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Title: Twenty-One Breaths (2/3)
Author: me
Fandom/Pairing: CSI - Nick/Greg
Rating: R for violent crime
Summary: A bad week - a bad case - turns decidedly worse.
A/N: I put a rush order on this fic because I think that the next new episode (Fannysmackin') will deal with similar issues (one can only hope that slashy shipping will be involved ♥), and I want to thank Fire SO MUCH for her quickquickQUICK beta-ing. She is awesome beyond words and deserves to be praised around the world.
Disclaimer: CSI is not mine. It belongs to Jerry Bruckheimer and his wonderful crew. I just borrow.
...
Part 1
9.
He remembered sitting, but not the finding of a seat. The taste of stale frenzy was on the air; nurses rushed, guided injured people past him, carried IV bags and sterile needles. Doctors passed back and forth, their faces grim with whatever they’d just come from in the rooms and curtained-off areas beyond the front desk. Nick remembered one sitting down next to him, a man with a soothing voice but no news he wanted to hear. He recalled the doctor’s gentle suggestion to wash himself up, and then looked down and found that his hands were still bloody, rust-red and flaking.
He remembered finding the restroom on unsteady feet. And he remembered sitting down again.
At some point, Catherine came down the hall, heels clacking a too-sharp staccato off the walls. She went right by Nick to the front desk and it wasn’t until he rose from his seat that she saw him. Catherine stepped away from the nurse’s station, her hands rising to her face.
“Nicky? Oh, Nick…”
He didn’t remember opening his arms, but suddenly she was in them, hugging him too tightly, and the world was very, very still. At long last, she pulled back, sniffing. Her blue eyes were dry and walled up.
“How is he?”
Nick shook his head, suddenly very thankful for his predilection to compensate for other people’s emotional failures. If Catherine broke, Nick knew he couldn’t break, couldn’t let it happen. His brain would not allow it. “He just went in. They haven’t… haven’t told me anything yet.”
She nodded. And that was the last concrete thing he remembered about Catherine, except that she whirled into a determined wind, sitting him on his chair again and striding off to find a doctor, a nurse, the ambulance attendant, anyone who might have the least little bit of information. He remembered her talking loudly, demanding a timeline. He thought she might have told it to him once she found out. He remembered tears glistening down one of her cheeks, and he remembered her hand clasping his, warm and solid next to him in another chair. He remembered her phone ringing, and her swearing as she fumbled it open.
All he could think was that they’d checked the truck. It had been empty.
In the end, Catherine was several minutes gone before Nick looked up and realized that she had said goodbye, I’ll be back soon, they need me at the lab, you call if, if, when they tell you anything, Nicky, do you hear me, you call, and that he had nodded. And she’d gone.
And Nick sat.
Waited.
10.
“Mr. Stokes—”
“Nick.”
“Nick… You’re friend has an intertrochanteric hip fracture. It’s lower down, and it’s one of the least dangerous hip fractures to have, but it’s still very serious, especially considering the amount of bruising he’s sustained. He’s just been sent in to surgery. Would you like to sit down?”
“No.”
“He has massive contusions along the left side of his body, but no internal hemorrhaging that we can see, which is a good sign. He avoided a broken femur, and his ribs seem to be intact, but it will take further exploration to make certain there aren’t any fractures there as well.”
“Alright.”
“Nick, he’s extremely lucky. His condition could be much worse. If he hadn’t been facing away, if the truck had hit him from the front, or even sideways where his knee couldn’t bend immediately—”
“Will… will he walk again?”
“This type of fracture has a very high rate of recovery. He’ll need pins in the bones, but he should be able to walk very soon after the surgery. In fact, we encourage that.”
“That’s…great.”
“Nick, there’s something else. It’s what I’m most concerned about. Your friend has suffered a severe concussion. We have yet to find out if there is more extensive damage. But I’m afraid we won’t know much more until the surgery is completed.”
“He’s bleeding.”
“Yes. He sustained a minor abrasion to the back of his head, most likely from contact with the wall. But it’s a long cut. And that’s the least of his problems, unfortunately.”
11.
The jangle of his cell phone pulled Nick out of his thoughts, and he blinked. Groped in his pocket and flipped his phone open absently. “Hello?”
There was a pause. “Nick?”
Grissom. Nick shook his head to clear it. “Ye— Stokes.”
And that sounded so professional. Nick’s mind whirled dizzily for an instant. The voice on the other end quieted.
“Nicky, it’s Grissom. Are you alright?”
“I’m—” He didn’t know how he was. “He’s in surgery,” he said instead.
“Nick, have the doctors told you anything yet?” Grissom was speaking slowly, not enough to condescend, but enough to draw Nick back, center him on his wildly tilting axis.
Grissom. It was Grissom, and he’d asked him a question. Nick made a supreme effort to gather his thoughts. “He’s… There’s an inter—” One more breath, come on, Stokes. “An intertrochanteric hip fracture. No hemorrhaging internally. His ribs are— they don’t think there was any breakage, and he has a lot of surface bruising. It’s a good fracture to have, if you had to pick.”
God, his thoughts were flying everywhere. It didn’t even sound coherent to him, but Grissom did not ask him to explain again. “Alright, Nick. Did they say anything else?”
They had. It seemed to lift in and out of the fog, drifting down where Nick couldn’t make sense of it, only to rise up again, unable to be ignored. Nick’s jaw felt hot with the stress of clenching it. There was only one thing he could really focus on, looming like some creature in the darkness. “There’s… He has a concussion, Gris. He hit his head, and they—It’s—”
“Okay. Okay, Nick? He’ll be alright. They’re going to do the best they can. Alright? Nicky.”
Nick nodded, and then remembered that Grissom couldn’t see it. “Yeah. Yeah, alright. Yeah.” He drew several deep breaths, listening to the waiting silence on the other end of the line. Grissom wasn’t rushing him, was just letting him collect himself. Unbidden tears stung Nick’s eyelids.
Damn it. He had to get himself together.
After a few more seconds, Nick blinked his eyes open and looked up at the white hospital ceiling. He swallowed. “Okay. Uh… Thank you, Grissom.”
“You’re welcome,” Grissom said. Then he sighed. “Nick, there’s another reason I called, and I know it’s not a good time for it, but I need you to pull yourself together for a little while longer.”
Nick nodded again. “What’s—What’s up?”
Grissom’s voice came clearly over the line, still speaking slowly, patiently. “I need you to come back to the lab for just a little while to give a statement to Vartann. I sent Warrick over to the hospital. He’s on his way, but I need you to come back. Just long enough to give them a statement about what happened. Can you do that?”
“I—” He blinked at the phone. “But what if he—”
He grimaced, suddenly unable to voice the implications aloud. Grissom heard them anyway.
“Nick, Warrick will be there, and he’ll call us if anything happens. We need your statement to get this guy, to place him in the truck, Nicky. We need to know what you saw.”
Yes. Yes, of course they did. It made sense to the less harried half of Nick’s brain. He looked up at the front desk, at the nurses and doctors bustling around with their clipboards and stethoscopes. Heard the clack of typing from the receptionist’s computer.
“Nick, it won’t take long, but you need to come back now.”
Repetition, the constant use of his name. Nick knew the tactic, the way to calm victims, to get them to focus. “Alright,” he whispered. And then more clearly, “Alright.”
“Good.” He could practically see Grissom nodding his approval. “Wait for Warrick, and drive carefully, Nick. We want you here in one piece.”
“Yeah,” he said. The line clicked on Grissom’s end, and Nick shut his phone with shaking hands. For a moment, he just stood in the white-washed hallway, staring at his silent little cell phone. Then sound swung back in on him. He took a deep breath and went to find an empty seat in which to wait for Warrick.
12.
The drive back was quicker than he’d thought it would be. Nick parked Warrick’s car in the lot and got out. The air was bitingly cold, coming in off the desert in slow gusts. He got five feet away from the car before remembering that he hadn’t locked the door, and went back.
Sara had checked the truck. And the garage had been empty, any fool could see that just by looking in. The truck was too high off the ground to hide anyone underneath, and he’d looked in the bed himself.
Sara had checked the cabin.
Nick’s steps slowed and then sped up again. Had they missed something? Maybe he’d been hiding in the back seat. But no, if he had climbed over the seat, the truck would have moved, at least a little bit. Nick’s nose had been inches from the side of the truck; he couldn’t have missed it. Could he?
Nick shoved the door open to find the lab swarming with people. He had no idea where they’d all come from; it was as if they’d magically appeared from wherever they’d been over the past week, just in time for this. Nick shook his head. No, because of this, you idiot.
He’d checked that truck. Sara had checked the truck. It had been dark inside, but it was empty, she wouldn’t have made a mistake about that.
There hadn’t been space under the steering column, not for a grown man. But suddenly Nick was uncertain. Anything seemed possible, even the idea that the man had been sitting right there staring back at him when he’d glanced at the window.
Maybe the guy had been dressed in black, maybe Sara had just missed him, maybe Nick hadn’t been looking hard enough and he’d—
And then the truck had started up. Roared out of the garage. Smacked right into—
Nick came around the corner so fast the world swerved. He skidded into the wall, pressing a palm there to right himself. His body wasn't behaving; strong and weak all at once. For one terrible second, he couldn't remember how to focus his eyes.
Hands gripped his shoulders. A familiar voice asked if he was alright. But he couldn't recognize it, didn't want to recognize it. He looked up, elsewhere, there were so many people that surely one of them would distract him, and a man came around the corner down the hall, flanked by officers, and Nick knew.
Knew that the man had driven the truck into Greg.
His eyes were hazel, roving the hallway. Fixing, darting again. The other voices in the lab became cotton in Nick's ears.
He recognized him, not with his eyes or because of the photos that had been scattered about a demolished and bloodied living room, but on a level much more primal. Deeper than dreams. His brain supplied the words: boyfriend, driver.
Murderer.
Nick froze for the third time that night, unable to look away as the man passed down the hall.
13.
“…no change? … Okay. Okay. And what did they say about his—Okay.”
Nick slowed outside Grissom’s office.
He wanted… Well. The statement had not taken long to give, and Nick couldn’t remember any of it. He knew he would later, maybe tomorrow. He wanted to leave. To go back. To get away from the lab. He listened to Grissom’s one-sided conversation, trying to decide whether to knock.
Grissom was silent for a long while. Then—“Have they contacted his parents?”
Nick swallowed. Grissom nodded. Nodded again. “Alright. I’ll send Nick back with your truck. I need you at the warehouse again. … Yes, the garage door. We’re going to match that paint to Hedgecock’s wall. And Warrick?”
Grissom’s face looked haggard. “We’re going to need Greg’s clothes,” he said quietly.
Nick grimaced. His stomach rolled alarmingly. He turned away and headed for the bathroom and the sink there to wash his face.
14.
Nick opened his eyes and found a glass wall three inches above him, and dark, moldy dirt above that. The scream was out of his mouth before he could think. He pounded the glass with his fists, twisting, kicking, smacking, crying, and the sound was muffled, there was a cold, metal something in his hand, there was no air, and he pounded, pounded, beat against the glass—
And woke with a start.
The light was too bright. Nick jerked and nearly fell out of his chair onto clean linoleum. Something beeped in his ear, beeped again. Again. Nick blinked, already halfway to the ground, gripping the armrests of his seat so hard his wrists ached. He looked around.
The nondescript white walls of the hospital room gazed solemnly back at him. The door was open, and the sound of chatter, footsteps from outside in the hall, came to his ears. Nick rubbed his face with his palm, still not quite in the room, still tasting dirt and iron and whatever had been on that gag. He fixated on the window, then the silent television mounted on the wall, and then the bed beside his chair.
Greg lay on his back beneath the thin hospital blanket. His chest rose and fell shallowly. He was asleep; the same dark smudges hung beneath his eyes and pooled in the hollows of his cheeks.
