it for the sixth inning. Charlie squinted at the page--sunlight reflected brutally off the white surface--and totaled up the counts. When he looked back toward the field, Terry was standing at the bottom of the bleachers looking up.
She was dressed casually, jeans and a faded t-shirt, the curve of her hips unbroken by a holster. She raised her eyebrows and nodded toward the bench to Charlie's right, silently asking permission. Charlie nodded back, waving his hand toward the empty space.
Terry settled beside him on the bleachers as the FBI team took up their positions on the field. David was playing second base (error-free, two fly balls caught so far). Terry yelled, "Go Feds!" and let out a piercing whistle.
Charlie just smiled, positioning his pencil over the seventh inning box. "You don't play?"
Terry smiled back and seemed to relax a little. He'd hardly seen her since the first time she and David came to the house; she must have been expecting him to freak out. "Baseball's not really my sport. Watching's fun, though, if you know somebody playing."
Charlie nodded. The LAPD sent out their first batter.
"Or if you're watching with somebody," Terry added.
Charlie nodded absently, watching the batter square up. His stance was subtly different than at his first two at-bats (one walk, one double). Terry was here for David, or here for Charlie--or both, maybe. There was no need to reduce her behavior to a single variable.
"In fact," Terry said, "I'm on my way to a game. Nats versus Dodgers at RFK Stadium."
Charlie frowned and recorded the batter's first strike. "That's in Washington."
Terry nodded. "I'm running about a year late, but my date was willing to reschedule under the circumstances."
The bat cracked against the ball, and Charlie's eye traced the beautiful high arc of a pop fly, falling perfectly into David's glove. Terry applauded while Charlie recorded the play. A year late--last June, then, or early July depending on Terry's definition of about.
Charlie could guess at the circumstances, but not the date. "I'm sorry, I still don't remember..."
Terry shook her head. "No, I'm--this is hard, and I'm being cryptic. I'm transferring to Washington, Charlie. My ex lives there, and we want to give it another try."
The rest was obvious. "You were about to transfer when I was kidnapped."
Terry nodded. "I already had my paperwork in, but I couldn't leave Don then. Once he left to find you, I knew I had to hold down the fort--and after he resigned like he did, the FBI wasn't letting me go anywhere."
Charlie looked her in the eye at that, searching her steady gaze for blame or fear and finding neither. "But now they're letting you go."
Terry nodded again and looked back out toward the field.
Charlie kept watching her, recording a strike when he heard the umpire call it. "Does that mean they're letting him go, too?"
Terry frowned down at her hands. "Nobody's assigned to the case, as far as I know, but they'll never close it without finding him. Any trail he leaves now could still be traced in the future, if the Bureau ever decides it's time to bring him in."
Charlie nodded. The Bureau wasn't looking, though, and Don wouldn't need more than that; he'd be careful. He'd be safe. The FBI would have no reason to ever go looking.
Terry looked up again, the frown easing from her face. "Charlie, Don left me something. I don't think he wanted you to have it, but he trusted me with it and it's my call to make now."
Charlie couldn't move.
"That was a strike," Terry said softly, and Charlie looked down blindly at the page and made the mark.
Don had left something--some link, something Terry had been in possession of all along--but Charlie already had nearly every material thing Don could have spared to leave. Terry wouldn't have risked keeping some incriminating object, and she obviously wasn't carrying anything now.
Charlie swallowed hard. "It's a message?"
Terry smiled, but the expression didn't reach her eyes. "Yeah, it is."
She paused, then turned her head toward him, looking him in the eye as she said, "Six oh five two three nine oh four four six. If he needs me."
Charlie felt his hands go slack, and felt Terry grab the notebook and pencil off his lap. He buried his face in his hands, and his hair brushed against the backs of his fingers, finally grown out long enough to give him a little cover when he needed it.
If he needs me. And a phone number--a phone number, he could call Don if--
"Charlie." Terry spoke just before she touched his arm, so Charlie froze but didn't jump. Terry didn't say anything else, and didn't take her hand away. Charlie could hear, far away and faint, the game going on. He hoped someone was paying attention. He'd have to crib the count.
He scrubbed his palms hard against his eyes and then looked up, meeting Terry's gaze. "I've got it," he said quietly.
Terry nodded. "I don't know which one of us knows Don better now, but I'll tell you this: that number is only going to work for you once. Choose your moment."
Charlie nodded, and Terry squeezed his arm, leaning in quickly to press a kiss to his forehead. Charlie had a sudden sick sense of déjà vu, Don bending down to kiss his forehead as the drugs pulled him down into unconsciousness. Then Terry straightened up and walked back down the bleachers, and Charlie reached for his notebook and pencil with shaking hands, squinting against the sunlight reflected off the page.
Charlie couldn't pass a phone without touching it. His cell phone was constantly in his pocket--on the bathroom counter when he took a shower, under his pillow when he slept. The phones in the house, in his office, the pay phone at the grocery store, had all taken on a magical significance now. They had an impossible mass, small objects that nonetheless exerted their own gravitational pull over him.
