by jordan
Houston, Texas 24 hours later
Except for a headache from where her skull had connected with the pavement in her jump from the car (great tuck and roll, her older brother would have applauded), Scully felt well enough to go back to work right away. She tried Mulder's number for the dozenth time, got nothing. She called the branch headquarters and got a prompt, if cool, response.
A car came to pick her up within the hour.
Neither Seagram nor Danson seemed inclined to kiss and make up, but they gave Scully a grudging respect which she deeply resented, because it was Skinner they were respecting, not her, with their polite but distant attitudes. Damn Skinner anyway. She understood and even appreciated his efforts to protect her. Nothing better in a boss, actually. But when it came right down to it, what he gave her in the way of protection, he took away from her in the way of self-respect. (You never get anything without paying for it, her father used to tell her. God doesn't allow shoplifters in life.) Everything comes with a price.
For some reason she couldn't get her father out of her head this afternoon. Did he watch, from some heavenly perspective, as she kissed Skinner, let him touch her? (Well, Dana, think about on THAT your next date, and you'll earn that Ice Queen title for real.) But that wasn't really what worried her. Anyway, all that was over. There had been a finality in her parting with Skinner that was both a relief and a bittersweet pang whenever she thought about it. When she had time to process all that had happened, to sit at her laptop and indulge her private thoughts, then she might feel guilty about it. But probably not. They'd given each other some sweetness in a time of emptiness and sorrow. In return, this sadness of farewell, the weight of knowledge between them that they had done something that would hurt other people if it continued. That made it wrong somehow. But it didn't feel wrong. Anyway, there was this pain in her, not terrible, just a low level sadness, that somehow balanced the books, paid for all the pleasure he'd given her.
Good Catholic girl upbringing. Pay for pleasure. For each time a stray image passed through her mind, say, Skinner holding her down and forcing his way into her, the line of his teeth so straight and even as her tongue teased his mouth open, the enormous power of the man held in such amazing check, filling her with power because she could control his every movement with no more than a whimper or a soft intake of breath---
Scully pressed her lips together, hard, to keep from smiling. (Where was I going with this?) Oh, yes. Guilt. Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. Sinner. Skinner. For each image, a penance. A stab of guilt.
They stopped in front of a row of abandoned buildings in an area in the heart of town, or so she thought; the tall buildings of Houston were somewhere beyond them, out of sight. The street names were too confusing to follow. Montrose, Waugh Drive, and then West Gray, but somehow West Gray seemed to run in all directions, dead ending and then picking up again in improbable places, blocks over. It was all a maze, and she gave up trying to memorize it and resigned herself to the back seat position.
Danson handed her a thick file over the back of his seat. "We've known for some time that the girls were being abducted from all over the country, and funneled to Houston to some central location," he told her. "This city is so close to the border that a plane can have them into Mexico in no time. From there, no one will ever be able to follow them."
"But Liz Ann ran away from home," Scully said. "Didn't she? Is there something I don't know about?"
"No, you're right," Danson said. "She and another girl, maybe the one in your picture and maybe not, took off together. Or else the other girl set out for Houston and then when she got here gave Liz Ann the go-ahead to come down. The details of this case are so sketchy we can't get together an actionable case against anyone. That's why we're so sensitive about it, I guess."
It was the closest to a real apology he'd come, and Scully was somewhat mollified. She said, "What's the pawnshop got to do with it?"
"This is where we hear our chief suspect, a man called �The Buyer' is supposed to make his contacts. We've had this place under observation, but we can't get enough to tag it, so we can't keep it under constant surveillance. The only photograph we've ever seen of the place besides the ones we've taken is the one you showed us."
Seagram said, "All we ever get is vague rumors and heresay. And yet the girls go missing, twenty to forty a year, and there's never a sign of them. No bodies, no leads, nothing. They just vanish from the face of the earth, as far as we can tell. But we suspect the Buyer doesn't use direct methods. He must draw them with some kind of bait. Maybe a modeling job, or a promise to let them be in a movie or something. Whatever, the girls come to him--he doesn't go to them."
