Notes To The DVD Edition: Okay, so I caved and did this"DVD Commentary Track" meme, but I'm really not sure I say much--though I seem to say it at great length.  I wish I could say that doing this changed my mind about the usefulness of author commentary, but I'm sticking to my original assertion that writers are less interesting on the subject of their own work than critics are,and that criticism is more interesting than autobiography.

But whatever, it's done now, so hopefully those of you reading this will find something interesting!!

I also thought that it might be interesting to have another voice besides mine in here, so I asked Julad to do a beta track as well.  My comments are in RED, her comments are in GREEN--and hers really are much more interesting than mine, because Julad is basically always right. *g*  You can skip to our comments by searching for our names, Speranza and Julad, in the text.

PROLOGUE:

SPERANZA:   Okay, so I went and looked up my notes on this .  I always have notes before I start, usually one central thing that I'm starting with, and generally I then "pitch" the story to one of my friends/betas in irc.   The first notes that I have for KIB are these, dating from October, 2001.
 

Ray Presumed Dead

Glasses found

Fraser steals them from evidence lockup

Pier--Ray's shirt in the water--dredging scene

****

Kowalski as Vecchio is investigating and getting too close--

Fraser figured out its the local mob--folks who would know Ray Vecchio

Local  mob takes out Vecchio and it isn't Vecchio

Local mob target Vecchio, but kill Kowalski, send message to 27 that it isn't Vecchio, resuling in pulling Vecchio from Vegas

Fraser and Vecchio solve case--each out of rage--parallel Juliet

Fraser crazy

Vecchio realizes that Fraser has feelings for Kowalksi--like Irene, it's different, "No, it isn't, Ray."

Thus armed, I pitched the thing to Mia, and I pitched it pretty close to the way that I wrote it, except:

      Sper: I want it to open--wham
      Sper: Fraser
      Sper: not hearing from Ray
      Sper: going over
      Sper: finding the place trashed
            Mia nods!
            Mia grins gleefully
      Sper: finding the blood spattered glasses
      Sper: and going, whoa, holy fuck

PROLOGUE:

JULAD:  So I've been betaing for Ces for a long time now, and this is how it goes.  She'll say, I want to write a story where such-and-such, and whoever's around will say "cool!" or occasionally "Ray? a clown? an angry clown? What the fuck?" and a little discussion will ensue about the whys and wherefores.  Usually at this stage, when we first hear about it, it's pretty fully formed in her head.  Then we'll go back to betaing the current story and a year later we'll actually see the first few pages of the story she pitched way back when-- "oh, yay, you're doing this one!" or "oh, wait, that bizarre-ass clown story, you were *serious*?"  She only writes one story at a time and then moves on to the next one, like they're all lined up, waiting their turn to get written.

SPERANZA's reply:  This is true; they are all lined up, like planes at an airport runway.  Sometimes things get delayed, but flights are rarely cancelled here at Speranza Airlines.  One story at a time, written from start to finish.

PART ONE

I.  Las Vegas, Nevada

Man, but if I got into it fast, I got out of it faster.  Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom--four-thirty on a random afternoon, me and the guys sitting around the conference table trying to fix the Wallace fight when the phone call came.

SPERANZA: ...Ray Vecchio's POV.  This is one of the weird things about this story, that its central character--Kowalski--is absent, and therefore has to be reconstructed from other people's perspectives.  Kowalski isn't around to tell us what happened to him, and you don't want to be too close to Fraser's grief for too long, because IMO, being too close to grief turns it into melodrama.  It demeans it in a way.  So you need a third person perspective on the story in order to get both the facts straight and the--sniff! god, he loves him!--feeling without it being twee.

I suppose I should say, at this point, that probably the biggest "issue" in this story, I think, its its take on romance.  In my head, KIB is a romance, possibly the most romantic story I've ever written (though I know it wasn't taken that way by everybody.)  But in my head, this was a capital R Romance--I mean, just look at the central image I started with, Fraser holding Kowalski's broken glasses (which he keeps in his breast pocket over his HEART--and hello, anybody else out there read Love Story?  This is all straight out of Segal's Love Story, which is possibly the sappiest novel of all time.  Remember how Oliver tells us that the only thing he saved of his dead wife was both pairs of her glasses?  That's gorgeous gorgeous sap, there.   So anyway, see, in my head the sap-o-meter needle is already quivering in the red before I've already started, and so writing KIB was an exercise in me trying to conceal from the rest of you what a total mushbag I am and how romantic this story is for me.   And frankly, I concealed the romance so well that I lost some number of you  between setting Ray on fire and the unreliable narration--more about which later.  But understand that a lot of what's motivating my choices here are my own deeply ambiguous feelings about romance--I want the payoffs, but I'm terrified of sappiness.

Anyway, back to Vecchio; I needed him to come in and comment on the love story, because he could say and see things about it that Fraser couldn't.  I needed you to see Vecchio seeing Fraser in grief--that's a lot of what's going on here.

Offhand, I still feel guilty about the "Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom" reference above--it's like some cliched mobster movie from the 60s--but I wanted a shorthand way to tell you which Ray you were dealing with.  I'm hoping you read that, thought "mobster," and forgot all about it.  Or as we say here, "Fageddabouit!"

JULAD ADDS:  So usually I'll see the first few pages of a new story and sigh, either in despair or relief.  In my experience, when Ces is *on* with a story, it shows right from the start, and if she's not on (or I'm not on board with what she's trying to do) then it also shows right from the start, and it's evident that it's going to be more of a gruelling process to get the story through to the end.  So I read this and was like, oh, fuck, *yes*, because it had that BAM, the crack of the bat as Ces once called it.  She's *on*, we're off and running.

Ray Vecchio is the perfect narrator for this, the dream narrator, because he knows enough but not everything, he's got no idea what the actual story is but he knows the background-- he's *us*, in a way-- partially informed, knowledge available for leverage, ignorance available for suspense, and so, yeah, I read this and the great RayV voice and the attitude and the rightness and went "*yes*".

So the first half of this story there's not much for me to say, because I was pretty much like, "yup, yeah, fine, good" with only little tweaks and quibbles.  Later it'll get more interesting...

"He ain't gonna throw it," Frankie was muttering;  he was staring down at the inlaid wood tabletop, looking stupid and murderous, Frankie's particular gift of a combination.  "Wallace ain't gonna throw it, he's gonna take a lot of persuading."

"So make him persuaded," Sonny replied calmly.  "Help the poor guy see reason."

Johnny G. looked like he could smell good steak grilling somewhere close.  "Yeah," he said, dropping a fist on the table.  "Bash his fuckin' face in--right, boss?"

SPERANZA:  Frankie, Sonny, Johnny G?  If you haven't got the context, say five Hail Marys and go watch The Godfather a couple more times. *g*  This whole McGuffin about fixing the Wallace fight substitutes for exposition wherein we establish Vecchio the Vegas mob boss.  "Ray had been in Vegas for nearly two years when..." (yawn.)

I sat there, slouched in my chair, watching all of them.  It took me a second to be sure that I had their attention;  you never said nothin' till you had everyone's full attention.  "Wrong," I said quietly.  "Frankie's right," and Frankie's head shot up as if he was shocked to be right about anything, ever.  "Wallace won't go easy, and it ain't worth the effort to make him see the light on this one.  So think outside the box for a second, you morons."

SPERANZA: I'm trying to remember why I decided to make this first person, past tense.  I can't now.  Probably for the immediacy of it, because this is so much a story about how different characters interpret the same situation.  (Funny, but that held true even in reception--readers interpret KIB so differently!!)

The table went silent as everyone struggled to kick their brains into gear.  Sonny was quickest on the uptake, which was only what I expected.  "So you want us to work on Leroy instead?"

Give that boy a gold star.  "Yeah," I said, showing him a smile.  "Work on Leroy instead."

Johnny's broad, stupid face creased into a frown.  "But the betting is all--"

I shot him a glance and he shut up.  One mean look always gets you further in a room full of thugs than any sort of yelling and screaming act.  Violence they expect and know how to deal with.  But a look means somebody's thinking, and being none too good at thinking themselves, it's like you're doing a magic trick:  Look Ma, no hands.

In fact, I'd learned this particular mean look right from my mother.

"You gonna tell me about betting?" I asked, except it wasn't really a question.  "You wanna advise me on this point?"

Johnny looked real nervous now.  "No, boss.  No."

"You think I don't know how the betting's going, Johnny?" You had to say everything three times to drum the point into Johnny's fat head.  "You tellin' me my fuckin' job, here?"

Johnny's mouth worked as his brain struggled to find some other, clever synonym for "no, boss," but I couldn't wait that long.  I sat up straight and everyone at the table tensed.

"We can get the bets reversed faster than we can break Wallace," I explained, and everybody nodded quickly: nod, nod, nod.  "We reverse the bets, work on Leroy, have him throw the fuckin' fight.  Same difference," I told them, except it wasn't quite the same difference, because it meant that Reggie Wallace, that proud kid from Queens, wouldn't have his fucking spine broken by these goombahs.  Whereas Leroy would happily throw it in for the right number of zeros, but I wasn't trying save the world or nothing.  Just a couple of spines, maybe--a couple of arms, a couple of legs, a couple less faces broken here or there when I could manage it without blowing my cover.

SPERANZA: Blah, blah, McGuffincakes--Vecchio's a tough mob boss, see? and yet, we can still see the mechanations of the honorable cop underneath.  So we know Vecchio's still a good guy in a dangerous situation.  This is all set-up for the phone call, below--establishing also a mood of danger and broken kneecaps, because otherwise there's be no suspense to pulling Vecchio out of Vegas.  "No one will be admitted during the scene where Vecchio calls his travel agent and arranges for car service..." not quite the same ring.

I settled back into my familiar slouch and looked at Sonny, who was the only one I trusted to handle this right.  "Go talk to him," I said quietly, and that was when the phone rang.  I let it ring once or twice while Sonny nodded at me slowly, his eyes telling me without words that yeah, he got my drift:  play nice with Leroy, slip him drinks and cash and quiet threats until he understood what was in his best interest.

Then I picked up the phone.

"Yeah," I said softly, not needing to say "Hello," or "Languistini," or anything like that, because in the realm of unlisted numbers this was pretty high up there on the un-list.

The voice said, "Mr. Archer wants to meet you at the orchard."

Suddenly I had ice water in my veins, and it was all I could do not to shiver, not to squeeze the phone right out of my sweaty hands.  "Oh yeah?  When?"

"Now.  There's a limo downstairs."

Keep cool, keep cool, I thought, taking a long hard look at the numbers on my gold watch, like I was wondering whether or not I could fit this meeting into my hectic schedule of blackmail and bookmaking.  Like there was any choice about it.

SPERANZA: Again, this is all me building tension about the "escape from Vegas."  It's actually pretty good writing, as I reread it.  It's amazing how well terseness and a couple of code words work to set up the tension.

"Right, gotcha," I said, and racked the phone into the cradle.  "Meeting over," I announced, and everyone's heads jerked toward me, surprised.  I shrugged as coolly as I knew how.  "I gotta see a guy about a thing," I said, shooing them with my hands.  "So get outta here, we'll talk about this later."

With a shuffle of chairs, the boys got up and headed for the door.  A moment later Baby Tommy materialized out of nowhere in that uncanny way he had, holding my suit jacket.  "Yer all brushed and polished, sir."

I turned my back to him and slipped my arms into the sleeves.  Tommy slid the jacket onto my shoulders and then adjusted it so that it hung right.  "Lookin' good," he commented as I turned around.  "You want yer alligator shoes?  They're just back from downstairs."

I patted his cheeks affectionately and felt a sudden stab of nostalgia;  geez, the kid was only twenty-two, and now I'd never get see him grow up to be a real gangster.  "Nah," I told him.  "I'm in something of a rush, kid, thanks."

I crossed the suite to the wall safe.  The leather briefcase was there, all packed and ready for me, and I pulled it out and slammed the steel door shut.  For a second I was tempted to go into my bedroom and pack a few things, because god, the stuff I had!--a closet full of tailored suits, thirty pairs of custom-made shoes--except I'd have to be out of my freakin' mind.

Anyone guessed about me not coming back and I'd never feel the bullet.

So bye-bye suits and bye-bye shoes.  I clutched the thick handle of my briefcase and breezed for the door.  "Later, kid," I told Baby Tommy, who shot me a jaunty two-fingered salute.  And then I was walking down the hallway toward the elevator, my shoes making no noise on the thick, elaborately-patterned carpet.  I pressed the button and the doors instantly opened, cause nobody makes anyone in the penthouse wait for anything.  I stepped in, pressed "G" for Ground, and watched myself from twenty-five different angles in the mirrored elevator car.  So long, Armando, you handsome devil, you.  I'm gonna miss you.  I'm gonna miss all of this.

I felt, more than heard, the familiar noise of the casino as the elevator doors opened.  It was like being hit by a wall of sound--bells, whistles, sirens, the call of the dealers: Blackjack! Craps! Poker!  Whoop--whoop--whoop! and somewhere there was a waterfall of quarters splattering into somebody's plastic bucket.  We have a winner, folks;  we have a winner!  Ah, the symphonic sound of suckers being sucked;  it was totally seductive to me, and I guess I wasn't the only one, cause Vegas is a town with a hard-on, twenty-four/seven.

SPERANZA: Everyone should write more stories where the guys end up in Vegas.  Just cause casinos are great backdrops for stories. The story I'm writing now has a Vegas sequence in it, too; for me, this writing really evokes the feel of Vegas, but that's because it's tweaking all my memories of the place.  I have no idea if it evokes Vegas as well for people who either aren't me or haven't been there themselves.  (I also really still like that line of Vegas being a town with a hard-on, 24/7.)

I moved fast through the casino toward the main exit, which itself marked me as a player, because these places are Roach Motels:  suckers get in, but they don't come out.

But I was getting out, and fast.  Bye-bye, now, I thought as I passed my favorite craps table, the lucky one where I'd won two-fifty last week.

Bye and seeya, because I was going back to a world where two-fifty got you a newspaper and maybe a bagel, cause it was two dollars and fifty cents, not two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

SPERANZA: Spot the regionalism--I wonder if Vecchio'd be as bagel-obsessed as a Chicagoan as New York Italians are?

But staying was out of the question, because Mr. Archer wanted to meet me at the orchard.  Now if it were Mr. Bates or Mr. Carlucci or Mr. Darby on the line I'd've had a little wiggle room.  Could've maybe packed my bags and planned a weekend trip to L.A., or had a final drunken blowout at the Grande or the Bellagio.  But Mr. Archer was not a guy you kept waiting.  Mr. Archer meant that there was a first-class, A-list, balls-to-the-wall screwup somewhere down the line, and I was running for my life.

SPERANZA: I'm still oddly delighted by this whole bit--I like the alphabetical code names, and the whole noir "running for his life" thing.  It's kind of like Chandler-lite: Down these mean streets walks one honest man...with gorgeous green eyes. *g*

I raised my palm and pushed my way through the revolving door into the bright sunlight and baking heat of a typical Vegas afternoon.  ("But it's drrrry heat," the tourists bleated to each other;  yeah, right--dry like an oven, dry like the goddamned Gobi desert.)  Instantly, a limo pulled up in front of me, long and white and glittering in the sun.   A doorman in a red uniform and gold epaulets stepped out of the shade to open the car's door for me, and I smiled at him, like I always did, because he reminded me of the Mountie.  I wondered, as I slid into the limo's plush, air-conditioned exterior, if I'd be seeing Benton Fraser any time soon.

SPERANZA: The description in this sequence owes something to Stephen King's story whose name I can't remember about the guy who revenges his murdered wife by burying her killer's car in the middle of the desert on his weekly run between Vegas and L.A.  What the fuck is the name of that story?  It'll come to me--but the point is, I'd read that recently and this sequence--and the descriptions of the desert--owe something to Steve.

The limo pulled away down the curving drive of the hotel and into the crazy traffic of the Strip.  I knew better than to ask the driver where we were going, I knew better than to ask anything at all.  I noticed, idly, that the car wasn't heading either toward the airport or toward L.A., the two most obvious places you went when you drove outta town.  Instead, we turned onto one of those roads-to-nowhere which criss-cross all over the state of Nevada.

I sighed, poured myself a scotch from the wet bar, and turned on the television.  Neither the local Vegas news nor CNN gave any indication as to what the A-list disaster might be, but it had been worth a try, anyway.

Half an hour into the steaming desert, the smoked glass window between my luxurious compartment and the driver's seat slowly whirred down.  The driver was in full uniform, cap and everything, and he shot me a quick glance over his right shoulder.  "Mr. Languistini?  I've been directed by Mr. Archer to take you to a safe place."

"We goin' to the orchard?" I asked, returning code for code.

He relaxed almost imperceptibly and then nodded.  "Yeah."

I took another sip of my scotch and then asked, "It's bad, huh?"

The driver didn't answer.  I turned my head and looked out the window at the pink and blue desert sky.  The colors out here always floored me.

"It's bad," the driver finally said.

I turned back and caught his eyes in the rear view mirror.  "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."  The driver's eyes were dark below his visor.  "Ray Vecchio's been murdered."

SPERANZA: Curtain line--you're either drawn in by this point or you're not.

II.  Happy Jack, Arizona

SPERANZA: I have no idea why the town is called Happy Jack. I needed some tiny, tumbleweedy, non-existent town to stash Vecchio in, purely for timing reasons--the below is yet another total McGuffin.  The logic of the story dictates that the second anyone thinks Kowalski's cover's been blown, Vecchio should be pulled out of Vegas for his own safety, but I can't have Vecchio on the scene in Chicago quite yet, because I have to have time in there for the cops to close the case, for Kowalski to be presumed dead, for the trail to have gone cold, for Fraser to start looking like he's refusing to accept the inevitable, etc.  Otherwise this whole story would have happened in about two days and I could have called it: Kowalski Is Briefly Missing.  Which doesn't quite have the same ring.

This reminds me to make the larger point:  the number one thing in a story that I'm usually stressing about is the TIMING--how to get events to unfold in something like a natural fashion, and how to fill time without making it LOOK like I'm filling up time.  When life is good, the things that I devise as time-wasters or McGuffins take on a life of their own and become important--or at least interesting--parts of the plot.  When life is less good, the scene always feels to me like what it is--la la la, something that happened between one important event and the next.  I think the Happy Jack Arizona sequence is more successful than not--I mean, the idea of a debriefing makes some sense, and it makes sense to keep Vecchio safe since he's the assumed target of the attack that "killed" Kowalski, etc.--but I still think that there's something about it that whispers what it is: a pretext for keeping Vecchio out of Chicago.

Nobody would tell me anything more, even once we reached the safehouse:  an adobe hut in Buttfuck, Arizona.  I handed over my briefcase, which held all the hard evidence I'd accumulated during my two year stint as Languistini, and sat through endless debriefings which turned out to be totally one-way streets, with information flowing from me to them.

Nobody would tell me a goddamned thing about my own goddamned murder--or rather about the murder of whatever poor slob they'd gotten to be me while I was out here being someone else.  And apparently part of the safety out here was freedom from any information that would bother my pretty little head, so I existed in a total news blackout--no newspapers, radio, television, nothing, nada, niente.  I had a TV but no goddamned reception, and so my armed FBI bodyguards brought me videos along with my food: Godfather I, II, and III;  Goodfellas; The Family; My Cousin Vinny--I guess it was their idea of a joke.  It wasn't funny.

SPERANZA: This owes something to Eddie Izzard's routine about "house arrest" in Dress To Kill:  "Do you have any videos?"

They let me make just one telephone call, right at the start--to my mother of all people.  Now don't get me wrong, I love my Ma and all, but what I really wanted was to talk to someone who knew something, who knew anything--Welsh if he would talk to me, or Fraser if he was still in Chicago, which I doubted.  But if wishes were horses there'd be shit on the streets.

So I tried pumping Ma.

Her:  "Oh Dio, Dio, Raimondo..."

Me:  "Yeah, Ma, I'm fine, great, healthy as a--"

Her:  "Madre di Dio, grazie per tutto!"  <sounds of sobbing>

Me:  "Ma, I'm fine!  Listen to me--"

Her:  "...nome di Padre e di figlio e di Spirito Santo, Amen."

Me:  "--for just a second, okay?!  This guy--the guy who got killed--"

Her:  <sobbing louder>  "His poor mother..."

Me:  "Forget his mother for a minute, willya, Ma?  Just tell me what--"

Her:  "Not everybody's like you! Not everybody can forget their mother so easy!"

Me:  "--the hell happened to him?"

Her:  "Two years and what?  Nothing, that's what!  Not a letter, not a card..."

Me:  "I've been undercover with the freakin' mafia!!"

Her:  "He brought me flowers every Mother's Day and on my birthday which is more than you ever did!  Mio povero figlio biondo--Madre di Dio, what did I do to make such a bum?"

I hung up, took a couple of deep breaths, and reminded myself that yesterday I could have put a hit out on her, no problem.

And I'd learned one thing anyway.  Poor bastard was blond.

SPERANZA: Right, so the above is my way of dealing with that fact that--in any rational universe--Vecchio would be seeing or talking to his family before encountering Fraser, and yet I want the story of Kowalski to be told by Fraser.  So Mom's hysterical and gibbering in Italian--problem solved.

It was a pretty rough six weeks all in all, with nothing to do but watch gangster movies and feel sick every time anybody blond got it in the head.  I even dreamed about him, Ma's povero biondo, and tried to convince myself that he hadn't gotten it because he'd been me.  After all, the guy was a cop-- maybe some perp had got him in a shoot-out, or he'd caught a stray bullet.  Or maybe not even that:  maybe he'd been porking his best friend's wife and the guy had shot him.  It didn't even have to be a deliberate murder, I told myself;  he could have been hit by a drunk driver, say, which was at least manslaughter, right?  And that would've been a problem just the same, cause they'd still have to bury the guy and what name do you put on the tombstone, mine or his?

