White Collar fic: Shelter on a Foreign Shore (1/2)

[sholio]

Title: Shelter on a Foreign Shore
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: ~65,000
Rating/pairing: PG, gen (canon pairings in the background)
Summary: AU. Peter, after being disabled on the job, buys a farm with El in upstate New York and raises horses. But retirement isn't suiting Peter so well, which means it's probably just as well when an injured forger turns up on their doorstep with trouble behind him.
Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/271080
Notes: This was written for attackfish in the fall 2011 collarcorner fic exchange, for the requests "realistic disability" and "what-if AU". This story contains spoilers for everything revealed about the characters' backstories up to 3x10, and oblique spoilers for various other events from the first & second seasons. Thank you so much to xparrot for being a fantastic beta/sounding board/shoulder to cry on; if it's still a mess after all her hard work, I have no one but myself to blame!




Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
- Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man"



1.


The day Neal Caffrey showed up in Apple Corners, New York was the same day Peter and El got thrown out of the fund-raising bake sale for the Apple Corners chapter of the Girl Scouts.

"You said I should get to know the neighbors," Peter said, as calmly as possible, pulling up to the turn-off at the Millers' U-Pick strawberry farm.

El heaved a sigh, sounding disturbingly like Marge Simpson. "I didn't mean compiling dossiers on them and confronting Mrs. Duncan about her prescription pill addiction in front of the entire PTA."

"I don't have dossiers," Peter said stiffly. "I have notes."

"You have notes compiled into color-coded file folders with surveillance photos and Google Earth printouts. Honey, I've seen them."

"Don't be angry, Aunt El," El's niece Jessica said from the backseat, sounding more delighted than placating.

"I'm not angry," Elizabeth said.

"This was the best fundraiser the Girl Scouts have ever had," Jess went on. "Every year should be like this year."

"I left my sun hat at the school, Aunt El," chirped the small voice of El's other niece, Susan.

"Well, we're not going back for it," Peter said.

"But it was my favorite hat." There was a wobble in the six-year-old's voice.

El gave him a Look -- it definitely warranted the capital letter -- and reached behind her seat to pat Susie's knee. "It's okay, sweetie. Your mom will bring it. I'll call her right now and tell her, okay? Do you remember where you last saw it?"

El was still on the phone to her sister -- "No, Pattie, I'm sure the Duncans didn't mean all that about suing us" -- when Peter turned into the Millers' yard. There was a light on in the upstairs window, so the girls' older brother, El's nephew, must be home. Peter figured that the girls, at thirteen and six, were old enough to be home alone anyway, but given the awkward state of family diplomatic relations at the moment, he was glad to have one more reason not to risk another meltdown between the Burke and Miller embassies.

Jess collected her little sister and the girls tumbled out into the driveway. Susie scampered for the house, but Jess hesitated. "Will you show me --"

"No," Peter said quickly, because knowing Jessica Miller, the end of that sentence was almost certainly going to be "your surveillance equipment" or "your files on all my classmates", and either way, he couldn't imagine Pattie and Mike Miller saying yes to it.

"You didn't even let me finish," Jess pouted.

"That's right, because the answer is no."

"How am I supposed to learn to be a detective if you never tell me anything?"

"You're not a detective," Peter said flatly. "You're in the ninth grade. We don't -- the FBI doesn't hire people who haven't graduated from high school."

Jess scowled at him. She had El's eyes, always a little disconcerting in her chubby child's face.

"Yes, Pattie, I know your brother-in-law is an excellent lawyer, but we really don't need a lawyer," El was saying in the passenger seat of the car.

When the scowl made no impression, Jess heaved a huge, theatrical sigh. "So I'll be over tomorrow morning, I guess." Her tone gave the impression that she was being dragged under duress and threat of torture. "Unless Mom grounds me, like, forever for talking to you, and puts a restraining order on you not to get near me." She brightened. "Do you think she might?"

"No."

"That's your favorite word, isn't it, Uncle Peter?"

"Yes," Peter said.

Jess's eyes narrowed. "If I work really hard and muck out all the stalls, will you show me your files on Amanda Bradshaw? 'cause I could really use some dirt on --"

"No," Peter said, horrified, and rolled up his window. It took two tries, because he reached with his right hand automatically -- still, even after three years.

"Pattie doesn't think the Duncans are serious about suing us," El said, tucking away her phone as Peter pulled out of the driveway. "But just in case, her brother-in-law has a lot of experience at handling civil --"

"We're not going to need a lawyer," Peter said.

"Of course not. But just in case, I can leave him a voicemail in the morning."

They drove most of the way home without speaking. The highway was nearly deserted in the purple dusk. Peter parked in the wide, curving gravel drive of the farmhouse, turned off the ignition and sat in silence for a moment, listening to the pinging of the cooling engine and, distantly, the snorting and stamping of the horses.

"El --" Peter said at last.

"Don't apologize," El said quickly.

He couldn't leave it there, he just couldn't. "Are you angry?"

"I don't know. A little. Mostly I'm just ..." El rubbed her eyes. "I knew what it said on the tin when I married you, after all."

"What you married isn't what you have now." He didn't mean it to come out so bitter, so harsh. His anger wasn't directed at her.

El undid her seatbelt and turned to face him, her face troubled. "What I married is exactly what I have now. I don't want you to change for me, Peter. You don't think I want that, do you?"

"No," he said, startled. "Of course not."

"My mother was that kind of woman. She was a good mother, she loved my father, but I always told myself I'd never, ever be like her --"

"Oh, honey, no," Peter said, and he leaned over and drew her near, wrapping her in the circle of his arms: the flesh-and-blood arm and the prosthesis, pulling her against his chest. El rested her face in the hollow of his neck. It was his scarred side, so he couldn't feel her against his skin, but the comforting weight of her was enough.

After a moment or two, Peter said into her hair, "Is your sister mad at me?"

El snorted a soft laugh against his collarbone. "Actually, she thought it was hilarious. Pattie and Mike have disliked the Duncans for years. And Jess is right: this was a Girl Scout fundraiser that this town is going to be talking about for years."

Peter laughed. They walked to the house hand in hand, and he told himself it didn't matter that she didn't understand, that she couldn't understand. She was doing her best, and it was almost enough.


***


The farm outside Apple Corners was forty rolling acres of pastureland interspersed with woods and orchards gone back to tangles of unpruned vegetation. When Elizabeth had walked into the farmhouse three years ago, it had whispered home to her -- possibly, she knew, because it reminded her of the converted turn-of-the-century farmhouse in which she and Patricia had grown up.

But more importantly, it was what Peter needed -- at least what he said he needed. A change. Somewhere far from the city. Horses. Land. Air. And in exchange for being fairly isolated, it was inexpensive enough that they could afford to buy it outright, between the sale of the Brooklyn townhouse and the FBI disability settlement -- plus it was close to El's family, and a reasonable drive from Peter's.

It wasn't perfect. The place needed some fixing up, and Apple Corners was not exactly a thriving job market. They wouldn't have been in actual trouble if Pattie hadn't been able to take El on as a partner at her bakery -- they could've lived on the townhouse money and taken out a mortgage -- but it would have been a much less comfortable life. El had been worried that she'd miss the fast pace of Burke Events and the bustling city, but to her private relief, she found herself sliding easily back into the ebb and flow of small-town life.

And Peter --

El watched him quietly from the kitchen as she made a quick, simple dinner: chicken and rice with a salad on the side. Freshly returned from a romp around the barn, Satchmo lay on the worn hardwood of the farmhouse's floor and watched her in the hopes that some tidbit might make its way dogwards.

"You like it here, right, Satch?" El asked the dog quietly. "This is a good place for dogs."

Satch pricked his ears and thumped his tail.

But a good place for retired FBI agents ... maybe not so much. El looked past the dog into the living room. Peter sat at the table that had come with the farmhouse -- a massive wooden edifice, scarred and blackened, its feet gnawed by long-vanished farm puppies and its legs carved with children's simple messages. It was a table with a history, unlike anything in fast-paced, stylish New York City. El liked it.

The last few nights, the table had been covered with color-coded folders surrounding Peter's laptop like islands -- no, more like whole archipelagos -- while little volcano chains of beer bottles built up between them. Tonight the file folders were gone -- Peter had wordlessly swept them into a box when they got home, and placed it in a corner of the living room. The laptop was closed. Instead he was reading a three-month-old copy of Field & Stream.

He'd been reading what looked like the same page for an hour.

The only thing that was the same was the island chain of beer bottles -- already three of them, and the evening was still young. El's heart broke a little.

Peter said he liked it here. He seemed to genuinely enjoy working with the horses -- right now the Burkes owned two and were boarding three more for friends and neighbors. And people did, after all, change. Perhaps it was possible for someone like Peter -- driven, intense, thriving on the mental challenge of pitting his wits against the criminals he'd hunted -- to settle into a new lifestyle, enjoying quiet days on a farm, brushing horses and reading books, where the most exciting thing in his week was going down to the corner bar to watch the game with the boys.

Yes, that's why he's been driving the local police and the neighbors crazy by playing amateur detective on every methhead, shoplifter and building code violator from here to Oswego.

El rubbed her forehead, where a small headache was pinging.

They'd moved to upstate New York because Peter wanted to -- because New York City had become a cage for him, every memory another bar. Her heart still tight with the fear of losing him, El had come along without complaint, and to her secret relief found that she liked her new life as much as her old one.

What now? Do we move again? Start a new life somewhere else? I want to support him, I do, but I don't know how long I'm willing to keep running until he finds whatever it is that he's looking for.

El slipped quietly into the living room with a plate of chicken. She slid an arm around Peter's chest from behind, and kissed him on top of the head.

"Maybe you could consult with the police," she suggested. "Or get a private detective's license."

"Don't need it," Peter said crisply, and turned a page. "I'm done with all of that. It's just holding me back. New start, new life. Oh, look hon, they're giving away a hedge trimmer."

Elizabeth sighed, kissed his hair again, and went to drain the asparagus.

As had often been the case lately, Peter didn't go to bed when she did. After dinner, El read in bed for a while and then tiptoed downstairs. He was sprawled on one of the downstairs couches, reading what El discovered upon inspection to be the New York state firearms statutes. The line of beer bottles on the table had grown a lot longer.

"Coming to bed soon?" she asked, running a hand through his hair.

"A few more minutes."

And all she could do was take him at his word. "Let Satch out before you go to bed, okay?"

Peter nodded absently, and reached up to catch her hand with his left one, letting her fingers trail through his.

Normally she could fall asleep quickly, but tonight she lay awake for a long time, aware of the cold empty space on the left side of the bed, even more aware of the soft hiss as another beer was cracked open downstairs.


***


When his watch clicked over to midnight, Peter groaned and rubbed his eyes. He still wasn't sleepy, and the beer had done nothing but give him a headache and make it hard to think. He knew he'd be half dead in the morning if he didn't get to bed, though. He still couldn't stop himself from popping awake at 5 a.m. -- it was a habit of too many years to break.

Like a lot of habits.

The sound of ticking dog claws on the hardwood floors made him raise his head. Satchmo wandered from his bed in the corner of the living room to the kitchen door and stared at it, his head cocked to one side. His tail lashed once, tentatively, then dropped.

"What's up, boy?" Peter asked aloud. His voice sounded too loud in the silence of the living room -- he still had trouble adjusting to how quiet it was here, without the traffic noise that had become so familiar.

Satchmo whined inquisitively, and then clicked back into the living room to lay down by the couch. But his ears remained alert, his nose pointed towards the door.

Peter pried himself off the couch. Probably raccoons or something. No point in taking chances, though -- there could be a prowler out there. He kept wanting to put security cameras in the driveway and the barn, but El thought it would make the neighbors think they were paranoid city folk who couldn't get used to the pace of life in the country.

He usually liked to do a round of the farm at night, anyway, to check on the horses and make sure that nothing was amiss.

Peter retrieved his gun and holster from the locked gun safe tucked behind the door between the living room and kitchen. The holster was a gift that El and her sister Pattie had made for him, specially designed not to interfere with the shoulder-control mechanism of his prosthesis -- though they had made him promise not to wear it to Apple Corners social functions before giving it to him. The straps fastened with Velcro to make it more one-hand-friendly, and it hung against his ribs on the right side, a little lower than a conventional shoulder harness but still in relatively easy reach. In the upper field behind the barn, he'd practiced drawing and firing with his left hand, until it was, if not effortless, then at least competent.

He had the best wife ever.

And he couldn't help noticing, as he slid it into place, that the weight of the gun felt familiar, right, even if it wasn't on the accustomed side. There was also a satisfying familiarity to the tension starting to uncoil from his belly, the anticipation of going into the unknown, pitting his wits against an opponent.

... which was probably a deer. Still, Satch looked eager too. The dog waited for Peter by the kitchen door, his tail lashing vigorously.

Dogs were bred for this sort of thing, after all: accompanying their masters on the hunt. "You get it, don't you, boy?" Peter asked Satch quietly. He unlatched the door and let them both out into the humid night.

As always, the quiet sounds of the country night swept him back to his boyhood: cicadas chirring in the trees, the horses stamping in the barn, a distant car on the highway. It was his FBI instincts, though, that took over and made him slip quietly to the side so that he was no longer silhouetted against the kitchen light.

Satchmo took off into the yard, trotting towards the barn with the brisk lope of a dog patrolling his domain: The Dog Is On The Job, his body language clearly stated. "Satch!" Peter called softly after him, to no apparent effect. Clearly there was nothing too dangerous, or Satchmo would be acting a little more nervous. Presumably. On the other hand, Satch had never been much of a watchdog; he'd be more likely to lick a prowler's hand than to growl at him.

The night was clear, and bright enough to see easily by the light of a nearly full moon, washing out the stars. The horses had been shut in the small paddock by the barn for the night, as usual. Peter didn't usually put them in the barn except in cold weather or during storms. There was a small three-sided shelter in the paddock where they could get out of the rain, if they needed to.

Tonight they were unusually stirred up, moving around restlessly in the paddock rather than settled down for the night. Something had definitely gotten their attention as well as Satch's. Coyote? Peter thought. Stray dog? He checked them by eye: no signs of panic, no indication that any of them were injured or even frightened. Just awake and restless. The nearest two, Pepper and Donny, ambled over to the fence to see if treats or petting were forthcoming. Peter patted the soft noses and shoved them firmly back through the split rails of the fence. He checked to make sure that the gate was still securely latched. Chantilly, one of the boarding horses, had a genius talent for undoing latches and getting into things; he'd had to buy a more secure latch to keep her in, and the rest of the horses along with her. So far, she didn't seem to have figured out the new one.

Peter looked around for Satchmo, but the dog was nowhere in sight. By the moonlight, however, Peter could see where he must have gone: the barn door was open a crack.

Okay. A coyote didn't do THAT. Could he have accidentally left it unlatched? He didn't think he'd be that careless. His evening routine was pretty well set, especially when it came to the horses. He trusted himself not to do stupid things like that.

Peter slipped his hand to the butt of his gun. Perhaps all those days in the pasture shooting beer bottles hadn't been wasted. He flattened himself against the side of the barn beside the open door, and went still and quiet, listening. Soft rustling in the hay. Satchmo? Then he heard the thumping of Satch's tail, and a quiet voice in the barn said, "Hey, boy. Good dog."

Thanks a lot, Satchmo. Some watchdog YOU are.

The barn was wired for electricity, and the light switch was just inside the door. Peter waited a few seconds while he built up a mental schematic. The voice had sounded like it came from eight or ten feet inside the door. Satchmo would be there, too. He'd need his left hand to draw the gun and that was also the side of the light switch; he knew he couldn't find the switch in the dark with the prosthesis, but he could bump it on with his shoulder or elbow --

He tried not to dwell on how alive he felt as he hooked his heel against the edge of the door, waited a fraction of a second, then kicked it open. His elbow found the light switch. The interior of the barn was suddenly flooded in white fluorescence, and the intruder froze in the act of petting Satchmo.

"Freeze!" Peter roared. "This is the FB -- I'm making a citizen's arrest! Don't move!"

The intruder straightened slowly, hands in the air. He was dressed more appropriately for a dinner gala than a barn; he even wore a tie, although it was loose and askew, and his expensive-looking suit jacket was torn and dirty.

And Peter knew him, but he was so deeply, shocking out of place here, in a barn in upstate New York, that it took a moment for Peter's brain to make the connection and dredge up the name.

"Neal Caffrey?"

Neal broke into one of those blinding, brilliant smiles that Peter remembered so well, the sort of smile that he'd used to charm his way across two continents and into who knew how many people's homes during his two-continent crime spree. "Agent Burke!" he said happily. "I knew that if you could find me, I could find you."

Then the confident smile slipped, coming apart in pieces, and Neal folded up and collapsed in the hay at Peter's feet.

---

2.


The last time Peter had seen Neal Caffrey had been at his trial. Peter had testified against him, and all the while Neal had looked vaguely friendly and unperturbed. Actually, Neal had started grinning like a kid during the part of the cross-examination when Peter was forced to recount such incidents as Neal sending all the FBI agents on his case invitations to a gallery opening he was planning to rob, or having flowers delivered to Peter's office.

Chasing Neal Caffrey had been alternately fascinating and frustrating, and there had been plenty of times when Peter felt like he was on the trail of an overgrown ten-year-old -- a boy with no malice in him, who was doing it for nothing more than the fun of the game. And if Neal had harbored any ill will towards Peter for catching him and putting him in prison, there had never been a hint of it at the trial. In fact, the very last time he'd ever seen Neal, at the sentencing, Neal had caught Peter's eye and lifted a shoulder in a shrug with a little grin, as if to say, What can you do?

Peter had told himself not to feel guilty. Neal had done the crime, and he had to do the time. His sentence hadn't been long -- four years, wasn't it? Hopefully he'd do a lot of thinking in prison, and by the time he got out, he'd have reflected his way into a better understanding of consequences.

And then Peter had had a whole lot more to worry about than Neal Caffrey serving his debt to society. In fact, as he knelt and checked Neal's vitals (pulse fast but strong, breathing okay) he had to do a quick mental calculation to figure out where Neal was supposed to be in his sentence. It hadn't been four years yet ... not quite. It was possible that Neal had gotten a couple months knocked off for good behavior.

It was also possible that Neal had escaped.

And turned up in my horse barn? Peter thought, rolling Neal onto his side. That would be stretching coincidence just a bit too far.

Neal's face was white and drawn, his hair a scruffy mess, flecked with hay and dead leaves -- from the look of that and the mud on his pants, he'd been crawling around in the woods. Peter drew back the flap of Neal's jacket, and sucked in his breath: Neal's white shirt was dyed red all down his side.

Pulling the jacket back further, Peter saw that both sleeves and part of his shirttail had been torn off for a makeshift bandage, but it was soaked through. It was hard to tell exactly what had happened without taking the bandage off, but Peter's money was on either a bullet or a stab wound.

"What the hell are you mixed up in, Caffrey?" he murmured, looking down at Neal's pale face. "And why are you trying to drag me into it?"

Satchmo, intrigued by the whole thing, wagged his tail and licked Neal's nose.

"Bad dog," Peter said. "Stop consorting with felons."

Neal's eyelids fluttered. "Ow." He pushed away the dog, and squinted up at Peter. "I'm not making a good impression, am I?"

"You need to be in a hospital."

Neal's eyes went wide. "No. No hospitals."

Well, that settled it in case there had been any doubt: he'd escaped. "No police either, I'm guessing?"

"No," Neal said, and then, looking years younger than any of his paperwork claimed he was: "Please."

"I'll make you a deal," Peter said. "You tell me exactly what you're doing in my barn, and who stabbed you --"

"Shot me."

Bingo. "Right," Peter said, eyes narrowed, and Neal tried to look innocent. "Then I'll decide whether or not to call the police."

"I don't really have a choice, do I?"

"You're the one who showed up in my barn," Peter pointed out.

Neal took a few shallow breaths and then said, "Can I do it sitting up?"

"You can do it over against that wall," Peter said, jerking his head towards the end of the barn with the cabinets, sink and hose, "because the first aid supplies are there."

"First aid for horses," Neal complained. His breath caught as Peter got his arm around Neal's chest and helped him to his feet.

"They're better than the ones in the house. And I don't trust you in my house anyway."

He deposited Neal on a pile of feed sacks and went to collect the things he needed. Between his recovery after the fire, and three years of taking care of horses, he'd gotten pretty good at first aid.

It was a warm night and Peter hadn't bothered putting on a jacket over his T-shirt before heading out to the barn, so it wasn't as if Neal could have avoided noticing the prosthesis and the harness holding it on. He hadn't blinked at that or the equally visible scarring on Peter's face and neck, so presumably he'd been doing some research on Peter's life since they'd last seen each other at the trial. Well, the fact that he'd shown up here, in Apple Corners, was proof enough of that.

What have you done, Neal? And more to the point, what do you want from me?

Neal appeared to have fallen asleep, his head tilted to the side against the wall, but he opened his eyes when Peter's shadow fell across him.

"Before I do this, I'm going to frisk you."

"You know I don't carry, Peter." But he submitted to being patted down. There was nothing on him except a wallet that, when inspected, turned out to contain nothing except two IDs in two different names. Neither name was Neal Caffrey, but both had his picture.

"That's private," Neal said, holding out his hand. Peter confiscated both IDs and then placed the empty wallet in Neal's palm. Neal rolled his eyes.

"Take your jacket off."

Neal started to raise his arm and then aborted the motion, any lingering hints of color draining out of his face. "Lean forward," Peter said, and supported him while working the jacket off. Neal settled back against the wall with a soft groan and eyed the spray can of disinfectant, labeled FOR ANIMAL USE ONLY.

"I can't believe you're doing this. I can't believe I'm letting you do this."

"At least I can be reasonably sure you won't kick me, unlike most of my patients," Peter said. "Eyes up and forward; I don't need you fainting on me again. Now, we made a deal. I haven't called the police, so it's time to pay up on your end. Why are you here?"

Neal fixed his eyes on the opposite wall. "I'm not sure where to begin."

"Nice try. Pick a point and start talking."

Neal sighed. "Well, to start ... do you remember Kate?"

"Kate Moreau? The reason why we caught you? Yes, I remember Kate. What about her?"

Neal closed his eyes briefly, and a spasm crossed his face, though when he opened them again, his face was calm. "She's dead. And the person who killed her is after me."

He said it so matter-of-factly that it took a moment for the meaning in his words to catch up. Peter froze in the act of tearing open a gauze packet with his teeth, then slowly lowered it. Kate. The love of Neal's life, as far as he'd ever been able to tell.

Thank you. I never would have found her without you. Neal's words as Peter had snapped handcuffs on him, four years ago. He'd sounded grateful, the bastard.

"I'm sorry." The words seemed horribly inadequate for the magnitude of what Neal had lost. If he's telling the truth, said a small cynical voice at the back of Peter's brain.

Neal gave his head a short, hard shake, like a horse bothered by flies, and said nothing.

"Do you know who killed her?"

"Yes," Neal said. He hesitated fractionally. "The person behind it is a man named Vincent Adler."

Peter froze again. "Vincent Adler? The same Vincent Adler who disappeared with a billion dollars after that Ponzi scheme seven years ago? Never caught? That Adler?"

Neal lifted the shoulder on his good side in a small shrug.

The next logical suspicion followed close on the heels of that revelation. "Were you involved with that? Were you and Adler partners?"

