Criminal Minds Fic: Dead Man's Hand
Feb. 27th, 2007 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cpolkTitle: Dead Man's Hand
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cpolk and matociquala
Rating:Fan Rating: FRT (some profanity, mentions of violence)
Pairing: This is not slash. It's gen. But Dr. Spencer Reid is in it!
Summary: This story is a sequel tomatociquala's Fic Two Pair of Aces. You must read that, or else this story will make no damn sense at all. And it still won't make sense if you've not watched the show. So it's like SPOILERS GALORE. Just saying.
What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.
Maybe.
Dead Man's Hand
Aces and eights. Full house.
The odds are 656 to 1.
Spencer peeks under the corner of his cards only once. He keeps his face impassive. Before the draw, he's holding the dead man's hand.
He's hot tonight. He's careful not to win too often, but everyone has their good nights. There was a tall glass cup of coffee at his elbow before he'd even entered the game, sweetened with three sugars; replaced with a fresh cup and comps by the time he'd gone up five thousand.
And now the dead man's hand, and a pile of chips growing as the table buys in. Spencer raises, enough to give a whiff of competition. A whisper of greed keeps everyone in.
He declines the draw, of course, and doesn't neaten the stack of black and green swirled chips in front of him. He stays mild and unassuming, considering the bet before him, then meeting it.
And, again.
Spencer watches the pile of chips in the middle as he meets and raises, taking up the space of a luncheon plate, three inches high at its peak.
Dominated by black chips, but just barely. Spencer adds two more, and a pair of green twenty-five dollar chips. Modest. Unassuming. Tentative.
656 to 1.
The cosmetic dentist nearly sneers as he meets and raises another two hundred. Dismissed again.
That's just fine.
This hand, and then something at the buffet, and then he'll find a leather seat in the lobby somewhere and write that letter to his mother. It's hardest to write her letters on his vacation - when he is closest to her, he has the least to say.
These days, he has too much that he can't say.
There's only three people in this round. The rest have folded and sat back.
A crowd gathers, attracted by the buzz that surrounds a high limit hand.
People crowd behind Spencer, looking over his shoulder even though there's nothing to see - the cards are facedown, precisely spanned.
One of the watchers brushes along the back of his chair. Spencer turns his head just a little, raising his right shoulder to a murmured "sorry."
He turns back to the green table. He feels watched.
Well, he is. Except--
The crowd shuffles resentfully for a waitress--June, her name is June--who smiles just slightly at him as she sets down a highball for one of the players - Canadian by his accent, short, neat dark hair, glasses, and a mole on his cheek. He thanks her, and June steps back, confident that the watchers will part for her.
They do.
In that gap, Spencer sees a woman. They make eye contact; the gap closes.
He sits higher in his seat, but a forest of heads block the way.
The bet comes to him. He doesn't need to look at the cards again.
656 to one. This could pay for...
...a lot.
But what are the odds of seeing her here? Now?
He throws in his cards and rises from his chair. The cosmetic dentist laughs. The kid lost his nerve.
Oh, if he only knew.
People get out of the way as Spencer pushes through the four-deep crowd, one hand steadying his messenger bag even as chips don't quite make it into his pocket and fall with dog-nail clicks to the wooden floor. He veers around the circle at half a trot and skids to a stop before a bar stool, an empty glass, filled near the top with ice.
He bends forward, sniffs.
Tanqueray. A smudge of thumbprint along the side.
He's got one hand questing under the tan leather flap of his bag, pea-green glove just meeting his fingers as a waitress comes and takes the tumbler away.
He doesn't even stop to curse, walking fast for the exits to catch up with Elle. You don't run when you're leaving a casino. Spencer can't afford suspicion. He scans the wall of glass at the exits, looking for the sweep of dark hair, her walk, even the sharp curve of her cheekbones.
A passenger in that dark green and white cab pushes her hair behind her ear as the vehicle pulls out.
Spencer straight-arms the glass door open and gets the next one, instructing the driver to follow.
She's in an A-Cab, number 1023. Spencer knows that follow-that-cab doesn't really work, in the movies or otherwise. Besides, Elle has to know that he's hot on her heels.
If it's Elle.
It's Elle. He is not imagining things. But what is she doing here? She could be looking for him.
She could have heard. That sort of thing gets around. Everyone knows, at Quantico. When he goes back, all the eyes will be on him, curious, concerned, avid.
After all. Look at what happened last time.
But why run, if she came to see him? Spencer stretches his spine, leans on his left buttock to look down the way. Too many Las Vegas taxis have white roofs.
"Sir? You're in the rearview."
"Right. Sorry. Do you...it's that one turning right on Industrial, isn't it?"
"Sure," the driver says. He doesn't know. The white and green cab flashes around the corner.
1404.
Shit. They drive on, stop and go, just one cab in a school swimming to the strip. Spencer cranes his neck again, peering at numbers.
Lost her.
But that's all right, maybe. Spencer keeps looking, but sits back into the velour seats. Elle wouldn't behave as if she were made if she hadn't been, and Spencer watches the lights swim by as he chews on whys.
It could have been a moment of panic. Perhaps she'll change her mind.
Perhaps she'll seek him out again, when she knows what she'll say. Spencer wonders if he's trying to convince himself, the way he wanted to hear that Elle's shooting in Dayton was good. That Elle's flight is like Spencer's letters to his mother - wanting to be close without having to risk being seen, or seen wrongly.
He really needs to write her a letter. Soon.
He makes the driver stop and walks along the strip--easier to find a cab when you're looking like you want one. He looks for green topped by white, the number 1023.
He finds it almost an hour later outside the Luxor. Spencer walks over and has his identification pushed against the driver's side window before the driver even looks up from his book.
From the cover--an enthroned man with long black hair and a streak of white in the front--Spencer recognizes it. He's read it. A few days ago he played Texas Hold 'Em against the author.
"Step out of the car, please."
It's not a request. Spencer usually plays unassuming and awkward, and leaves cold authority up to Morgan or Hotch.