SPERANZA: Actually, see, here's a case where--imo--the McGuffin takes off.  Mom is gibbering in Italian because of my need for her not to say too much that's substantive, ("Well, you see, Ray, that nice young man impersonating you?  He's dead! And Fraser's so upset..."  Sssssssst...and there goes all the tension) and the povero biondo thing was just a bit of gibberish dialogue I came up with.  Except that I think that it worked really well as just enough detail to haunt RayV--and obviously, the reader, who knows the whole RayK blond cliche thing.  So that turned out better than expected and neccessity gave me a nice little invention.  I liked the biondo thing so much that I turned it into kind of a running theme.

Except I knew, just knew, that this was wishful thinking, that this guy hadn't spun out on the ice or anything.  They said murdered, they meant murdered:  they meant somebody'd gone and done the poor fucker in.  All I could hope was that he'd gotten killed for himself and not for me--a sick, selfish thought, I knew, cause it didn't make any difference to him, now, did it?  Dead was dead, after all.  But I couldn't help hoping.  It was bad enough for a cop to get killed.  But if this guy'd been killed on my account, I wasn't sure I could handle that.

Finally we got the word that it was okay for me to come out of hiding.  My bodyguards, acting almost human for a change, tried to make small talk with me on the way to the airport--which was a shame, really, because now I didn't want to talk.  My stomach was like a fist:  whatever way this had gone down, I was about to find out.

And I was pretty sure I didn't want to know.
 

III.  Chicago, Illinois

We flew into O'Hare, and I felt like king of the underworld as I walked through the airport with armed guys to either side of me.  A black car was waiting for us outside, but not a limo this time, so I figured I was on my way to coming down in the world.  And no uniformed chauffeur opened the door for me--but all 300 pounds of Danny Quinzio was in the back seat, thank the Lord God.

"Danny."  My stomach unclenched a little at the sight of him.

SPERANZA: "Hello, Ray.  I am Exposition Man.  I am here to give you one version of this narrative--a first version that will be tested by Fraser's version, and Frannie's version, and others.  You see, Ray, this story has, at its core, a mystery and an absence, and so it's a story about competing versions of the story, and the stories people tell actually tell us more about them than about what really happened to Kowalski.  So don't believe everything you hear; rather, look at who's telling the tale and ask what their investments are.  Now me, for instance, I'm a senior operative for the FBI.  I am therefore going to tell the tale in fairly hard-boiled law-enforcement terms.  I am, in fact, performing the function for this FBI case that Welsh often performs in actual episodes of due South."

"Hiya, Ray."  Danny showed me a tired smile as he shook my hand.  His palms were sweaty, but I squeezed tight--so great to see him after two years of him being only a voice on the phone, my only outside contact.  Right now I felt closer to Danny Quinzio than to anyone in the world, cause he was the only voice from outside Vegas I was allowed to hear, the only voice for two years who knew I was me.

The car pulled away from the curb and I said, "What's going on, man?"

Danny blew out a breath, and right there any hopes I had of not being responsible for this just upped and died.  I sank back against the leather seat, feeling sick.  "Hell.  How'd it happen?"

"Short version?" Danny asked, and the familiarity of his voice was almost soothing.  "It was a fuck-up.  This guy Kowalski--"

I closed my eyes.  "Kowalski," I repeated, and my throat felt like I'd just swallowed glass.  Cause suddenly it was real, he was real--not just some guy but a particular guy:  a guy with a name as well as a haircolor and a mother.  I took a deliberate breath, trying to clear my spinning head.  "Not a paisan, I take it?" I asked, and smiled thinly.

SPERANZA: I'm really pleased with Vecchio's reaction, the whole thing of Kowalski being real, suddenly--a guy with a name as well as a haircolor and a mother.  </pointless reaction>

Danny looked surprised at the question.  "Kowalski?  No, he was a Polack."

I nodded and rubbed my aching forehead with the heel of my hand.  "Yeah, I figured that, Danny.  So what happened?"

"He picked up a homicide, a guy found shot in the park.  Standard kind of thing, looked like a drug deal--nothing that rang bells.  So it went onto Kowalski's docket."  I nodded for him to go on and he did.  "Case didn't go anywhere for weeks," Danny continued.  "In fact, Welsh blacklisted it twice."  I nodded again, knowing that Welsh kept a list of cases that looked like they were gonna mess with the bullpen's solve rate.  "Except Kowalski must have still been working it," Danny said quietly.  "Morning of April 9th, he leaves a message saying that this thing might connect back to Charlie Fish--

Everything went suddenly sharp and clear:  Charlie Fish, aka Carleggio Pesce.  "Oh shit..."

"--and that he's gonna go check it out, ask some questions, shake things up."  Danny's face tightened;  he could see I was already way ahead of him.

"Why the hell didn't Welsh stop him?" I exploded, suddenly furious.  "What the fuck was he--"

"Welsh didn't know anything about it," Danny said grimly.  "No way would Welsh have let Kowalski go after Charlie Fish, what with Charlie being such a huge fan of yours."  Danny shifted uncomfortably on his side of the car, rocking the whole back seat.  "Look, it was a fuck up, like I said--we tried to keep Kowalski off the mob cases, except nobody knew this was a mob case.  I mean, we only figured it out afterwards, once he was dead."

SPERANZA: So here's that key plot bit I started with--the idea that Kowalski would eventually stumble on a mob case that would get him hurt or killed.  (Of course, the whole substitution of K for V ludicrous, so there's really no point working on a "logical" consequence; in "real life" K would be exposed long before THIS.)

I frowned across the car at him.  "What do you mean?"

"I mean it was a fuck-up!" Danny almost shouted;  I'd never heard him sound so upset.  "Kowalski goes to shake up Charlie's people, and I guess he did a pretty good job of it because next day he's gone, missing, vamoosed, and his apartment's been trashed and everything he owns torn to pieces--"

"Christ," I muttered.

"--and there's a message spraypainted on his living-room wall in foot-high letters," Danny finished in a voice full of quiet savagery.   "Where is Ray Vecchio? We pulled you out of Vegas that afternoon."

SPERANZA: And here's the spraypainted message.  These mobsters--no subtlety at all.  *g*  Still, these are people who normally use things like a dead horse head, so I feel I can be forgiven the extremity of it.  (Ces imagines a scene where they were gonna leave a message on the phone pad like normal people, but nobody has a pen.  And then someone says, "Fuck it, just spraypaint it on the wall." "Right, boss.")

I sat there in silence for a few minutes as the car cruised along the highway, processing this, picturing it.  Danny seemed to understand that I needed a sec before I could handle much more of this story.  "So okay," I said, finally.  "Then what?"

"Then we had to figure out what the fuck happened," Danny replied;  he seemed to have calmed down himself.  "Turns out his partner knew all about it--"

I sat up straight in my seat.  "What partner?"

Danny just blinked at me.  "His partner," he repeated, like I was just being stupid.  "Your partner--you know, the Mountie," and suddenly my stomach clenched so tightly that I would have thrown up if there'd been anything in me to throw.

"Fraser's still here?" I managed;  I'd convinced myself that no way was that possible, not after two years, not still.  In fact, I'd had it in the back of my mind that I might go up north to see him as a way of maybe delaying my re-entry into the mess of what remained of my life, but that was impossible now, because Benton Fraser was apparently still in the middle of the mess.  Life as usual.

SPERANZA: I remember thinking while writing this that, really, it's kind of surprising that Fraser stays in Chicago as long as he does, and that he sticks it out with Kowalski as long as he does.  Yes, yes, I know--Fraser stays just long enough to achieve syndication--but seriously, within the logic of the show, it strikes me reasonable of Vecchio to think that Fraser would have been long gone.  And also, you can read Fraser's staying as...romantically suspicous. *g*

"Yeah, he's here," Danny confirmed, "and he was working with Kowalski.  He--"

"He told Fraser," I said, squeezing my eyes shut.  I had the whole picture now.  "Kowalski told Fraser about Charlie Fish, is that it?"

"That's it, yeah.  He left a message at the Canadian Consulate--"

"And Fraser didn't know about Charlie and me, so he didn't know to stop it.  And they didn't tell Welsh, because me and Fraser always worked on our own.  Act first, report later..."

"That's about the size of it."  I opened my eyes and saw Danny looking at me somberly.  "And by time we put all the pieces together..."  Danny shook his head and I felt a chill steal up my spine.  "We were already doomed to playing catch-up.  But the good news," Danny added, and hell, I couldn't wait for some good news, "is that Charlie's dead too."

SPERANZA: Convenient, isn't it? *g*  (Though really, my precedent here is the murder of that other famous blond.  Oswald kills Kennedy, Ruby kills Oswald, and nobody knows what the fuck happened exactly.)

I stared at him, meanly delighted.  "He is?"

"He is," Danny said in a firm, satisfied voice.  "I only wish it was our people who shot him.  But one of his guys spared us the trouble, a guy called Joey Carbone.  He was pissed at Charlie for bringing the heat down by killing Kowalski."

This was all too much to take in.  I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to soothe my pounding head.   "Enough already," I muttered.  "Enough for now."

"Two more things you got to know, Ray," Danny said quietly.  The car had pulled up in front of a suburban house, another goddamned safehouse, I assumed.

"Enough," I repeated, and reached for the door handle.

Danny ignored me.  "One.  The D.A. cut Carbone a deal for killing Charlie Fish, because we were all so glad to see the bastard dead."  I gritted my teeth and nodded, betting that Carbone was real popular around the 2-7 right now.  Hell, I might send flowers myself.  "So it's from Carbone that we have the details on Kowalski's murder.  Carbone was one of the kidnappers, so he told us how the grab was done."

SPERANZA: You know, rereading this, I really wish there was some way to make this plot simpler.  I tried hard at the time, so I'm going to swear that I couldn't make it simpler--but I still wish I could.  (And its simpler than the plot of A Moment of Insight, anyway. But sheesh, writing any kind of murder plot or mystery plot is hard--it gets so boring, so fast.  Even on DS that's true for me--who the hell cared about the actual CRIME Ray and Fraser were solving that week?  Not me, anyway...

I went for the door handle again--I didn't want to fuckin' hear this!--but Danny pressed a button and the locks shot down with an audible click.

SPERANZA: Yes, you must be trapped in the car to hear this--because this is the REALLY IMPORTANT EXPOSITION!  So listen to EXPOSITION MAN!  He will give you what you really going to need to follow the plot!

"They broke in and beat him up in his apartment," Danny went on, sounding like the goddamned voice of doom.  "Evidence at the scene confirms this.  Then Carbone says they dragged him down the stairs and put him in the trunk of Charlie's car.  We impounded the car, got matching blood, hair and fibers--"

"All right, already!" I banged my fist against the car door.  "I got the picture!"

"Carbone then testified that Fish told them to get out of there, that he'd finish it himself.  Fish then drove Kowalski to the docks, shot him, and dumped his body in the lake."  Madre di Dio, I thought.  Povero biondo... "We used sniffer dogs to find the dock, then sent in a team--"

"Christ, stop."

"--which found more blood and hair, DNA confirmed as Kowalski's .  Plus we recovered a bloodstained shirt from the water--"

"I believe you!" I shouted.  "I fucking believe you, all right!"

"Well, that's good," Danny said flatly, "because your Mountie doesn't," and I shut my mouth so fast my jaw snapped.  "Benton Fraser says no body, no death, and nothing we say seems to convince him otherwise.  He's just not sane on the subject, Ray, and so we were hoping that maybe you could talk some sense into him."

JULAD:  Now, the thing is, Ces doesn't tell us what happens in the story.  We get each scene, sometimes each paragraph, as she writes it, and sometimes she'll tell us part of the upcoming plot, but she'll usually be very cagey about it and sometimes flat out say "I can't explain that right now."  So we know about as much about the story as the reader who's seen it mentioned around LJ-- but we have to wait days and sometimes weeks to find out what happens in the next bit.  (I say this here because at this point it hit me-- oh, boy, it'll hurt like a bitch, waiting to find out what happens in this story.)

Keeping us in the dark keeps our reactions fairly genuine, I think--  it's often our reactions, our interpretations of each thing that she's interested in, and she starts asking why? where do you get that idea from? We don't know why she's interested in that particular thing until much later, but part of what she's doing with her betas is making sure that we (as readers) are on the track she wants us on, interpreting events the way she wants us to.

"Where--"  I had to stop and swallow before I could get the words out.  "--is he?"

"Inside," Danny said calmly, nodding toward the safehouse.  "That's the second thing I wanted to tell you," he added, and unlocked the car door.

SPERANZA: Again, I think this is a pretty decent curtain line.  I think the tension's pretty high on that whole "no body, no death" thing, and we've been well prepared for Fraser's intro into the story.

The other thing that's probably worth mentioning right here is the status of Kowalski's death at this point in the story--my assumption, which I'm still pretty sure is correct, is that the minute you find out that Fraser believes RayK is alive, you the reader also believe that RayK is alive.   Therefore, I didn't worry too much about worrying you, because my sense of it is that you're with Fraser on this, that you're going to believe what Fraser believes.  (Also--"Is Bleeding" is present tense, and thus conveys Ray's essentially aliveness.  It's not called "Kowalski Was Bleeding"--a much more ominous title!)

PART TWO

I.  Near West

I climbed the porch steps, crossed to the door, and turned the knob.  The house wasn't locked, which didn't surprise me much being that it was Fraser who was living here, and he never really got the concept.  I guess the house was 'safe' just by having Fraser there, sort of by definition.

I stepped into a living room that reminded me of my grandmother's, God rest her soul, only more disgusting.  Plastic-covered furniture from the forties--not retro but ugly--and a coffee table covered with cigarette burns.  I dropped my bag on the table, slung my overcoat onto the sofa, and went to explore the rest of the house.

SPERANZA: Okay, so let's talk about the little boxes. *g*

They're basically there to indulge my desire for multiple POVs in this scene--I really wanted, like, snapshots of things that were happening outside of my solid Vecchio POV.  My first thought was actually pop-up windows--I'd still like to try that actually--where as you're reading the story there are certain phrases in bold and as you click on them, you get a kind of spin-off thought as to what the other character in the scene is thinking/how they're reacting.  I actually went to far as to research the technology, the code and such, but ultimately it just didn't seem workable--and also, the story would have been damn near unprintable, and a lot of people, I know, want to download and/or print stories to read.

So I decided to just integrate my pop-up windows into the text, and so here you go.  But I'd still like to do a pop-up story, where you could, say, wave your mouse over a character's name and get their reaction to something...

JULAD adds:  Yeah, I remember this discussion, and remember Ces getting very frustrated with the limitations of conventional narrative.  We had quite a few discussions of how else you can tell a story, what else you can do with html and maybe LJ to tell stories in a different way, but ultimately she wasn't going to do some crazy hyperlinked popup box story unless it was exactly the right way to tell that exact story.
 

Fraser was sitting at the kitchen table, his head braced on one hand.  He looked up when I pushed through the door, and Christ, he looked older.  There were fine lines around his eyes and mouth that I didn't remember being there.  And maybe it was just the light, but I could swear he had flecks of gray in his hair. I wondered if I looked that much older to him.  "Hey, Benny." "Ray."  The hard lines in his face softened, and he stood up, his chair scraping the linoleum.  "Ray..."

"Please, Fraser."  Stella's face was hard, but I'd seen that sort of hardness before and knew it was primarily a sign of suffering.  I suspected my own face was etched in similarly harsh lines.  "You're not making this easier on anyone, you know.  For God's sake, think about Barbara if you can't bring yourself to give a shit about anyone else--"

SPERANZA: Okay, so the box above...the scene on the right, the Stella scene, is what Fraser's thinking about when Vecchio surprises him at the kitchen table.  We get this tiny little glimpse into Fraser's mind of what's haunting him...a memory.

A blur of steps and then I had Fraser in the tightest bear hug I could manage.  I grabbed so much flannel that I thought I'd split the back of my fancy suit jacket, and moreover I didn't give a shit.  Fraser hugged me back with equal force, and I figured he was pretty damn pleased to see me, too.

Finally I pulled back and punched his arm lightly.  "You're a sight for sore eyes, Fraser--God, I'm glad to see you.  Though I'm sorry it's like this.  I didn't want it to be like this."
 

Fraser's faint smile didn't reach his eyes.  "I take it they told you." "They told me, yeah."  We sat down and looked at each other across the table.  "I'm sorry, Fraser--really, I am.  I can't help thinking this is all my fault." Fraser shook his head in a quick negative.  "It's not your fault, Ray.  In fact I'd rather not think in terms of fault at all right now."  His lips twitched again, but no way I could call that tight, ugly look a smile.  "It just doesn't help," he added quietly. "Well, it's not your fault," I protested.  "You had no way of knowing about me and Charlie Fish-- Fraser avoided my eyes.  "As I say, perhaps we'd best leave any question of fault aside." I pounded the table once in frustration, then fell back in my chair.  "Christ, what a mess."  I blew out a breath and looked around the ancient kitchen.  "They been keeping you here?"

"Message for you, sir."  I found myself wondering if Turnbull would have had a brilliant career in some alternative universe as head butler of an English estate;  the man was like something out of Evelyn Waugh.  "Oh?" I asked, and Turnbull handed me the memo slip. "Detective Vecchio called," Turnbull explained, "and said something about..." His face creased into a frown and he put a finger to his cheek.  "Now let me see..." I glanced down at the message, which was in Turnbull's very own handwriting. Tell Fraser that Simpson used to work for Charlie Fish.  "That Mr. Simpson used to work for Charlie Fish?" Turnbull brightened. "That's it," he said.  "You're very clever, aren't you, sir?"

SPERANZA:  Again, with box 2 above--we get a gloss of the scene where Fraser finds out what turns out to be key information:  "Tell Fraser that Simpson used to work for Charlie Fish."  Now, as Exposition Man told us earlier, if Fraser and Ray had worked a little more collaboratively and a little less out on their own, they might have run into someone who would have recognized the name and therefore put a halt to this whole situation.  But they didn't, and Fraser right now is feeling pretty responsible.  But anyway, the idea here was that Fraser's memory on the right of getting Ray K's message is what's in the back of Fraser's mind as he talks to Ray V about fault  on the left.

"They were," Fraser explained with an oddly un-Fraserish shrug.  "They lifted security this morning, after Mr. Carbone was sentenced.  But they're letting me stay on a few days."

"Stay on?  Why?" I asked, frowning.  "What's wrong with your place?"
 

"It burned down." "Burned down!?" Fraser waved his hand dismissively, as if it were no big deal.  "Not recently.  Quite some time ago.  A performance arsonist--it's a long story.  I've been living at the Consulate," he said, and then added, "primarily," and gave a polite little cough.  "But since I resigned, it's no longer appropriate for me to--" "Resigned," I repeated; what with so many shocks to the system these past weeks,  I was losing the ability to muster surprise.

"Look, you wanna keep your keys in your hat, keep your keys in your hat.  Just don't keep my keys in your hat, cause that's what pockets are for.  Figure how stupid I look as a cop when my place gets robbed because I gave my keys to a Mountie who keeps his keys in his hat.  We on the same page here?" "Certainly, Ray."

SPERANZA:  Box three--our first hint that RayK and Fraser were involved; Ray K gave his housekeys to Fraser.  Again, this is something that is meant to be in the back of Fraser's mind as he explains to Ray that he lives in the Consulate, er, primarily. Actually, of course, he hangs his hat someplace else, and Fraser has a flash memory of being given the keys.

Really, what I liked about doing the boxes was the sense that every moment has layers, that there's more than one thing happening at once, even in someone's head.  I guess this is all the literary equivolent of split-screen.

Fraser braced his hands on this thighs and stared down at them. "Well, I had to.  They wouldn't let me work on this case anymore."

Right, okay, here we were at the nub of the thing.  "You don't think he's dead?"

Fraser winced so sharply, and with such obvious pain, that I could have kicked my ass up and down Main Street for framing the question like that.  I was trying to think how to apologize when Fraser said, quietly, "I don't know.  It's certainly possible.  Maybe even probable.  I don't know."

He fell silent then, still staring down, and I waited, not trusting myself or my big mouth.

Finally Fraser lifted his head and looked at me. "It's more that I'm skeptical of the case as it stands.  It just doesn't make sense to me."

I put my elbows on the table and leaned forward.  "How so?"

"Well, motive for one thing." Fraser raised an absent hand and stroked his thumb across his mouth, lost in thought.  "Why kill Ray?"

"Ray?" I asked, wondering if this was his name or mine.  I didn't even know the povero biondo's first name.  "Was his name Ray, or--?"

Fraser twitched again, and I didn't realize what I'd done until he'd corrected me.  "Yes, he's a Ray too.  Which is convenient," present tense.

I felt like an idiot, like somebody should just gag me and lock me in the basement.  "I bet.  But Fraser," I added quickly, wanting to get past the present tense thing, "I gotta tell you--Charlie Fish don't need no motive to kill me.  The guy hates me for that whole mess in '86--I mean, he really really hates me, Fraser.  If Kowalski got in his face--"

Fraser shook his head again.  "Let's be logical about this," he said, and that was more like the Fraser I remembered.  "Nobody has suggested that Ray was murdered for his investigation of Charlie Fish per se.  Rather, the explanation is that Ray, as 'Ray Vecchio,' asked some very inconvenient questions about Mr. Fish's involvement in a murder.  Mr. Fish, furious that you would dare to interfere with him--"

"--which I wouldn't've," I interrupted, thinking that the point was worth making.  "If it were me, I wouldn't've, Fraser, because it woulda been like waving a flag in front of a bull--"

Fraser raised his hand.  "Please, Ray, let me finish.  Mr. Fish is thrown into a fury that you--you, in particular--would dare to investigate him or his people.  So he and his men decide to teach you a lesson.  They go to what they think is your apartment.  They confront the man whom they believe to be you.  Except he isn't you.  Now according to Mr. Carbone's testimony, Mr. Fish was surprised and startled to encounter Ray Kowalski.  According to Mr. Carbone, that's how the beating began--with Mr. Fish wanting to know what the game was and where you really were.  And to seal matters, Mr. Fish left the question writ large upon the wall--Where is Ray Vecchio?  All of which goes to show that it was you, and not Ray Kowalski, who was the target of Charlie Fish's murderous rage that night."