Nick exhaled hard, and sat up. The sigh stuttered from his lungs in bursts. He leaned over, elbows on his knees, and covered his face in both hands. What time was it? He couldn't even remember falling asleep. Greg's monitor beeped, low and monotonous. Nick frowned and looked up irritably.
Like a clock. Tick, tock. Ticking.
He stood up, and then stopped, unsure why he'd risen in the first place. The room was warm, slightly stuffy. But Nick had felt that before in perfectly airy rooms after dreaming. He knew he only needed a few seconds to clear the haze from his mind. It was thicker today, and he was afraid to shut his eyes and wait for it, afraid of what might reappear in the blackness. Deep breaths. Greg's monitor sounded steadily.
Had he moved? Had he woken and drifted off again? Nick stared at his friend, searching— but there was no sign of Greg having regained consciousness. He lay in the same position he had been in all day, arms flat and still next to his body, legs straight out beneath the blanket. The skin of his left arm was mottled, a grotesque tortoiseshell of color. His IV wound a sinister coil into his wrist and the bag hung, full and bloated, like a large insect with no legs.
Nick's pulse thudded in his temples. He tried to breath again, to force himself into submission, but it wasn't working. The smell of the room – he couldn't distinguish what was tell-tale and what was real – sickened his stomach. Can't leave him. You shouldn't just leave. What if he wakes up? But Greg hadn't moved, hadn't twitched in two days, and suddenly Nick couldn't even imagine movement from the body under those sheets, other than that slow, stilted breathing.
He had to leave. Couldn't stay in that room.
Nick made his way into the hallway, then to the stairs. His legs moved mechanically to the ground floor, and then outside, and before he knew it, he was walking briskly and the hospital had fallen behind, just another building among buildings. Nick took a deep breath, taking in the scents of the city, the warmth of summer – it was evening, he could smell it now, see the golden glow over the horizon. The air cleared away the last traces of his dream and Nick slowed to a more comfortable pace.
He didn't really have a destination in mind. The hospital again, eventually; he couldn't just leave for the night, not like this, but it was too much to stay there at the moment. To wait for a waking that might not come.
"Don't be stupid," he muttered to himself. "They said he'd wake up. Just a question of when." It was odd, feeling his fears at war with his knowledge. Each had a voice and he knew which was which, but neither one overrode the other for some reason.
The traffic was thick down the boulevard, the signs of store fronts and theaters winking on. The Las Vegas lights were changing, their ever-present shift from day to night, from natural to dazzling. Nick took several turns, walking aimlessly, not really seeing which venues he passed, which people he stepped aside to let by. The noise rose: laughter, the already drunken revels of tourists, the honk of impatient drivers. Nick took one last turn and the hospital came into view again, some blocks away. He headed back without a concrete decision, just knowing that that was where he was going tonight.
It was much busier when he returned. Ambulances tweaked their sirens, clearing the way as they left the bay. A pregnant woman was helped out of the car by her distraught husband. Nick watched a nurse wheel a chair out for the woman, waited for them to go inside, and followed them in. He took the elevator upstairs this time. The bright lighting greeted him beyond the doors, and he went down the hall, keeping toward the wall to avoid running into other people.
He reached Greg's room, but the murmur of a voice inside came through the open door, surprising him. Nick stopped just outside the doorway.
Grissom was in the room. And Greg's eyes were open.
Their supervisor sat, one hand extended to rest on the blanket. Greg's face was drawn tight, lined with a dull pain and pale enough to cast his eyes into shadow. But he looked at Grissom steadily as the man spoke. Nick heard words, broken and indistinct.
"Only a retirement event... you let it... Greg, your decision."
Greg murmured something too soft to make out and Grissom's face opened in a way Nick could only describe as paternal. For a moment, there was nothing to override the sadness lining his mouth and eyes. Grissom reached out and touched Greg's arm.
"It's not my place to tell you what to do." This time, as soft as Grissom's voice was, it carried. "I won't even try to make that decision for you. But Greg, we – all of us, not excluding me – we learn. We go on, we pick ourselves up."
Nick couldn't tell if Greg spoke, but Grissom answered. "You did fine. You did just fine out there."
Nick turned from the door and leaned against the wall. Rubbed his face.
The reality – the sanitary smell, the narrow doorway into that dimly lit room, the incessant beep of Greg's monitor – washed over him, and it wasn't the first time it had done so. But it hurt worse this time, carved deeper and cut more away. There was an age on Grissom's face, one that just had not been there before. Sheer and full of weak spots that looked as though they would cave at any second.
Nick knew that Grissom was close enough to see what he could not: the purpling bruises covering Greg's left arm. The too-pale cast of his skin.
God— They'd come too close. He'd come too close, to a loss he couldn't identify, because to identify it was to give it a name, to acknowledge the possibility of it actually happening. And he couldn't acknowledge that. The fact that it hadn't happened was no comfort; the shadow remained, an incontestable pendulum that might swing down at any moment.
The truth was, it had already swung. The utter uselessness of it was staggering.
At least in the box, there'd been a method. A purpose, however twisted. That box was meant for one of them, meant to be the coffin of someone. There was no method to a truck barreling through the night. There had been no target on Greg's back and it had hit him anyway, swiping him off his feet into the void. Leaving Nick behind.
Why could he accept that shadow for himself, accept the possibility of his own death... but not Greg's?
Perhaps it had just been a futility created by his own mind, but in that box Nick had felt some amount of control. Yes, it was the minimal control of a squeezed trigger, but it was still his choice. He had even made that choice, and still he'd come out alive somehow. The luck of an instant. But he'd had some control. It was the only way he'd been able to bend the nightmares to his will so quickly, reminding himself that in the end, he had been given a choice.
Greg had not. And even deeper, even darker... none of them had been given a choice this time. Nick had not been given a choice in Greg's fate. He'd simply been forced to watch as it swooped down on the other man.
Nick heard movement in the room and pulled away from the wall. Any moment, Grissom might come through the door and find him there. For all he knew, his supervisor already knew he was there. Certainly Grissom knew he was supposed to be; aside from the lab, Nick had been nowhere else over the past two days.
But that had been when Greg was still asleep, and Nick was sitting alone with only his own thoughts to batter him.
The memory of their argument made the sickness he’d felt before pale in comparison. It meant nothing in the overall scheme of life, nothing, just a stupid, useless fight that could have been avoided. Until now. Greg’s accident had given it meaning, given it so many possible inflections.
But for the space of a few inches between truck and body, that fight had nearly been made into the defining moment of his relationship with Greg. The last thing they did before Greg… died.
Nick’s throat felt swollen. He stumbled away from the room, hurrying down the hall to the stairs. He’d had a choice then, too, of how to interact with Greg, and he’d chosen anger. The things he’d said sounded so stupid now, so inconsequential. It was Greg, and he’d been doing his best, but Nick hadn’t been able to see that, and he’d taken out his own frustrations with the case on him.
And then another human being had intervened before he’d even thought of fixing it, and nearly taken Greg away.
It made no sense that this should suddenly be such an issue; he dealt with the aftermath of people making God-like choices every day. Dead people who perhaps should not have died yet, but had not been given the option because someone else decided to be selfish.
But it was different this time. Things were different with his friend in that hospital bed.
It was absolutely helpless, what he felt. As if he contained the energy and strength of three people, but there was nowhere for it to go. Nothing for him to do. And the rage… Nick shut his eyes tight, trying and failing to redirect. He knew that if he saw that man at that moment, the one behind the wheel of the truck, he would fly at him with no thought to the consequences.
He wondered if they’d felt like this when he’d been under the dirt. They must all have felt this pressure, this need to act with no outlet. To correct what had occurred, make it make sense again. But he knew that was wrong, it was wrong, because there was something intangibly different in how it felt to have Greg be the one in danger. He sought, tried to put his finger on it over and over, but it was indefinable.
It was also frightening in its immensity.
Nick pushed his way through meandering groups of people looking for the right floor, coming in and out of the gift shop, trying to find the payphones. Not caring if he appeared rude or rushed. He was rushed. The hospital’s air was too thick, too warm. He couldn’t breathe. Sweat broke out on his brow as he hurried through the lobby. Outside, the promise of cooling desert breezes beckoned, the vastness of a world where he and his feelings and troubles were insignificant in comparison to everything else.
He exited through the automatic doors, listening to the hiss and slide as they closed behind him. The breeze hit him full in the face, and he was struck by how dark the night was, despite the lights of the hospital. Nick hunched his shoulders and headed in the direction of his car.
He knew he was moving further and further away from the room where Greg was now awake, tired and talking, trying to explain his situation to himself as best he could. Trying to make sense of senselessness.
Perhaps alone by now, in a strange room with strange blankets, and no one sitting in that chair.
Your chair, Nick, his mind whispered.
For one instant, he turned, wavering on the edge, knowing he should go back in, knowing he couldn’t leave, if he left now he wouldn’t come back, and that would be unforgivable. The hospital towered, a hulking creature that had swallowed someone close to him – could have been forever – and still held him inside its maw.
For one instant, Nick almost turned.
In the end, he opened his car door, closed himself inside, and drove away.
15.
"Is my blood done yet?"
Hodges lifted his eyebrows and rose to his feet. "I was just about to get it out of the printer. You'd be surprised how smoothly things are going today. But then again, my lab is usually ship-shape."
Nick nodded and shifted on his feet as the DNA tech retrieved the printout. He brandished it with a flourish. "One blood analysis, with time to spare."
Nick took it and stared for a moment without seeing it. He blinked and the numbers focused. Hodges smirked at him, waiting. "It's him. All over the side of that photo. Paper-cuts are the worst."
Nick nodded, but there was no relief, not yet. His chest felt more hollow than usual. He couldn't feel relieved until he knew if this would get them anywhere. "Looks good."
"Shame about Sanders." Hodges leaned on his countertop. "Any idea if... when he'll be back?"
Nick frowned at the other man. "He's in recovery."
Hodges nodded, pursing his lips in that regretful, sanctimonious way of his. "Good, good. I just wondered. Although, he did sign up for field work. And if you can't take the heat, stay—"
Nick stepped forward abruptly, cutting the man off. "Hodges, if you say one word to me about replacing Greg, one word... I swear you will be out of this lab by the end of the hour."
Hodges' eyes widened. Nick saw him swallow. But he didn't care to hear whatever answer the man might give. He turned on his heel and left the lab.
16.
When Sara didn’t come back from her break, Nick went looking. The trace lab was too empty to be alone in; his thoughts filled the void far too eagerly.
He found her in the break room, but she wasn’t alone. Nick stopped outside, looking in, knowing they couldn’t see him. Sara hunched in her chair at the table, staring at the surface of it as if she were fixed in place. Grissom sat beside her. His hand gripped hers.
“Thank you for going,” he said in a low voice.
Sara shook her head fiercely. “I thought I wanted to. I mean, I did want to. I thought—But he just looked so… I don’t know.”
“I’m sure he was glad to see you, Sara.”
“Well, but he wouldn’t even be there if not—” She stopped and covered her face with her free hand. Nick could see the quiver in her fingers. “When is he out of there? I don’t like hospitals.”
“I’m taking him home in a couple days,” Grissom said evenly.
She drew her hand out of Grissom’s grasp and crossed her arms over her chest protectively. The look on her face was twisted. “He was in a good mood. I mean, he—Considering. You wouldn’t even think he’d been—” She forced a laugh, but her chin tightened visibly. “Well. Except for the bandages.”
Grissom laid a hand on her back. “Sara. He’s going to be fine.”
“I checked the truck,” she whispered to the table. Her shoulders began to shake. Nick could no longer see her face. “I could have sworn it was empty.”
Grissom didn’t answer.
“I should have—should have looked harder. But I was so sure—” Her voice broke completely, giving way to quiet, wracking sobs. Grissom rubbed her back.
Nick turned away.
17.
Sara’s voice had gone flat, beyond businesslike into something much more ominous. “Where did you hide the truck grill, Mr. Simco?”