He had a phone number. He could call Don.
If he needed him. And only once. Only at great risk to Don, because how could he be sure the FBI didn't have him under some kind of surveillance? Even if they didn't, they might check his phone records sometime in the future and spot the anomalous call.
And there was no guarantee that Don would answer, and only the slimmest of possibilities that Don wouldn't hang up on him instantly. Don could still be dead--or the phone could be. It had been nearly six months now. Anything could have happened in that time.
But there was a possibility now. The phone number, the message--that was concrete evidence that Don had intended to be alive, and reachable, in case Charlie needed him.
Charlie was living proof that Don did what he intended to do.
So Charlie didn't call. He didn't need to, not really. He was getting along all right. Kelley had told him that most cases of post-traumatic stress resolved naturally within six months, and he was doing better, he was functioning. He went to school and worked, even talked to students when they stopped by his office. He emailed back and forth with Amita, trying to reconstruct the thought process that had been forcibly interrupted on that morning in July. He ran errands with his father and didn't hesitate as he drifted by a payphone, pretending that reaching out to touch it was only a whim.
Charlie remembered, with a crystal clarity edged in adrenaline, that first morning after Don left him here, his first time back in the house. He'd been surrounded by strange things that had since become familiar again, confronted with strange people who had become his family again. He remembered the first thing Larry had said. The waveform collapses.
While he was missing, Charlie had been Schroedinger's Cat, alive and not alive, safe and not safe, until he was seen again by the people who loved him, and reality collapsed into a single stream. Now it was Don in the theoretical box, existing in two states simultaneously for as long as Charlie didn't call. Equally safe and endangered, equally found and lost.
Charlie didn't call.
Terry sat at her gate with her phone in her hand, waiting for her flight to start boarding and choosing her words. Cutting out all the ones that started with jerk and asshole saved a lot of time. So did cutting out all the questions that couldn't be answered. Everything that started with why was as pointless as name-calling.
Explanations would be redundant. I thought you would want to know was meaner than asshole and would take longer to say. Goodbye would be cruel.
She couldn't spook him away from this line, and she couldn't say anything incriminating. No names. No more than a few seconds. Everything she had to say about herself and her soft spot for exes would be said by the fact that she called.
The flight was boarding, and in the flurry of people around her standing up and gathering their bags, Terry hit send.
Two rings, and the phone on the other end was picked up. Terry didn't wait for a greeting, didn't force him to decide what name to speak into the phone. She couldn't remember him ever answering her call with something as pointless as hello and she didn't want him to start now.
"He's doing all right," she said, softly but clearly, so there could be no mistake.
There was maybe a small sound, a breath or a sigh--or maybe it was her own breathing, or the woman sidling past her with a too-large bag.
Terry hung up her phone and turned it off. That was that. She was finished with LA, and it was long past time to go.
Charlie woke up from a confused dream about being late to a baseball game, pursued by a bully who was also his Aunt Helen. He'd worked out a path-selecting algorithm to evade her, but it made the trip to the ball park longer, and then he wouldn't have time to tell Don about figuring it out before the game started.
He woke up still swamped with the need to tell Don what he'd figured out, though the dream-algorithm melted with the dream. He sat up in bed and realized he had his phone in his hand--he could call Don--but no, that would be stupid, calling Don in the middle of the night. He dropped the phone on the night stand. He could just go across the hall.
Charlie stood in the doorway to Don's room for a minute, staring at the empty bed, unable to process it--but no, of course Don wasn't there. Charlie shook his head, smiling at himself, and then stepped inside anyway. Even when Donnie wasn't home, his bed always felt safer than Charlie's.
Charlie pulled the covers over his head and was asleep again before he had time to do more than wish Don had spent the night tonight.
Charlie woke up disoriented, blinking in sunshine coming from the wrong direction. He looked around for a minute, baffled, before it fell into place. Don's room. He was in Don's room. He rubbed his face, remembering vaguely that he'd had some dream and come over here, looking for--
Looking for his brother.
Charlie grabbed the pillow and pressed it hard to his face, letting it muffle the strangled sound he made, tearing out of his throat, something between a scream and a sob and--
Looking for his brother. Looking for Don.
Wishing Don had spent the night, like he used to sometimes when he came home for dinner--after a case, or--
It was like being dropped into deep water, crashing waves of memory pushing him here and there. It was like the time they'd been down at the beach and Charlie had walked out to the end of a pier and fell (jumped, he'd jumped, he never told anyone he jumped) in. The water was so much bigger than he was, cold and deep and solid, knocking him back and forth, filling his mouth with salt. It had been someone else who pulled him out, a grownup, but it had been Don who knelt over him on the warm dry wood of the dock with the bright sky behind his head, saying, "Charlie--are you okay? What'd you do that for? Charlie?"