Neal quirked a small smile that didn't touch his eyes. "I assure you, I had nothing to do with either Adler's thefts or his disappearance."

"So why is he after you, then?" Peter asked. He peeled the old bandage away, unsticking it carefully from the edges of the wound.

Neal's breath hissed between his teeth. His voice had a ragged edge when he replied. "Believe it or not, Peter, it's actually a misunderstanding."

"Oh right, I forgot. You're perfectly innocent. And I don't recall giving you permission to call me Peter." The injury looked like a flesh wound; the bullet had probably skimmed his ribs but didn't seem to have penetrated deeper. Which was one less thing to worry about. Still, it had bled a lot.

"Well, Agent Burke isn't accurate anymore, and Mister Burke is completely out, so -- ow!"

"I'm sorry," Peter said sweetly, "did that hurt? I believe you were telling me about Vincent Adler. I'm guessing that he's not trying to kill you because you took his cab or forgot to tip him when he delivered your pizza."

Neal closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall. There were dark shadows under his eyes. He looked like he hadn't slept in a while. "Adler thinks I have something he wants." There was another slight hesitation, which put Peter's suspicions on high alert. "A music box."

"A music box?" Peter repeated. "Like, twirling ballerinas, plays Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, that kind of thing?"

Neal cracked an eye open in weary amusement. "It's a little more expensive than something your grandmother picked up at a rummage sale in Schenectady."

"Why is it so important to him?"

"I have no idea," Neal said. "As far as I know, it's just a music box -- a fancy one, but nothing special."

"Do you have it?"

"You just frisked me," Neal pointed out. "Did you find a music box? Like I told you, there's been a complicated misunderstanding."

"Does part of that misunderstanding involve you escaping from prison?" Peter asked, and saw Neal flinch. "Yeah, I thought so."

Neal opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on Peter. "I didn't have a choice, Peter. Kate was in trouble. I had to find her."

"And now?"

"Now ..." Neal closed his eyes again, sinking against the wall as if all his remaining strength had finally deserted him. "Now Kate's dead, the U.S. Marshals are after me, Adler's after me ..."

"And you're in my barn."

Neal huffed a small laugh.

"Why me, Caffrey?" Peter asked quietly. "I'm just the agent who put you away four years ago. And, as you've so tactfully pointed out, I'm not even with the Bureau anymore."

Neal let out his breath in a long sigh. "Because ..." His voice was almost too soft to hear. "Because I have nowhere else to go. And I thought you might listen. Or at least listen long enough not to turn me in immediately."

Damn it. Damn him. Peter finished taping down the gauze and then sat back on his heels. "You really should see a doctor, you know. Actually, what you ought to do is turn yourself in. You'll be looking at more prison time, but Adler can't touch you, and I'll speak on your behalf. You might get off with another three or four years."

He expected outright refusal, but instead Neal said in a voice so weary that Peter barely recognized it, "I don't know. I can't make a decision like that right now. I just needed a place to stop for a while."

There were a lot of things Peter wanted to say: What's the rest of the story you aren't telling me? and Who do you think you are, leading trouble to my door like this? Instead, he heard himself say, "When was the last time you ate something?"

Neal shrugged, one-sided. Then his eyes opened. "Peter. Are you offering?"

"We have enough leftover roast chicken for an army, and I'm not going to let you starve to death in my barn."

"Does this mean I can come in the house now?"

Peter'd had every intention of making him stay in the barn, but Neal contrived to look as wilted as possible. Peter sighed. "Fine, provided you don't wake up my wife. But in the morning, you're going to tell Elizabeth everything that you told me in the barn, about Adler and Kate and the music box. This isn't my house and my farm, Neal; it's our house and our farm, and if there's trouble chasing you, then my wife needs to know about it."

---

3.


Elizabeth opened her eyes into her pillow, then raised her head and squinted at the glowing numbers on the clock. Her alarm was about to go off. She'd developed a sixth sense for it over the years. She shut it off to avoid waking Peter, then rolled over and found that the bed beside her was chill and empty.

El ran her palm across his pillow, closed her eyes for a moment, and then shuffled off to take a shower. Falling asleep on the couch after too many beers -- she'd thought they were past that part of the adjustment process. She'd hoped they were past it. Damn it.

Dressed for the day but still toweling her hair, she trotted downstairs. Pattie would be here soon to pick her up for work and drop off the kids. She'd need to wake Peter or he'd be grouching at the poor kids all morning, but she could let him sleep for just a little longer --

El stopped at the sight that greeted her at the bottom of the stairs.

The furnishings in the living room had come with the house: massive overstuffed recliners and two long sofas, all of them scruffy and well-used and comfortable. Peter was asleep in one of the recliners, his head twisted to the side. He'd fallen asleep in the prosthesis and she winced on his behalf; she knew he'd be feeling that when he woke.

Seeing him like this, she felt a rush of affection for him, as always: his hair tousled, his cheek pressed against the puffy wing of the chair like a worn-out child. God, she loved that stubborn man of hers.

But he wasn't alone. A stranger was sprawled on the couch, asleep. Something about him nagged at El's memory, as if she had seen him before, or maybe seen a picture of him. He was young, his hair dark and falling loose across his forehead. The colorful afghan that El's aunt Betty had given Peter and El for a wedding present was thrown across his legs.

There were two coffee cups on the table, and a plate with crumbs and a fork. Peter had let the stranger in and fed him. Someone with car trouble? El wondered. Out in the country, people helped each other, and she and Peter had fallen into that pattern as well. Perhaps the stranger didn't want to bother his family or friends by calling for a ride in the middle of the night.

Satchmo, lying on the floor between the two men, raised his head and thumped his tail, then jumped up and darted into the kitchen. El heard his toenails click on the linoleum over to the door. His morning priorities were clear.

The stranger flinched. His eyes opened and he squinted blearily at the ceiling, then at El. She could see his focus sharpen in an instant, his whole demeanor changing from lazy post-sleep lethargy to an all-over alertness. She caught herself tensing, too. She did not know this man. Being out in the country didn't mean that all strangers were harmless.

Then he smiled at her, a winsome, winning smile. "You must be --"

El touched her finger to her lips and pointed at Peter.

"... Elizabeth," he finished in a whisper.

El nodded. She pointed to the kitchen. The stranger started to sit up, halted with a grimace, and then made his way slowly and stiffly to his feet. He was wearing an oversized Le Moyne sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up; it looked like one of Peter's old shirts. In fact, she recognized the stain in the front: it was one of Peter's shirts. The mystery deepened.

In the kitchen, she let out Satchmo and put on a pot of coffee. The stranger seated himself at the kitchen table with deliberate care; she noticed that he favored his side. "Are you all right?" she asked quietly.

His smile was a little rueful. "Long story." He held out a hand. "Neal Caffrey."

El couldn't stop a delighted grin from breaking through. "The Neal Caffrey? The one I heard about every day for all those years that my husband was chasing you?"

"The one and only," Neal said, grinning broadly.

She shook his hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you at last. But what are you doing here?" With a frown at his shirt, she added, "Wearing my husband's clothes?"

"Uh. Long story. I'm sure you'll hear it from Peter."

"I'd rather hear it from you." She put on a kettle of hot water for her morning tea. "Would you like some coffee or tea? Perhaps orange juice? It's good for you -- full of electrolytes."

"Orange juice. Sure." He dragged a hand through his hair, smoothing it into some semblance of order. "I won't be here long. I wasn't really planning on coming here in the first place."

El poured orange juice into a glass. "Why did you?"

"I don't know. I guess I had nowhere else to go. Someone is looking for me." He glanced up at her. "His name's Vincent Adler."

El shook her head. "I don't know that name. It sounds a little familiar, but ..."

"No reason why you would. Peter can probably tell you more. Anyway, he's not a nice guy."

He studied the glass of orange juice as if it held all his answers. From everything that Peter had said about him, the man was a criminal mastermind, devious and dangerous. Right now, he looked sleepy and vulnerable and barely old enough to vote.

Gravel crunched under car tires outside. "My sister's here," El said. "We can finish talking about this later. There's cereal in the cabinet, milk and eggs in the refrigerator; Peter can show you where everything is."


***


Peter woke with a start, his arm cramping fiercely. Half-awake, still muzzy with sleep, he reached for it to rub out the cramp, and his fingers slid across plastic and metal. He could feel it anyway -- could follow the twisting path of the cramp across the forearm he no longer had.

His face was mashed against the side of the recliner, early morning sunlight streaming into his eyes. He'd fallen asleep in the harness, and it was digging painfully into his shoulders. His first thought was Why am I sleeping downstairs? He didn't remember El kicking him out of bed ...

Oh. Wait.

Caffrey. Neal Caffrey, in his barn. Neal Caffrey, on his couch. Oh hell.

Peter raised his head and blinked at the afghan in a rumpled heap on the couch. Neal was nowhere to be seen. Outside, a car door slammed and he sat upright with a bolt of adrenaline racing through him.

Right. The Millers. El's sister stopped by every morning around five-thirty to pick her up and take her to the bakery -- and to drop off her two oldest children, who were earning summer spending money by helping out around the Burkes' farm. Normally Peter exercised the horses with the kids and then, as the heat of the day grew more oppressive, drove them home.

But the absolute last thing he needed today, with a wanted felon somewhere on the farm, was Brian and Jess poking around.

Peter vaulted out of the chair and shot into the kitchen, where a startled-looking El was filling her travel mug with tea. Peter glimpsed Neal at the kitchen table and snapped, "Stay there! Do not move! Or speak!"

He whipped open the kitchen door just as El's sister raised her hand to knock.

Pattie Miller was a slightly older, slightly plumper vision of Elizabeth. El had mentioned that she and her sister were sometimes mistaken for each other in high school, and Peter could see why; around the face they were nearly twins, although Pattie's not-entirely-convincing blonde curls reduced the casual resemblance somewhat -- while making her look even more like a stereotypically wholesome farm wife. The first time Peter had met the Millers (taciturn Mike, bubbly Pattie, the three then-small and apple-cheeked children) he'd boggled at them: they were straight out of Farm Family Central Casting.

Right now the two teenagers sulking behind Pattie looked a great deal less wholesome and more like they'd been dragged out of bed at five a.m. during summer vacation and were not happy about it. Peter had learned by experience that the only thing to do with them in that mood was to put them to work, which, luckily, was exactly what he needed to do this morning -- as far away from the house as possible.

"Pattie! Morning!" He squeezed out without opening the screen door more than a foot -- Satchmo wove his way deftly at Peter's heels -- and pointed at the barn. "Brian, Jess, horses."

The kids gave him identical death glares and headed for the barn, Brian sneezing as he went; he was allergic to everything, including horses. And dogs -- Satchmo romped happily after the kids.

"Don't forget to take your Zyrtec!" his mother called after him, and then turned a beaming El-style smile on Peter. "Good morning, Peter! Is El ready?"

"Oh yes, yes, she's just -- Here she is! Hi, hon!" Peter beamed at El, hauled her out the door before she could open it fully, and kissed her quickly. "Have a great, very normal and uneventful day at work, okay?"

"Okay," El said, wrinkling her nose at him. "A perfectly normal day. Absolutely. 'Bye, hon."

"'Bye, hon." He kissed her nose, made an abortive move to hug Pattie and ended up clapping her on the shoulder instead, and ducked back through the kitchen door before she could say anything. He sidestepped quickly to the window and cracked the blinds with two fingers to watch Pattie and El leave the porch.

"Very smooth, Eliot Ness," Neal said.

"I told you not to talk."

His missing arm still hurt fiercely, a sharp spiraling pain twisting through his nonexistent forearm. He hadn't had phantom pain in months, but then, he didn't make a habit of falling asleep with the arm on, either. Peter shrugged off the harness and leaned against the wall, massaging the stump absently while he watched El and her sister through the kitchen blinds. He didn't relax until Pattie's SUV turned out of the driveway. Okay, one obstacle down. All that was left was ... the rest of the entire town, since if there was one thing people in Apple Corners liked to do, it was poke into their neighbors' business.

Which made them total hypocrites for objecting when someone else did it to them -- but, no. Letting it go. Letting it go.

He turned around to look at Neal. It was too bizarre, having a felon (that he'd chased for three years) sitting in his kitchen drinking his orange juice from a glass with cheerful painted orange slices on it.

"Okay, we need some ground rules for damage control," Peter said. "Just having you in my house makes me and El accessories. You realize that, right?"

"I know," Neal said. "I really am sorry about that."

He sounded sincere, which was, in a way, the worst part. "If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have come here in the first place. Anyway, ground rules. I don't want any more people getting sucked into this than absolutely have to be. El's niece and nephew are out in the barn, and I want you staying in the house and out of sight while they're here, got it?"

Neal nodded.

"Shower's upstairs on your right. First aid kit's under the sink, and you can get something to wear from the left-hand closet in the master bedroom. Don't touch anything," he added hastily, "that you don't have to, and if I catch you stealing from me --"

"I won't," Neal said quickly. "I know I'm asking a lot. I owe you for this, Peter."

"Yes," Peter said. "You do. Now I need to go make sure Pattie's kids haven't set the barn on fire." He shrugged back into the harness.

They hadn't set anything on fire, although in the absence of adult direction, neither of them had managed to accomplish a whole lot. Jess had dragged out one of the saddles and was sitting on it with a compact mirror in one hand and an eyebrow pencil in the other. Jess's parents had flatly vetoed any possibility of piercing anything other than her ears until she was twenty-one, so she'd taken to drawing lip and nose rings on herself with eyebrow pencil whenever her parents weren't around. She'd also removed the loose, oversized Neon Trees T-shirt she'd been wearing when Pattie had dropped her off, revealing a very tight mesh blouse that barely covered her tiny sports bra and extreme lack of breasts.

Her brother Brian, Pattie and Mike's eldest, was sitting on a hay bale, playing some kind of game on his iPhone. Brian was a skinny, pallid fifteen-year-old who vastly preferred being inside at the computer to any sort of outdoor activity. Peter had often reflected that his own father would have had no idea what to do with Brian. Burke Sr. had been very firmly of the opinion that there were two kinds of boys: proper boys who played sports, and pansies. He'd had enough trouble with Peter majoring in math.

Mike, Brian's dad, was very much cut from the same cloth as Peter's dad where that sort of thing was concerned, and Peter was fairly sure that Brian's part-time job at the stable was mostly an attempt to get Brian to buck up and behave like Mike's idea of what a boy should act like. Peter had a lot of respect for both his dad and for Mike, but no desire whatsoever to emulate either one of them in squashing Brian's ... whatever it was that Brian had going for him. Unfortunately he had no idea how to do that, since he had little in common with the kid. They'd developed an informal agreement where Brian took the gentlest horse in the stable for daily rides and, otherwise, Peter found things for him to do inside.

Jess was a more outdoorsy kid than Brian. One of the horses, Pepper, belonged to the Millers, though since none of them were horse people except for Jess, the horse was de facto hers. She enjoyed working with the horses, but Peter got the impression that the real draw of working on the farm for her was the opportunity to talk to a Real! Live! FBI! Agent!

She seemed to enjoy following him around asking questions like, "Did you ever shoot somebody? You know, like a criminal? Or a bystander, or whatever."

"No," was Peter's standard response to all questions of that nature.

"No one?" Jess's expression had made it plain that she did not believe him. "Ever?"

"I was in the White Collar unit. We caught forgers. We didn't exactly see a lot of shootouts."

"Oh, you mean the boring unit."

"That's it, no letter of recommendation to Quantico for you, Nancy Drew."

And that was Jess. Peter thought that Brian wouldn't notice a grenade going off behind his head unless pictures were posted on Facebook. Jess, on the other hand -- he could only imagine the nightmare that would result if she ever decided that the Burke household had something mysterious going on that had to be investigated. Jess had to be kept away from the house at all costs.

"Morning, team!" he announced. Jess kept applying eyebrow pencil; Brian slipped out one of his earbuds but otherwise remained fixated on the iPhone screen. "Jess, put your shirt back on; you're not going out like that. Brian, take your headphones off and look at me. That's better. All right, team: let's get ready for today's mission. Up, up. Jess, get Chantilly saddled. Brian, you've got Ladybug. Hup! Move out!"

"Did one of the horses get hurt, Uncle Peter?" Jess asked.

Peter's heart skipped a beat. "What?"

Jess stuck the eyebrow pencil behind her ear. She seemed to think it made her look intellectual and sophisticated. "The Betadine was left out, and there are gauze wrappers in the trash."

"Why are you snooping through my trash? No, don't answer that. It was --" he cast about wildly for something plausible "-- the neighbor's ... cat. Bitten by a raccoon." Did raccoons bite cats? Well, he was committed now; nothing to do but soldier on. "The cat's fine; don't worry about it. All taken care of."

"It must have been a heck of a bite, Uncle Peter," Jess said. "Or a heck of a cat. You used enough gauze to cover --"

"Do I see you saddling horses? No? Let's roll, team! We're burning daylight! Where are your helmets?"

A few minutes later, from the back of Chantilly -- a tall leggy bay with a fractious personality -- Jess looked down and said, "I wanted to ride Pepper."

"Get Chantilly exercised first. She's bored and she's been acting up, bothering the other horses. You can take Pepper out on the jumps when you get back."

Pepper was an AQHA quarter horse, a fast little buckskin whose full name was American Yellow Bell Pepper. She'd been too old for serious competition when the Millers had bought her, but Jess liked working with her, and Peter and the kids had set up a training course in an unused part of the upper field. The best way to deal with Jess was to distract her, and Peter figured that between exercising Chantilly and riding the obstacle course with Pepper, she ought to be too busy to do too much snooping.

"Aren't you coming with us, Uncle Peter?" Brian asked, mounting gentle Ladybug, El's horse.

"Not right now. Things to do. Just take the horses on the trail by the old mill. When you get back, Brian, fill the horse troughs, and Jess, take Pepper out."

Jess cast a last suspicious glance over her shoulder, and the kids trotted off towards the woods, Satchmo frisking along behind them with puppylike excitement. Peter headed for the house, hoping that Neal hadn't had enough time to steal anything important or run up an astronomical credit card bill in the meantime.

He hadn't, but he was on Peter's laptop at the living room table, wearing a fresh set of oversized sweats, with his hair wet from the shower. "Hey," Peter said. "No computer for you. Get off that. What are you doing?"

Neal backed off. "I'm not causing any harm, trust me. I just wanted to check the news, see if anything had happened since I left the city."

Peter had glimpsed him closing a browser window, and made a mental note to check his browser cache later. "Anything? Like what? Are you expecting something newsworthy to happen?"

"Well, you never know, do you? Adler's a guy who doesn't pull punches." Neal tried to slouch casually against the back of the couch, and utterly failed to look either casual or comfortable. From the way he was moving this morning, he was in a lot of pain.

"Stay off my computer, and I'll fry a couple eggs. I can also get you some painkillers. You look like you could use 'em."

"For horses?" Neal asked, eyes narrowed.

"No, smartass." Peter thought about bringing Neal upstairs with him, then reconsidered making him climb the stairs. Instead he tucked the laptop under his arm and bounded up the stairs: the less time Neal was left alone in the living room, the better. He contemplated the Vicodin in the bathroom medicine cabinet -- a half-empty bottle; he'd tapered off it over a year ago -- but went for the less felonious Tylenol option instead. He also took the time for a quick look around the master bedroom. Nothing was noticeably out of place, but then, nothing would be. Neal was an expert.

When he got back downstairs, Neal was looking at pictures of El's sister's family on the old-fashioned mantelpiece in the living room. "They look like great kids," he said, sounding wistful.

"They're teenagers," Peter said flatly. "Here. If you need heavier stuff I've got it, but I'm not supplying narcotics to an escaped felon if these are enough." He went into the kitchen and got out a skillet.

Neal followed him into the kitchen, pouring several capsules into his hand. After swallowing them with the dregs of the orange juice, he leaned against the sink and watched Peter break out the omelet fixings. Peter knew exactly what he was looking at; the only unexpected thing was that Neal had managed to contain his curiosity as long as he had. Peter was sharply aware of Neal's eyes tracing the dual cables on the prosthetic arm, watching the way that it shifted when he moved.

Still, he was surprised when Neal spoke. "Hey, Peter? Do you mind if I take a closer look at that?" When Peter paused, turning back from the refrigerator with a carton of eggs in his left hand, Neal added quickly, "I won't if it bothers you. I just want to see how it works."

After a moment, Peter unlocked the elbow and extended the arm. Neal laid his fingers between the two hooked claws, studying the cable that hooked to the articulation point, then tracing it with his eyes back to the shoulder harness. Peter closed the claws as gently as possible, trapping Neal's fingers between them.

"Cool," Neal said, heartfelt. "Your arm muscles do that?"

"Shoulders."

Pattie's kids had reacted much the same: open curiosity and questions, unlike most adults, who pretended not to see it aside from occasional wary glances when they thought he wasn't looking. Peter preferred the curious approach. It was honest, at least.

Neal examined the metal claws before slipping his fingers out of Peter's grasp with his usual light grace. A mischievous smile made his eyes crinkle. "Can you get a switchblade attachment?"

Peter would have swatted him if he didn't have a carton of eggs to set down first. "What do I look like, Inspector Gadget?"

Still grinning, Neal limped to the coffeepot and poured himself a cup. "If you don't mind a little more impertinent curiosity --"

"That never stopped you before."

"Touché," Neal said. "I was just wondering why you don't have one that looks like an actual hand. But I think I figured it out."

"Did you, Freud?" Peter cracked eggs into the skillet, left-handed. "I do have one, actually. A social arm, the physical therapy guy called it. It's upstairs in the closet, where it has been ever since we moved here. Useless hunk of plastic. I prefer an arm that I can use to actually --"

"Pick things up?"

"Exactly."

"I would have thought it'd be too much like lying for you," Neal said. "Like ... Tofurkey at a vegetarian Thanksgiving, or something."

Peter stopped and stared at him. Because Neal was right. And he'd never told anyone that, not even El. He didn't just hate the social arm because it was immobile and basically useless, although that was part of it. More critically, though, he hated it because it could pass inspection at first glance. It was a polite social fiction. A lie.

Still ...

"Tofurkey? Seriously?"

"It was the best metaphor I could come up with." Neal hid a grin behind his coffee cup. Again Peter was reminded of Neal's resemblance, in certain respects, to an overgrown kid.

An overgrown kid who was devious, slightly ruthless, and wanted by the U.S. Marshals. Sobering thought.

"So," Peter said, shaking it off and whisking the eggs, "when do you plan to tell me what you were really doing on my computer? Hand me that loaf of bread."

"I told you: I was looking up the news. And sending an email," Neal added without looking him in the eye.

"An email to whom?"

"No one you know," Neal said. "A drop box, that's all. Just letting a friend know I landed on my feet."

Peter gave him a pointed look: the borrowed clothes, the way he was slightly hunched over and not touching his side.

"... sort of on my feet."

"I had no idea that you had any friends."

Neal topped off his coffee and Peter's. "That's cold, Peter. By the way, you need to stop buying the cheapest store brand of everything. Even in a town this small, you can probably find a decent Italian roast."

"I like my coffee. Tell me more about this friend of yours."

The kitchen door slammed. "Hey, Uncle Peter!" Jess called. "Brian wants to know where you put the -- oh, wow, hi."

For a moment, no one moved. Neal and Jess stared at each other. Peter stared at both of them.

