White Collar fic: Thursday's Child

[sholio]

Title: Thursday's Child
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: ~20,000
Pairing: Gen with background Neal/Elizabeth and a little one-sided Peter/Elizabeth
Summary: Peter acquires a couple of unorthodox guardian angels. Sequel to Monday's Child, in which Elizabeth meets Neal before she meets Peter, and embarks on a life of crime.
Notes: Thank you so much to frith_in_thorns for the beta! All remaining mistakes are my own.
Crossposted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/713605



Monday's child is fair of face
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go.
- Nursery rhyme


Peter's apartment in Toledo was one room up four flights of stairs, with a toilet that worked about half the time and a persistent smell of mold. He'd drifted west through a series of private security jobs, mostly doing night security on factories and apartment buildings. It was one of the few things he could do that was still in a law-enforcement vein after being fired from the FBI.

After the Caffreys' frame job, he'd been lucky to get off without jail time. Most of his former co-workers would no longer speak to him, and Peter, knowing how he himself felt about dirty cops, couldn't blame them.

With his career in tatters, he had given serious thought to trying to apply his accounting degree, but in the end, he just couldn't. Partly because it had been twenty years, and he'd forgotten more about math than he'd ever known. And partly because ...

... partly because, well, he didn't even know why, exactly. Law enforcement was what he did, and he couldn't seem to give it up, even if it was leading him to lousy bottom-feeder security jobs. Jobs from which he kept getting fired, because he'd been drinking a hell of a lot more than was good for him.

Peter recognized that he was in a downward spiral, but not enough to pull himself out, mostly because he hadn't yet come up with a good reason. He was behind on his rent and suspected he was probably going to get evicted. This would be the third place in a row, and he'd just lost his job as a night watchman at a warehouse down by the river for failing to show up on time three nights running.

He had a feeling that he wasn't at bottom yet, and there might be a long way to go down.

He'd just spent his last paycheck at the bar -- he knew he shouldn't, but it was booze and companionship, and right now both of those were what got him through the day. He climbed the musty stairwell to his apartment, half drunk, and slowed and stopped when he saw two things. One was an overdue-rent notice, on a sheet of yellow paper, taped to his door. The second was beneath it, a box sitting on his doorstep.

Interesting.

It was a small cardboard Amazon box, the flaps of the lid loosely taped shut, with his name printed in black marker. PETER. Nothing else. Peter poked it with his toe. It didn't make a ticking sound or do anything else dangerous, so he cautiously opened it.

The box was full of money. Flat stacks of crisp bills, rubber-banded together, piled neatly, filling the box to the brim.

"What the hell?" Peter said out loud.

He started to pick it up. Then he thought better of it. People don't just leave boxes of cash lying around. He ended up reconnoitering the entire neighborhood, seeing no sign of surveillance on his place, before he took the box into his apartment and plunked it down on the cracked Formica countertop.

A box of money.

He flipped through enough of the stacks of bills to ascertain that it actually was money (nonsequential twenties, mostly), as opposed to bound stacks of newsprint or some other trick. Of course, it could be counterfeit. It could be a lot of things.

Peter looked more closely at the handwriting. It was block printing, but there was still something vaguely familiar about it. A particular way of looping the "R", perhaps.

He couldn't prove it without a lab, and all he really had to go on was gut instinct, but Peter's gut was telling him that was Neal Caffrey's handwriting.

"You son of a bitch," Peter said aloud, half angry, half admiring.

If Neal had left the money here, then a) it was definitely for Peter (as opposed to a misdirected drug deal or something), and b) it was almost certainly stolen. He spent about five minutes idly entertaining the fantasy of keeping and spending it. Paying all his overdue bills. Fixing his car. Maybe moving to a part of the city where he didn't come home to find new graffiti on the wall every day.

Then he came to his senses and hunted through the apartment -- it was a mess of beer cans, dirty laundry and old newspapers -- to find something to put the money in, something that didn't have his name on it. He dumped it into a grocery bag, not without a certain amount of regret, added a second bag so that the contents were not obvious at first glance, and then left the apartment.

He ended up leaving the money on the doorstep of a youth center that was a few blocks down the street, in a depressing concrete box of a building. He scribbled "Donation" on an old scrap of newspaper and left it in front of the door, where it would be found by the first person to open the building in the morning. Assuming someone didn't steal it before then, but hey, if one of the kids who came to this place walked off with it, they probably needed it a lot more than Peter did.

He still had a few qualms about it -- if this was money that the Caffreys had ripped off from a bank heist or something (and they sure as hell hadn't earned it through honest means, he did know that much), it really ought to go back where it belonged. But he had no way to know where that was, and no way to contact them and give it back, so this was the next best thing.

After tucking the "Donation" note into the bag, he took out a wad of twenties and, on his walk back to his apartment, quietly left a few of them with every sleeping homeless person he could find. It was good karma. At the rate Peter himself was going, he might actually be one of those people eventually.

He did save back the last twenty and bought a pizza and a six-pack with it. No point in being too much of a martyr, after all.


***


After a few days of fruitless, halfhearted job hunting, Peter decided to cowboy up, go in and talk to the landlord and see if he could eke out another month's grace period. For whatever good that would do him. He got a surprise, though.

"Your rent's paid up. Back rent and three months in advance."

"How?" Peter demanded, but he had a sinking feeling he knew how. What he didn't know was why.

"Nice young couple came in and paid it, just a few hours ago."

Yeah. Caffrey was back ... and playing some kind of game. Peter was deeply annoyed and, at the same time, intrigued. Somewhere deep inside him, something seemed to be waking up -- the old curiosity, the need to know, the delighted fascination in seeing if he could counter one of Neal and Elizabeth's moves before they made it.

Back in his apartment -- which was apparently his for another three months, moldy carpet and all -- Peter got out a legal pad and a beer, and began making notes. Caffrey in town, he jotted at the top, then crossed it out and wrote Caffrey + Mitchell in town.

He got all the pertinent facts down -- dates and their approximate movements, at least as far as he could guess from the cash on the doorstep and their visit to his landlord. All known activity, which wasn't much. He got out the one tangible piece of evidence that he had, the Amazon box, and moved a pile of newspapers and some empty beer bottles to set it on the countertop.

Then he stopped in the middle of it. He wanted to laugh. You're putting together a case, Burke. A case for what? And why? He wasn't a cop anymore. Whatever Caffrey and Mitchell were up to, and why they'd taken an interest in him, was something that he'd probably never know; he was one small part of some much bigger plan.

He knew it was probably a bad idea to get drunk when he was in a mood like this, but at the moment he couldn't see a single reason not to -- well, not a single reason except, somewhat importantly, he'd run out of alcohol in the apartment. He left what he tried not think of as case files on the countertop, and headed down the street to the little liquor store on the corner. It was a gloomy evening, the low gray sky threatening rain.

When he got back, the door to his apartment was very slightly ajar.

Peter wished he had a gun with him. However, he had a feeling who might have broken into his apartment. There was no sign at all of forced entry, though he was sure he'd locked the door when he'd left.

He hefted the slightly clinking bag -- he could always swing it at an assailant, if he turned out to be wrong -- and nudged the door open with his foot.

He wasn't wrong. Neal Caffrey was leaning on the countertop, looking through Peter's notes.

"You!" Peter said.

Neal raised his hands in a pacifying gesture. As far as Peter could tell, he didn't appear to be armed. "I'd like to point out that you don't have any authority to arrest me."

"I can make a citizen's arrest," Peter said. "You broke into my apartment."

"True," Neal conceded. He glanced behind him, at the half-open window with a small, sad pot of mostly dead basil on the sill. "Then I'll go out the window."

"It's four stories straight down into an alley."

"I'm good at going out windows." Neal smiled. "Do you want to see me do it, or be a good host and offer me a drink?"

Peter glared at him. Neal smiled back, innocent and friendly. Peter sighed, and took a beer out of the bag, then stepped just close enough to hold it out at arm's length. "Here."

Neal looked at the label without taking it. "You know, I'm not really a beer guy --"

"You're in my apartment. Which you broke into. If you want a drink, you'll drink my beer." Peter popped the caps off two beers, and put one on the counter in front of Neal. He thought about trying to block the window, but he really was curious. "What are you doing here?"

"Admiring your paperwork, mostly." Neal nodded to the legal pad on the countertop. "Very thorough."

"Always document everything," Peter said. "Where's the lovely Ms. Mitchell?"

"Mrs. Caffrey," Neal corrected him lightly. "She's around."

Probably on the roof of the building next door with a sniper rifle, Peter thought with a nervous glance at the window. Then he fixed his stare on Neal. "Okay, let's cut to the chase here, Caffrey. You're in my apartment, which you just paid for. Drinking my beer, which you aren't paying for. What do you want?"

"Maybe I just want to say hi," Neal suggested.

"Uh-huh. If you're trying to sucker me into something, there's no point," Peter said. "I'm not with the FBI anymore. There's nothing I have that you could possibly want."

Neal looked uncomfortable; no, more than that, he looked guilty. "Yeah, about that. The thing is, we kind of. Feel bad. About you losing your job."

As well you should, was Peter's first thought, but, well ... the funny thing was, he didn't hold it against them, any more than he suspected they would hold a grudge if he'd managed to nail one or both of them and put them in prison. They were just doing what they did, as he had been. They'd beaten him fair and square. (Well, actually, they'd beaten him through underhanded manipulation, but that was their stock in trade, and he was the one who hadn't been sharp enough to catch onto their tricks in time.)

Neal was still looking at him nervously. "So let me get this straight," Peter said. "You gave me a box of money as -- I don't know, some sort of bizarre form of apology?"

"It's not exactly that," Neal said quickly. "You seem to be having a little trouble, uh, getting your feet under you after losing your job. We wanted to help out. That's all."

Peter stared at him in disbelief. "Are you two spying on me?"

"Of course not." Neal grinned unrepentantly. "More like checking up."

"I really should arrest you."

"Window," Neal said pointedly.

"I am not going to accept stolen cash, Caffrey. That's not even a possibility. Forget about it."

"We realized that when you gave it away," Neal said. "That's why we paid the rent on the apartment directly."

"You think you've got me all boxed in, don't you?"

Neal rolled his eyes. "It's a gift, Peter. You understand how those work, right? I give you something, you say thank you ..."

"And now we're on a first-name basis." Peter took a long slug of his beer. He was going to need it to get through this conversation. "Wonderful."

Neal smiled and sipped his beer, then made a face and put it down. "You know, I was just going to drop by and make sure you hadn't done anything stupid on general principles, like moving out --"

"Now that you know where I live, I'm thinking about it."

"-- but I haven't eaten yet, and I wouldn't mind taking this somewhere a little less ..." He glanced around at the mess. "Uh, a little less here."

"You're inviting me to dinner?" Peter asked in outraged disbelief.

"Preferably someplace that has decent wine."

Which was how he ended up having dinner at a pleasant little Italian restaurant with a known, wanted criminal ... who had been responsible for framing him and getting him fired. "I can't believe I'm doing this," Peter muttered, shifting his napkin in his lap. "I should be marching you down to the nearest police station."

"Where you can explain why your rent is being paid by the criminal you just turned in?" Neal asked cheerfully.

