Lock and Key

Replay was not generally given to nightmares, but under the circumstances most of us would have expected it. Hence Lindbergh wasn't at all surprised when she sat bolt upright at the sharp crack of thunder which indicated a lightning strike less than a half-mile away. There was nothing about her to hint that she was other than fully alert, expecting trouble, and prepared to deal with it, but the rumble of more distant thunder a few moments later was enough to let her relax considerably and drop most of that facade. "It's okay," the pilot told her, wondering as he did who he was trying to reassure; "it's only a storm."

"What's the highest point around, and how far?" she asked, which startled him a bit.

"Methodist steeple," he answered after a moment's thought. "Almost half a mile. Or maybe the police dispatch tower a little closer. Hard to tell. Why?"

"A girl has to watch out for lightning if she wants to stay out of hospitals," she said. "It's not one of my favorite weather phenomena." From the tone of her voice, she might not have relaxed as much as he'd thought. "There isn't a basement around here is there?"

"I can check, but the sirens aren't going off."

"They don't need to for me to be unhappy."

Lindbergh had just reached for his own go-phone when someone knocked on the door, and he pulled the Beretta instead. "It's Rawhide. C'mon, open up; the Lady's got a thing about storms."

The pilot unlocked the door on the strength of recognizing that voice alone, but eased it back cautiously, pistol ready until he was certain. Rawhide nodded his approval and Lindbergh put the gun away. "You're missing whatever Buckaroo wanted to talk about, aren't you?" he asked.

"Not for awhile," said Rawhide, although he'd heard little more of it than most of us at that point. "You up to this, or do I need to carry you?" he asked Replay.

"I think I can manage," she said, "but I'll regret it later."

"It's not far," he said. "We're going to put you in the boiler room for awhile." He helped her to her feet, careful to put himself between her and the small, high windows as much as possible. "Lots of concrete. A little chill maybe, but you'll like it."

"Where do I sign the lease?" she quipped, trying a first step she probably wouldn't have managed if she'd had shoes on.

"Let me help," Rawhide said, slipping an arm around her. She was much too shaky for his liking, but he knew how far he wouldn't get by arguing. If she really needed to be carried, he'd probably find out when she fell over unconscious; pushing the issue would only ensure that at least one of them would end up that way, and it didn't necessarily follow that it would be her.

"Point me the right way," she said. If her decision to trust Buckaroo had been based initially on the fact that he was clearly an ally, she would not have said the same of Rawhide. Remembering his face from her own art was one thing; the way he held her now was quite another. He'd done this before, though she couldn't recall where or when; his grip was deliberately planned to be more of an aid to balance than anything else and to allow her free access to the weapons they both knew she wasn't carrying just now. Nothing about it was calculated enough to strike her as intended to reassure her; he simply knew her better than she might have hoped for under the circumstances, well enough to know she understood the difference between business and opportunity. Just now, it was definitely business.

If Lindbergh had qualms or questions about Rawhide's grip, he wisely kept them to himself. Rumor had it that she was one of the big man's personal recruits, though not one whom Big Norse was jealous of; it was possible considering the apparent difference in their ages that she was a younger sibling, not that it was anyone's business but their own. As long as she wasn't objecting, the pilot didn't really have much to say about it. "Am I still on duty?" he wondered, sticking to a safer subject and holding the door.

"You okay with that?" Rawhide asked Replay. The slightly surprised look she gave him before answering confirmed Buckaroo's hints that something wasn't what it appeared. She didn't seem to understand why he was asking.

"I get a selection?" She certainly knew that someone was going to be keeping an eye out regardless of her wishes, and wasn't bothered by that part of it. Having an unexpected choice, even in theory, was another matter. "Since when?"

"Since overwatch got to be stormwatch," the cowboy said, wondering if she'd take the hint that the other man might not be experienced enough -- or sufficiently briefed -- to deal with her under those circumstances. "And since Raven isn't here."

The name went right past her without any sign of recognition, nothing more than a name she would undoubtedly recall and be able to connect to him later without putting a face to it. She flinched at another nearby lightning strike and nearly lost her footing. "How far?" she asked, the issue of who'd watch over her banished from her immediate attention.

"One more door, and a flight of steps," he told her. "I'll watch her myself, Lindbergh. Go tell the boss I'm working on it, but he may be right."

The stairs proved to be something of a problem for Replay until she decided to close her eyes and lean on Rawhide for navigational assistance as much as for support, but she managed to get down the single flight without toppling over. The boiler room itself was every thing he'd described it to be. Thick concrete walls the builders had intended to help contain the damage had the boiler ever burst were as much insulation for her as she could have expected to find outside the ranch, for which she was immediately grateful. "Better?" Rawhide asked her, hoping it was enough.

"Much," she said. She was only flinching slightly every time the lightning hit, but now some of what looked like mere shivers actually were. "Thanks."