"He's my ... cousin," Peter said. "From Schenectady."

"Sweet," Jess said, still staring. She stuck out a hand. "I'm Jessica! Wow. Hi."

Neal moved to take her hand; Peter glared at him until he retreated back to the counter. "You were looking for something," Peter said pointedly.

"What? Oh -- yeah. We can't find the big spray head for the hose."

"On the shelf above the feed sacks." When Jess didn't move, Peter added, "In the barn."

"Right. Yeah." Jess finally tore her eyes away from Neal. "Nice meeting you, mister --"

"Neal," Neal said. "Neal --"

"Burke," Peter inserted. "Neal Burke. Jess, tell Brian I'll be out in a minute."

The screen door slammed.

"Cute kid," Neal said.

"Yeah. You're not allowed within five hundred yards of her. Don't look at her or talk to her."

"Peter. She's what, twelve? What do you take me for?"

"Thirteen. Stay away from her."

"Your niece's honor is safe with me, Peter."

"It's not her honor I'm worried about. It's the fact that she's thirteen and thinks she's Nancy Drew. If you want your every waking move meticulously documented and your every secret brought to light --"

"Then I'll just keep spending time around you," Neal said.

"Funny. See me laughing."

---

4.


Elizabeth expected to be given the third degree -- Pattie was no idiot -- but fortunately the Girl Scout bake sale was the topic on everyone's lips, including Pattie's. And then they were caught up in the whirlwind of the morning rush, as farm wives and commuters on their way to work stopped in for a donut and a cup of coffee, or a sandwich to save for lunch.

The Good Eatin' Bakery was located right on Main Street in the heart of the old downtown, convenient for locals and easy to find for strangers from out of town. Apple Corners, Elizabeth always maintained, wasn't quite as tiny as Peter claimed -- there was a little sprawl of businesses around Main Street, and another cluster across the railroad tracks, where the "new" construction was located: the library, the Wal-Mart, a few chain stores. It might be a step down from the city (okay, a big step down, maybe a whole flight of stairs) but there was certainly enough business to keep the two sisters in business -- and on their feet in the mornings.

As the usual morning crowd began to thin, a stranger came through the door. They always got a smattering of pass-through traffic off the highway, and El pegged him immediately for a cop. She'd been married to an FBI agent for much too long not to recognize law enforcement when she saw it. He was a big guy with a ginger crew cut.

"Cup of coffee," he told her, smiling. "And a question."

"Sure," El said, pouring his coffee. Pattie didn't hold with notions of espresso: all the coffee at Miller's Bakery was fresh-brewed in a pot. "Go right ahead."

"She's married, if that's what you were going to ask," Pattie put in, as she breezed past with a tray of fresh pershings.

"Pattie! Stop. She's my sister," El explained, handing over his coffee. "She has to tease me. It's her job."

The out-of-towner smiled. "Yeah, I can see the resemblance. Actually, your sister might be able to help me as well. You two probably know everyone in town, and I'm looking for a guy." He unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket. "He's a fugitive, and I'm tracking him. Have you seen this man?"

Pattie shook her head immediately. "But I think I'd remember if I had. Wow. What'd he do?"

"You don't want to know," the cop said smoothly. "He escaped from prison, and he's dangerous, possibly armed. It's very important that we find him as soon as possible." He turned his attention to El. "You haven't seen him, have you? Or heard of a stranger in town?"

El managed to laugh. "The only stranger I've spoken to this morning is you, I'm afraid." She hoped she sounded convincing. It was almost true. Neal wasn't a stranger; Peter had told her everything from Neal's romantic history to his shoe size over the breakfast table during those years of pursuit.

She tried not to look at the printout in the cop's hand, and Neal's face smiling at her from it, for fear that she'd give something away.

"Well, thanks for the help. Can I leave you my card?" Both women nodded, and he passed them each a little square of white cardboard. "Please call me if you hear anything. And if you do see this man, don't approach him. Like I said, he's very dangerous."

"Is it likely he's in the area?" Pattie sounded more fascinated than afraid.

"Not really, but we're taking no chances. What do I owe you ladies for the coffee?"

"Oh, it's on the house," Pattie told him. "You're doing good work. It's the least we can do."

As the bell in the bakery's door tinkled behind him, she turned to El, bright-eyed with excitement. "Isn't that amazing! A fugitive! Like something out of a movie, El."

"Like something out of a movie," El echoed. She turned over the card in her fingers, reading the name: GARRETT FOWLER, FBI.

She needed to talk to Peter.


***


Given the way his life had been going lately, Peter was entirely unsurprised that despite his efforts to keep Pattie's kids away from Neal, the four of them ended up eating breakfast in the Burkes' kitchen together.

"You work for him?" Neal said to the kids. "What's that like?"

Jess gestured with her fork. "Total slave driver."

"Total," Brian said. "It's like having a drill sergeant."

Peter stared at them. "What? You work three hours a day! Mostly riding horses!"

Neal leaned close. "Does he still do that thing with his face when he's ordering people around ..." He pulled a face and the kids broke into giggles.

"Ohhhh yes," Jess said.

"I do not do a thing with my face! How do you know about any thing with my face?"

"Hey, you weren't just watching me," Neal said. "I was watching you, too."

"Keep this up," Peter said, "and you're going straight back to pr -- Poughkeepsie."

"I thought you were from Schenectady, Uncle Neal," Jess said.

Peter sputtered. Neal looked vastly amused.

"He's not your uncle. I'm your uncle."

The kitchen door opened and El came in, stopped at the sight of the group at the table, and then broke into a brilliant grin. "Well, look at all of you."

Peter rose to give her a quick kiss. "What are you doing here? It's not even nine."

El shrugged and dropped her purse on the countertop. "I hated leaving you to deal with ..." She glanced at Neal. "... everything all by yourself. After getting Pattie through the morning rush, I let her know I needed a couple of hours for personal stuff. I'll go back for the lunch crowd." She rolled her eyes pointedly at the kids, then at Neal.

Peter began collecting plates from the table. "Brian, Jess, how would you guys like to knock off a bit early today? I'll run you home. Hon, do you want to come along?" Though that would mean leaving Neal in the house alone. He wasn't sure what was less appealing: leaving Neal unattended in the house, or unattended with his wife.

"That's fine, honey," El said, smiling at him. "Neal and I ought to talk anyway."

"Hey, wait ..." Neal protested, as Peter, with an uncertain backward glance at Elizabeth, shooed the kids towards the door.

"I'll be back in a few minutes; they don't live that far away. El will keep you out of trouble." He smiled at his wife, then leaned close and murmured into her ear, "Don't believe a word he says."


***


After Peter left with the kids, Elizabeth gestured Neal towards the porch. "Come on," she said. "It's nice out there. Let's talk a bit. Would you like some lemonade?"

"Sure." Neal let himself be ushered to a sagging couch, a little musty-smelling and flecked with dog hair. While she went back inside to get the lemonade, he tried to take advantage of the opportunity to marshal his brain. The Tylenol had taken the edge off the knife in his side, but he was still sleep-deprived and hazy, his thoughts running slower than usual.

Being left alone with Peter's wife was an unforeseen development he wasn't quite sure how to handle. He was on much easier footing with Peter, even though they'd never had more than a few words of actual conversation before last night. Theirs had been a strange relationship, but a oddly comfortable one. There had been rules that both of them understood, and even if their cat-and-mouse almost-friendship had been taken to a new level now, the game was still afoot, their wits and wills still crossed like swords. But Elizabeth -- he didn't know where he stood with her, what he was to her. Normally he would look at it in terms of what he wanted to get from her or learn from her, and this wasn't always in pursuit of a con. A lot of times he just liked to talk to people for the pleasure of it, because people were fascinating.

But he was in her power, as much as he was in Peter's. He didn't know how to relate to her from that angle.

He still couldn't explain the impulse that had made him run here, of all places. He'd looked up Peter Burke after escaping from supermax, of course, just to see what his old nemesis had been up to in the years he'd been incarcerated. Through the dry text of old newspaper clippings, he'd learned of the fire and Peter's subsequent retirement from the FBI. It was strange to see the reality after reading the stories: the horse ranch lying somnolent in the July heat, the old farmhouse with its well-worn furniture and the history embedded in its walls. And Peter, his broad, tanned face remapped with a pale tracery of scar tissue. It was one thing to read the headline: FBI AGENT INJURED, 3 KILLED IN WAREHOUSE FIRE. It was another to be faced with the reality, and he felt oddly guilty about it, even though he'd had nothing to do with it. As if, being there, he could have prevented it. But that was silly: even if Peter hadn't caught him, he wouldn't have been there. He'd have been living in the lap of luxury somewhere else. Peter's problems weren't his problems.

"Sorry to make you wait." Elizabeth nudged open the screen door, her hands full. The dog pushed his way out behind her, and jumped up onto the couch beside Neal as if it were his due. Neal thought about getting up to help her, but by the time the thought could settle, Elizabeth had already seated herself on a wicker chair in front of him and pulled up another chair to serve as an end table.

As well as two glasses of iced lemonade, she'd brought a small plate of variously shaped cookies, arranged in an artful spiral. "One thing about working at a bakery, you end up bringing a lot of baked goods home." She smiled. "Peter says I'm trying to make him fat. Now I get to make you fat instead."

Neal cautiously took a cookie with pink icing. "Thank you ... I think."

"There was a man asking about you at the bakery this morning," El said, and Neal stopped in mid-bite. "He said he was with the FBI."

Neal chewed. Swallowed. Then he said, "What did he look like?"

"He looked like an FBI agent," El said. "I know the type, believe me; I've been married to it for long enough. He was a big man. Light-colored hair."

Neal closed his eyes briefly to mask the despair. Fowler. He should have known. Maybe he should've been more up-front with Peter in the beginning, because this was not going to go over well. But the more the Burkes knew about his situation, the more danger they'd be in. And the more they knew, the more damage they could do to him if they decided to sell him out to Fowler and Adler -- or turn him in to the police.

"He said you were dangerous," El said quietly. "He was showing around a picture."

Suddenly her delay inside the house -- getting lemonade, arranging cookies on a plate -- made sense to Neal. She called the police. Or, worse, Fowler. She's waiting for them to arrive.

"I'm not," Neal said. "I swear to you, Elizabeth. I've never hurt anyone, and I don't mean any harm to you and Peter."

It was so damn hard to think and plan. He'd only had a couple hours' sleep in the last two days, on Peter and El's couch this morning. Ironically, it was the first place he'd been in a long time that he felt safe enough to sleep.

Still, he couldn't blame her for turning him in. Fowler said I'm dangerous. Of course he did.

Possibly this whole fugitive thing would be a lot easier if he were dangerous. Neal let his eyes dart around the porch and tried to think like a dangerous, wanted felon. What would such a person do? There were no weapons in sight. Maybe he'd smash his lemonade glass, hold the sharp edges against El's throat, and ...

... die in a hail of gunfire, probably. Those things never ended well. Besides, El had been kind to him, and she was Peter's wife. The idea of hurting her made him sick.

Elizabeth's eyes were too astute, seeing right through him. "I believe you," she said. "I'm not sure why, but I do. After all, I did hear quite a lot about you while my husband was chasing you. He was very adamant that you were not a violent person. Not harmless, precisely, but not violent. And I don't believe he would have let you in the house if he was afraid you'd hurt me."

"I won't. And I don't want to see either of you hurt, either," Neal said. Despite all the things he wasn't certain about, that he knew for sure. He leaned forward and tried to infuse all the sincerity that he possibly could into his face and voice. It helped that it was true. "I'd rather leave than have you and Peter come to harm because of me. Do you want me to go?"

"No, I --" She pressed the cold glass of lemonade against her forehead for a moment. "I almost lost my husband three and a half years ago, Neal. I don't know if you know what happened to him, or if you understand how close I really came to losing him. I want to know that I'm not going to risk Peter, or my sister, or anyone else that I love because of you. I want to help you, but -- I'm afraid, Neal."

The lemonade rose in the back of his throat. For an instant all the walls that he'd flung up and buttressed in the last two days trembled on the verge of falling, but that was something he couldn't allow to happen. Not here. Not now. Kate, he thought, and then, Breathe in. Breathe out.

When he was able to look at Elizabeth again, he saw her studying him with a frank curiosity tinged with worry. "Are you all right?" she asked.

The irony of her asking him that made him laugh softly. "I guess so," he said.

"Is this FBI person telling the truth, then? Are you a fugitive?"

Taking a deep breath, he pushed onward. He owed her the truth. Some truth, anyway. "Yes. I escaped from prison. And I told Peter this last night. He already knows."

"I thought you said this Adler person was after you ...?" Questioning. Testing his story. Wanting to believe.

"Yes," Neal said. "The FBI agent you talked to -- Fowler is his name -- works for him."

"Oh, Neal," Elizabeth sighed. "Peter did warn me about you ..."

"I'm not lying," he said quickly. "Fowler is an FBI agent, but he's dirty. He's squarely in Adler's pocket. Fowler is the one who --" He stopped, fighting to get the words out. He needed truth to get her on his side. Not all of it. But the parts of the truth he needed to dig out -- those parts seared his throat like acid. "He killed my girlfriend Kate two nights ago. That's why I ran, why I came here. I didn't know he was that close behind me. He's bad, Elizabeth. Bad news. Don't get near him."

El gazed at him levelly for a long moment. He recognized the look on her face; it was the expression of a mark struggling to decide whether to believe one of his more outlandish, heartstring-tugging stories. And he recognized, too, the moment that she fell from querulous uncertainty into belief, into trust. She reached out a hand and placed it over his. "Oh, honey."

Neal let himself go with it -- let a little of the pain show, enough to make his voice crack, his eyes come close to welling up. He was afraid to let more of it out because he was already balanced on a knife's edge of self-control, and the last thing he wanted was to break down crying in the arms of Peter Burke's wife. It might even help with his credibility -- but, no. Just, no.

"Does Peter know all of this?" El asked.

Damn it, they were bound to compare notes, so he'd better be honest. "Not about Fowler. I didn't tell him because I figured there was no need to get you two deeper into this than you have to be. The less you know, the safer you'll be."

And because it changes everything. If there was one thing Neal knew well, it was the brotherhood that existed between law enforcement officers of all stripes. Peter might be a decent man, all things considered, but he would never take the word of a con over one of his brothers. In explaining the situation to him last night, Neal had selected the facts of the situation in order to present it in terms of con vs. con -- and Adler was a much bigger con than Neal himself, a much better score. Peter might help Neal in order to get Adler, but Neal could imagine the way his face would have shut down if Neal tried to claim that the FBI manhunt for him was a conspiracy orchestrated by dirty cops. No cop was ever willing to believe that another cop was dirty unless they had the evidence right in front of their eyes, and sometimes not even then.

Elizabeth would find that out for herself as soon as Peter got home.

I'm going to have to run again.

At least his little detour at the Burkes' had provided him with a hot meal, a change of clothes, and some first aid supplies. And there was also the roll of cash tucked into the pocket of his borrowed shirt. He'd found it in the toe of one of Elizabeth's nylons -- really, such an obvious hiding place; he'd think Peter would have taught her better than that.

The Burkes had been kind to him, and if he managed to survive this, he planned to send it back -- with interest -- in an envelope with no return address as soon as he pulled off his next big score.

But in the meantime, he had to look out for himself. No one else was going to.


***


"Why didn't you tell me this last night?"

El had tried to press a glass of lemonade onto Peter as soon as he'd shown up, but he was having none of it -- he could see just by looking at them that something was up. After they'd told him about Fowler, Neal and El both sat on the ancient swaybacked couch while Peter paced with short hard steps from one side of the porch to the other. Satchmo had slunk off to the barn.

"Because I didn't want to get the two of you into --"

"Can it, Neal," Peter snapped. "Let's assume for a moment this whole thing is true -- crooked FBI agents, homicidal crooked FBI agents. God. Not telling us about it doesn't keep us out of trouble, it gets us into even more trouble, because we wouldn't have known what was coming after you, after us, until it was too late. And on some level you must know that, or you wouldn't be telling us now."

Neal clammed up.

"Honey --" El began.

"Don't." Peter held up a finger at her, waited until she made an elaborate lip-zipping motion (accompanied by a small eye-roll), and turned back to Neal. "We're helping you, Neal, at risk to ourselves. We've opened up our home to you, aiding and abetting an escaped felon in the process, and in return, you lie to us."

"For the record," Neal said, "everything I told you last night was the absolute truth, Peter. I never --"

Peter raised his finger again, and spoke over the top of him. "And what it makes me wonder is, what else is Neal Caffrey lying about? That's what I'm wondering now, Neal."

"Look," Neal said, when Peter paused for air. "I'm leaving, Peter. Okay? I'm out of here. I didn't know Fowler was that close behind me. You're right, he's dangerous, and I never meant to lead him to your doorstep."

He started to rise. "Oh no you don't," Peter said, swooping to intercept him and pushing him back down onto the couch. "You stay right there." He whipped out his cell and began scrolling through the list of saved numbers.

Neal chewed his lip. "Honey," El said, "please, let's think about this. Fowler is --"

"What makes you think I'm calling Fowler?" Peter flashed them both a quick grin.


***


Diana answered on the first ring. "Boss! Hey!"

"I'm not your boss anymore, Diana; you can actually call me Peter, you know."

"I know," she said. He could hear the grin in her voice. "But I'll always think of you that way. How are things in Grover's Corners?"

"Apple Corners. They're good. Well, maybe not so good. I need some information."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "I know I'm a civilian now," Peter said, trying to make it sound like it didn't hurt. "I'm not asking you to tell me anything that isn't a matter of public record. It's just that ..."

"It's faster to call me?"

"Well, given the nature of the request. There's a guy up here poking his nose around who says he's an FBI agent."

"You think he might not be?"

"I think there might be something else going on. At the very least, I'd like to know what division he works for, and anything else about him that might be ... you know ..."

"On the public record?"

"Exactly."

He gave her Fowler's name, and Diana promised to get back to him as soon as possible. "And be discreet as possible. If what I'm hearing about this guy is accurate, you'll want to stay away from him."

"He's crooked?"

"As a twopenny nail. Allegedly. But all I've got is hearsay, nothing I could take to OPR without being laughed out of the building. So keep your head down, and like I said, don't give me anything I couldn't get --"

"-- through other channels. I'll get right on it. Peter."

"Thanks, Diana. You're the best. There's going to be a baked-goods care package coming your way as soon as things calm down around here."

When Peter hung up, he found both El and Neal watching him. Neal in particular was studying him with a baffled expression, as if Peter had suddenly grown a second head.

"What?"

Neal shook his head helplessly. El rose and cupped Peter's face between her hands, and kissed him on the lips. "Have I mentioned lately that you're a good man? Also very hot."

"I guess I can live with that," Peter said, grinning back at her.

"Neal, come with me," El said over her shoulder. "You hardly got any sleep last night, and you look completely done in. Let me go make up the guest bedroom for you, and you can nap a little this afternoon. I need to get back to the bakery. At least for now, Fowler's not getting any closer, and we can tackle this again once you've had some rest."

Neal, moving like a sleepwalker, let himself be herded into the house. While El fluffed up pillows and unfolded sheets, Neal drifted closer to Peter. "Why are you helping me?" he asked quietly, with uncharacteristic earnestness tempered with helpless bafflement. "Either of you?"

"God only knows. Maybe I need to take up skydiving for a hobby, because my life is clearly lacking in stupid risks."

"Do you believe me about Fowler?"

"That he's in Adler's pocket? I don't know. At the very least, it's a bit suspicious that he shows up right after you do, but with no sign of backup, no announcements on the news regarding an escaped felon, no indication of a manhunt in progress. Just Fowler, all by his lonesome. That's a little weird, don't you think?"

Neal met Peter's eyes, and nodded.

"You're still on thin ice, you know," Peter added warningly.

This drew a tiny smile. "Was I ever off thin ice?"

"It's not a joke," Peter said.

"No. I suppose not." Neal looked thoughtful. Then he dug in his pocket and tucked something into Peter's with a quick flick of his wrist. Peter pulled it out, and stared at the roll of cash in his hand. He could feel temper building like a storm front.

"Neal, did you steal this from us?"

"If I were stealing it, would I be giving it to you? Just testing your security systems. You might want to have a discreet word with Elizabeth that every burglar over the age of twelve looks in the sock drawer first."

Now the temper storm was building a series of thunderheads. "You stole from my wife?" That'd teach him to trust a con. He should've called the cops last night, he really should've. "Neal, so help me, if every single dime isn't here --"

"It is," Neal said. "It is, really. Count it. You can search me if you don't believe me."

Peter stared at him, caught between fury and disbelief -- what game was he playing now? Neal looked sincere. But, of course, he was good at that.

"Don't tell her, Peter, please," Neal said softly. "Just put it back."

---

5.


Afternoon, and the damp July heat that came along with it, settled on Apple Corners like a muffling blanket.

Downtown, all two blocks of it, was nearly deserted. The Good Eatin' Bakery hadn't seen a customer in over an hour.

Across the railroad tracks and a mile or so down the road, the Wal-Mart and its associated shopping district had a few cars. It always did. The chain stores that had moved in along with the Wal-Mart -- a NAPA Auto Parts, a Taco Bell and so forth -- marched in a neat line to the wedge of park outside Apple Corners' tiny municipal library.

Jessica Miller perched on the edge of the WWII memorial fountain in the park, her skateboard dangling from one hand, kicking her feet. Brian was sitting in the shade of the fountain with his back against the concrete retaining wall. Occasionally one of Jess's dangling sneakers would hit her brother in the shoulder, ear or head. Brian ignored her. Having lived most of his life with younger siblings had given him an extremely high tolerance for that sort of minor torment. Besides, he was working on a high score in "Meteor Blitz".

"So, do you think that guy is really Uncle Peter's cousin?"

"I'm not even sure if you're really my sister," Brian muttered.

Jess kicked him in the side of the head, on purpose this time.

"Ow! I don't know! Stop kicking me." Brian coughed. "If Dad doesn't pick us up soon, I'm waiting inside the library. It's air-conditioned and not full of pollen."

"He said to wait in the park."

Brian sighed, and texted, DAD WHR R U?

HUNG UP @ FEED STORE, SORRY, FEW MINUTES came the reply. He held it up wordlessly to show his sister.

Jess heaved a sigh cranked up to maximum dramatic intensity, dropped her skateboard onto the sidewalk and then herself after it.

"Don't go anywhere," Brian called after her.

"Where am I gonna go? There's nowhere to go!"

Brian watched her skateboard down to the Wal-Mart parking lot and do some loop-de-loops before he felt comfortable going back to his game. If there was any trouble to get into on a lazy July afternoon, his sister would find it.

Brian, on the other hand, preferred to avoid trouble as much as possible. Jess was wildly curious about the mysterious stranger staying with Aunt El and Uncle Peter, but Brian just wished the stranger would go away. What if he turned out to be some kind of ax murderer? Uncle Peter had never mentioned a cousin before, and Jess had been spinning far-fetched theories all morning. (Witness protection! Mafia! Aliens!) With every new, increasingly gruesome idea that Jess came up with, Brian wished more wholeheartedly that he'd never heard of Cousin Neal Burke.

A shadow fell across him, and Brian looked up from his game, startled. The person standing above him was a big guy with wide shoulders and a sweaty, rumpled suit. This guy was definitely from out of town, probably the city. Nobody dressed like that around here.