SPERANZA:  Man, I tried so hard to make this all clear; I don't know if it is clear.  But there's a standard kind of Sherlock Holmesian deductive question and answer thing going on, which was the best I could do at the time.  The thing about a complicated plot is that it's complicated, and I've gotten real admiration for people who can lead you through the details of that clearly.  It's something to keep working on, I guess--god knows how crime novelists do it! (Badly, a lot of 'em.)

Now it was my turn to shake my head.  "Yeah, but Benny--all well and good there, except your Ray got his ass caught in the middle.  You can't kill the Ray you want, kill the Ray you're with, you know?"

"Yes, I know," Fraser said quietly, "and that might very well be what happened."  Now he was rubbing his eyebrow nervously, his face tense.  "I have no doubt that the beating happened.  I have no doubt that Ray was taken down to the car.  And it's certainly possible that Ray was subsequently murdered just for being there, or because his impersonation of you made Mr. Fish feel like a fool.  However," Fraser added suddenly, dropping his hand to the table with a thump, "consider this.  If Charlie Fish wanted to kill you--you, Ray Vecchio--what would have been his best chance of getting you?"

I stared across the table at him for a long moment while my brain worked it out.  "A trade," I admitted.

It was like Fraser's whole body had suddenly turned to water.  He sank back in his chair, wearing an expression of the very purest relief.   "Yes, Ray.  Exactly."

"I'm with you," I said, and I was;  Fraser was no dummy.  "You think that Charlie Fish stuck Kowalski somewhere, figuring to trade him for me later, when I resurfaced."

SPERANZA:  Ahoy! Plot point!  Actually, I think this piece of the plot--the idea that Kowalski's been hidden, rather than killed, comes across fairly clearly.  "Where in the world is Ray Kowalski?" </Rockappella>

Fraser suddenly looked five years younger.  "Yes."

"Except then he got himself shot, which he wasn't expecting."

"Yes," Fraser agreed.

I frowned.  "So where is he?  I mean, it's been weeks now..."

"I don't know."  The tension lines had returned to Fraser's face with a vengeance.  "I've been wracking my brain for alternatives;  in fact, I have a list of possibilities.  But it's like finding a needle in haystack..."

"Fraser," I said, feeling a sudden stab of panic, "if he had Kowalski holed up in the wrong place--somebody's basement, a warehouse, or a dungeon somewhere--"

"I know."  Fraser seemed barely able to get the words out.  "He could already be dead--starved, suffocated, what have you. As you say, it's been weeks.  But if there's even a chance that he's still alive somewhere..."

"I got it," I said, nodding grimly.  "All right.  I'm with you."

To my surprise, Fraser reached across the table and clutched my hand tightly between both of his, and for the first time since I'd seen him there was hope in his eyes.  "I knew you'd come.  I knew you'd help me.  You're the best friend I have," and damned if I wasn't, and damned if I wouldn't do anything he ever asked of me.

SPERANZA:  One of the things I liked about writing this story was the chance to have Vecchio and Fraser collaborate on a case together.  Therefore this story allowed me to write all the DS dynamics I most like--the F/V friendship and partnership as well as the F/K love affair, more about which later.

We sat up late into the night, drinking tea and making plans.  It was Fraser's idea that we ought to go through all the evidence again, follow the trail, just like old times, just like this was a regular case.  That way I'd get up to speed on the details, and he'd get to go over it again and see it all fresh.

It turned out that Fraser had worked the case at first--in fact, he was the one who found Fish's car, and it was Dief of all wolves who'd found the dock where Kowalski was dumped--sniffer dogs, my ass.  And they'd both of them been there at the dock when Kowalski's shirt was pulled from the water--but when the CPD declared Kowalski dead, Fraser'd jumped ship on the investigation.

"They stopped looking," Fraser said doggedly.  "They stopped looking, they decided that we'd found everything there was to be found."  Except to Fraser's mind they hadn't found the most important thing, the key thing:  Ray Kowalski himself, or in the worst case, his body.

They'd retaliated by putting Fraser into protective custody, "for his own good," they said, but really, Fraser thought, because they didn't want him messing up the evidence chain.  "But I'm a civilian now," Fraser told me, and under that polite exterior was a determination that I knew better than to cross.  "I'm a civilian and as of this morning I'm no longer under police protection," and as far as Fraser was concerned, that was license to do whatever he damn well pleased.

SPERANZA:  I think this dogged Fraser is contiguous with what we see in canon; the guy who leaves the country to track down his father's killers, the guy who is willing to go it alone in GFTS.  I just think its wildly sexy to see him exercising this kind of determination on Ray's behalf.

"Besides," Fraser added, and I could see that his determination was only a half-step away from real fury, "they're on the verge of closing the case for good.  And with Joey Carbone now in prison, all evidence is now fair game, don't you think?"

Yep.  Fair game.  Totally--and to be honest I was finding this whole thing goddamned therapeutic.  Because it was all so familiar, him and me, talking cop talk and bucking the system.  Finally, after two long years, I was Ray Vecchio again-- and I was beginning to feel like Ray Vecchio, to work like Ray Vecchio.  I was sitting here in this shitty kitchen with Ray Vecchio's best friend, and I could almost forget--almost--what it was we were working on.

Except every so often I'd get a real look at Fraser's face and it would crash down on me that this was his partner we were talking about--his partner and the guy who had replaced me at the 2-7.  Because Fraser--all right, Fraser was always personally involved in his work, but not personally personally, not like this.   The only time I could remember seeing Fraser like this was the first time, back when he'd stood in front of my desk and told me that the dead Mountie was his father.  And now the dead cop was his partner, and the dead cop was me, and it was pretty damn weird and oddly familiar at the same time.

SPERANZA:  Er, like I was just saying. (I forgot I'd made the comparison to Fraser's dad so explicitly!)

"Tomorrow, we'll start again," Fraser said, putting down the pencil he'd been writing with.  "Revisit the whole case, start to finish.  We'll begin at Ray's apartment, then I'll show you the evidence from the car, and the dock."  He rubbed his forehead and looked down at the notes he'd made.  "Hopefully we can figure out some line of attack, some method of search..."

"I'll do my best, Fraser," I said, meaning it most sincerely, and Fraser smiled at me.

"I'm sure you'll bring me luck, Ray.  You always did."

We gathered our things and headed up the stairs.  Fraser showed me the bedroom I would occupy until I could figure out what was up with my life.  It reminded me a lot of my bedroom at home.  I sighed;  this was no suite at the Bellagio, that was for sure.

"Sleep well, Ray," Fraser said, and moved down the hallway toward his own room.

"You too," I replied absently, and then I heard myself calling after him.  "Hey!  Fraser!"

He stopped and looked back at me curiously.

"This Kowalski."  I leaned against the doorframe and chose my words carefully, being sure as hell to use the present tense.  "Is he a good guy?  Will I like him?"

"Yes," Fraser said, sounding serious, "and I certainly hope so," and then he stepped into his room and disappeared.
 

II.  South Side

Kowalski's place was nice enough from the outside;  one of those old buildings that got advertised as having 'character', which in my experience meant 'no elevator.'  Sure enough, we had to whuff our way up three flights of stairs to the apartment door, which was criss-crossed with yellow crime scene tape.

SPERANZA: Right, so it's only now that we see the crime scene, and I think this works better than my original idea of starting the story here in Ray's apartment, because the place is all the more poignant for having been abandoned and trampled by the cops.  In my head, the Ray's apartment is an achingly empty place--a destroyed, familiar place--emblematic of RayK's own absense.

Fraser pulled out his knife and slit the tape without hesitation, and I reached for the knob.  The door was locked, just like I figured.  "You want me to go talk to the landlord?" I asked, but Fraser already had the keys out.  That made me smile, because I had forgotten how Fraser was always prepared for everything.  I guess I wasn't entirely back to being Ray Vecchio yet.

Fraser unlocked the door and the smile fell off my face.  When Danny said the place had been trashed--well, he wasn't kidding: it was like a fucking hurricane had blown through here, and a mean one at that.  What really got me was the obvious maliciousness of it all--upholstery ripped to shreds, stuffing flung everywhere, chairs hacked to pieces.  Drawers were emptied, papers shredded, glass broken--there wasn't a thing in the place that looked intact or recoverable.

SPERANZA: I'm counting on your affection for Ray's apartment (as the site of so many of your favorite stories!) to be driving the knife in deeper. *g*  The apartment itself is kind of a character here.

And there, across the wall in red spraypaint, was Charlie Fish's final postcard: WHERE IS RAY VECCHIO?  It gave me the serious creeps to see my name up there in what looked almost like blood, and to know that I'd been responsible for wrecking this guy's life.
 

Fraser was crouched beside some smashed stereo equipment--nice stuff, or used to be, from the look of it.  The floor around there was scattered with old records, and it looked like Charlie and his pals had taken the time to stomp on every one.  Fraser picked up an album, slid it out of its sleeve, and contemplated the jagged half-moon of black vinyl for a moment before letting it fall to the floor.  Soul Of The Tango, the cover said, and I wished I hadn't seen that, because right now a sense of the guy's personality was all I needed.  Still, though, once I'd started noticing I couldn't stop noticing--a broken strand of chili pepper lights hung over the pass-through to the kitchen, and there were painted footprints on the floor under the rucked up rug.  Dancing feet, I realized a moment later, like you saw in old movies. "He likes to dance, huh?" I asked Fraser. Fraser turned his face away.  "Yeah." I sighed and tried to look at the room more like a detective.  One corner was a little less cluttered than the rest, so I figured this was where they'd laid into Kowalski.  I bent down to confirm this and saw a smear of blood on the white wall, and another on the edge of the battered roll top desk.  Maybe Kowalski's blood, but maybe he'd managed to land a few punches himself. "He any good at fighting?" I asked absently. "Yeah."  There was a strange undercurrent to Fraser's voice--like maybe he thought the question was funny.  "You could say that." "Aggressive?" I pressed, turning to look at him. "Very." "In other words, he's an asshole," I said, and to my surprise Fraser laughed. "Completely and utterly, yes," Fraser admitted, grinning at the thought.  "In fact, Ray's rather a colossal asshole, which is much of his charm." I burst out laughing myself, half of out shock.  "Wow, a colossal asshole--even better," I suggested.  "Sounds like the Vecchio name's been in good hands." "Excellent hands, yes."  Fraser stood and gave Kowalski's living room a long, searching look, and I stood there and watched the good humor die on his face.  He looked suddenly lost in the rubble--like maybe he was barely resisting the urge to clean up the place. But after all, Fraser knew this place as a place.  He probably spent a lot of time here, hanging with Kowalski and talking whatever shit they talked together.  Fraser had to know what this place looked like when it was normal, so it had to be a bigger shock to him seeing it look like this, like a wreck. all beat to shit.  For me, this was pretty much just another crime scene, but for Fraser, this was a place he was connected to--his partner's place, his friend's place.  He had memories here, and maybe he recognized some of Kowalski's stuff, made associations back to the guy. "You spend a lot of time here?" I asked him.

...la división de alto rendimiento de General Motors y en 1964 dió en el clavo con el GTO, asi como Ford con el Mustang. Porque si hay un auto que refleja todo el fenómeno muscle car... Ray stared at me across the kitchen table.  "You know, I never figured you for an addiction to Spanish radio."  "It helps me keep up with my Spanish," I explained, feeling vaguely embarrassed.  "It's educational, and of course it's free--" "My two favorite things," Ray muttered into his coffee cup. "Look, could we maybe hear the news, maybe?" I gestured toward the radio.  "I thought you'd be interested in--" "I would be if I was a genius and spoke Spanish, which I don't." "I thought you studied Spanish," I said with a frown. "Flunked ain't studied, Fraser.  In fact it's the opposite." "But you like things Spanish, don't you?" Ray seemed to slump further in his chair, then shrugged his shoulder.  "Tacos count?" "You like the tango," I pointed out, but this was apparently the wrong thing to say, because suddenly Ray was sitting up in his chair and bristling all over.  Even his hair seemed to have gotten somehow spikier.  "It was my wife who liked the tango," Ray said, stabbing a finger at me.  "She liked the tango, I just liked her. Her records, and she dumped them just about the time she dumped me.  Okay? Comprende?" "Entiendo," I murmured, lowering my eyes.  Behind me, I could still hear the radio announcer burbling.  Pontiac, haciendo caso omiso de la orden, ofreció la opción GTO con un motor 389 en el modelo Lemans del 64... I felt like perhaps I ought to apologize, but what precisely would I be apologising for?  He was the one with the attitude problem, after all. After a moment I could hear Ray shifting nervously in his seat, and then he muttered something I couldn't make out. "Pardon me?" I asked, lifting my head. "Ex-wife," Ray muttered, and now he was avoiding my eyes. "Indeed," I said, as breezily as I could manage, and got up to pour myself another cup of tea.  "Accuracy is, of course, important--" "I'm sorry, okay?"  He glanced up, and then away, looking rather like a hunted dog.  "Just--I'm sorry, Fraser--"

SPERANZA:  OK, with this box we start up with the relatively controversial "Ray is an asshole" theme.  We actually don't yet have all the interpretive tools that we need to make sense of this section, but I'll give you a sense of what it was ideally supposed to be doing.

First of all, you're supposed to be kind of shocked and surprised that Fraser adopts the word "asshole" to describe Ray--not so much on Ray's behalf, but because it's not a very Fraserish thing to say, right?  Subconscious message:  Fraser's changed, this Fraser is very different from the last time Vecchio saw him.  And this Fraser is different--in the coming sections, we'll see how his relationship with Ray has changed him.

Fraser finds the broken tango record on the floor, and that triggers this memory of a tango-related argument he had with RayK.  But in my perfect world, the reader is also reading *through* the story on the right to see that there are some layers to the conversation that Fraser isn't getting.  Ray clearly associates the tango with Stella (as we can see from his statement and as we know from canon) and he brandishes the word "wife" at Fraser like its a weapon.  I think we're in a better position than Fraser was to see that Ray has deeply mixed feelings about his own emergent homosexuality-- because we know more about Ray's asociations with the tango than Fraser does.  Fraser didn't see Ray dancing alone in his apartment at the end of Strange Bedfellows, so Fraser doesn't understand, in that section on the right, what mindfield he's stumbled into, though I'd argue that the Fraser on the left may now understand and thinks back on that period with a kind of rueful affection: what a long, strange trip it's been.  In my head, therefore, the argument on the right takes place early in the Fraser/RayK sexual relationship, and Ray feels threatened when Fraser reminds him of the tango/Stella/etc, and his response implies that he (Ray) is somehow more manly, more macho, than Fraser--he had a wife, after all!  He used to be a "real man, etc."

But Ray's clearly on the retreat by the end of the memory passage--first correcting wife to ex-wife (i.e. acknowledging that his life is different now, that he's no longer married, that he's with Fraser) and then moving to a guilty apology.  What I was trying to do was give you a portrait of a good man who is not yet entirely comfortable with his sexuality, and Ray being Ray he turns his fear outwards, so that if manifests itself as aggression.

I think that this is a fairly common male response, btw--fear manifesting as aggression.  I'd argue that this RayK is a close relative of Mountie on the Bountie!RayK, who picks a fight with Fraser right after being scared out of his skin.  I like reading male aggression as a symptom either of passion or of fear--in this story, its both, because for this Ray, his passion for Fraser is an absolutely terrifying thing.  (Also, I was hoping you'd take your cue on this from Fraser and Vecchio's response, which is affectionate; their use of the word "asshole" pretty much translates into "good guy.")

"You could say that," Fraser murmured, and then suddenly he snapped back into himself;  suddenly he was all business again.  "There," he said, pointing at the corner where I'd been looking before.  "Notice the scuffle pattern--"

"Yeah, I noticed," I said, and I did.  "You got blood on the wall, blood on that desk over there--"

"Right," Fraser agreed, and stepped carefully through the rubble toward the corner.  "Now, they must have caught Ray by surprise, because he never got to his gun--"

"Wait, wait, whoa," I said, raising my hands.  "How do you know that?"

"It's in evidence lockup," Fraser explained.  "It was found in the bedroom, in the lockbox where Ray normally keeps it."  Fraser looked the roll-top over with a critical eye.  It was smashed up pretty badly, and covered in glass;  I figured this was where Kowalski had kept his tchotchkes.  Fraser started struggling to pry open the battered roll top.  "However," he added, gritting his teeth as he pulled, "Ray did of course--"

The accordion top splintered suddenly, leaving a gaping hole big enough to worm a hand into.  With a sigh, Fraser started to bash at the opening with his elbow.   A moment later he reached in and pulled out a second lockbox, only this one wasn't locked.  Fraser popped the latch and pulled out another gun.

SPERANZA: I'm so pleased, for some reason, with the visual of Fraser bashing in the roll top desk with his elbow.  Fraser should really bash things more often (note to self!)

"His ankle piece?" I asked, and Fraser nodded grimly.  "Nice.  Okay, so both guns accounted for, which means for sure Kowalski never saw this coming."  It also meant that Fraser had spent a lot of time here, because he'd put his hands on Kowalski's spare piece pretty damn fast.  "The knock at the door takes him off guard," I mused, pointing toward it, "takes him off guard, and then there's guys in here and he's overpowered.  How many guys--do we know?"

SPERANZA: Vecchio twigs pretty quick to the ease with which Fraser moves around Kowalski's apartment--so even if he doesn't yet KNOW they're involved, he's sure starting to know it.  Later, he won't have to do much to put the pieces together.

"Four," Fraser said softly.  "And Charlie Fish, at least according to Mr. Carbone."

"Right, okay.  Five to one, not great odds."  I bit my lip and stared around at the room.  "They jump him and get him beaten down, tied up and restrained--"

Fraser shot me a sharp look.  "I assumed they knocked him unconscious."

"No."  I shook my head.  "You don't know Charlie, Fraser.  He'd want Kowalski to see this--to know what they were doing to his place, his life, all of it."

Fraser nodded slowly, his face now blank.  "Yes, I see.  An intimidation tactic.  Though knowing Ray as I do, I can't imagine he'd be easily intimidated.  Such a display would be much more likely to infuriate him."

"Then that tells you how badly they beat him," I said flatly.

"Yes, of course," Fraser said and turned away.

"So they restrain him, trash the place, and then drag him down to the car."  I paced slowly across the battered room, and then stopped and kicked at a pile of rubbish.  "So far, so bad--but what I'm seeing here confirms Joey Carbone's story, Fraser."

"Yes," Fraser said quietly.  "Unfortunately.  The blood here was confirmed as Ray's, and the trail led out of the apartment, down the corridor, down to the street."

"And right to Charlie's car."

"Yes."

"The cops pick up any weapons?" I asked, looking around.

"Yes," Fraser replied.  "Two bloodstained coshes, no fingerprints.  They're at the 27th precinct, along with the other evidence that was collected.  We'll go there now;  you should see it.  You should see all of it."

I nodded at this.  "Should I go downstairs and call up another taxi?"

To my surprise, Fraser shook his head.  "No.  Now that we're here, we have other options."

I followed Fraser out of Kowalski's building and down the block.  Near the corner was an alleyway and we turned up it;  it ran along the back of the row houses which lined the next street.  Fraser stopped at the third garage door, took his keys out of his pocket, and inserted one into the lock.  "Ray rents this garage from Mrs. Kraschek," he explained as he turned the key and then twisted the latch open.  "She's eighty-three, and consequently prohibited from driving."  Fraser reached down, grabbed the steel handle, and sent the door clattering up.
 

My breath caught in my chest as I beheld a vision of pure loveliness.   A perfectly restored 1967 Pontiac Gran Turismo Omologato, the most beautiful--no, I corrected myself, feeling a sudden pang of guilt--the second most beautiful car ever made.  And okay, this one was a particular beauty:  ported heads, AC, PS, PB, Hooker Super Comp headers with Flowmaster custom exhaust system, automatic TH400, Hughes 2500 stall converter, custom drive shaft, drive shaft loop, disk brakes all around, 15 inch Rally II wheels with Firestone radials, engine compartment painted and detailed, hideaway headlights, black interior, bucket seats...I was in love, I was in love, I was in love. Fraser practically had to pull me out from under the hood.  "Ray.  We need to--" "You got the key to this thing?" I asked. Fraser looked taken aback.  "Yes, but--" But me no buts.  "Gimme the key." Fraser brought out his keys and then hesitated, clutching them tightly in his fist.  "I'm not sure I ought to--" I crossed my arms and glared at him.  "Did he drive my car?" A spasm of guilt crossed Fraser's face.  "Er--hm.  Well.  About your car, Ray--" "Did he or did he not drive my car?" I demanded. "He did, yes," Fraser admitted. "Gimme the keys, Fraser," and Fraser sighed and handed over the keys. The thing ran like a dream--gorgeous, totally gorgeous, just purring like a kitten, mrrrrow!  I found myself speeding down the street, testing her, just seeing what she'd do and how well she'd do it.