"Shit," Peter said, heartfelt. An elderly couple at the nearest table turned to glare at him. Peter raised his hands in apology and leaned closer to Neal. "Is that what you're doing here? Getting a hold over me in case I come after you again?"

"I hadn't really thought about it that way," Neal admitted. "I guess it does look like that from a certain point of view. And I can't deny that it gives us a certain, uh, leverage where you're concerned. But we really did mean it as a gift. No strings attached."

"There are always strings with you two," Peter muttered, but then the waiter arrived and he had to back off from discussing stolen money or anything of that nature.

The sad thing was, he thoroughly enjoyed the evening, which was probably a depressing commentary on how long it had been since he'd crossed verbal swords with an intelligent opponent. Peter had always liked the smart ones. Neal had been fun to chase, and he was also fun to talk to, even if there was a strong subtext that as soon as the conversation turned in a direction Neal didn't like, or if Peter made a move for a phone, Neal would be out the nearest exit. Thereby sticking Peter with the bill, which he couldn't afford, so it was in his best interests to keep Neal talking rather than send him scooting for the back door.

It had nothing to do with genuinely enjoying his company.

Well. Maybe a little bit.

Neal walked back to Peter's apartment with him. Peter kept an eye out for handy police cars, just in case he changed his mind about turning Neal in. Naturally there was never a cop around when you needed one.

"So where is Elizabeth, anyway? Still together?"

"Of course we're still together, and I told you, she's around."

The low, gray Midwest clouds finally opened up on them, and they dashed the last fifty yards into the stairwell of Peter's apartment building. Shaking off his hat, Neal said, "Really, Peter -- Toledo?" He sounded accusing.

"Do I question your life choices?"

"Well ... yes," Neal said. "All the time. Especially when you're trying to arrest me for them."

"Only when you're breaking the law," Peter retorted. "I mean things such as the city in which you choose to live, or those ridiculously ostentatious suits you wear."

"There you go again. I bought you dinner, didn't I?"

Peter caught the sparkle in Neal's eye, took a deep breath and firmly tamped himself down from being baited any further. "If you really want to make it up to me, you could give me your current address."

"So you can call Interpol to come knocking on my door? No thanks."

"Interpol?" Peter's ears pricked up. "Overseas, then?"

"Ah, ah. I've given you all the hints I'm going to."

Peter unlocked his apartment door, and Neal leaned against the wall, showing no particular inclination to come inside. Half the lights in the stairwell were burned out, and in the dim light, Neal's voice issued facelessly from the shadow under the brim of his hat. "Seriously, Peter, you should find something to do with your life. Something that isn't this."

Hands on hips, Peter glared at him from the doorway. "I can't believe that you, of all people, are lecturing me because my life isn't up to your standards."

"It's not a matter of it not being up to my standards; the problem is that it isn't up to your standards," Neal said, and while Peter was still processing this, Neal tipped the brim of his hat and turned away into the shadows. "See you around."

"Hey!" Peter said, but Neal was gone, melted away into the darkness as if he'd never been. And for an instant, Peter felt oddly bereft.


***


Having his rent paid gave him a grace period, but every time he scanned the classifieds for another low-wage security job, he could hear Neal's voice in the back of his head, telling him he could do better than the life he had. It would be less annoying if it weren't so true.

He ended up landing a job as a part-time clerk at the all-night liquor store near where he lived, to make food and beer money while he thought about things. He collected catalogues from area universities and flipped through them, thinking about taking some refresher courses and then trying to use his accounting degree. The trouble was, accounting didn't feel like what he wanted to do, either. He had always been drawn to the problem-solving aspect of math, but it felt so dry and sterile compared to his work at the FBI.

Another somewhat serendipitous opportunity fell into his lap when he noticed a flyer taped to the light pole outside the liquor store: the youth center was looking for volunteer basketball coaches. He went in, applied, and a few days later he found himself mentoring kids, most of whose lives made Peter's look like a stroll down the yellow brick road.

He was still spinning his wheels, but it felt less like a downhill slide and more like -- well, he wasn't really sure. Waiting for something to happen, maybe. He just wasn't sure what.

But something did happen, about a month after Neal's visit. Peter came home late in the evening from the youth center, and found the lights on in his apartment and the door unlocked. Burglars, at least the regular kind, wouldn't have turned the lights on, so he sighed and pushed the door open. "Neal --"

But it wasn't Neal. Peter stopped in the doorway. The place had been cleaned, or at least half-cleaned -- newspapers and old takeout containers had been stuffed into a couple of trash bags, and his late-night visitor was in the process of picking up his scattered paperback books and sorting them neatly into cardboard boxes. She looked up at his entrance and gave him a little smile.

"Elizabeth," Peter said blankly.

Elizabeth straightened. She was wearing an immaculate lemon-colored pantsuit with a wide-brimmed hat and white lace gloves. She looked as out of place in his filthy, run-down apartment as a diamond ring in a sewer. "Do you have a vacuum cleaner?" she asked. "I looked but I couldn't find one."

"I, uh --" Peter felt like his brain was half a mile behind the conversation, frantically jogging to catch up. "I don't think so."

"That does explain a lot." She looked down at the half-filled box of books, and then looked back at him with a slightly sheepish smile. "I'm sorry, I know it's your place, and I'm intruding. I was waiting for you, and I needed something to do while I was waiting, so ..."

"It's all right. It's been so long since I've seen the carpet that I'd forgotten what color it was." She offered a hesitant smile, and Peter said quickly, "That's a joke, right? What color, because it's been covered up by -- Okay, explaining my jokes, that's probably not -- uh. You want to sit down?" He looked wildly for a chair, tipped its contents onto the floor, and shoved it in her direction.

"Thank you." She sat, and to her credit, didn't even brush off the seat of the chair before sitting down, though Peter saw her give it a look as if she was thinking about it.

"Can I get you a drink? All I have is beer -- I don't know if you're much of a beer person ..."

"I'd love one," she said.

He opened a beer for each of them. And then a silence fell. "So," Peter said. "You're ..."

Looking good, he was going to say, except she didn't, really. The large blue eyes had dark shadows under them, and while she was perfectly put together, she was wearing minimal makeup and she kept fidgeting with the clutch on her purse with one hand as she sipped at her beer.

Instead he said, "Are you all right? Did someone do something to hurt you?"

"I'm okay," she said quickly. "Thank you. That's sweet. You're sweet." She stood up and put the beer, mostly undrunk, on the countertop. "Agent Burke --"

"It's not Agent anymore," he said, more harshly than he intended, and the fact of his firing hung in the air between them, a sudden and palpable presence in the room.

"No," she said quietly. "I suppose you're not." She clasped one hand over the other one. "Mister Burke, I need --" She seemed to be having trouble getting the words out. "Your help."

"You. Need my. Help." He honestly wasn't sure what to do, or say.

"I know," Elizabeth said, her eyes impossibly blue and impossibly sad. "I know what I'm asking for, and I know you'd have every right to turn me away. But I don't have anyone else to turn to."

"What about Neal?" Peter asked, and he couldn't help the tiniest little niggling hope that maybe Elizabeth was going straight and had parted ways from Neal. Except, that made him feel bad on Neal's behalf, and seriously, he needed to stop having conversations with wanted criminals; it just didn't end well.

"Neal is the problem," Elizabeth said. "He's in trouble, Mr. Burke. And I need your help to save him."

He ought to throw her out. He ought to call the police and turn her in.

Instead, he brushed off a spot on the newly uncluttered couch for both of them. "Mr. Burke is my dad. Call me Peter."


***


Elizabeth's tale of woe was more or less what Peter expected. She and Neal had been working a con -- scamming an oil tycoon named Branson, who turned out to have international organized-crime connections. And Neal had disappeared.

"I don't think he's been killed," Elizabeth said. "At least not yet. But I have no idea where he's been taken. And this isn't my area of expertise, at all. I don't know how to track down a missing person."

"So you came to consult an expert." The thought crossed his mind that he ought to be offended. Hell, he ought to call the police. Instead, he was intrigued, especially when she opened her large purse and pulled out a stack of computer printouts -- Branson's recent credit card statements, copies of plane tickets and so forth.

"We do our homework," Elizabeth explained, spreading them on the couch. A dimple appeared. "Better and more comprehensive than the FBI."

"The FBI uses warrants," Peter said pointedly. "When did you last see Neal?"

They stayed up all night, working their way through Neal and Branson's movements of the last few days. The more Peter found out, the less he liked it. Branson, it turned out, was hip-deep with a crime family, the Cernaks, that operated in France, Belgium, and Eastern Europe. Neal and Elizabeth had had a few close calls with them in the past.

"They tried to recruit us," Elizabeth explained. "We turned them down. Ever since then, things have been a bit dicey. Do you know them?" she asked, at Peter's frown.

"I know of them. They're bad news."

In any case, Elizabeth was concerned that Neal had been made by one of the Cernaks. Neal had walzed into Branson's offices the previous morning, as per the latest step in their plan to replace a particular painting in Branson's private collection with a forgery. (Elizabeth wouldn't tell Peter which one.) He never showed up to meet Elizabeth at lunchtime. As soon as Elizabeth started asking questions and discovered that Branson's employees were claiming that they'd never met Neal in the first place, she had pulled out completely and gone to ground.

"You think they got him and now they're after you."

"I haven't noticed anyone following me," Elizabeth said. "I was doing all back-end work on this one; they might guess I'm in town because Neal is, and they know the two of us work together, but I think I'm pretty safe. Neal, on the other hand ..."

Her disaffected mask dropped for a moment, and raw panic showed through. Peter froze; he'd never been good with crying women. But Elizabeth clamped down on her emotions and gave him a slightly strained smile.

"You're the expert at finding missing persons, Agen --" She hesitated. "Peter. Where do we begin?"


***


As soon as offices started opening on the East Coast, Peter called some old contacts of his in Interpol. The first two hung up on him, but he had a pleasant chat with an old Quantico buddy who told him about recent scuttlebutt in the Paris organized-crime scene.

"It seems that Janko Cernak, one of the younger sons in the family, was in New York a couple of days ago," Peter said, as Elizabeth turned a hopeful face up to him. "Routine talks with the organized crime families in New York, the usual diplomatic stuff. He took a flight two days ago back to Paris, a few days ahead of schedule, with a companion. No one's quite sure who the companion was. He came alone."

"Neal," Elizabeth breathed. "They took him back to Europe."

She didn't ask how they'd gotten him to cooperate. Probably she'd run down the same list of options that Peter had: they'd threatened Elizabeth, they'd drugged Neal, they'd done some combination of the two.

Elizabeth pulled out her phone.

"Who are you calling?"

"I'm obtaining a flight to Paris today," she said calmly, as if such things were perfectly easy to arrange.

"You're not going up against the Cernaks by yourself," Peter said in disbelief.

Elizabeth regarded him coolly. "I don't have a choice."

"Look, let me talk to Interpol. This is a kidnapping. We can get the local authorities involved --"

"And then what?" Elizabeth demanded. "How excited do you think the Paris police will be to intervene in a conflict between two different sets of criminals? Neal is not a kidnapped suburban housewife, Mr. Burke. They would be falling all over themselves to rescue him if he were on your side of the law. As it is, the best we could hope for is that they might retrieve him in order to extradite him to the U.S. to face a long prison sentence here. More likely they will simply step back and let it sort itself out."