"Hi there, kid," the stranger said.

"Hi," Brian said warily. He scrambled to his feet, acutely aware of how weedy and small he was next to the stranger's bulk.

"Don't get scared, it's okay." The stranger pulled out a wallet and flipped it open. Brian was surprised to see a badge, sort of like on TV. GARRETT FOWLER, it said. "I'm with the FBI."

"Are you here for my sister?" Brian asked. He looked wildly around for Jess. If anyone could get in trouble with the FBI, it was Jessica.

"No," Fowler said, looking startled. "What did your sister do?"

"Nothing that I know of," Brian said. He glimpsed Jess, still down in the Wal-Mart, catching air with her board. "Yet."

Fowler followed his gaze, and smiled. "No, I'm not here for your sister. I'm looking for a very dangerous fugitive who escaped from prison. And if there's one thing I know, it's that kids notice stuff grownups don't, right?"

As soon as Fowler said "very dangerous fugitive", Brian got an awful sinking feeling in his stomach, and his stomach fell right to his toes when Fowler unfolded a computer printout with a somewhat grainy picture of Cousin Neal on it.

It was on the tip of his tongue to blurt out a full confession, but then an even more terrifying thought occurred to him: would Uncle Peter and Aunt El go to jail? That would be awful. Maybe he should talk to his parents first. Or Uncle Peter, and find out what was really going on.

"What did he do?" Brian asked. His voice emerged a little shaky. His palms were sweaty too. "Did he kill somebody?"

"I'm really not at liberty to talk about it," Fowler said. "Tell you what, kid, why don't you ask your friends and see if anybody's seen him around town? And you can have them call me if they do."

He handed Brian a card with an embossed FBI logo. "Um, thanks," Brian said, and cleared his throat, pointing to the picture. "Can I take that, please? I can, um, show it to my friends, and stuff."

"Sure." Fowler handed it to him. "Thanks a lot, kid."

Brian sank down on the concrete retaining wall, spreading out the picture on his bony knees. His mouth was horribly dry. He heard Fowler walk away, but didn't dare look up for fear his face would give away the awful, all-consuming guilt he was feeling.

I just lied to an FBI agent. Oh, sure, nothing that he said had been a direct lie, but didn't Uncle Peter always say that lies of omission were just as bad as regular lies? I could go to jail, Brian thought, and he started shaking even harder.

The sound of Jess' skateboard wheels scraped on the pavement, and Brian hastily crumpled up the paper and stuffed it into the pocket of his shorts. He had to think, and if Jess saw this, he'd never have a chance to think at all. He'd just be caught up in another of his sister's wild schemes, like always.

"Hey, who's that guy who just went into the library?" Jess said. "City dude or somethin'?"

"I don't know," Brian said, and oh fudge, now he was lying to his sister too.

Jess frowned at him. "Are you getting heatstroke or something? Maybe you ought to drink some water."

He was saved from even more lying when Dad's pickup pulled up to the curb. Jess scooted over to the middle of the bench seat, and Brian got the outside, being the oldest. The air conditioning vents poured cold air over him, which helped calm him a bit.

Dad was complaining about the latest feed prices, and Jess told him about how she'd finally learned to do a flatground ollie, whatever the heck that was. Brian wedged against the window and wondered miserably if they sent kids to prison and why on Earth two very law-abiding people like Aunt El and Uncle Peter would be hiding a dangerous escaped felon in their barn.

Maybe he should just call the police. Or that FBI guy Fowler. He wanted to ask his dad, but he couldn't get a word in edgewise with Jess's chattering. And the more he thought about it, the more scared he was that if he told his dad, they'd all be in a lot of trouble.

How did he get himself into these things? He was just minding his own business. He wasn't a trouble magnet like Jess.

"Hey, look, a hitchhiker!" Jess said, leaning into Brian's space to point out the window.

"Big whoop," Brian muttered. It was pretty common to see the older teenagers hitching in and out of town, usually getting rides from their friends. But he looked and saw that this was another stranger: a guy wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a flat, soft-brimmed cap like somebody might wear in a really old movie.

Great. More mysteries. As they whipped past him, Jess bounced in her seat. "Dad! Aren't you gonna pick up that guy?"

"There's no room in the truck, sweetpea. Someone will pick him up, wherever he's going."

Jess heaved a sigh and went back to talking about her skateboard tricks. Brian twisted around and peered out the rear window. Sure enough, a big truck carrying hogs was slowing down on the side of the road. The hitchhiker was dwindling in his field of vision as they pulled away, but Brian could still tell from his body language that he was less than thrilled.

So the guy would get to wherever he was going, big deal, and Brian hunched down against the window again. When he got home, he was gonna Google this escaped felon until he figured out what was going on. You could find anything on Google. You just had to try hard enough.


***


Neal woke slowly from a deep, heavy sleep, haunted by vague shadows of unpleasant dreams that he couldn't quite remember. His side hurt abominably, but it hurt a lot less if he didn't move. Also, napping in the middle of the day always left him kind of fuzzy, so for a while he just lay on top of the quilt covering the bed, watching tree branches sway in the sunshine out the window and cast their dappled shadows on the floor.

It was unbelievably peaceful and idyllic here, more like something out of a movie than a place people actually lived. He figured that it would probably take him less than a week to get thoroughly bored with the place -- it was amazing that Peter hadn't gone stir crazy in three years -- but as a temporary haven, it really couldn't be beat.

Occasionally he could hear creaking from the living room, the banging of the screen door, the low murmur of the TV. Peter was still here. For some reason that made him feel more safe, rather than less.

What am I doing here? This wasn't a place for Neal Caffrey, con artist and high roller -- in so many ways. He shouldn't be putting the Burkes in Adler's line of fire. He didn't belong here.

But it had been so long since he'd been able to stop moving without having to watch his back. Since he went to prison, in fact. And since he'd escaped ... well. It had been nothing but one long nightmare: searching for Kate, trying to dodge Fowler and the U.S. Marshals as he dug his way closer to the truth surrounding Kate's disappearance -- and then --

But he wasn't ready to think about that. He wasn't sure if he ever would be.

What mattered was that he felt safe here. And he didn't want to examine the emotion too closely, for fear that its flaws, magnified, would cause the illusion to fall apart, as such things usually did. He'd felt safe with Kate, too, once upon a time.

Something rustled outside the window.

Neal went still. He wasn't familiar with the sounds of the country; maybe that was a perfectly normal sort of noise. But it seemed ... furtive, somehow. He listened. More rustling. Then a shadow appeared and disappeared at the window: it was backlit by the sun and he only glimpsed it, but it was definitely someone's head, and he didn't think it was Peter's.

Neal rolled off the bed -- or tried to; he was brought up short by the tug of the healing injury in his side. Moving more slowly, he slid off the bed and sidled over to press himself against the wall. He edged to the window just as the prowler popped his head up again.

It was so completely the last person he was expecting to see here that for a moment all Neal could do was stare through the window with his mouth open.

Mozzie stared back at him, then began mouthing urgently at him.

"Shhh!" Neal hissed back at him, and began wrestling with the window, trying to get it open. He dislodged some dead leaves and a few annoyed spiders, and pushed it up a foot or so.

"Thank God! I thought I was going to have to look in every window on the ground floor, which is not an easy feat, believe me, without being spotted by the suit with the attack dog. And that's assuming you weren't being held on the second floor, or in the basement --"

"I'm not a prisoner, Moz," Neal whispered back. "What are you doing here?"

"What's it look like? I got your email and hitched north to Mayberry here."

"I didn't tell you to come! Moz --"

"Oh, what? Now you want me to hitch back? Did I mention the hog truck? That's not a metaphor, by the way."

"No, I want you safe," Neal whispered, but it was clear that nothing was getting through. He sighed. "Hang on, I don't plan to have an entire conversation through the window. I feel like Juliet at the balcony. C'mon in."

Between the two of them, they managed to wrestle the window high enough to admit Mozzie, though it was a struggle to get him over the sill -- Mozzie wasn't the world's most athletic person, especially since he was hauling what looked like an army surplus duffle with him. He ended up tumbling to the floor, duffle and all. Neal managed to step back in time to avoid going over with him.

In the living room, Satchmo barked.

"Oh great," Neal whispered, as footsteps approached rapidly in the hall. "Closet!"

Mozzie vanished into the closet with silent speed, just as Peter tapped on the door. "Neal?"

"Nightmare!" Neal called. "Gonna try to go back to sleep."

"Well, don't sleep too long," Peter said through the door. "El's on her way home, and I've got a pot roast in the oven."

Neal tried to wrap his brain around the idea of Peter Burke, badass federal agent, cooking for him. His brain simply would not do it, so he gave up. "Yeah, gimme a few minutes to wake up."

Peter's footsteps retreated, along with Satchmo's clicking claws. Neal listened for a moment, and then opened the closet, letting out Mozzie along with a waft of musty rosewater and mothballs. Mozzie brushed himself off and then looked in a sort of horrified disgust around the room, which was decorated in Early Farm Cliché, complete with stitched samplers on the walls and a rocking chair in the corner.

"What in the world are you, of all people, doing on Happy Acres Farm here? I thought the countryside was your Kryptonite."

"We don't always have a choice about where we land, Moz." Neal sat on the edge of the bed. "What's in the duffle?"

"My gear," Mozzie said. "Don't leave home without it."

"Especially when you're being hunted by crooked feds and worse?" Neal asked rhetorically. "Except you're not, Moz, and I told you to stay out of this. I don't even think Adler knows about you, and I'd like to keep it that way. There's more than I told you in my email, more that's come to light: Fowler knows I came up this way. He's nearby."

"Kate?" Mozzie asked gently. "The word on the street --"

All Neal could do was shake his head, waving off any unwanted sympathy that might be forthcoming.

"Damn," Mozzie whispered. He sank down onto the other bed, rumpling its gingham quilt. "When?"

"Two nights ago. That's when I ran."

"You ran to Burke."

Neal could only shrug. He didn't fully understand it either.

"You could've gone to me."

"No," Neal said. "No, Moz. I don't even want you here. Adler's been a step ahead of me the whole way. Among other things, he's managed to force me to use up most of my funds, and cut me off from the rest. He's trying to isolate me and make sure I have nowhere to go. That's why I had to get as far away as possible from the places he'd expect me to be. I could feel the trap closing around me in New York."

"What about the musi --"

Neal raised a hand. "In a safe place. That's all I'm going to say. And that's more than you should know, really."

"You could probably trade --"

"I'm not making deals with Adler," Neal said flatly. "Not now. Not after -- no. No deals."

Mozzie took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Where are you going from here?" he asked quietly.

"I'm not sure. Canada, probably. If I can get to another city -- Toronto, Montreal -- I can start to set myself up again, gather enough resources to make another jump to Europe or Asia. Lose myself on another continent. Adler'll never find me."

Mozzie slipped his glasses back on, and studied Neal intently. "You are running, then."

"It's that or stand and die, Moz." But behind the words was the truth he could not bring himself to acknowledge: that he had nothing left to lose. Kate was gone, and the other friends and contacts that he'd had before he went into prison had either vanished, or Adler had managed to cut him off from them. Besides, the last thing he wanted was to drag them into this mess along with him.

Maybe, in truth, that was why he'd run to the Burkes' farm, rather than seeking one of his old friends: because he'd been gutted already by Kate's death, and he couldn't risk anyone else he cared about. He'd had to go to ground somewhere though, and then, and then ...

His hatred of Adler and Fowler was a physical thing, crouching in the back of his mind. And he dared not give in to it, because the grief lay that way, too. It was all tangled up together, a black monster that would roar up and crush him.

Nothing left to lose.

Except Mozzie. And the longer he stayed with the Burkes -- the longer he had to deal with their willingness to help him, their cute niece and nephew, even their damn dog -- the more they mattered. He couldn't afford that kind of entanglement right now. He needed to go.

"Neal?" Peter tapped on the door. Neal jumped. "El's home. You think you might be ready for dinner soon?"

"Give me a minute!" Neal called.

After he was reasonably sure that Peter wasn't listening outside the door, he said quietly, "You can stay in here. I'll see if I can sneak out some leftovers for you later."

"Oh no." Mozzie rose and slapped his cap back on his head. "I'm not staying in the house of the Man. I will seek accommodations elsewhere."

"Where?" Neal inquired dryly, gesturing to the window, where sunset was casting a ruddy tint over the leaves of the shade tree. "It's not like we're in a thriving metropolis. The Burkes do have a decent barn, though. Comfortable."

Mozzie groaned as he heaved his duffle out the window. "Barns. Barns. The things I do for you."

"Moz?"

Mozzie turned back.

"Thanks," Neal said, and if his voice broke a little, it was only because he was still exhausted from the last couple of days. "Thanks for coming."

Mozzie held out a hand. Neal hooked his fingers in his friend's. Then Mozzie was out the window into the shadows of the evening.

Neal sighed and went to have dinner with the Man.


***


Neal was quiet and distracted at dinner. Peter figured this wasn't surprising, given everything the kid had been through lately, but it made for a subdued atmosphere.

"Pattie said that Fowler man has been talking to everyone in town," El said. "Neal won't be able to show his face in public without someone noticing him."

"El, he's a stranger in Apple Corners. He wouldn't be able to do that anyway."

El acknowledged his point by pursing her lips.

Peter looked at Neal. "This is ridiculous. We're just reacting right now, letting Adler and Fowler make all the moves."

"He's right. We need a plan, Neal," El said, idly tapping her fork on the edge of her plate.

That finally made Neal look up from picking at his food. "We?" He looked startled, but otherwise his expression was hard to read, his eyes shadowed. "We, no, there isn't -- Look, I'll be out of your hair in --"

"A day or two, yeah, right." Peter rose and began clearing the table. This was something he'd told El early on that he wanted to be his chore -- there was nothing like the threat of breaking dishes to help teach him to coordinate between his natural and artificial arms. In the beginning they'd lost a few plates and glasses. These days, not so much. "Neal, listen. I've been stepping easy because I know you've just been through something really rough. But if I'm going to help you, I need to know more than just the bare bones of what happened. I need the whole story. You, Adler, Kate, Fowler. Everything."

"I didn't ask for --"

"Help? Right. Like Fowler and Adler are just going to stop looking for you and stop bothering us if we let you walk away."

"They probably will," Neal protested. "They have nothing to gain by getting other people involved, and everything to lose. Just stay out of their way and you'll be fine."

"Right, because I've made a career of staying out of the bad guys' way."

"It's not your career anymore!" Neal said to his back. "You can walk away from this, Peter. I never meant to get you involved."

"Uh-huh." Peter turned around and fixed Neal with a stare. "Last night, you gave me a handful of selected facts. Tonight I want the whole story, Neal. Nothing held back."

After a long moment, Neal said, "Let's talk."

Peter got a beer from the refrigerator, and a screw-top bottle of wine from the cabinet over the sink. "Hey, hon? Wine?"

"Why do I get the feeling I'm going to need it?" El sighed. She picked up the wine bottle along with two glasses from the dish rack. After some thought, Peter fetched the whole six-pack of beer -- he figured he was going to need it, too.

El and Peter snuggled up on one of the oversized couches in the living room, and Neal settled carefully onto the one opposite, with a glass of wine that he eyed dubiously. Satch stared wistfully at the empty spot beside Neal, until Neal gave him a little grin and patted it. The dog jumped up happily.

"Okay, let's go back to the beginning," Peter said. "And I want the whole story this time. How did you meet Adler?"

Neal's smile was crooked and a little strange. "He's the man who made me who I am today."

"Say what?" Peter sat up straighter, nearly dislodging El. "I thought you said you didn't work with him."

"I didn't. I worked for him." As Peter's expression flattened out, Neal said, "Peter, you have to believe me, I had no idea he was doing any of the things he was doing. I honestly thought I was scamming him. I ended up ..." He hesitated, looking faintly embarrassed. "I ended up being taken for a ride instead."

"He conned you?" Peter tested the sound of it.

"You don't have to sound so pleased about it."

"He conned you."

"Can we move on, please?" Neal twirled his wine glass between his fingers. "The point is, he knew me, but I didn't know him. Not like I thought I did. And he didn't come back into my life until about a month ago."

"When you escaped from prison," Peter said. He could feel the tension in El -- she was listening intently.

"Yeah," Neal said. "When I escaped from prison."


***


"Kate came to see me while I was incarcerated. Every week."

It was surprisingly easy to talk about it. The trick, like the trick to giving the exact right emotional responses in so many of the cons he'd pulled, was pretending it was all happening to someone else. It was like a movie, not really his life at all.

"And then she stopped coming. And I escaped to find her."

"From supermax." Peter sounded unsurprised.

"Took me a month and a half," Neal pointed out.

Peter snorted a soft laugh and opened another beer. He'd slipped off the prosthesis and its harness -- more comfortable without it, Neal assumed -- and tossed it on the back of the couch. He tucked the beer under the stump and twisted off the cap, practiced and easy, obviously something he did a lot.

"How'd you escape?"

"Is that really relevant?"

"Probably not," Peter conceded. "I'm just --"

"Nosy?"

"I was going to say curious."

"Boys," El said, wrinkling her nose. "We can get to that later, can't we? Anyway, Neal, you left prison to look for Kate, right? And you found her."

Peter looked down at the top of her head. "You make it sound like that's a good thing."

"I think it's sweet." She tilted her head back, and kissed his nose. "Like you wouldn't come looking for me."

Neal looked away, carefully tamped his emotions down again. "Yes, I found her. Eventually. She didn't make it easy for me. She was running, and she took me on quite a hunt. The fact that I was having to keep an eye out for the Marshals at the same time didn't help." A faint grin slipped out. "Not that any of them came close. You're still the only one who's caught me, Peter."

Peter answered with a small grin of his own. "Was she running from you?" he asked. "Or from Fowler and Adler?"

"She went out of her way to make me think it was me she didn't want to see. But it wasn't. They were threatening her, trying to use her to get to me. Well, Fowler mostly. He's Adler's cats' paw. If anything, Kate was trying to protect me." At least, that was how he'd reconstructed it in his head. He'd never know for sure now. If Kate was also playing her own game -- well, concern for him was part of it. Most of it. Had to be.

"And they wanted you because they thought you had the music box," Peter said.

"Which I didn't have."

Peter eyed him skeptically before taking a slug of his beer. "Oh, no. Completely innocent, I'm sure."

"Peter, I swear to you, even though they thought so, I did not have the music box: not when I was in prison, and not stashed somewhere to pick up when I got out. It was one of those things -- word on the street was I had it, and I never corrected them. Does that make sense?"

"Gives you the street cred without actually doing the crime. Sure. Makes sense." But Peter was still giving him an intense look -- his FBI Special Agent Burke look. Peter was too damn smart, and given the music box's current location, Neal couldn't let the line of questioning continue down this road. So far, he'd managed to skate by on the truth -- not the whole truth, but enough of it that he still had plausible deniability for the things he hadn't said. This conversation was now teetering on the brink of something he might not be able to come back from, so he wrenched it to its inevitable conclusion.

It's just a movie. These things happened to someone else.

"To make a long story short," Neal said, "Kate and I didn't trust Fowler to honor the deal he offered us. Things went south. Fowler killed her, shot me, and that's how I ended up in your barn."

"Oh, sweetie," El whispered.

"You could maybe make the short story a little longer than that," Peter said.

Elizabeth twisted her head to frown at him. "Peter Burke, this isn't an interrogation. He's lost someone he loves. Give him some space."

Peter opened his mouth, closed it, and Neal saw his jaw clench. "Sorry," he said, surprising Neal. "But you've got to understand, I need to know what happened in order to get anywhere. I know it's rough on you, but we can't tiptoe around everything."

"I know." Neal poured himself more wine. It was cheap and lousy, but he could feel its warmth spreading through him, offering the false promise of insulation from pain both physical and mental. He forced himself to go easy on it. He couldn't let himself slide into a bottle right now; not until he was alone, anyway. Which hopefully would be soon. Keeping himself in emotional check sapped energy he didn't have.

"Fowler tried to make a deal with us. The music box in return for bulletproof cover identities somewhere else. He claimed he had FBI backing for it, though I realized in retrospect that was probably a lie. Kate and I talked about it, though, and we knew that if we took Fowler's deal, he'd always have leverage over us." Weeks of running from the U.S. Marshals had given him an idea of what that kind of life would be like. It wasn't freedom that Fowler had offered them, but a different kind of prison.

He hesitated, trying to decided how much to share with them. How much was safe to tell. Clearly they couldn't know the entire story of what had happened at the hangar. But whatever he said had to be plausible. And he still didn't want to lie outright -- their trust was a hole card that he didn't intend to squander lightly.

"So you two told Fowler you weren't taking his deal," Peter said.

Neal nodded. "And he --" He stopped. Swallowed.

"Took out Kate. And shot you." Peter's voice was unexpectedly gentle, despite the brutal truth of the words.

"Yes." Give or take a few key details. "And I ran. Bought a Greyhound ticket in cash, ditched the bus in Syracuse and hitched up here."

"Any idea how Fowler tracked you down so quickly?"

Neal shook his head. "I assume he started with the bus. I shouldn't have done that, but I couldn't think of a better way to get out of the city quickly. Rental car companies don't take cash anymore, and I couldn't get enough on such short notice to pay for a cab all the way out of the city. Boosting a car would have been -- illegal and therefore not an option," he said quickly, at Peter's look. In reality, it was way too conspicuous in the city, with the combined forces of several branches of law enforcement after him. In retrospect, it probably would've got him farther and with less of a trail than the bus. He just hadn't been thinking clearly at the time.

He hadn't meant to take the bus all the way to Syracuse, either. He'd passed out, drowsed -- lost some time, certainly. He'd intended to ditch it as soon as he was far enough from the city to have a good shot at boosting a car that no one would notice missing for a day or two. Instead he'd ridden all the way to the Syracuse Greyhound terminal, giving Fowler and the U.S. Marshals an excellent start on finding him. Stupid, stupid. It was so much easier to think of options now that he was no longer scared, in pain and -- he could admit it to himself, if not to anyone else -- so shaken up about Kate that he hadn't been thinking straight. All he could think was Run, run, get somewhere safe. And for some reason the Burkes had been the only thing he'd come up with.

"Does he have any reason to connect you with us?" Peter asked.

"I can't think why --"

"Like the birthday cards you sent me every year, for example."

"... well, there were those. But I sent them to your old address. I didn't even know you'd moved until I was out of prison."

"Escaped from prison," Peter pointed out, gesturing with his bottle of beer.

"Semantics."

"No, not semantics, Neal. It means that you can't take this to the police, even assuming you have evidence -- do you have evidence?" he asked, raising his eyebrows. Neal shook his head. "Yeah. Thought so. But even so, with Fowler in Adler's corner -- that's why you were so resistant to the idea of turning yourself in, isn't it? Fowler will step in and take over jurisdiction from the local LEOs ... and you'll never make it to trial."

El sucked in her breath.

"One of many reasons," Neal said.

Peter sighed and set down his half-empty beer to press his fingertips against his eyes.

"All right," he said. "The one thing I guess we have going for us at this point is that Fowler doesn't seem to have called down the Marshals on your ass yet. He could've, and he still could -- if he thinks you're somewhere around here, he could have roadblocks and announcements on the six o'clock news. He hasn't done that. Which probably means he's planning on dealing with you himself, without getting due process involved --"

"Thanks for the pep talk, Peter."