"I think maybe you'd better at least sit down," he suggested. "How about over here?" The interior corner of the room, with not one but two solid walls to her back, struck him as the choice she would have made for herself if she'd been thinking that clearly, so he wasn't surprised when she didn't object to it.

"You're family too, aren't you?" she said, surprising him. "You and Buckaroo both."

"Yeah, and no." Better to be honest, even if he confused her at first. "Nothing the courts recognize around here."

She didn't seem surprised by that. "Did he tell you I've got entire days missing?"

"Just that things weren't right. Hate to say it, but you're missing more than a few days."

"No kidding." She was way too tense, and probably too cold, to go back to sleep any time soon, but at least he could keep her attention off of the lightning enough for her to think straight without undue effort. That was a small victory in its own right, considering that the storm was pretty intense for something that didn't seem inclined to spawn tornadoes in all quarters. "It's like someone's erased specific things, but I can't put enough together to know why anybody'd try it. Or how they'd go about accomplishing it. That's like trying to pick all the grains of quartz out of a bag of mixed sand; what gain is there in it?"

"You're not just headblind, are you?" He wasn't avoiding her question, just trying to decide how to answer it without feeling like an idiot or worrying her.

"That and confused. Not paranoid of you, if you're wondering." He wasn't surprised that she pulled the blanket he'd brought down with them closer around herself anyhow; the storm had dropped the outside temperature significantly, and she just wasn't acclimated to it. For her, the room would have been a bit chill even if she'd been wearing jeans instead of the overlong T-shirt she'd been put to bed in.

"Me personally, or...?"

"I drew you once," she said. "And I'm guessing you autographed it yourself, but damned if I can tell you if I've ever heard you play. I wasn't even sure Buckaroo was anything more than a friend of the family until he said 'bye'." She didn't explain that, figuring that if she was right about Rawhide, he'd already know what she meant. Other people, Lindbergh in particular, might have taken B. Banzai's parting gesture as nothing more than a casual pat on the shoulder. Anybody who knew her well enough to rate any clearance number at all knew better; in her family, that particular contact was a greeting reserved for parents or siblings. "But so far, the only person I have a hint I ought to be paranoid about is this Wayback."

Rawhide whistled. "Buckaroo wasn't kidding when he said situation. Said you wouldn't call it that, though." As far as she was concerned, situation was a very loaded word, not used without caution; most of us were beginning to pick up that habit.

"I haven't got the information to base a call on," she admitted, "so I'm stuck leaving it to the local experts for now." She shuddered again, and this time even he could feel the electricity in the air for a fraction of a second before the strike. "Should I be paranoid of you, or for you?"

"Of, no. For -- maybe. Can't say yet whether there was more to it than the talava."

"Lords, this is frustrating," she told him. "I've seen enough by now to know I ought to know people, but I just can't retrieve anything."

"Kick in the jaw, ain't it?" Rawhide sympathized.

"You?"

"Awhile back," he said. This, at least, was not something they'd ever discussed before. "I was clinically dead for a couple minutes. The medics got me back, but I woke up not knowing where I was or who anybody was. Took a couple days to get used to the medication before I started getting anything back."

"That was meds." She said it like she'd seen the same thing happen elsewhere -- not dismissive of it, merely negating it as a likely culprit in her case. "You've got no personal way of telling how disoriented in general you were, do you? This doesn't happen to me, not that way, and not from having my head bashed in."

"Repeatedly." He brushed her hair back from the part of her forehead where her skull was protected by a steel plate under the skin.

If she hadn't been pretty certain of his status before, that would have clinched it. "The last time I had to deal with anything remotely like this was, Lords, maybe ten years ago, right before I nearly took out the end of the landing bay. Hadn't been back in the world for more than a few months when I about lost it over a little brother being threatened and --" Whatever she'd been intending to say, she lost it in the face of a wave of memories too recently regained and almost too painful to have shared even with those involved. It took the overpressure from a lighting bolt hitting the top of the chapel steeple only a few hundred feet away to bring her back to the present.

"You don't have to talk about it," Rawhide said. Whatever was bothering her, it had to be pretty serious; she didn't normally say 'back in the world' except in contrast to 'incountry'. Neither was an expression Wayback -- or many of the other interns just then -- would have expected to hear anyone of her apparent age use, dating as they did to the Vietnam War. Those of us who are residents knew her to be much older than she looked, but also to be very closemouthed about the months she'd spent in the middle of that conflict.

"I think maybe I do," she disagreed. "But not here or now." Her control was questionable at best, if the tone of her voice was any indication. "I thought I'd gotten back everything I lost then that I was ever going to recover, but something sneaked up on me a few months ago, Christmas shopping. I'm not dealing with that too well yet."

"I've seen a couple of Indigo's flashbacks, lady. I don't begin to know how you could take it."

"I almost didn't. Sometimes I still wonder if I did."

***

We live in an age when most people are quite media-literate by the time they reach adulthood, if not sooner. But with the broadcast ratings services using a statistical sampling scheme, most of us end up quite completely out of the loop in terms of the actual numbers game. T he Nielsen company, at recent report, polls less than two thousand households in order to generate the number, in millions, of people watching a particular television show on any night of the week. The higher the ratings a show gets, the more it's network can charge for advertising in that time slot.