Charlie was twisting on Don's bed, clutching the pillow, the sheets, the mattress, looking for somewhere deeper to hide, something solid to hang on to. He remembered the first agent he'd seen zipped into a body bag, and the bandage on Don's arm (a scar, he'd seen it as a scar, just below Don's elbow, and barely thought about where it came from). He remembered--he remembered Don saying, "It's over, Charlie, Mom's gone," and he remembered Don standing at the plate, in the stance that meant he was about to knock the next pitch out of the park. He remembered.
After a while he found himself holding still, on hands and knees with his forehead pressed to the scratchy bare mattress. The pillow had gotten away from him, and he felt light-headed and hollow--buoyant, maybe. You could float on top of the ocean if you held yourself just right. You didn't have to drown.
Charlie had been four years old when Don taught him to swim.
His arms and legs went out from under him all at once, and he rolled as he fell to the bed. He lay flat on his back, arms and legs outstretched. He kept his chin tilted up and remembered to breathe.
It was like when he'd first started getting his memories back, all over again. Everything that had started to seem familiar and normal changed all over again, because now Don was everywhere he looked. Don had eaten breakfast with Charlie at the dining room table before Charlie's first day of high school. Don had stood at the sink washing dishes while Charlie stood next to him on a chair to dry them. Don had grumbled every time Charlie came creeping into his bedroom, but rarely actually kicked him out.
Charlie retreated into the garage after a few hours (Don had come out here to convince him to help on a case, come out here with files and photos and jobs he needed Charlie to do). He managed to lose himself in his work, and it wasn't until late that night that he found himself idly sketching a Scrabble board above an expression he couldn't quite work out.
He smiled a little, thinking of kissing Don by the chalkboards, and then the memory of his brother collided with the memory of Don. Charlie felt suddenly winded, like he'd somehow just punched himself in the stomach.
This was it, this was what he'd been afraid of, this was why he'd never wanted to remember--but even as Charlie closed his eyes against the revulsion he was sure he would feel in a moment, he realized that wasn't what he should have been afraid of.
Grief came crashing down.
The kiss over Scrabble, that had been all right, that had been as good as it got for him and Don, who they were then. Who Don was, by then. What stole his breath now, what filled his chest with lead, was the realization of how enormously Don had been altered, between an afternoon in July and a day in November with no time to tell. Charlie had been the only one grabbed at gunpoint that morning, but he hadn't been the only victim. They'd changed his brother into the man he knew, they'd hurt him and scarred him and broken him without ever touching him, and they'd used Charlie to do it as surely as Williamson had used him to rob banks.
E=mc², Don had said when Charlie asked to be called c. The conversion of mass to energy--nothing was lost, but everything changed. You couldn't un-split an atom, and he couldn't bring Don home and make him back into the brother Charlie remembered. But Charlie had been able to make Don smile, even in the midst of everything. He'd made Don happy sometimes, and Don had made him happy. They'd felt good, and they'd been a team.
Don had nobody now--Don was all alone out there wherever he was, at the other end of that phone number with no partner, no brother, no family, no backup.
Charlie had been standing behind Don in the hallway of the house as they made their escape. Charlie had been the one to spot Williamson, and Charlie had shot him before he could shoot Don.
Charlie had saved Don's life, too.
But Charlie hadn't been able to drop Don somewhere safe afterward. Charlie hadn't been able to promise Don that no one would hurt him again. Not even me, Charlie thought, his lips twisting in a wry smile.
Charlie flipped the chalkboard to the clean side and started sketching out a plan. He wasn't done with Don yet, and just like that Charlie finally had a job to do.
He locked himself in his office the next morning with a big printed outline map of the United States. People were used to his office door being locked. No one would bother him, and he could work without worrying about anyone realizing what he was working on.
He laid the map out across his worktable and leaned over it with a red marker in hand, thinking it out. If Don were going to be reachable with a US phone number--presumably a cell phone--he had to be somewhere in the United States. The logistics of travel to and from Hawaii--by air, requiring identification and security checks--would be prohibitive. Charlie crossed it out first.
Alaska was next up. Charlie considered it for a moment--the border with Canada, overland, was significantly more porous--but it was still an isolated location with low population density. Don was accustomed to living and working in cities, and if he'd intended to be available to Charlie in an emergency, he wouldn't want to risk getting caught at a border crossing coming back.
That left the lower forty-eight states. Charlie studied the map, considering.
The problem was a little like the first violent-crime case he'd worked on with Don, finding out where the LA Rapist worked by plotting backward from his crime scenes. Charlie's data on Don was all old and plotting where he would be from where he had been was a highly subjective exercise, but it was all Charlie had to work with right now.
He started drawing circles around places Don wouldn't be. Nowhere in southern California, for starters: too close to Charlie and to the rest of his former life. Not in Chicago, or probably anywhere in Wisconsin, where they had been together. Not in Albuquerque, which Don had detoured around even when driving back here with Charlie. By the same logic, Charlie drew a wide circle around Quantico, Virginia, where Don had been trained.