Peter was disgusted to realize that she was right. "So what are you going to do, take them on alone? Elizabeth, we're talking old-school, Eastern European organized crime here. These are the sort of happy guys who set people on fire for double-crossing them --" He broke off as Elizabeth flinched, and he remembered this was her husband's possible future they were talking about.

Considering that both Neal and Elizabeth were career criminals, there was something oddly innocent about them sometimes. They were like kids playing with forces they didn't seem to understand. Peter took a deep breath and hoped he didn't regret what he was about to say. "Look, at least don't go alone."

"Peter Burke," she said, and her voice broke on a half-laugh. "Are you offering to come with me to Paris?"

"Apparently," Peter said wearily. "Better get two tickets before I change my mind."


***


Somehow she got them a flight that afternoon. It was amazing what money could buy, even stolen money. Peter tried to sleep on the plane, knowing that he'd need it when they got to France, and exhausted from the previous sleepless night. But he was too wired to do more than catnap, and every time he woke up, Elizabeth was awake too, staring out at the arc of the Earth beneath them.

"Is this really worth it?" he asked her quietly. They were flying first class, something Peter had never done in his life. It was pretty nice, he had to admit, but if the price was always having to look over your shoulder for people you'd double-crossed and leaving a trail of wrecked lives in your wake, he'd take the rathole apartment in a heartbeat. "The nice clothes and nice hotels and fancy things -- does it really make up for all the rest of it? Always having to run, never being able to settle down?"

"We're happy," Elizabeth said. "We have the life we want."

"So what about the ethical side of it, then? You live a life that's based on taking things away from the people who bought and paid for them. And don't give me a line about how you only take from people who have enough they can afford to give it. Unless you ask your victims ahead of time if they don't mind giving things to you."

Elizabeth shrugged and looked out the window again. "It sounds like you've made up your mind, so does it matter what I say?"

"It matters because ..." He stalled out, frustrated. It matters because you're better than that, he wanted to say, but then he just circled around to feeling like he was repeating the exact same words that Neal had said to him, in the stairwell of his crappy apartment.

"It matters because you're living a lifestyle that, at its heart, can't be maintained without hurting people," Peter said at last, very quietly. "I know that firsthand, believe me."

"It was self-defense," Elizabeth said sharply.

"I know it was. And the weird thing is, I don't really blame you for it." He couldn't help smiling. "I would have caught you, eventually."

"I know!" Elizabeth said. "That's why we took you out of play."

"But I'm not a chess piece, I'm a human being," Peter pointed out. "Elizabeth, you and Neal took away my life. If you can sit here and tell me you're perfectly okay with that, I have an Amazon box in my closet that says otherwise."

There was something of Neal in Elizabeth's quick flutter of a smile. "You kept the box?"

"Stop changing the subject."

This time the sideward dart of her eyes was more guilt than anger. "I'm not going to say we've never had regrets for any of the things we've done. But, Peter -- we're human beings too. So was every person you ever put in prison. You say that we make a living off human misery, and perhaps there is some truth in that, I won't lie -- but do you really think you're that far above us?"

They'd hit an impasse. Peter decided to try to sleep again. When he cracked an eye open, Elizabeth was looking out the window once more, her gaze distant.


***


Peter had rarely been out of the U.S. in his life. There had been a few FBI assignments that had taken him over the border into Canada or Mexico, and one trip to England with his family when he was a boy. Paris, however, was sensory overload. He wished he had the leisure time to enjoy it, but Elizabeth wasn't the only one who felt urgency nipping at their heels. Neal had been missing for almost three days now, and in Paris with Janko Cernak for twenty-four hours. They might already be too late. For Neal's sake, and for Elizabeth's, Peter tried to convince himself that there was still time.

Their rental was another -- in Peter's opinion -- extravagant display of too much cash, a townhouse with a private terrace, hidden down a side street well outside the central, touristy part of the city. Peter luxuriated in the first shower he'd had in months that had all the hot water he wanted and a tap that didn't try to come off in his hand. Afterwards, Elizabeth took him to a cafe at the end of the street for lunch ... or dinner, or whatever it was now. Peter was so jet-lagged and turned around that he kept having to check his watch just to find out if it was morning or evening. Elizabeth, meanwhile, looked perfectly fresh in a brand-new, stylish sundress. She'd tucked up her hair under a blonde wig, as casually as if she went out in disguise all the time. Which, Peter thought, she probably did. She ordered for them in fluent French.

"I called a friend who might be able to help," Elizabeth said, biting into a croissant. "He'll be arriving in Paris soon."

"Help how?" Peter asked. "Are we talking the kind of 'help' that shows up with enough weapons to equip a private army?" He refilled his glass with the red wine she'd ordered. He wasn't really a wine guy, at least in the connoisseur sense, but this stuff was good. He had to remind himself that he was running on almost no sleep for the last forty-eight hours, and the last thing he needed was to get tanked in a foreign country in the company of a woman he still had a small crush on, who was wanted by the FBI and married to a criminal.

"No, more like the kind of help that shows up with a large box of unconvincing fake mustaches. Don't ask. But he knows people, and there is no one better at ferreting out information from unexpected sources. And he wasn't going to stay away, anyhow."

"When do I meet this friend?"

"You don't," Elizabeth said. "He's completely off the FBI's radar, and he plans to stay that way."

"I'm no longer FBI."

"Yes, you are," she said. It was gentle, the way she said it -- almost affectionate. "You're FBI down to your bones, Peter. It's all over you. Believe me, people like us can see it. You'll never be completely free of it."

"If what you're talking about is integrity, I don't want to be free of it."

Again their conversation crunched into a brick wall. They busied themselves with their food, and Peter topped off his wine again, even knowing it was probably a bad idea.

It was just that he could so easily imagine this entire scene from an entirely different angle, as the waiter no doubt saw it. The two of them at the cafe, in the afternoon Parisien sun ... two American tourists, man and woman. The woman wore a simple gold wedding band. Maybe they'd been married for a few years, and had finally saved up enough for a vacation ...

But the fantasy kept falling apart, because Elizabeth, gorgeous and classy, in her immaculately styled blonde wig, wasn't the sort of woman who would ever go for someone like him. And besides, he wasn't the kind of person who moved in on a friend's wife.

-- check that, on a near-total stranger's wife. On anyone's wife.

He'd definitely had too much wine. Peter pushed the glass away.


***


Back at the townhouse, Peter stumbled off to the nearest bedroom to crash for a few hours, attempting to sleep off the wine and jetlag. He was still muzzyheaded and weary when voices woke him.

He found Elizabeth on the terrace drinking wine with two people he didn't know, a leonine blond man and a little guy with a wide-brimmed hat and an enormous, bushy, obviously fake beard. "I wouldn't want to wait until morning, myself," the blond man was saying, and then he saw Peter and trailed off.

There was a brief awkward moment, then the blond man said something brief in French to Elizabeth; she answered in kind, and smiled brightly at Peter before reaching for a fourth wine glass. "Peter. I'm glad you could join us. This is a local friend of ours, Jean-Marc, and this is --"

"Bob," the little man put in.

"Bob," Elizabeth said without missing a beat.

Peter sat down, somewhat reluctantly. No one asked him who he was or what he was doing here, though "Bob" kept giving him a narrow-eyed, deeply suspicious look. Elizabeth briefly filled him in on what he'd missed -- or, Peter thought, at least the part of it she wanted to share. They'd located Neal, or at least pinpointed his most likely location, at a nearby villa owned by the Cernaks. Word on the street was that the Cernaks had taken one of their enemies there, an American.

"I will be straight with you," Jean-Marc said. He'd barely touched his wine. "I don't expect Neal will last long now that he is in their hands. You need to get him out and get him out fast."

"It's going to be difficult to get inside," Elizabeth said. "They know who I am, and they've seen me enough to recognize me."

"They haven't seen me," Bob said.

"Or me," Peter said, and all three of them looked at him. "What? Did you think I came all this way to sit on my hands? I'm here to help. I meant that."

Elizabeth studied Peter as if she'd never seen him before, her head tilted to one side. "How are you at acting?"

"I've gone undercover. I'm good at it."

"This isn't the same," Elizabeth said.

"With all due respect, this is a lot more like an FBI op than a con. It's a simple snatch-and-grab, with ..." He took in their table companions. "... minimal backup. Still, I've planned a lot of those. Do you know the layout of the villa?"

Despite the strain and obvious weariness on Elizabeth's face, her dimples had appeared again. She produced a notepad and pen from her purse, and passed it to Jean-Marc, who gave Peter a wary look and then began to sketch. It became very obvious as the villa walls took shape in quick strokes of the pen that he was an artist, which Peter supposed would imply how Neal and Elizabeth had come to know him. And I'd bet my bottom dollar that not everything he paints is sold under his own name.

Having little time to make preparations, they came up with a very simple plan. The villa, Jean-Marc said, had regular delivery vehicles that went in and out, including a laundry service that came late every night. Jean-Marc had a friend at the laundry and thought it would be possible to bribe some people there and let the regular crew take a couple hours off while Jean-Marc had the use of the truck. Or, rather, Peter would be driving. Elizabeth and Jean-Marc were both known to the Cernaks, so they would hide in the back.

"I don't have an international driver's license," Peter protested.

This garnered disgusted looks from both Jean-Marc and the little guy with the beard. Elizabeth said, "We're breaking into a mobster's hideout to steal a kidnapping victim. I think if we're caught, improper documentation will be the least of our problems."

Peter tried not to think about it. "What about him?" he asked, jerking his thumb at the little guy.

"They're used to seeing two men up front," Jean-Marc said. "Mozzie will be the other one."

"Hey!" the little guy snapped with a vicious glare at Jean-Marc. "Names! Thank you so much for selling me out to the feds."

"Ex-feds," Peter said.

"Whatever, J. Edgar," Mozzie said. "Anyway, that's not going to work. Suit here doesn't speak French, and I don't think my accent can pass for local."

"No, trust me, it can't," Jean-Marc said. "He's right. I will drive, then, with Mozzie beside me. It will be nearly dark, and with luck, the guards will not know me."

"Luck," Mozzie muttered.

"It's all we've got," Elizabeth said.


***


There was no more time to plan. They were cutting it close enough as it was; if they missed their delivery window, they'd have to either come up with a different plan or try again the following night. And from all they'd said, and what little Peter knew about the Cernaks, Neal might not have another twenty-four hours.

There were guns, two no-nonsense Glock 19s, produced from Peter had no idea where; Jean-Marc must have brought them, or whoever had prepared the villa for Elizabeth had left them there. Jean-Marc took one; Elizabeth took the other. She'd changed into jeans and a dark sweater: proper sneaking-around attire.

"I thought you and Neal didn't like guns."

"Neal doesn't like guns," Elizabeth said, tucking it into the waistband of her jeans under the sweater.

No one offered a gun to Peter, which bothered him until he got to thinking about the consequences of getting caught with an illegal firearm in a foreign country. He was teetering close enough to the brink of the law as it was. (Hell. Why lie to himself. He was way over, and if they'd given him a weapon, he would have taken it in a heartbeat. But in a way, it was nice that they didn't trust him enough to offer; at least he didn't have to make that decision.)