He used to leave it up to Elle.
He just needs to ask a few questions. The driver doesn't have any answers.
Until: "At 11:42 pm, you picked up a woman outside of the Palms. She had dark hair, high cheekbones, olive complexion, brown eyes. She wore a black high necked blouse and white trousers. She requested a particular destination but changed her instructions during the trip, requesting sudden changes of direction until she asked to be dropped off at busy intersection where you waited for a light. She paid in round numbers and didn't stop for change."
The driver's jaw drops lower and lower as Spencer tells him exactly what Elle did on her fare. And then the driver nods, and explains that Elle had originally asked to be dropped at Caesars, but then changed her mind and told him to turn left on Industrial, and then all through the streets behind the casinos. That she wanted to get out where they were about to turn left onto Tropicana, but it wasn't safe and he dropped her at the MGM Grand instead.
The driver tells Spencer that she went inside.
Profiler voodoo just does that to people. Most of the time it's just statistics. Playing the odds. Not this time, though. Because a profile is just like poker.
There's statistics. And there's how you play the hand. There's how much you're willing to gamble.
And there's why the other guy is at the table.
Spencer thanks him for the information and continues down the Strip.
#
When Spencer walks into the lobby of the MGM Grand, he finds a leather armchair and sits, even though Elle hasn't been here for an hour. The monorail station is right here. She could be anywhere by now.
If she knew about the monorail station. If she's been here long enough to know her way around--
No. She knows. She directed that driver through the maze of streets behind the casinos to evade him. No tourist could do that. Elle lives here.
Elle works here.
Maybe... right here.
No. She wouldn't come in here and leave a trail to follow if she worked at the MGM Grand. Nor would she have gone to Caesars if she was trying to lose him and go to ground. Because that's what she's done, isn't it? She's faded into a crowd that never stops.
Spencer frowns, and runs a check--
Left foot throbbing: his fractured metatarsals have had enough of his 164 pounds, thank you. Ribs only a little sore. Stomach clenching around hunger, or anxiety. All pretty usual.
Except his head hurts.
He claps one hand over his left eye, peers through the right, then repeats the process on the other side. Both a little fuzzy without his glasses, but nothing alarming - no dazzles or spots. He covers one ear and then the other, listening.
Tinkling, music. the growl of voices. Laughter, ahead and to the left. Usual.
Spencer inhales through his nose. Leather, from the seat around his shoulders. Stale coffee, from the abandoned cup at his elbow, but not pencil shavings, not burnt toast, not the metallic ozone of lightning.
Just a headache.
That's all it is.
Everybody gets them. They even get nauseous when it happens. Especially after too much coffee and not enough to eat.
He walked away from thousands on a hot hand. Twenty dollars for the buffet pales beside it. Spencer thinks of towers of shrimp, roasted chicken wings, bloodied slabs of prime rib, deep fried everything...
Then winces and pats his stomach. He walks out of the lobby in search of a green salad and soup.
#
Spencer still hasn't eaten anything. He can't face food. So he's in the Albertson's on Trop, browsing the liquor aisle for a two liter bottle of Vernor's ginger ale when he realizes he hasn't been inside an Albertson's since Zane Floyd put on his Marine Corps uniform and went on a shooting spree, killing four people and injuring another.
Spencer had been 17 and beating hell out of his theoretical math thesis, and hadn't policed the news well enough. He'd had to promise his mother that he would never go into an Albertson's. She thought it was too dangerous.
Spencer keeps his promises when he can.
He walks past an array of bourbon and sour mash, all the labels turned out and perfectly centered, nodding at the evidence of a stockist with a touch of OCD. Zane Floyd might have been that organized, once.
But before he snapped, he had just moved back in with his parents. He had been dumped by his girlfriend the night before. His girlfriend leaving him in a public nightspot had triggered an episode of explosive rage. Floyd had first tried to satisfy it with drink, then by raping a 19 year old outcall escort at gunpoint.
Spencer didn't need to check to know that Zane would have requested someone with a basic physical resemblance to his ex.
Spree killers are usually middle aged, conservative, and motivated to achieve. Failure to succeed in their goals is generally blamed on the oppressing action of others, and the attack usually is directed at the people who represent the killer's oppressors. Based on that, Spencer can guess that the people Zane Floyd took aim at held something in common, like the 14 "feminists" shot dead in Montreal by spree shooter Mark Lepine. They had been accepted in engineering school, while Lepine hadn't.
All of Zane Floyd's victims had been Albertson's employees. Spencer realizes he doesn't actually know why that might have triggered Floyd.
But it didn't happen in this Albertson's. The one where it happened was over on Decatur and Sahara. That one's closed, and something else now.
He finds the green-and-gold labeled bottles of Vernor's, pulls down two and walks toward the checkout. Past the hard liquor section.
Red seals catch his eye. Green bottles, ridged just below the shoulder, white labels with the name in a copperplate script.
Gin.
Tanqueray.
Where does Elle work?
Spencer cracks the seal on one bottle of Vernor's to release some of the bubbles. The faster it goes flat, the better. He needs sleep.
He needs to write his mother, who he promised that he would never go into an Albertson's. His head --
His vision goes white and twists, as everything warps for an instant, and the tinkle of the video gaming machines fades out into that white, and then comes back, fuzzy and a little dim but growing back to normal.
The pain in his head feels like it could bulge the bones of his temples out.
Franklin Roosevelt complained of a "terrific headache" just before he dropped dead.
Spencer has to get out of here. He picks up his bottles and walks out, ignoring the cashier who holds out his change - out into the night air, walking fast out of the parking lot and already scanning the streets as he heads towards the waiting cab that will drop him on Don Quixote Street.
Going home.
#
Spencer hates this letter already. At least he didn't drop dead in the middle of the street. At least the Imitrex spray worked and it didn't drop him dead in the middle of his bathroom.
But now he has to write this letter, because his mother must be nearly out of her mind. He should go see her, but he doesn't move easily. His eyes peer out of caves. He's too thin. He could never convince her that he was all right.