"Here you are," I said, spying Ray bent nearly double under the GTO's hood.  "I've been wondering where you--" Ray lifted his head;  he hadn't shaved that day, and his chin was rough with pale stubble.  There was a streak of grease under his left ear, and two clear prints where he'd wiped his hands on the front of his T-shirt.  "About time you got here.  I needed you like hell a couple of hours ago." "Oh?"  I stood next to him and peered at the engine;  he smelled like clean sweat and motor oil,  and I forced myself to focus on the machinery before me.  "What's the problem?" Ray wiped his hands hard on his thighs, and then pointed.  "Windshield wiper motor got detached from the harness, and I either needed two guys or nine-foot-long arms to get it back into place, of which I had neither.  Look, see," Ray said, bending down to reach deep and back into the engine;  he was fiddling with what looked like a piece of hose, "one piece connects from this side, but the other's in the car on the back side of the firewall--" His shirt rose up at the small of his pale, smooth back.  "Well, it seems to be connected now," I said.  "You managed it somehow--" "Only by spending two hours making like MacGyver," Ray snorted, pulling himself out.  "I tried bracing the other side with the snowbrush and my toolbox but that didn't work, and then I was trying to build, like, some kind of architectural structure to hold that side down but that didn't work, because the only things I got in here are a plank of wood and a toaster--"

SPERANZA: Next box.  First of all, it makes tons of sense to me that Vecchio would go ga-ga over the GTO, though Vecchio strikes me as a lot less of a hands-on-car-guy than Kowalski.  Vecchio takes his car to a mechanic; my husband, who's building a 66 Pontiac himself, doesn't go to a mechanic unless he's under extreme duress.  It's pretty common for people to realize that RayK steps into RayV's life pretty happily, what with the Mountie and the wolf and all, but it was nice to spend some time in this story showing that Ray V fits very well into RayK's life, and is happy to drive the GTO and marry Stella.

The other thing is--the garage-memory scene is one of the few we do actually see played out in real time later, in the Fraser POV section.  I had written a much shorter memory here, and then I'd continued on and written the scene out fully, and then I came back here and replaced that earlier section with the exact words from later on.  This also meant amending the scene on the left, because that scene had to take up about as much space as the memory flashback did.  Somebody asked in the comments section of this meme if I wrote in order--the answer is yes, I write from beginning to end, straight through, though occasionally I jump back in time to revise.  Not often, though.  Usually, when I move on, the previous paras are pretty set in stone.

Oh and one last PS--I don't know what I'd do without Curtis when it comes to car-talk-slang.  It was obviously Curtis's windshield wiper motor which got detached from the harness, and he did have a really hard time connecting it back through the firewall. *g*

One thing for sure about Mr. Kowalski:  the guy knew his cars, yessiree.

I came to myself somewhere up on Wacker, when I realized that I'd completely forgotten where we were going.  I glanced over at Fraser, and felt instantly terrible:  he looked really far away and sort of desolate.

"Hey, I'm sorry," I mumbled,  "I got caught up with the car.  It's a beautiful car."

"Yes," Fraser agreed quietly.  "It is.  Ray's very fond of it."

I coughed and flicked the turn signal on--even the click, click, click sound was gorgeous.  "Where are we going?  The station?"

"If you would, yes," Fraser replied.  "There's some evidence there that I'd like you to see.  However, you'll have to be the one to request it." Fraser looked up at me finally, and it was weird, but I couldn't read his eyes at all.  "I'm afraid that I'm persona non grata at the moment--certainly, I have no authority there, official or otherwise.  But if you were to ask--"

"Okay, yeah.  I got it."

Fraser licked his lower lip thoughtfully and looked away again, out the passenger window.  "You might even suggest to Lieutenant Welsh that you want to see the evidence in order to convince me of Ray's death."

I nearly blew through a red light;  instead, I downshifted and stared at the back of Fraser's head.  You leave a Mountie alone in Chicago for two years and look what happens:  the bastard gets downright cagey.   Or was this the influence of Mr. Ray Vecchio aka Kowalski, he of the beautiful cars and the dancing feet?  I had a serious moment of what the fuck has been going on here in my absence?

SPERANZA: Again, I think its true that Season 3-4 Fraser is something a little different than Vecchio-era Fraser.  I myself just don't think that's a bad thing; I like him earlier, and I like him later, too.

Fraser just stared out the window and didn't say a thing.
 

III.  Downtown

I switched the engine off, turned to Fraser, and said, "Okay, look--I'll get Welsh to give us the evidence, but you've got to run interference for me up there.  This is a work run--I'm not ready to give my 'what-I-did-in the-Mob-last-summer' speech yet, okay?"  Fraser nodded, seeming to understand.  "I wanna lay low, keep the hi and byes to a minimum.  Gimme your scarf."  Fraser instantly pulled his scarf from around the collar of his leather jacket and handed it to me.  I wrapped it around my own neck, high above my overcoat collar, so that I could duck my face into its folds if I needed to.

SPERANZA: See how I do not want to be getting embroiled in all this "Hey, Look, Ray's Back" stuff?  I think the sneaking around here is well integrated into the story, and fits with the spy stuff earlier, and it also allows me to do nice things with Stella later.  But mainly, the need is to not waste time with Ray's Return from Undercover--and I certainly don't want to imply that it wouldn't be a Big Thing, because I think it would be.  (Notice how the DS writers themselves copped out, so to speak, and just showed Ray Back At The Station--we never got any word, any news, hugs, shrieks, anything.  People in the extremes of emotion are very boring. It's why we all hate looking at other people's home movies or photo albums.)

We got out of the car and headed across the courtyard to the door.  Fraser put his hand out for Kowalski's keys, and reluctantly I tossed them back to him.  And only then did it occur to me that it was pretty weird that Fraser had those keys in the first place.  Cause I myself loved Fraser like a brother, but I'd never given him the keys to my car.  And even with the undercover thing, when my whole life was being given away, the one thing I'd balked at was the Riv.  But they'd insisted--said that the Riv was an essential part of the undercover guy's cover--so I'd given in, finally.  But I hadn't been happy about it.

SPERANZA: See RayV figure it out.  More clues, more clues..."I loved Fraser like a brother, but I'd never given him the keys to my car. "

"Hey Fraser?" I asked, holding the door open for him--cause it only takes a second to be courteous.  "Where is my car anyway?"

"I'll tell you later," Fraser said, and walked into the station.

SPERANZA: A little moment of comedy there. *g*

We split up at the staircase--he went up first while I lounged around for a bit, studied the wanted boards on the first floor.  New guys, same brand of ugly.  I glanced down at my watch and figured I'd left him enough time.

The bullpen was achingly familiar, all the bustle, people running around, strange shit happening in every corner.  I pulled my scarf up around my face a little and tried to blend in, like I was here to get my crack-whore-wife out on bail or something.  Welsh's door was shut, but from the shadows I could see that he had people in there right now.  Meanwhile, Fraser was talking to Huey and Dewey over near my desk, and none of them were looking my way, which was good.

I knew the best way not to be noticed was to stay in motion, so I walked around--down the hall past the interrogation rooms, bought myself a soda at the machine, drank it as I turned up the second leg of the corridor.

And then, bang, coming down the hallway straight for me was my sister Frannie, carrying a clipboard and looking hell bent for leather.

SPERANZA: Frannie looking "hell bent for leather" is kind of an in-joke with me--I always get a flash of her in that leather outfit.

I skittered back and turned my face to the wall, waiting for her to pass--and then just as she came close I whirled and grabbed her, slapping my hand over her mouth and dragging her into one of the interrogation rooms.  She kicked me hard in the shins just as I got the door shut behind us--so hard I felt it in my teeth, like eating cold ice cream--and then a second later she had me smashed up against the door, one arm so high up behind my back that I thought it would break.

SPERANZA: Fraser's not the only one who's changed in Season 3 and 4--Frannie's a much tougher cookie, too.  You could almost feel sorry for Ray; the place is so much the same and yet so different.

Okay, so nice move.

SPERANZA: I wish I'd cut the above line; in fact, I still might. I don't think I need it, but I gave into my authoral desire for RayV to momentarily admire his sister.  But I think that's an authorial insert--I don't think Ray would be so much admiring the move as cursing his head off.

"It's me, it's me, it's me!" I yelled, my nose smushed up against the door and getting splinters.  "Me!  Ray!  Your brother!"

Strangely, this only made her yank my arm harder and shove her knee into the small of my back.  I howled in pain.  "That's not funny, buster!  You don't even look like my brother!"

SPERANZA: Hahaha--this is another joke, but of course, RayV doesn't get it.  (Cause her brother is, of course, the povero biondo...)

Even for Frannie, this made no sense.  "What are you talking about?  C'mon--lemme go, already!  Zio, zio, zio!"

The knee at my back eased up.  "Ray?" Frannie asked, sounding uncertain.

"Yes!"  She let go of me, and my aching arm slipped back to my side.  Wearily, I rolled around so that I had the door to my back, so that she could see my face.  "Christ, when did you become such a bruiser?"

SPERANZA: "Christ, when did you become such a bruiser?" is a much better line than "Okay, so nice move."  Really, I ought to go back and cut that.

She leapt toward me, and for a long, terrifying moment I thought she was gonna beat me senseless.  But then I had two armfuls of sister, and she was hugging me hard and kissing my face with big smacks.  I held her so hard that I took her right up off the ground.

"You're back.  Ray, you're safe," and I just kept holding her tight, because I felt really choked up and I didn't want her to see me all mushy-faced.  "Ma said you were coming back, but I didn't know--hey, put me down."

I let her down, and she stared hard at my face for a couple of seconds before pulling back her arm and whacking me one.

"Why the hell did you grab me like that?" Frannie yelled, jamming her fists on her hips and glaring at me.   "I could have broken your stupid head!  This is a police station--somebody might've  shot you before they even realized--"

God, I had maybe even missed this.  "Shut up already, willya?" I said and kissed her forehead.  "I didn't know you were such a killer."

"Hey, I'm a police aide."  Frannie proudly tapped the badge sewed onto her bicep:  Civilian Aid Worker, it said.  "You should see what I do around here, Ray--I do most of the computer stuff, fingerprints and mugs shots and everything.   I do filing, and make coffee, and I've been taking self-defense classes so that I can self-defend myself."

"That's great, Frannie," I said, and I meant it.  "I'm real proud of you."

Frannie shrugged a little, her petite little shoulder rising and falling.  "I was thinking,--you know, before--about maybe becoming a cop."  She showed me a tentative smile that faded quick.  "Now I'm not so sure.  You know...what with what happened to Ray...."  She let out a long sigh and looked upset.  "I mean, that coulda been you.  And even so it was him.  And he was great--I mean, I loved the guy, Ray, he was my fake brother for two whole years..."

SPERANZA: I remembered wanting to do the Frannie's gonna be a cop bit, except, yeah, I think that having Kowalski be killed might really change her mind about that, or at least make her question her resolve.  That's another tricky thing about writing--trying to suss out all the implications of your plot.  What things stay the same? What things from canon or fanon have to change?

"Yeah, Fraser seems real attached to him, too," I said.

To my surprise, Frannie blew out a little, frustrated snort.  "Yeah, well, Fraser's totally on Mars where Ray's concerned.  He told you, right?"

SPERANZA: It was extremely significant to show that Frannie didn't believe Fraser; it was the best way I could think of to a) make the reader doubt a bit or b) show the reader that really, Fraser was pretty alone and friendless at this point.  Because Frannie's always been 110 percent on Fraser's side with a kind of abject, unquestioning devotation; if Frannie no longer believes in him, he's very alone indeed.

I parked my hip on the interrogation table.  "He told me, yeah."

"Poor Fraser," Frannie said, shaking her head.  "I feel bad for him, don't get me wrong--but he's been giving Stella the most awful time."

"Stella who?" I asked.

"Stella Kowalski," Frannie answered.  "Who is also ASA Kowalski--she's Ray's ex-wife."

I winced at this;  yet another piece of the shattered Kowalski life.  Just put it on my tab.  "I didn't know he was married."

"He was--divorced a couple years ago, I think.  Before he started being you."  Frannie let out another long sigh.  "Anyway, she wants to close it up, hold a service, like.  A memorial thing, flag and the whole business.  For his parents and stuff.  Ma wants to go, too, and Maria--cause, I mean, Ray's been sort of adopted by us out of necessity.  Christmas, Easter, all that.  Ma's really broken up about it;  she's got her black on for him, which is too tight but--"

"And Fraser's blocking the service?" I interrupted.

"Fraser's blocking the service big time," Frannie said.  "He's like a brick wall about it--and you know I love Fraser, you know that--"  She was almost pleading with me, and I nodded reassuringly, because yeah, I knew she loved Fraser.  Bane of my existence, in fact, "--but he's really gotta stand aside on this.  Do you know that normally it takes three years for someone who's missing to be declared dead?" Frannie demanded.

I nodded again;  yeah, I knew that, too.

"Except Stella Kowalski's a lawyer," Frannie explained, "and so she filed some kind of motion based on the fact that there's testimony as to what happened to him.  And she wins, right?--the judge signs the paper that says that Ray's dead, which means that everything can move to closing.  Except get this," Frannie said, eyes widening the way they did whenever she was sharing really good gossip.  "They go in to read the will?  and guess who's executioner?"

SPERANZA: Let me take a second to tip my hat to Kat Allison, author of "Executioner." *g*

Right.  Duh.  "Benton Fraser," I replied, groaning.

"Bingo," Frannie said.  "Benton Fraser is right.  And so what do you think his first thing he does as executioner is?"

"He stops the service," I muttered, shaking my head;  boy, this was a mess and a half.

"He stops the service is right," Frannie said, "because it turns out that one of the executioner's jobs--"

"Executor," I muttered.

"--whatever," Frannie said, irritably, "is to arrange for the funeral and stuff, except that if Fraser says no then it's no go.  Boy, you should see Stella Kowalski, she's just furious about it, cause after all her hard work--"

"Has anybody considered that Fraser might be right?" I shot back.  "Huh?"

"Right?"  Frannie looked sort of shocked.  "Whattya mean right?"

"That maybe Kowalski's not dead.  That maybe he's holed up somewhere and--"

"Rayyyyy."  Frannie's voice had hit that whining place that only dogs could hear.  "Okay, look, I get it, you've been talking to Fraser, but clearly nobody's told you the other side of it.  Nobody wants it to be true, believe me, but we got evidence, mountains of evidence, buckets of--"

"Okay, yeah--that's what I'm here to see," I told her, suddenly seeing exactly why Fraser'd suggested the strategy that he did.  Man, things had really changed around here if he didn't even have Frannie on his side.   "I figured if I could see the evidence, I could maybe sit down with him, convince him, you know?"

Frannie smiled at me, sorta warmly, sorta sadly.  "Okay, yeah--that would be a really good thing, there.  He'll listen to you.  Maybe only to you."

"Can you get me the stuff?" I asked her.  "You got keys?"

"Sure I got keys," Frannie said and pulled a huge ring of keys from her belt.

"Let me see what you've got in evidence lockup," I told her, "and then I'll do my best to convince Fraser of the truth.  Okay?"

"Okay," my sister said, nodding.  "You just wait here."

I waited, and fifteen minutes later the door slammed open and Frannie reappeared, wheeling a dolly stacked with battered-looking boxes.  "Man, you weren't kidding," I muttered, running to help her.

"I look like a comedian to you?" Frannie snapped.  She pushed the dolly to a stop and passed the back of her hand across her forehead.  "I'm not kidding here, Ray.  Fraser's wrong on this one."

It felt like some sort of heresy for her to say it--Fraser's wrong--and I suddenly realized that I didn't want Fraser to be wrong, that I really needed Fraser not to be wrong about this.  Because I needed Kowalski not to be dead.  But now, confronted with those three big boxes, I felt my first sickening wave of doubt.

SPERANZA: It's really fun having RayV as the protagonist here, as the soul in balance, the last person who has to be swayed.  Because it's only RayV's opinion that's in doubt; Fraser knows what he believes, and the rest of the cast do too.  Will Ray help Fraser or abandon him?

"Fraser's usually not so off base," I said quietly, trying to calm myself down inside.

"I know," Frannie said.  "It's really weird.  It's just how he was with Ray--they were really weird together, the two of them."

"Thick as thieves, huh?" I asked.

"Sure," Frannie said with a shrug, "or at each other's throats."

SPERANZA: And say what you want, but this is arguably TRUE.  Fraser and Kowalski are either in each other's pockets or at each other's throats in a really weird way.  This aspect--the MOTB aspect--of their relationship can certainly be played down (and I frankly often choose to play it down, because I'm not a Mulder/Krycek "aggression means passion" person by nature) but it's VERY VERY hard to do when you actually put both Rays into the same story.  Because RayK's relationship with Fraser is, in my view, much spikier than RayV's--Ray V is the soul of patience, just a lovely lovely guy, and OK, yes, he moans, but ultimately he'd do anything for Fraser.  RayK, otoh, ain't a moaner--RayK, I suspect, would not have put up with half of what RayV put up with--but on the other hand, there are sparks that happen with RayK that just don't happen with RayV.  Ray K fights him more, and in resisting some of Fraser's more crackbrained ideas, he causes friction between them--interesting friction, fascinating friction.  To argue the case both ways, I'd say that the Fraser/Vecchio slash pairing is more like a marriage, and the Fraser/Kowalski slash pairing is more heated, more like passion.  (Interestingly, my other big MOTB story is Wildly Dangerous Ways, which treads similar ground; in that story, too, the guys aren't thrilled about being gay, but are basically dragged into it by the sheer intensity of their passion for each other.)

I felt my mouth fall open.  "You're kidding me."

"Again with the comedian thing."  Frannie made a face at me.  "I'm dead serious here.  They were like very--very--" she seemed to fumble for the word.  "Tempesting.  Up and down like a yo-yo, feast or famine, come hell or high water--"

I was trying to get this into my head.  "You're saying they fought or--?"

"Like cats and dogs," Frannie confirmed.

I tried to picture Fraser being the cat to anyone's dog or vice versa, and found I couldn't.  "I just can't picture Fraser fighting--"

"Yeah, well, Kowalski could fight with a rock," Frannie retorted.  "It was like a gift of his, God rest his soul.  Don't get me wrong," she added, raising her hand.  "It wasn't always like that.  Just it wasn't like before, when it was you and him.  You and Frase always got on pretty easy-like, where with Ray it was always like...I dunno.  Either they were glued together or they were all prickly and yelling."  She shrugged again.  "Really weird, like I said--so I mean, I'm not stunned that Fraser's being weird now that Ray's dead.  They probably had, you know--unresolved issues."

SPERANZA: The above para delights me still.  I'm laughing as I read.  Because Kowalski *can* fight with a rock, and I like the way in which Frannie can see but not see that Fraser and Ray are lovers--spatting, quarreling, etc.  She knows something's different, that "it wasn't like before, when it was you and him" but she doesn't know what's changed.  "Either they were glued together or they were all prickly and yelling,"--she doesn't see what she's describing, even though she's taking psychology, (which is just the coup de grace joke here. )  Frannie's an intensely unreliable narrator; or rather, her descriptions are accurate, but her conclusions are to be very much doubted.

She nodded at me sagely, and I narrowed my eyes at her.  "You've been taking psychology, haven't you?"

"Yeah," Frannie said, beaming at me, "at the community college last semester--can you tell?"

I sighed and hauled the first box onto the table.  "Gimme a while with this stuff, Frannie, okay?  And if you see Fraser, tell him to come in here, pronto--but don't tell anyone else I'm around."

"Right, Ray.  Okay," she said and disappeared.

Not only was there a lot of stuff, but it was organized--everything properly bagged, tagged, and indexed, if maybe getting dusty.  A cop killing, I thought grimly;  nothing like it to boost efficiency and organization around a station.

One gray flannel shirt in a plastic bag.  Large pale pink stain on the front, diluted from the water.  I felt the hairs on my arms stand on end--this felt like the closest I had gotten to Kowalski so far.  Even being in his apartment and his car hadn't given me this sort of eerie feeling.

I stared at that shirt for a long time, and then made myself put it aside.  Pages and pages of DNA reports, bagged hairs, bagged fibers--I held one tiny ziplocked bag to the light.  Golden blond, darker at the root.   Dyed, maybe--who the hell was I dealing with, here?

The coshes were in the box, not bagged, the blood dry on them and crusting off.  Also a chair leg from one of Kowalski's chairs, and this had blood on it, too--Kowalski's again.  Another bag brought up a large jagged shard of glass, from a broken picture frame maybe, and this had blood on it that was not Kowalski's.  Kowalski's fingerprints were on the wider edge, though, and I found myself cheering him on, even though this fight was way long over.  You grab that glass, Kowalski.  Slit their fucking throats.  I made a note to myself to ask Fraser if they'd ever found out who it was that Kowalski'd managed to cut.

SPERANZA: I really enjoyed constructing the fragments and letting them tell the story.   Much more interesting than straightforward narrative, IMO.

I was putting the glass shard down on the table when I heard the door open. "Bout time you got here," I said, and looked up.

It wasn't Fraser.

For the second time that day my heart stopped.  The car had been good--the car had been really, really good--but this was on a whole other level of good.  The woman standing before me was the most drop-dead gorgeous creature I had ever seen: pale blond hair, good cut;  an excellent suit,  powder blue silk--Spring collection Armani, it looked like;  a fantastic figure:  great breasts, slim waist, and long legs to boot.  Even her shoes were good--alligator, my favorite, maybe 2 1/2 or 2 3/4 inch heels, plus with pointy toes, Italian style.  Plus she smelled nice:  I was in love, I was in love, I was in love.

JULAD writes:  Ha, I remember this paragraph, because I remember liking the love at first sight thing but being dissatisfied with how it was done.  I was like, "he has to describe this woman like he described the *car*"-- inventory the details, gush over the extras, luxuriate in the perfection.  Of course he couldn't walk in a circle around her, run his hands over her hood or kick her tyres, but you can't have everything.  *g*

I was also really really happy with this scene and the dinner scene, that Ces made the RayV/Stella pairing make perfect sense, turned it from a horrid loose-end-tying into fate, kismet, destiny.  (Also, note that she sneaks in COTW rewrites even when she's not rewriting COTW.)

SPERANZA adds:  Yeah, you're right, I forgot about this--that whole inventory of Stella down to her shoe size, that was in response for your desire to more closely parallel this to the car specs para.  Well done!