Elizabeth and Jean-Marc went to get the truck. Peter and the little guy -- Mozzie -- were going to meet them at a particular location, which Peter apparently wasn't allowed to know; they all three kept slipping into French when he was around.

"I can't believe we're working with feds," Mozzie muttered as they waited in darkness beside the road. "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, I suppose." He gave Peter a sharp look. "Why are you here, anyway?"

"Why do you need to know?"

"Well, for one thing, if this is all a ruse to sell us out to your suit friends, I'd like to get an escape plan ready."

"As if you don't have an escape plan," Peter said. "I know how you people operate."

"Touché," Mozzie said. There was silence, then he said in a very different voice, "If you intend to betray Neal and Elizabeth, I can assure you that there's nowhere on Earth you can hide that I can't find you."

Peter looked down at him. He'd only known Mozzie for about three hours, and the little guy looked less than intimidating -- especially in that ludicrous beard -- but Peter believed him.

After a little while, Peter said, "If you want to know the truth, I have absolutely no idea why I'm doing this. There's a part of me that knows I should've called the police the instant Elizabeth turned up in my living room. But I didn't do it then, and I'm not going to do it now."

"For some reason, I believe you," Mozzie said. "For the record, however, I still don't trust you, Suit."

"I don't expect you to," Peter said. "I don't trust you either."

"Excellent." Mozzie clapped his hands together. "Now that we've got that straight, our ride's here."

The truck pulled up in a shriek of badly maintained brakes. Jean-Marc was driving. Elizabeth hopped down; Peter offered her a hand, but she was already on the ground. "Ready?" she asked them, although it was mostly directed to Peter.

"No," Peter said, but when she climbed into the back of the truck, he followed her.

It was relatively comfortable -- just them and a bunch of sacks of clean linens. It was also completely dark once Mozzie closed and latched the back door. Peter hadn't thought about the fact that they'd be dependent on other people to let them out; he felt a sudden surge of unaccustomed claustrophobia. Small rustles from Elizabeth's direction let him know where she was, until they were covered by the sound and vibration of the truck.

It seemed that there should be something to say, just the two of them, in the dark. But there wasn't. All the things had been said long ago, Peter thought -- and there, in the back of the truck, he let go of all the stupid fantasies he'd once entertained that she would see the error of her ways and give up her life of crime for him. Contrary to all expectation and common sense, she seemed to be happy with Neal. Catching them and putting them away was one thing -- it had been his job, his right and his responsibility. But trying to snare her and clip her wings for any other reason would be reprehensible.

He didn't want to break her ... or Neal. He never had. You do the crime, you do the time -- and he believed that, he did, but most of all, he wanted the two of them to stop doing these stupid, reckless things that were going to get them both killed one of these days. He wanted them to stop using those sharp, beautiful brains to find new and ever more creative ways to screw over their fellow man, and do some good in the world instead.

The truck jolted to a halt, jarring him out of his thoughts. There were voices up front, too low to easily make out even if they hadn't been speaking a language he didn't understand. Peter tried not to breathe, and next to him, Elizabeth was equally silent.

After what seemed an eternity, the truck jolted forward again. It made a wide turn -- Peter could tell by the shifting inertia -- and came to a halt. The engine died, and a moment later, the back door was thrown open.

Elizabeth had been crouched and waiting, and she was out as soon as there was a gap wide enough for her body. Peter followed and found himself on a flagstone parking area beside a wide expanse of lawn. The stone wall of the villa loomed above them. Most of its windows were dark.

"We're going to have less time than I'd hoped," Jean-Marc whispered. "I think one of the guards may have recognized me. I'm going to stroll over there and have a chat with him. Mozzie will begin unloading the truck."

As he started to turn away, Peter caught his shoulder. "And by 'have a chat', you mean --"

Jean-Marc shrugged out of his grasp. "I mean exactly what I said. We will have a chat, and I will try to defuse his suspicions. If I'm unable to do that -- then yes, I will do what needs to be done. We are here to rescue our mutual friend, correct?"

"Guys," Mozzie whispered. "The clock, as they say, is ticking."

And Elizabeth had vanished. Peter caught sight of her farther down the wall. Leaving Mozzie hauling sacks of laundry, and grumbling about it, he caught up just as she nudged open a side door, peeked in, and darted through.

They were in a narrow passageway with a stone floor. Jean-Marc hadn't been able to tell them much about the layout of the inside of the villa. Elizabeth, however, seemed to know where she was going. "Have you been here before?" Peter whispered.

"No," she whispered back. "But all these old places have huge wine cellars. That's what I'm looking for. It's underground and nearly soundproof, the most likely place for --" She broke off on a small catch in her throat.

Jaw tight and heart pounding, Peter followed her.

They found a back stair, little more than stone steps going down into the black earth. Peter realized that there was one key element they'd forgotten to bring as they felt their way down in the darkness: a flashlight would have been smart. He wished he'd thought of it. He was starting to realize, though, that a hastily thrown together commando raid was not nearly as much like a SWAT-style operation as he'd thought. He felt the lack of his gun like a missing limb, and kept automatically reaching to touch the place where his shoulder holster should be.

Elizabeth paused; Peter bumped into her. It was absolutely, stiflingly black. He heard the small click of a door opening. There was no light beyond, but he heard a tiny scuffling sound from somewhere deeper in the darkness, which made him realize that they were in a larger space than he'd thought at first.

He could hear Elizabeth fumbling along the wall for a light switch. She must have found it, because sudden light flooded the area from a string of low-wattage bulbs stretching ahead of them. The wine cellar was not just large, but huge: a vast cavernous space, reinforced with heavy cross-beams and support pillars blackened by years of soot. It was also in active use as a wine cellar even today; racks of dusty bottles stood to either side.

Elizabeth had the gun out, and brought up the other hand to support it. She carried it with the confidence of someone who knew how to use firearms and was comfortable around them. With her hair tied back and the gun in her hands, she might have been an undercover policewoman. She looked nothing at all like the sweet, wholesome Midwest girl in all of her file photos.

Peter wished again that they'd given him a weapon. He picked up a cobwebby piece of a broken wine rack, holding it in a baseball batter's grip.

The two of them ventured deeper into the wine cellar. Then Elizabeth stopped in her tracks, and Peter stopped too. Ahead of them, two sets of handcuffs dangled from a metal bar in the ceiling, each with one cuff clamped to the bar and the other dangling open. The dirt floor beneath was puddled with dark stains like motor oil, some old, some fresher.

Elizabeth called quietly, her voice much steadier than Peter thought it had any right to be, "Neal?"

From somewhere in the shadows along the walls, behind a stack of barrels, a quiet voice called back, "El?"

She was off like a shot, scrambling over obstacles. By the time Peter caught up, she was kneeling on the floor with her arms around him and Neal's tousled dark head buried in her shoulder. Neal was murmuring her name over and over. Peter halted, feeling suddenly like an intruder on their private reunion.

"I see there's no point in us rescuing you," Elizabeth said shakily. "Seeing as you got yourself free, and all."

"True." Neal's voice was a cracked whisper. "I still left a few things for you to do, though, like getting past all those guys outside."

He raised his head and froze like a wild animal caught in headlights at the sight of Peter. "Surprise," Peter said dryly, kneeling on his other side. "Can you walk?"

"Sure I can walk," Neal said, and then collapsed when Elizabeth tried to lift him to his feet. "Or maybe not."

They managed to get him standing with Elizabeth on one side and Peter on the other. Neal was barefoot and stripped to the waist, which made it uncomfortably obvious that his body was one giant bruise. Peter was fairly sure that Neal's shoulder had been dislocated and reduced; bruising around the joint made it hot and swollen, and he hissed in pain when Peter slid his own arm under Neal's to support him. Neal's eyes were blackened, his lip split, and one side of his face was covered with dried blood. On the other hand, as far as Peter could tell, they hadn't done anything permanent to him yet. He still had the usual number of fingers, toes and ears. They'd worked him over pretty good, but they hadn't gotten to the real fun yet.

"Couldn't turn down a French vacation, huh Peter?" Neal rasped. He stank of sweat and blood. His skin was clammy and cold to the touch.

"Apparently not," Peter said. "Or maybe chasing you is a habit that's so hard to break I'm doing it freelance now."

"Can I expect a whole contingent of police --" He started coughing, and caught his breath in pain. "Ow."

"No police," Elizabeth said. "But we do have a laundry truck."

"Someday you'll have to tell me how she talked you into this, Peter," Neal mumbled. His head lolled onto Peter's shoulder.

"Someday I'd like to know how she talked me into it," Peter muttered.

As they started up the stairs, the lights in the stairwell suddenly came on. The two men at the top of the stairs were laughing and talking in French, and clearly half-drunk. Elizabeth deposited Neal entirely onto Peter and had the gun out before either of the men so much as noticed them. Then they scrambled for their own guns. She took them out with two calm, well-placed shots.

Peter recoiled, and managed to stomp hard on his conscience. You're in their world now. It's kill or be killed. There was no backup coming. These guys had probably done a lot of bad things. But he'd never killed anyone in the line of duty, rarely even used his service weapon at all, and he made himself look at the bodies as he and Elizabeth helped Neal over them. Made himself remember that, as much as he liked Neal and Elizabeth when he let his guard down, this was their world; this was who they were, what they did.

As the three of them stumbled out into the night, lights were coming on all over the villa. The laundry truck skidded to a halt in front of them, with Jean-Marc behind the wheel. Mozzie jumped out of the back and helped Peter and Elizabeth manhandle Neal inside. "They did a number on you, didn't they, mon frère?" Mozzie murmured, helping Neal lie down on the laundry sacks.

It was impossible to close the doors properly from the inside, and leaving them open would be leaving them all exposed to gunfire, so Peter jumped out and slammed the doors just as a half-dozen men with guns burst out the front door. Jean-Marc peeled away; Peter was dragged for a few steps before he managed to get his feet up onto the bumper, where he clung, shocked and terrified. A bullet caromed off the paint inches from his nose. "Jean-Marc!" he yelled, but Jean-Marc either assumed everyone was on the truck or just didn't care. Bullets tore past him, missing him only through sheer luck and the truck's erratic swerving.

The truck tore through the gates, which stood ajar. It hit a sudden sharp turn at the bottom of the drive, and that was when Peter's tenuous grip gave way. He lost his purchase on the truck and tumbled down the embankment, coming to rest in the ditch. He was shaken and bruised, but more scared than hurt. The men at the villa had seen him on the back of the truck for certain, and they might have seen him fall off. He got shakily to his feet, scrambled over a low stone wall, and then dropped to a crouch as two cars roared out of the drive, their headlights probing over his head before they tore off into the night.

Trembling, he leaned against the wall. Well, now what. The laundry truck would be halfway back to the city already. He had no idea where he was; the only thing he knew was that it was too dangerous to stay here.

He didn't blame Jean-Marc for taking off -- well, rationally didn't blame him, anyway. It was possible Jean-Marc thought they were all on the truck; he couldn't see what was happening at the back. And they were about to be hip-deep in angry mobsters. He'd probably have been pedal-to-the-metal himself. Except ... you didn't leave people behind, you just didn't -- but here he was thinking like a cop again. It was every man for himself in Neal and Elizabeth's world.