Spencer peers out from behind the soft cotton wall that covers up his headache, and tries again.
Spencer gets up and turns on the radio in the kitchen. KNPR, 24 hours news radio, volume dialed low. The quiet in the house presses on him. Just now, he needs to hear voices. He doesn't even have to hear what they say.
It used to be that he could tell his mother everything. Writing to her kept them linked. And telling her everything had been safe, because Diana Reid was locked away for the rest of her life, and who could she tell?
If only Spencer had known.
Spencer sets the pen down and drinks some flat, warm ginger ale. Any gastric comfort is a placebo effect. There's no real ginger in this, to actually settle his stomach. But mom gives you ginger ale when you're sick and says it will make you feel better. And so it always does.
It's just conditioning. Association. But it works.
He worries at the fluffy edge of the drug that put his migraine behind a screen.
And it's just a migraine. That's all.
He picks up his pen again, and writes.
Spencer stops writing, right hand poised over the page.
He can't remember what he was going to say.
Adrenaline.
It's just adrenaline making his hand shake.
He just misplaced a word.
It happens to everybody.
Even freaky geniuses with an IQ too high to be reliably measured. Even to a visual pseudo-savant with an eidetic memory and borderline Asperger's, or maybe LLI, nobody can quite decide what's wrong with him.
He doesn't think he's autistic. He doesn't think he could do his job if he was autistic.
And low latent inhibition is probably just autism with enough processing power behind it to handle the input, anyway.
And he's got all the processing power in the world.
And if he is autistic, how the hell would he know it? Just like he wouldn't know it if he was crazy. If he was going crazy.
If he was imagining things.
He unfocuses his eyes and tries to picture the word he wants, to see it in print. It comes linked with a cascade of remembered pages, a flood of information. Just as it should.
Yes. The word he wants. It's right on the tip of his tongue. Right before his mind's eye. He can read it off the page.
He knows he talks like a book.
This is why.
The radio drones to itself: "--shot execution-style outside his Donna Street Apartment--"
"Ordeal," Spencer blurts aloud. How could he forget that?
Momentary aphasia. It's nothing. Everybody does it. Spencer bends over the paper again.
"--made headlines when he was acquitted last month for two counts of sexual assault--"
Spencer slides one hand through his hair, rubs his fingertips together. Oily. After he's done this letter, he'll wash it. And go to bed. And then have something to eat. He's meant to get something to eat for hours now, but--
--wait.
Did they say execution-style?
"--if you have information on this shooting, please contact--"
And they didn't catch the shooter?
Spencer hooks his messenger bag over his shoulder as he stands up, pushing the kitchen chair away with one knee. He moves to the other side of the house, to the room with his mother's books, his mother's desk. He sits in the chair right by the window, pulls the notebook out of the bag and sets it on his knees.
Not his mother's desk.
Not his mother's chair.
Windows searches for the wireless network connection that the kids next door don't secure, and Spencer is in Google news, tabbing half a dozen different boolean searches before his machine even kicks up winamp.
He selects a playlist--enqueue in winamp--and thinks that he needs to stop listening to the mope music so much. Processing grief or not, it's not good for him. What he needs is to get back to work. The tingle in his fingertips, the adrenaline rush--positive, for once, and not another panic attack this time--tell him that. If he were back on the job he wouldn't be brooding in his mother's empty house.
He sings along under his breath while he scans articles.
it's a small crime, and I've got no excuse
it's the wrong kind of place to be thinking of you
The list is on shuffle. He wishes he could call up Garcia and get her to pull the files on the acquittal. But there's plenty on the 'net. And he can call Metro if he has to, and even sound grown-up on the phone.
There's streaming video on one of the TV news sites. Alt-tab pulls up winamp and his finger slides across the contact pad to pause the song.
killers re-invent and believe
and this leans on me like a rootless tree.
Ten seconds later, Spencer Reid realizes he's staring at his own shaking hands as if they belong to a murderer. He swallows, hard, trying to convince himself that the reek of gunpowder stinging his eyes and sinuses is just a flashbulb memory. Post-traumatic stress. It's not the sharp scent of pencil shavings, the stink of burning.
He did not just lose ten seconds of his life to a micro seizure.
He lost it to a catastrophic realization.
He pulled up this album by reflex. Just what he felt like hearing. Just what--
He clenches his hands, tendons straining below the knuckles, fingernails biting his palms.
He doesn't need to call Metro.
He's ready with his profile now.
#
The subconscious mind processes information at volumes the conscious mind can't approach. If you are Spencer Reid, it has ways of getting that information through to the upper levels. Some of those ways are a little spooky.
Spooky enough when you are watching it from the outside. When you're inside, under the canopy, and you still can't figure out the magic trick?
There are reasons he's afraid of his own mind.
Serial vigilantes are extremely rare. Metro probably doesn't even know what they've got on their hands.
Spencer won't find Elle at MGM, and not at Caesars. But he's back in the lobby of the MGM Grand, because this is where Elle went in, and disappeared. From here, Spencer can assume she got on the monorail, but he's not ready to assume yet. He needs to think. His hands shoved into his pockets, he's thinking hard.
He found other execution style shootings in the Las Vegas area in the last few months. Each victim was found outside his home, and had escaped convictions on sexual assault charge. Those victims were also connected to drug trafficking and violent crimes.
Usually vigilantes employ some kind of signature or dramatic effect, to symbolize the personal vendetta of the crime and the killer's own need to bolster self-esteem, as well as to call attention to their cause.
The chair he had been sitting in before is empty, and Spencer heads that way. Retracing his steps.
In this case, from what he could find in the news reports, there were no such signatures. Which could mean that the pertinent information had been suppressed by the police--as with the Green River Killer's habit of leaving a stone inside the vagina of his victims. But Spencer didn't think Metro knew they had a serial killer. They certainly hadn't contacted the BAU about it.