"But it also means that his resources are extremely limited. And that makes him easier for you -- and us -- to avoid. I'll call Diana back in the morning and see what she's found out about him. We may be able to start an internal investigation, give him something else to think about, anyway." Peter hesitated. "Neal, I think you should at least consider cutting a deal. I still have a lot of friends in the Bureau. I can get you to someone above Fowler."

"No."

Peter sighed. He looked older than Neal remembered. And of course he was -- but it wasn't just a matter of time's inexorable passage. Especially in the lamplight, he looked like an altogether different person from the cocky FBI agent, flushed with success, who had arrested Neal three and a half years ago. "Neal, compared to Adler, you're small fry. If they can make a deal with you and take down Adler, they'll go for it in a heartbeat. You'll probably be out in a year or two. No more running; no more looking over your shoulder."

"No," Neal said again.

"What's the matter with you? It's the best you're going to get, and you know it. Are you protecting Adler? Or planning on going after him on your own?"

Neal threw an arm over his eyes, lying back on the couch. "I don't know, Peter. All I know is that if I put myself in Fowler's hands, I may as well take your gun and stick it in my mouth. That's what I'd be doing."

After a moment, Peter said, "We'll do it your way, for now. No plea bargains. Yet. But in the morning, as well as checking with Diana, I'm calling some old friends at the FBI and starting the ball rolling on an investigation of Fowler. If he really is as dirty as you say, then there has to be a trail, and with luck, it'll lead back to Adler."


***


Before bed, Peter wanted to do a final sweep of the farm to make sure everything was as it should be. If he thought it was strange that Neal insisted on coming with him, he didn't say anything about it. He brought his gun.

Neal was braced to cover if he needed to, but Mozzie had apparently gone to ground so thoroughly that Neal would never have guessed he was there. If he even was there; maybe he'd gone off to find a hotel somewhere. Neal had hoped to slip some food out to the barn, but Peter seemed to be watching him as intently as the dark farmyard, so there was no opportunity to do more than look helpful and vigilant.

Satchmo seemed unusually interested in the barn, but when Peter flicked on the light and glanced around inside, Neal couldn't see anything visibly out of place. Not that he would recognize "out of place" in a barn unless it was really blatant. But there were no, say, suspicious loafers protruding from under a pile of hay.

Peter closed the barn door. A couple of the horses, slow and sleepy in the dusk, wandered over to the edge of the paddock to see what they were doing.

"Hey, lady," Peter said, reaching over the top bar of the fence to stroke the nearest horse's neck and then push her nose away. "Got nothing for you tonight. Go back to bed."

The other horse was black, and in the dark, Neal was barely aware of it, until it reached over the fence and lipped at his arm. He recoiled. So did the horse.

"I'll be damned," Peter said. "Put your hand out. Fingers together, so he can't bite you."

"Bite?" Neal said, stopping in mid-reach.

"Ness is a good horse, deep down, but he doesn't trust anyone," Peter said. "He hardly even lets El get near him. I've never seen him take to somebody like this. Let him sniff you."

This was less than comforting, but Neal felt that there was no way to back down without embarrassing himself, so he followed instructions and held out his hand. The black horse had danced away from the fence. Now he moved back, reaching his neck out cautiously to snuffle around Neal's hand. His nose was velvety soft, though a little damp.

"Wish I'd brought a treat to give him," Peter said softly. "I've never seen him do this with anyone he doesn't know. Or most people he does know, for that matter."

Getting a little bolder, Neal tried lifting his hand, slowly and carefully, to pet the horse's shoulder. The horse put up with that for only a few seconds before trotting off.

"Well," Neal said, "he didn't bite, at least."

Peter slapped the other horse's neck and led the way back to the house.

"You named your horse after Eliot Ness?" Neal said. "Why does that fail to surprise me."

Peter, uncharacteristically, hesitated before speaking. "No one's really sure what his name was before. He's a rescue."

He paused on the steps to the porch, looking back through the darkness at the paddock and the barn. "When we first moved out here, El and I knew from the beginning that we wanted to foster and rehabilitate rescue horses. Ness is the first one we took in. We didn't plan to keep him, there's just something ..." He shook his head.

"Something?" Neal said when Peter didn't go on, because he'd just be damned if he'd let an opportunity to find out a little more about Peter Burke slip away.

"I don't know if you can really understand it unless you've been through it," Peter said. "When he came here, he was afraid of everything, half-starved and skittish. And slowly, over time, he started warming up to us. The day that he let me saddle him for the first time -- there just aren't words for that feeling, seeing an animal that used to be so afraid of human beings learning to trust again. It was the first time since I left the FBI that I felt like --"

His mouth snapped shut.

Neal was suddenly glad that it was too dark to see Peter's face and whatever was revealed there.

They stood in silence for a moment. Then Neal said, "It was a bomb."

He couldn't see Peter's expression, but could tell from the shift in Peter's posture that Peter was listening.

"It was a bomb that killed Kate." Neal swallowed hard. "There was a private plane, supposed to take us out of the country. Fowler arranged it. Well, Adler did, through Fowler. We were both supposed to be -- but instead it was just her. I watched it happen."

Peter swore softly.

"In the chaos, I ran. Fowler shot at me. Winged me." His hand went automatically to his side, still tender, but healing. "I didn't even realize it until later."

"Sometimes you don't feel it at first." Peter sounded like he was speaking from experience.

And sometimes you do. He'd felt Kate's death, felt the scalpel that had cut her neatly out of his life, as if it had been cutting his own flesh.

After a moment, Peter reached out and touched his arm. Neal jumped, expecting -- and prepared to brush off -- awkward sympathy, but instead Peter pointed out into the barnyard. When Neal opened his mouth to speak, Peter gestured him urgently to silence, and then reached down to put his hand on Satchmo's head, keeping the dog still.

Neal wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking for, or whether he should be alarmed. Then he saw movement in the shadows beside the barn. He tensed, but it was small, not a human being, certainly.

With exquisite grace, the animal darted out into the moonlight, and Neal saw that it was a fox: little, dainty, delicate. It made no noise at all. The wide, fluffy tail floating behind it was almost as big as the fox's catlike body.

It was no more than twenty feet away from them.

Satchmo quivered, and made a tiny frustrated sound in his throat. Peter hooked his fingers into the dog's collar.

The fox froze, its head up. It looked around. Neal could swear that its eyes, shining in the moonlight, met theirs for an instant. Then it trotted off, not alarmed but purposeful, like a dog going about its business. It vanished behind the house.

The spell was broken. They could move again. Peter said in a soft voice, "She's been coming around for a couple of years. El calls her Sue."

"How do you know it's a girl?" Neal asked.

"Saw her with kits last summer. For all I know, this might be one of Sue's kids. I can't tell them apart. Anyway, foxes don't bother the horses, and we don't have chickens or anything, so we like having them around."

Their voices were still hushed. Speaking loudly seemed somehow disrespectful. Neal couldn't help thinking of the steady calmness of the fox's gaze. There was intelligence behind those eyes, a mind and a purpose, albeit an alien one.

Though he'd never seen one in the wild, he'd always felt a kinship with foxes, and other archetypical trickster animals. Con men, by and large, were a superstitious lot. Neal had never considered himself so, but he wondered what Mozzie would make of it.

"Anyway," Peter said. His voice was lighter and more cheerful than it had been. He opened the kitchen door and pushed Satchmo inside; the dog still wanted to go investigate. "Long night. Early morning. You can sleep in the guest bedroom."

El appeared in the kitchen doorway in a fluffy bathrobe. "Sue's out there," she said softly, her eyes sparkling with delight. "I just saw her."

Peter nodded and grinned. It lifted years off his face. "We were watching her from the porch."

"And you had Satch out there with you? I'm surprised."

"He's getting used to it." Peter ruffled the dog's ears. Satchmo was still on high alert, his head and tail up. "Probably thinks we're the world's worst hunters, though."

"Well, he'd be right about that." El laughed. "Neal, I left some more of my husband's clothes in the guest bedroom, along with clean towels. There's also a spare toothbrush, clean and unused, I promise. If you like I can see about picking some things up in town tomorrow. My sister's husband isn't any closer to your size than Peter, but I'm sure there must be someone around who's the right size. Or I could stop by Wal-Mart on my way home."

Neal hoped that his horrified blanch at the word "Wal-Mart" hadn't been too visible. "Thank you," he said, but the words seemed inadequate -- the magnitude of what they were doing for him was starting to hit him, along with a crushing awareness of the debt he was incurring. "I mean, really. I'll pay you back for all of this, I promise."

Peter, who was locking the kitchen door and window, looked skeptical at that -- well, Neal thought, let him. He'd see. The next big heist, I'll do more than just pay back what I borrowed, Neal promised himself. He had a feeling that if he dropped a box of cash in the mail, Peter would never accept it, but he'd think of something. Maybe set up a trust fund in their name? Donate to a charity? Buy them a villa on a small Caribbean island? He promised himself silently that he'd come up with something suitably extravagant, because they'd earned it.

El gave him a hug. "Sleep well." She caught hold of Peter's hand and the two of them vanished into the living room.

Neal got himself a glass of water and went off to the bedroom. Flicking on the light, he was struck once again by the overwhelming kitschy homeyness of the room.

"What am I doing here?" he murmured to himself. This wasn't a place for Neal Caffrey. Neal Caffrey was a man made -- literally made -- for designer suits and expensive brandy sipped in penthouse apartments. He hadn't been in a place like this since --

-- since his name hadn't been Caffrey. But that was a very long time ago.

He rustled around, brushing his teeth, changing the bandages on his side, and making plausible getting-ready-for-bed noises. Then he turned out the light and waited a half-hour or so to make sure the Burkes were safely asleep. Perhaps because of his nap, he was still wide-awake, though tired and aching. The wine hadn't helped; the effects were wearing off, leaving him even achier than before. He took another couple of Tylenol, then slipped out of his room. The whole floor was a series of creaky floorboards scattered like land mines, but he crept along the walls and tried to move as quietly as possible. The healing bullet wound tugged at him whenever he twisted or moved too quickly, which made stealth difficult.

Satchmo, lying on the living-room couch, hopped up at the sight of him and trotted expectantly into the kitchen.

"No," Neal whispered. "Bad dog." This had no visible effect. Satch watched hopefully while Neal collected bread and leftover pot roast onto a plate, then pressed close at his heels when he opened the kitchen door. Worried that the dog would scratch and whine if he left him behind, Neal let Satch out into the warm, humid night and then followed him.

Compared to the city he was used to, it was so dark and quiet here that it made him uncomfortable. Anything could be lurking in those shadows under the trees. The chirring of cicadas rose and fell as he waded through ankle-deep damp grass to the barn. He looked around for the fox, but it was nowhere to be seen, although Satchmo snuffled busily around the yard where it had been.

"Moz?" Neal whispered, tapping lightly on the door. "Moz, it's me."

"What's the password?" came a sharp whisper from the other side.

"There is no password, Mozzie, for crying out loud."

"That'll do," Mozzie whispered, and the door slid back just enough to admit Neal and Satchmo.

The barn was lit dimly by a small Coleman lantern sitting in one of the stalls, a piece of canvas shielding it so that it let out just enough light to illuminate Mozzie's little foxhole -- a fat paperback book, a tin cup and a bottle of hand lotion were neatly arranged on a handkerchief next to a pile of hay with a blanket thrown over it. Judging from the indentation in the blanket, it was being used as a chair.

"Don't set fire to the Burkes' barn, please." Neal handed him the plate of leftovers. "They're doing a lot for me. I don't want to repay them by destroying their farm."

"I'm not an amateur." Mozzie sneezed and brushed ineffectually at the straw clinging to the shoulders of his jacket, then began making himself a sandwich. "I hate the country, have I mentioned that lately? Rurality of any flavor is not my scene. The only sensible thing to do is pave over it. Why are we still in this horse-infested hell hole?"

"Because we've got nowhere to go, Moz." Neal's legs were getting shaky -- he was still feeling his convalescence a lot more than he liked. He sat down on Mozzie's blanket-covered pile of hay. It felt like a prickly beanbag chair. Getting up wasn't going to be easy. "At least, I don't. You're a different story. Just get out of here before Fowler catches sight of you. No one knows about you, and I'd think you'd like to keep it that way."

Mozzie crouched down opposite him. "How are you holding up?" he asked quietly.

"I'm fine," Neal said. "Just fine."

"Kate --"

"I don't want to talk about Kate."

Mozzie watched him a moment longer, his eyes too knowing. Neal stared at him until Mozzie gave up and began to pace. "We need a plan."

We. We. What is this thing with people putting themselves in danger for me? "Peter wants me to turn myself in to the FBI."

"Once a suit, always a suit," Mozzie said in disgust. "They stick together. I hope you're not considering that kind of madness."

"I don't know, Moz. It'd be quick, at least, unlike anything Adler has planned for me."

Mozzie's look was fast and horrified. "Don't give up on me, man."

"No, I'm not considering it. Not that I have a better plan."

Satchmo, hovering at Mozzie's feet in the hope of crumbs, raised his head suddenly and trotted towards the door with his tail wagging.

Mozzie extinguished the lantern, plunging them both into darkness. "Great," he whispered. "Were you followed?"

"I don't think so," Neal began, when the overhead lights in the barn came on. Neal squinted against the glare and was completely unsurprised to see Peter in the doorway, armed; his hand hovered near the butt of his gun, though he hadn't drawn it. Satchmo frisked happily around his master's feet. Mozzie was nowhere to be seen.

"Neal," Peter said.

"Peter."

"Just hanging out in the barn, talking to yourself?" Peter looked pointedly at the lantern, book and other evidence of occupation.

Neal sighed. "Moz. C'mon out."

After a long pause, Mozzie sidled out from behind a stall divider. "Judas," he muttered in Neal's direction.

The look on Peter's face was a blend of suspicion and a sort of resigned amusement. "And you are?"

"A neighbor," Mozzie said promptly. "I live up the road. I was checking on the ... horses."

"Uh-huh," Peter said. "Let's try this again. Are you by any chance the friend that Neal was using my computer to email this morning?"

Mozzie shot a quick, sharp look at Neal.

"Yes," Neal said wearily.

Mozzie's expression was one of betrayal.

"C'mon, Mozzie, you're hiding in his barn," Neal pointed out. "I don't think either of us have much of a choice about trusting him at this point."

Peter gave him a cool look. "Given the fact that I'm hiding you from the police and making myself and my wife accessories to your crimes, I don't think a little reciprocal trust is too much to ask for."

"Believe it or not, Peter, I was trying to protect you. Both of you."

"You have a funny way of showing it."

Mozzie took advantage of the opportunity to sidle away. He made it halfway to the door before Peter noticed. "Oh, no you don't." Peter pointed to the hay bales in the corner. "Pull up a bale. Let's sit. And talk. Again. I want to know what you're doing here and what you two are planning."

"We're not planning anything," Neal said, and at Peter's narrow-eyed look, "No, honestly, we're not. You showed up before we could."

Peter jerked his thumb at Mozzie. "So why is he here? Moral support?"

"Do I look like the fighting type to you?" Mozzie said.

"You know, I don't know what to believe anymore." Peter sat on a hay bale and rested his arm across his knees. "Two days ago, I was running a horse farm and the last time I'd heard from anyone at the FBI was when they gifted me with a 'see you later, Peter, have a nice life' wristwatch. Now I have crooked FBI agents talking to my wife and two con men in my barn -- that's what you are too, right?" he asked Mozzie.

"I admit nothing."

"Oh, for God's sake." Peter ran his hand over his face, and looked up at the two of them. Satch laid his head on his master's knee, and Peter absently fondled the dog's ears. "Guys, I can't deal with this tonight. I just can't. Let's all get some sleep, and in the morning, we will all make a plan. Together. You -- he called you Mozzie, right? That's your name? You can bunk with Neal tonight. There's a second bed in the guest bedroom."

"I'll be fine out here," Mozzie said quickly, even though, Neal thought, he'd been complaining about the barn mere moments ago.

"Oh no you don't. I want you where I can keep an eye on you."


***


As soon as the creaking sounds of Peter on the stairs had died away, Mozzie threw back the covers on the second twin bed -- he was fully clothed underneath, including shoes -- and headed for the window.

Neal propped himself up on his arm. "C'mon, Moz. Let's sleep in here and figure this out tomorrow."

"I believe I mentioned that I'm not sleeping in the house of the Man?" Mozzie pushed up the window. "I have everything I need in the barn. I'm footloose and fancy-free, a veritable rolling stone. A man with simple needs. I'll be fine."

"Not if Peter finds you," Neal muttered, and sank face-first into his pillow.

As silence settled once again on the Burke farmhouse, Neal forced his mind blank, seeking the oblivion of sleep. It wouldn't come; the more he sought inner stillness, the more that everything he'd been trying to hold back pressed against the walls keeping it at bay. Talking about it hadn't helped.

There is going to be one hell of a reckoning, sooner or later, Neal thought.

He rose and padded into the kitchen, found the bottle of wine and took it back to his room. After closing the door, he moved a chair in front of it.

Then he drank the wine straight from the bottle. There was still two thirds of the bottle, and he emptied most of it in probably fifteen minutes. Dinner had been hours ago, and he hadn't eaten all that much of it. The alcohol hit him like a freight train.

He didn't cry. That surprised him. He'd expected to sob until his throat was raw. Instead he lost himself, sank into a depression as black and deep as a bottomless well.

Hate was the lifeline he found in the pit. Hatred of Adler, of Fowler. It was the only thing he had to hold onto.

Somewhere in that black emptiness, he must have slept, because the smell of burning jet fuel filled his dreams.

---

6.


Peter woke to the sound of yelling outside. He groaned, rolled over and looked at the clock. He'd been so tired that he'd slept right through El's alarm.

5:30. Jess, Brian and Pattie must be here.

"Oh shit," Peter mumbled into his pillow.

He lurched to the window and poked his head out just in time to hear Jess shout at the top of her considerable lungs, "-- stranger sleeping in the barn!"

"For God's sake," Peter muttered. "I can't leave any of them alone for a minute." He pulled on the nearest pair of sweat pants and stumbled downstairs and out into a chaotic assemblage of Millers in the yard. Mozzie was there, looking half-asleep and disgruntled, but Neal, to Peter's relief, was nowhere to be seen. Hopefully he'd stay that way.

El was trying to calm down Pattie, but still managed to shoot Peter an eloquently worried/annoyed/exasperated look. Peter gave her a helpless shrug.

"He's trying to steal the horses!" Jess was saying.

"Why would I want a horse?" Mozzie retorted.

"I'm calling the sheriff," Pattie announced.

Peter plowed his way into the middle of the group. "There's no need for that. This is -- a friend of ... my cousin's brother-in-law, and he has a ... condition. He can't sleep indoors." El just stared at him, wide-eyed, clearly not buying a single word. Peter mouthed Tell you later at her, and leaned closer to Pattie. "You can see he's not entirely right," he murmured to her.

Pattie nodded, though she was still frowning. Peter kissed El's cheek. "Sorry to give you guys a scare. Honey, it's fine. Go to work with Pattie. Everything will be all right."

El's expression said that it was far from all right, but she kissed him and hustled her sister towards the car. The look that she gave him over her shoulder promised that explanations would be forthcoming later.

Peter looked at the remaining three: Jess glaring daggers at Mozzie, Mozzie giving Peter a disgruntled look, and Brian looking scared and miserable, which was his usual expression when people were fighting around him.

"Where's Neal?" Peter asked.

"Who's Neal?" Mozzie said. Peter resisted the urge to kick him in the shin.

"Here," Neal said behind him, and joined the group. He was wearing one of Peter's shirts with the sleeves rolled up. He looked like hell; the blue shadows under his eyes were darker than ever, and he kept blinking in the early-morning sunlight. His smile, though bright as usual, looked somewhat pasted on. "I just woke up," he said, and yawned. "I missed El's sister, right? Too bad. I'd like to meet her."

Uh-huh, Peter thought. At least Neal had the sense to stay hidden some of the time.

"You!" Jess said. "I have questions for you!"

"No one is asking or answering any questions yet," Peter snapped. "We'll talk in a minute, but first I'm gonna put on shoes, and then we're going for a horse ride. All of us."

"Excuse me," Mozzie said. "It sounded like you said 'we'. And 'us'."

"I did. There are five horses and five of us, counting Neal. And if I'm going to have freeloading con artists living in my barn, they are damn well paying me back by exercising my horses."

"I don't ride," Mozzie said.

"You do today." Peter snared Neal's elbow. "Walk with me."

"You need help putting on your shoes?"

"No, I don't need help putting on my shoes." Peter glanced over his shoulder, realizing too late that he had not one con man to corral this morning, but two. The kids and Mozzie were already on their way to the barn, Jess dragging Mozzie along and chattering a mile a minute, while Brian slouched behind. Damn it. Well, he'd just have to hope that the little guy was better at improvising a cover story with the teenagers than he had been last night in the barn, because he wanted a minute to talk to Neal alone.

"Do I want to know how many bottles of wine I'm going to find missing?" he asked, holding the kitchen door.

"Just the one," Neal said. At least he didn't try to deny it. His voice was scratchy, and Peter was familiar with the stale smell of a next-day drunk.

"If you puked anywhere, you're cleaning it up."

Neal's laugh was hoarse, but genuine. "Give me some credit."

The thought percolated slowly through Peter's conscious mind that he really was worried about Neal, and not just because of the possibility that a depressed, self-destructive Neal might be a danger to himself and El. If even half of what Neal had told them last night was true, the poor kid had just walked through a metric ton of shit, and Peter had a feeling that the aftereffects were only now starting to hit him.

"Look, I'm the last person in the world to give someone else advice about self-medicating with a bottle, all right? Just ..." He wasn't sure what he wanted to say. He wasn't Neal's friend. He was the guy who put him in jail, for Chrissakes. "Eat something before you go out there, at least. You'll feel better."

Neal winced. "Yeah, food's not high on my list of priorities right now."

"It'll be worse if you don't. Take it from a veteran of a lot of hangovers. Half a piece of toast, maybe. And drink some water. I'll bring down a bottle of aspirin."

"Yes, mother," Neal said to his back as he went upstairs.

Neal still looked uncharacteristically bleary, but a little less flattened, by the time they made it out to the barn. Mozzie was regaling the kids with a story that seemed to involve an armored car, a bucket of ball bearings, a Shriners' convention and a weasel -- Peter decided that he really didn't want to know any more than the little he'd heard. And naturally, no one had accomplished a thing in his absence. He sent Jess off to get the horses.

While Jess saddled gentle Ladybug for Mozzie, Peter showed Neal how to saddle Donnybrook, a well-trained American Saddlebred that the Burkes were keeping for one of the other neighbors. Cinching the saddle straps was one thing that he still had trouble with. Some things were just a whole lot easier with two hands. Neal, though, was still favoring his side -- Peter was pretty sure that Neal thought he was being inconspicuous, but he was definitely limping -- so Peter did it for him, though he had to do it over when the strap slipped. He hadn't had that happen in awhile. At least Neal had the prudence not to say anything.

"Have you ridden a horse before?"

Neal nodded. "Just once. At a resort north of -- well," he demurred with a smile, "yes, I've been on a horse. Just for a short pleasure ride around the estate."

"The estate?"

Neal shrugged.

