Cold Comfort

(Notes: This story takes a very unsympathetic view of a very beloved character and a sympathetic view of an unpopular character.  That’s about all the warning I want to give, though. *g*  Also, I’ve taken what might be interpreted as some very minor liberties with the canon timeline—although I don’t think they’re any more serious than what the show’s writers themselves would have been willing to tolerate.  Many thanks to Maverick and Rowan for very helpful comments and encouragement.  The encouragement was needed even more than usual with this particular story.)


A gin and tonic always reminds him of the best things about summer, so he orders one now and tells the bartender not to be stingy with the gin.

And don't be stingy with the gin. Just for a second, he hears his own sour voice as if he were someone sitting next to him, a stranger, and he doesn't like what he hears. When, during the course of his life, did he become the kind of guy who's short with bartenders? But the tiny part of his mind that cares is easily overshadowed by a much bigger part that's been steeped in the day's horror and has no patience with such pointless considerations.

Summer is where he'd rather be right now; it's become both a time and a place to him, the best possible time and place, the one he retreats to when he needs to escape the evil that he stalks—that stalks him in turn—throughout each day. Summer is a warm night at home with his wife and son, sitting on lawn chairs in the backyard and listening to the crickets and the gentle rattling of the sprinklers. He remembers the last time he was there for real, laughing and breathing the sweet, heavy evening air. It was just a few weeks ago, the night before they drove Jamie to college and left him there. Alone, on his own, an 18-year-old kid in a tiny dorm room with a stranger for a roommate. Who would look after him now? Who would protect him from...

His eyes are drawn to his briefcase, lying on the stool next to him. Between where it's been today and what it holds, he doesn't even want to touch it.

Instead, he reaches inside the pocket of his jacket to pull out the three photographs he carries with him everywhere now. Three young men, two so young that their most recent pictures had been taken while they were still in high school. Just kids, really. Not much more than kids.

He studies each one in turn, taking note of how they're starting to wear a bit around the edges, how they're molded into a shape that approximates the curvature of his pocket. One neatly airbrushed, brand-new-shirt-and-tie high school senior portrait; one candid shot of a boy crouching, grinning and shirtless, on the deck of a sailboat; one not-so-candid shot of an awkward, serious boy in a slightly ill-fitting suit, holding a large trophy. It's too small to make out in the picture, but the trophy is for first place in a conference-wide debate competition.

Now that he's holding them in his hand, he feels he should at least go through the motions of having taken them out for a legitimate reason.

"Excuse me, sir."

The bar isn't crowded this early in the evening, and the bartender seems happy enough to turn away from the television and come right over. He's young—probably another college student, or maybe someone not long out of college—and has the unsettling look of someone whose picture might end up being carried around in his pocket someday.

Get a grip, he thinks. Like a uniform he can slip on and off at a moment's notice, his posture straightens and stiffens and his face takes on a slack, neutral expression as he shows his FBI identification.

"Is there some kind of problem...um...Officer?" The bartender's voice is tight and nervous; he clearly isn't sure about the proper way to address an FBI agent.

"Special Agent Pierce Taylor, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I'm simply canvassing everyone in the area. Have you ever seen any of these men come into this bar?" He unfolds a napkin and places the photos on top of it in a row.

The bartender seems somewhat relieved, if still a bit twitchy. Taylor knows enough about body language to know that he's been thrown off by his mere presence, not by anything more than that. He watches wide blue eyes dart from photo to photo, failing to take anything in.

"Take your time."

"Sorry, I..." He takes a deep breath, exhales it. "They don't really look familiar. I mean, they could have come in here, though, and I just didn't notice, you know? I'm not really good at remembering faces—I mean, I don't always pay that much attention, because sometimes we're really busy? And --"

"It's okay." Taylor holds up a hand to dissuade him from further babbling.

"Did they, uh...are they wanted or something? Like, dangerous?"

Wanted? Taylor bites back the bitter reply he wants to give him. Well, in a manner of speaking, yes, he thinks. They're wanted very badly, by many, many people. Their mothers, for instance. Their mothers want them. Their fathers, too. They want their sons back home at Spring Break, at Christmastime, on the odd weekend, the way they're supposed to be. They want their sons back, period.