And a lack of flourish or distinction was one good reason why Metro wouldn't realize that the shootings could be connected to a vigilante. But the victims are all
--scumbags--
violent criminals.
Metro likely wouldn't spend much time on a crime that they would consider a public service.
The stale coffee cup is long gone, but there is something on the seat of the leather armchair. Spencer picks it up and sits down, turning the little card over in his hands.
A green circle set above a stylized curve, the abstract graphic of a comforting embrace. And within those arms: The Rape Crisis Center, with the number for the 24 hour hotline.
--Do you know how many rapists I saw walk, during my sex crime days?--
Spencer looks up, very slowly, and finds just what he would expect--a black plastic half-dome, obscuring a security camera center.
The eye in the sky.
Las Vegas casinos use some of the most sophisticated surveillance techniques in the world. Garcia's own facial recognition software owes much of its existence to those casinos, to their financial power and pressing need to identify banned players and keep them out.
The house must always win.
Elle already knows that he is back.
Elle could be watching him. Right now.
Spencer looks up at the black curve of the dome as he slips the little card inside his pocket. He crosses the lobby to a little cafe that has internet access. He's back on Google before his coffee arrives, looking for press releases that trumpet casino security coups.
And there she is: Elle Greenaway, formerly of the FBI, now the Associate Director of resort security at the Bellagio.
His coffee's in a takeout cup. Spencer turns on his heel and heads for the monorail.
#
Spencer pauses in the lobby of the Bellagio, considering his next move. He's here. Elle knows it.
She can run - behind the doors of casino security, he alone cannot get to her. He'd have to bring the force of the Bureau field office to pry her out.
But does he want to do that?
He might have never known that Elle was here, if she hadn't gone to see him. If she hadn't allowed herself to be seen. She could have stayed up here and watched him every time he came here to play--she probably did. She didn't have to risk--
Unless she drew him out onto her board, drawing him forward, positioning herself so his three steps forward and one left couldn't - quite - touch her. If she wanted him to see.
Spencer moves through the crowds to the poker tables. He finds a low limit table, buys in, and waits for his chance at the draw.
"Spencer," a voice says behind and to his left.
He turns and lets that side of his face smile. "Amanda."
"Isn't this a bit junior leagues for you?" she asks, pouring him a coffee.
"Oh, I'm just--waiting. For someone. Thanks."
His cards are down in front of him. Spencer peeks.
Pair of Aces.
Spencer leans to the right as Amanda's voice murmurs quietly to let him know she's coming up behind him. She usually serves the high-limit tables. She's taking care of his coffee, black-three-sugars, just because it's him.
But she's got something else with his refill. She sets a key-card next to it, looking at him with searching eyes.
"Thanks, Amanda."
She smiles back, half assured, and he goes back to the hand. He doesn't need to look - just keeps meeting the bet as the others battle the stakes higher. It might be a low-limit, but the competitive greed is the same.
Moment of truth. Spencer shows three nines, collects, stands up.
"You're not going to stay?"
The protestor is red-faced, balding, making too free with the rum to be a real player.
Spencer holds up the key-card as he says, "No, I'm not." Only then does he realize what Amanda was thinking as she delivered that key, slipped into her hand by a casino executive ten years older than her favorite poker player.
He has the grace to blush, but walks out of the gaming room anyway.
When he reaches the lobby does he realize that he doesn't know what room it's for. Three steps later, though, and he does.
Because he can see the number on the door, like a snapshot in his perfect memory. The same way he can see the only load in a single-action revolver turning with each pull of the trigger.
Spencer knocks on room 926--shave and a haircut--even though he has a key. Perhaps Elle would rather answer.
She doesn't.
He slides the card along the reader and the red light clicks to green. Spencer steps inside, snaps the lightswitch.
The room is empty. Typical upscale Las Vegas hotel room: two beds, four pillows on each. Taupe brocade comforters. Ivory walls.
But on the table, where he can't miss it:
A short, heavy-bottomed crystal glass.
A bar-fridge sized green bottle with a red dot on its white label.
There is no ice bucket.
One sheet of hotel stationery, with a handwritten note:
The note is unsigned, but weighted by a twisted bit of metal.
Spencer recognizes what it is, and therefore what it must be: A bullet.
The bullet.
Elle's bullet. The one that stopped her heart.
He thinks about his bullets. The one fired past his ear, into the wall. The one he fired into the chest of an angel.
Those two are somewhere in cardboard boxes, in some Georgia evidence room. This one is right here.
Like him.
He slips it into his breast pocket before twisting the little bottle open. Spencer pours the contents into the glass.
He raises it in the air.
"Well, then. Here's to winning," he says, and knocks it down, the pine smell of juniper filling his sinuses.
He waits. Almost an hour. Elle doesn't come to join him, though he'd hoped. If he saw her, he might know what to do. The gin triggers another headache before too long. Not a migraine, at least.
He tells himself it's just the gin.
He descends to the casino again, walking slowly through the merry noises of gaming machines. He still hasn't eaten, and so he's also walking through the warm fuzz of gin when a blue-rinsed lady gets up from her slot machine and walks away with her bucket.
Spencer looks up. It's the Wheel of Fortune.
Spencer eschews the slots. He's a player. The slots carry no skill. The odds are ridiculous. One may as well make wishes or mumble prayers.
Which is what slot players do, isn't it?
Spencer steps up to the machine and feeds it two dollars. The bullet is in his breast pocket. He grasps the lever. Not the button. Magical thinking. This is a ritual.
What does he do about Elle?
He yanks the lever down.
The slot wheels spin.
And Spencer Reid awaits the will of God.
Author:
cpolk and matociqualaRating:Fan Rating: FRT (some profanity, mentions of violence)
Pairing: This is not slash. It's gen. But Dr. Spencer Reid is in it!
Summary: This story is a sequel to
matociquala's Fic Two Pair of Aces. You must read that, or else this story will make no damn sense at all. And it still won't make sense if you've not watched the show. So it's like SPOILERS GALORE. Just saying.What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.
Maybe.