Charlie's marker wavered over the southwest, remembering--a little hazily--the stories Billy had told him about their fugitive-hunting work. Their work had taken them all over the place--into New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, even Wyoming, if Charlie hadn't dreamed that story about Billy, Don, and sheep as far as the eye could see. Charlie drew a string of question marks around their perimeter, and then drew another string of question marks along his and Don's route from Chicago to California, south along the Mississippi and west through Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas before it entered the same territory he'd already marked off.
After a moment's thought, Charlie drew another circle around Stockton, California, home of the Rangers. After a longer pause, he drew a circle around Princeton, wide enough to wipe out the entire state of New Jersey and a fair portion of New York.
The phone number Don had left for Terry had a 605 area code, which corresponded to the entire state of South Dakota. Don obviously hadn't been in South Dakota to get the phone, which meant he'd chosen it, and he wouldn't have chosen a number that gave away his location at a glance. Charlie circled the entire state of South Dakota.
Charlie stared at the map, and then shaded in all the circled areas, connecting the ones that came close to each other into a solid mass. The remaining white areas of the map were an island in the northwest, from Montana west to the Pacific, and a corridor east of the Mississippi, stretching from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico.
Don would gravitate to big cities.
Charlie laid his finger on the dot that marked New Orleans, and swallowed hard, thinking of the rising water, the wreckage of people and city that lingered even now.
Not there, Don. Don't make me follow you there.
Obviously there was no way to simply narrow down Don's location by process of elimination.
When they'd been working on the LA Rapist case, they'd ended up catching the man where he worked--Charlie remembered, clear as a bell, Don saying that if they made a plot like that for him, they'd find his office, not his apartment, because Don was always at work.
Where Don had gone was only half the question. What was Don doing?
Don's job with the FBI had been all-consuming--and coming after Charlie, working for Williamson, had been an extension of that same job, solving Charlie's kidnapping when no one else could. Before the FBI, Don had played baseball, working random jobs in the off-seasons after college. He'd been equally impatient with office work and construction, Charlie remembered. And once he'd gotten into the FBI, he'd never looked back, never seen any use doing anything less important.
Don had been changed when Charlie was taken, but not in a way that would make him satisfied doing less important work than he used to. But obviously he couldn't work in law enforcement now...
Charlie frowned. Something was niggling at him, something Billy had said. They'd worked through the six-pack between them, and then walked down to the liquor store--closer than the comic shop, which had been handy--and bought more. Things had gotten hazy after that, sitting on the steps and drinking, Charlie demanding one story after another about Don in fugitive recovery.
Eventually, though, Charlie had recognized the little hitches and hesitations in Billy's stories, and he'd realized--Don was a fugitive now, more or less, and Billy knew that.
Charlie had interrupted him in the middle of a story to ask, "What if they told you to find Don?"
Billy shook his head. "Conflict of interest, they'd never--"
"What if they did, though," Charlie demanded. "What if they made you?"
Billy went very still. "They couldn't make me, Charlie. If the Bureau tried to twist my arm like that, it'd be time to turn in my badge. Hell, I could go into business for myself, the money's better and there's a fuck of a lot less paperwork."
Billy finished his bottle of beer and finished telling the story like Charlie hadn't interrupted him, and when Charlie woke up the next morning it had all been a haze.
If Billy had to leave the Bureau, Billy would go into business for himself. Don had left fugitive recovery because it was hard on his family, but he'd left his family behind.
Charlie spent ten minutes searching the internet, and by the end of it he was certain, gut-deep. Don was working as a bounty hunter. Charlie knew what he was doing, and he had an idea where. Now all he had to do was figure out who Don was these days, and he'd know what to do about it.
Larry and his father had both offered to drive him, but Charlie thought that being able to go to the DMV on his own to get his license was half the test. He mapped his route carefully and took the bus. He got a seat near the front and watched carefully as the city rolled by outside, waiting for the unfamiliar stop.
The building was tall, glassy and imposing, and Charlie had to step through a metal detector to get inside. An impassive man in a uniform sat watching. Charlie didn't make eye contact, emptying his pockets and keeping his head down as he stepped through. There was no point trying not to look nervous. People felt nervous about driving tests even when they didn't want their license for the express purpose of taking a road trip to visit a fugitive.
If he couldn't get his license he could probably get where he was going by bus--if he was right about Don being in a city, if he wasn't paralyzed by dependence on an inadequate public transit system to cover the last few miles. He couldn't fly anywhere to see Don--that was too obvious, would leave too clear a trail. Driving would be safest; all he had to do was pass the test today.
Charlie took a number and settled in on a hard plastic chair to wait, reviewing his strategy for the hundredth time. He couldn't rush into the task of finding a bounty hunter, somewhere in one of two huge regions of the country, who matched Don's description. Charlie had identified a few reasonable criteria (active only in the last six months, exceptionally competent, almost certainly working alone) but he had no data set to apply them to.