Dangerous? Hardly. Not to anyone. Especially not now.

"No." Taylor reaches for his briefcase, yanks it open, pulls an 8½-by-11 sheet of photo paper out and tosses it across the bar. "What about him?"

It doesn't take an expert in law enforcement to tell it's a printout of a mugshot, and the bartender picks it up gingerly. When he really takes a look at it, though, he doesn't seem to be able to look away.

"Hmm."

Excitement curls through Taylor's gut. "Yeah?"

"No...I mean, I definitely haven't seen him before. Him, I think I'd remember."

Jesus Christ. It's the same old story. Taylor wants to snatch the picture away, tear it into a hundred tiny pieces, light them on fire, piss on the ashes.

He gathers the other three photos, stacks them neatly, and tucks them back into his pocket. "Look...technically, I'm off duty. You don't even need to be talking to me." He wants the bartender away from him now. After everything Taylor's seen today, after the way this guy couldn't take his eyes off the mugshot, it's a little too easy to imagine him as a bloated, trussed-up, half-decomposed body in a shallow grave.

"No, I want to help. I wish I could. Hey, let me get you another drink. On the house."

The guy's already pouring the gin, so who's Taylor to say "no"? He glances at the mugshot as he stuffs it back into his briefcase, the smirking face that says You'll never prove a thing, G-man.

"So this guy—the guy in the mugshot. Is he dangerous? Should we, like, keep an eye out for him or something?"

Taylor doesn't want to talk about him. He doesn't want to talk about any of this anymore. "No. You don't need to worry about him. He's in prison."

"But...okay, so you're not looking for him? Like, chasing him?"

Every question this guy asks has too many possible answers, and having to sort through and pare them down to the one that's actually appropriate is starting to give Taylor a headache.

Oh yeah, he thinks. I'm chasing him, all right.

He shakes his head and swallows the dregs of his drink, then stares in contempt at the glass he's just emptied. Tall and skinny, like those flasks in high school chemistry class—probably supposed to be trendy. He assumes the four-plus bucks they charge for a few sips out of one is intended to make the whole experience even trendier.

At home, he mixes drinks in big, crystal beer mugs; the thickness of the glass helps maintain the drink's temperature as he sips it slowly throughout the evening, even when it's hot and muggy outside. Jamie always liked to watch him mix drinks, ever since he was a little kid. Taylor even let him have a sip from time to time. To take away alcohol's mystic allure, he said whenever his wife eyed the two of them skeptically. You'll thank me for it someday.

It seems to have worked, too. Well, something did, anyway. Jamie's never been in any kind of real trouble, never once come stumbling through the door with booze on his breath, no matter how long past curfew he stayed out with his friends.

No, scratch that: his friend. There really was just the one.

He's my best friend, Dad, that's all, is what Jamie had said. But the way he'd looked down at the floor and blushed bright pink told him that really wasn't all.

Taylor clutches his gin and tonic tightly and tries to take another sip, having already forgotten it's empty. Those moments with his son, such breathtaking parental ineptitude concentrated into just a few brief minutes, are ones he tries not to revisit very often; when he does, he almost always needs more of whatever he's drinking.

That conversation had still been plaguing him daily the last time he talked to Mrs. Lewis, Byam's mother. She'd seemed to look right inside his head and read his thoughts. You have a son, too, don't you Mr. Taylor, she had said to him. It was a statement rather than a question, choked out as she jabbed at the air with her cigarette and tears slid down her cheeks. Maybe he's like my boy...that way...and maybe he isn't. But no one's son deserves this. You hear me? You got that?

"So, if he's in prison..." The bartender has already set another drink in front of him and is now leaning casually against the bar, obviously much more comfortable than he was a few minutes ago. "Then why show me his picture?"

Again with the questions.