Except it wasn't, not really. Elizabeth had risked one hell of a lot to find Neal and bring him home. Mozzie and Jean-Marc had put themselves in danger too. The one who didn't fit in this picture was Peter; he wasn't part of their little criminal crew. He knew they hadn't left him on purpose, but he also knew, equally well, that there was no reason they'd come back to get him.

So stop dithering and get moving. He could hear a babble of voices at the top of the drive. They'd be searching outside the villa soon.

He began to work his way along the wall. It ended at a road, though Peter wasn't sure if it was the same road or a different one. He looked back along the wall and tried to put together a mental map. It was hard, though, since he hadn't been able to see anything during their drive to the villa. Not too far behind him, a flashlight stabbed through the woods.

When his cell phone vibrated, he almost jumped out of his skin. He hadn't even been entirely sure that it worked in France. The caller ID said Liz Marks, someone he'd never heard of, but when he whispered a cautious "Hello?", it was Elizabeth's voice that said, "Peter! Where are you? What happened?"

"I fell off the truck," he whispered. "Hang on, I have pursuit. I need to find a more secure location. Can't talk yet."

He darted across the road. There was a patch of woods on the other side. A little deeper in the trees, he whispered, "Better, but not safe. Did you get away?"

"They did," Elizabeth said. "I had them let me out about a mile up the road. Now tell me where you are and they'll pick us up. Or, no, wait -- if you have GPS on your phone, give me the coordinates and I'll see you in a few minutes."

He gave her the coordinates, but was hesitant to hang up, not wanting to lose his last connection to the only people in this entire country that he knew. "I thought you'd left me," he confessed in a whisper.

"We probably should have," Elizabeth returned bluntly. She was breathing hard, speaking while jogging. "But, I don't know what to say -- you helped me get Neal back, and for that, I guess I owe you a little more than dumping you to die in the French countryside. And Neal was freaking out about going back for you, too, so I would've had a fight on my hands in any case -- Is that you over there?"

A moment later she dropped to a crouch beside him, panting. "They're everywhere. I dodged at least three foot patrols on my way here." To Peter's disbelief, she was grinning, a flash of white teeth in the dark. "Isn't this fun?"

"No!" Peter whispered back. "You saw what they did to Neal -- you think they'll be gentler with us if they catch us? Where did you say our ride is?"

"Come on." She tugged on his arm, and they crossed the narrow band of woods and found themselves in a field with rows of staked plants that Peter realized were grapevines when a heavy bunch of grapes dragged across his face. They paused briefly so that Elizabeth could make a telephone call. The conversation was in French, and very quick. "Jean-Marc knows where we are," Elizabeth said. "He'll pick us up on the far side of the vineyard."

They emerged from the rows of staked grapes onto the roadside just as the laundry truck screeched to a halt. Peter and Elizabeth both scrambled into the cab; Jean-Marc took off again before Peter had a chance to close the door. It was cramped, with Elizabeth squashed between the two men.

As they tore around narrow dark roads, Jean-Marc and Elizabeth had an exchange that Peter couldn't understand -- it was even more frustrating than not having a gun, not being able to comprehend the discussion around him. Glancing at him, Elizabeth said, "He thinks he's shaken them off for the moment. He's going to drop us off and then return the laundry truck."

"You people," Jean-Marc said. "I have to live here, you know. Now I'll be looking over my shoulder for Cernaks everywhere I go."

"Italy is nice this time of year," Elizabeth said. Peter couldn't tell if she was joking. She gave Jean-Marc's arm a squeeze. "Neal owes you his life, and I owe you a great debt."

"Which you'll probably be in prison before you can repay," Jean-Marc grumbled.

They took a circuitous route back into the city, and Peter didn't realize they were approaching the townhouse until the truck stopped and Elizabeth gave Peter an impatient shove. He jumped down from the truck and opened the back doors, then helped Mozzie get Neal out.

"I guess they found you," Neal said, leaning against the back of the truck. Elizabeth seemed to be having some kind of long, complicated goodbye with Jean-Marc in the cab, including a lot of gesturing and then a heartfelt hug. "Pro tip: try not to fall off the getaway vehicle next time."

"There's not going to be a next time, so shut up."

Elizabeth joined them and the laundry truck pulled away. "Jean-Marc is going to lie low for a while," she said. "I suggest we do the same."


***


It was hard for Peter to believe that they'd only been gone for a few hours. They deposited Neal onto the bed in one of the unoccupied bedrooms. Mozzie vanished to make unspecified "security arrangements", while Elizabeth got a large plastic case out of a freestanding wardrobe.

"Don't you think he should go to the hospital?" Peter asked. "There could be internal injuries."

"We don't do hospitals," Elizabeth said absently, opening the case.

"Of course you don't."

The case contained not merely first-aid supplies, but something close to a portable field hospital, much of it probably illicit in civilian, non-medical hands. Elizabeth snapped an ampoule of morphine into a syringe. "Peter, could you fetch a bottle of sports drink from the kitchen, please?"

"I hate that stuff," Neal mumbled without opening his eyes.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Elizabeth said unsympathetically. "It has fluid, electrolytes and sugar, all of which you desperately need."

When Peter came back with the bottle of sports drink and a glass, Neal was relaxed into a boneless puddle on the bed, and Elizabeth had donned a pair of gloves and was disinfecting his cuts. Once again, Peter had the feeling that he'd walked in on something overly intimate; the fact that Neal was, at the moment, wearing nothing but a pair of boxers probably had something to do with that. "I can, uh, leave," he offered, setting the glass on the nightstand.

"Actually, could you get me a pan of warm water and a cloth?" Elizabeth asked absently. "And then see if you can make him drink some of that. I'm not sure if he's going to be able to pick it up without help."

"'m right here," Neal mumbled, not moving.

"I know, dear."

Peter did as requested -- he passed Mozzie in the hall, carrying a large spool of wire and some kind of gadget with an antenna on it; Peter decided not to ask. After giving Elizabeth the bowl of water, he sat next to Neal's head on the edge of the bed, propped him up with pillows and gave him small sips.

"I think I'm stoned," Neal reported. His voice sounded a little less ragged and hoarse than it had earlier, though now it was a bit slurred.

"I know you are, dear." Elizabeth's voice was distant; she was cleaning a set of small round marks on his chest that Peter thought looked like burns. That helped a lot with his pangs of conscience about the men Elizabeth had shot.

"So Peter's on our side now?" Neal asked after Peter gave him another drink.

"No," Peter said hastily, before Elizabeth could answer.

Neal clumsily patted Peter's leg. "Awwww, too bad. I always thought you'd make a great con, Peter."

"That's not as much of a compliment as you seem to think."

Elizabeth looked up from her work. "Neal, I know this isn't easy to talk about, but I need to know. Did they ask you any questions -- about our safehouses, our codes, anything like that?"

Neal shook his head; his tangled hair, matted with dried blood and sweat, brushed against Peter's thigh. "No. They didn't want to know anything, except where you were, and I didn't tell them. Mostly they just wanted ..." He shivered all over; Peter could feel the vibration through the bed. "To hurt me," he murmured.

Elizabeth left off cleaning his stomach and leaned over to kiss him on his split, swollen lips. "No one is going to hurt you anymore," she said fiercely. "You're safe here."

"She's right," Peter said. "No one's going to get near you. We won't let them." His own surge of protectiveness surprised him -- but then, he'd always had a little bit of a protective streak for these kids, wild and stupid and prone to dangerous, damaging stunts as they were. There was something about Neal right now, crumpled and hurt, that brought it out powerfully. If anyone came for these two, they were going to have to go through Peter Burke to get there.

Elizabeth kissed Neal again and laid her head beside his, which made Peter uncomfortably conscious of his third-wheel status. He rose from the bed. "I don't think there's much else for me to do here, so I'm going to see if Mozzie needs help with, uh, whatever he's doing out there."

Elizabeth nodded; I appreciate your help, but I want some alone time with my husband was clearly implied.

"Peter, Peter, wait." Neal snagged his shirt with one hand. Peter allowed himself to be drawn back to the bed, and was unexpectedly given a sloppy, one-armed hug. "Thanks for comin'," Neal murmured.

Peter patted Neal's head awkwardly and tried to untangle himself. "Of course I did," he said, which for some reason didn't make Neal any less inclined to snuggle on him.

"Sorry," Elizabeth said, detaching her husband. "He's affectionate when he's drugged."

Peter left the two of them tangled up in each other and escaped into the living room, or whatever the French called it, where he found Mozzie singlehandedly working through a bottle of wine. Neal and Elizabeth's little friend had finally ditched the fake beard, revealing a face that was somewhat younger than Peter had expected, and very, very tired.

"Do not," Mozzie said, "under pain of death, reveal this face to the federales. If I so much as suspect you have a secret camera hidden under that shirt --"

"No secret cameras." Peter flopped into a chair. The sun was coming up, casting long shadows of the surrounding buildings over the terrace. Had it only been yesterday they'd arrived? The days were all running together into an impenetrable tangle. He wondered if life was like this for Neal and Elizabeth all the time -- day blurring into night, divorced from time and place. All he knew was that he couldn't remember the last time he'd been this tired.

There was a gentle glug of wine being poured. "Thanks," Peter murmured, reaching for the glass Mozzie handed him. He discovered in the process that he'd somehow gotten Neal's blood on his hand. And on his shirt. And basically all over him.

He was too tired to care.

"It went well," Mozzie said, and Peter looked over at him, jolted out of his own thoughts.

"This is going well?"

Mozzie shrugged. "None of us were hurt, there's nothing wrong with Neal that a little rest and recuperation won't cure, and the Cernaks have no idea where we are. That's a definite win in my book."

"What's your next move?" Peter asked. "There are a bunch of angry mobsters looking for you."

Another shrug. "Wouldn't be the first time. Go somewhere until the heat dies down, I guess."

"That's it?" Peter said in disbelief.

"What else? We're not prepared for a war with the Cernaks. Their reach is pretty limited, all things considered. We'll just avoid doing anything too openly in their main strongholds for a few years."

Peter boggled at him. Just walking off and leaving things unfinished -- the bad guys unpunished and at large -- went against every fiber of his being.

"What do you suggest, then, Suit? Turn them in to the police?"

"Well, that would be a start," Peter said. "I mean, we're talking kidnapping, assault and attempted murder at the very least. They have an ugly little torture chamber down in that wine cellar; Neal is obviously not the first person they've had there. You can direct the police to look down there --"

"And then?" Mozzie said. "We don't have a single witness who can come forward without being immediately arrested -- with the possible exception of you, except that I'd like to know what story you're going to come up with for the last forty-eight hours that doesn't incriminate all of us. Plus, the Cernaks are canny, they're rich, and they've been doing this for a long time. They've probably got a few judges and highly placed police officers in their pocket. So I'll tell you how it'll go down." He leaned forward in his chair. "The police will arrive at the villa. The Cernaks will invite them in, everyone will have coffee and some nice little pastries, and the police will get a guided tour of the premises. After some hail-fellow-well-met handshakes, with certain fists perhaps containing a euro or fifty, the police will leave. That's always how it goes, Suit."

"That's not how it has to be," Peter said stubbornly.

"Has to be, supposed to be, woulda, shoulda, coulda. That's how it is. Here, and on your side of the pond, too."