When he'd been consulting for the FBI, those files would have appeared for him, handed off by Terry or David or some technician--lists of licensed bail enforcers in the relevant states, maybe, or information on re-arrested fugitives. But Charlie couldn't ask anyone for that information now, and any attempt to steal it could tip off the FBI.
He didn't need those huge quantities of raw data, though. Charlie's criteria made Don an outlier, exceptional in his field. Other bounty hunters would know about Don, the same way mathematicians knew about Charlie. All Charlie had to do was identify the group of people who already knew what he needed to know, and then get just one individual to tell him.
Of course, he had to do that without revealing his own identity or Don's. He also couldn't let slip the nature or intensity of his interest in recently-active bounty hunters, nor leave a trail the FBI might follow to Don.
Charlie smiled grimly at his shoes and thought that even when he was working for Williamson, life had been simpler when other people did the intel-gathering and he did the math.
Somebody called for 172 over the loudspeaker, and Charlie stood up and focused on the first step. Driving.
It wasn't paranoia if they were really out to get you, and however laid back their approach (however laid back it appeared), the FBI really was out to get Don. Charlie took sensible precautions.
He cleaned up his computer, removing every trace he could find of that first search for information on bounty hunters. He wouldn't use his own computer for anything else relating to Don. He wouldn't use any internet connection that could be traced back to CalSci or his home.
Charlie made a list of internet cafes and public libraries where he could get internet access, and plotted them out on a map of the Los Angeles area. He divided the map into six sections, then numbered the locations within each section, and then used a series of dice rolls to select the order in which he would visit the different locations, so that they would be truly random. He memorized the list, then crumpled up the map and burned it in the fireplace when his father wasn't home.
He paid for two hours on a slow Pentium with a flickering screen at a hole in the wall coffee shop in Valencia. The coffee was better than the computer, and he sipped it slowly as he worked through the search strategies he'd spent the last two days considering. It didn't take long to locate websites targeting bounty hunters, clearinghouses of information. Charlie read carefully, taking note of names, observing patterns of information flow and interaction, following the links that built a web of associations.
He'd barely scratched the surface when his two hours were up, but he had pages of hand-written notes, coded and nearly illegible. He shook out his cramping hands, threw out his coffee cup, and drove to the next location on the list, a library in Santa Monica. He was only supposed to get half an hour, but charmed the librarian into leaving him alone while he worked out where the message boards were.
This would be key. No one was going to simply broadcast the information he needed. He had to be able to interact with these people. He'd picked up enough of the basics to construct a plausible identity--he wouldn't claim to be a bounty hunter himself, that was too easily discredited. But there were hangers-on in the population, and if he presented himself as one to the right members of the group, he could attract information to himself by a kind of osmosis--knowledge traveling from an area of high density to an area of low density.
All he had to do to get started was register, establishing an identity for himself on the message boards. He stared at the blank for a name, considering his options. He couldn't use any variation of his own name, of course. But on the off chance that Don himself was watching the boards--keeping an eye out for pursuit, for instance--Charlie would rather have Don recognize him than mistake him for anyone else.
Charlie let his fingers hover over the keys, then took a deep breath and committed to it.
Name: Mac Williamson
He clicked the button, submitted his registration, and the plan was in motion. Charlie logged off, drove home, and spent the rest of the day asleep on the couch, not moving until his father woke him up and sent him to bed.
Charlie couldn't rush the human element. Once he started interacting with other people, he had to operate at their pace, and keep his own apparently casual. He burned time and nervous energy working in the garage and his office, returning again and again to old problems--anything but P vs. NP. He modeled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina over and over, pulling in organizational theory and physical models, trying to work out the gravitational pull of need, the mass of money and help. Larry made interested noises at the math, and didn't ask where it had come from. Charlie didn't tell him.
One night Larry and Charlie came in from the garage at dinner time to find David in the kitchen with Alan. David, who had worked with Don. David who had been beside him when a sniper took a shot at him, though it had been Don who rushed over and tugged him up off the street.
David smiled hesitantly at Charlie. "I was in the neighborhood, I just..."
"Stay for dinner," Charlie said immediately, and David didn't argue.
They talked all through the meal, smiling and joking like family--whittled down from a year ago, but they were getting along. After dinner there was chess, a round robin tournament between David, Alan, and Larry. Charlie watched and refrained from commenting on any of their strategies, going through his beer a little faster than the competitors did.
David made a respectable showing--losing to Larry in twenty-eight moves, and dragging his game against Alan out to an impassable stalemate. Charlie watched them cycle through the same moves for a dozen turns before they recognized the impasse for what it was. Don had been like that sometimes, dragging out an inevitable defeat with one delaying tactic after another, or the same delaying tactic over and over. Charlie had never been sure whether Don was teasing him, or whether he'd been seriously convinced that he could find an escape.