"Well, at least I can assume we're not starting from zero. Unlike some people." Mozzie's complaints were audible from the far side of the barn. Fortunately he was the kids' problem. Peter had seen them give riding lessons to other kids from school. They were good at it, and, though he'd never admit it because he knew better than to give them an inch, he trusted them not to be reckless with the horses' welfare. Elizabeth's horse Ladybug was the gentlest horse in the stable, and if anyone could put up with Mozzie, she probably could.

Peter flipped over a feed bucket to give Neal a step up without wrenching his side.

"Heels down. Your posture's good, but sit a little looser -- yeah, that's it." Peter took him through a quick "how to get your horse to go where you want it" primer and then turned him loose to walk Donny around the pasture while he saddled Ness. By the time he turned the Friesian towards the other horses, it looked like Neal, hung over or not, had gotten the hang of steering Donny -- he'd either been downplaying his horse-riding experience or he was a natural at this, like so many other things.

Mozzie had at least managed not to fall off. Yet. Both the kids looked frazzled. Trying to keep Mozzie on the horse managed to keep the three of them from talking about anything other than horses, though, so Peter figured it counted as a win.

They rode single-file into woods dappled with early morning sun. Patches of mist lay in the low spots. Satchmo romped cheerfully in the brush alongside the path. Jess was riding Chantilly because she was the most experienced rider besides Peter and the only other one of them who could handle the hard-mouthed bay, but Brian had trouble holding the frisky Pepper down to a walk, so Peter let the kids go ahead. This gave the kids a break from Mozzie, and Peter a chance to speak to his two houseguests alone, exactly how he wanted it.

"I think this thing is about to throw a gear," Mozzie complained, sliding around in the saddle on Ladybug's back. "Can I get an upgrade?"

"No whining," Peter said. "If your horse was any more calm, she'd be dead."

"I'm not part of your little world-domination empire," Mozzie said. "I don't have to follow your orders. Are there bears in these woods?"

"Is he always like this?" Peter appealed to Neal.

"Like what?"

Peter shook his head. "I guess that's my answer."

After passing through a band of woods, they rode into the edge of the upper field, still cloaked in patchy morning fog. The log jumps that Peter and the kids had constructed for Pepper reared out of the silver mist like islands in an alien sea.

Jess called out to Brian, and the two kids veered their horses sharply to the right and raced down the field in a thunder of hoofbeats, teenagers and horses alike delighting in the crisp morning air. Peter held up a hand to stop his companions and waited for the kids to burn off their energy. Ness tugged at the bit, wanting to join them. Peter patted the horse's glossy dark neck. "Not today, bucko."

"Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but that looks like fun," Neal said, and without waiting for permission, he nudged Donnybrook and urged the horse down the field after the others.

"If he tries to take a jump, just let him," Peter called after him. "Don't yank the reins, you'll go right over his head -- are you even listening to me?"

Donnybrook, recognizing his rider's inexperience, settled into a beautiful gliding canter. Neal bent low over the horse's mane. His seat was loose and easy. He definitely had the makings of a good rider, Peter thought. A lot of riding was nothing more than empathy: understanding the horse, anticipating it, responding to it. Empathy was what had made Neal such a good con man -- the ability to form connections to other people, and to read them like open books. Perhaps it wasn't surprising that he could do the same with horses.

The kids hit the far end of the field like jockeys on racehorses, cornering neatly where Peter's shooting targets hung on the fence, and came racing back. Halfway up the field, Pepper made her own decision to veer off towards the obstacle course, the direction she was used to going. Jess laughed at Brian's obvious dismay but kept a firm enough grip on Chantilly to keep her going straight. When girl and horse passed Neal and Donnybrook, Donny rounded to rejoin his stablemate; Neal didn't have a chance of stopping him. The two of them galloped back to Peter and Mozzie. Meanwhile a yelp from the direction of the obstacle course let Peter know that Pepper had unseated Brian on one of the sharp turns.

"Jess, go make sure your brother is okay."

Jess nodded and trotted off. Peter turned to Neal, who was flushed and grinning. If his injury or hangover still bothered him, the endorphins seemed to be compensating.

"It's a rush, isn't it?"

He'd expected a denial, but Neal laughed and nodded.

"Thrill seeker," Mozzie told him darkly. Ladybug hadn't moved in all the excitement except to take a step sideways to crop at a better patch of grass.

"You're just jealous," Neal said, and he flashed a smile at Peter, infectious in his exhilaration.


***


"Sorry about that," Jess called, and reached down a hand to help her brother to his feet. At least she didn't have to chase down Pepper; the horse had stopped immediately after realizing she'd thrown her rider. "I bring her up her all the time, and we always do the obstacle course. I didn't even think."

Brian dusted himself off without complaining. He'd been quiet all morning, Jess mused. More so than usual.

"Who peed in your Cheerios?" Jess asked. She'd heard it on TV and thought it was the best thing she'd ever heard; she had to use it at every opportunity.

"No one. I mean, nothing's wrong." Brian used the lower rail of one of the jumps to mount Pepper. "I'm fine. Don't worry about it."

"Uh-huh. Something's eating you, and I won't stop 'til I figure it out."

"You want to know? You really do?" Brian nudged Pepper and urged her beside Jess's horse. "Here. This is what's eating me."

He took a sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it and passed it to her. Jess looked.

"Isn't that a picture of Neal?"

"Yeah," Brian said. "I got it from an FBI agent in the park, while you were skateboarding down at the Wal-Mart."

"You talked to a real FBI agent in Apple Corners and I missed it?" She couldn't believe it. Her brother had all the luck.

"Jess, the police are after this guy!" Brian glanced over towards the adults and lowered his voice. "The FBI guy said so, and when I got home, I did some Googling. I had to hunt around a bit, because his name's not Neal Burke, it's Neal Caffrey. He escaped from prison, Jess. There was a whole manhunt for him and everything."

"That is the most exciting thing I've ever heard."

"See, I knew you were going to react this way."

"What did he do?" Jess asked, leaning forward eagerly.

"He lied and cheated and stole from a bunch of people. Jess, the FBI guy said he's dangerous. What if he hurts Aunt El and Uncle Peter? What if he hurts us?"

"Don't worry," Jess said. "I'll take care of it. Leave everything to me. I can get him to confess and we'll find out what's really going on."

Brian stared at her. "Jessica, this isn't The Fugitive. This is real life. This guy isn't wrongly accused, he's actually guilty. The papers were very clear about that."

Jess smiled. "Don't worry, I won't do anything risky. Really," she added, when her brother looked at her skeptically. "I'll just get him to 'fess up. Neal won't know what hit him."


***


Neal was, to his own surprise, happy. Really, truly happy. He would never have guessed that riding a horse would turn out to be that much of an adrenaline high, and hadn't realized that he'd missed that feeling so much. Being in prison had been a constant bore with occasional moments of the bad kind of adrenaline, the sort where there's no particular reward except getting out of an unpleasant situation. Escaping from supermax had been a special high all its own, but ever since he'd gotten out, he'd been exhausted and worried most of the time. Maybe he should've stopped along the way to knock off a jewelry store just for fun, or something.

He didn't even hurt much, though he figured he'd pay for it later on. The aspirin seemed to have kicked in, and Peter, annoyingly, had been right about getting a little food in his stomach, because he did feel better.

The kids rejoined them and led the way into the woods on the far side of the field. They seemed to know where they were going, so Neal relaxed and let his horse follow theirs. He focused on adjusting to the gentle rocking of the horse's gait, learning to let his body sway in rhythm with the horse's steps.

Once the kids had drawn ahead again, Peter broke the comfortable silence. "So, any criminal mastermind breakthroughs last night that you two would like to share with the class?"

"Such as?" Mozzie said, a little too quickly.

"We need to figure out our next move," Peter said. "And Adler's." He looked at Neal closely when he said this. Neal wasn't sure what he was looking for, but kept his face blank, just in case. "Neal, you said that he's looking for a music box which he inexplicably thinks you have. And we know he's willing to kill for it. So what does he do now? You've vanished, supposedly with the music box. He sent Fowler upstate to look for you, and obviously he's narrowed it down to this area. Do you think Adler would come up here in person?"

Neal and Mozzie glanced at each other. "I'm not sure," Neal said. "Adler prefers to work through intermediaries. He doesn't like to take risks himself."

"But he will if the risk is worth the reward, right?" Peter said. "Like, say, vanishing with uncountable millions of his investors' money."

"Even the most cautious person will take a risk if the reward is high enough," Neal said.

"That's what people like you count on," Peter said. Neal didn't bother denying it; it was, after all, true.

Peter drummed his fingers against the saddle's pommel. "So my question to you two is this, then: does Adler want the music box enough to take risks for it? Based on what you've told me, I'd say the answer is yes."

"He doesn't have to come up here in person to make your lives a living hell," Mozzie pointed out. Neal reached over to catch a branch before it smacked him in the face. "He can hire people to do it for him. There could be an army of goons closing in even as we speak."

Both Peter and Neal reflexively glanced over their shoulders at the sun-splashed forest path behind them.

"But he'd have to trust anyone he sends not to take off with the music box and leave him high and dry," Peter said. "I'm guessing that Adler isn't the trusting sort."

Neal's eyebrows climbed towards his hairline, and he smiled. "You have a suspicious mind, Peter. I like it."

Peter's only response to that was a half-amused snort. "I'm not sure if we'd be in more trouble, necessarily, if Adler shows up in person than if he sends an intermediary to beat the location of the music box out of you. Or me. I think we need to start thinking about security, Neal. Not to mention going on the offensive. Having you lying low at the farm is all well and good, but you and I both know it's a very temporary solution for a long-term problem --"

He stopped speaking because the kids had halted their horses in the middle of the trail, waiting for the adults. As the three of them drew up behind the kids, Neal discovered that the trail dropped down a steep slope to the sprawling brown loops of a river below them. He glimpsed a ruined building draped in vines, peeking out of the woods.

Oh crap. Of all the places they could have ridden this morning, of course they'd come here. Because fate, the universe, or whatever just hated him that much.

This was the way he'd approached the Burkes' farm that first time, going through the woods rather than staying on the road. It had probably taken several times as long as it would have otherwise, but he'd been half out of his head with paranoia, fear and pain, terrified that Fowler or Adler was right on his heels.

Not such a paranoid fear after all, as it turned out.

Interesting how different it all looked in the daytime. He followed the river with his eyes to the bridge downstream -- he remembered crossing it, limping and scared, two nights ago.

"Careful on the hill," Peter said. "If you have trouble, dismount and walk 'em down."

Even Brian, jolted out of whatever teenage sulk was eating him this morning, rolled his eyes at this. "Yeah, 'cause we never come here," Jessica said.

"That was for the novice riders, smart mouth."

"Yeah, I'll just stay here," Mozzie said, eyeing the steep path.

"Yeah, no you won't."

The descent wasn't bad, and soon they were on the flatter ground by the river. "That's an old mill," Peter said, pointing to a crumbling wall with vines crawling over it. "El and her sister used to climb all over it when they were kids -- not that you two should be getting any ideas," he added quickly. "It's completely unsafe and they were lucky not to break their necks."

Neal made a noncommittal noise and kept his eyes moving, trying to look like he'd never seen the place before.

"Stay on the trail," Peter added, mostly to the kids but for Neal and Mozzie's benefit as well. "There are old well shafts, poison ivy and God knows what else."

A short spur of the trail went down to the water's edge. From the blackened fire circle and the scattered beer cans, it was obviously a hangout of the town's teenagers. The river was shallow here, running fast across a bed of stones. The horses drank from the water's edge, while Neal looked up at the face of the mill: the boarded-over windows, the roof collapsing at one end. A splash of neon-bright graffiti marred the otherwise eighteenth-century picture. It was a lot less creepy in the daylight than he remembered from his nighttime encounter with the place.

"It's supposed to be haunted," Brian said. He'd hardly spoken all morning. Neal wondered if the kid was sick; he looked pale and unhappy.

Jess rolled her eyes. "Oh, that's just a story that Amanda Bradshaw made up to keep her little sister from poking around and finding out that she and Jimmy Sawyer were doing the nasty in there."

"I don't know how you could do anything in there without getting tetanus," Brian said.

"Or worse," Jess said with relish.

"I think that's enough of this conversation," Peter said. He went to rescue Mozzie, whose horse had wandered off to nibble grass at the edge of the water.

Jess leaned over her horse's neck to swipe off a fly. "So why are you up in Apple Corners, anyway?" she asked Neal in a voice that was far too casual to actually be casual. Brian perked up for the first time, looking intent.

"Oh, just visiting your aunt and uncle," Neal said. He glanced over at Peter, who was arguing with Mozzie; snatches of the conversation drifted to him, enough to catch Peter's exasperated tone. "I'll probably head out in a day or two." His lazy, calm mood began to evaporate, the peaceful languor of the morning swallowed by the darkness inside. This wasn't a place for men like him and Moz. Especially not with danger on their heels. He'd had the respite that he'd needed, time to rest and recover before moving along.

"What did you do back in Schenectady?" Jess pressed.

A casual grin came naturally to him. "Tax preparer. I work for H&R Block." He'd learned that the best way to deal with a nosy mark was to offer a cover story so mind-numbingly banal that no one would bother asking questions about it. He wished he'd had the presence of mind yesterday to lay the groundwork for a more convincing and detailed cover story, but he could work with what he had.

"Are you married?"

Neal worked on keeping his posture relaxed, his smile friendly, not displaying that the question had landed like a blow. "No. You ask a lot of questions."

"I'm just being friendly," Jess said. "Uncle Peter never talked about a cousin."

"I'm sure it never came up," Neal said. "We've never been close, Peter and I. More like two ships passing in the night. He had his life, I had mine."

"So why are you here?"

"Sometimes you just need a place to go," Neal said. "You'll understand when you're older."

Jess leaned forward in her saddle. "Are you in trouble?"

Saved by the bell, Neal thought as Peter rode back to join them, leading Mozzie's horse by the reins. Jess looked disgusted. "Come on, troops," Peter said. "Let's head back to the house. The newbies are going to be sore as hell if we stay out here much longer, and Jess, if you want to put Pepper through her paces, you'd better do it while the day's still cool. I'll make one of my famous mushroom-and-onion omelets."

"While we do the actual work," Brian said to Jess. She was still giving Neal her suspicious stare, promising more grilling later.

He'd leave tonight, he decided as they settled back into the ride up the hill. There was simply no point in staying any longer, putting Peter and El in danger, making it ever more likely that Fowler would find him. Elizabeth's sister had met Mozzie now, and word would be leaking out. There was no way that he could stay hidden on the Burkes' farm for much longer.

Peter would be pissed, but he'd get over it. He'd be alive to get over it, which might not be the case if Neal stayed in one place long enough for Fowler and Adler to catch up with him.

So enjoy the moment, he told himself, and consciously relaxed, easing into the rhythm of the horse's walking pace, the voices of Peter talking to the kids, the sun on his shoulders and the warm growing-things smell of the woods.


***


"That's what you call taking care of things?" Brian whispered fiercely to Jess as they rode back towards the Burke farm.

"I was interrupted. I woulda got somewhere if Uncle Peter hadn't showed up."

"We should call the police," Brian said.

"We should talk to Uncle Peter first," Jess said. "Maybe he doesn't know. This Neal guy could have told him some kind of story and got him hooked. You know what he can be like."

Underneath his grumpiness, Uncle Peter was a total soft touch for a sob story. Pattie and Mike's kids all knew it and took full advantage of it when they wanted something.

"The longer we wait, the better the chances that he'll rob Uncle Peter and Aunt El," Brian protested. "And what about this other guy, this Mozzie guy? It can't be coincidence that he's here. He's obviously an accomplice."

"He tells great stories, though," Jess said wistfully. "I wish Uncle Peter had let him finish that one about the weasel."

"We'll be heroes if we turn them in. If we don't, we're aiding and abetting a fugitive. I looked that up, too. You can't argue with the Internet, Jess."

"Just let me ask few more questions first."

"Jess, if they steal from Aunt El while you're playing Nancy Drew, Mom is going to be so mad."

"A few more questions," Jess said, stubborn, and Brian caved, because he always did.


***


Back at the farm, Peter set the kids and Neal to work currying the horses -- Mozzie had disappeared as soon as everyone's backs were turned, but Neal seemed to genuinely enjoy working with the horses, and they liked him. Everyone likes him, right up until he takes off with their life savings, Peter thought grimly, but he caught himself smiling as he watched Jess showing Neal how to untangle the burs from Chantilly's long, flowing tail. The kids were fidgety -- he'd have to talk to them later, find out what they were up to -- but Neal looked relaxed and carefree and genuinely happy, something Peter hadn't seen since Neal had first turned up in his barn two days ago.

He sat on the top rail of the fence and called Diana.

"Hey," Diana said. "Hang on, I'm in the middle of something. I'll call you back in a sec."

A minute later, his phone rang, and he saw from the caller ID that she wasn't calling from her office line, but from her cell. "Sorry to keep you hanging," Diana said. "I'm in the lobby now. Hope you don't mind if I walk and talk. I could use a latte anyway."

Peter smiled grimly. "I take it you found out something on Fowler."

"I found a few things, yes. For one thing, get this, boss: he's with OPR."

No wonder she didn't want to use the office phone. "Catching Neal shouldn't be part of his jurisdiction, then. What's an OPR guy doing hunting a fugitive upstate?"

"I think that would be very interesting to know," Diana said. "He's squeaky clean, though, at least in the files that I could access without raising any flags. If he's ever been investigated for anything, it was very much on the QT."

She fell silent -- a loaded, waiting silence. "But you found something," Peter prompted.

Diana drew a slow breath. "Boss, it could be nothing. Coincidence. OPR is a fairly small department, after all."

Peter felt something cold and tight coil in his stomach. Even without knowing what she was about to say, he knew he wasn't going to like it.

When Diana spoke again, the words were dragged out of her, deliberate and reluctant. "He was the agent in charge of the warehouse fire investigation."

She didn't have to say which warehouse fire. There was only one that had haunted Peter's nightmares for the last three and a half years. The stump of his arm throbbed with a sudden sharp pain. Peter told himself it was psychosomatic and tried to ignore it.

"He investigated me," Peter said. He could barely hear his own voice over the pounding in his ears. "After."

"Yes," Diana said quietly. "I wasn't able to look at any of his reports without leaving a trail. But ..."

"I know what they said, anyway. Diana, hang on for a minute, all right?"

Diana was still talking, asking him if he was all right, but Peter laid down the phone on the fence rail and for a moment he just sat there, rubbing the stump of his arm and looking out across the pasture until the red cloud across his vision receded. Blue sky. Sunshine. The kids' voices and Neal's sudden, startled laughter. The smell of horses and grass, the chirring of cicadas in the trees ... He took slow breaths and focused on these things -- here, now, real -- until he could push down the fury and think again.

Then he picked up the phone again. "Diana, you still there?"

"Yeah, I'm here. Boss -- Peter ... don't go off half-cocked on this. We don't know that Fowler was --"

"I know that Fowler's the bastard who made sure I'd never even have a desk job at the FBI," Peter said between his teeth. "I know he's the one who tried his damnedest to pin the deaths of three good men on me."

Negligent. Careless. The worst part was not knowing if those damning words were correct. He could tell himself a million times that he'd done everything he could, that he'd been careful, that he'd followed procedure and done nothing wrong. Kramer, he knew, had argued on his behalf, and Kramer's opinion carried a lot of pull. Still, he'd been tried and nearly convicted behind his back, by people he'd trusted. At the time, he'd been in the hospital, doped to the gills most of the time and reeling as the life he'd built had fallen apart around him. Kramer had only later told him how close he'd come to criminal charges in the deaths of those men.

Three years later and the bitterness still rose like bile in his throat. He'd devoted his life to the Bureau. He'd given his damn arm to the Bureau. And in the end they'd hung him out to dry, with nothing to show for all those years but a monogrammed watch and a disability pension.

"It wasn't your fault, Peter." Diana sounded like she was talking to a skittish horse. "Clinton and I know that. Everyone on your team knows that."

Everyone on my team who survived.

"You think I don't know it?" Peter said, his voice rising. Neal glanced in his direction and he forced himself to tamp it down. "Because I do. And before I'm done with Fowler, he'll know it too."

"Boss," Diana said. "I don't want to say it, but I know we're both thinking it. If -- and this is a big if -- Fowler had you railroaded out of the FBI on purpose ... either he waited for a very convenient opportunity to come along --"

Peter blew out his cheeks and closed his eyes. "Or he made his own."

The official investigation had found that the fire had been set by the counterfeiters that Peter's team had been chasing, to destroy evidence. But the warehouse had gone up faster than anyone had expected, trapping the counterfeiters as well. They'd died along with three members of Peter's team.

That had been one of the hardest things, actually. There was no one to chase, no one to suffer for what had happened. It was neat and tidy, all the loose ends tied up.

And if Peter had thought about it -- if he'd been able to think about it rationally, to pick apart the sequence of events without shying away -- he might have realized that life is never that neat and tidy.

"If that bastard Fowler is responsible for the deaths of three of us -- three of my people --" Rage crashed over him in a wave. "I'll string him up, Diana. He can't run far enough or fast enough."

"Boss. Peter. We don't know. We don't know anything yet."

"Yeah, well, I'm going to find out." He looked out across the pasture, serene and beautiful in the morning sun. The borders of his little world here in the country seemed close and confining all of a sudden. Fowler was nearby, and Peter was going to nail that bastard. He could feel the sense of purpose, of certainty, taking hold.

"If Fowler wanted you out of the FBI -- why?"

That was a good question. It couldn't be anything to do with Neal; he'd already put Neal away at that point. "I can still remember the other cases I was working on at the time," Peter said. "They all would've been reassigned to other agents afterwards, but I have no idea what went where. I can send you a list."

"I'll text you my personal email -- I don't think it'd be a good idea to use the official one. But, yes, I'll take a look."

"Be careful," Peter reminded her. "If Fowler really did take me out for some reason -- managed to push something like that through OPR, and cover it up ... there's no telling how high this goes."

"I'm always careful, boss," she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice before she hung up.

Peter sighed and stared at the phone for a moment. He missed Diana.

Then he dialed Kramer's number.

He got voice mail, which was probably just as well. Trying to explain the situation to his old mentor would be hard enough without being muddle-headed with anger as well. He left a brief message asking Kramer to call him, then tucked the phone away and hopped down off the fence.

"How's it going, crew?"

"They're great teachers," Neal said with one of his easy grins, the sort that Peter automatically distrusted.

"I think he's already better with the horses than Brian," Jess said.

Brian scowled at her with more than the usual amount of brother-to-sister venom.

"Jess, why don't you take Pepper out before breakfast," Peter said. He thought for a minute that she was going to argue with him, but then Jess gave her brother a firm glare and went to get Pepper's saddle.

As soon as he had the other kid alone, Peter asked, "Are you two fighting?"

"No," Brian said quickly. He cast a nervous sideways glance at Neal. "I'm gonna go clean the tack."

The fact that he was volunteering for this, normally one of the kids' hated chores, meant that something was definitely up. But Peter didn't think he had it in him to figure out what was wrong with the kids on top of everything else. Time enough for that later. "Come on up to the house when you're done, then. You, with me," he said, jerking a finger at Neal.

"What's got you so wound up?" Neal asked as they crossed the lawn to the house.