The man slouched in the chair, the fingers of one hand tapping on the tabletop. There was a tiny smile behind his eyes. Nick studied his face with rising disgust.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Ms. Sidle,” Simco said.
“Come on, man,” Nick broke in. “We’ve got the make, the manufacturer, even the type of screw you used to attach it. What’s wrong? Super Duty not big enough for you?”
“A guy’s gotta have his hobbies,” Simco answered with a lazy smile.
“Do those hobbies include killing your girlfriend?” Sara leaned forward as she spoke. The movement was enough to startle Simco into glancing her way.
“Hey,” he said after a second. “Bitch got what was coming to her. I won’t try to hide that. But no one’s saying it was me.”
“I’m saying it,” Nick countered. Simco’s hazel eyes narrowed. Nick saw the man’s jaw tighten.
“You get mad at her, Simco?” Sara’s voice was sweetly conversational. She cocked her head. “Did it make you angry that she’d moved on with her life and left you behind?”
“Hey, there was nothing to leave behind,” he spat back, showing the first real shard of emotion in the last twenty minutes. He sat up in his chair and glared at Sara across the table. “I’m the one who moved out. Good riddance.”
“Yeah, you’re the one who moved, because she kicked your ass to the curb.” Nick entwined his fingers in front of himself and smiled thinly at the suspect. Simco’s head slowly swiveled to face him. The man’s expression was unreadable. Nick let his smile become a smirk. “But that didn’t take, did it? That why you rammed your truck into her house?”
This time Simco snorted. The easiness slipped back into his face again. “You’ve got no proof of that.”
“No, we’ve got your truck,” Sara said. “We’ve got paint on the inside of her wall that matches the paint you scraped off tearing out of that garage three nights ago. We’ve also got your tire treads, and dirt from her lawn in your wheel well. We’ve got pieces of a battering ram of some sort embedded in her wall, the same type of metal as the shavings we took off your truck’s bumper and front grill. And that doesn’t even cover what we pulled off of her totaled car.”
Simco’s amusement slid away just as quickly as it had come. He glared at Sara, and was met with nothing but a raised eyebrow. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then shrugged. “Okay. Maybe I ran into her house. She deserved it, let me tell you. Wasn’t even her house. We bought it together. And I may have dinged up her car. But that doesn’t make me the killer.”
Nick squinted at him. “So it was your house, too.”
“Yeah.” Simco frowned at him. Nick could practically feel the edge of Sara’s smile.
“Pretty unique way of dealing with it,” she said.
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Simco spat.
Sara smirked and leaned forward. “Here’s how I see it. You were mad. Not just because she kicked you out, but because she kicked you out of the home you shared. She just pushed you right out of it, and then went on like nothing was wrong. That pissed you off, didn’t it?”
The man sneered. “What do you think?”
“I think you crashed into her house because it should have been your house. She didn’t love you anymore. You didn’t just want to destroy her. You wanted to destroy her life without you in it.”
The room went very quiet. Nick could hear the uneven breathing of the man across the table. He watched him. It was so easy to hate this man. They were getting to the meat of it, finally, and Nick could feel it building within him. As if the rest had been preliminary, a preparation for the deadly enormity now settling over them.
“What was it, man?” Nick murmured. “A new car she didn’t have to share with you? Did she repaint the house? What did she do to send you over the edge?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Simco gritted. He flashed pearly whites at Nick, but there was no humor there. “I didn’t kill the bitch. Someone else did that.”
“Before or after you knocked her wall in?” Sara stared at Simco like a snake seeking its prey. “Was she looking at you after you killed her? Is that why you cut out her eyes, or was it because you couldn’t handle seeing them staring out of a dead body?”
Simco’s hands clutched the table’s rim. “You got all kinds of theories, don’t you?”
“Oh, there’s more,” Nick stated. “We know you went through the photos. You cut yourself on them, or on the glass from the frames. All those pictures of the two of you. Didn’t know she still had them out, did you? You didn’t notice until it was too late.”
“I don’t care about any damn photos,” he scoffed, but Nick went on.
“You took one or two, didn’t you? Broke the frames and took them away. She loved you. She still had your pictures all over the house. It was so obvious, but you didn’t think to look until it was too late. Did you?”
“I know how she felt about me,” Simco hissed. “And it wasn’t love. Don’t twist what wasn’t there. Fucking romantic.”
“Did you think that this was romantic?” Sara countered. “Tragic death, misunderstood feelings… It’s almost like Shakespeare. You end up alive, but you’re the one who suffers the most.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Simco said softly. “You’d like me to be sorry for what happened.” He shook his head. “I’m not sorry. She got what was coming to her.”
“And you saw to that,” Nick said.
Simco’s sneer widened. “You’ll never know.”
Revulsion coiled in Nick’s belly. “Oh, we know you did it. You had a score to settle with her, and you acted on it. It won’t be hard to convince a jury.”
The man’s smile was positively frightening. “It wouldn’t matter if I did it or not. She was a loser. Didn’t have any fucking family. Whoever killed her did her a favor by putting her out of her misery.”
“Did you a favor, you mean,” Nick ground out between his teeth.
Simco leaned back. “I’m not complaining. Stokes. That your name? Well, Stokes, you tell your jury what you’ve got on me. I couldn’t care less. I’m the suffering ex. I found the body first and was too upset to stick around. They won’t care about much else by the time I’m done with them.”
Nick’s jaw began to hurt. “That why you ran? Why you hid?” At Simco’s silence, Nick leaned across the table. “Is that why you drove your truck right into a crowd of cops the other night?”
The color of Simco’s eyes darkened perceptibly. Without warning, he stood up, scraping his chair back. The orange of his jumpsuit was too vivid. “Just remember, you followed me there. I was doing just fine on my own.”
Nick rose to his feet, frayed nerves rocketing closer to the edge. “Hey, sit down.”
Simco laughed. “Why should I? Feels good to walk.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw Sara get up as well and slide to the right, still keeping the table between herself and the suspect. Nick inched to the left.
Simco stared at them from across the room. He was nearly backed up against the window. “You know what your problem is? You cops? You can’t leave well enough alone. You get involved in everyone else’s business and then you don’t like what you find.”
“Sit down,” Nick snapped.
“You should have just let me go. Saved yourself the trouble. I was leaving anyway.”
A cold, dark alley flashed across Nick’s memory. The sudden roar of the truck’s engine seared into his mind, the horrendous scrape as it careened out of the garage. The sound as it hit Greg, knocked him into the wall.
“You were leaving,” Nick stated, in a voice he didn’t quite recognize.
“I always told her it would be on my terms. Not hers. And then you showed up.” Simco raised his hands resignedly. The amusement under his voice was sickening.
Nick could feel his own words tangling in his throat. “You hit one of our guys.”
Simco’s mouth twisted into an unpleasant sneer. “Yeah, you tell that guy to be more careful next time.”
Nick was on him before deciding to do it, jerking his collar and shoving him so hard he smacked against the window. Simco let out a surprised grunt, and in that instant, Sara was behind Nick, grabbing for his shoulders with both hands.
“Nick! Let him go, let go!”
But Nick knew he was stronger. Knew he was angrier. He shook the man, pinning him to the window with one hand.
“I should beat your face in,” he seethed.
Simco grinned at him, white-toothed and remorseless. “Why? Just a little misunderstanding between me and my girl.”
“No, this time you took from us!” Nick yanked him forward off the glass. “You tried to take something from me, you bastard, you stole from us!”
The man’s eyes flickered, skipped over his face. Something larger skittered in his consciousness.
Sara’s hands went slack on Nick’s shoulders, and he could feel her pause, feel her breathe. Feel her stare, right past him at the man in his grip. Feel her weigh it, put what had happened into context. He knew in that instant that if he beat this man to within an inch of his life, she wouldn’t stop him.
Simco stared at him, looking awed – afraid – for the first time.
Nick shoved the man away, feeling his fingers catch on the collar of his jumper, and pushed Sara’s hand off his shoulder. Without looking at her – his eyes were only for the sack of shit cowering against the wall – he left the room, giving the door a good slam.
The hallway went quiet, but not for lack of people. One of the younger techs held a sample bag in her hand, and blinked at him as though she’d not realized there were other people in her lab. But it was the stares of the others, the ones he knew, that caught his attention. Their eyes fixed upon Nick there in the hall, blank, yet startled. Like deer. Catherine stood beyond, her hair in a loose ponytail, mouth slack and eyes narrowed.
The door to the viewing room smacked the wall, making the techs jump. Ecklie stormed out, his already thin mouth white-lipped.
"Stokes." His voice trembled with an anger that threatened to swarm right over his keenly crafted assuredness. "You're off the case."
"Fine," Nick snapped. He turned and went down the hallway toward the locker room. "Just fine."
18.
Nick went to work. He immersed himself in the lab. Ran blood and hair samples, and poked through Catherine's latest findings. Watched with a distended sense of horror as it became clear that Simco's lawyer was going to plead insanity.
He knew he was watching another one get away from them. If he'd felt that his dismissal had left stones unturned somewhere, had given that man a loophole to slither through, he might have raged as Sara still did in the break room, slopping her coffee onto the floor in large drops.
But the truth was, there wasn't anything left to find. The man had confessed, and then had secured himself another way out. They'd uncovered everything they could and it still wasn't enough.
So Nick worked. Night after night, avoiding the interrogation rooms and Grissom’s office. Sometimes he saw Sara, stalking down the halls as if she wanted to put her foot right through the floor and kick whatever was beneath, and Warrick, grim-faced and getting grimmer as each new piece of evidence led to a useless end. Sometimes Catherine came into the room and settled her hand on his shoulder as he worked. She never said anything, and he wondered what she thought was going on in his head, if maybe Simco had touched an old, still-smarting nerve somehow. He wanted to laugh because it wasn’t an old nerve.
It was so new, so foreign to him, that Nick could barely think about it for longer than a few seconds before backing away and shutting himself down.
He didn’t return to the hospital. The thought of going in and seeing Greg’s parents there in his room made his head swim. He knew they were in Vegas; he’d seen them in Grissom’s office, the woman stiff-faced, the man full of anxious questions. Nodding, all the time, as if Grissom were giving them the secret to existence. Perhaps he was. He was giving them the assurance of their child’s life, after all.
Nick couldn’t return to the hospital, and then another day passed and he knew Greg was no longer there.
Wendy walked into the room one day, tired-eyed and pleasantly sunburned, carrying Catherine’s newest AFIS printouts. Catherine’s domestic violence case had ballooned into something bigger, involving two ex-husbands and a missing son. The tech handed the sheaf of papers to Nick with a drawn look on her face.
“I heard about Greg. How’s he doing?”
Nick just looked at her. Wendy shifted uncomfortably. “Grissom said he’s out of the hospital. Have you—How is he?”
“I don’t know,” he answered shortly. He gathered up her printouts and stood. “I’ll get these to Catherine.”
She nodded, watching him go. Nick left the room as fast as he could.
I don’t know.
He wasn’t sure what was more disturbing: the fact that he didn’t know, or that that fact made him so completely furious with himself.
The memory of Simco’s shoulder under his hand, the look in his eyes in the interrogation room, came to Nick when he slept, and not as a nightmare. Nick woke just as often from a stupor in the lab as he did in his bed, remembering the force of his shove and the surprised grunt that tore from Simco’s throat.
It wasn’t the recurring image of Simco’s fear that made him regret; it was the deed itself.
He knew he had to stop reacting this way. First with Cassie McBride, now this. Nick massaged his eyes. He was lucky he hadn’t been fired outright. Ecklie sat around waiting for this type of thing, as if there weren’t more important problems to solve. Nick passed by Grissom’s office again and again, wondering each time whether his supervisor had spoken to the assistant director on his behalf. Secured his job again, somehow.
But when he wasn’t thinking of Simco, there was nowhere else his thoughts could go, and he thought instead of alleys. Empty truck cabins. Shouting matches in a deserted lab.
One moment that had turned the world sideways.