I could ask him Charlie thought a little dizzily, watching his father and David laughing across the chess board at each other, both of them looking for a way for either of them to win. If he found Don, he could ask him all sorts of questions, though he might not get answers. Even if he found Don, it wouldn't be like it had been, chess on chalkboards and sharing a narrow mattress. They both had other choices now, a whole world of moves available to them, unconstrained.
Charlie was still turning that over in his mind as he walked out the front door with David, strolling down to the street, where he'd parked. They were talking about chess--Charlie was gesturing expansively, explaining a superior strategy David could exploit next time--and part of Charlie's mind was considering moves and countermoves, but part of his mind was back at the chalkboard, waiting for the moment he'd be able to sweep in and finish Don off.
Chess had only ever been a representation of the real fight--on an ancient battlefield, between Charlie and Don, it was all the same. But neither of them had to play anymore--there were other games, other fights. Other players. Other possibilities, vibrating in quantum space.
Finding Don was a matter of narrowing down a world full of uncertainties to a single choice--but there were more uncertainties than just Don's name and whereabouts. Charlie couldn't even be certain of himself anymore.
David leaned against the side of his truck and laughed, the light from the porch shining off his dark eyes and the startling brightness of his smile. Charlie had lost the thread of what he was saying, and it struck him that he had an opportunity, right here, to make an empirical test. He leaned in, pushing up onto his tiptoes to reach, and pressed a kiss to David's mouth.
David's hand caught his shoulder, neither pushing him away or pulling him closer, just holding him steady as David pulled back from the kiss. He was frowning a little. He'd had less to drink than Charlie, and he was not made up of a mass of co-existing improbabilities.
"Charlie? Um..."
Charlie looked away, falling back to stand flat-footed.
"Sorry," he muttered, running a hand through his hair to keep from touching his mouth. It had been a long time since he'd kissed anyone, well over a year since he'd kissed anyone but Don. It hadn't been fair to use David for this. "That was--sorry. Stupid."
"Hey, it's okay," David said softly, squeezing Charlie's shoulder. "You just caught me by surprise there."
Charlie looked up sharply, and David was watching him intently--not offended, not laughing, and Charlie was suddenly painfully conscious of exactly what it meant to have choices. He could kiss David again, maybe get it right this time--this was something that could be real, something that could be halfway honest if it was anything at all. This was something that could make sense.
David's hand tightened on his shoulder, giving Charlie a second's warning before David's mouth pressed to his, giving his quick kiss back to him warmer and wetter and harder, lingering.
Charlie remembered this, kissing guys, remembered liking it more than this--or only needing to like it just this much. He'd liked David well enough, though it had never seemed possible that David of all people would like him back.
Charlie hadn't been too picky before. He didn't have to be picky now--wasn't, on some level, because he was leaning into David's grip on his shoulder, blood rushing down to his dick. It felt so good just being this close to someone, lips to lips and body to body, more contact than he'd had with anyone in so long. The promise of more was right there, too, in the way David leaned gently back against the car, drawing Charlie with him.
Even as the kiss went on, even as Charlie let his hand settle against David's chest, felt the warmth and the closeness of him, Charlie was thinking ahead. He'd have to go inside and say something, but they wouldn't really ask any questions, wouldn't mind--not when it was David he was going off with, David who they knew and trusted. And then he could go with David, back to his place or just to someplace quiet, somewhere they could keep doing this, only more. Someplace they could get their clothes off, could be even closer, even better, and then, and then--
And then Charlie would wake up in the morning next to a perfectly nice guy who still didn't know, to whom he could never explain himself truthfully. Charlie would wake up and wonder when he'd get his next lead on Don, when he could go and find Don. And as good as the sex might be, and as nice as it would be to have someone just to touch, just to be close to--it wasn't just someone Charlie wanted. It wasn't David.
Charlie pushed back, breaking the kiss and then taking another, definitive step away.
"I'm sorry," Charlie mumbled, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. "I really--I can't--I'm sorry. I didn't think, I just--"
"I got it, Charlie," David said, still not seeming angry. "I, uh," David quirked a smile. "I probably should've told you before now, it just never seemed like--"
David looked away, ran a hand over his head. "After you were gone, Amita and I, we--for a while, we were, you know."
Charlie blinked, wondering what had been in those deleted emails, suddenly reconsidering Amita's occasional casual mentions of David in their correspondence lately. "Oh."
"Yeah," David said. "There's probably a limit to how much anybody should pinch-hit, right? I didn't think either. Fair's fair."
Charlie bit his lip, dizzy at the thought that David knew--but no, David meant Amita. David thought it was Amita Charlie missed.
David looked up finally and smiled ruefully. Charlie smiled tentatively back and shoved his hands into his pockets, standing on the grass until David had gotten into his truck and pulled away, and then for a while after. It wasn't David he wanted. It wasn't Amita he wanted, either, though perhaps he could have visited Boston and given that a try. He wanted Don, nothing less.
It was a good thing to be sure of.