"Knowing that a killer's chasing you isn't enough?"

"You weren't this tense an hour ago."

Sometimes Neal's perceptiveness was really annoying. Peter debated how much to tell him. Neal sure as hell wasn't getting the whole story about the warehouse fire; it wasn't even something he talked to El about. "I spoke to Diana," he said, opening the screen door -- the thought crossed his mind that perhaps he should start locking the house, something he and El hadn't done since they'd moved here. "Fowler's with OPR; that's the Office of Professional Responsibility, our version of Internal Affairs."

He looked at Neal, who looked politely blank. For all his specialized knowledge, the ins and outs of the FBI bureaucracy weren't part of it.

"So there's no logical way that he'd be involved in the search for you," Peter went on. "He's completely out of his jurisdiction, and therefore, definitely up to something."

"We knew that already." Neal toyed with the curtain pull on the kitchen window; he was always doing something with his hands, Peter noticed, the graceful fingers in constant motion. "Well, I knew that already."

"He's managed to keep his nose clean at the FBI, though, according to Diana. I put in a call to an old friend in DC who may be able to pull strings at a higher level than Diana can, but right now we're still in a holding pattern."

Neal had visibly stiffened when Peter got to old friend in DC. "How much are you planning to tell this friend of yours?"

"As much as I need to," Peter said. "I don't plan to string him along with half-truths. Kramer's the head of DC Art Crimes, and my old mentor at Quantico. He's a solid guy."

"You still think I should turn myself in, don't you? Peter --"

"Don't start with me, Neal. You're the one who came here and got me involved. As long as my family's at risk, I get a major say in the way we handle things. That's just the way it is. You want my help? You take it on my terms."

Neal's jaw set in a mulish way that Peter was becoming all too familiar with -- then smoothed out, sliding into a relaxed smile. "Yeah," he said. "You're right, Peter."

Peter gave him a long, searching look. Neal's calm, friendly expression gave nothing away. Finally he turned away and busied himself laying out the omelet fixings. "Make yourself useful and chop this," he said, tossing a yellow pepper to Neal. "The one thing we need to stop doing is exactly what we've been doing so far -- sitting here and waiting for Fowler to come to us, giving Adler plenty of time to make plans, gather information, and go on the offensive against us."

"Yeah," Neal said. "Good point."

Peter pointed at him with a spatula. "So we take the fight to him. I'm taking everything we've got on Fowler so far and dumping it in Kramer's lap. He's smart, he's discreet, and he has connections in the State Department and all up and down the FBI chain of command. Kramer is old school: he knows everybody, and with a compromised agent on our hands and the possibility that Adler is back in the game, there couldn't be a better person to have on our side. I knew you'd give me shit about it, but -- say, why aren't you giving me shit about it?"

"Because you're right," Neal said, shrugging. "We can't handle Fowler and Adler on our own. Sitting here and letting them make all the moves gives them the advantage. So, yeah. Going up the chain of command, over Fowler's head, makes a lot of sense right now."

He started chopping the pepper with brisk, expert strokes. Peter watched him, trying to read him, but every line of Neal's body projected casual innocence. Which was suspicious all on its own.

That was too easy. He's planning something. The only question was what.


***


Brian entered the barn but immediately slipped out the back, where the trailer with the hay bales was. He climbed up on top of the bales of hay, which gave him a good view around. Distantly he saw the small figure of Jess on Pepper, riding for the upper pasture and her obstacle course.

Jess would kill him when she found out. But he'd had about all he could take. It was obvious that Jess planned on playing girl detective until something really bad happened, and Brian, who'd always been a little awkward around his aunt and uncle, couldn't figure out a way to approach Uncle Peter and ask what was going on. He'd held out as long as he could, and he was getting no help from his sister. It was time to let the proper authorities take over.

He stared at Fowler's business card for a long moment, then checked his cell for reception and, heart beating fast, dialed the number.

The gravelly voice of the guy from town answered on the first ring. "Fowler."

Brian wet his dry lips. "Hi. I'm Brian Miller -- you talked to me in town. I think I know where that guy you're looking for is. His name is Neal, right?"

"Yeah," Fowler said. There was a hot anticipation in his voice, the same kind of eagerness that Brian sometimes heard in Uncle Peter's voice when he talked about his old cases. "That's right. You've seen him?"

Brian tried to push away his misgivings, push away his worry about why Uncle Peter would get involved with a dangerous guy like that. Uncle Peter always says that we need to follow the law and do what's right. Well, I'm doing what's right, even if HE'S not.

"He's at my uncle's farm," Brian said. "I can tell you where it is."

---

7.


"Peter's hiding something."

"He's a fed, Neal. Or ex-fed, whatever, but once a suit, always a suit. He's hiding a lot of things."

"I mean more than usual," Neal said, sitting back on the coverlet in the guest bedroom and resting his weight on his hands. "I think his FBI friend Diana told him something that he doesn't want me to know. I'm just not sure what it is."

Breakfast had been awkward, enduring Peter's evasiveness and the kids' alternating sullenness and curiosity. Peter had finally, mercifully left to drive them home, giving Neal and Mozzie a brief window to talk alone.

"By the way, don't think that I haven't noticed you had a little party last night and didn't invite me," Mozzie said.

Neal groaned. He was still achy and exhausted, physical weariness entwining with emotional fatigue until he felt flattened, his sharp edges dull. It was awfully tempting to just flop down on the bed and sleep away the day. Maybe the week.

"Which is not to say I don't understand," Mozzie added. "This whole business -- Kate and all -- you know I'm not good at this, but all I'm saying, mon frère, is that if you want to talk, I'm there for you."

"I know," Neal said quietly. "Thanks."

There was a brief pause, heavy with emotional awkwardness, then Mozzie clapped his hands together. "All right, on to the business of the day. Have you made a decision about leaving yet?"

"Yeah. I'm going to cut and run tonight."

"Thank God you've come to your senses. I thought Stockholm Syndrome had got you for sure. I was afraid I'd have to tie you up and drag you out of here."

"Exaggerate much, Moz?" Neal said dryly. "Yes, I've been enjoying the Burkes' hospitality, but I've been here too long already. Peter's planning to sell me out to a friend of his at the Bureau -- oh, he says I can trust the guy, and I even think he might believe it, but once the FBI gets involved in any official capacity, I'm toast. The sooner we leave, the better."

Mozzie looked up. "You going to take a little starter fund from the Burkes?"

"No." The word jumped out before Neal had a chance to think. With a little more restraint, he added, "I can't, Moz. I've already taken enough from them."

"You can pay it back later. Anonymously. If you really have to."

"I said no, Moz."

Satchmo, lying on the bed beside Neal, put up his head with his ears pricked. He hopped down to the floor and trotted cheerfully out of the room. Neal heard the click of the screen door in the kitchen.

"The suit's back," Mozzie said.

Neal raised a finger, touching it to his lips. "We should've heard him pull into the driveway," he whispered. "I didn't hear a thing, did you?"

Mozzie's eyes went round.

Neal rose as quietly as possible and looked around the room for anything resembling a weapon. The closest thing he could find was the lamp off the bedside table. Trailing the cord, he crept to the door.

Mozzie sidled up next to him. "What are you doing, playing Rambo?" he whispered urgently. "Let's get out of here."

"You'll be a sitting duck in the yard," Neal whispered back. "If it's Fowler, he's probably not alone."

But the voice that spoke from the kitchen was female -- and familiar. "Oh, hi, doggie. What's your name?"

Mozzie's mouth dropped open. "What's she doing here?"

Neal fixed him with a glare. "Gee, I don't know, Moz."

"She's not with me, Neal. Trust me."

Neal sighed, set down the lamp and sauntered out into the living room -- keeping an eye open just in case she wasn't alone. "Alex. I see you still haven't mastered the art of knocking on strangers' doors."

Alex Hunter straightened up from fondling the dog's ears and gave him one of her brilliant, insincere smiles. As usual, she was impeccably tailored in a crisp black pantsuit and high-heeled boots: Thief Chic. She looked as out of place as Mozzie in the Burkes' rustic house.

"Caffrey. Where's my music box?"

"Nice to see you too, Alex."

"Yes, I can see you're delighted to see me. Mozzie." She nodded to Mozzie when he appeared behind Neal, then held out her hand. "The music box, Caffrey."

Neal made a show of patting down his pants. "What, do you think I've got it tucked into my pocket?"

"I wasn't born yesterday, Caffrey. I know you had it four days ago, which makes it rather likely that it's around here somewhere." Alex looked around the kitchen. "Who in the world are you staying with? I had no idea you had friends upstate."

"No one you'd know," Neal said. "How did you find me?" Because if she'd found him, then Fowler and Adler could do it the same way.

"How do you think? I followed your buddy." She pointed to Mozzie. "He never leaves the city. Ever. When he headed north, I knew he was going to you. I lost him in that awful little town yesterday, though. If I hadn't spotted the bunch of you riding horses this morning, there's no telling how long I would have been trapped in this bucolic hellhole."

"I swear, Neal," Mozzie said, holding up his hands in response to Neal's accusing look. "I had no idea she was back there."

Tires crunched on gravel outside the screen door. "That'll be Peter," Neal said. "Alex, the guy who owns this house is ex-FBI, and unless you want to explain to him why you're here --"

Alex boggled. "I don't believe this -- you're hiding out with a fed?"

"Ex-fed," Neal said.

"He's lost his mind, hasn't he," Alex said to Mozzie. Mozzie gave a vigorous nod.

"Guys." Neal pointed urgently at the kitchen door. "In five seconds Peter's going to be in here. Alex, we do need to talk about the music box, but right now, you need to hide. Mozzie, get her into the bedroom."

"Will do," Mozzie said, and hustled her out of the room, an instant before the screen door opened.

"Peter --" Neal began.

It wasn't Peter.

For an instant Neal and Fowler stared at each other.

Then Fowler reached under his jacket for his gun, and Neal yelled "Fowler!" for Mozzie and Alex's benefit as he leaped backwards, crossing the kitchen in a single adrenaline-fueled leap. Mozzie and Alex had almost certainly gone into the bedroom, so he dashed for the stairs.

"Caffrey!" Fowler barked. "You're under arrest!"

Neal bounded up the stairs three at a time. He wished he'd taken the time to explore the upstairs more thoroughly. Master bedroom at the end of the hall, bathroom and another small bedroom that Peter seemed to have outfitted as a home gym. Would the windows open? They had to, right? Fire codes and all --

"Caffrey!" Fowler's footsteps pounded the stairs behind him.

Having only a split second to make the decision, he went for the master bedroom in the hopes that if any room in the upstairs was likely to have functional opening windows and some kind of fire escape ladder, it was that one. Neal slammed the door and locked it, not that the flimsy Victorian-style doorknob would hold for more than a single kick.

He looked around quickly. He'd been in here once already, looting the Burkes' spare cash (before returning it). Everything was as he remembered: bed, dresser, computer on a desk in the corner. Large opening window.

This time, though, his eyes were drawn to something at the far side of the room: a pull-down ladder and trapdoor in the ceiling. Of course. There was an attic.

Neal ran across the room, opening the window and giving it a hard shove as he passed it. If Fowler thought he'd gone out the window, it would buy some time. He stretched to grab the ladder, wincing as the movement tugged at the healing injury in his side.

"Caffrey, there's nowhere to go," Fowler said from the other side of the door. "You know what I want. We can make a deal. You were willing to deal before."

Neal pulled down the ladder and scrambled up, pushing open the trap door. The attic was a narrow dark space, little more than boards laid across the rafters, with the roof coming all the way down to the floor on both sides. Piles of boxes and random junk -- an old bicycle, a dollhouse -- looked like they'd come with the house and hadn't been touched in decades. There was one small dormer window, its flyspecked windowpanes admitting dim shafts of sunlight.

And, he realized, there was no way to pull up the ladder from above. If he hid up here, Fowler would know exactly where he'd gone.

But maybe he could buy enough time for Peter to come back -- and for Alex and Mozzie to get away.

There was a splintering crash from below, which meant his decision was made for him in any case. Neal slammed the trapdoor and dragged the nearest stack of boxes on top of it, then added a steamer trunk so heavy he could barely move it.

The edge of the trapdoor lifted a half-inch or so before plunking back down. "Damn it, Caffrey!" Fowler yelled from below. "I don't have to be your enemy! At least I'm not the worst one you could have."

"I'm not an idiot, Fowler," Neal called. He tugged at the dormer window, but it was painted shut. "I know you're working for Adler, and you know that any hope of making a deal with me went up in smoke when Kate died."

"Kate's death was a mistake," Fowler called back. "I regret it, Caffrey -- you don't know how much. I regret a lot of things."

Neal's lip curled, scorching anger racing through him. "I'm really sorry to hear that." He took off his shoe, used it to protect his hand, and slammed it full-force against the window frame, splintering the sash and forcing the window open.

A heavy thump lifted the trapdoor an inch or two before it dropped back down, shifting the pile of boxes.

"Adler will never let you go, Neal," Fowler said from below. "Not with everything you know. Me, though -- all I want is the music box. Give it to me, and I'll buy you time to get away."

"Right, like I'm supposed to believe that." Neal leaned out the window, looking down. The roof was made of shingles -- old, unstable-looking shingles. "You really expect me to believe you'll just let me run, knowing enough to torpedo your career?"

"It's the best option you have. You're running out of time, Neal." There was a pause and a soft rattling sound -- Fowler trying to jimmy the trapdoor -- before he resumed talking. "Adler's on his way up here with someone a lot worse than me. His name's Larssen and he trained in the Special Forces with me. You don't want to be on his bad side."

"Let me guess," Neal said. "They know exactly where to find me, thanks to you." He put a foot on the sill, braced himself and slithered out onto the roof.

Whatever Fowler answered was too muffled by the walls to be heard. The ground suddenly looked a lot farther down than it had a minute ago. Neal found purchase on the shingles and sidled carefully around the window, then pulled himself up to straddle the ridgeline.

He had a fantastic view from up here. The horses in their paddock looked like toys. He could see over the trees into the neighbors' yard. Across a patchwork of woods and fields, he even glimpsed the far-off river.

I could tell him. Give him the damn music box, and split.

But that wouldn't end it. Fowler might be lying or merely deluding himself, but Neal knew without a doubt that Adler wasn't simply going to let him walk away. And the Burkes' farm was on Adler's radar now. A sudden image flashed behind Neal's eyes with stark clarity: Peter and Elizabeth and Pattie's kids, beaten and bleeding, forced to tell Adler everything they knew --

He blinked hard to chase it away. No, that's not going to happen. Peter still had friends at the FBI, friends powerful enough to protect him. The best thing you can do for them is get out of their lives, and get Adler pointed in a different direction before things go from bad to worse.

The sound of a revving engine in the driveway drew his attention. Neal couldn't help grinning at the sight of Alex in the driver's seat of Fowler's car, which she had presumably just hotwired. Impulsively he waved to her. Alex's arm appeared out the driver's window, waving back, and the car slewed into motion, sending gravel flying everywhere.

Fowler appeared from under the porch roof, running after his car. Neal flattened himself on the roof, grinning. He would love to be a fly on the wall for the conversation when Fowler tried to explain this.

There was no sign of Moz, but if he wasn't in the car with Alex, Neal trusted that he'd found a safe place to go to ground. Mozzie was absolutely brilliant at the things he was good at, and avoiding danger was definitely one of those things.

Then Fowler abruptly reversed direction and sprinted for the barn. Neal sat up on the ridgepole, confused at first as to what Fowler was trying to avoid. It became obvious when Peter's car turned into the driveway.


***


As he slowed down for the turn onto his property, Peter was almost run down by a silver sedan peeling out of his own driveway. He caught only a fleeting glimpse of the driver, a dark-haired woman he was pretty sure he'd never seen before.

"What the hell --?"

The urge to pursue the car, rapidly vanishing in the distance, warred with the desire to find out what the hell Neal was up to, because Peter had no doubt that Neal had something to do with this. The "find Neal" urge won.

"Peter!" he heard Neal call as he opened his car door. Neal's voice came from above him. Peter looked up, and stared.

Welcome to a new installment of Life With Caffrey, he thought. "Neal, what are you doing on my roof?"

"Fowler!" Neal shouted, and pointed towards the barn. "He went that way!"

All thoughts of mysterious women in silver cars temporarily fled Peter's brain, chased out by a hot wash of anger. He jogged up the steps and retrieved his gun from the gun safe, fending off Satch's enthusiastic greeting. Then he made a dash for the barn.

"He took one of the horses, Peter!" Neal shouted from the roof.

That, Peter could see at a glance. Chantilly was missing. Son of a bitch is a horse thief too? he thought in disbelief.

Well, there was no way Fowler'd had time to saddle her, not if Peter's arrival had chased him out of the yard. With any luck, she'll throw the bastard.

Pepper responded to Peter's whistle. After all Jess's work with her, if there was a horse in the paddock who might be semi-responsive without saddle or bridle, Pepper was that horse. Peter grabbed a lead rope dangling from the fence, clipped it to her halter for a makeshift rein, and mounted her off the fence rail.

"Time to show me your stuff, baby."

Satchmo raced to join them. Satch loved going along on the kids' rides, and seemed to think of the horses as honorary members of his pack. In fact, maybe ... "Hey, Satch, wanna go for a ride?" Peter called to the dog, and Satchmo took off like a shot for the woods. With any luck, he'd be on Chantilly's trail, running to catch up as he sometimes did when the kids accidentally left him behind.

"Did you see which way he went, Neal?" Peter yelled in the direction of the house.

Neal's small figure paused in the act of climbing down to the dormer window. "Got a glimpse of him over there, through the trees," he yelled, pointing.

That would be the trail that went behind the Sawyers' property and, damn it, hooked into the main network of riding trails around the river. Peter urged Pepper to a trot and then to a canter.

It was a strange feeling, riding the horse and knowing that he had little control over her. Like skydiving, or downhill skiing on a fast slippery slope -- terrifying and yet exhilarating. Peter had never been more aware of the power of the horse under him, a runaway train of flesh and bone. Up ahead of him, Satch floated in and out of patches of sunlight, pausing occasionally to look back and see if the human on the horse was still following him.

The trail split, the right fork going off towards the Sawyers' and the other dipping down into the bottomlands along the river. Satchmo turned down the left fork. Peter directed Pepper after the dog with his knees, and she took the turn like a dream, never hesitating.

If the kids tried something like this, he'd rip them a new one. Actually, he'd probably rip himself a new one if he stopped to think about it for a minute. This was reckless, stupid, dangerous --

-- exciting, thrilling, exhilarating ...

Alone in the woods, with no one but the dog and the horse to hear him, Peter let out a wild whoop of pure joy.


***


Neal sighed in relief when his feet thumped back onto the dusty floorboards in the attic. The adrenaline rush of scrambling out onto the roof had long since worn off; now he was just tired and worried about Moz. And, if he had to admit it to himself, Peter. Fowler was dangerous, and while he knew full well that Peter could take care of himself, there was still a part of him that, ludicrously, wanted to run after them into the woods and help.

The wood around the bedroom doorknob was splintered, and Fowler had caved in one of the bottom door panels when he'd kicked it. Great. Now I owe them a new door, on top of everything else.

"Mozzie?" he called. The house seemed very still and silent after all the excitement. Neal crossed the kitchen floor and went out onto the porch just as Fowler's car appeared in the driveway.

He ducked back into the kitchen, then saw that Alex was driving and cautiously stuck his head around the kitchen door. Alex rolled down the window and waved. "Caffrey, come on!"

"Come on where?" Neal asked, amused and surprised.

"Somewhere that isn't here," Alex said, and in an irritated voice, over her shoulder, "You can sit up now. No one's shooting at you."

Mozzie's head popped up in the backseat. "No one's shooting at me yet," he corrected her, and scrambled out of the car, staying low. "Hang on, I have to get my stuff."

Neal laughed. Alex never ceased to amaze him. "You're going on the run in an FBI agent's stolen car? There's chutzpah and then there's ..."

"Sounds like something you'd do, doesn't it?" Alex said. "And you mean we are going on the run. Unless you want to stay here 'til Fowler comes back."

Neal opened and closed his mouth. When it came right down to it, this was probably the best chance to leave that was likely to come along. Peter was out of the way, El was at work, Fowler was busy ... And he didn't have a good reason not to go with her, except the one thing he couldn't say: the truth. I don't want to, and I'm not sure why.

"And we can have a nice long chat about my music box," Alex added.

Well, there was that.

"I don't have the music box, Alex."

"You mean you don't have it in your hands right now," Alex said. "Which I can see. But I know how you operate, Caffrey. You've hidden it somewhere, haven't you?"

Mozzie emerged from the barn, lugging his duffle. "You need anything from the house?" he asked Neal.

"No." All he owned was ... well, his shoes, actually, since he was still wearing Peter's borrowed clothes.

The Burkes had literally given him the shirt off their backs. Neal glanced at the woods again.

"Neal, come on," Mozzie said, throwing the duffle in the backseat and climbing in after it.

I was planning on doing this tonight anyway. The opportunity came along sooner than I was expecting, that's all.

He got in the passenger seat.

"Nice threads, by the way," Alex remarked, glancing at the oversized sweatshirt with its rolled-up sleeves.

"Since you're driving," Neal said, "I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop at the first clothing store we come to. And I still think you ought to ditch the car as soon as possible."

"I can see this is going to be a charming road trip," Mozzie said from the backseat.

"No one asked the peanut gallery." Alex turned the car around smartly and pulled out of the driveway.

Neal looked back over his shoulder: the house, the barn, the paddock with the horses, all receding into the distance, until they were swallowed by trees.

He'd really been looking forward to leaving. He couldn't wait to get back to civilization: good restaurants, silk sheets, transportation that didn't have hooves. He had friends around him, wheels under him, and he was leaving Fowler and Adler far enough behind that he'd finally get some breathing space -- time to plan revenge for Kate without the Burkes getting underfoot. Yeah, he was running again, but he'd been running most of his life for one reason or another. This was what he lived for: being on the road, footloose and free.

And yet, it felt like he was being ripped in half.


***


The trail emerged from the woods along the river, and Peter slowed Pepper to a walk to let her cool down and get her wind back. Once again, she responded beautifully. He was going to have to tell Jess that she was a horse-trainer extraordinaire.

Up ahead, Satchmo gave a sharp bark. Peter looped the rope rein over the saddlehorn, keeping his hand on it but ready to draw his pistol in an instant if he needed to. Most of the saddles on the Burke property were Western-style, since he often found the saddlehorn useful in place of an extra hand.

As they came around a bend in the river, he saw Chantilly on the far bank, riderless, browsing on the scrubby grass on a sandbar.

Peter reined in Pepper and drew his gun. "Fowler?" he called.

There was no answer, no sound but birdcalls and the rushing of the water over the river's shallow bed. Peter tried to place their location in terms of the overall geography of the area. There was a road right behind the trees on the far side of the river. Either Fowler was using Chantilly as bait in a trap, or someone had come to pick him up. Or both.

"Fowler, I know you probably don't want to talk to me," Peter called. If you did what I think you did, I don't blame you. "So here's the deal. I'm going to cross the river and get my horse. And then I'm riding back the way I came. We aren't going to have a problem unless you make it a problem."