Dead Man's Hand
Aces and eights. Full house.
The odds are 656 to 1.
Spencer peeks under the corner of his cards only once. He keeps his face impassive. Before the draw, he's holding the dead man's hand.
He's hot tonight. He's careful not to win too often, but everyone has their good nights. There was a tall glass cup of coffee at his elbow before he'd even entered the game, sweetened with three sugars; replaced with a fresh cup and comps by the time he'd gone up five thousand.
And now the dead man's hand, and a pile of chips growing as the table buys in. Spencer raises, enough to give a whiff of competition. A whisper of greed keeps everyone in.
He declines the draw, of course, and doesn't neaten the stack of black and green swirled chips in front of him. He stays mild and unassuming, considering the bet before him, then meeting it.
And, again.
Spencer watches the pile of chips in the middle as he meets and raises, taking up the space of a luncheon plate, three inches high at its peak.
Dominated by black chips, but just barely. Spencer adds two more, and a pair of green twenty-five dollar chips. Modest. Unassuming. Tentative.
656 to 1.
The cosmetic dentist nearly sneers as he meets and raises another two hundred. Dismissed again.
That's just fine.
This hand, and then something at the buffet, and then he'll find a leather seat in the lobby somewhere and write that letter to his mother. It's hardest to write her letters on his vacation - when he is closest to her, he has the least to say.
These days, he has too much that he can't say.
There's only three people in this round. The rest have folded and sat back.
A crowd gathers, attracted by the buzz that surrounds a high limit hand.
People crowd behind Spencer, looking over his shoulder even though there's nothing to see - the cards are facedown, precisely spanned.
One of the watchers brushes along the back of his chair. Spencer turns his head just a little, raising his right shoulder to a murmured "sorry."
He turns back to the green table. He feels watched.
Well, he is. Except--
The crowd shuffles resentfully for a waitress--June, her name is June--who smiles just slightly at him as she sets down a highball for one of the players - Canadian by his accent, short, neat dark hair, glasses, and a mole on his cheek. He thanks her, and June steps back, confident that the watchers will part for her.
They do.
In that gap, Spencer sees a woman. They make eye contact; the gap closes.
He sits higher in his seat, but a forest of heads block the way.
The bet comes to him. He doesn't need to look at the cards again.
656 to one. This could pay for...
...a lot.
But what are the odds of seeing her here? Now?
He throws in his cards and rises from his chair. The cosmetic dentist laughs. The kid lost his nerve.
Oh, if he only knew.
People get out of the way as Spencer pushes through the four-deep crowd, one hand steadying his messenger bag even as chips don't quite make it into his pocket and fall with dog-nail clicks to the wooden floor. He veers around the circle at half a trot and skids to a stop before a bar stool, an empty glass, filled near the top with ice.
He bends forward, sniffs.
Tanqueray. A smudge of thumbprint along the side.
He's got one hand questing under the tan leather flap of his bag, pea-green glove just meeting his fingers as a waitress comes and takes the tumbler away.
He doesn't even stop to curse, walking fast for the exits to catch up with Elle. You don't run when you're leaving a casino. Spencer can't afford suspicion. He scans the wall of glass at the exits, looking for the sweep of dark hair, her walk, even the sharp curve of her cheekbones.
A passenger in that dark green and white cab pushes her hair behind her ear as the vehicle pulls out.
Spencer straight-arms the glass door open and gets the next one, instructing the driver to follow.
She's in an A-Cab, number 1023. Spencer knows that follow-that-cab doesn't really work, in the movies or otherwise. Besides, Elle has to know that he's hot on her heels.
If it's Elle.
It's Elle. He is not imagining things. But what is she doing here? She could be looking for him.
She could have heard. That sort of thing gets around. Everyone knows, at Quantico. When he goes back, all the eyes will be on him, curious, concerned, avid.
After all. Look at what happened last time.
But why run, if she came to see him? Spencer stretches his spine, leans on his left buttock to look down the way. Too many Las Vegas taxis have white roofs.
"Sir? You're in the rearview."
"Right. Sorry. Do you...it's that one turning right on Industrial, isn't it?"
"Sure," the driver says. He doesn't know. The white and green cab flashes around the corner.
1404.
Shit. They drive on, stop and go, just one cab in a school swimming to the strip. Spencer cranes his neck again, peering at numbers.
Lost her.
But that's all right, maybe. Spencer keeps looking, but sits back into the velour seats. Elle wouldn't behave as if she were made if she hadn't been, and Spencer watches the lights swim by as he chews on whys.
It could have been a moment of panic. Perhaps she'll change her mind.
Perhaps she'll seek him out again, when she knows what she'll say. Spencer wonders if he's trying to convince himself, the way he wanted to hear that Elle's shooting in Dayton was good. That Elle's flight is like Spencer's letters to his mother - wanting to be close without having to risk being seen, or seen wrongly.
He really needs to write her a letter. Soon.
He makes the driver stop and walks along the strip--easier to find a cab when you're looking like you want one. He looks for green topped by white, the number 1023.
He finds it almost an hour later outside the Luxor. Spencer walks over and has his identification pushed against the driver's side window before the driver even looks up from his book.
From the cover--an enthroned man with long black hair and a streak of white in the front--Spencer recognizes it. He's read it. A few days ago he played Texas Hold 'Em against the author.
"Step out of the car, please."
It's not a request. Spencer usually plays unassuming and awkward, and leaves cold authority up to Morgan or Hotch.
He used to leave it up to Elle.
He just needs to ask a few questions. The driver doesn't have any answers.
Until: "At 11:42 pm, you picked up a woman outside of the Palms. She had dark hair, high cheekbones, olive complexion, brown eyes. She wore a black high necked blouse and white trousers. She requested a particular destination but changed her instructions during the trip, requesting sudden changes of direction until she asked to be dropped off at busy intersection where you waited for a light. She paid in round numbers and didn't stop for change."