"And we never catch them going out at the bus terminal, or at Hobby, or Houston Intercontinental," Danson said. "Whoever has set up this operation has made it foolproof, as far as we can tell."
Scully had been leafing through the file. She narrowed her eyes and said, "Hey! These are the two men who tried to grab me."
Seagram took the file from her and looked at the photographs clipped to the reports. "This is Omar Kudsi," he said. "We're not sure who the other an is. We've observed them coming and going from this area, but never with anyone. We suspect they're the primary procurers."
"But you don't have anything tangible, or solid, in the way of evidence?" Scully asked.
The men exchanged looks. Danson said, "Our solve rate is sixty percent. That's higher than anyone else in our department." His tone wasn't defensive, just weary. "They gave us this case so another twenty or forty girls a year won't end up in some Arab's tent this year." He sighed. "Now each time it happens, it's like it's our fault for not stopping it."
Seagram looked at Scully with more genuine feeling than she suspected him capable of. "Look," he said, "We have files on these girls. They're clean, almost in every case virgins, as far as we can tell, and none of them have had any problems with substance abuse or criminal activity. These are the flower of American womanhood, in the bud, so to speak."
A poet, thought Scully, though a bad one. She said, "Have you tried to set up a trap of any sort?"
"This guy is a fuckin' criminal genius," Danson said. "I'm telling you, we've tried everything. And this place--" he pointed at Issie's, "Is just one hunch. And only because pawnshops with this name are found in every city that our girls have been missing from."
Seagram said, "And even at that, it's just rumor, because this isn't even a real pawn shop. It's not registered and as far as we can tell it doesn't advertise itself as such."
"Have you ever gone in?" Scully asked.
Danson and Seagram exchanged a Partner Look, the unspoken communication that only years of working together can develop. Scully knew it all too well. Danson cleared his throat and said, "Uh...no. No, we haven't."
"Why not?"
"We just haven't."
Puzzled, Scully jacked open her door and said, "Well, then, let's see what we're dealing with."
Neither man moved for a few seconds. Danson said, "Well, what the hell."
"What's wrong?" Scully asked.
Seagram just shook his head and got out of the car. Danson hesitated an instant longer. "It's just--" Then he got out of the car, too.
The three of them stood together, closer than most people would consider a comfortable distance apart, in the unforgiving sunshine. Scully, looking at the window, saw something move, a reflection. She looked around quickly, saw only the ragged buildings behind her. She rubbed her eyes hard, until she saw sparks, and then opened them and let her vision clear.
What she had not told anyone, even Skinner, was the real reason the men had tried to abduct her had lost control of their car. Bouncing around in the back seat, Scully had seen the passenger holding a gun on her, and had stopped struggling and was only trying to maintain her balance. She looked out the windshield and saw a girl step directly into the path of the Cadillac. No hesitation, a deliberate act: suddenly there she was, a young blonde girl with a packback. The driver had let out a yelp of fear and jerked the steering wheel hard to the left, and the Cadillac had hit a parked car, giving Scully enough time to get out and make her escape.
(Easy enough to see it that way in retrospect, though, after a blow to the head when you're trying to remember details. Mulder's so suggestive; he could make you remember Skinner as the one who stepped in front of that car, if he was convinced of it himself.)
Scully started walking towards the door of the shop, and the men followed. It was a strange sensation, almost like walking in mud; she felt dragged down, slowed, something about gravity seemed to change as she moved forward. An intense emotion swelled inside her like a balloon full of feeling suddenly inflated to its maximum capacity. A homesickness, a nameless longing. For a moment her eyes stung with tears, silly, referenced by nothing.
All she could think of was Mulder. Mulder.
*************************
Victoria, Texas, 24 hours earlier
Mulder stood just inside the shop for a few minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the dim interior after the white hot glare of the sun. He smelled musty odors, and spices, and wood polish, and human sweat, and mice. He felt rather than heard the dull thumping of bass from somewhere, everywhere.
There was a long oak bar, like in a pub, across the back of the shop,
which seemed enormous, cavernous, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The sunlight weakened as it had further to travel, so that the far end of the shop looked almost dark.