He knew the night Greg returned to the lab by the change in the air. And Warrick’s face, sliding from pained to cheery in one smooth shift. Warrick raised his hand and walked forward toward whoever else was in the locker room, laughing. “Sanders! Welcome back. Nice cane you got there.”
And Nick, who had been ready to go in and retrieve his bag and shoes so he could head home, faltered in the hallway. He heard Greg’s voice, sounding wearier than it ever had, and shifted to the right until he could see. Not sure if it was a good idea, but suddenly needing to see him.
“It keeps me standing,” Greg answered.
Warrick’s grin widened. “You look a hell of a lot better than last time I saw you. Aren’t you supposed to be bedridden or something?”
Greg’s smile was so familiar. “Don’t I wish. They had me up and walking as soon as my head was back on.” He fingered the metal cane in his left hand. Nick could still see the faded line of bruises there, now more yellowish than purple. “Good for my leg. Or something ridiculous like that.”
Warrick reached out. “Here.”
Greg leaned against the wall of lockers and passed him his cane. Warrick looked it over, nodding. “Nice. You and Doc Robbins’ll have something else to talk about now.”
Greg snorted and took the cane back. “My mom was all set to move in. She even bought me chocolates. Alas. Duty calls.” He gestured at the rest of the room and Warrick laughed again, sounding lighter than he had in a week.
“You could have had chocolates from your mom? Man, I wouldn’t pass that up if I had the option.” Warrick slapped his shoulder lightly. Genially. “It’s good to have you back, Sanders.”
They were about to come out. Suddenly Nick didn’t want to see Greg’s face and remember it still and silent, and battered. Empty eyes. Red-tinted hair against a white gurney.
He retreated to the darkened fingerprinting lab and waited a good twenty minutes before heading home.
19.
The lab was quiet again three days later, and the morning sunlight streamed through the windows like watery milk. Nick rubbed his burning eyes, wishing he were asleep, and yet not wanting to go home.
His shoulders hurt, his legs felt as if they might collapse under him. And the only thing he could think was that he would be right back in this spot in twelve hours, staring down yet another shift.
He hadn’t been able to sleep this week. If he’d had any dreams, he couldn’t remember them, but still, restfulness eluded him. Just a blank gray slate stretching from the moment he closed his eyes to the moment he woke. Nick slung his work shirt into his locker and sat down on the bench, kneading his temples. His head felt like it wasn’t his own. Pressure behind his eyes and his cheekbones—He took a deep breath.
He was glad Warrick was out in the field working overtime, and that Sara had been stuck in the lab with Wendy for the last few hours. He didn’t feel like trying to explain his weariness to anyone. Hell, he couldn’t even explain it to himself.
No, you won’t explain it. Nick grimaced and pressed harder, trying to drive the voice away. He had tried, he honestly had. But every time he made the attempt, he realized that it went so much deeper than the surface he could see. The accident in the alleyway hovered over it all, insinuating itself into his thoughts and weaving in where it couldn’t be ignored. Every time he thought about it, Nick felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
It just hit so hard, on too many levels to contemplate. And he couldn’t bring himself to explain why, because when he did have nightmares, that was the stuff of them.
Nick sighed and focused on the speckled floor beneath his shoes. He really had to get out of here. The lab was muddling his brain, and he wasn’t taking the proper time outside of work this week to wash it away. Now it was building. If he could just get a moment to cleanse it all out of himself, like some sort of breaking fever, then he would probably be able to make sense of it. To face it all.
The scrape of a footstep in the doorway brought Nick’s head up. A second later, he wished he’d kept it down. Greg stood there, framed by the relative darkness from the hall beyond, leaning on his cane. He gazed at Nick, expression indecipherable. His fingers twitched around the padded handle of the cane.
“There you are.” But there was no amusement in it, no sense of satisfaction. Greg’s words were flat, edged with disappointment. Nick could see him chewing his lower lip, as if trying to keep his mouth from giving him away.
“Greg,” he said weakly. The younger man’s face was still too pale. As if Nick were looking at a sick person. His eyes still held their smudges, and his shoulders looked frail underneath the material of his button-down shirt. Nick winced. They weren’t frail, they were just as they always had been, but somehow they looked fragile. Wasted.
“Haven’t seen you in a while.” The words were clipped. Nick frowned, hearing the tiniest tip of sarcasm.
“Been pretty busy here,” he answered lamely. Damn it, but it was still making him feel like shying away, just having Greg in the same room. What was the matter with him? He should be happy to have Greg up and walking, returning to work none the worse for wear. But all he could think was how close he’d come to the other side of that coin. Greg’s physical presence held the shadow of that side, the very existence of the possibility, as if the man were carrying it around with him. Like that cane.
Greg nodded, a swift jerk of his head. He looked down, and when his head rose again, his expression was both sad and angry. “Yeah. I know it has. I’ve been around.”
Nick looked at him sharply, stung, and having no right to be so. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say in answer. Instead he concentrated on his shoes, tying up the laces of his sneakers, wondering what twist of fate had made his timing so bad tonight.
He’d managed to keep to himself for the last few days. The law of averages had to catch up with him sometime.
He heard Greg exhale, a short burst through his nose. “Well. I’m feeling just fine, thanks.”
Nick looked up before he could stop himself. “Greg… That’s not how it is. I just…” Words failed him again. He shrugged, disgusted with himself. Damn. Why hadn’t he asked? It had been the one coherent question pressing in on his mind the entire time, and yet he hadn’t done a thing to obtain the answer to it.
“Thank you, Nick, for explaining it to me,” Greg said, and this time there was no way to mistake the ire in his tone. Nick frowned in spite of himself.
“Something you want to say to me, Sanders?”
Greg’s mouth opened and shut. He looked at Nick incredulously. Came through the door, toward the bench. His cane thumped dully on the floor. Nick repressed a shiver.
“It’s like you changed shifts,” Greg said abruptly.
Nick blinked. Greg glared down at him, brow furrowed, breathing harder than normal.
“What?”
Greg rolled his eyes, then shut them as if gathering patience. “I have been back for nearly a week. Not all the time, I grant that, Nick, but enough to where I should have at least warranted a hello from you. I don’t know, maybe I’m being too self-involved again, is that it?”
Nick stood up, and Greg’s eyes followed him without flinching. “What are you talking about?”
The younger man shook his head. It was almost disdainful. That emotion on Greg’s face felt a little too raw in all the wrong places. “Just get it off your chest, Stokes, whatever it is,” he snapped. “Quickly, like pulling a band-aid off. It hurts less.”
Greg was right there, not three feet in front of him, with awareness in his irises again, energy vibrating through his limbs, and anger there, as plain as day. Alive.
He wanted… to touch him. To reach out and—
“No,” Nick muttered. He glanced down and saw Greg’s cane. His gut curled at the reminder.
When he looked up, he found Greg’s eyes boring into him. His mouth dried and he gestured at the cane, suddenly furious with its presence. “No, I’m not going to start with you, Greg.”
Greg’s face twisted, cheeks blossoming red. His fingers clenched around the cane’s handle. “What, Nick? This?”
He pulled the cane up and tossed it across the small space between them. Nick’s hand opened instinctively and caught it.
“Well, I don’t need it,” Greg spat. His mouth tightened visibly and Nick saw his eyes flash. “Maybe you’ll be able to face me better without it.”
Before he knew it, irritation had clicked home. Nick’s jaw clenched on its own. He gripped the cane in one hand. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You tell me!” Greg swayed, bracing himself against the bank of lockers to his right. “I never thought you were one to hold onto things, Nick, but I’m thinking I was wrong.”
“You don’t expect me to hold onto this?” Nick smacked the cane down on the bench and straightened, breathing hard. It was just too much. The week, the accident, the lack of sleep, and now Greg, right when Nick was at his weakest. “You nearly got killed!”
“I know that,” Greg returned heatedly. “I was there, if you’ll remember.”
Nick shook his head impotently. He turned and jerked his bag out of his locker, slamming it shut. “I do remember.”
Greg’s face shuttered oddly. He looked to the side as if searching for something, and then snapped his attention back to Nick. “Why didn’t you come to the hospital?”
“I did,” Nick hissed. He opened his mouth to go on, but Greg cut him off.
“Oh, I know you went, you came with me! And then you left? You just—”
“I was there!” Nick said hotly. He scrubbed a hand over his head. “I went to the hospital, I saw you there. But I couldn’t—” Couldn’t sit and watch you breathe couldn’t picture a paler face on a slab couldn’t be reminded over and over again that you’d been hurt.
Couldn’t face that I couldn’t do anything about it.
“I couldn’t stay,” he whispered. Turned away.
“You couldn’t stay.”
Nick glared down at his hands as they fumbled for the strap of his bag. Greg’s hand shot out and latched onto his arm, jerking his attention back.
“You were the last thing I remember, Nick, in the ambulance, leaning over me like you had a vested interest in what happened.” Greg’s face had contorted, suppressing something else with the anger. “But then you’re nowhere to be found. I guess your concern only lasts as long as it takes to make sure I’m still breathing.”
Nick stepped forward. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he grated through clenched jaw. His heart was hammering, as much at the mention of Greg not breathing as at the tension between them.
Now the sadness was creeping forward. “Is this because of what happened before? Are you still mad at me for that, Nick, because if you are, I just want to let you know how stupid—” Greg bit down on whatever he’d been about to say.
Nick shook his head. “That is not what this is about!”
“Then what? What? Look, if you have a problem with me, I’d rather just know about it so I can stop thinking it’s something I can fix!”
“It’s not you,” Nick snapped. And then was floored by how right and wrong that was. He stifled a hiss as the events in the alley rushed up on him again. Not knowing what was happening until the truck was nearly out of the garage, Warrick’s shout, the crack of Greg’s head against the brick, the uncontainable fear that had guided his hands to Greg’s face.
The look in Greg’s eyes, as if he were watching the edge slide forward to suck him under.
And he’d been completely helpless to stop it.
Nick’s hand found Greg’s shoulders, gripped, and pushed hard. The younger man let out a hiss as his back came into contact with the bank of lockers. He stared at Nick, wide-eyed. Nick held him there, suddenly unable to keep his hands from squeezing, feeling the warmth beating through Greg’s shirt, the proof that he was alive, that he’d survived.
“Why didn’t you turn around?” he said helplessly, shaking Greg, gripping him by the shoulders. “God, why didn’t you—”
Greg’s eyes opened wider, and then narrowed frighteningly, and Nick saw the last of that hope die right in front of him, overwhelmed by the fury. “You think I messed up out there? That I caused—”
Nick had to shut him up. Stop the painful words that kept pouring forth, and he didn’t even realize he had done it with his own mouth until he heard Greg’s grunt of surprise. His mouth tasted salty and sweet all that same time. Greg’s lips parted and Nick needed—He swiped his tongue inside, touched lips, teeth, another tongue. Greg’s hands clutched his arms, fingers spasming against his skin, digging deep. Nick sought for something he couldn’t even visualize – Greg made some sound in his throat – and suddenly his hands were pressing Greg against the lockers and his head was tilted and he could taste the sound, feel it in his head and chest and hips and fingers. Greg gasped; his hand trembled, then Nick felt him grip the back of his neck – their teeth clacked together, Greg’s body gave a helpless shiver under his palms—
And Nick stumbled backward.
Couldn’t think.
Greg gaped at him, breathing hard, inches away. His exhalation hit Nick’s lips. He blinked rapidly. Nick heard him swallow, a strangled sound. “Nick…”
He let go of him and backed up on shaking legs. His mind was a haze, fogged and indistinct, but he could see Greg collapsed there against the lockers, staring at him as if there were nothing else in the entire world.
“I—”
Greg’s face was far too open, far too haunted. Nick fumbled, grabbed his bag off the floor where it had fallen, and lurched for the door. Greg stirred behind him.
“Nick.” The word was wounded, cracked.
He fled the locker room, and didn’t stop to process until he was pulling into his own driveway twenty minutes later.