The driver's jaw drops lower and lower as Spencer tells him exactly what Elle did on her fare. And then the driver nods, and explains that Elle had originally asked to be dropped at Caesars, but then changed her mind and told him to turn left on Industrial, and then all through the streets behind the casinos. That she wanted to get out where they were about to turn left onto Tropicana, but it wasn't safe and he dropped her at the MGM Grand instead.
The driver tells Spencer that she went inside.
Profiler voodoo just does that to people. Most of the time it's just statistics. Playing the odds. Not this time, though. Because a profile is just like poker.
There's statistics. And there's how you play the hand. There's how much you're willing to gamble.
And there's why the other guy is at the table.
Spencer thanks him for the information and continues down the Strip.
#
When Spencer walks into the lobby of the MGM Grand, he finds a leather armchair and sits, even though Elle hasn't been here for an hour. The monorail station is right here. She could be anywhere by now.
If she knew about the monorail station. If she's been here long enough to know her way around--
No. She knows. She directed that driver through the maze of streets behind the casinos to evade him. No tourist could do that. Elle lives here.
Elle works here.
Maybe... right here.
No. She wouldn't come in here and leave a trail to follow if she worked at the MGM Grand. Nor would she have gone to Caesars if she was trying to lose him and go to ground. Because that's what she's done, isn't it? She's faded into a crowd that never stops.
Spencer frowns, and runs a check--
Left foot throbbing: his fractured metatarsals have had enough of his 164 pounds, thank you. Ribs only a little sore. Stomach clenching around hunger, or anxiety. All pretty usual.
Except his head hurts.
He claps one hand over his left eye, peers through the right, then repeats the process on the other side. Both a little fuzzy without his glasses, but nothing alarming - no dazzles or spots. He covers one ear and then the other, listening.
Tinkling, music. the growl of voices. Laughter, ahead and to the left. Usual.
Spencer inhales through his nose. Leather, from the seat around his shoulders. Stale coffee, from the abandoned cup at his elbow, but not pencil shavings, not burnt toast, not the metallic ozone of lightning.
Just a headache.
That's all it is.
Everybody gets them. They even get nauseous when it happens. Especially after too much coffee and not enough to eat.
He walked away from thousands on a hot hand. Twenty dollars for the buffet pales beside it. Spencer thinks of towers of shrimp, roasted chicken wings, bloodied slabs of prime rib, deep fried everything...
Then winces and pats his stomach. He walks out of the lobby in search of a green salad and soup.
#
Spencer still hasn't eaten anything. He can't face food. So he's in the Albertson's on Trop, browsing the liquor aisle for a two liter bottle of Vernor's ginger ale when he realizes he hasn't been inside an Albertson's since Zane Floyd put on his Marine Corps uniform and went on a shooting spree, killing four people and injuring another.
Spencer had been 17 and beating hell out of his theoretical math thesis, and hadn't policed the news well enough. He'd had to promise his mother that he would never go into an Albertson's. She thought it was too dangerous.
Spencer keeps his promises when he can.
He walks past an array of bourbon and sour mash, all the labels turned out and perfectly centered, nodding at the evidence of a stockist with a touch of OCD. Zane Floyd might have been that organized, once.
But before he snapped, he had just moved back in with his parents. He had been dumped by his girlfriend the night before. His girlfriend leaving him in a public nightspot had triggered an episode of explosive rage. Floyd had first tried to satisfy it with drink, then by raping a 19 year old outcall escort at gunpoint.
Spencer didn't need to check to know that Zane would have requested someone with a basic physical resemblance to his ex.
Spree killers are usually middle aged, conservative, and motivated to achieve. Failure to succeed in their goals is generally blamed on the oppressing action of others, and the attack usually is directed at the people who represent the killer's oppressors. Based on that, Spencer can guess that the people Zane Floyd took aim at held something in common, like the 14 "feminists" shot dead in Montreal by spree shooter Mark Lepine. They had been accepted in engineering school, while Lepine hadn't.
All of Zane Floyd's victims had been Albertson's employees. Spencer realizes he doesn't actually know why that might have triggered Floyd.
But it didn't happen in this Albertson's. The one where it happened was over on Decatur and Sahara. That one's closed, and something else now.
He finds the green-and-gold labeled bottles of Vernor's, pulls down two and walks toward the checkout. Past the hard liquor section.
Red seals catch his eye. Green bottles, ridged just below the shoulder, white labels with the name in a copperplate script.
Gin.
Tanqueray.
Where does Elle work?
Spencer cracks the seal on one bottle of Vernor's to release some of the bubbles. The faster it goes flat, the better. He needs sleep.
He needs to write his mother, who he promised that he would never go into an Albertson's. His head --
His vision goes white and twists, as everything warps for an instant, and the tinkle of the video gaming machines fades out into that white, and then comes back, fuzzy and a little dim but growing back to normal.
The pain in his head feels like it could bulge the bones of his temples out.
Franklin Roosevelt complained of a "terrific headache" just before he dropped dead.
Spencer has to get out of here. He picks up his bottles and walks out, ignoring the cashier who holds out his change - out into the night air, walking fast out of the parking lot and already scanning the streets as he heads towards the waiting cab that will drop him on Don Quixote Street.
Going home.
#
Dear Mom;I'm sorry I haven't
These past few weeks have been hard and I haven't had a chance to
Spencer hates this letter already. At least he didn't drop dead in the middle of the street. At least the Imitrex spray worked and it didn't drop him dead in the middle of his bathroom.
But now he has to write this letter, because his mother must be nearly out of her mind. He should go see her, but he doesn't move easily. His eyes peer out of caves. He's too thin. He could never convince her that he was all right.
Spencer peers out from behind the soft cotton wall that covers up his headache, and tries again.
I have not written to you of my adventures, Mom, and I am sorry. For you know that adventures lead to triumph and wisdom, and some are frightening and painful. From some adventures, one needs to heal.
I have been in need of healing. I am all right. The team found me. And I don't know what to tell you, Mom. I don't want you to worry and this is not something I can talk to you about, but I have had little else to say.