Gah.

"Hi," I said stupidly, then showed her a gigantic smile, like I was an idiot child.

She showed me a smile in return, but hers was quick and tight and nervous--like maybe she was scared my inner idiot child was gonna bite her or something.  "Hi--do you have a minute?  I wanted to talk to you."

"Sure!" I said.  "Yeah!"  Talk?  I could talk.  I could talk all day and all night if she wanted--music, art, you name it.  I could talk till I was blue.  "Come on in."

She shut the door behind her softly, then took a step into the room on her high heels.  "You're Ray Vecchio, aren't you?  The real Ray Vecchio?"

"Real, one-hundred percent Ray Vecchio," I said, resisting the urge to thump my chest.  "Completely authentic.  You can check with my Ma."

SPERANZA: "You can check with my ma"--that's a scene I'd like to see. *g*

Her pale pink lips twitched at this, and I felt like I'd just won an Olympic gold medal.  "It's nice to meet you," she said, extending out her pale, gorgeously manicured hand.  It was soft and warm and I wanted to rub it all over my face.  "I'm Stella Kowalski."

The world stopped, tilted, flipped over entirely, then went totally black.  An opera started playing in my head, some wild dark thing full of shrieking sopranos, because it was the part where the hero slits his throat with a piece of broken glass after finding out that the woman of his dreams was married to his heroic dead warrior rival.  Or maybe it was Tosca, I dunno.

SPERANZA: I'm still really proud of this description--the opera, the shrieking sopranos, the hero slitting his throat with glass after finding out that the woman of his dreams was married to his heroic dead warrior rival.  Not just because it's vivid, but because it strikes me as properly Rayish.  (This is also a case where your premise has unforseen complications--with Ray K dead, the Vecchio-Stella relationship has to have at least one additional emotional twist.)

I held on to her soft hand as the world gradually settled back into place around me.  "Oh," I said, and hey, that wasn't a bad first remark considering I'd just lost my fucking mind.

She looked at me with her huge, beautiful blue eyes.  Hell, this was destiny.  This was kismet.  This was--oh, wait, the lady was saying something.  "I know that you told your sister not to say you were here.  And I don't want to get her into trouble--but she said you were here to help, that you were going to help me."

"I'll do everything I can," I told her, squeezing her hand reassuringly, and then I steeled myself for what I had to say.   "I'm so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Kowalski--"

"Stella," she interrupted.  "Please call me Stella.  Or Ms. Kowalski if you must," Stella added briskly, "but I haven't been Mrs. Kowalski for years now.  In fact," she said, and gave my hand a reassuring little squeeze this time, which sent sparks straight up my arm, "I'm mainly trying to arrange things for Ray's parents.  I'm still very close to his mother Barbara, and they've been--well, devastated by this, as you might imagine."

"Yeah, I'm sure," I murmured.

She took a deep breath and blew it out;  even her breath was sweet.  "I know you're Constable Fraser's friend," she said, sounding really nervous now, and I got why: like Frannie, she was about to commit heresy, and was waiting for the lightning bolt.  "And he was a good friend to Ray when he was alive, but--"  She bit her lip, and I stared at her mouth, totally entranced.  "Well, he's just not helping," she burst out, finally.  "He thinks he is, but he isn't--he's just holding everything up, making everyone suffer.  How are Ray's parents supposed to go on with their lives?   We need closure.  We need to move on."

SPERANZA: This isn't too far from the Stella-Fraser memory we saw in the very first box.  We knew this was coming.

I felt my throat close up, felt ripped up inside by warring impulses.  On the one hand, I wanted Fraser to be right, for Kowalski not to be dead.  On the other hand, suddenly the thing I wanted most on this earth was for Stella Kowalski to be able to go on with her life, and for that life to somehow include me.

SPERANZA: Part of the fun with this was increasing the tension around RayV's decision--I just gave him a whacking great incentive to decide that Ray Kowalski IS dead.  If RayV sides with Fraser, Stella's not going to be pleased.

"I'll do everything I can," I repeated, at a total loss for what else to say.  "I mean, I'll do my best to try to...move things on, one way or the other."

That was pretty vague, but Stella smiled at me and seemed to take it in the right spirit.  "Thanks.  I really appreciate it," she said.  "And I'm happy to meet you, I'm just sorry it has to be like--"

She blinked suddenly, furiously, and then seemed to wobble a little--and I shifted my hands quickly, grabbing hold of her at wrist and waist.  "Hey, you all right?" I asked quickly.  "You okay?"

She nodded quickly, her face flushed.  "Yes, I'm fine;  I'm sorry;  I'm stupid," she said tersely, almost angrily.  "I didn't notice you were working on--"  She raised her hand and pointed at the table, and I glanced over my shoulder and saw Kowalski's bloodstained shirt wrapped in plastic.

SPERANZA: I hope Stella doesn't come across as awful in this story; I actually wanted her to be likeable.  I was trying to portray her as the voice of rationality, who is acting rationally in the face of this horrible situation, who is the person who RayK's parents are depending on, etc.  But she clearly still loves her ex-husband and is distraught about his death.

"No, I'm sorry," I said, stifling a groan.  "I should have been more--"

"No, I'm sorry!" Stella insisted.  "You're just doing your job, Detective--"

"Ray," I blurted, and felt my face get hot.  I wished my name was something else, anything else.  Phil or something.  Shithead, even.

"Ray," Stella acknowledged, averting her eyes.  God, this was so fucking unfortunate.  She pulled away from me, showed me another nervous smile, and then turned for the door.  I watched her as she stopped, hand already gripping the knob, and looked over her shoulder at me.  "You know," she said, and there was something in her tone that I couldn't quite get--a forced casualness or something.  "Ray's real first name was Stanley, except he hated it."  Her nervous smile had gone sort of wry.  "Ray was his middle name, actually," she said as her parting shot, and there was a message for me there, I knew it.

SPERANZA: Here, again, we are invited to interpret/read through somebody's actions--I made this a lot more overt by having Ray V actually think, HUH, there's a MESSAGE here, but this is the kind of thing I want the reader to be doing the whole story.  Why IS Stella telling Ray V that Ray K's "real first name was Stanley?"  There's a bond being formed there, an assurance being given, an invitation being issued--if you read between the lines.

When Fraser finally came in, I was sitting hyperventilating at the table, even sweating a little--wet and stinky at the pits.  I blew out a sigh of relief toward the brown back of his leather jacket as Fraser turned to shut the door behind him.  I was glad it was just him--any more visions of loveliness today and my goddamned heart was gonna give out.

"Where the hell have you been?" I demanded, wiping another layer of sweat off my forehead.  "I thought you were gonna help me with this."

Fraser's smile was as tense and forced as Stella Kowalski's.  "I'm sorry," he said, pulling a chair up and sitting next to me, "but I've been forced to endure a number of rather earnest, well-meaning speeches--"

Yeah, well, now I knew what that was all about.  "You didn't tell me you were executor," I accused.  "You didn't tell me you were holding up Kowalski's services--"

"I'm executor," Fraser said with an ironic tip of his head.  "I'm holding up the services."

My heart filled with a vision of Stella Kowalski.  "Why?"

"Because. There's. No. Body," Fraser said slowly and distinctly, like I really was an idiot child--and maybe now I could see Fraser arguing with Mr. Stanley Kowalski, he of the beautiful taste in cars and women.  Cause Fraser'd sure gotten snippier since I'd been away, or was I just remembering him wrong?

SPERANZA: Here's that theme again--Fraser's tougher, snippier, more prone to argue, too.  (I also like how RayK's become, in RayV's mind, "Mr. Stanley Kowalski, he of the beautiful taste in cars and women. "  This is, of course, partly to help me with the Ray pronoun problem later, as Vecchio starts to feel closer to Kowalski.)

I waved my hand at the boxes.  "There's a lot of evidence here, Fraser."

"Yes, I know, Ray."  Fraser had that total evenness to his tone that meant he was very highly pissed.  "Let me remind you that I found most of it."  He slipped his jacket off his shoulders and backwards onto the chair back before leaning forward and heaving another brown Kowalski box onto the table.  "There are a couple of things that I wanted to show you--"

The question I filed away from before sprang back to mind.  "Did you ever find out who Kowalski cut?"

Fraser shot me a satisfied look.  "Charlie Fish.  The scar was on his body when we recovered it--well over six inches, I'm afraid."

SPERANZA: Yeah--Fraser sounds really remorseful, huh? Tsk.

Good for Stanley.  Fraser had reached into one of the boxes, produced a small ziplock baggie, and flickered it back and forth.  "Fibers," he said.  "From the trunk of Charlie Fish's car."  I nodded and rolled my hand at him, encouraging him to continue.  "Rope," he told me, dropping it onto the table, "matching a coil that was found in Ray's utility closet at home.  Rope that Joey Carbone says was used to bind Ray's arms and legs as they took him down to the car."

SPERANZA: I like all this stuff--the bloody shirt, the fibers, the mystery of how the shirt came off in the water.  This was all in my head from early on, as you saw from my notes.

I shrugged.  "So?"

"So Ray was tied up when they took him to the car," Fraser said, using his brand-new 'I'm-talking-to-an-idiot' voice.

"Again--so?" I asked.  "You gotta figure that they'd tie him up, Fraser, especially if he was still conscious, which he probably was--"

Apparently I was still disappointing him;  he reached out and grabbed Kowalski's plastic-bagged shirt, dropped it in front of me with a thwack, and then sat back in his chair and stared at me.  "Well?"

You know, I could see why maybe Stanley would have wanted to smack him around now and then.  "Well?" I repeated, annoyed that my brain wasn't clicking right, except then suddenly it did click right and I got it.  "Wait, whoa," I said, sitting up straight.  "What is he, Houdini?"

Fraser nodded approvingly at my deduction.  "Exactly," he said, frowning down at the shirt.  "How does Ray's shirt come off in the water if his hands are tied together?"

I put my elbows onto the table and stared down at the bagged shirt myself.  "All right, well there's gotta be some explanation..."

"I'd love to hear it," Fraser said.

"Charlie untied him before he threw him in the lake," I suggested.

"And just why would he do that?  Surely he'd sink faster if he were trussed up."

I had a sudden brainstorm.  "Maybe he wanted it to look like suicide!  In case the body was found--"

"Suicide."  Fraser seemed to think about this.  "Interesting theory.   So Ray, presumably suffering from some sort of extreme identity crisis, destroys his own apartment in a frenzy of self-loathing and writes 'Where Is Ray Vecchio?' upon the wall as a parting gesture."  I groaned and put my head down on the table, but Fraser didn't let up on me.  "Perhaps that was by way of a suicide note.  Or no--I have it!--no doubt it was the proverbial cry for help--"

"All right,  stop.  I didn't think it through," I muttered.

"I should say not.  In fact, I'm finding this whole experience very frustrating," Fraser said, crossing his arms.  "This case of all cases, everyone's thinking seems to have taken on the razor sharpness of suet pudding."

SPERANZA: I love me some snarky Fraser, and this Fraser, this angry and frustrated post-Kowalski Fraser, is about as well-authorized to dispsense the snark as any I've ever written.

I sighed.  "Maybe the ropes disintegrated in the water--"

This earned me a dismissive head shake.  "Rope swells in water--if anything, Ray's bonds would have gotten tighter.  No."

I sat up and glared at him.  "So you explain it."

Sonofabitch did, too.   "Ray never went into the water.  His shirt went into the water without him."

Fine.  I decided to go on the offensive.  "I'm assuming you pointed this out to the correct authorities."

"Yes.  Of course."

"And what was their explanation of the Case of the Incredible Sinking Shirt?" I demanded.

"Ah, yes--well, it's a masterpiece of its kind," Fraser said bitterly.  "They simply concluded that Ray wasn't actually wearing the shirt that day."

Now I was really confused.  "So what's it doing in the lake?"

"I asked the same question.  The reigning theory," and I don't think I'd ever heard Fraser drawl a word out with such sarcasm before, "is that the shirt was brought along as a bandage, to staunch blood somewhere on Ray's body.  Thereby accounting both for its free-floating nature and the presence of Ray's blood on the fabric."  Suddenly Fraser slammed his hand down on the table so hard that I jumped, and part of me was on the verge of running for it, cause I'd never seen Fraser so angry before.  "Except that's ridiculous.  Preposterous.  Either you're trying to kill a man or you're not--you can't have it both ways!  I don't understand this business of staunching the wounds of a man you're determined to kill.   It doesn't make sense psychologically--you're either murderous or solicitous, you can't be both."

I raised my palms.  "All right.  What do you think happened?"

Fraser blew out a breath.  "I think Ray was wearing the shirt, and it got bloody when they beat him.  I think he was still wearing it when they tied him up, dragged him downstairs, and put him into the trunk of Charlie's car--a fiber match proves the shirt was in the trunk.  And then later..."  Fraser looked into the mid-distance thoughtfully, like he was picturing the scenario in his mind.  "Later the ropes are cut, and the shirt is stripped off Ray and thrown into the lake precisely to create the effect that it did create--that Ray was dead.  That's what Charlie Fish told his men, remember. That he'd killed Ray and thrown his body into Lake Michigan--"

"But why would he do that?"  I exploded.  "I thought the whole idea of his maybe keeping Kowalski alive was to trade him back for me, to have a card to play back with the cops--"

"Yes," Fraser interrupted.  "That's what I believe.  That's exactly what I think he did.  But consider what actually happened, Ray--Charlie Fish was subsequently shot by one of his own men."  Fraser gnawed at his lip and considered for a moment.  "I think this whole situation is motivated by fear--Charlie's fear.  I think that Charlie Fish was getting very nervous about his own status and power within his little corner of the mafia.  I think that's why he took your investigation--Ray Vecchio's investigation--so much to heart:  it was a sign of his own weakness that you were daring to investigate him so openly, you who by all accounts should have been terrified of him.  I think he brought his men to Ray's apartment intending to make a grand display of power--he was going to kill you, and show his men that he was capable of killing you, thereby cowing them back into submission and proving that he was still on top, the big man in the organization.  Except you weren't you--the door opens and it's not Ray Vecchio on the other side, but Ray Kowalski.  So what does Charlie do?  Does he kill Ray Kowalski openly, in front of his men?  No.  Does he order them to kill him?  No, we know he doesn't.  So why not?"

I wasn't gonna take any chances on a stupid answer.  I just waited.

"If Ray is dead," Fraser said carefully, "then the story makes no sense. Why send the men away and murder Ray by himself?  Much better to either kill Ray in front of them as an intimidation tactic, or order them to do it, thereby binding the group together in the shared murder.  But if Ray isn't dead, the story clarifies itself," Fraser mused.  "Why send the men away?  Because he isn't going to kill Ray, and he doesn't want them to know that.  Why throw Ray's shirt, and whatever else we haven't found, into the water?  To support the story he told his men.  Why haven't we found Ray in any of the obvious places?  Because Charlie Fish didn't put him in any of the obvious places, or use any of the obvious resources he had at his disposal.  And that gives Charlie every card to play:  his men think Ray's dead, but Charlie can pull him out of hiding at any time and trade him, return him, barter his life in some way if the going gets rough.  Except it backfires," Fraser concluded quietly.  "Because Ray's not just a cop, he's an undercover cop, and he's an undercover cop covering for a man who's in his own sensitive undercover operation with the mafia.  The heat comes down, the men play their cards, and they shoot Charlie Fish in an attempt to placate the police.  Charlie's removed, Joey Carbone tells the story, and everyone's happy, police and thieves alike, case closed."

I let out a long, slow whistle.  "That's a hell of a story, Fraser."

"Yes, I know."

"I mean, it's nuts," I explained.

Fraser acknowledged this with a slight nod of his head.  "Yes, I know," he repeated.  "It's completely nuts.   Still," he added, "you wouldn't expect any less from me, would you?" and I had to admit that he had a point.

We spent a little more time looking over evidence, then planned an exit that was the reverse of our entrance.  Fraser would go out first, drawing everyone's attention, and then wait for me in the car.

Fraser pulled on his leather jacket and surveyed the interrogation room briskly; everything was neatly packed and stacked, the boxes all loaded up again on the dolly.  "All right," he said.  "I'll meet you downstairs."
 

He turned and made for the door, and then stopped short in front of it, like maybe he'd forgotten something and couldn't remember what it was.  "You've got everything," I assured him.  "And I've got your scarf, so--" I shut up, because Fraser wasn't responding; in fact it was like he hadn't registered the sound of my voice.  Instead, he just stood there, staring at the door, and after a moment he lifted his hand and pressed his palm against it, like he was trying to push it open, except it wasn't a swing door and it didn't open that way anyway.  The damn door opened in. Slowly I got to my feet, wondering what was up.  "Fraser?" I said, louder, but again he didn't answer.  It occurred to me that maybe he needed a moment to collect himself before venturing out into the bullpen and withstanding another round of speeches about how he really ought to let Stella bury Stanley, or at least whatever it was that was left of him.  Bury his shirt or whatever.  It was weird to see Fraser so beat, because most of my memories were of him being damn near invincible--the guy who could surf for half an hour on the tailgate of a truck in the mud and fall off with nary a hair out of place.  Fraser was supposed to be perfect, goddammit--even tracking down his father's killers he was almost like some sort of justice machine.  But now he seemed sort of bent, like there was a weight on his back.

Ray sighed softly against my ear and his muscles relaxed;  he was easing up, trying to pull away from me.  I felt my back come away from the door--but this was intolerable.  I wasn't ready, I couldn't be seen like this, I couldn't possibly let him see me like-- I clutched hard at his arms, keeping him close, refusing to let him back away.  He resisted, trying to put distance between us, but I steeled myself and kept us rooted together.  I wouldn't let him gain the distance.  I would not let him see my face until I'd composed it. He tried to twist his head to the side, but I leaned forward and moved with him, keeping our faces in strict and perfect parallel.  Ray's movements became tighter and more frantic--we swayed like dancers--and then he shoved at me with a sticky hand and crammed a foot's worth of space between us.  But that was enough.  Too much, in fact.  "You're an asshole," I blurted. Even in the darkness, I could see a spasm of shock cross his face.  "You weren't supposed to let me."  He was wide-eyed, and seemed almost scared.  "You weren't supposed to--"

SPERANZA: This box...this is all about Fraser's memory as he's staring at the door, and this is another scene we get to see played out in full later.  Ray and Fraser have this passionate, prickly sex in the interrogation room--on the verge of non-con, actually, though I don't think it quite crosses over.  But it's a complicated sex act, no question, and I still like Ray's terrified (and rather chilling) statement of: "You weren't supposed to let me."  In real time, we see Fraser pressing his hand to that door, like he's communing with it.

JULAD adds:  She was starting to lose my interest with some of this stuff, the whole asshole thing and the unexplained stuff.  She's very dismissive of the plot but the plot had me *riveted*, and I was far less interested in what was going on with Fraser and RayK-- for me it was enough that okay, whatever, something's going on, can we get back to RayV??  The downside of the fantastic RayV pov was that, for me, the Fraser POV was paler in comparison.

SPERANZA:  I think it must be because the Fraser/RayK stuff is mostly told and not shown, where the RayV plot is shown and is just barrelling ahead like a movie.  I've got my head way up my own ass on this story--I'm totally interested in the drama inherent in Fraser's unreliable narrative voice, as my whole commentary indicates--but strip away the fancy talk and what we're saying is that (even with sex as an additional factor!) tell loses to show.  Show will always be more interesting than tell, even if the tell features Callum Keith Rennie. *g*

The case was freakin' getting to him--and I felt an irrational stab of jealousy against Mr. Stanley Kowalski, both on my own behalf and that of the rest of the free world.  Cause who the hell was he, anyway, this Mr. Kowalski, to get Benton Fraser all twisted up like this?  Or was it just that Fraser hadn't managed to solve this particular case to his satisfaction--that Kowalski was the one man that the Mountie'd failed to get?

"Fraser!" I shouted, and this time Fraser's head jerked over his shoulder.

"Sorry, Ray, did you say something?"

Now that I had his attention I didn't know what the hell to say.  "Better get a move on."

"Indeed, yes," Fraser said quietly.  He straightened up, dropped his hand to the knob, and passed through the door into the hallway.

I found myself pacing the room back and forth while I waited, trying to process.  Rope and bits of fiber.  Dyed blond hair.  Live blond hair--golden and gorgeous and brushing Ms. Kowalski's shoulders.  Bloody shirts and jags of glass and Fraser with his head bowed and his hand pressed to the door, deaf to the world.  My sister doing jujitsu, Fraser stopping the funeral, Kowalski tied up with rope and maybe drowning, maybe not--

I glanced down at my watch and turned for the door;  I'd waited long enough, and now I needed some goddamned air.  Head down and scarf up around my mouth, I strode down the hallway for the exit and--kismet, destiny--ran smack into Stella Kowalski again, nearly knocking her off her gorgeous alligator heels.  She opened her mouth to yell at me, stopped when she saw who I was, and then I grabbed her arms and blurted, before I lost my nerve, "You wanna have dinner with me?"

Her blue eyes widened with something that looked a lot like shock, and for a second I felt like the scum of the earth--just leap on the poor widow, why don't you?  And then she blinked twice and whispered, "Yes, all right," and the whole grimy bullpen disappeared around me.  "What time?"

"Eight?" I asked.

She glanced furtively around to make sure no one was listening and then said, "All right.  Eight."

"Where should I pick you up?"

"Here," she replied.  "I'll be working late," and suddenly the bullpen crashed back in around us.  "Eight o'clock, then," Stella repeated, and then she was past me and moving down the hallway.

I had to stop myself from dancing down the stairs.