Ratings are important for radio too, although quite how they're determined is even more arcane to most of us. Certainly, a station's format affects the numbers, but there are perhaps more subtle factors related to the DJ than are fully realized. A DJ having a bad day and venting it on the air may work in one market but not another, while a DJ having a bad day on the air is likely to make the numbers drop regardless of the target audience. Concert announcements are always good for ratings, though. Generally speaking, background information about a band the station is welcoming to town can do wonders as well, especially if it's presented a bit at a time. Nonetheless, there are limits.

One of the DJ's on a particular station in town had stepped over the line. Those of you native to the area probably aren't having to guess which station was involved, even if you didn't hear it; they have a reputation for that kind of "slip up" occurring from time to time. The pig looks like it's smoking marijuana for a reason, I'm told.

Normally, however, letting a band's current location slip out over the air can get a DJ suspended and/or fined. It doesn't usually provide the police with a reason to get involved, but in our instance there was some question as to whether it was a relatively innocent grab for ratings or intentional aid to the enemy.

Likewise, the police were still gathering evidence from the hotel itself. As something of a security measure, we'd been given rooms near the to p of the building, some of which were now open to the sky. Fortunately, the structural damage had been confined above the 24th floor, allowing most of the other guests to return to their rooms without major safety concerns, but the necessity of shoring up the top three floors before the police could risk spending much time on the crime scene had undoubtedly destroyed a significant amount of evidence.

Had a civilian managed to make it past the 25th floor on the elevator the afternoon that Replay regained consciousness, he probably would have been arrested the instant he tried to step off, however mistakenly. Certainly he could have been forgiven for looking once and deciding that it would be simpler and cheaper to destroy the damaged floors altogether than to repair them. The biggest shards of glass that clung precariously to warped and broken frames were scarcely larger than a quarter, most of them hazed or chipped where needles had impacted before bouncing away. One interior wall, only partially standing, bore a silhouette in unmarked plaster, mute testimony to where Replay had been standing when the blast occurred. Two separate forensics teams were working the site, not an officer among them who wasn't on edge. The possibility of someone getting stuck by one of the thousands of flechettes was on everyone's mind, a far more immediate threat than any shifting the building might do.

The photographer was finished with the initial scene photos well before anyone had tried to touch anything, of course, and had shot a second set after the temporary pillars had been put in place. The flechettes had actually made things easier for the police in one respect; wit h some of us on the scene long before the photos could be arranged for, those tiny projectiles made it obvious where items had been disturbed before the scene had been secured. There was only the exact position of a white Stratocaster guitar to be accounted for, which seemed insignificant at present and very likely to remain so; it would not have been an issue at all if Perfect Tommy hadn't been captured on home video leaving the scene with it. Since that amateur tape was the only public footage anyone had of us since the incident, it had played heavily on the local news stations, much to the frustration of detectives, who too-frequently found themselves speaking to people who wanted to question them about the tape rather than to potential witnesses.

In truth, detective Sergeant Harrison, was finding little but frustration in being in charge of the case. The high-profile nature of the incident would have made dealing with the media difficult enough even if no celebrities had been involved. Too, a good number of his fellow officers were inordinately interested in the slightest discovery, so there were more than the usual number of precinct house rumors flying about. Speculation seemed to be the order of the day everywhere he turned. There were only two things he had no doubts about at present. One was that he was getting too old for this stuff. The other was that it would get worse before it got any better.

Normally, the forensics teams would have been long finished by this point too, which at least would have gotten the media off his back for a couple days, but the same structural damage which had compounded their chain-of-evidence worries had kept them out of the site for well over 24 hours. Normally, there would only have been one team, and normally, it wouldn't have taken the better part of two days once they had gotten in. They would have gone about the routine business of picking up everything portable from dust bunnies to ceiling tiles and carted all of it off to the labs a long time ago. This was where the flechettes themselves were causing concern on a second level. No one wanted to end up with one of the tiny needles in a finger, even if it was the "clean" end; they were scarcely larger than a medium splinter and devilishly difficult to remove without magnification. Pulling one out of a hand would have been enough of a problem, but preserving them as evidence had proven to be positively nightmarish. If retrieving them hadn't been difficult enough, there was also the question of how to secure them safely for transport and storage.

For the present, they were using a stainless steel chafing dish liberated from the hotel's kitchen, but Harrison was debating the wisdom of even dealing with the projectiles for at least the thirtieth time since lunch. They should have been using hazmat gear for that, or at least have brought in some MPs from Ft. Leonard Wood who were qualified in NBC suits. He was debating what choice words he was going to have with the Chief about it when his train of thought was derailed by a distinctive tone coming from his two-way radio. Just what he needed. Weather. Time to pack it in before the storm tore hell out of his crime scene.

Go to Chapter Four