Spencer gets up and turns on the radio in the kitchen. KNPR, 24 hours news radio, volume dialed low. The quiet in the house presses on him. Just now, he needs to hear voices. He doesn't even have to hear what they say.
It used to be that he could tell his mother everything. Writing to her kept them linked. And telling her everything had been safe, because Diana Reid was locked away for the rest of her life, and who could she tell?
If only Spencer had known.
Spencer sets the pen down and drinks some flat, warm ginger ale. Any gastric comfort is a placebo effect. There's no real ginger in this, to actually settle his stomach. But mom gives you ginger ale when you're sick and says it will make you feel better. And so it always does.
It's just conditioning. Association. But it works.
He worries at the fluffy edge of the drug that put his migraine behind a screen.
And it's just a migraine. That's all.
He picks up his pen again, and writes.
But something happened today.
Today I thought I saw a friend. Or someone I thought might still be a friend, or once was. I only saw her for an instant, and when I looked back, she was gone. I tried looking for her, but no luck. But I am sure it was her, and I'm sure that she had come looking for me.
I think she was to make sure that I am all right (and I am. I did get hurt on the case, but I'm healing up. And it was frightening, but it is over.) I think that maybe she didn't know what to say, or if I would accept her, because she left my life under a cloud. I knew that there was something wrong, but I couldn't reach her and she left after her
Spencer stops writing, right hand poised over the page.
He can't remember what he was going to say.
Adrenaline.
It's just adrenaline making his hand shake.
He just misplaced a word.
It happens to everybody.
Even freaky geniuses with an IQ too high to be reliably measured. Even to a visual pseudo-savant with an eidetic memory and borderline Asperger's, or maybe LLI, nobody can quite decide what's wrong with him.
He doesn't think he's autistic. He doesn't think he could do his job if he was autistic.
And low latent inhibition is probably just autism with enough processing power behind it to handle the input, anyway.
And he's got all the processing power in the world.
And if he is autistic, how the hell would he know it? Just like he wouldn't know it if he was crazy. If he was going crazy.
If he was imagining things.
He unfocuses his eyes and tries to picture the word he wants, to see it in print. It comes linked with a cascade of remembered pages, a flood of information. Just as it should.
Yes. The word he wants. It's right on the tip of his tongue. Right before his mind's eye. He can read it off the page.
He knows he talks like a book.
This is why.
The radio drones to itself: "--shot execution-style outside his Donna Street Apartment--"
"Ordeal," Spencer blurts aloud. How could he forget that?
Momentary aphasia. It's nothing. Everybody does it. Spencer bends over the paper again.
ordeal. I have wondered if she is all right.
"--made headlines when he was acquitted last month for two counts of sexual assault--"
Spencer slides one hand through his hair, rubs his fingertips together. Oily. After he's done this letter, he'll wash it. And go to bed. And then have something to eat. He's meant to get something to eat for hours now, but--
--wait.
Did they say execution-style?
"--if you have information on this shooting, please contact--"
And they didn't catch the shooter?
Spencer hooks his messenger bag over his shoulder as he stands up, pushing the kitchen chair away with one knee. He moves to the other side of the house, to the room with his mother's books, his mother's desk. He sits in the chair right by the window, pulls the notebook out of the bag and sets it on his knees.
Not his mother's desk.
Not his mother's chair.
Windows searches for the wireless network connection that the kids next door don't secure, and Spencer is in Google news, tabbing half a dozen different boolean searches before his machine even kicks up winamp.
He selects a playlist--enqueue in winamp--and thinks that he needs to stop listening to the mope music so much. Processing grief or not, it's not good for him. What he needs is to get back to work. The tingle in his fingertips, the adrenaline rush--positive, for once, and not another panic attack this time--tell him that. If he were back on the job he wouldn't be brooding in his mother's empty house.
He sings along under his breath while he scans articles.
it's a small crime, and I've got no excuse
it's the wrong kind of place to be thinking of you
The list is on shuffle. He wishes he could call up Garcia and get her to pull the files on the acquittal. But there's plenty on the 'net. And he can call Metro if he has to, and even sound grown-up on the phone.
There's streaming video on one of the TV news sites. Alt-tab pulls up winamp and his finger slides across the contact pad to pause the song.
killers re-invent and believe
and this leans on me like a rootless tree.
Ten seconds later, Spencer Reid realizes he's staring at his own shaking hands as if they belong to a murderer. He swallows, hard, trying to convince himself that the reek of gunpowder stinging his eyes and sinuses is just a flashbulb memory. Post-traumatic stress. It's not the sharp scent of pencil shavings, the stink of burning.
He did not just lose ten seconds of his life to a micro seizure.
He lost it to a catastrophic realization.
He pulled up this album by reflex. Just what he felt like hearing. Just what--
He clenches his hands, tendons straining below the knuckles, fingernails biting his palms.
He doesn't need to call Metro.
He's ready with his profile now.
#
The subconscious mind processes information at volumes the conscious mind can't approach. If you are Spencer Reid, it has ways of getting that information through to the upper levels. Some of those ways are a little spooky.
Spooky enough when you are watching it from the outside. When you're inside, under the canopy, and you still can't figure out the magic trick?
There are reasons he's afraid of his own mind.
Serial vigilantes are extremely rare. Metro probably doesn't even know what they've got on their hands.
Spencer won't find Elle at MGM, and not at Caesars. But he's back in the lobby of the MGM Grand, because this is where Elle went in, and disappeared. From here, Spencer can assume she got on the monorail, but he's not ready to assume yet. He needs to think. His hands shoved into his pockets, he's thinking hard.
He found other execution style shootings in the Las Vegas area in the last few months. Each victim was found outside his home, and had escaped convictions on sexual assault charge. Those victims were also connected to drug trafficking and violent crimes.
Usually vigilantes employ some kind of signature or dramatic effect, to symbolize the personal vendetta of the crime and the killer's own need to bolster self-esteem, as well as to call attention to their cause.
The chair he had been sitting in before is empty, and Spencer heads that way. Retracing his steps.