Around him were a million items, shelves crammed full of things, things stacked on the floor, dangling from the ceiling. Guitars, umbrellas, typewriters, hair dryers. Books of every kind, backpacks, wheeled tool carts in bright red that said SNAP ON. Telephones, silver trays with tea services, quivers full of arrows.
Someone stirred in the depths, behind the counter. Mulder blinked him into focus, and walked across the creaking wood planks of the floor, going a further distance than made sense to him, into the bowels of the shop.
The man was no more than five feet, slim and supple, vaguely Asian in features. He had lank black hair and slanted eyes, broad high cheekbones. When he smiled his mouth reminded Mulder of a marsupial wolf, an extinct creature he had only seen on the Discovery channel in a black and white film. When the wolf had yawned its mouth had opened the length of its whole head.
"Ah, it's you," the man said, as if greeting an old friend.
Something suspended from the ceiling brushed Mulder's face like a cobweb, and he reached up to push it back. It was a pair of shoelaces, white, with the word NIKE printed on each one.
Thump thump thump thump.
Mulder felt unaccountably ill. He put both hands on the counter to brace himself against a wave of nausea.
"I can help you?" the man asked. Or said. He had an accent; it was hard to tell.
Mulder's voice sounded strange to his own ears, as if he had a head cold.
"Looking for Issie," he managed.
"I am Issie."
"I'm sorry. You'll have to excuse me. I'm feeling a little..." Mulder squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again there was some subtle change in the room. The shadows in the corners seemed to have deepened, elongated. The light coming form the big front window was more muted than before, and gave no warmth at all.
He looked at Issie desperately and said, "What's that noise?"
"What, this?" The little Asian was holding something under the counter.
Three balls. He held them up, miniature replicas of the balls above the door. They were no bigger than tennis balls. They seemed to be moving.
One was the color of whirling smoke, one was melting gold, one was a crystal prism containing light.
His voice was liquid, like a winding snake. "This noise?"
Thump thump thump thump.
Mulder looked into those black, black eyes. For a moment he heard the whole sound, or almost all of it, the way someone listening to music in their head hears only a few bars, over and over, and then hears the whole song on the radio, and it becomes clear.
The sound was: thump thump thump thump thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump
A music he knew in his blood, hot and bold and terrible. He clapped his hands over his ears and shouted, "Stop!"
The sound stopped at once. The pain of his headache was so intense he could hardly breathe. He saw the balls in a blur; they seemed to be moving around each other like some intricately complex toy.
"The girl," he began.
Issie smiled that impossibly wide smile, the corners of his lips sliding almost all the way back to his ears. "Ah, girls," he said. "Like sweet flowers, aren't they? Sweet, sweet flowers."
Mulder looked away from the entrapment of those eyes. "Do you know what happened to Flower?" he asked.
"She went home," Issie said. He sounded a little sad. "She was here. Now gone."
Mulder felt drunk. The balls seemed to be juggling of their own accord. The guy was a magician. It was all a trick. Gas, drugs. Something in the air. He swayed, staring at them as they circled each other.
Issie held one out, the crystal ball. He said, "Gold for beautiful memories in the past. Silver for present, all smoke and mirror. Strange reflections, yes? Crystal for future. Look here."
Mulder looked. He saw a blank wall, some kind of innocuous wallpaper, vaguely familiar. And two posts, connected by an arch. A headboard. Banging on the wall. Thump thump thump thump. Daylight blazing through the curtains across a naked back.
Thumpthumpthumpthump�
"No!" He turned and ran, one foot in front of the other, knocking things over, flailing wildly with his arms like a skier losing downhill control, stumbling, banging through the front door, and a thin strange thread of laughter tinkling behind him like a silver bell�
*********************
Houston, Texas
There was a little bell on the door that tinkled when they opened it, and Scully shuddered for some reason, a goose walking over her grave, as she glanced up at it.
And saw the three balls suspended in mid air.
Seagram and Danson realized she'd paused, and followed her gaze up.
"Son of a bitch," Seagram said, with admiration. "How the hell do they do that?"
Danson said, "I saw something like that done once with electro magnets and a globe. It was like perpetual motion. Great special effect, though, isn't it?"