Nine days after he kissed David, Charlie was down to his twenty-eighth source of internet access. He'd had a couple of possibilities crop up already, but nothing that panned out under scrutiny. Charlie opened up the likeliest of the half-dozen discussions he'd been participating in, and there was a new reply from TigerJones:
Jake Field's your best bet. He's based in Detroit, works for Ace mostly, I think.
Charlie rubbed his face and clicked to the next message.
Yeah, Field's the type. I met him one time in Ohio, he's nuts but in an okay way. Probably won't tell you fuck, but he won't rip your head off for asking.
Charlie looked around the internet café, dazed. Everyone around him was acting like nothing had just happened. The ground hadn't shook, there were no sirens closing in. Jake Field. Detroit. Works for Ace.
Charlie forced himself to breathe, hunching over the keyboard to type a reply.
Nah, I'm pretty sure the guy I'm thinking of works out of Portland...
"All right," Kelley said.
Charlie couldn't tell if she was letting more expression into her voice lately, or if he'd gotten better at reading her, or if he was projecting his own uncertainty. She sounded dubious.
"Charlie, what do you think will happen if you do find him?"
Charlie nodded glumly, looking down at his hands. "I keep trying to picture it, you know? Map it out. What he'll say, what I'll say, what we'll do. Half the time I think I just want to chase him down and punch him."
Kelley smiled a little when Charlie's lips twisted up. "And the other half?"
"Kiss him." Charlie shrugged, then forced himself to square up, meeting Kelley's gaze. "And then I think it doesn't matter what I do, because all he'll do is stand there and take it and wait for me to stop."
Charlie set his spoon down carefully beside his bowl and sat in silence as his father finished. When his dad glanced up, Charlie said, "I'm going on a road trip. I'll be gone for a week or two."
His father swallowed and sat back from the table, frowning. "You're going to need your own car for that."
Charlie nodded. "I'm going to look at cars tomorrow morning. Financing shouldn't be a problem, so--"
"I'm coming with you."
Charlie stared, at a loss for words. For all the questions or arguments he'd braced himself to answer, he'd never imagined this one.
His father raised his eyebrows and cracked a small smile. "Not on your trip, Charlie. I'm coming with you to look at cars, so you don't wind up paying retail."
Charlie frowned. "Isn't that how you... buy things?"
His father shook his head. "Oh, my son the genius. You have so much to learn."
Alan walked out to the driveway with Charlie. The sun had barely come up, the air still unseasonably cool. Charlie tossed his backpack into the passenger seat, and placed a cardboard box more carefully in the back, and that was it. That was all he was taking on his road trip.
Alan couldn't stop thinking about the last time he'd seen Don, though Charlie's departure was as different as... well, as his two sons from each other. There had been no whispered oaths from Charlie, just a blithe remark about needing to get away for a while to get his head together.
Alan wasn't fooled. It had been more than two weeks since Charlie had suddenly begun talking about Don, casually, as if he'd always been perfectly comfortable mentioning his brother in conversation. In that time he'd gone off alone to get his driver's license, and then disappeared for hours each day. It was the first time since he'd been back that he'd gone anywhere without telling Alan exactly where, and when he expected to be back.
Charlie came back around the car and stood hesitantly at arm's length from his father. Alan sighed and pulled his son into a tight hug. He couldn't tell Charlie not to do this any more than he'd been able to tell Don not to--and wherever Donnie was now, it couldn't be as dangerous as where Charlie had been. Give or take the FBI.
He released Charlie from the hug but held on to him, studying his son, memorizing the bright-eyed smile on his face, his barely-restrained energy. He was nearly bouncing under Alan's hand. Alan could feel him forcing himself not to pull away.
"Drive safely, Charlie. And call me when you stop for the night."
"I will, Dad," Charlie said.
Alan's chest went tight, and he couldn't resist pulling his baby boy into another tight hug. Charlie returned it unhesitatingly, but his smile had dimmed when he stepped back.
"I am coming back, Dad. It's just a couple of weeks, then I'll be home."
Alan nodded and let Charlie go, and he stood in the driveway long after Charlie had disappeared down the street, trying to believe that.
Driving was exhausting. Charlie had to stop every hour or two that first day to stretch his legs and shake out the shuddering nervous energy that built up in him like static electricity, crackling on his skin. He expected his hair to be standing on end every time he glanced in the rearview mirror.
Early in the afternoon, he stopped on the outskirts of Las Vegas and ate lunch in a little diner, trying not to think of the little place he and Don had stopped, the night of Christmas Eve. When he'd finished his sandwich, the waitress asked him if he'd like dessert, and Charlie shook his head and asked for change for a dollar, instead.
There was a slot machine by the door. Charlie took his position in front of it a little warily--it was stupid, of course, gambling flourished as a business proposition because it favored the house. The anticipation tingling on his skin was just that, anticipation, an emotion that had no ability to predict the future.