In this case, from what he could find in the news reports, there were no such signatures. Which could mean that the pertinent information had been suppressed by the police--as with the Green River Killer's habit of leaving a stone inside the vagina of his victims. But Spencer didn't think Metro knew they had a serial killer. They certainly hadn't contacted the BAU about it.
And a lack of flourish or distinction was one good reason why Metro wouldn't realize that the shootings could be connected to a vigilante. But the victims are all
--scumbags--
violent criminals.
Metro likely wouldn't spend much time on a crime that they would consider a public service.
The stale coffee cup is long gone, but there is something on the seat of the leather armchair. Spencer picks it up and sits down, turning the little card over in his hands.
A green circle set above a stylized curve, the abstract graphic of a comforting embrace. And within those arms: The Rape Crisis Center, with the number for the 24 hour hotline.
--Do you know how many rapists I saw walk, during my sex crime days?--
Spencer looks up, very slowly, and finds just what he would expect--a black plastic half-dome, obscuring a security camera center.
The eye in the sky.
Las Vegas casinos use some of the most sophisticated surveillance techniques in the world. Garcia's own facial recognition software owes much of its existence to those casinos, to their financial power and pressing need to identify banned players and keep them out.
The house must always win.
Elle already knows that he is back.
Elle could be watching him. Right now.
Spencer looks up at the black curve of the dome as he slips the little card inside his pocket. He crosses the lobby to a little cafe that has internet access. He's back on Google before his coffee arrives, looking for press releases that trumpet casino security coups.
And there she is: Elle Greenaway, formerly of the FBI, now the Associate Director of resort security at the Bellagio.
His coffee's in a takeout cup. Spencer turns on his heel and heads for the monorail.
#
Spencer pauses in the lobby of the Bellagio, considering his next move. He's here. Elle knows it.
She can run - behind the doors of casino security, he alone cannot get to her. He'd have to bring the force of the Bureau field office to pry her out.
But does he want to do that?
He might have never known that Elle was here, if she hadn't gone to see him. If she hadn't allowed herself to be seen. She could have stayed up here and watched him every time he came here to play--she probably did. She didn't have to risk--
Unless she drew him out onto her board, drawing him forward, positioning herself so his three steps forward and one left couldn't - quite - touch her. If she wanted him to see.
Spencer moves through the crowds to the poker tables. He finds a low limit table, buys in, and waits for his chance at the draw.
"Spencer," a voice says behind and to his left.
He turns and lets that side of his face smile. "Amanda."
"Isn't this a bit junior leagues for you?" she asks, pouring him a coffee.
"Oh, I'm just--waiting. For someone. Thanks."
His cards are down in front of him. Spencer peeks.
Pair of Aces.
Spencer leans to the right as Amanda's voice murmurs quietly to let him know she's coming up behind him. She usually serves the high-limit tables. She's taking care of his coffee, black-three-sugars, just because it's him.
But she's got something else with his refill. She sets a key-card next to it, looking at him with searching eyes.
"Thanks, Amanda."
She smiles back, half assured, and he goes back to the hand. He doesn't need to look - just keeps meeting the bet as the others battle the stakes higher. It might be a low-limit, but the competitive greed is the same.
Moment of truth. Spencer shows three nines, collects, stands up.
"You're not going to stay?"
The protestor is red-faced, balding, making too free with the rum to be a real player.
Spencer holds up the key-card as he says, "No, I'm not." Only then does he realize what Amanda was thinking as she delivered that key, slipped into her hand by a casino executive ten years older than her favorite poker player.
He has the grace to blush, but walks out of the gaming room anyway.
When he reaches the lobby does he realize that he doesn't know what room it's for. Three steps later, though, and he does.
Because he can see the number on the door, like a snapshot in his perfect memory. The same way he can see the only load in a single-action revolver turning with each pull of the trigger.
Spencer knocks on room 926--shave and a haircut--even though he has a key. Perhaps Elle would rather answer.
She doesn't.
He slides the card along the reader and the red light clicks to green. Spencer steps inside, snaps the lightswitch.
The room is empty. Typical upscale Las Vegas hotel room: two beds, four pillows on each. Taupe brocade comforters. Ivory walls.
But on the table, where he can't miss it:
A short, heavy-bottomed crystal glass.
A bar-fridge sized green bottle with a red dot on its white label.
There is no ice bucket.
One sheet of hotel stationery, with a handwritten note:
Reid;
He's dead.
You're right here.
You won.
The note is unsigned, but weighted by a twisted bit of metal.
Spencer recognizes what it is, and therefore what it must be: A bullet.
The bullet.
Elle's bullet. The one that stopped her heart.
He thinks about his bullets. The one fired past his ear, into the wall. The one he fired into the chest of an angel.
Those two are somewhere in cardboard boxes, in some Georgia evidence room. This one is right here.
Like him.
He slips it into his breast pocket before twisting the little bottle open. Spencer pours the contents into the glass.
He raises it in the air.
"Well, then. Here's to winning," he says, and knocks it down, the pine smell of juniper filling his sinuses.
He waits. Almost an hour. Elle doesn't come to join him, though he'd hoped. If he saw her, he might know what to do. The gin triggers another headache before too long. Not a migraine, at least.
He tells himself it's just the gin.
He descends to the casino again, walking slowly through the merry noises of gaming machines. He still hasn't eaten, and so he's also walking through the warm fuzz of gin when a blue-rinsed lady gets up from her slot machine and walks away with her bucket.
Spencer looks up. It's the Wheel of Fortune.
Spencer eschews the slots. He's a player. The slots carry no skill. The odds are ridiculous. One may as well make wishes or mumble prayers.
Which is what slot players do, isn't it?
Spencer steps up to the machine and feeds it two dollars. The bullet is in his breast pocket. He grasps the lever. Not the button. Magical thinking. This is a ritual.
What does he do about Elle?
He yanks the lever down.
The slot wheels spin.
And Spencer Reid awaits the will of God.