Scully ducked inside, out of the blazing Houston heat into the vast cool interior of the shop.
It was dark inside, light filtered down from some unseen souce, probably a skylight in the ceiling, through which dust motes swirled lazily, giving everything a kind of antique patina, a hazy look.
Scully saw an umbrella stand made from an elephant's foot. She shuddered and turned away, saw at the far end of the shop an oak counter with a small Oriental man at the far end. When Danson and Seagram moved towards him, away from her, she could see that they were going downhill somehow, not just away, but DOWN, as if the floor dipped. And yet when she moved to follow them, there was no gravitational shift to tell her she was going in any direction but a straight even line.
It took forever to reach the end of the shop. Five mintes? What the hell was going on here? This place was too creepy. Despite its huge size, she felt claustrophobic. Danson and Seagram just kept walking and walking and walking.
Finally time caught up to her, like a rubber band elongated and then let go with a snap. She had experienced the feeling before, but she couldn't remember where or when. Then she was standing in front of the counter. The small man, whose mouth reminded her of a snake's mouth, that thin line going from one side of his face to the other, fixed his black eyes on her and ignored the men.
"You want redeem?" he asked.
He spoke as if he knew her. Danson and Seagram gave her curious looks, as if wondering whether she'd been here before.
She said, "Pardon me?"
"Redeem?" He was holding something in his hands, some balls like the ones over the door.
"Is this a pawnshop?" she asked.
The smile came, horribly, as she knew it would. Slowly spreading like a crack in the universe. His voice was invidious, mocking. "You want redeem?" he repeated.
Seagram said something. When the dark eyes moved to him, Scully felt released, and turned around, looking at the shop itself. There were stacks of old rolled maps, lamps made of brass pipe fittings, and boxes of crayons. There were sailor hats and latex gloves and little pots carved from sandstone. There were jars full of screws and rolls of duct tape and candles shaped like naked women. It was as if the detritus of the world had settled here in this shop, the odds and ends of everyone's junk drawer had somehow sifted down through that smiling crack in the universe and had fallen into this place.
Scully was in the process of turning back when her eyes skimmed a rusted rear view mirror lying on a shelf, and saw something reflected in it. Not her own blue eyes, but by some trick of the light, hazel ones. Triangular, as familiar to her as her own, but not her own. Mulder's eyes, looking at her.
She gave a short gasp and took a step back. Someone had turned on a radio somewhere; she could feel the bass thump reverberating through the wooden floorboards. Must have been a car passing with the stereo on, rising to a crescendo, then falling away.
Oh Skinner, inside her, forcing her open, harder, faster, the headboard banging with each forward thrust, his eyes half closed watching her Skinner Skinner--she flung out her hand, reaching across infinity, and cried out, Mulder!
Scully blinked. The sound was gone, and her headache with it. The balls in the man's hands looked dull, flat. Her right hand ached with emptiness.
(Okay, so maybe you did suffer a mild concussion after all. This is just some kind of reaction to the head injury. It'll clear up in a minute. Just hang in there.)
The man behind the counter was answering questions, half smiling, toying with the balls. The three of them might have been speaking in a foreign language. Scully felt like she was falling away from reality, not losing consciousness, just losing her grip. This was why she drank so rarely, this awful feeling that made some people mellow terrified her. She didn't want to let go.
Desperate, she played her trump card. During a lull in the voices, she drew the picture of Tanya MacClean from her purse and laid it on the polished oak counter and said, "Have you seen this girl?"
The man's face changed as much as Brother John's had. He shook his head.
"No," he said. "No, no." But he obviously knew exactly who Tanya was, and didn't like it.
"So," Seagram said. He reached into his own pocket and pulled out some pictures, sorted one out and laid it on the counter. It was a picture of Liz Ann, one Scully hadn't seen before. "Then have you seen this one?"
Your timing sucks, Scully thought sourly. Mulder would have drawn it out, made him speak before either of them spoke again. In a verbal match, the first person who speaks loses, and ends up telling more than they want to say. (You shouldn't have stepped on my line, you fool. Now we've lost him.)