...
Part 3
Author: me
Fandom/Pairing: CSI - Nick/Greg
Rating: R for violent crime
Summary: A bad week - a bad case - turns decidedly worse.
A/N: I put a rush order on this fic because I think that the next new episode (Fannysmackin') will deal with similar issues (one can only hope that slashy shipping will be involved ♥), and I want to thank Fire SO MUCH for her quickquickQUICK beta-ing. She is awesome beyond words and deserves to be praised around the world.
Disclaimer: CSI is not mine. It belongs to Jerry Bruckheimer and his wonderful crew. I just borrow.
...
Part 1
9.
He remembered sitting, but not the finding of a seat. The taste of stale frenzy was on the air; nurses rushed, guided injured people past him, carried IV bags and sterile needles. Doctors passed back and forth, their faces grim with whatever they’d just come from in the rooms and curtained-off areas beyond the front desk. Nick remembered one sitting down next to him, a man with a soothing voice but no news he wanted to hear. He recalled the doctor’s gentle suggestion to wash himself up, and then looked down and found that his hands were still bloody, rust-red and flaking.
He remembered finding the restroom on unsteady feet. And he remembered sitting down again.
At some point, Catherine came down the hall, heels clacking a too-sharp staccato off the walls. She went right by Nick to the front desk and it wasn’t until he rose from his seat that she saw him. Catherine stepped away from the nurse’s station, her hands rising to her face.
“Nicky? Oh, Nick…”
He didn’t remember opening his arms, but suddenly she was in them, hugging him too tightly, and the world was very, very still. At long last, she pulled back, sniffing. Her blue eyes were dry and walled up.
“How is he?”
Nick shook his head, suddenly very thankful for his predilection to compensate for other people’s emotional failures. If Catherine broke, Nick knew he couldn’t break, couldn’t let it happen. His brain would not allow it. “He just went in. They haven’t… haven’t told me anything yet.”
She nodded. And that was the last concrete thing he remembered about Catherine, except that she whirled into a determined wind, sitting him on his chair again and striding off to find a doctor, a nurse, the ambulance attendant, anyone who might have the least little bit of information. He remembered her talking loudly, demanding a timeline. He thought she might have told it to him once she found out. He remembered tears glistening down one of her cheeks, and he remembered her hand clasping his, warm and solid next to him in another chair. He remembered her phone ringing, and her swearing as she fumbled it open.
All he could think was that they’d checked the truck. It had been empty.
In the end, Catherine was several minutes gone before Nick looked up and realized that she had said goodbye, I’ll be back soon, they need me at the lab, you call if, if, when they tell you anything, Nicky, do you hear me, you call, and that he had nodded. And she’d gone.
And Nick sat.
Waited.
10.
“Mr. Stokes—”
“Nick.”
“Nick… You’re friend has an intertrochanteric hip fracture. It’s lower down, and it’s one of the least dangerous hip fractures to have, but it’s still very serious, especially considering the amount of bruising he’s sustained. He’s just been sent in to surgery. Would you like to sit down?”
“No.”
“He has massive contusions along the left side of his body, but no internal hemorrhaging that we can see, which is a good sign. He avoided a broken femur, and his ribs seem to be intact, but it will take further exploration to make certain there aren’t any fractures there as well.”
“Alright.”
“Nick, he’s extremely lucky. His condition could be much worse. If he hadn’t been facing away, if the truck had hit him from the front, or even sideways where his knee couldn’t bend immediately—”
“Will… will he walk again?”
“This type of fracture has a very high rate of recovery. He’ll need pins in the bones, but he should be able to walk very soon after the surgery. In fact, we encourage that.”
“That’s…great.”
“Nick, there’s something else. It’s what I’m most concerned about. Your friend has suffered a severe concussion. We have yet to find out if there is more extensive damage. But I’m afraid we won’t know much more until the surgery is completed.”
“He’s bleeding.”
“Yes. He sustained a minor abrasion to the back of his head, most likely from contact with the wall. But it’s a long cut. And that’s the least of his problems, unfortunately.”
11.
The jangle of his cell phone pulled Nick out of his thoughts, and he blinked. Groped in his pocket and flipped his phone open absently. “Hello?”
There was a pause. “Nick?”
Grissom. Nick shook his head to clear it. “Ye— Stokes.”
And that sounded so professional. Nick’s mind whirled dizzily for an instant. The voice on the other end quieted.
“Nicky, it’s Grissom. Are you alright?”
“I’m—” He didn’t know how he was. “He’s in surgery,” he said instead.
“Nick, have the doctors told you anything yet?” Grissom was speaking slowly, not enough to condescend, but enough to draw Nick back, center him on his wildly tilting axis.
Grissom. It was Grissom, and he’d asked him a question. Nick made a supreme effort to gather his thoughts. “He’s… There’s an inter—” One more breath, come on, Stokes. “An intertrochanteric hip fracture. No hemorrhaging internally. His ribs are— they don’t think there was any breakage, and he has a lot of surface bruising. It’s a good fracture to have, if you had to pick.”
God, his thoughts were flying everywhere. It didn’t even sound coherent to him, but Grissom did not ask him to explain again. “Alright, Nick. Did they say anything else?”
They had. It seemed to lift in and out of the fog, drifting down where Nick couldn’t make sense of it, only to rise up again, unable to be ignored. Nick’s jaw felt hot with the stress of clenching it. There was only one thing he could really focus on, looming like some creature in the darkness. “There’s… He has a concussion, Gris. He hit his head, and they—It’s—”
“Okay. Okay, Nick? He’ll be alright. They’re going to do the best they can. Alright? Nicky.”
Nick nodded, and then remembered that Grissom couldn’t see it. “Yeah. Yeah, alright. Yeah.” He drew several deep breaths, listening to the waiting silence on the other end of the line. Grissom wasn’t rushing him, was just letting him collect himself. Unbidden tears stung Nick’s eyelids.
Damn it. He had to get himself together.
After a few more seconds, Nick blinked his eyes open and looked up at the white hospital ceiling. He swallowed. “Okay. Uh… Thank you, Grissom.”
“You’re welcome,” Grissom said. Then he sighed. “Nick, there’s another reason I called, and I know it’s not a good time for it, but I need you to pull yourself together for a little while longer.”
Nick nodded again. “What’s—What’s up?”
Grissom’s voice came clearly over the line, still speaking slowly, patiently. “I need you to come back to the lab for just a little while to give a statement to Vartann. I sent Warrick over to the hospital. He’s on his way, but I need you to come back. Just long enough to give them a statement about what happened. Can you do that?”
“I—” He blinked at the phone. “But what if he—”
He grimaced, suddenly unable to voice the implications aloud. Grissom heard them anyway.
“Nick, Warrick will be there, and he’ll call us if anything happens. We need your statement to get this guy, to place him in the truck, Nicky. We need to know what you saw.”
Yes. Yes, of course they did. It made sense to the less harried half of Nick’s brain. He looked up at the front desk, at the nurses and doctors bustling around with their clipboards and stethoscopes. Heard the clack of typing from the receptionist’s computer.
“Nick, it won’t take long, but you need to come back now.”
Repetition, the constant use of his name. Nick knew the tactic, the way to calm victims, to get them to focus. “Alright,” he whispered. And then more clearly, “Alright.”
“Good.” He could practically see Grissom nodding his approval. “Wait for Warrick, and drive carefully, Nick. We want you here in one piece.”
“Yeah,” he said. The line clicked on Grissom’s end, and Nick shut his phone with shaking hands. For a moment, he just stood in the white-washed hallway, staring at his silent little cell phone. Then sound swung back in on him. He took a deep breath and went to find an empty seat in which to wait for Warrick.
12.
The drive back was quicker than he’d thought it would be. Nick parked Warrick’s car in the lot and got out. The air was bitingly cold, coming in off the desert in slow gusts. He got five feet away from the car before remembering that he hadn’t locked the door, and went back.
Sara had checked the truck. And the garage had been empty, any fool could see that just by looking in. The truck was too high off the ground to hide anyone underneath, and he’d looked in the bed himself.
Sara had checked the cabin.
Nick’s steps slowed and then sped up again. Had they missed something? Maybe he’d been hiding in the back seat. But no, if he had climbed over the seat, the truck would have moved, at least a little bit. Nick’s nose had been inches from the side of the truck; he couldn’t have missed it. Could he?
Nick shoved the door open to find the lab swarming with people. He had no idea where they’d all come from; it was as if they’d magically appeared from wherever they’d been over the past week, just in time for this. Nick shook his head. No, because of this, you idiot.
He’d checked that truck. Sara had checked the truck. It had been dark inside, but it was empty, she wouldn’t have made a mistake about that.
There hadn’t been space under the steering column, not for a grown man. But suddenly Nick was uncertain. Anything seemed possible, even the idea that the man had been sitting right there staring back at him when he’d glanced at the window.
Maybe the guy had been dressed in black, maybe Sara had just missed him, maybe Nick hadn’t been looking hard enough and he’d—
And then the truck had started up. Roared out of the garage. Smacked right into—
Nick came around the corner so fast the world swerved. He skidded into the wall, pressing a palm there to right himself. His body wasn't behaving; strong and weak all at once. For one terrible second, he couldn't remember how to focus his eyes.
Hands gripped his shoulders. A familiar voice asked if he was alright. But he couldn't recognize it, didn't want to recognize it. He looked up, elsewhere, there were so many people that surely one of them would distract him, and a man came around the corner down the hall, flanked by officers, and Nick knew.
Knew that the man had driven the truck into Greg.
His eyes were hazel, roving the hallway. Fixing, darting again. The other voices in the lab became cotton in Nick's ears.
He recognized him, not with his eyes or because of the photos that had been scattered about a demolished and bloodied living room, but on a level much more primal. Deeper than dreams. His brain supplied the words: boyfriend, driver.
Murderer.
Nick froze for the third time that night, unable to look away as the man passed down the hall.
13.
“…no change? … Okay. Okay. And what did they say about his—Okay.”
Nick slowed outside Grissom’s office.
He wanted… Well. The statement had not taken long to give, and Nick couldn’t remember any of it. He knew he would later, maybe tomorrow. He wanted to leave. To go back. To get away from the lab. He listened to Grissom’s one-sided conversation, trying to decide whether to knock.
Grissom was silent for a long while. Then—“Have they contacted his parents?”
Nick swallowed. Grissom nodded. Nodded again. “Alright. I’ll send Nick back with your truck. I need you at the warehouse again. … Yes, the garage door. We’re going to match that paint to Hedgecock’s wall. And Warrick?”
Grissom’s face looked haggard. “We’re going to need Greg’s clothes,” he said quietly.
Nick grimaced. His stomach rolled alarmingly. He turned away and headed for the bathroom and the sink there to wash his face.
14.
Nick opened his eyes and found a glass wall three inches above him, and dark, moldy dirt above that. The scream was out of his mouth before he could think. He pounded the glass with his fists, twisting, kicking, smacking, crying, and the sound was muffled, there was a cold, metal something in his hand, there was no air, and he pounded, pounded, beat against the glass—
And woke with a start.
The light was too bright. Nick jerked and nearly fell out of his chair onto clean linoleum. Something beeped in his ear, beeped again. Again. Nick blinked, already halfway to the ground, gripping the armrests of his seat so hard his wrists ached. He looked around.
The nondescript white walls of the hospital room gazed solemnly back at him. The door was open, and the sound of chatter, footsteps from outside in the hall, came to his ears. Nick rubbed his face with his palm, still not quite in the room, still tasting dirt and iron and whatever had been on that gag. He fixated on the window, then the silent television mounted on the wall, and then the bed beside his chair.
Greg lay on his back beneath the thin hospital blanket. His chest rose and fell shallowly. He was asleep; the same dark smudges hung beneath his eyes and pooled in the hollows of his cheeks.