The protest that he'd spent his life fighting that sort of thing crumbled under the crushing weight of the fact that he'd been fired, most of his former friends and co-workers thought that he was one of those dirty cops, and the pressure that he could have brought to bear on the Cernaks just wasn't there any more. And he was much too tired to deal with the fact that he was having this conversation with one of the people who, more than likely, had helped set him up. "I think," Peter said, rising and swiping the bottle, "I'm going to get drunk in my room."

"Hey!" Mozzie protested.

"Don't give me that look; I'm sure there's more where this came from."

He was too tired to get properly drunk, though, or even drunk at all; he fell asleep before he'd finished his glass.


***


They all slept through most of the day. Peter lurched out of his bedroom sometime in the afternoon to find that someone had obtained food; there was a buffet of cheese, bread, fruit and wine spread on the table.

By the next day, everyone was starting to get bored. Peter hung out in Neal's room and watched Neal and Mozzie play a very slow game of chess; Neal kept falling asleep in the middle of his move. Peter wasn't sure where Elizabeth had gotten off to, but Neal seemed to be recuperating adequately despite the lack of proper medical care. He'd been sleeping a lot, and was able to move around under his own power, though very slowly and with a lot of wincing.

Elizabeth showed up in the afternoon, dressed to the nines as usual. She slipped off her strappy, heeled sandals as she came into Neal's room, sat on the edge of the bed with the shoes dangling from her hand, and gave him a kiss. "It looks like we're safe," she said, and two of the three men in the room slumped visibly with relief; Peter hadn't even realized they were in danger. "The word is that no one knows about this place at all. Jean-Marc's out of the country for a while. Really, all there is to do at this point is rest and recover until Neal's well enough to go somewhere else." She looked over at Peter, and smiled. "If you'd like to go, I can have you on a plane tomorrow. On the other hand, I was wondering if you wanted to see a little of Paris? I imagine you haven't been out and about much."

"I'm not a complete rube," Peter said, a little stung. "Is that safe, though? Aren't there mobsters looking for us?"

"Us," Elizabeth said. "They never got a good look at you. They have no idea who you are. And I expect that if I put on a hat and keep my eyes open, I'll have nothing to worry about. Everyone will see what they expect to see: a pair of tourists enjoying the sights." She winked at him. "What do you say, Mr. Burke? Do you want to explore Paris a bit?"

"Now?" Peter asked weakly. She caught his hand and tugged him to his feet.

"Why not now? You've been cooped up inside all day. I'm sure Mozzie doesn't mind watching Neal for a while. They can finish their game."

Peter gave Neal a last appealing look, hoping to be saved by jealousy, but Neal only smiled and gave them a wistful little wave. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"I don't think I want to do anything you would do," Peter protested.


***


And so he spent the next few days touring Paris in Elizabeth's company.

Elizabeth was a fun and interesting tour guide. She took him to some of the major tourist attractions -- "You can't go to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower, it just isn't done" -- but she also knew a lot of fascinating little places off the beaten track: interesting bookshops, quirky little museums, serene parks with Art Deco sculptures.

And she was, of course, fluent in French. She taught Peter some words and phrases, enough to say hello and goodbye, and order in restaurants without feeling too abysmally stupid.

"You should learn a foreign language," Elizabeth said as they ate lunch at a sidewalk table. She looked at him over her menu, serious rather than playful. "You're cutting yourself off from so much human experience that way."

"I took Spanish in high school. I got to use it a few times on the job."

"Yes, but do you really speak it?"

It was a fair point. He added "take Spanish refresher courses" to his mental to-do list.

They spent the evenings back at the townhouse. Mozzie wandered in and out; he seemed to have frequent nighttime activities, which Peter decided he was better off not knowing about. Neal was recuperating steadily, enough to get bored and restless; he demanded a full accounting of their day. He tried to teach Peter to play chess, which Peter wasn't that interested in learning, but the idea of beating Neal at his own game (literally) was too compelling to pass up, especially since Neal was still slightly befuddled from painkillers, so Peter thought he might have a fighting chance despite his beginner status.

Pleasant days and pleasant nights. It was like a fantasy world, Peter thought, a small bubble of time set aside from the real world. Except for the constant reminders of the serious reason for their being here in the first place, of course: the healing bruises on Neal's face, the flinch when he'd move too fast and put pressure on his ribs.

The real world was still out there.

But Peter could see why these kids liked to pretend it wasn't. He could see, now, a small glimpse of how they lived, skipping from one little bubble of fantasy-time to another, letting each one collapse as the police moved in, as their enemies moved in, and jumping ship to somewhere else.

It would be fun for a while, but Peter wondered how they could stand it in the long run. Sooner or later, the running had to get exhausting, but once you'd started, you couldn't ever stop. You just had to keep running and running, on and on forever, long after it had stopped being fun anymore.

Sooner or later, the bubble would burst.


***


And of course, it came to an end, as it had to. They left in typical (for them) fashion: Peter woke up one morning, and the townhouse was empty except for him. On the table, there was a ticket to Ohio for a week later. There was also a receipt showing the townhouse had been paid up through that date, a credit card in a name that definitely wasn't his, and an envelope with cash in it. The note was in Elizabeth's handwriting: The cash is a backup in case your "conscience" prevents using the credit card.

"Damn straight it does," Peter muttered -- regardless of whether the card was stolen or completely forged, he'd be screwing over every merchant he paid with it. The cash was only slightly less dodgy, but the alternative they'd left him with was being stranded in Paris for a week without enough money to buy a loaf of bread. Still, he resolved to spend as little as possible, though considering they were already paying for his apartment with someone else's money, he didn't really have the moral high ground in any case.

Even living on a tight budget, he enjoyed himself tremendously. He explored the city and even took a train into the countryside. At first he was highly self-conscious, knowing little of the language and having lost his interpreter, but he began to enjoy it when he started looking at it as an interesting challenge. He hadn't been really, truly challenged in years.

It was something of a letdown to fly from Paris back to the Midwest, especially when he was trading a luxurious townhouse for a run-down apartment infested with cockroaches. On the bus ride from the airport -- he was trying to live within his means again; he'd left all the extra cash as a tip for the maid -- he pondered his next move. This thing he was doing, spinning his wheels, with no idea what he wanted to do next -- it had to stop. It had taken getting out of his everyday rut, doing something fun and interesting for the first time in months, to make him realize that the cloud of apathy weighing him down had been more than lack of options. He'd been really damn depressed. He had completely forgotten his liquor-store job while he'd been gone; he had surely been fired by now. The gray industrial wasteland of the city closed around him, and he could feel the cloud of blackness settling on him like the city smog.

"No," he said aloud, startling the handful of bus patrons nearby. Law enforcement might be out, but there were options and he was going to find them. He didn't relish the humbling notion of finding an entry-level accounting position, but it was one hell of a lot better than drinking himself to death in a hole-in-the-wall apartment. Maybe the youth center had some employment openings ...

He was thinking about this as he climbed the stairs to his apartment, and then he stopped at the sight of something taped to the door. His first thought was an overdue rent notice -- he'd gotten used to the familiar sight of the yellow sheet of paper taped to the door. But this was an envelope. When Peter opened it, a key and a small, folded piece of paper fell out into his palm. The paper held nothing but an address.

The address turned out to be in a smallish condo building in a much nicer part of town, overlooking a wide, tree-lined street with a small park where some children were playing on the swing equipment. The key fit the door of a three-bedroom apartment -- not dreadfully ostentatious (Peter thought he'd probably have walked right back out if there had been 20-foot cathedral ceilings and a private swimming pool), but snug and cozy and very ... him. There was a big-screen TV, a comfortable-looking couch, a nice little kitchen, and a balcony.

In the kitchen, a bag of expensive coffee -- Italian roast -- was pinning down a note in Neal's tidy handwriting.

We're tired of paying rent on that fleabag apartment. The condo's paid off and it's in your name. Hope you like it. The building association fees are your problem, though; we aren't running a charity for ex-feds here.

Thank you for the help.

Peter, still in shock, was tempted to crumple the note and fling it out the window. Who did they think they were, trying to arrange his life like this? Still boggling, he opened the fridge and found two six-packs of microbrew with red bows on them, and another note, this time in Elizabeth's loopy handwriting, that said, Welcome home. N+E

And that was what tipped him over the edge into helpless, hopeless grinning.

Those damn kids were going to be the death of him one of these days.


***


Somehow it didn't surprise him when Neal and Elizabeth turned up on his doorstep two weeks later.

"We decided not to break in this time," Neal said, and cheerfully flourished a bottle of wine. "And this time we brought our own refreshments, because, Peter, don't take this the wrong way, but you're not exactly the world's best host."

"I'm not in the habit of offering hospitality to home intruders," Peter shot back. He stepped back to let them in, eyeing Neal closely. Faint, yellowish traces of bruises were still visible on Neal's face, and he moved carefully, despite obvious efforts to hide it.

"Quit staring at me, I'm fine," Neal said, depositing himself on the couch. "We have a proposition for you."

"I should have locked the door," Peter muttered, and went to see if there was anything in the kitchen that resembled wineglasses.

"We'd just have picked it," Elizabeth said.

They drank the wine out of mugs, which Neal complained about; Peter ignored him, but made a mental note to buy some crystal the next time he could afford it, since it seemed that this was just going to keep happening. And then he was distracted by the exact nature of Neal and Elizabeth's "proposition".

"You want me to help you with a con?"

"Hear us out," Neal said, and offered him a smug grin. "We think you'll like this one."

There was, it seemed, a crooked real-estate operator in the area, Alan Krebbs, who'd made a fortune through shady land deals, foreclosures, substituting inferior materials and skimming the proceeds, jacking up rental prices, and generally being the epitome of a slumlord.

"And you're conning this guy ... why, exactly?" Peter said, looking between the two of them.

"Because he's wealthy, of course," Elizabeth said when Neal didn't answer immediately. "Why else?"

"And where do I come into this?"

"Our plan needs a third operator," Elizabeth said. "Someone who would make an honest-looking outside man. So we thought of you."

"I really, truly don't believe this." Peter turned away from them in despair, and a bit of disgust. "Look, Elizabeth, I know that I worked with you to get Neal back, but that was an exception, all right? I'm not going to help you two steal things just for kicks. That's not me. That'll never be me."

"Peter, this guy is nasty," Neal said. "A nasty, sorry excuse for a human being. He throws old ladies and families with little kids out on the street in the middle of winter. He's been sued because of illness and injury due to poor maintenance of his buildings, but he's got an army of crooked lawyers to settle out of court for a pittance. The FBI has wanted to get him for years, but he's never made a big enough mistake that they can really nail him."

Peter turned to look more closely at both of them. "And you know all of this because ..."

"Background research for the con," Neal said immediately.

"Which you just happen, by total coincidence, to be pulling here, in Toledo, Ohio."

Elizabeth leaned against Neal's shoulder. "We figured we'd stay in the area for a while. We've never worked this part of the Midwest at all. It's wide open."

"And so," Peter said, because he was no fool, "you've been hanging around Toledo, looking high and low for some sort of crime that could be foiled using con-artist methods." He stared at the two of them, sitting close together on the couch and regarding him with bright-eyed innocence. "You brought me a crime."

"Don't be silly," Elizabeth said. "Why would we do that?"