Maybe it was whatever he saw on my face, but Fraser didn't let me drive this time;  at my approach, he himself slid into the driver's side of that bad-boy GTO.  I guess that was fair, because where my head was I'd probably have crashed it.  In fact, I was so lost in replaying the scene upstairs, which in my head was playing in wide-screen Dolby with surround sound ("You wanna have dinner with me?"  I asked, against the setting sun, the wind dramatically whipping at the folds of my flowing overcoat.  She raised her long, white gloved hand to me and I kissed it.  "Yes, all right," she said, and the wind blew her hair back.  "What time?") that I didn't even notice we'd pulled up.

SPERANZA: Notice how the reply of the Vecchio-Stella scene is used to elide the time of the car ride.  I spend my whole life worried about stuff like this.

I jerked my head to stare out the window;  I had absolutely no idea where I was.  "Where are we?"

Fraser'd switched the engine off, and as an afterthought, had pocketed the keys.  "The Consulate.  I need to stop in and--"

"It is not," I protested, ducking my head and taking a second look at the building.

Fraser sighed and opened the door.  "You're right, it's not.  My idea of a joke, I'm afraid."  He stepped out of the car and then bent down to pop his head in.  "Wait here, I'll be right back."

SPERANZA: The canonical reality of the "new" Consulate gives me the opportunity to bring out a bit more Fraser-snark.

I watched him as he passed through the wrought iron gate, jogged up the few steps and disappeared into the building.  The sign outside said, "Canadian Consulate."

Okay, so I guessed they moved it.

Two minutes later the reason for the pit stop became evident.  Diefenbaker bounded down the steps ahead of Fraser, then ran to my door, leapt up on his hind legs, and began licking the window.  I hooted with laughter and pressed my hands and face to the glass.  A moment later, Fraser opened the driver's side door, pulled down the seat, and called for him.  Dief dashed round the car and hopped into the back seat to lick my face in person.

"You stupid mutt!" I yelled by way of greeting.  "It's so good to see you!"  I grabbed him by the muzzle and shook his face from side to side.   "Look, he remembers me."

"Of course he does," Fraser said.  He started the car, pulled us back onto the street, and turned the car south.

SPERANZA: Dief is--I love Dief, but every single story I write, somewhere in the middle I stop and bang my head on the desk and go, "Oh, hell, where the fuck is Dief?"  He's kind of a pain in the ass, really.  I keep reminding myself that he's really very independent! and therefore I don't have to know where he is every fucking single second of the day!

IV.  South Side

Dief fussed over me for a few minutes and then went to sprawl out on Kowalski's back seat.  I turned my attention back to Fraser.  "They don't let you keep him at the safehouse?"

"They didn't, no," Fraser replied distractedly; he was focused on driving.  "Not while I was an official visitor.  Now that I'm no longer under police protection, I don't see the problem."

"No police protection for Dief, huh?" I asked, and Dief barked in support of my outrage.  And then I realized where Fraser was taking us--the south lakeshore--and that knocked all the joke right out of me.

SPERANZA: I remember haraunging all my Chicago friends--where would you dump a body?  What does the lakefront look like, etc?  I did, in fact, look at maps and stuff and find an actual location, but then--as so often happens--I decided that, in the writing, I didn't NEED to be that specific; we don't, actually, refer to specific addresses in our day to day lives.  "You want to go to that Thai place downtown?" "Which one?" "You know, the one on the east side,"--like, it's only tourists who would give the exact neighborhood as found on a map.  I don't think the research was a waste, but it reconvinced me that the goal is plausibility, not accuracy.

Ten minutes later, Fraser had us parked at a beat-up old harbor.  When he turned in his seat I thought he was gonna talk to me, but instead he turned all the way around and addressed himself to Dief.

"Diefenbaker," he said, and Dief barked to show he was paying attention.  "Show us where Ray is."

Diefenbaker stared at him for a moment, and suddenly I realized where Fraser'd gotten his "I'm-talking-to-an-idiot" look from.  Then the dog looked at me and let out a bark.

"No, not him," Fraser said testily.  "The other one."

Dief paced in a nervous little circle around Kowalski's back seat and then let out another sharp woof.

"Glad to hear it," Fraser said and opened the car door.  He held the seat down for Dief, who bolted out and took off at a run.  We got out of the car and watched him blur away for a second before following him down one of the smaller side piers.  "I want you to see this," Fraser murmured to me, his eyes locked on Diefenbaker as we walked.  "I want to see what you make of this."

Diefenbaker had run straight down to the very end of the dock, and now he crouched there, staring out over the expanse of Lake Michigan, barking his head off.  Jesus Christ.  I looked at Dief, then looked out onto the endless expanse of choppy gray waves--there was a wind today, a bad one, the kind that cuts right through you.

This was not a good place to die, I thought, shivering violently in my overcoat.

SPERANZA: I seem to remember there being a bit of a beta scuffle around this bit, the description of the choppy waves and the wind and such.  Somebody--Mia? I don't remember--didn't like it, but I really did like it and so I left it.  I thought it had a kind of noirish feeling, but also, it seemed real to me that you would stand at the lakefront in such a situation and think, geez, this sucks.  But I also understand that this is arguably a bit OTT.  Still, I liked it--and ultimately, I probably read these stories more than anybody else does.

Fraser didn't even look cold;  he was just looking down at Dief sadly.  Dief, for his part, looked like he wanted to leap out into the water--and for a second I let myself picture it.  Dief diving and resurfacing, then swimming furiously for shore dragging the bloated body of--

SPERANZA: This is another Stephen King move.  Thanks, Steve!

"So what do you make of it?"  Fraser's voice was quiet.

"God, Fraser," I said, feeling agonized.  "Not good, this is so not good, here--"

Fraser narrowed his eyes at me.  "So you think what they thought.  That he's down there, in the water."

I wheeled on him, flinging my arms in the air.  "Fraser, even the wolf thinks he's down there in the water--where do you think he is?"

Fraser turned toward the lake--and then slowly, slowly, he raised his arm and pointed out, over the water.  "Lake Michigan is sixteen hundred and sixty miles in circumference," he said softly, still staring out toward the horizon.  "Most of that is beachland, of course, but obviously there's been a lot of development.  Still, I have to think that Charlie Fish would want Ray close to hand, somewhere nearby where he could get to him quickly if the need arose--"

SPERANZA: I thought this was all pretty vivid--Dief running to the edge of the water and barking, and the way in which this could be interpreted as RayK in the water rather than RayK over the water.  I like how Fraser thinks outside the box on this.

"Fraser," I said.  "I don't follow."

Fraser didn't answer me directly;  instead, he crouched down by the very edge of the dock and rubbed his hand along the wooden planks facing the water's edge.  A moment later he raised his hand to his nose, sniffed it, and then licked it.  I winced, but Fraser was already nodding to himself as he heaved himself up.

"I think they went in a boat," Fraser said.  "Wherever they went, they got there by boat," and then he turned on his heel and began walking away from me, up the pier, toward the car.

I gave him a couple of minutes to himself, and then followed him back to the car.  Fraser was in the driver's seat, staring straight out the windshield.  I tapped my knuckles on the window;  he didn't look at me, but a moment later the glass whirred down.

"You okay?" I asked, and Fraser jerked a tight nod and tightened his hands on the wheel.  "Okay," I said, and lifted my head to stare out at the lake.

"That's all I know," Fraser said finally, and his voice was dead in a way that sort of frightened me. "That's as far as I've gotten."

"We'll need maps," I said, looking down at him.

"Yes."

"Computers, too--computers would help.  Maybe look at harbor records, shipping records, boat licenses--"

"I don't have any of those things."

"We'll get 'em.  I'll get 'em for you."

"Yes.  Okay.  Thank you, Ray," Fraser said.
 

V.  Downtown

There wasn't much of anything we could do after that.  Only place still open by this time was the station, so we pulled over at a pay phone and I called over there.  I got my sister on the line, who herself was on her way out.  I asked her about maps of the lake, and she said there were some around that she could probably "borrow" for me;  she'd look, anyway.  I asked her about the computers but hit more of a wall there--I didn't have a password anymore, and while Frannie did have one, she didn't have enough clearance to do what we wanted.

I put my hand over the receiver and had a brief conference about it with Fraser--who at the station might help us?  Huey? Dewey? Welsh?  Fraser shook his head at each one and I sighed:  I thought we'd been outsiders before, but we were real outside now.  Act first, report later suddenly wasn't looking so good as a philosophy.  I didn't have any status at the moment, no badge, no gun, nothing, and what with Fraser's link to the RCMP cut off, we were finding out real fast why civilians didn't do so well at investigations.

SPERANZA: This was more of me having to deal with the ramifications of the story I was telling.  I didn't want to do all the brouhahah of "Ray Coming Back From Undercover," but then it meant that I was stuck with Ray Having No Official Police Connection. I think it was right around here I was like, oh, fuck, now what do I do?  Because all of the crime-solving McGuffins require some coplike "network" so that Frannie can run in with a fax or a print out and say, "Hey, I'm Exposition Girl--and our magical Computer has come up with the address of the killer!"  So I had to deal with that--and again, I think the necessity provided a good invention below, with Ray hacking Kowalski's passwords and such.

I lifted the receiver to my mouth again.  "Okay, Frannie.  Grab what you can, okay?  Meet you outside in twenty minutes?"  She agreed and I hung up the phone.

"Hey, some of this will be public domain anyway," I told Fraser, trying to be encouraging--which was weird, me encouraging Fraser.  He nodded, still looking sort of glum.  Personally, I thought he was being overly cynical about the situation, because I'd seen Fraser in operation, and on charm alone he could usually get anyone to give him practically everything, particularly if the person in charge was a chick.  "Tomorrow we can go to the public offices and do it the old fashioned way--by hand.  People have to register property, Fraser.  They pay taxes, collect rents--"

SPERANZA: I'd thought about actually doing this, but it just sounded SO BORING.  So you'll notice that they never actually made it to the public records office.   Ray got a better idea. *g*

Fraser seemed to shake off his mood by a sheer act of will.  "You're right, of course.  There will be records--it's just a matter of putting our backs into it.  And now there are two of us to do the work."

We went back to the car with a sense of shared determination, though somewhere in the back of my head I kept hearing Fraser's voice saying: sixteen hundred and sixty miles in circumference.  Though yeah, okay, most of that was just rocks.  But still, face it, there wasn't a whole lot of hope here unless we had some sort of brainstorm.

SPERANZA:  I never really thought about this before, but it's funny that my MOTBish plot should also revolve around Lake Michigan and boats.  I wasn't thinking about that directly, but I wonder if it influenced the plot I came up with?

Frannie, bless her, was waiting for us at the corner with a bunch of rolls of paper under her arm.  "This is what I could get," she said, passing them to me through the window of the car.  "Even this I had to explain by saying I was interested in studying geography, which nobody even wanted to hear about, the bastards."  She leaned down into the window and grinned at me, then looked past me at Fraser.  "Heya, Frase.  How're you holdin' up?"

"I'm all right, Francesca," Fraser replied. "Thank you kindly for asking."

"You gotta let it go, you know," Frannie told him, the evening wind whipping her hair around as she stood in the cross-draft of the intersection.  "You gotta let Stella move ahead with--"

Fraser actually interrupted her.  "I appreciate your input," he said, just as I asked, "Can we drop you home, Frannie?"

"Nah, I got a date," she said, then grinned teasingly at me.  "Don't tell Ma."

"I ain't talking to Ma, yet," I said in all honesty.  "I'm layin' low for a while."

"Well, enjoy your lowness," Frannie said, and stepped away from the car.  "Don't lose those maps or I'll get fired."

We turned toward home, me clutching the rolls of paper in my lap.  I figured this was as good a time as any to mention my evening plans to Fraser.  "Hey," I said, nervously.  "Speaking of dates, and speaking of Stella--"

That was enough to make even Fraser take his eyes from the road, though his face was carefully blank as he looked at me.  "You have a date?" he asked, sounding as near to incredulous as Fraser ever sounded.  "With ASA Kowalski?"

"Yeah," I said, and shrugged, trying to make it seem as casual as I can make it.  "Just dinner.  I just wanna talk to her a little."

"Hm," Fraser said, and returned his eyes to the road.

"What--hm?" I asked, defensive maybe because of my guilty conscience.

"Nothing."

"What nothing?" I pressed.

"Nothing," Fraser repeated, still staring forward.

VI.  Near West

Surprising me not at all, Fraser instantly took charge of the maps when we got back to the house, spreading them out on the kitchen table as he put up the water for tea.  I sighed and took myself upstairs;  I wanted a shower and a shave and a change of clothes.  I found some extra towels in the closet and settled in for the longest, hottest shower I could stand.  I felt like I wanted to wash the day off me, maybe wash away some of the guilt and the creepy-bad visions of dead Kowalski before I saw Stella again.

I felt a lot better when I got out.  I went back into my room and put on the best suit I had--the suit I had on my back when they pulled me out of Vegas.  A clean shirt, good cufflinks, my gold watch and a silk tie--and  I had some of the old spark back--just a little Languistini in my Vecchio, which felt really fine. I still had one pair of good shoes left, too, so I brushed these up and put them on.  Picture complete, and I stared at myself in the mirror with some satisfaction.

She'd love me.  How could she possibly resist me?  How could anyone?

SPERANZA: I love Vecchio.  And Vecchio loves himself, apparently.  (There really is a certain kind of Italian-American guy like this--mainly constructed by their mothers, who think that they're God's Gift To The World.  I'm related to many of them.)

I slung my jacket over my shoulder, feeling like a hero in one of those great old movies of the forties.  I could even feel the strut in my step.

SPERANZA: And here it comes: the scene this whole story was written for.   Act Two Climax--what this whole section was moving  towards:

When I pushed through the swing door into the gloomy kitchen, Fraser was sitting staring down at the kitchen table, just like when I first saw him--had that only been yesterday?  For a second I thought he was studying the maps, but then my eyes focused better and I saw that he was looking over something else, some object he was turning over in his hands.  He didn't look up, and I took another step closer to the table, squinting, trying to see what he had there.

And then it came clear:  he was holding a pair of glasses.  Round tan plastic frames, really thick, with the left lens spiderwebbed and cracked.  And I didn't have to ask whose glasses those were, and a second later, I realized that there were other things I didn't have to ask now, either.  Because the way he was holding those glasses told me a lot--told me damn near everything, in fact.  Or maybe there'd been bits and pieces of it coming to me all day and it took this to force me to put them together.

"Where'd you get 'em?" I asked, though I thought I pretty much knew the answer to this.

Fraser didn't look up.  "I stole them," he said, staring down at them.  "From evidence lock-up.  Not today," he added, almost gently, glancing up at me.  "I wouldn't have jeopardized your sister's trust in you."

I was really lost for what to say, here;  I felt like I'd seen something I shouldn't, which I now couldn't unsee.  I didn't know what he wanted to tell me.   I didn't know if I wanted to know anything.

But I couldn't just walk out and go on my date with Stella;  walking out was just--cold.  "You and Kowalski?"

Fraser turned the broken glasses over yet again.  "Yeah."

"Long time?"

"Long enough."

"I'm sorry, Fraser," I said.

"Me too.  I'm sorry, too."

And I went off, feeling really helpless, to go and phone for a taxi.

SPERANZA: Okay, so, this still really works for me.  Just because it's so quiet--it's a great "show", I think, where we see Fraser holding those glasses and suddenly, without telling, we know that Fraser's in love with Kowalski.  I'm a total mushball over it.  And I like the spareness of the dialogue afterwards:  "You and Kowalski." "Yeah."  I mean, that's all you need to say, really.

PART FIVE

SPERANZA: Geez, this story just goes on and on, doesn't it?  I didn't remember it was this long when I agreed to do this!

I woke up to the most annoying buzzer sound in the entire world.  "Oh, god," I muttered, and then there was a voice, a muzzy female voice, saying, "Don't worry about it, it's just the alarm--"

SPERANZA: I'm really pleased that Vecchio got laid in the story.

I sat up in a panic and looked around, looked down:  Stella.  She smiled up at me from her mound of pillows.  "It's just me," she said.

"Just you?  What're you kidding?" I leaned down and kissed her as passionately as I could manage, which was quite a bit, me being a Vecchio and all.  "You are like--a vision," I told her honestly.  "You are like--like I need to pinch myself, like I might be hallucinating.  It's just that--"  I looked around and found the alarm clock:  man, 7:30 in the morning, and Fraser was probably up with the pigeons.   "I just gotta get going.  I gotta be somewhere."

JULAD sayz: And then yay more! because we're back in RayV POV, things are happening, the RayK/Fraser exposition is *over*, we're back on the move, baby!

"That's all right," Stella said, sitting up, the white sheet falling down to her waist:  my god, she was lovely.  "I've got to get to work anyway."

I kissed her again, and again, before scrambling out of bed and looking for my clothes, which were crumpled up on the floor by the side of the bed.  So much for my best suit.

"Will I see you again?" Stella asked quietly, as I zipped up my pants.

"Stella," I said, "with God as my witness, you are going to see me every day from now on till the end of your natural life."

I ran out through her living room, pausing to snag an apple out of the bowl on her glass dining room table, and took the elevator down to the lobby, where her doorman hailed me a cab.  Sitting slumped in the back seat, I sat and watched the city whiz by me.  There were people heading to work, cars clogging the streets, stores opening up--it was a great morning, a beginning, the first day of my life.  My new life with Stella.

I saw a sign blur by, and it took a few seconds to register--and then I was leaning forward, tapping on the glass, and yelling at the cabbie, "Wait!  Wait!  Go back!"

Cause I had an idea.

SPERANZA: Yeah, I had an idea, too--it's called, "God, please, I don't want to do boring scenes of them at the public records office!!)

Fraser was sitting at the kitchen table, writing furiously in a notebook, Frannie's lake maps spread out all around him.  He glanced up as I pushed through the kitchen door, then stood quickly to give me space to put the box down.

"Okay, sorry, sorry," I said, setting the box onto to the table with a thump.  "I'm late, but hey--I come bearing gifts."

Fraser looked down at the brown box, then up at me again.  "So I see. Did you have a good evening?"

"Fraser," I said, sinking down in a chair and shaking my head, "you don't even know the half of it."

Fraser managed a smile, which I really appreciated knowing how stressed out he was and everything.  "It went well, then?"

"It went amazing," I answered honestly.

Fraser sat down in the chair across from me and looked at me curiously.  "You like her, then?"

"I--"  I was about to tell him exactly how much I liked her, except for a second I just wasn't sure of the etiquette here.  Was it okay to fall crazy stupid in love with the ex-wife of the murdered guy who was your best friend's partner and lover?  I didn't think there was any sort of greeting card out there for this one.  "Yeah.  I like her, Fraser--I really really like her.  She's just so smart and pretty and ambitious--"  Fraser flinched a little at the description;  okay, maybe too much information there. "Look," I said quickly, "I know you've got problems with her.  I mean, over Kowalski--it's gotta be weird for you and everything.  Just I can't help that I--"

"No, no," Fraser interrupted, "I understand perfectly. Of course you shouldn't help it--there's no reason for you to help it, in any case.  She's a lovely woman," Fraser said, and I felt his approval like a blessing, like a benediction, "and under other circumstances..."  He trailed off, looking thoughtful, and then added quietly:  "I don't blame her for what she's doing;  she's got the difficult task of trying to make things right for Ray's parents.  I haven't even been able to talk to Mr. or Mrs. Kowalski.  I wouldn't know what to say."  Fraser sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose with his fingertips.  "Awkward all around.  But if I were her, in her position, I'd be doing exactly the same thing.  Clever of her to approach a judge;  imagine having to wait three years before getting a death certificate.  It would be horrible for them--it's horrible enough already."

"So you don't mind?" I asked, needing to have this all clear.

"Of course I don't mind.  I think it's wonderful."  He stood up then, and considered the box in front of him.  "So what have we here?"

"This is for two years' worth of missed Christmases and birthdays," I told him.  "Go on, open it."

He did, prying the thick staples out of the cardboard with the flat of his knife.  He seemed to sigh in relief as he pulled out the laptop, set it down on the table, and then cleared away the styrofoam packing and the box.  "Thank you," Fraser said.  "I'm sure it'll help--save us some footwork, in any case."

SPERANZA: Oh, you bet it will save us some footwork!  Thank god!  Nothing like a computer to get out out of a McGuffin but FAST.  Also, it allowed me to do this fun stuff with the passwords, below;  necessity giving me another really nice bit of invention.

I leaned forward over the table, grinning excitedly.  "Okay, yeah--except I had this idea.  You don't have codes, I don't have codes--for CPD access I mean."  Fraser nodded grimly, pursing his lips.  "Right, but figure institutions, Fraser--like marmalade, slow as molasses."  Fraser just stared at me, waiting, and it was nice to see confusion on his face for a change.  I sat back in my chair and showed him my cockiest grin.  "You know who'll have codes?  Kowalski.  I'll bet you money that they haven't deleted Kowalski from the system yet."

SPERANZA: This is true; I'm constantly shocked at the networks I continue to have access to! Places I haven't been in years!

Fraser's eyebrows flew up;  clearly this idea hadn't occurred to him.  "Well, yes, that's certainly possible," he admitted.  "But I don't have Ray's passwords."

"No," I granted, pulling the laptop toward him and flipping the top up.  "Figured you didn't.  But look--his login name's gotta be my login name, because he was there being me, right?"  Fraser was nodding slowly, watching as I found the power button and began to boost up the machine.  "It's a standard thing anyway--first initial, four letters of the last name.  RVECC."

"Right...all right..."  Fraser'd pulled his chair closer and was staring at the glowing blue screen.

"We need a phone line," I said, turning to him.  "Please god that this place has a phone."