Still, he held his breath and fed his quarter in and pulled the lever, watching the old-fashioned mechanical wheels spin.
Bell, cherry, bar. Nothing.
Charlie's lunch turned to a solid weight in his stomach, but he fed in another quarter, and another, and another. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
He told himself that it was the statistically probable outcome of any four attempts at a slot machine. He told himself he didn't believe in omens.
But he didn't have to get out of the car to pace again. When he stopped for the night in a small town over the Utah border, he fell onto the motel bed and slept straight through until morning without dreams.
He couldn't catch his breath in Denver, and his motel room was freezing. The second time Charlie woke up shivering, he crawled over to the other bed, where he'd dropped his backpack and the carefully-packed cardboard box. His hands were shaking as he ripped the tape off the flaps, but he got it open and lifted out most of the stuff inside, until he got his hands on the red fleece blanket.
Charlie pressed it to his face. It smelled like the house, like home, and it felt like all those nights spent between Don and the wall on a narrow mattress, feeling safe.
Charlie wrapped the blanket around himself and crawled back into bed.
He didn't bother repacking the box, and wrapped himself up in the blanket again the next night. He watched the weather in the morning before he hit the road and at night when he woke up alone in a strange place. The familiar voices of the anchors made everything seem less impossibly foreign, and Charlie clung to the illusion that the future could be forecast.
Charlie got into Detroit about an hour before dawn on the twenty-seventh of June. He found a motel that didn't charge by the hour, paid cash for two nights in advance, and took all his things inside with him. It was cool outside, downright cold in his room with the air-conditioner running full blast. Charlie shut the air off and laid down on the bed on top of the covers, wrapped in the red blanket.
He was in the same city with Don (probably, if he was right about Don being Jake Field, if this wasn't a false lead, if Don wasn't off working some job, if he hadn't gotten himself killed chasing a fugitive in the last week). He'd meant to stop in Chicago--he'd stopped on the outskirts and called his dad, said he'd be spending the night there, maybe stay a few days. But he'd gotten back into the car and driven a little further, just far enough to see a sign that said Detroit 279 miles. After that he couldn't stop.
Charlie felt exhausted and wide awake, mind racing, trying to plan every contingency. If he couldn't find Don--if he did find Don and Don wouldn't listen to him--if he found Don hurt--
Charlie opened his eyes bathed in sweat, face down in the polyester bedspread, the room dim. He stared at the clock, baffled, and eventually figured out that he'd slept over twelve hours. It was past six.
Charlie sat up and found the blanket crumpled up on the floor. He folded it up carefully and put it back into the cardboard box along with the other stuff he'd packed, folding the flaps together so they'd stay shut. Then he grabbed the phone book and forced himself to sit down, hands shaking as he flipped to the bail-bond services.
Mostly works for Ace, that was what the guy on the message board had said. Charlie would start there. Ace Bail-Bond had a big display ad, with a little map showing their location. Charlie easily matched it to the road map he'd brought along.
He optimized his route in his head while he took a quick shower. He got dressed and then stood staring at himself in the mirror, trying to tell whether he looked different from what Don would expect. His hair had grown out again--curls brushed over the fading scar beside his eye; people hardly noticed it unless they were looking.
Don would be looking. Maybe soon. Maybe tonight. Charlie grinned giddily at his reflection and switched the light off, grabbing his backpack and the cardboard box and heading out to his car.
Outside the air was warm, but not oppressive. His car, sitting in the sun all day, was easily thirty degrees hotter inside, and Charlie broke into an instant sweat. He rolled down all the windows and made himself wait to try the A/C. Dusk was falling by the time he found Ace Bail-Bond.
It was in an even worse neighborhood than the motel, parked on the end of a row of vacant storefronts. It huddled close to an intersection whose adjacent corners hosted brightly-lit gas stations. The fourth corner was an empty lot, and Charlie noticed uneasily that the streetlights there were broken.
Charlie chose the gas station that was easiest to pull into, parked at the edge of the lot and rolled up his windows, blasting the A/C. There were lights on at Ace Bail-Bond--he remembered the slogan CALL NIGHT OR DAY in the ad--and Charlie stared at them. He couldn't see through the windows past the blinds and assorted neon signs, and really, the odds of Don actually being there had to be worse than the odds of hitting the jackpot with a single dollar's worth of quarters at any given slot machine.
But he wouldn't get anywhere asking them about the whereabouts of a freelance bounty hunter, and this was the one place Charlie had any reason to believe Don would come back to, so he'd just have to see what happened. After half an hour, he went into the gas station and bought a package of beef jerky and a cold bottle of soda, sliding cash carefully under the bulletproof glass. The clerk looked bored, so Charlie figured he wasn't about to get rousted out of the parking lot just yet.
He stepped back outside, looking across the street as he did. Charlie was still standing in the doorway of the gas station--silhouetted, he thought, bad place to stand for long--when the barred front door of Ace Bail-Bond swung open, and Don appeared.
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