He holstered the gun, dismounted and tied Pepper to a bush. For a moment he wished for two hands with a bitter, savage urgency: one to hold his gun, the other to put Plan B into effect. But, forced to choose between them, he had to admit that the gun was the less important of the two. In the middle of the river, he wouldn't even have time to get off a shot if Fowler tried to snipe him.

He drew his cell phone instead. Reception in the woods could be flaky, but holding it up, he managed to get a strong enough signal to call Diana.

"Hey, boss. I haven't had time to look up --"

"That's not why I'm calling," Peter interrupted. "I'm with Fowler right now. Or, to be accurate, I'm in the woods somewhere in his general vicinity. You're my insurance policy."

"How do you mean?" Diana asked.

"I'm about to retrieve something Fowler stole from me. I think he might be using it as bait in a trap. I want you to get a fix on the GPS of this phone while I do it. If anything happens -- if you hear gunshots, if I stop answering -- then Fowler either did it or he's heavily involved with someone who did. Scramble agents to this location, and call Kramer at DC Art Crimes, tell him everything I've told you about Fowler."

"I can see that civilian life hasn't done anything for your sense of self-preservation."

"I knew I could count on you, Diana."

"The GPS is showing that you're upstate. It'll take hours to get anyone there."

"I know," Peter said. "That's why I'm hoping the threat is enough."

He held up the cell, waved it in the air and called, "Fowler? See this? I'm on the phone to a friend of mine at the Bureau right now. Anything happens to me in the next five minutes, they'll know you did it and there will be agents on the way. Now I'm coming across to get my horse."

Either Fowler wasn't there, or the threat was enough. Peter waded across in waist-deep water, retrieved a reluctant Chantilly -- she was having fun, and not especially interested in going home -- and waded back across.

"Hey, Diana. Mission accomplished."

"I forgot how nerve-wracking it was to work for you," Diana sighed. "Did I hear you say '... get my horse'?"

"Long story," Peter said. "I'll call you from the house in about twenty minutes. If I don't call you back within a half-hour --"

"I know. Send in the troops."


***


The ominous silence at the house should have been a clue.

But Peter didn't catch on until he'd already turned the horses into the paddock, called Diana to give her a quick "still alive, don't push the panic button" update, and then walked into the house and called Neal's name.

No answer.

The house had the still, unlived-in feeling that Peter remembered from his days with the Bureau. He knew the difference between the waiting silence of a house with someone in it, even someone sleeping, and the open, echoing silence of one that was empty. It was an overall feeling made up of little sounds, little clues you didn't even notice consciously. Learning to listen to the reptilian hindbrain, to pick up on those clues, was one of the things that separated old cops from dead cops.

And this house was empty.

He went room to room, looking for blood or bullet holes or any signs that Neal hadn't been as healthy when he'd left as he was when Peter saw him on the roof. The splintered door lock gave him pause. The ladder pulled down from the attic and the broken window offered another chapter of the story.

But Neal was gone, and when he went out to the barn, he wasn't surprised to find that Mozzie's things were gone too.

They'd done a runner.

Peter sank down on a bale of hay and leaned against the wall, suddenly weary beyond the telling. "Damn it, Neal," he said, to an audience of only the horses and the silence in the barn.

---

8.


They ditched Fowler's car near Apple Corners, and Alex boosted another one, which they in turn traded for a second stolen car halfway to Syracuse.

Syracuse wasn't much of a town for high-end shopping, but at least Neal was able to buy something to wear that didn't look like hand-me-downs from his big brother. It was an off-the-rack suit and not even the best of those, but he turned around in front of the mirror and saw himself again, not whoever he'd been since Kate's death. Whoever he'd been at the Burkes'.

Alex sat watching him, legs crossed, tapping her foot. "How much of my time are you planning to waste?"

"Do you have an appointment somewhere?" Neal tried a hat, then another one. He looked at himself in the mirror again. It looked like him. Maybe if he kept trying, it would eventually feel like him. "We've got all the time in the world."

But in the back of his head, there was a ticking countdown. Adler and this Larssen, whoever he was, were coming up from New York. They'd get to Apple Corners, to the Burkes' farm, and find that Neal wasn't there. And then they'd --

"You might," Alex said. "As for me, my patience is getting a little thin. That's my credit card you're running up, you know."

Neal summoned his usual easy grin. "And whose was it before it was yours?"

Alex waved her hand. "Details, details. And don't forget, there's a reason I took you with me."

"I thought it was something to do with saving my life and getting me back to the city lights." Neal tipped the hat rakishly over his eye. Oh, yeah. That was better. He smiled at himself in the mirror, and wondered if that smile looked as insincere to everyone else as it looked to him right now.

"That," Alex said, "and my music box."

"Our music box."

"Does that mean you admit you have it?"

"I never admit anything."

"This was cute for a while, Neal, but it's not funny anymore." Alex rose. "I'll be out in the car with Mozzie. And believe me, it's a sorry day when I prefer his company to yours."

As soon as her back was turned, Neal let the smile drop away.

What would Peter be doing now? Calling the police on him? In a way, Neal hoped so: it might make his flight with Alex and Mozzie a little more complicated, but it would mean that Peter was talking to the authorities, maybe getting protection so that he and his family weren't entirely at Adler's mercy.

I could call them. He'd been tempted several times on the drive to Syracuse to ask Alex or Mozzie if he could borrow their phone. Or, better yet, now that he was back in a town that actually had stores, he could pick up a cheap prepaid phone somewhere. Call Peter. Let him know that Adler was coming and that he needed to get out of the house --

-- and then Peter would argue with him, and bring out the guilt, and the next thing he knew, he'd be trying to talk Alex into driving back to Apple Corners. No, he couldn't talk to Peter.

Besides, he didn't know Peter or El's number. He'd only been with them for two days. He had no way to get in touch with them, short of making physical contact again, and no logical reason to consider their welfare his responsibility.

He's got friends at the Bureau. Highly placed friends. He's better off than you are, Caffrey. Let Peter take care of himself --

But what it all came back to was that Peter wouldn't need to take care of himself if Neal hadn't shown up in his barn two days ago and led trouble to his front door. No matter how fine a point he put on it, he'd taken off and left Peter and El to face the danger that he'd led to them, and just trying to think about it made him sick to his stomach with guilt and fear.

There was also the small matter of the music box. Which Alex hadn't shut up about.

I should've picked it up before we left Apple Corners. Because now, getting it would mean going back.

But he couldn't have brought it without admitting to Alex that he had it. And Neal Caffrey was never one to play a hole card if he didn't have to.

Not to mention that it gives you a convenient excuse to go back. Isn't that right, Caffrey?

He stared at himself in the mirror. The blue eyes under the brim of the hat looked back at him. Strangers' eyes.

Adler won't hurt Peter and El. He's got no reason to. He'd only get himself in trouble, and he's too cautious for that. As far as he and Fowler are concerned, they're just a random couple who sheltered me for a couple of days, no one he should be concerned about.

I have to take care of me, and they have to take care of them, and we'll both be all right.

If he told himself enough times, maybe he'd believe it.


***


El looked up automatically when the customer doorbell at the bakery tinkled. At the sight of her husband, a smile broke across her face, but it faded when she saw his expression.

"Pattie, I'm going to take five, all right?"

All Pattie had to do was take a single look at her brother-in-law, and she squeezed El's arm with a sympathetic smile. "Take as much time as you need. I've got it."

El nodded her thanks, and poured two cups of coffee. She pushed one of them into Peter's hand, and steered him behind the counter and into Pattie's tiny office adjoining the kitchen.

"What's the matter?" she asked, kissing his cheek. "Is everything all right at the house? Is it Neal?"

Peter allowed himself to be pushed down into the room's single chair. "That's complicated," he said, and told her about Fowler, about his possible connection to the warehouse fire, and about Neal and Mozzie's disappearance -- which involved backtracking a bit to explain who Mozzie was.

"Fowler was there? At our house?"

"Well, Neal said so." Peter went silent for a moment. "Come to think of it, all I ever had was Neal's word for that. He could've turned Chantilly loose himself -- if he endangered the horses playing his games, El --"

"He doesn't seem like that kind of person to me."

"I don't have any idea who Neal is," Peter said softly. "He's whoever it suits him to be at any given moment. I don't even know if he knows."

El perched on the edge of the battered antique table that served as Pattie's desk. The air was hot and close, and smelled of sugar and cinnamon. "That's not really fair to Neal, hon. And you know it."

"I think I know him a little better than you do," Peter pointed out. "I chased him for years."

"Yes, but did you ever talk to him? I think I've had nearly as many conversations with him as you have."

Despite his obvious efforts to stay in a funk, Peter's lopsided smile appeared on the unburned half of his face. "And what are your conclusions, Doctor Burke?"

El pursed her lips in a prim and proper way. "Well, let me see, Agent Burke." The affected manner fell away, and she said sincerely, "Peter, he's young and lonely and scared. I don't think he's had very many people in his life he can trust. I'm not even sure if he knows how."

Peter leaned against her shoulder; she rested her cheek on top of his head. "So what's your recommendation, Doctor?" he asked. "Can he be rehabilitated?"

El sighed, ruffling his hair with her breath. "Oh, hon. I wish I knew. I know he likes us. I think he wants to trust us, but can't quite bring himself to it."

"And he's out there," Peter murmured against her sleeve. "Running to God only knows where. And Fowler ..."

His fingers curled into a fist. El cupped her hand over his.

"I'm going to take down that son of a bitch, El. I know Kramer will help me. I don't have any evidence yet, but I feel it in my gut -- he was involved with what happened that night, to those men."

"And to you," El said quietly into his hair.

"And me. But this isn't about revenge, hon." When she squeezed his hand, Peter sighed. "Okay. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a little -- but that's not why I want to see him go down. He doesn't deserve to walk around free after what he's done."

"And what if there's no way to take down Fowler without taking down Neal along with him?"

Peter drew back and looked up at her. "You don't shy away from asking the hard questions, do you?"

"Only when you're asking yourself the same questions," she pointed out.

Peter heaved a sigh.

"It would be easier to help Neal if he wouldn't make helping him such a pain in the ass."

"Gee, that doesn't remind me of anyone I know at all." El kissed the top of his head. "What are you going to do next?"

"Well, the logical thing at this point is what I should've done two days ago: talk to the police, and to the FBI."

"And Neal ..."

"Neal got himself into this," Peter snapped. "It's not up to me to get him out."

"Of course not."

"I don't even know him. Like you said -- I never had a conversation with him until two days ago."

"True," El said.

"So what I'm actually going to do," Peter said after a moment, "is try again to get in touch with Kramer, and then go out to the old mill by the river."

El pulled back and frowned down at him. "The ruined mill? Why?"

"I went there this morning with the kids and Neal," Peter said. "And Neal's been there before. You could tell by the way he was looking around -- or not looking around, rather. He's like a kid -- insatiable curiosity. He was trying too hard not to look; it couldn't be anything but an act. And I got to thinking. According to the story Neal told us, there was a full day between the time that his girlfriend died and when he turned up in our barn. It wouldn't take that long to get up here, even hitchhiking. He'd be an absolute fool to hang around New York for twelve hours with Adler trying to kill him, so where do you suppose he was?"

"I assumed he came directly out to the farm," El said.

"Because that's what he wanted us to think. I don't know if you've noticed, hon, but whenever Neal's talking, the truth is usually in what he doesn't say."

Peter had the look that El thought of as his "The FBI Agent Is On The Case" expression. She hadn't seen that look in four years, and her breath caught at the realization that she'd really missed that thousand-yard stare, the laserlike fixation on something that only Peter could see.

"So let's say he didn't know where the farm was. He got a ballpark idea from whoever gave him a ride, but he couldn't exactly grill everyone in town without making a target of himself. So he ended up wandering around in the woods for awhile before he found us. If he was going to unload something he didn't want us to know about, that'd be the time."

El managed to tamp down her fond smile and focus on what he was saying. "Do you still think he was lying about the music box?"

Peter's brow furrowed. "I don't think he necessarily lied. I can't remember everything word-for-word, but I think he tried his damnedest to give the impression that he didn't have it without coming right out and saying so. Assuming he didn't have the brass balls to hide it on our property -- and honestly, I wouldn't put anything past him -- the mill is the next most likely place. It's close, but relatively isolated."

"That sounds dangerous. Fowler's out there, and we both know cell reception along the river is spotty..."

"I'll be careful. I'll take my gun, and check in with you every so often. The minute things get dangerous, I'll call the cops." He squeezed his arm around her waist. "You should probably get back to work."

El nodded, but she stayed cuddled against him for a moment longer.

"I hate leaving you alone," Peter said.

El laughed. "Honey, I'm not alone. No one is going to snatch me from the bakery in broad daylight. And I promise I won't so much as go to the bathroom without making sure that Pattie knows where I am and when I'm coming back, okay?"

"All right," Peter conceded, "but I'll stop by and pick you up this evening. And don't work late. As soon as the bakery closes --"

"-- I'll call you. Yes. That's fair." She kissed the tip of his nose. "Be safe."

"You too."


***


"I think I've been very patient," Alex said.

Neal looked up from a cup of coffee. They'd ditched the second stolen car and regrouped at a Syracuse restaurant to go over plans. Well, more accurately, to drink a lot of coffee while avoiding talking to each other.

"You," Mozzie said. "Patient."

"Don't start with me. I just rescued both of you from rural hell. The least you could do is stop giving me the runaround."

Neal groaned and rubbed his eyes. I'm not, was on the tip of his tongue, but damn it, he was, and he didn't like lying to friends. "I'm just not sure where to go from here, Alex. Things have been happening very fast."

"Things always happen fast around you, Caffrey," Alex said. Her smile dropped away and she toyed with her coffee cup. "So when do we rendezvous with Whatsername, anyway?"

"Whatsername?"

"Kate," Alex said. Mozzie looked up sharply, and Neal felt himself flinch. She didn't know. She didn't know. "Unless you two are quits. Oh, God, don't tell me. She dumped you and took the music box. You know, Neal, if you would tell people things, I wouldn't go and stick my foot in it --"

"She's dead," Neal said. It was like ripping off a bandaid, really. Or tearing the bandage off an open, bleeding wound.

Alex stopped with her mouth open. It wasn't easy to leave Alex speechless. Under different circumstances, he would have enjoyed it.

"That can't --" Alex wet her lips and started over. "It's only been, what, four days since the last time I saw the two of you? When did ..."

"Two days ago," Neal said. "More like three, now."

Alex stared at him. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"It didn't come up, all right?" He was aware of Mozzie giving him a long look, and tried to ignore it. "Like I said, things have been happening fast."

Alex started to reach across the table for his hand, then aborted it in mid-gesture -- his body language must have been giving off do not touch vibes. Instead she started taking out sugar packets and carefully rearranging them in their little ceramic holder. "Neal, I know that -- well, Kate and I have never really seen eye to eye on a lot of things, but -- can I ask what happened?"

Keeping himself under control was an increasing effort. His hand on the cup started to tremble. Neal locked his jaw, locked himself down. "Adler happened."

Alex's head snapped up.

"Adler?"

"Yes, Adler. Vincent Adler. Why do you think I'm hiding out upstate, Alex? Because I like the country air?" Neal forced his voice down to a harsh whisper. "Adler killed Kate, and he's trying to kill me. This isn't like one of the cons we used to run. This isn't even like stealing the music box. Kate's dead, and I --" His vision was starting to telescope into a dark tunnel. Oh, God, it wasn't going to hit him now. It couldn't. Not here. "I'm taking that bastard down," he said, holding onto self-control by the skin of his teeth.

"I have to use the restroom," Alex said. Her face was very white. She shot to her feet and headed for the back of the cafe.

For a moment no one said anything. Neal stared at his coffee cup, which had become the center of his universe, and focused on his breathing. If you're going to lose it, Caffrey, this isn't the time and it isn't the place.

"Neal ..." Mozzie said. His voice was soft and helpless. Neal looked up at him, finally. "Do you want me to go after her?"

"No." Neal rose. He was a little less shaky, a little more himself -- or whoever he'd become; he honestly had no idea anymore. "I think I could use a trip to the restroom myself."

It was the middle of the afternoon and the cafe was almost deserted: small favors, anyway. The restrooms were down a small hall beside the kitchen. Alex was leaning against the wall outside the ladies' room. She wasn't crying and she wasn't hastily putting away a cell phone, which were the two possibilities that had occurred to Neal. She looked up when he appeared.

"Let's talk," Neal said.

Alex didn't resist when he took her arm and steered her out the service door at the end of the hall. It led to a small employee parking space behind the restaurant. There was room for two cars and a dumpster, and not much else.

"I don't suppose you've taken up smoking," Alex said. Her voice shook a little. "I haven't either, but all of a sudden I could really use a cigarette."

"No cigarettes. Sorry." Neal started to lean against the wall, took a closer look and thought better of it. "Alex, are you working for Adler?"

She gave a ladylike snort of disgust. "Working for Adler? Hardly. Those days are over."

"Working with Adler, then."

Alex turned away. To the parking lot in general, she said, "We both worked for him back in the day, you know."

"Alex, I'm not judging. Believe me, I know how charming Adler is. I didn't think he was capable of something like this, either."

And if I'd realized in time, then Kate -- But that was a road he couldn't go down. Not right now.

"The crazy thing is, I wasn't just doing it for the money," Alex said to the parking lot. "He said that the box was what he wanted, not you. That as long as he had it, you and Kate --" She stopped, took a deep breath and went on. "That you could both go about your lives, no strings attached. As long as I could find you and retrieve the box."

She rubbed her eyes and didn't look at him. Neal had never been a smoker except when he'd adopted it as part of a persona, but he could empathize with her craving for a cigarette. He was itching, restless, uncomfortable in his skin; he wished he had something to do with his hands.

"Neal, do you mind if I ask how it -- I mean, how she --"

Yes, he minded, but it was a fair question. And maybe if he kept saying it, then it would make it more real. Or less real. Or something. "He blew up a plane with Kate inside."

Alex's mouth opened, then closed. "The explosion at the airfield -- that was Kate? It was on the news. Rumor said it was a mob hit."

"No," Neal said.

Alex paced as best she could, two short steps from the dumpster to the nearest car and back. "Are you sure it was Adler?"

"I was on the phone with him when he pushed the button. I was standing right there. I saw it happen."

Kate. The plane. Fowler, gun in hand, holding a cell phone out to him. "There's someone who wants to talk to you, Neal ..."

Alex stopped pacing. "Oh, God. Neal."

"Right up to that point, I still thought I could make a deal. A better deal than Fowler was giving us. The box for our freedom, Kate's and mine." There was so much about that day he couldn't think about, didn't dare think about, not when he was clinging to self-control by the tips of his fingers. But the bone-deep shock of realization, that he'd been so wrong about Adler, for all these years, still cut like a blade.

"Instead, I found out how wrong I was. And Kate died, and I took a bullet from Fowler, and I ran."

Ran ... ran to Peter Burke, who he'd spoken to once, four years ago. Peter Burke, who'd tracked him across two continents and finally run him to ground. Peter Burke, who, when Neal's back was up against the wall, was his bulwark, his anchor, his one constant in a world gone mad. It made no sense. And yet. There it was.

"Did you have the box when you ran?" Alex asked. "The truth, Neal. I'm as deep in this as you are now, and you know it."

Neal forced himself to meet her eyes. "Yes," he said.

Nothing changed in her face. It wasn't exactly news to her, after all.

"I knew I never should have given it back to you after we stole it, Caffrey."

"To be honest, I wish you hadn't." If she'd just run with it, as she'd started to, after the four of them had taken it from the embassy a few nights ago -- but, no. There were so many different turns they could have taken, so many changes large and small that could have broken the chain of events that had led them here. But here they were. And time was a one-way arrow, moving only forward.

"Where is it?"

In for a penny, in for a pound ... "It's hidden back in Apple Corners."

"Damn it, Neal!"

"In case you haven't noticed," Neal said dryly, "I'm not really the trusting sort."

"I'd always considered it one of your better traits, but now I'm starting to realize how annoying it is." Alex ran her hand through her hair. "I expect that Adler's on his way now, if he isn't there already."

"Did you --"

"Call him? No. I was planning to handle things on my own, get the box and get it back to him without tipping him off to your location. But since Fowler knows where you've been hiding, then Adler will know too."

"Yeah," Neal said. "I'd figured."

The service door cracked open. Neal flinched and started to reach for Alex's hand -- cover, cover -- but it was only Mozzie. "What is going on out here? I'm starting to feel abandoned."

"We've been having a very enlightening conversation," Alex said. "Clearing the air. You know. That sort of thing."

"Ah. That sort of thing. Want me to --"

"No," Neal said. "Stay. You should be involved in this conversation too. We were just discussing our next move."

"Among numerous other things," Alex said. "Caffrey -- those people you were staying with --"

"The Burkes."

"Yes. Them. When Adler gets there and doesn't find you -- how dangerous is he, Neal? How ruthless?"

And there it was, the truth that he'd been trying so hard to deny. "As ruthless as he needs to be, to get what he wants," Neal said, wrenching out the words and forcing them into the light, where he couldn't deny them anymore. "And he wants the music box very badly."

"Do they know where it is?"

"No," Neal said. "They don't even know I have it." Though Peter had suspected, he knew. And that little bit of knowledge was just enough to get Peter and Elizabeth into a lot of trouble.

Alex, ever suspicious, had brought her purse with her to the restroom, and now she took out a slim phone and held it out to him. "Call them, Neal."

"I can't. I don't know their number, and, Peter being Peter, I doubt if it's listed anywhere. I might be able to get in touch with Elizabeth's sister; I know she owns a bakery, though I don't know the name of it."

Mozzie, as always, knew him much too well. "Oh, tell me that you're not thinking what I think you're thinking."

"We have to go back for the music box anyway," Neal said, studiously not looking at Mozzie, whose silence became somehow accusing.

Alex dropped the phone back into her purse. "Yes, and the sensible thing is to wait until Adler's gone and then get it. I like you, Caffrey, but I draw the line at risking myself for strangers."

"You don't have to come," Neal said. "In fact, I'd really prefer it if you two didn't come. There's no point in all of us --"

"See what I have to put up with," Mozzie told Alex.

"My condolences," Alex said without sympathy.

Neal cleared his throat. "Is anyone listening to me? I'm not joking. Adler's out for blood -- mine, and anyone near me. As far as I'm concerned, having you guys here, as backup, is a lot more useful than dragging all of us into trouble."

"My bag of surplus Russian spy gear begs to differ," Mozzie said.

"Guys --"

"No, no, no. It's my turn to talk and your turn to listen, Neal. For the record," Mozzie said, "I think we're moving too fast. My vote is for strategic withdrawal, followed by marshaling our resources and then launching an offensive. But." He reached out and gave Neal's arm a quick, light tap. "I'll back whatever play you make, man. I've got nothing against Adler personally -- hell, the guy pulled off the con of a lifetime, you gotta admire that -- but when he took out Kate, this became war. It's not about the suits and it's not about the law. Kate was one of us." Mozzie looked at Alex. "Am I wrong?"

Alex twisted a strand of hair between her fingers, and wilted under Mozzie's stare. "You're not wrong," she said quietly.

Neal swallowed, his throat suddenly tight. "Guys ..."

"Don't get mushy on me," Mozzie said. "We need to make a plan. And ..." He sighed. "I suppose we're heading back to Apple Corners. Just when I thought I'd seen the last of that place."

"So I'll steal another car, then, shall I?" Alex said brightly.


Part Two