Instantly Fraser was out of his chair and pushing through the door to the front hallway--that's right, I remembered seeing the phone out there on the hall table.  "It's here, dammit," Fraser called back, surprising me with his language, "but the cord's not long enough.  We need a longer--"

SPERANZA: It seemed like just too much luck for the place to be conveniently net-wired.  So I had them move the furniture and stuff.  A nice bit of business, the sort of small detail that can make a scene feel real.  A lot of times, when I'm reading weak stories, it's because they're moving too quickly and things are too easy.  I remember making a post about this on PL, I think, back in Sentinel, talking about dialogue--how people always understand each other too easily in badly written stories.  Everybody always knows exactly what the other person means, which elides all the interesting bits of a conversation.  That's the verbal equivolent of finding the phone cord for your modem too easily--you then don't get the fun scene of Ray and Fraser moving the table together.

"Forget it," I called back.  "Take the mountain to Mohammed, Fraser."  He came back and we pulled the table and two of the kitchen chairs out into the hallway, shoving it up against the wall under the stairs where the telephone was.  "All right," I said, unplugging the phone and sticking the cord into the back of the computer.  "We're almost in business--"

"But the password," Fraser reminded me.  "We don't have--"

"We do have, it's in your brain somewhere."  I tested the modem--okay, shitty, but sending a signal;  it would do.  "I know cops, Fraser, and so do you--they keep sending us those damn memos telling us to change our passwords to something stupid, seven characters with two numbers that no one on earth could remember, but we just don't give a shit and we never do.  My password used to be CANNOLI--a word, seven letters, easy on the head.  Think about it, Fraser--you know Kowalski, you know how he thinks.  He's gonna have something like that," I said, "because only anal people follow the rules on this stuff--"

SPERANZA: I stand by this assertion, though I am now being forced to choose passwords with numbers.  I still choose moronic things, though.

"People like me, I suppose,"  Fraser admitted.  "My password was DIDTEAP."   I rolled my eyes at him and Fraser said, sort of defensively, "It's an abbreviated quotation.  From Eliot--"

SPERANZA: A lot of people wrote me feedback with the right quote. But for the rest of you:  "Do I dare to eat a peach?" from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," I said impatiently;  I'd gotten us to the opening screen now.  USER, it prompted, and I typed in:  RVECC and hit tab to the box saying PASSWORD.   "Get cracking, Fraser--start thinking."

Fraser blew out a breath and sat down beside me in the chair.  "Okay.  Seven characters."

"Seven characters, " I repeated, fingers poised over the keyboard.

"That would seem to exclude dates, which are only six--so no birthdays, anniversaries, anything like that."

"It's gonna be a word," I insisted.  "He's a cop, it's a word."

"A seven letter word," Fraser said and closed his eyes.

"Or a shorter word with a number," I admitted reluctantly.  "You could do that too."

"God, this is hell," Fraser muttered, and then he opened his eyes.  "All right.  First things first:  try STELLAK."

SPERANZA: This first guess says a lot about Fraser,  I think--Fraser's own fears and insecurities.

I did, hitting return with a sudden, irrational wave of hope.  PASSWORD DENIED.  "No," I sighed, quickly trying  STELLA1, STELLA2, STELLA 3, all the way up to 9.  Nothing.  "That ain't it.  What about STANLEY, that's seven letters--"

"Don't even bother," Fraser said, shaking his head firmly.  "Not to sound hubristic, but try me.  BFRASER."

I nodded and tried BFRASER, FRASER1 through FRASER9, and then, feeling really clever, MOUNTIE.

"No," I said finally.  "Try again.  Wait--could be so dumb as to use VECCHIO?"  I tried it; he wasn't; and then I tried RAYMOND just in case.  "Okay, no."

"Let's stay with people," Fraser suggested, hunching forward over the computer.  "His mother's BARBARA, that's seven letters."  That wasn't it.  "Try MCQUEEN."   I shot him a sideways glance, but did it.  No go.  "MBRANDO?"  No.

"All right, let's take a different tack," Fraser muttered.  "Places--start with CHICAGO."  No. "He lives on South Pagani," S. PAGANI; no, "and he grew up on Clark Street, but that's not seven letters.  God."

"Keep goin'," I said softly.  "You got it in there, I know you got it in there..."

"Ray, it could be anything."

"No, it couldn't.  People are dopes, Fraser--it's gonna be something obvious, trust me."

"Obvious after the fact," Fraser griped.  "All right, the car.  What about the car--GTO?"

"How do I make that into seven letters?" I asked.

"I don't know.  GTO AUTO?"  No.  "1967 GTO?  GTO 1967?"

"Nope, neither," I reported.  "Gran Turismo Omologato--TURISMO is seven letters," but they were the wrong fucking letters, just my luck.  "All right, what's the plate?"

"WE 761," Fraser said.  "Not enough."

"It is if you add IL in front of it," but ILWE761 got us nothing.

"All right," Fraser sighed. "Try DANCING."  No.  "FUCKING."  No.  "CHAMPION--no, wait, that's eight letters."  Fraser closed his eyes again.  "TURTLES?"

SPERANZA: I  had a lot of fun coming up with these passwords.

"You're overthinking this, Fraser," I growled.  "What kind of gun does he carry?"

"A Glock 9 mm."

"Okay, that doesn't help."  I stared down at my fingers, thinking, trying to think.  "What kind of food does he like?"

Fraser was starting to sound a little desperate.  "I don't know.  He never struck me as particularly picky.  He likes...I don't know.  Pizza.  Tacos.  Chocolate--chocolate ice cream, sweet things.  He takes a lot of sugar in his coffee..."

This wasn't helping.  "He smokes, right?  What brand?"

"Marlboro--eight letters."

"Shit.  What about music, what kind of music does he--"

Fraser was already shaking his head.  "It's too wide a field;  his record collection was simply enormous."

I leaned back in my chair and looked at him;  Fraser's whole body was wracked with tension.  "Why don't you make us some coffee or something," I suggested gently.  "We'll take a break, clear our heads..."

Fraser squeezed his eyes shut for a second and then nodded and got up, heading for the kitchen door.  "You know, I did think I knew him..." he said quietly, pushing through the swing door--

--and then he pushed right out again, like a cartoon or something, a Keystone Cop.  "No, wait, I'm an idiot," Fraser exclaimed, looking like he was about to smack himself in the forehead.  I sat up in my chair.  "I know what it is--and you're right, it's obvious, it's stupid, we skipped right over it--"

"Gimme! Let's try it," I said.

Fraser sat back down in the chair, looking sort of stunned and disbelieving.  "Try nothing--I'm sure of it, Ray.  It's the car.  It's PONTIAC."

He was right;  I knew he was right even before I typed the letters into the field, my fingers nervously jittering over the keys.

PASSWORD ACCEPTED.

~~WELCOME TO THE CENTRAL COMPUTER SYSTEM OF THE CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT....

"We're in, Fraser," I said with relief.

We spent the next few hours narrowing the radius down, or at least trying to.  No way we could consider the whole of Lake Michigan, and from the way Fraser was thinking, Charlie Fish would've wanted to keep Kowalski close by, so he could trade him--exchange him for a new model Vecchio if he got the opportunity.

We worked from the computer to the maps and back again, isolating the stretch of coastline around Chicago, and then going to the detail map for a better look.  "There's fuckin' miles and miles of coastal property, Fraser," I muttered.  "Apartment complexes, warehouses, golf courses, parks..."

Fraser was rubbing his jaw as he studied the maps.  "It's got to be something specific," he muttered to himself.   "Charlie Fish had a car, so it was someplace better reached by boat than by car..."

"All right," I said, trying to get my strength back up.  "So let's eliminate everywhere that hasn't got a dock."

SPERANZA: I remember coming up with this idea fairly early, of where to hide Kowalski--in a burn unit in a coast guard hospital.  The whole idea, actually, owes something to the old Cherry Ames series--Nurse Cherry, remember?  In what was, I think, the very first of these books, Cherry goes to work in a hospital as a candystriper, and she comes to realize that there's a mysterious room that only the doctors go into, and there's a patient swathed in bandages in there and moaning.  At the end of the novel it turns out that they've got some war hero (the book is set during WWII) or something stashed in there, and nobody can know he was wounded, etc etc.  He has to be treated in secret.  The idea of having a patient swathed in bandages and unable to communicate always struck me as a neatly creepy idea, and so I stole it and used it here.  It strikes me as a great way to hide someone in plain sight.

We started doing this, crossing out properties in the detail map with Xs in red pen--but geez, it went slow.  I made him stop to have lunch, and then we called out for Chinese food around dinnertime.

I had a brainstorm in the middle of my beef lo mein, and put the carton down.  "All right, look, wait a minute," I said, still chewing, and Fraser dropped the red pen and leaned back in his chair, stretching his back out.  "This is going well, this is going good--but let's stop for a second, okay?"  Fraser reached out for his tea, took a sip, and made a face--it must've gone cold.  "Just--we're doing this a good way, the methodical way, narrowing in," and Fraser nodded at this, "but it's time-consuming:  we could spend days doing this."

"I'm all right with that," Fraser said grimly.  "It feels so good to be finally doing something--"

"Yeah, I'm glad you like drudgery, Fraser, but maybe we can get at this faster.  Stop being so anal and maybe make a couple of brilliant guesses, take a couple of wild stabs in the dark."   I pulled the laptop toward me and began to click around.

SPERANZA: Vecchio's request for brilliant guesses and wild stabs in the dark is both good characterization and useful for speeding this shit the fuck UP.

"What are you looking for?" Fraser asked, leaning forward to stare at the screen.

"Reports from the water," I explained.  "Instead of looking to eliminate, maybe we should look for something positive--some break in the pattern of whatever's normal around there."

Fraser nodded slowly;  he seemed to appreciate the idea.  "I see what you mean.  A stolen boat, for instance..."

"Well, yeah--that would be great," but we didn't find any reports of stolen boats in the week surrounding Kowalski's murder.  Just to be on the safe side, I scanned all police reports from the lakefront, but there didn't seem to be anything weird there.  Just the normal weird.  "All right, I'm getting more coffee," I said, getting up with my mug.  "Why don't you see if we can get access to the Coast Guard?  Ninth District."

"Right," Fraser said, and took over the laptop.

When I came back, Fraser was peering over records of maritime incidents.  "Eight drownings that day," he read quietly.  "Five of them children..."

I grunted sympathetically.  "And the other three?"

"Men, all of them," Fraser reported. "Two of them older, both identified--"

"Fishermen, probably," I sighed.  "And the last guy?"

"A suicide, it looks like."  Fraser frowned at the screen, and I felt suddenly nervous.  "Still unidentified.  Took all his clothes off and jumped into the water..."  I sat up straight in my chair.  Took all his clothes off.  Kowalski's clothes in the water...

"Wait a minute--just wait!"  Fraser shouted at me;  he was angrier than I'd ever seen him.  "Hang on, for God's sake--there's a description!  Let me just see..."

I sat there, braced for it, wondering what on earth I was gonna say to Fraser if this guy turned out to be Kowalski.

"Male," Fraser read in a tight voice, "blond, blue eyes, approximately forty years old, and--"  he seemed to go limp with relief, "two hundred and thirty-five pounds."  He looked up at me, and we shared our relief.  "If Ray's a hundred and seventy-five pounds soaking wet..."

"Right, okay," I said, rubbing my suddenly aching temples.  "He ain't the jumper.  That's good, that's real good..."

For a moment we neither of us could do anything;  we just stared into space.

"Maybe finish with this site and take a break," I suggested quietly.  "Cause I need a break, Fraser.  It's been all day with this..."

"Yes, you're right.  All right."  He blew out a breath and then leaned forward to read through the rest of the log.

"Anything else?" I asked a couple of minutes later.

"Yes--quite a lot, actually," Fraser replied with a frown.  "I had no idea the Coast Guard had such a wide brief.  There were a number of search and rescue efforts that night--half of them false alarms, apparently;  drunkards or kids setting off flares.  The others seem genuine:  people falling overboard, a small fishing boat capsized in rough water."  Fraser continued to scroll downward, licking his lip thoughtfully.  "People lost, calling in for directions from various points.  Three boats were boarded that night--large quantities of drugs were found on two of them. "

SPERANZA: I actually did look up the Coast Guard logs, and these were the kinds of things that appeared in their logs.

I considered this last thing.  "Maybe something there.  Except the mob usually isn't that sloppy..."

Fraser was still reading, frown deepening.  "There were a number of accidents that night.  The terrace of a restaurant collapsed, sending all the patrons into the water--"

"Oh, that must've been fun," I muttered.

"--and there was a fire on another boat, two people taken to the hospital.  And a derelict vessel ran aground near--well, quite near the harbor where Ray was, actually," Fraser mused.

SPERANZA: Two of these examples--the restaurant collapse and the derelict vessel, were real incidents.  My fictional fire slips nicely between them.

"Derelict?  Meaning what?" I asked.

"Meaning empty, abandoned.  They apparently secured it, marked it with a strobe light and left it there--they haven't been able to identify the owners."  Fraser sat back in his chair and seemed to think about this.  "Well, that might be worth looking into.  We could check on that tomorrow..."

"Yeah, okay," I said, and shoved at his shoulder with his arm.  "For now, let's give it a bit of a rest.  Is there a television in this joint?"

"Yes," Fraser said.  "In the parlor."

"So c'mon," I said, getting up out of my chair.  "Watch TV with me for an hour.  Let your brain rest a little."

I put Fraser in front of the television--not like he was watching it, he was just looking past it, staring into space--and then I stole back into the hallway to unplug the modem and re-plug up the phone.  I dialed her office first, and then her home number.  She picked up there:  at least not everyone in Chicago was working late.

"Stella," I whispered, and I thought I could hear her smile over the phone.

"Hi," she said.  "I thought you forgot about me."

"Never," I said.  "Not ever ever.  I've just been busy, I've been working all day--I'm just taking a break now," I griped, hoping maybe to get a little of her sympathy.

She didn't disappoint. "Oh, I'm sorry, Ray," Stella said.  "That sounds rough."

"It is a little, yeah," I admitted, fidgeting a little as I worked up my nerve.  "Stella.  Listen.  I meant what I said:  I still want to see you--"

"I want to see you, too," Stella said softly.

"--except I just don't know what time I can--"

I heard the door behind me open and turned around:  Fraser was standing in the doorway.   He took two quick steps toward me and yanked the phone out my hand.  "Stella, I'll send him back when I'm done with him," Fraser said, and then he hung up the phone and pulled the cord out.

I was really and truly shocked.  "What the fuck, Fraser!" I yelled.  "You said you were okay with--"

But Fraser wasn't paying any attention to me;  he'd plugged the cord back into the laptop and was booting the damn thing up again.  Hell, this wasn't about Stella;  this was about wanting the laptop.

It was only then that I noticed that Fraser'd gone pale.

"Fraser, what?" I asked.

Fraser's fingers were flying over the keyboard.  USER:  RVECC.  PASSWORD:  PONTIAC.  "I had an idea," he said tightly, "something I thought of and--dear God I hope I'm wrong..."

I sat down slowly in the chair next to him.  "An idea about what?"  Fraser ignored me, typing furiously and then leaning forward to read when he'd gotten back to the right screen--the Coast Guard log again, I could see that much.  "Fraser?" I repeated, getting very nervous now.  "An idea about what?"

Fraser slowly turned away from the screen, his face a tense mask.  "Fire," he said quietly.  "An idea about fire."

I stared at him, mind spinning furiously.  Fire...there was a fire on another boat, two people taken to...

"Two people taken to the hospital," I repeated, and Fraser jerked his head in acknowledgment as he fumbled for his red pen and peered down at the printed maps.  I watched, stunned to silence, as Fraser moved the tip of the pen carefully around the coast--and then stabbed it down hard and started swirling quick circles around a particular location.

Fraser lifted his head;  his eyes were dark with pain.  "Say you wanted to hide somebody for a long time with minimum assistance," he said in a low, distant voice.  "You don't have many people to help you and you're not sure who you trust.  Say, furthermore, that the person you're trying to hide is quite--special," his voice broke a little bit on the word, "someone who would be missed, the subject of a high-priority search, his picture publicized in newspapers and police bulletins.  Where might you hide such a person?"

SPERANZA: This is Fraser's "I've called you all here today..." speech; his big Holmes/Poirot moment.

I snatched the paper map from under Fraser's pen, which left a long, ragged red mark like a scar.  Calumet Harbor Hospital, Fraser'd circled.  USCG--United States Coast Guard.

SPERANZA: Calimet Harbor was the real-life south side location where the pier was earlier in the story.   I decided not to name the pier, but it was too good a name not to use at all.

"In the hospital," I mumbled, finally managing to get the words out of my throat.  "You'd put the guy in the--"

"Yes.  In the hospital.  In the burn unit."  Fraser stood, like a man in a dream, and said with eerie calmness:  "I'll get my coat."

SPERANZA: I was very self-conscious about giving Ray a serious injury like this, but I felt the story depended upon something  serious happening--this wasn't a case where they could find Ray and he would be fine.  Ray's condition had to be worthy of Fraser's suffering--so if not death, serious injury was necessarily.

I watched in a daze as he walked up the stairs and then I practically dived for the laptop.  The page was still loaded but the details were sketchy.  A call to Calumet Harbor Hospital at 11:04 P.M.  The report of a kitchen fire on a boat called the Bella Linda.  A request for a Coast Guard ambulance.  The team of hospital corpsmen, upon boarding the boat, found two healthy men aboard the Linda--and one man who'd been burned.

"2nd & 3rd dgr burns to left torso & arm," the corpsmen had scrawled.  "Minor burns to face, neck and hands."

SPERANZA: Now if I remember correctly, Te contributed a lot to this part of the story--she was kin of my medical consultant.  She seemed to know more than anyone ought to about burns, and she was pretty insistent on the details being right.

The owner of the boat identified himself as John Pileggi, and his licenses had all been in order.   The other two men on board were identified as Charles and Gary Raymond--two brothers, friends of his, he'd explained, and they'd all just hoped to grill a few steaks, drink a few beers--

If the corpsmen had noticed that Charlie Fish and Stanley Raymond Kowalski looked nothing alike for brothers, they hadn't mentioned it in their report.  Then again, Kowalski might not've looked much like much right then, Christ help him.   Jesus Christ, I knew what burns could be like.  Deliberate, accidental--it was the kind of thing you saw on the job and wished you'd never seen.  Wished you'd never smelled.

SPERANZA: Te, like Resonant, is a smell person--I'm pretty sure this line about "the kind of thing you wished you'd never seen, wished you'd never smelled" came from her.

Fraser came back down the stairs in his jeans and leather jacket--and his hat.  It'd been two years since I'd seen that hat, and maybe Fraser shouldn't have been wearing the hat, being as Fraser had retired and was now an ex-Mountie, but--

SPERANZA: I figured the hat had to make an appearance at the climax.  That's how you know its the climax.  Fraser puts on his hat.

God, I was glad to see the hat.  Like, things could not be this bad if Fraser was wearing the hat.  If Fraser was wearing the hat, there was still some kind of order in the universe somewhere.  Like everything would have to turn out okay.

I stood up, grabbed my coat off the chair, and followed him out the front door to the car.  It was past midnight, now, and the street was silent around us.  Fraser stopped on the sidewalk and handed me the keys.  "You drive," he said quietly.  "I don't think I can drive."

I drove us through the dark night to Calumet Harbor Hospital.

The place was all lit up, bright against the darkness of the streets in the front and the water behind.  Quiet, though;  only a few cars in the lot, mostly with M.D. plates, and nobody in the waiting room as we passed through the huge automatic sliding doors and headed straight for the desk.

A brisk looking nurse looked up from the counter as we approached.  Her nametag said Mary Lansing, R.N. "Can I help you?"

"Yes," Fraser said shortly.  "I'm here to see Gary Raymond."

She looked surprised at the request.  "It's past midnight."

Fraser didn't so much as lower his eyes.  "I'm aware of that.  But it's very important."

This would normally be the point where I would sigh wearily, pull out my badge, and shove it up into her face so she could read it.  Except I had no badge, nothing at all to give Fraser here except moral support.

SPERANZA: This was another necessity and invention moment--I was momentarily stymied to realize that Vecchio had no badge and no official police connections at the moment (at least none which he could produce).  You don't realize--or maybe you do, but I didn't--how much fanfic and tv writers just depend on people caving to authority in stories.  But I had no authority in this story, nobody whom the nurse had to listen to.  I thought about having Vecchio just fudge it, claim to be a cop anyway, but I couldn't make myself believe that the nurse would just accept his word for it.  I was a little "grr" about it, and then I thought--okay, that's the situation, so what does Fraser do?  And the answer turned out to be: wow, he pulls a gun on the nurse!  And that was interesting!  (I hadn't realized he'd been carrying a gun, but see what I know!)

"Uh-huh," Mary Lansing said, looking us over critically like she thought we were maybe lunatics, which maybe we even were.  "Hold on a moment," she said, and reached for a clipboard thick with paper bound up by huge steel rings on the top.  "That name's not ringing a bell for some reason..."  She scanned the top sheet and muttered, "Raymond...Raymond...oh, I see," she said, suddenly.  "Raymond, Gary..." she murmured and then flipped a thick chunk of paper over until she came to what seemed like the right page.

I saw the very second she put on her most professional, "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, gentlemen, but that's impossible," nurse face.  "I'm afraid Mr. Raymond can't be seen," she said firmly.  "He's one of Dr. Pileggi's private patients, and we've been given explicit orders not to--"

SPERANZA: You know, if I could find that Cherry Ames book, I would totally change the names here to "Nurse Ames" and whatever the doctor's name was.  Private patients! Ha!

I jerked my head toward Fraser to see if he'd caught it--Pileggi, Doctor Pileggi, same name as the guy who owned the goddamned boat!--but Fraser seemed totally not interested in that really interesting coincidence.  In fact, he was standing there, quite calmly, holding a gun--fuck, that was Kowalski's gun, the little ankle piece I'd seen him pull out of the rolltop yesterday.  Man, the guy must have hands like Houdini, and for the first time I could see why Welsh must've worried about Fast-Hands-Fraser mucking up the evidence chain.