Why, indeed. It reminded him of nothing so much as a cat catching mice and depositing them at its owner's feet. Except, of course, these two were nothing like pets. They were as wild as it came, and Peter wondered just what the hell he'd gotten himself into. Especially since he knew he was going to say yes before the words left his mouth.


***


Elizabeth and Neal informed Peter that they'd already established ourselves with Krebbs as a couple of high-flying developers from Chicago who were looking to unload some real estate in the area.

"Which you don't actually own," Peter said. "Just to get that straight."

"Correct," Elizabeth said, "but that's part of the plan. We're negotiating a deal with Krebbs tomorrow. You are going to show up and blow our cover."

"That sounds unsafe."

"Come on, Peter, roll with it," Neal said. "All you have to do is play, well, you. Peter Burke, former FBI agent. You're looking for a rental broker to handle this condo for you, or whatever other decent cover story you can come up with by 1:30 p.m. tomorrow. And then you see us --"

Elizabeth widened her eyes in exaggerated shock. "Mr. Krebbs, these people are criminals!" she gasped, placing her hand on her chest. "They're trying to pull a real estate scam on you!"

"In other words, the truth," Peter said. They both grinned at him. "So what then? Call the police?"

"Not yet, but the threat needs to be out there." Neal smiled, sharklike. "We'll try to buy your silence -- you and Krebbs. Now, exactly how this is going to go down will depend on how easy he is to bribe, but your job as the outside man is to make sure that eventually he goes for it, and help us push the amount up as much as possible. Then we'll get his account information and dump in a load of cash."

"So at that point, you're paying him," Peter said. "Not really seeing the advantage here."

"The point is that in the past, through a sequence of events you probably don't want to hear about, we happened to come into the routing information for an account the Mafia uses to launder money," Elizabeth said. "We've always held it as one of our hole cards, in case we needed leverage or fast money. The FBI knows about the account, though. Your Organized Crime department has been passively monitoring it for some time."

"You're giving him mob cash."

"Exactly," Neal said. "At this point in the con --"

"I'd rather call it a sting," Peter said.

Neal rolled his eyes. "If it makes you happy. In any case, he's just taken a huge bribe from the mob. Or, from the mob's point of view, stolen a ton of cash from them. We'll also be bribing you -- or so Krebbs thinks; he needs to know you're in it with him, because you're not a threat as long as you're paid off. Of course, we're not giving you anything, you never heard of any bribe pointed in your direction, and all you have to do as soon as you're out of his office is call the FBI and tell them you just saw Krebbs take a bribe from the mob. It'll dovetail with Organized Crime's information. If he doesn't cooperate with the investigators, he'll have to contend with some very unpleasant people trying to get back the money they think he stole. The mob tends not to accept excuses like 'oops, it was an accident, here's your cash back'."

Peter turned it over in his head. "I'm not actually doing anything illegal."

"No, of course not, that's the point."

"And what are you two getting out of this, again?"

"The satisfaction of eliminating public corruption?" Neal tried.

Peter's eyes narrowed. "Tell me you're not planning on skimming some mob money for yourself while you're at it."

"We're not completely lacking in common sense," Elizabeth said. "Besides, the amounts have to match up or the frame job doesn't work."

"And you two are doing this out of the goodness of your hearts? Try again."

Neal quirked a sideways smile. "Krebbs likes throwing money around. He just might own a few rare art items that we have our eye on."

"Does that change your decision?" Elizabeth asked.

"No." Actually, it made him feel better about it. If they'd claimed pure altruism, he'd be keeping one eye on them the whole time to figure out what they were up to. "So where are you meeting Krebbs?"

"At his office downtown," Neal said. "We need a good pretext for you to be there."

Peter raised his eyebrows. "And I just happen to drop by at the exact time you two are meeting him? Nothing suspicious about that, huh? Why don't you see if you can get him to go for a power lunch. It'd make more sense if Peter Burke, concerned local citizen, is also out to lunch, spots you two and raises a fuss."

Elizabeth and Neal exchanged a look -- and a grin. "Welcome to the con," Neal said.

"Sting."

"Whatever."


***


The following day at 1:45, Peter, wearing his only decent suit, arrived at the restaurant Elizabeth had given him directions to. In a quick scan of the premises, he located Elizabeth and Neal, both of them wearing natty business attire and each with a little briefcase. They were sharing a table with a balding man sporting a ludicrous diamond-encrusted watch and a suit that even Peter recognized as ridiculously expensive. Likes throwing money around, indeed, Peter thought. From the look of things, Krebbs was exactly the type of flamboyantly corrupt fatcat that Peter had once relished bringing down.

He could feel himself coming alive. He'd always enjoyed going undercover, pitting his wits against his opponents'. He had to remind himself that this wasn't a proper undercover job. There was no backup, no Bureau standing behind him, no legal seal of approval on anything he did here. He, Peter Burke, was pulling a con, and if he wasn't careful, he could easily go to prison for it. He wondered again how they'd managed to talk him into it.

But it still felt like slipping back into his old skin. Peter the broken-down, fired warehouse guard receded into the background as Peter the wary, alert FBI agent took over.

Two tables over from Neal and Elizabeth, someone waved in Peter's direction. Peter looked over his shoulder, saw no one behind him, and realized that it was, indeed, him who was being waved at. Furthermore, he recognized the person waving, although the hat had thrown him off.

Mozzie rose when Peter approached his table and held out a hand.

"You're here too, huh?" Peter said under his breath, smiling and nodding.

"You stand out too much if you have lunch alone," Mozzie muttered back. "My involvement in this lunacy, over my protests I might add, is strictly limited to providing a cover for you."

"I thought this sort of thing was what you did," Peter said, taking a seat.

"Nice try, Suit. No self-incrimination here."

"I don't have the authority to arrest you," Peter said, but quietly, just in case they were overheard.

"So you claim."

From here, Peter could hear the rise and fall of voices at Neal and Elizabeth's table, but he couldn't make out what was being said. Glancing that way, he saw Krebbs studying papers that Elizabeth held out to him.

A waiter poured glasses of water at Peter and Mozzie's table. As soon as he was out of earshot, Mozzie murmured, "That's exactly right. Keep looking at them. Do it a few times, and stare a little longer than normal, like you recognize them but aren't quite sure if --"

"I have gone undercover before," Peter retorted. "I know what I'm doing."

"Excuse me, this job may be happening over my protests, but I do have my professional pride," Mozzie said loftily. "I don't plan to let it go south because we're working with amateurs now."

"Amateurs, my ass," Peter muttered, glancing over again. Krebbs was scribbling a signature on the stack of paper in front of him.

"The crab is in the pot," Mozzie said. Peter looked at him pointedly. "What?" Mozzie waved a hand. "Go, go. You're on stage, Olivier. Let's have a look at your acting skills."

Peter took a deep breath and pushed back his chair. The restaurant was nearly empty, the lunch crowd having cleared out except for a few people lingering over cups of coffee. Peter marched towards Neal and Elizabeth's table. "Hey! You!"

Some heads turned, including the heads of the three people at the table. Neal and Elizabeth looked innocently surprised; Krebbs, irritated.

"Yeah, you," Peter said. "I know you two." He focused on channeling righteous anger to the surface; it wasn't hard. To Krebbs, he demanded, "Do you know who these two are?"

"Sir, we are conducting business," Krebbs replied. "Which is absolutely no business of yours."

"Oh really?" Peter demanded. "Ask them about New York. Ask them about taking me for my entire savings and getting me fired!"

"This man is clearly disturbed, Mr. Krebbs," Elizabeth said, a hint of amusement dancing in her eyes.

Don't oversell this, Peter reminded himself, and he tried to infuse his face with as much desperation and sincerity as possible. "These people are con artists. Grifters. Shysters. Let me guess, they're selling real estate, right? At bargain prices? And they're hustling you through the deal, told you they have another buyer waiting in the wings?"

"I don't think you need to listen to this, Mr. Krebbs," Neal said. He rose, getting in Peter's face. "I think you need to leave now."

"Oh, I need to leave? Like you did, when you and your wife destroyed my life and ran off with my money?"

Elizabeth put her hand on Krebbs's arm. "This man clearly has us mixed up with someone else. Why don't we take this back to your office where there are fewer interruptions?"

"You know what happens next?" Peter snapped, fending off Neal's hands. "They disappear, leaving you holding a handful of worthless paper. They've done it before. I should know -- I used to be an FBI agent before these two got done with me."

Krebbs looked down at the folder of paperwork spread out on the table in front of him.

"You know what?" Peter said, whipping out his phone. "I'm calling the police. They can straighten this out."

"No!" Neal said sharply. "Wait! I'm sure we can work this out ourselves."

Krebbs pulled away from Elizabeth. "There's no truth to these ridiculous allegations, surely, Mr. Holden?"

"We can explain everything," Elizabeth said smoothly. "Perhaps we should take this somewhere less public."

"Oh, I bet you'd like that," Peter sneered. "Give you a chance to run again, huh? Don't listen to them; every word out of their mouths is a lie." He noticed Neal giving him a speculative look and wondered if he was being a little too vehement. Or possibly a little too honest.

"Perhaps we should call the police and get this sorted out," Krebbs said.

Elizabeth lowered her voice. "Everyone is looking at us. We can come to an agreement, I'm sure, but can we take this back to your office, please?"

Krebbs looked back and forth between the three of them: Peter with phone in hand, Neal blocking him, Elizabeth looking sincere and pleading. "I have a home office that might be better for a private meeting," he said. "I'll let my secretary know I'll be out of the office for a while."


***


Krebbs's house was gorgeous, a huge, rambling custom job with eleborately landscaped grounds. As they stepped out of Krebbs's car, Peter glimpsed a swimming pool down a flight of stone steps. This was definitely a side of Toledo he hadn't seen much of yet.

What concerned him more was that they were now on Krebbs's turf and isolated. Krebbs's driver was packing heat; Peter had glimpsed the bulge beneath his nicely tailored suit. And that was something he hadn't factored into his calculations, although he should have.

Neal and Elizabeth looked worried. Part of the act, Peter thought, or genuine? Well, they were in too deep to back out now. He carefully didn't look at them for fear of giving something away.

They went around the side of the house, into a large private office with a peach-colored carpet and a skylight. It was lavishly decorated, with framed art on the walls and small pieces of porcelain and statuary displayed in strategic alcoves. Peter tried not to wonder if any of those were the ones Neal and Elizabeth had their eyes on. He noticed the two of them looking around avidly, and found himself wondering if getting into the house this way had been their purpose all along.

"Wait outside," Krebbs told his driver, who nodded and discreetly withdrew. The four of them sat down around a table of glossy, polished dark wood.

"I think we should just call the police," Peter said. "They're criminals, and they're running a scam on you, Mr. Krebbs."

"I believe you. I had my secretary do some checking on the drive over." Krebbs slid the folder of documents across the table; Elizabeth caught it with her manicured fingertips. "It appears that once you dig behind a rather transparent shell corporation, these apartment buildings you're trying to sell me actually belong to a property management office that's never heard of you. Is there some reason why I shouldn't just call the police right now?"

Elizabeth and Neal looked at each other; they looked credibly worried, Peter thought. "Money," Neal said. "You want money, right? How much to forget you ever heard of us?"

"I lost my life because of you people, and you want to buy me off?" Peter said sharply. Again, Neal's eyes snagged his briefly.