Nick exhaled hard, and sat up. The sigh stuttered from his lungs in bursts. He leaned over, elbows on his knees, and covered his face in both hands. What time was it? He couldn't even remember falling asleep. Greg's monitor beeped, low and monotonous. Nick frowned and looked up irritably.
Like a clock. Tick, tock. Ticking.
He stood up, and then stopped, unsure why he'd risen in the first place. The room was warm, slightly stuffy. But Nick had felt that before in perfectly airy rooms after dreaming. He knew he only needed a few seconds to clear the haze from his mind. It was thicker today, and he was afraid to shut his eyes and wait for it, afraid of what might reappear in the blackness. Deep breaths. Greg's monitor sounded steadily.
Had he moved? Had he woken and drifted off again? Nick stared at his friend, searching— but there was no sign of Greg having regained consciousness. He lay in the same position he had been in all day, arms flat and still next to his body, legs straight out beneath the blanket. The skin of his left arm was mottled, a grotesque tortoiseshell of color. His IV wound a sinister coil into his wrist and the bag hung, full and bloated, like a large insect with no legs.
Nick's pulse thudded in his temples. He tried to breath again, to force himself into submission, but it wasn't working. The smell of the room – he couldn't distinguish what was tell-tale and what was real – sickened his stomach. Can't leave him. You shouldn't just leave. What if he wakes up? But Greg hadn't moved, hadn't twitched in two days, and suddenly Nick couldn't even imagine movement from the body under those sheets, other than that slow, stilted breathing.
He had to leave. Couldn't stay in that room.
Nick made his way into the hallway, then to the stairs. His legs moved mechanically to the ground floor, and then outside, and before he knew it, he was walking briskly and the hospital had fallen behind, just another building among buildings. Nick took a deep breath, taking in the scents of the city, the warmth of summer – it was evening, he could smell it now, see the golden glow over the horizon. The air cleared away the last traces of his dream and Nick slowed to a more comfortable pace.
He didn't really have a destination in mind. The hospital again, eventually; he couldn't just leave for the night, not like this, but it was too much to stay there at the moment. To wait for a waking that might not come.
"Don't be stupid," he muttered to himself. "They said he'd wake up. Just a question of when." It was odd, feeling his fears at war with his knowledge. Each had a voice and he knew which was which, but neither one overrode the other for some reason.
The traffic was thick down the boulevard, the signs of store fronts and theaters winking on. The Las Vegas lights were changing, their ever-present shift from day to night, from natural to dazzling. Nick took several turns, walking aimlessly, not really seeing which venues he passed, which people he stepped aside to let by. The noise rose: laughter, the already drunken revels of tourists, the honk of impatient drivers. Nick took one last turn and the hospital came into view again, some blocks away. He headed back without a concrete decision, just knowing that that was where he was going tonight.
It was much busier when he returned. Ambulances tweaked their sirens, clearing the way as they left the bay. A pregnant woman was helped out of the car by her distraught husband. Nick watched a nurse wheel a chair out for the woman, waited for them to go inside, and followed them in. He took the elevator upstairs this time. The bright lighting greeted him beyond the doors, and he went down the hall, keeping toward the wall to avoid running into other people.
He reached Greg's room, but the murmur of a voice inside came through the open door, surprising him. Nick stopped just outside the doorway.
Grissom was in the room. And Greg's eyes were open.
Their supervisor sat, one hand extended to rest on the blanket. Greg's face was drawn tight, lined with a dull pain and pale enough to cast his eyes into shadow. But he looked at Grissom steadily as the man spoke. Nick heard words, broken and indistinct.
"Only a retirement event... you let it... Greg, your decision."
Greg murmured something too soft to make out and Grissom's face opened in a way Nick could only describe as paternal. For a moment, there was nothing to override the sadness lining his mouth and eyes. Grissom reached out and touched Greg's arm.
"It's not my place to tell you what to do." This time, as soft as Grissom's voice was, it carried. "I won't even try to make that decision for you. But Greg, we – all of us, not excluding me – we learn. We go on, we pick ourselves up."
Nick couldn't tell if Greg spoke, but Grissom answered. "You did fine. You did just fine out there."
Nick turned from the door and leaned against the wall. Rubbed his face.
The reality – the sanitary smell, the narrow doorway into that dimly lit room, the incessant beep of Greg's monitor – washed over him, and it wasn't the first time it had done so. But it hurt worse this time, carved deeper and cut more away. There was an age on Grissom's face, one that just had not been there before. Sheer and full of weak spots that looked as though they would cave at any second.
Nick knew that Grissom was close enough to see what he could not: the purpling bruises covering Greg's left arm. The too-pale cast of his skin.
God— They'd come too close. He'd come too close, to a loss he couldn't identify, because to identify it was to give it a name, to acknowledge the possibility of it actually happening. And he couldn't acknowledge that. The fact that it hadn't happened was no comfort; the shadow remained, an incontestable pendulum that might swing down at any moment.
The truth was, it had already swung. The utter uselessness of it was staggering.
At least in the box, there'd been a method. A purpose, however twisted. That box was meant for one of them, meant to be the coffin of someone. There was no method to a truck barreling through the night. There had been no target on Greg's back and it had hit him anyway, swiping him off his feet into the void. Leaving Nick behind.
Why could he accept that shadow for himself, accept the possibility of his own death... but not Greg's?
Perhaps it had just been a futility created by his own mind, but in that box Nick had felt some amount of control. Yes, it was the minimal control of a squeezed trigger, but it was still his choice. He had even made that choice, and still he'd come out alive somehow. The luck of an instant. But he'd had some control. It was the only way he'd been able to bend the nightmares to his will so quickly, reminding himself that in the end, he had been given a choice.
Greg had not. And even deeper, even darker... none of them had been given a choice this time. Nick had not been given a choice in Greg's fate. He'd simply been forced to watch as it swooped down on the other man.
Nick heard movement in the room and pulled away from the wall. Any moment, Grissom might come through the door and find him there. For all he knew, his supervisor already knew he was there. Certainly Grissom knew he was supposed to be; aside from the lab, Nick had been nowhere else over the past two days.
But that had been when Greg was still asleep, and Nick was sitting alone with only his own thoughts to batter him.
The memory of their argument made the sickness he’d felt before pale in comparison. It meant nothing in the overall scheme of life, nothing, just a stupid, useless fight that could have been avoided. Until now. Greg’s accident had given it meaning, given it so many possible inflections.
But for the space of a few inches between truck and body, that fight had nearly been made into the defining moment of his relationship with Greg. The last thing they did before Greg… died.
Nick’s throat felt swollen. He stumbled away from the room, hurrying down the hall to the stairs. He’d had a choice then, too, of how to interact with Greg, and he’d chosen anger. The things he’d said sounded so stupid now, so inconsequential. It was Greg, and he’d been doing his best, but Nick hadn’t been able to see that, and he’d taken out his own frustrations with the case on him.
And then another human being had intervened before he’d even thought of fixing it, and nearly taken Greg away.
It made no sense that this should suddenly be such an issue; he dealt with the aftermath of people making God-like choices every day. Dead people who perhaps should not have died yet, but had not been given the option because someone else decided to be selfish.
But it was different this time. Things were different with his friend in that hospital bed.
It was absolutely helpless, what he felt. As if he contained the energy and strength of three people, but there was nowhere for it to go. Nothing for him to do. And the rage… Nick shut his eyes tight, trying and failing to redirect. He knew that if he saw that man at that moment, the one behind the wheel of the truck, he would fly at him with no thought to the consequences.
He wondered if they’d felt like this when he’d been under the dirt. They must all have felt this pressure, this need to act with no outlet. To correct what had occurred, make it make sense again. But he knew that was wrong, it was wrong, because there was something intangibly different in how it felt to have Greg be the one in danger. He sought, tried to put his finger on it over and over, but it was indefinable.
It was also frightening in its immensity.
Nick pushed his way through meandering groups of people looking for the right floor, coming in and out of the gift shop, trying to find the payphones. Not caring if he appeared rude or rushed. He was rushed. The hospital’s air was too thick, too warm. He couldn’t breathe. Sweat broke out on his brow as he hurried through the lobby. Outside, the promise of cooling desert breezes beckoned, the vastness of a world where he and his feelings and troubles were insignificant in comparison to everything else.
He exited through the automatic doors, listening to the hiss and slide as they closed behind him. The breeze hit him full in the face, and he was struck by how dark the night was, despite the lights of the hospital. Nick hunched his shoulders and headed in the direction of his car.
He knew he was moving further and further away from the room where Greg was now awake, tired and talking, trying to explain his situation to himself as best he could. Trying to make sense of senselessness.
Perhaps alone by now, in a strange room with strange blankets, and no one sitting in that chair.
Your chair, Nick, his mind whispered.
For one instant, he turned, wavering on the edge, knowing he should go back in, knowing he couldn’t leave, if he left now he wouldn’t come back, and that would be unforgivable. The hospital towered, a hulking creature that had swallowed someone close to him – could have been forever – and still held him inside its maw.
For one instant, Nick almost turned.
In the end, he opened his car door, closed himself inside, and drove away.
15.
"Is my blood done yet?"
Hodges lifted his eyebrows and rose to his feet. "I was just about to get it out of the printer. You'd be surprised how smoothly things are going today. But then again, my lab is usually ship-shape."
Nick nodded and shifted on his feet as the DNA tech retrieved the printout. He brandished it with a flourish. "One blood analysis, with time to spare."
Nick took it and stared for a moment without seeing it. He blinked and the numbers focused. Hodges smirked at him, waiting. "It's him. All over the side of that photo. Paper-cuts are the worst."
Nick nodded, but there was no relief, not yet. His chest felt more hollow than usual. He couldn't feel relieved until he knew if this would get them anywhere. "Looks good."
"Shame about Sanders." Hodges leaned on his countertop. "Any idea if... when he'll be back?"
Nick frowned at the other man. "He's in recovery."
Hodges nodded, pursing his lips in that regretful, sanctimonious way of his. "Good, good. I just wondered. Although, he did sign up for field work. And if you can't take the heat, stay—"
Nick stepped forward abruptly, cutting the man off. "Hodges, if you say one word to me about replacing Greg, one word... I swear you will be out of this lab by the end of the hour."
Hodges' eyes widened. Nick saw him swallow. But he didn't care to hear whatever answer the man might give. He turned on his heel and left the lab.
16.
When Sara didn’t come back from her break, Nick went looking. The trace lab was too empty to be alone in; his thoughts filled the void far too eagerly.
He found her in the break room, but she wasn’t alone. Nick stopped outside, looking in, knowing they couldn’t see him. Sara hunched in her chair at the table, staring at the surface of it as if she were fixed in place. Grissom sat beside her. His hand gripped hers.
“Thank you for going,” he said in a low voice.
Sara shook her head fiercely. “I thought I wanted to. I mean, I did want to. I thought—But he just looked so… I don’t know.”
“I’m sure he was glad to see you, Sara.”
“Well, but he wouldn’t even be there if not—” She stopped and covered her face with her free hand. Nick could see the quiver in her fingers. “When is he out of there? I don’t like hospitals.”
“I’m taking him home in a couple days,” Grissom said evenly.
She drew her hand out of Grissom’s grasp and crossed her arms over her chest protectively. The look on her face was twisted. “He was in a good mood. I mean, he—Considering. You wouldn’t even think he’d been—” She forced a laugh, but her chin tightened visibly. “Well. Except for the bandages.”
Grissom laid a hand on her back. “Sara. He’s going to be fine.”
“I checked the truck,” she whispered to the table. Her shoulders began to shake. Nick could no longer see her face. “I could have sworn it was empty.”
Grissom didn’t answer.
“I should have—should have looked harder. But I was so sure—” Her voice broke completely, giving way to quiet, wracking sobs. Grissom rubbed her back.
Nick turned away.
17.
Sara’s voice had gone flat, beyond businesslike into something much more ominous. “Where did you hide the truck grill, Mr. Simco?”