SPERANZA: Actually, as a sidebar, the evidence chain is frankly so screwed up on most TV cop shows that I doubt any single one of these criminals would be convicted in a court of law.  Frankly, all you'd probably have to do in most cases was to cite the arresting officer's record--he fired a gun how many times? he was involved in how many hostage situations?  he just happened to be in how many downed planes??

"Fraser, keep your head," I blurted, which was a really stupid thing to say, since Fraser didn't look the slightest bit like he was losing his head.  In fact, he looked totally calm, kind of scarily so--like he was some polite, hospital-visiting robot who might suddenly pop a spring and start shooting up the place.

"No, really," Fraser said mildly, like he was just asking which way to the men's room.  The gun never wavered, though.  "I really do have to see Mr. Raymond immediately.  If you'd just tell me the room number..."

"Just do it," I yelled at the woman.  "Tell him the goddamned number already--"

"312," Mary Lancing said tightly;  and hey, give her credit, her nerves hadn't buckled yet.  My own were feeling kinda shot.

"Thank you kindly."   Fraser headed up the hallway looking determined.  I went after him at a clip.

"I'm calling the police!" the nurse shouted after us, and now there was a tremor in her voice.  She'd held it together while the gun was on her, though, which I totally appreciated.  "Just so you know!  I am calling the police right now!"

I whirled around and walked backwards for a step or two so I could shout back at her.  "That's a great idea!  That's a first-class, great fucking idea!"

And then I had to turn around to chase after Fraser, who'd given the elevator a miss and was pushing through the door to the stairs.  He ran up the two flights of stairs taking them steps at a time, and I panted after him, my overcoat getting tangled around my legs as I climbed.

SPERANZA: For some reason, that overcoat tangling around Vecchio's legs strikes me as the most vivid bit of Vecchio characterization in the thing.   I don't know why, but it totally evokes Vecchio to me!

"Fraser, wait!" I shouted as I pushed through the door onto the third floor.  "Fraser, goddammit!"

Down the hall a-ways, Fraser stopped, wheeled, and glared at me.  "What?  What?"

I gasped for breath as I walked toward him, hand extended.  "Gimme the gun," I panted.  "Before you go in there.  Just let me have it."

He stared at me for a second--and then his lips tightened and he nodded.  I stopped in front of him, my palm open, and he put the gun into my hand.  I clenched my fingers around it and put it into my side pocket.

"Okay," I said softly, "now just let me say two things to you, okay?"  Fraser swallowed hard, then nodded again.  "Okay.  First thing--it may not be him in there, so take a second to prepare yourself for that.  This is a theory, and it's a good theory--but theories have been known to be wrong and if there's some other poor slob behind that door you should maybe think about him for a minute, all right?"

Fraser took a deep breath and nodded yet again;  I was reaching him.  He was hearing me.

"Okay, second thing," I said, lowering my voice even more.  "If it is him in there, Fraser, just--just keep it together, okay?  Cause he won't need your shit on top of everything else."  Fraser just blinked at me stupidly and I reached out and fisted his leather jacket, shaking him just a little.  "You hearing me, Benny?" I demanded.  "Capische?"

"I'm hearing you," Fraser repeated.  "I'm hearing you, Ray..."

"All right."  I let go of him.  He turned and curled his fingers around the long steel doorhandle, clutching it so hard I could see that his knuckles were white.  He seemed to be steeling himself up, and I tried to do the same--if this was Kowalski, he'd need Fraser to be calm, and Fraser'd need me to be calm.

Finally Fraser pulled downward, turning the latch, and pushed the door open.  Instantly I could see a weird blue light from inside, enough to see by without being bright enough to disturb sleep.  The room was large and private, containing only one bed--and the figure in the bed was being well-monitored, anyway, if the soft bleep-bleep-bleep noises were any indication.

Fraser was walking toward the bed like the floor was made of glass.  I couldn't see his face, only his back, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be praying for, here:  "Please God, let this be Kowalski," or, "Please God, let this guy not be Kowalski."  It was only when Fraser stopped, and stopped breathing, leaving the room silent except for my own harsh gasps and the bleep-bleep of the machines that I knew it was Kowalski, knew it suddenly for sure.

I put a hand out to steady myself against the doorframe, not knowing if this was panic or relief I was feeling, but feeling dizzy with it anyway.   Stanley Kowalski, I presume.

"Ray?"  Fraser'd made it to the bed now, and he seemed to be keeping it together well enough.  "Ray?"  I saw his head tilt as he studied the man's face.  "Ray?" and there was a more desperate edge to the word, now, as Fraser took note of the complex mess of wires and tubes.  He trailed his fingers gently over some of them, tracing them back to their various sources--and then suddenly his whole body tightened and his fingers pinched down on a clear plastic tube.

In two seconds I was next to him and grabbing hold of his wrist.  "Fraser, don't," I said quickly.  "Don't.  That's the morphine drip."

Fraser's voice was quiet and furious.  "I know what it is--"

I knew what it was, too;  I knew all about it, having watched my old man's slow fade out once the cancer got bad.  I squeezed Fraser's wrist tightly, grinding the bones together until his fingers eased up.  "Okay, then you know what it is, and you know that it sucks--but you do not just yank somebody off morphine after six weeks, do you hear me?  He will not appreciate that."

SPERANZA: Te was the one who knew about morphine drips, how they work, what the effects would be.  Thanks, Te!!

Fraser let go of the tube and I pulled his arm away from the whole mess of it.

"This ain't gonna be a thing of 'pull out the wires, throw him into the back of the car, and go home,'" I said quietly.  "This is like--we need a doctor here, a real one, to tell us what the fuck to do about this."

Now, finally, I had a good look at him--my replacement, my namesake, the povero biondo.  A little less biondo than I'd expected, because the amenities of this private hell-clinic didn't seem to include touch-ups to your dye job, so Kowalski's hair was darkening noticeably brown at the roots.  Plus he was real pale--and that just made the red stand out more: deep red like a sunburn.  Kowalski had patches of sunburn on his shoulder and neck, spider-creeping up to his face just below the left ear.  From the flames licking up, I thought instantly, certainly--because these were the good burns, the mild ones, the ones that would heal up.

Kowalski's arm was another story--that was nasty, and that was gonna stay nasty, even after the skin graft took.  If he was lucky he'd use it again, though there'd be scarring either way and he'd feel it most days.  Same thing down his left side--I couldn't see all of it, it disappeared under the sheet, but he'd had work done there, too, which meant it was serious.

Fraser pressed his fingertips to the unblemished skin of Kowalski's right cheek and then leaned down carefully to touch their mouths together.   When he straightened up again, tears were falling down his face, though he didn't seem to notice them;  he was keeping it together, I was proud of him.

SPERANZA: This scene here has a lot to do with my choices for the ending; we see Fraser kissing Kowalski and tears falling down Fraser's face, and frankly, this only works for me because Fraser's trying so hard to be brave here.  But this is my romantic climax, the moment where the lovers are reunited, my payoff moment.

"I don't know what to do," Fraser said in a weirdly normal voice, like he wasn't crying and we weren't here and nothing strange was going on.  "Tell me what to do, Ray."

"Okay, I'll tell you.  I'm gonna find a phone, and I'm gonna call the cops, and I'm gonna call Welsh at home, and I'm gonna get some doctors here, some real doctors, some specialists."

Fraser nodded quickly and swiped his arm across his face like a fly had just landed on his nose.  "And Stella," he said, to my surprise.  "Call Stella.  Because she should know and--and we might need some legal help, too."

"Right, good thinking," I agreed, and then suddenly we both turned at once because there was a sort of groaning sound from the bed, from Kowalski.  He'd opened his eyes, and he was staring at the ceiling--and man, his pupils were blown, and that was morphine all over.

SPERANZA: Te again, giving me the detail of the blown pupils.  Who knew?

"Ray."  There was an undercurrent of terror in Fraser's voice and I elbowed him, hard--Kowalski was flying pretty high but he'd still sense fear in the room, which might fuck with his head.  Fraser stared at me and I mouthed, "Easy."

Fraser cleared his throat and tried again, and this time he got his normal tone back.  "Ray, it's me.  Ben."

"Ben...hey," Kowalski said, except it came out like, "Ehnn....ayyy," and that was all about the morphine, too, as was Kowalski's sudden, brilliant smile.  High as a kite, totally out of it--the man was feeling less pain right now than either Fraser or me.  "Aaayaabeen?" Kowalski asked happily.  How've you been?

I wasn't gonna stick around to watch Fraser field that one.  I went looking for the phone instead.

JULAD EXPLAINS:

Okay, so this whole scene was the big disagreement.  Ces was worried about people's reactions to Ray getting burned, and indeed freaking a little because some of her betas were upset about it.  Me, I was fine with the burning, whatever, it's plot, but I was *not* fine with this section.  I kept saying, Fraser has to react! I want a Fraser box! I want Fraser at least saying, "Ray. Ray. Ray. Ray. Ray."  And Ces gave me all these logical reasons why Fraser had to keep it together and I was *such* an idiot to listen to her.  If I had known the extent of her anti-romance paranoia at the time, realised that it wasn't logic but her fear of being sappy that was causing her to shut Fraser down emotionally, then I would have yelled and screamed and argued until I got my way, or at least made a really good effort at it.

Because, right, we're going through all this Where Is Ray and Our Tortured Relationship and Fraser fighting everyone he knows and being alienated and stuff because he has to keep believing that Ray is still alive, and this is IT! This is the BIG MOMENT where he's FINALLY FOUND HIM and IT'S ALL GOING TO BE OKAY and the music should be swelling and the camera spins around wildly and people are jumping up and down and crying or whatever and what do we get?  Nothing.  Nada.  Zip.

Okay, so we get a kiss and some tears but a) it's totally out of proportion to the angst we've just been through--  We went through all that confusion and misery because we wanted a payoff, right?  We wanted our happy kisses and sunset sleigh rides or the fight-n-fuck RayK/Fraser equivalent.  We gots the hurt, we wants the comfort, both for ourselves and for Ray and Fraser, but we're cut off from our closure, the character doesn't react, the camera pans away, that was it.  And b) all through this story we've already HAD Fraser keeping it together about Ray, being the one to be forcefully rational, logical, optimistic, determined, etc, and so now, at the climax, this is where he should be totally falling apart, letting it go, etc-- I really feel that he should have done a complete 180 here.  I should have been screaming my freaking head off at Ces for that, until I got the reaction and the emotion that I wanted, but I let her convince me otherwise.

Which was especially dumb of me, because with the boxes, there was already a perfectly established mechanism for Fraser keeping it together on the outside and reacting inside, so none of her logic applied anyway.

(Ces likes talking about the brick I hit her with, but man, sometimes it takes a brick to get things through her skull.  Fans of this story may disagree, but if ever a situation called for brick-wielding, I think this did.)

PART SIX

"Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!--what part of ow aren't you getting, Fraser?!--Ow, I said!  Are you fuckin' deaf?  Are you fuckin' stupid?"

SPERANZA: Okay, so what I have to say here--and I expect Julad will offer a counter opinion--is that I felt I'd really blown my allotment of schmoop.  I'd done my Love Story scene, and Ray had cried and Fraser'd cried and the lovers had been reunited.  I was not, therefore, looking for more romantic climax--I'd had my romantic climax above.  What I was looking for, what I wanted to end on, was some sense of peace made between the two Rays--that was the shoe that I felt hadn't yet dropped.  So this last scene is about that, mostly.

I start with the above first line for a couple of reasons:  1) it shows you right away that RayK is alive and relatively well, because, yeah, those are yells of pain but they are energetic yells of pain, so I don't have to tell you that Ray's alive and doing better 2) I think--and I know there are those who disagree with me on this--that it's funny, because it's so counter to the pathos of the last scene.  I mean, a moment ago we had that "Sniff! Poor Ray!" moment and now we've got this guy.  It's a 180 degree turn and I think it's's kind of funny.  3) Illness really is a bitch, and pain fucking HURTS.  I didn't want trivialize the extent to which Ray really was hurt (he was set on FIRE and had skin grafts) and the extent to which a person in that situation is going to be yelling and screaming about it.  I haven't met too many saintly invalids in my time, and Ray's a really unlikely candidate for that; and 4)it's good Ray-characterization for this story, because we've already seen that this Ray vents his fear as hostility.  And now Ray's afraid again, but of his pain, not of his homosexulity.  This response of his is well in line with the character as we've seen him thus far.

A second later Fraser walked out of the bedroom and said:  "I'm going to kill him.  I'm confessing in advance."

Stella looked up at me over her legal pad.  "Make sure you mirandize him."

"Check."  I stood up and stretched.  "Want me to take a crack at him?"

"Sure.  With a wrench," Fraser said, pouring himself a cup of tea.  "Then you can go to prison."

"Deja vu all over again," Stella muttered darkly.

"Though really, prison's looking very attractive at the moment," Fraser said, sitting down at the table;  he looked exhausted.  "Small cell, a couple of books, peace and quiet..."

"You know, that's pretty much why I divorced him," Stella said to Fraser.

"Well, yes, I do see the merit of the idea," Fraser said and sighed.

"Where are you guys?"  I asked Fraser.  "Still stretching?"

Fraser nodded.  "Still stretching.  Third set of ten."

I snorted.  "Oh, well--he's not wimping out too early in the game, is he?"

"I wouldn't use the word wimping in front of him," Fraser advised, rubbing his temples.  "His left arm's out but his right arm works fine."

"I could take him," I boasted.

Fraser narrowed his eyes at me.  "Ray, right now you can have him, believe me. "

JULAD: ...and okay, here again, I was unhappy, I wanted warm fuzzy Ray and Fraser and instead I got cranky Ray and Fraser who aren't even in the same room.  And I could have lived with that if I'd gotten my happy ending above, and I could have lived with the above if I'd gotten my happy ending here, but we got neither.  And again, Ces convinced me, she was very reasonable and rational and this is why it's gotta be like this, but what time really tells is that I can't remember the reasons now, I just remember grumpily letting it go.

I do love this scene in retrospect; I think it's great.  The only problem with this scene is that there should have been a MUCH more cathartic scene just previous to it, so that we know, on every level, that this is the happy ending, they're just fighting, they'll fuck later, it's Ray and Fraser being their macho manly selves, and it's alllll good.

"Deja vu all over again," Stella repeated darkly.

SPERANZA: I didn't mean any of this to indicate genuine dislike--more like married person squabbling (hence the overt paralleling of Fraser and Stella.)  However, I do understand that the parallel could be troubling to the extent to which Ray and Stella's marriage didn't survive.  I didn't think of that at the time; in fact, the picture I was trying to paint here was almost of a family being formed, where the ultimate success of Vecchio's arrival is to unite all four of them into this tightly bonded (and loving, despite the snark!) family unit (or alternative community.)

I went into the bedroom, and--give him credit--Kowalski was straddling the work-out bench with his left fist curled tight, trying to do the stretch.  I wasn't going to take any chances, though.  "Kowalski, shut up," I said as a greeting, "and gimme your arm."  I sat down on the stool in front of the bench and carefully wound my fingers around his wrist.  He didn't complain.  "What set are you on?"

"Seven," Kowalski said, gritting his teeth as I braced my other hand on his chest and began to pull his arm outward... extending it... out... slowly...

"Heh," I said grinning.  "You fuckin' liar--"

"It's seven!"

"It's three, and you're a dirty, rotten, stinking liar, Stanley."

"You know," Kowalski said, fixing me with a stare, "it's a good thing I didn't know you when I was bein' you because I woulda hung myself from depression."

I rolled my eyes, unimpressed.  "Yeah, well, it's a good thing I didn't know you when you were bein' me or I woulda mailed you the rope."

Kowalski grinned.  "Heh  That's good, I like that.  Mailed you the rope."

SPERANZA: Trash talk--guys dig it. *g*  But I like that Vecchio and Kowalski are verbally sparring like this; I think you can really see them coming to like and trust each other.

"That's good, huh?" I said, grinning back at him.

"Very good.  Most excellent--ow," Kowalski added, face contorting as I got his arm near full extension, "that would be an ow, and that would be another ow right there.  Ow, you bastard!"

"All right," I murmured, "coming back now..." and Kowalski blew out a huge sigh of pain as we slowly began letting his arm fall back into a more comfortable position.

"Where's Fraser?" Kowalski asked;  his forehead was beaded with pain-sweat.  "He throw himself out the window yet?"

"Nah, he's gonna go up to the roof first," I replied, giving him a second to let him catch his breath.  "You know Fraser, he likes a good running jump.  Ready?"

"No," Kowalski said instantly.

"Tough," I said and started extending his arm again.

"Christ!" Kowalski shouted.  "I don't think I can take this.  Not another fucking day of this--"

"I'll make you a hemlock shake for breakfast," I said, keeping the motion nice and steady, nice and steady.  "One shake for breakfast, another for lunch..."

"...and a sensible dinner," Kowalski finished through gritted teeth and then he giggled suddenly, gasping.  "Except hold the lunch and the dinner."

"Almost," I said softly.  "Almost there...okay, now," and we began letting his arm slowly relax again.  "You're doing good," I told him, letting him hear it in my voice that I meant it.  "You're doing really good, there."

Kowalski was panting pretty hard by time his arm was back in its normal position.  "I don't feel so good," he said between gasps, and when he spoke like that, honestly, I knew why he yelled and screamed all the time--it was easier to take than the quiet, simple truth.

SPERANZA: I think this is true, too--yelling is easier to take than suffering.  So  in an odd way, by being an asshole, Kowalski is absolving everyone of the duty of grieving for him.  By being pissy himself, he's giving them permission to be pissed, too.   This is actually a great service--he's sparing them many painful feelings of pain and guilt, if you follow me.

"Oh, sorry," I replied, keeping my face neutral.  "I meant you were doing good for essentially being a huge pussy."

His face cracked in a smile;  Stanley needed me to insult him just as much as he needed to insult me.  "Guess that's why they picked me to play you."

"Good one!" I said.  "Ready?"

"Just stop asking already," Kowalski said and squeezed his eyes shut.  We went through it again, taking it all from the top.  "Stella still here?" Kowalski asked tightly, obviously needing something, anything, to distract from the pain.

"Yeah, she's here," I replied.  "She's trying to crush the Pileggi brothers' balls for you."

"Oh good," Kowalski gasped.  "She's always been good at that..."

"Hey," I said, without any anger at all.  "That's my future wife you're talking about."

"My condolences," Kowalski said;  his face was like a fist as we approached full extension.  "I got some old jackets you might--"  His breath came out in a whoosh as we passed the pain threshold and started heading back.

"Forget it," I said.  "I've seen your jackets and they all look like they've been chewed on or something."

Kowalski was real pale suddenly;  this last round had been bad.  "Tell me I get to jump on his head," he said, and I looked up at him.  "Pileggi," Kowalski clarified, "and his fucking brother too--"

I let him have a slightly longer break this time;  he looked like he really needed it.  He was now the same gray color as his exercise shorts, and the sweat patch was spreading from his pits to his chest.  "Thing is, Stanley, he actually did a pretty good job on you--"

"He sure did."  Kowalski grimaced and braced his palm on his pale, hairy knee.  "Gotta love that lighter fluid--"

That wasn't the brother I meant and he knew it.  "I mean the doctor," I said, patiently.  "He did a pretty good job for a goombah, which believe me his lawyers are capitalizing on.  He did a good job fixing you, and he didn't kill you which he could've.  His lawyers are claiming he was scared, that he just didn't know what do and so he did nothing--"

"Oh yeah," Kowalski spat.  "Nothing except get me addicted to morphine while he collected Charlie's dough week after week.  I mean, if I'm gonna be a junkie, Vecchio, I want the whole nine yards:  the camaraderie, the hip clothes, having sex for money, maybe Vegas--"

SPERANZA: Ray Kowalski as a hip, gay, Vegas junkie is an AU just begging to be written, isn't it?

"Sorry, that was my gig," I said wryly.  "Look, Stella is on it;  she is making the case and hitting the money angle hard, because that's where we'll sink him.  And the brother's already nailed," which was true, because all a jury needed to hear was that John Pileggi had held Detective Kowalski down while Charlie Fish soaked him in butane.  End of story, case closed.  "So nobody's arguing with you, okay?  I'm on your side, remember?"

"Yeah."  Kowalski looked away, and his voice had gone back to that soft, honest place that I hated so much.  "I know.  And I'm grateful, really--"

I grabbed at his good arm and held on.  "Shut up.  Don't you say that shit--not to me.  This was my mess, my fault--and you and Fraser and Stella are stuck in the middle of it, paying my tab--but especially you."

"S'not that simple," Kowalski muttered.  "Still.  I'm grateful, you know, even if I don't always say--"

"Hey, any time you shut up, Blondie, we're all grateful, believe me. Ready?"  I asked, and began to pull.

SPERANZA: In hindsight, I might have finessed the ending slightly differently.  Julad, I remember, wanted a Fraser box in the hospital, but I was pretty determined not to give her one (mainly because I was convinced that whatever was going on in Fraser's mind would be a cliche--strong emotions really are cliched, IMO.  A box of "Ohmygod, thank God, thank you, God..." blerg, who needed it?)  But I think I might have done something more F/Kish near the end, though even now, as I read it, I don't know what that would be.  I need Fraser to be fed up with Ray and send Vecchio in for that ending bit, and I love the ending bit--I think, in fact, that one of the "problems" with the story is that even in the five seconds they're in the story together, Vecchio and Fraser start to generate heat.  So maybe I needed to have one last passionate moment between Ray and Fraser--the first in real time!--before ending it, but at the time, the last thing I was worried about was the F/K; I thought that Fraser had, like Orpheus, braved the underworld to get Kowalski back, and Ray's passion for Fraser was so strong that it overwhelmed his own sense of himself, his own self-image and his own fear...but in hindsight, ok. *g*  One more sucking, biting kiss wouldn't've hurt.

THE END

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