Why show him his picture? Because he'd already been shown the pictures of three innocent young men who had been butchered, and the one action must always be followed by the other. Because you never know what's going to trigger a memory, what's going to make a guy say Oh, God, yeah, he was in here, yeah, I remember him, you don't forget someone like that, he could have had his pick of guys, but he left with the dorky college boy who'd been sitting alone at the end of the bar, the one who seemed too shy to talk to anyone, and hey, come to think of it, I don't think I've seen either one of them in here since.

"Because prison's too fucking good for him, that's why." It comes out sounding more venomous than he'd meant it to, so he shakes his head and waves his hand in a vaguely apologetic gesture. He realizes he should probably say more. "I'm working to nail him on more serious charges."

The night they put a needle in that evil bastard's arm is the next night I'll sleep peacefully. Mrs. Lewis was the one who said it, but, as he lay in bed that night, he'd realized it applied to him, too. And he knew they weren't the only ones.

One night, someday, they'll all get a good night's sleep, if he has anything to say about it.

"Got any glasses bigger than this?"

The bartender smiles and says "Sure thing—your money's no good here anyway." He says it like he's been waiting his entire short career as a bartender to say that to somebody—and, again, who's Taylor to say "no"? Let him keep 'em coming if it'll make him happy. He'll give his wife a call—his wonderful wife, who always understands—and then, later, he'll call Vinnie, who'll come and pick him up and drive him home, no questions asked. Taylor's done the same for him, plenty of times. They both understand how the job can get under your skin, some cases worse than others, and every once in a while a man needs a night like this—alone, anonymous, not expected to make conversation or respond to any, able to sort through the thoughts that need to be sorted through without having to explain or justify his silence to anybody.

Before he has too many more drinks, though, he's got another call to make.

Jamie's panting when he answers the phone; he says he had been down the hall when he heard it ring and had to run to answer it in time. Taylor can always tell when his son is telling the truth.

"You staying out of trouble?" he asks in a mock-gruff fatherly voice.

"Pretty much," Jamie answers, his voice sly. "Let's just say I haven't been up to anything a federal agent would need to concern himself over."

"Ha ha." Taylor's smiling, but his throat feels tight. "Just be careful, okay? That city is full of freaks. You have no idea..."

"I do know, Dad. And I'm always careful." Of course, Jamie isn't stupid; he's well aware of what his father does for a living. He knows better than to just brush it off. "You've had a couple of drinks, huh?"

Taylor snorts. "We'll make a detective out of you yet."

"Call Vinnie to drive you home, okay?"

Taylor opens his mouth to reply but can't speak. How can he tell him what he really needs to tell him? That the world is stalked by homicidal freaks who'd love nothing better than to get their hands on a kid like him, and he has the crime scene photos in his briefcase to prove it? That they might look and sound and act normal—even worse, they might be "charming," "attractive," "irresistible," they might have an "insanely sexy swagger" or a "gorgeous smile" or "beautiful, clear blue eyes"—and that he'd probably be better off not taking anyone he meets at face value? That he's better off just not trusting anybody? That Mark Karachi, Byam Lewis, and Brice Tibbets had run off to college, too; they'd packed up and left their parents, tried their hand at playing adult, gone out to the wrong kind of bar and struck up a conversation with someone who, swear to God, didn't seem like an evil, demented monster—and now two of them are buried deep in the earth and the third is zipped up in a body bag, lying inside a morgue refrigerator?

How can he tell him those things? To put them into words would be to turn his worst nightmare into something tangible, an actual possibility.

So he says, in a gravelly voice, "That's the plan, kid"—because that way he sounds like a normal dad, more or less. He'll spend the rest of their call asking about his son's classes and whether or not he has enough money, the sorts of things his dad would have asked him about. Things Jamie will probably groan about later with his friends but that he'd miss if he didn't hear them.

But another part of Taylor's mind will be somewhere else, just like it is most of the time these days. That part will be sitting in a small room in front of a pane of glass, among three grieving families, watching an evil man's last moments on earth. And after he says "goodbye" to his son, that part of his mind, once again reminded of its purpose, will overshadow everything and demand to know what's going to be done next.


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