The man slouched in the chair, the fingers of one hand tapping on the tabletop. There was a tiny smile behind his eyes. Nick studied his face with rising disgust.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Ms. Sidle,” Simco said.
“Come on, man,” Nick broke in. “We’ve got the make, the manufacturer, even the type of screw you used to attach it. What’s wrong? Super Duty not big enough for you?”
“A guy’s gotta have his hobbies,” Simco answered with a lazy smile.
“Do those hobbies include killing your girlfriend?” Sara leaned forward as she spoke. The movement was enough to startle Simco into glancing her way.
“Hey,” he said after a second. “Bitch got what was coming to her. I won’t try to hide that. But no one’s saying it was me.”
“I’m saying it,” Nick countered. Simco’s hazel eyes narrowed. Nick saw the man’s jaw tighten.
“You get mad at her, Simco?” Sara’s voice was sweetly conversational. She cocked her head. “Did it make you angry that she’d moved on with her life and left you behind?”
“Hey, there was nothing to leave behind,” he spat back, showing the first real shard of emotion in the last twenty minutes. He sat up in his chair and glared at Sara across the table. “I’m the one who moved out. Good riddance.”
“Yeah, you’re the one who moved, because she kicked your ass to the curb.” Nick entwined his fingers in front of himself and smiled thinly at the suspect. Simco’s head slowly swiveled to face him. The man’s expression was unreadable. Nick let his smile become a smirk. “But that didn’t take, did it? That why you rammed your truck into her house?”
This time Simco snorted. The easiness slipped back into his face again. “You’ve got no proof of that.”
“No, we’ve got your truck,” Sara said. “We’ve got paint on the inside of her wall that matches the paint you scraped off tearing out of that garage three nights ago. We’ve also got your tire treads, and dirt from her lawn in your wheel well. We’ve got pieces of a battering ram of some sort embedded in her wall, the same type of metal as the shavings we took off your truck’s bumper and front grill. And that doesn’t even cover what we pulled off of her totaled car.”
Simco’s amusement slid away just as quickly as it had come. He glared at Sara, and was met with nothing but a raised eyebrow. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then shrugged. “Okay. Maybe I ran into her house. She deserved it, let me tell you. Wasn’t even her house. We bought it together. And I may have dinged up her car. But that doesn’t make me the killer.”
Nick squinted at him. “So it was your house, too.”
“Yeah.” Simco frowned at him. Nick could practically feel the edge of Sara’s smile.
“Pretty unique way of dealing with it,” she said.
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Simco spat.
Sara smirked and leaned forward. “Here’s how I see it. You were mad. Not just because she kicked you out, but because she kicked you out of the home you shared. She just pushed you right out of it, and then went on like nothing was wrong. That pissed you off, didn’t it?”
The man sneered. “What do you think?”
“I think you crashed into her house because it should have been your house. She didn’t love you anymore. You didn’t just want to destroy her. You wanted to destroy her life without you in it.”
The room went very quiet. Nick could hear the uneven breathing of the man across the table. He watched him. It was so easy to hate this man. They were getting to the meat of it, finally, and Nick could feel it building within him. As if the rest had been preliminary, a preparation for the deadly enormity now settling over them.
“What was it, man?” Nick murmured. “A new car she didn’t have to share with you? Did she repaint the house? What did she do to send you over the edge?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Simco gritted. He flashed pearly whites at Nick, but there was no humor there. “I didn’t kill the bitch. Someone else did that.”
“Before or after you knocked her wall in?” Sara stared at Simco like a snake seeking its prey. “Was she looking at you after you killed her? Is that why you cut out her eyes, or was it because you couldn’t handle seeing them staring out of a dead body?”
Simco’s hands clutched the table’s rim. “You got all kinds of theories, don’t you?”
“Oh, there’s more,” Nick stated. “We know you went through the photos. You cut yourself on them, or on the glass from the frames. All those pictures of the two of you. Didn’t know she still had them out, did you? You didn’t notice until it was too late.”
“I don’t care about any damn photos,” he scoffed, but Nick went on.
“You took one or two, didn’t you? Broke the frames and took them away. She loved you. She still had your pictures all over the house. It was so obvious, but you didn’t think to look until it was too late. Did you?”
“I know how she felt about me,” Simco hissed. “And it wasn’t love. Don’t twist what wasn’t there. Fucking romantic.”
“Did you think that this was romantic?” Sara countered. “Tragic death, misunderstood feelings… It’s almost like Shakespeare. You end up alive, but you’re the one who suffers the most.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Simco said softly. “You’d like me to be sorry for what happened.” He shook his head. “I’m not sorry. She got what was coming to her.”
“And you saw to that,” Nick said.
Simco’s sneer widened. “You’ll never know.”
Revulsion coiled in Nick’s belly. “Oh, we know you did it. You had a score to settle with her, and you acted on it. It won’t be hard to convince a jury.”
The man’s smile was positively frightening. “It wouldn’t matter if I did it or not. She was a loser. Didn’t have any fucking family. Whoever killed her did her a favor by putting her out of her misery.”
“Did you a favor, you mean,” Nick ground out between his teeth.
Simco leaned back. “I’m not complaining. Stokes. That your name? Well, Stokes, you tell your jury what you’ve got on me. I couldn’t care less. I’m the suffering ex. I found the body first and was too upset to stick around. They won’t care about much else by the time I’m done with them.”
Nick’s jaw began to hurt. “That why you ran? Why you hid?” At Simco’s silence, Nick leaned across the table. “Is that why you drove your truck right into a crowd of cops the other night?”
The color of Simco’s eyes darkened perceptibly. Without warning, he stood up, scraping his chair back. The orange of his jumpsuit was too vivid. “Just remember, you followed me there. I was doing just fine on my own.”
Nick rose to his feet, frayed nerves rocketing closer to the edge. “Hey, sit down.”
Simco laughed. “Why should I? Feels good to walk.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw Sara get up as well and slide to the right, still keeping the table between herself and the suspect. Nick inched to the left.
Simco stared at them from across the room. He was nearly backed up against the window. “You know what your problem is? You cops? You can’t leave well enough alone. You get involved in everyone else’s business and then you don’t like what you find.”
“Sit down,” Nick snapped.
“You should have just let me go. Saved yourself the trouble. I was leaving anyway.”
A cold, dark alley flashed across Nick’s memory. The sudden roar of the truck’s engine seared into his mind, the horrendous scrape as it careened out of the garage. The sound as it hit Greg, knocked him into the wall.
“You were leaving,” Nick stated, in a voice he didn’t quite recognize.
“I always told her it would be on my terms. Not hers. And then you showed up.” Simco raised his hands resignedly. The amusement under his voice was sickening.
Nick could feel his own words tangling in his throat. “You hit one of our guys.”
Simco’s mouth twisted into an unpleasant sneer. “Yeah, you tell that guy to be more careful next time.”
Nick was on him before deciding to do it, jerking his collar and shoving him so hard he smacked against the window. Simco let out a surprised grunt, and in that instant, Sara was behind Nick, grabbing for his shoulders with both hands.
“Nick! Let him go, let go!”
But Nick knew he was stronger. Knew he was angrier. He shook the man, pinning him to the window with one hand.
“I should beat your face in,” he seethed.
Simco grinned at him, white-toothed and remorseless. “Why? Just a little misunderstanding between me and my girl.”
“No, this time you took from us!” Nick yanked him forward off the glass. “You tried to take something from me, you bastard, you stole from us!”
The man’s eyes flickered, skipped over his face. Something larger skittered in his consciousness.
Sara’s hands went slack on Nick’s shoulders, and he could feel her pause, feel her breathe. Feel her stare, right past him at the man in his grip. Feel her weigh it, put what had happened into context. He knew in that instant that if he beat this man to within an inch of his life, she wouldn’t stop him.
Simco stared at him, looking awed – afraid – for the first time.
Nick shoved the man away, feeling his fingers catch on the collar of his jumper, and pushed Sara’s hand off his shoulder. Without looking at her – his eyes were only for the sack of shit cowering against the wall – he left the room, giving the door a good slam.
The hallway went quiet, but not for lack of people. One of the younger techs held a sample bag in her hand, and blinked at him as though she’d not realized there were other people in her lab. But it was the stares of the others, the ones he knew, that caught his attention. Their eyes fixed upon Nick there in the hall, blank, yet startled. Like deer. Catherine stood beyond, her hair in a loose ponytail, mouth slack and eyes narrowed.
The door to the viewing room smacked the wall, making the techs jump. Ecklie stormed out, his already thin mouth white-lipped.
"Stokes." His voice trembled with an anger that threatened to swarm right over his keenly crafted assuredness. "You're off the case."
"Fine," Nick snapped. He turned and went down the hallway toward the locker room. "Just fine."
18.
Nick went to work. He immersed himself in the lab. Ran blood and hair samples, and poked through Catherine's latest findings. Watched with a distended sense of horror as it became clear that Simco's lawyer was going to plead insanity.
He knew he was watching another one get away from them. If he'd felt that his dismissal had left stones unturned somewhere, had given that man a loophole to slither through, he might have raged as Sara still did in the break room, slopping her coffee onto the floor in large drops.
But the truth was, there wasn't anything left to find. The man had confessed, and then had secured himself another way out. They'd uncovered everything they could and it still wasn't enough.
So Nick worked. Night after night, avoiding the interrogation rooms and Grissom’s office. Sometimes he saw Sara, stalking down the halls as if she wanted to put her foot right through the floor and kick whatever was beneath, and Warrick, grim-faced and getting grimmer as each new piece of evidence led to a useless end. Sometimes Catherine came into the room and settled her hand on his shoulder as he worked. She never said anything, and he wondered what she thought was going on in his head, if maybe Simco had touched an old, still-smarting nerve somehow. He wanted to laugh because it wasn’t an old nerve.
It was so new, so foreign to him, that Nick could barely think about it for longer than a few seconds before backing away and shutting himself down.
He didn’t return to the hospital. The thought of going in and seeing Greg’s parents there in his room made his head swim. He knew they were in Vegas; he’d seen them in Grissom’s office, the woman stiff-faced, the man full of anxious questions. Nodding, all the time, as if Grissom were giving them the secret to existence. Perhaps he was. He was giving them the assurance of their child’s life, after all.
Nick couldn’t return to the hospital, and then another day passed and he knew Greg was no longer there.
Wendy walked into the room one day, tired-eyed and pleasantly sunburned, carrying Catherine’s newest AFIS printouts. Catherine’s domestic violence case had ballooned into something bigger, involving two ex-husbands and a missing son. The tech handed the sheaf of papers to Nick with a drawn look on her face.
“I heard about Greg. How’s he doing?”
Nick just looked at her. Wendy shifted uncomfortably. “Grissom said he’s out of the hospital. Have you—How is he?”
“I don’t know,” he answered shortly. He gathered up her printouts and stood. “I’ll get these to Catherine.”
She nodded, watching him go. Nick left the room as fast as he could.
I don’t know.
He wasn’t sure what was more disturbing: the fact that he didn’t know, or that that fact made him so completely furious with himself.
The memory of Simco’s shoulder under his hand, the look in his eyes in the interrogation room, came to Nick when he slept, and not as a nightmare. Nick woke just as often from a stupor in the lab as he did in his bed, remembering the force of his shove and the surprised grunt that tore from Simco’s throat.
It wasn’t the recurring image of Simco’s fear that made him regret; it was the deed itself.
He knew he had to stop reacting this way. First with Cassie McBride, now this. Nick massaged his eyes. He was lucky he hadn’t been fired outright. Ecklie sat around waiting for this type of thing, as if there weren’t more important problems to solve. Nick passed by Grissom’s office again and again, wondering each time whether his supervisor had spoken to the assistant director on his behalf. Secured his job again, somehow.
But when he wasn’t thinking of Simco, there was nowhere else his thoughts could go, and he thought instead of alleys. Empty truck cabins. Shouting matches in a deserted lab.
One moment that had turned the world sideways.