Indeed, the man visibly regained his composure, his bland expression creeping back over his features and erasing all trace of emotion. "No," he said, barely glancing at the picture.
Scully said, "Sir, is this establishment a pawn shop?"
"No," he said, but his smile was so sly, she was confused.
"Then what did you mean when you offered me redemption?" Scully was aware of how odd that sounded, and thought of how to word the sentence better.
She looked to Seagram for help, but he was staring at the retreating back of his partner. Danson was halfway across the room, headed for the door.
After an obvious internal war about what to do, Seagram gave in and went after his partner. Scully took a step hesitantly behind them, but the man behind the counter said, "Wait."
She looked at him, into the obsidian depths of his eyes. They were like tunnels, like bottomless pits. She said, "Sir, if you know anything about either of these girls that you're not telling us, you could be held as an accessory to a federal crime."
The faint tinkle of a silver bell. Scully remembered the fresh air outside with a longing as if she'd been shut up in a submarine for a week. She knew how good it would feel to be out there with them again, above ground. Clear headed. Alive.
The Asian held a ball on his finger, balanced like a little spinning basketball. "Three balls," he said. "The past is remembered golden. The future is just glass, a reflection. But this one." He held out the silver ball, which seemed curiously drained of energy. "This is the one you can have if you want."
It was listening to the ravings of a schizophrenic, words that almost made sense, but didn't, so that the listener began to question her sanity instead of the sanity of the speaker.
Scully said, "I'm going to ask you one last time. Do you know anything about these girls?"
He said in a soft voice that seemed to ripple the air around him like a transparent curtain, "All girls are flowers. Sweet sweet flowers."
Scully said under her breath, "Shit."
Then sharp and clear, the whipcrack of a gunshot. Scully had her automatic in her hand in a flash, and was running the eternal distance to the door. The room around her seemed oddly out of focus, like a picture dissolving in acid. She couldn't hold clarity in her peripheral vision; she just knew she had to get to the exit before it all melted around her.
She burst unexpectedly into heat, glaring sunlight. Danson lay in the parking lot, a pool of bright red billowing under his shoulders, one hand flung out over his head. Seagram was nowhere to be seen. Scully scanned the tops of the buildings for a shooter. The afternoon was silent except for a dull hum that seemed to be coming from the spheres above her head.
She saw the glint of sunlight off a car windshield just as the Cadillac came out of an alley and roared across the lot. She ran to the agents' rental car, diving and rolling behind it. Seagram was on the other side, crouched down with his gun pointed at her. He lowered it quickly.
"Is that the car you saw yesterday?" he asked.
"Yeah, I think so. What happened?"
"They blindsided us when we came out the door. Got Danny." He peered over the hood at his partner, lying motionless. Scully straightened up. "You go after them. I'll call� Damn!" She remembered her stolen phone and said, "Leave me your phone. I'll-- "
"Fuck that," Seagram said. "My partner's down. I'm not leaving him."
It was so unexpected and so irrational that Scully wasted precious seconds staring at him. Then she said, "I'll go after them. Give me the keys. You call an ambulance."
She went to Danson and checked him out. A pulse, and unsteady breathing, but she could tell by the amount of blood he'd lost that his chances weren't good. She found the entry wound in the right breast. Not good at all. Wadding the tail of his jacket, she held it to the wound and said, "Keep pressure on this. Like that. Yes."
She patted Danson's arm--you never knew if they could tell you were there--and ran back to the Taurus. Seagram threw her the keys and she got in, fired it up.
The car growled like an animal eager for the hunt, and Scully hit the gas, coming out of the alley so fast the front tires jumped the curb and the car came down with a flash of sparks as the muffler scraped the sidewalk. A fishtail and then she regained control, and took out after the white car just as it swerved around a far corner.
At last, something clear and concrete to go after, known felons, a crime committed under her very nose, one of her own shot and maybe dying on the asphalt. Something she could get her back up against. Black and white resolved itself out of the mist of ambiguity at last, and the last faint wisps of her headache, her muzziness, vanished, as Dana Scully, Federal Agent, shot down the street in hot pursuit the big white Cadillac.
click here for chapter15a/16