He knew the night Greg returned to the lab by the change in the air. And Warrick’s face, sliding from pained to cheery in one smooth shift. Warrick raised his hand and walked forward toward whoever else was in the locker room, laughing. “Sanders! Welcome back. Nice cane you got there.”
And Nick, who had been ready to go in and retrieve his bag and shoes so he could head home, faltered in the hallway. He heard Greg’s voice, sounding wearier than it ever had, and shifted to the right until he could see. Not sure if it was a good idea, but suddenly needing to see him.
“It keeps me standing,” Greg answered.
Warrick’s grin widened. “You look a hell of a lot better than last time I saw you. Aren’t you supposed to be bedridden or something?”
Greg’s smile was so familiar. “Don’t I wish. They had me up and walking as soon as my head was back on.” He fingered the metal cane in his left hand. Nick could still see the faded line of bruises there, now more yellowish than purple. “Good for my leg. Or something ridiculous like that.”
Warrick reached out. “Here.”
Greg leaned against the wall of lockers and passed him his cane. Warrick looked it over, nodding. “Nice. You and Doc Robbins’ll have something else to talk about now.”
Greg snorted and took the cane back. “My mom was all set to move in. She even bought me chocolates. Alas. Duty calls.” He gestured at the rest of the room and Warrick laughed again, sounding lighter than he had in a week.
“You could have had chocolates from your mom? Man, I wouldn’t pass that up if I had the option.” Warrick slapped his shoulder lightly. Genially. “It’s good to have you back, Sanders.”
They were about to come out. Suddenly Nick didn’t want to see Greg’s face and remember it still and silent, and battered. Empty eyes. Red-tinted hair against a white gurney.
He retreated to the darkened fingerprinting lab and waited a good twenty minutes before heading home.
19.
The lab was quiet again three days later, and the morning sunlight streamed through the windows like watery milk. Nick rubbed his burning eyes, wishing he were asleep, and yet not wanting to go home.
His shoulders hurt, his legs felt as if they might collapse under him. And the only thing he could think was that he would be right back in this spot in twelve hours, staring down yet another shift.
He hadn’t been able to sleep this week. If he’d had any dreams, he couldn’t remember them, but still, restfulness eluded him. Just a blank gray slate stretching from the moment he closed his eyes to the moment he woke. Nick slung his work shirt into his locker and sat down on the bench, kneading his temples. His head felt like it wasn’t his own. Pressure behind his eyes and his cheekbones—He took a deep breath.
He was glad Warrick was out in the field working overtime, and that Sara had been stuck in the lab with Wendy for the last few hours. He didn’t feel like trying to explain his weariness to anyone. Hell, he couldn’t even explain it to himself.
No, you won’t explain it. Nick grimaced and pressed harder, trying to drive the voice away. He had tried, he honestly had. But every time he made the attempt, he realized that it went so much deeper than the surface he could see. The accident in the alleyway hovered over it all, insinuating itself into his thoughts and weaving in where it couldn’t be ignored. Every time he thought about it, Nick felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
It just hit so hard, on too many levels to contemplate. And he couldn’t bring himself to explain why, because when he did have nightmares, that was the stuff of them.
Nick sighed and focused on the speckled floor beneath his shoes. He really had to get out of here. The lab was muddling his brain, and he wasn’t taking the proper time outside of work this week to wash it away. Now it was building. If he could just get a moment to cleanse it all out of himself, like some sort of breaking fever, then he would probably be able to make sense of it. To face it all.
The scrape of a footstep in the doorway brought Nick’s head up. A second later, he wished he’d kept it down. Greg stood there, framed by the relative darkness from the hall beyond, leaning on his cane. He gazed at Nick, expression indecipherable. His fingers twitched around the padded handle of the cane.
“There you are.” But there was no amusement in it, no sense of satisfaction. Greg’s words were flat, edged with disappointment. Nick could see him chewing his lower lip, as if trying to keep his mouth from giving him away.
“Greg,” he said weakly. The younger man’s face was still too pale. As if Nick were looking at a sick person. His eyes still held their smudges, and his shoulders looked frail underneath the material of his button-down shirt. Nick winced. They weren’t frail, they were just as they always had been, but somehow they looked fragile. Wasted.
“Haven’t seen you in a while.” The words were clipped. Nick frowned, hearing the tiniest tip of sarcasm.
“Been pretty busy here,” he answered lamely. Damn it, but it was still making him feel like shying away, just having Greg in the same room. What was the matter with him? He should be happy to have Greg up and walking, returning to work none the worse for wear. But all he could think was how close he’d come to the other side of that coin. Greg’s physical presence held the shadow of that side, the very existence of the possibility, as if the man were carrying it around with him. Like that cane.
Greg nodded, a swift jerk of his head. He looked down, and when his head rose again, his expression was both sad and angry. “Yeah. I know it has. I’ve been around.”
Nick looked at him sharply, stung, and having no right to be so. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say in answer. Instead he concentrated on his shoes, tying up the laces of his sneakers, wondering what twist of fate had made his timing so bad tonight.
He’d managed to keep to himself for the last few days. The law of averages had to catch up with him sometime.
He heard Greg exhale, a short burst through his nose. “Well. I’m feeling just fine, thanks.”
Nick looked up before he could stop himself. “Greg… That’s not how it is. I just…” Words failed him again. He shrugged, disgusted with himself. Damn. Why hadn’t he asked? It had been the one coherent question pressing in on his mind the entire time, and yet he hadn’t done a thing to obtain the answer to it.
“Thank you, Nick, for explaining it to me,” Greg said, and this time there was no way to mistake the ire in his tone. Nick frowned in spite of himself.
“Something you want to say to me, Sanders?”
Greg’s mouth opened and shut. He looked at Nick incredulously. Came through the door, toward the bench. His cane thumped dully on the floor. Nick repressed a shiver.
“It’s like you changed shifts,” Greg said abruptly.
Nick blinked. Greg glared down at him, brow furrowed, breathing harder than normal.
“What?”
Greg rolled his eyes, then shut them as if gathering patience. “I have been back for nearly a week. Not all the time, I grant that, Nick, but enough to where I should have at least warranted a hello from you. I don’t know, maybe I’m being too self-involved again, is that it?”
Nick stood up, and Greg’s eyes followed him without flinching. “What are you talking about?”
The younger man shook his head. It was almost disdainful. That emotion on Greg’s face felt a little too raw in all the wrong places. “Just get it off your chest, Stokes, whatever it is,” he snapped. “Quickly, like pulling a band-aid off. It hurts less.”
Greg was right there, not three feet in front of him, with awareness in his irises again, energy vibrating through his limbs, and anger there, as plain as day. Alive.
He wanted… to touch him. To reach out and—
“No,” Nick muttered. He glanced down and saw Greg’s cane. His gut curled at the reminder.
When he looked up, he found Greg’s eyes boring into him. His mouth dried and he gestured at the cane, suddenly furious with its presence. “No, I’m not going to start with you, Greg.”
Greg’s face twisted, cheeks blossoming red. His fingers clenched around the cane’s handle. “What, Nick? This?”
He pulled the cane up and tossed it across the small space between them. Nick’s hand opened instinctively and caught it.
“Well, I don’t need it,” Greg spat. His mouth tightened visibly and Nick saw his eyes flash. “Maybe you’ll be able to face me better without it.”
Before he knew it, irritation had clicked home. Nick’s jaw clenched on its own. He gripped the cane in one hand. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You tell me!” Greg swayed, bracing himself against the bank of lockers to his right. “I never thought you were one to hold onto things, Nick, but I’m thinking I was wrong.”
“You don’t expect me to hold onto this?” Nick smacked the cane down on the bench and straightened, breathing hard. It was just too much. The week, the accident, the lack of sleep, and now Greg, right when Nick was at his weakest. “You nearly got killed!”
“I know that,” Greg returned heatedly. “I was there, if you’ll remember.”
Nick shook his head impotently. He turned and jerked his bag out of his locker, slamming it shut. “I do remember.”
Greg’s face shuttered oddly. He looked to the side as if searching for something, and then snapped his attention back to Nick. “Why didn’t you come to the hospital?”
“I did,” Nick hissed. He opened his mouth to go on, but Greg cut him off.
“Oh, I know you went, you came with me! And then you left? You just—”
“I was there!” Nick said hotly. He scrubbed a hand over his head. “I went to the hospital, I saw you there. But I couldn’t—” Couldn’t sit and watch you breathe couldn’t picture a paler face on a slab couldn’t be reminded over and over again that you’d been hurt.
Couldn’t face that I couldn’t do anything about it.
“I couldn’t stay,” he whispered. Turned away.
“You couldn’t stay.”
Nick glared down at his hands as they fumbled for the strap of his bag. Greg’s hand shot out and latched onto his arm, jerking his attention back.
“You were the last thing I remember, Nick, in the ambulance, leaning over me like you had a vested interest in what happened.” Greg’s face had contorted, suppressing something else with the anger. “But then you’re nowhere to be found. I guess your concern only lasts as long as it takes to make sure I’m still breathing.”
Nick stepped forward. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he grated through clenched jaw. His heart was hammering, as much at the mention of Greg not breathing as at the tension between them.
Now the sadness was creeping forward. “Is this because of what happened before? Are you still mad at me for that, Nick, because if you are, I just want to let you know how stupid—” Greg bit down on whatever he’d been about to say.
Nick shook his head. “That is not what this is about!”
“Then what? What? Look, if you have a problem with me, I’d rather just know about it so I can stop thinking it’s something I can fix!”
“It’s not you,” Nick snapped. And then was floored by how right and wrong that was. He stifled a hiss as the events in the alley rushed up on him again. Not knowing what was happening until the truck was nearly out of the garage, Warrick’s shout, the crack of Greg’s head against the brick, the uncontainable fear that had guided his hands to Greg’s face.
The look in Greg’s eyes, as if he were watching the edge slide forward to suck him under.
And he’d been completely helpless to stop it.
Nick’s hand found Greg’s shoulders, gripped, and pushed hard. The younger man let out a hiss as his back came into contact with the bank of lockers. He stared at Nick, wide-eyed. Nick held him there, suddenly unable to keep his hands from squeezing, feeling the warmth beating through Greg’s shirt, the proof that he was alive, that he’d survived.
“Why didn’t you turn around?” he said helplessly, shaking Greg, gripping him by the shoulders. “God, why didn’t you—”
Greg’s eyes opened wider, and then narrowed frighteningly, and Nick saw the last of that hope die right in front of him, overwhelmed by the fury. “You think I messed up out there? That I caused—”
Nick had to shut him up. Stop the painful words that kept pouring forth, and he didn’t even realize he had done it with his own mouth until he heard Greg’s grunt of surprise. His mouth tasted salty and sweet all that same time. Greg’s lips parted and Nick needed—He swiped his tongue inside, touched lips, teeth, another tongue. Greg’s hands clutched his arms, fingers spasming against his skin, digging deep. Nick sought for something he couldn’t even visualize – Greg made some sound in his throat – and suddenly his hands were pressing Greg against the lockers and his head was tilted and he could taste the sound, feel it in his head and chest and hips and fingers. Greg gasped; his hand trembled, then Nick felt him grip the back of his neck – their teeth clacked together, Greg’s body gave a helpless shiver under his palms—
And Nick stumbled backward.
Couldn’t think.
Greg gaped at him, breathing hard, inches away. His exhalation hit Nick’s lips. He blinked rapidly. Nick heard him swallow, a strangled sound. “Nick…”
He let go of him and backed up on shaking legs. His mind was a haze, fogged and indistinct, but he could see Greg collapsed there against the lockers, staring at him as if there were nothing else in the entire world.
“I—”
Greg’s face was far too open, far too haunted. Nick fumbled, grabbed his bag off the floor where it had fallen, and lurched for the door. Greg stirred behind him.
“Nick.” The word was wounded, cracked.
He fled the locker room, and didn’t stop to process until he was pulling into his own driveway twenty minutes later.
...
Part 3