Krebbs snorted. "You tried to take me for quite a lot, Mr. Holden."

"Three million each," Neal said, his gaze level.

"Oh, honey," Elizabeth breathed, covering her mouth with her hand. A trifle overdone, Peter thought.

"What? Don't 'honey' me. It's better than going to prison."

Elizabeth rose and turned away. "I can't bear this."

"Three million might be a good place to start," Krebbs said coolly. "Would you care for a cup of coffee?"

Ten minutes of bargaining later, the price tag had crept up to ten million each, and Neal gave Peter a little nod, so Peter started trying to steer Krebbs towards closing the deal.

"Do you really have that kind of readily available cash?" Krebbs asked.

"Of course not. We'll have to liquidate some assets."

"We're going to be destroyed," Elizabeth moaned. "This is all your fault, Nick." She'd started pacing the room, openly agitated. Peter managed to pretend that he hadn't noticed her snag a small glass sculpture and slip it into a pocket of her business jacket.

Before Peter could prompt him, Krebbs got to the next part of the script all on his own. "So I'm supposed to let you walk away on the promise of ten million? I don't think so."

"Half now, half when we have a chance to liquidate," Neal said. "Look, we have a retirement account in the Cayman Islands. I can transfer the money right now, if you'll give me your routing information."

"Give my account information to an admitted con artist? How stupid do you think I am?"

"If he doesn't want the money, I'll take it," Peter said on cue.

"I never said I didn't want it." Krebbs gave Peter a speculative look, then he said to Neal, "Can I talk to you privately?"

Hmm, now he'd realized that cutting Peter out meant more money for him. Peter wondered how they ought to play this. It looked like Neal and Elizabeth were willing to roll with it, so he was too. Neal and Krebbs retreated across the room and put their heads together. Peter watched them carefully, and tried to convince himself that he wasn't having a whole lot of fun with this. It was tense, but ... damn. He could see why Neal and Elizabeth did it. Riding that adrenaline edge was an amazing high.

A hand settled on his shoulder and Elizabeth leaned down, her hair falling like a curtain and partly blocking his view of Neal and Krebbs. "You're having fun," she murmured, as if reading his thoughts. A gentle wave of her perfume washed over him.

"So sue me," he muttered back.

"No guilt? No G-man conscience nagging at you?"

"If the FBI could get enough evidence to arrest this guy, they'd be doing just what we're doing here." Except with a warrant, and fewer thefts of small, portable art objects, he reminded himself. "I did some research of my own after you guys left last night -- don't think I wasn't going to. And you're right that he's crooked as they come."

"Checking up on us, Peter?" She looked pleased rather than upset.

"I just think it's interesting you two have turned into a couple of Robin Hoods all of a sudden," Peter said, and was gratified to see her mocking smile falter; he'd scored a hit, gotten a brief peek behind the mask. "If I didn't know better, I'd say I'm not the one having guilt problems."

Elizabeth smiled again. It was softer this time. "Believe it or not, Peter, you can be very persuasive in your own stubborn way."

"What are you two doing over there?" Neal demanded.

Elizabeth raised her head but kept her hand on Peter's shoulder. "We're discussing our own arrangements," she said. "Since you seem to be doing the same."

"I'm trying to build a future for us both," Neal said pointedly.

"And how is that going?" Elizabeth released Peter and strolled to Neal's side of the conference table.

"I think we've discussed everything we need to," Krebbs said. He turned around with a small pistol in his hand.

Elizabeth and Neal both blanched, and as far as Peter could tell, their shock was entirely genuine. This wasn't part of the plan at all.

"Whoa," Peter said. He held out his hands, palms up, placating. "Wait, wait, wait. Let's not do anything hasty."

"You stay right where you are. All of you, take your phones and toss them this way."

They all three obeyed. Peter's mouth had gone dry. It didn't help that Neal and Elizabeth were a couple of complete wild cards. He saw them exchange a glance, and had a bad feeling that they were concocting some kind of insane plan through quick eye contact and half-hidden hand signals.

"Look, I just wanted to get back what I'd lost," Peter said. He rose from his chair slowly, keeping his voice calm, his talking-down-agitated-perps voice. "I never meant things to go this far --"

Krebbs shot him.

He'd never been shot before. It felt like being punched, sudden sharp pressure rather than pain. The pain came after, a hot bloom spreading across his chest. Peter saw Krebbs's shock -- maybe he'd never shot a man before -- and then Peter fell. He didn't feel himself hit the floor, but when he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back on the carpet, his head turned to one side. He had a view that was composed mainly of chair legs and people's shoes.

"You shot him!" Neal said. His voice rose on a note of outrage.

"Nobody move!" Krebbs sounded one breath from falling apart himself. "You two stay right there. Hands where I can see them!"

"We have money," Elizabeth said quietly. "You know that. We can pay you, and nothing has happened yet that you can't come back from, if you make the right decisions from here on out."

"Shut up!" When Neal started to move -- Peter could only see his feet and lower legs, but he could tell when Neal started to swivel -- Krebbs snapped, "I said nobody move!"

"What's going on in here, Mr. Krebbs?" Another voice -- Krebbs's driver.

"What's going on is all of you people are staying right here. Nobody's going anywhere."

"This man needs a doctor," Elizabeth said in that same too-quiet, too-calm voice.

"Well, he's not getting one." Krebbs knelt and scooped up their phones. "All of you are staying right here, and I -- I need to make a few calls."

He backed out and slammed the door.

Peter closed his eyes. When he opened them, Elizabeth was bending over him, taking off her scarf. "Don't move," she said. "Peter? Can you hear me?"

"This ..." Peter said. He swallowed. It felt like there was a great weight sitting on his chest, making it hard to breathe. "This is the sort of situation where backup would be nice."

"We have backup." Neal's voice came from somewhere outside Peter's field of vision; then Neal knelt beside Elizabeth, his face white. "Moz is still out there and he knows where we are."

"We can't count on that, though," Elizabeth said. She was working busily outside Peter's range of vision, and something that she did hurt in a way that made his vision white out for a moment. When he came back, it was to Elizabeth saying, "-- windows?"

"Bulletproof glass," Neal said from farther away, sounding disgusted. "How paranoid can you be? There's plenty in here to work with. Getting out isn't going to be that hard, except ..."

Peter could guess what, or who, the "except" was. "Look, guys," he said, trying to raise his head and only managing a sort of feeble thrashing. Elizabeth pushed him back down onto the soft thing he was pillowed on, which turned out to be her thigh. "I appreciate loyalty as much as the next guy, but it makes a lot more sense for you to get out of here and call the cops on him."

"He has a point, hon," Elizabeth told Neal.

"Bulletproof glass in the windows," Neal mused, "but possibly not in the skylight." He dragged the conference table under the skylight and scrambled onto the tabletop. Peter tipped his head to the side to watch. Neal added a chair, and was able to reach it easily. "Yeah, this just pops right up." He jumped back down and crouched beside Elizabeth and Peter. "El, you're better at climbing than I am, and you're smaller."

"I'm busy," Elizabeth pointed out. "You'd be faster; you have more experience."

"I'm not just going to run off and leave you here."

She arched a brow. "So I should run off and leave you?"

"You two are being ridiculous," Peter told them. His mouth tasted coppery. "You should both go."

"Shut up, people who've been shot don't get a vote." Neal laid his hand on Peter's chest, where Elizabeth had pulled away Peter's shirt to get at the injury, and left it there. Neal's fingers were very warm; Peter felt cold to the bone.

"It makes more sense," Peter argued. He kept having to pause, collect his thoughts, get his breath back. "Get out, call the police and EMTs. You don't want to be here when they get here."

There was some rustling and a snap, then Neal said, "Short straw."

"Those are pencils," Elizabeth said, but she leaned forward, shifting Peter in her lap. A hot sharp pang flashed through his chest and he plunged into red-tinged darkness.

When he swam back to consciousness, he was almost regretful, because waking up hurt, and the soft pillow of Elizabeth's lap was gone. Someone had covered him with what turned out be one of the window drapes. Peter thought for a moment they'd actually done the sensible thing and left, until Neal appeared out of nowhere, cat-silent, and dropped to sit on the carpet beside him.

"El got the short pencil, so she went out the ceiling," he said in response to Peter's questioning look. "Cavalry should be here anytime."

"At which point you do what?" Peter asked. His voice was thread-thin.

"Go out the ceiling too, of course," Neal said impatiently, as if the question was too stupid to need asking. He grinned, though there was a slight edge to it. "This won't be my first last-minute escape from the authorities across the rooftops."

"Yeah," Peter said, "I remember that time on the roof of the MoMA."

"I really wasn't expecting you to come out the window after me."

"Almost had you that time."

"You were very close," Neal conceded. "I'll give you half a point for that one."

There was a moment's nostalgic silence; then Neal cleared his throat. "Uh, Peter ... we had no idea, when we asked you to do this ..."

Peter would have laughed, except it would have hurt too much. "Of course not. Stop sitting there feeling guilty. Makin' me twitchy."

"I would like to point out that our plans don't usually end in disaster," Neal said. "Actually, they work most of the time."

Given recent events, Peter decided not to dignify that with a response. Instead he closed his eyes.

"Hey," Neal said. Closer now, leaning over him. "Hey, Peter. No sleeping."

"Can't tell me what to do," Peter mumbled, his eyes still closed.

Neal's warm fingers laced through Peter's cold ones. "If El comes back and finds you dead, I'll be in trouble, okay? Don't get me in trouble."

"The hard thing is keeping you out of trouble," Peter murmured, or maybe he just thought it, because the world was sliding sideways, going away.

Gone.


***


He woke, alone, in the ICU.

The nurse told him there had been no visitors and didn't seem to understand why he was so agitated about that. Somewhere in the middle of arguing with her, he slipped away again.

Through the next few sleep-wake cycles, he managed to get calmer, so that when the police came to interview him, he was able to tell them an edited version of what had happened without shaking them and demanding to know where Neal and Elizabeth were. He told the police that he'd recognized the two con artists who'd ruined his life, tried to confront them, and ended up going back to Krebbs's place to talk it over. "Yeah, I know it was a stupid decision. But I didn't have any evidence, and I had no idea he'd be dangerous. I was faced with watching them laugh it off and walk away. What was I supposed to do?" Then things went bad, Krebbs shot him, and the con artists had, presumably, fled.

"Unless you caught them," he added with innocent curiosity.

"No one else was found at the scene, aside from employees of Mr. Krebbs," the interviewing officer said, and something in Peter sagged in relief. The detective flipped through his notes. "There was a woman's scarf binding your injury. Did it belong to Mrs. Mitchell?"

Mrs. Caffrey, he almost corrected. "It might. I was pretty well out of it at the time."

So Neal and Elizabeth had gotten away. Far away, judging from their continued non-presence at the hospital. There had been a small, hopeful part of him that had thought ... Well, but it didn't matter; he knew how it was. Neal and Elizabeth would probably show up in another month or two, when things got too dull on the Italian Riviera or wherever they'd ended up, bringing a dash of light and life into his world and then vanishing again. In the end, Peter was just another of their fantasy bubbles, and they were not the type to stay in one of those for very long, let alone deal with the messy and boring parts.

But in the meantime, recovery took up most of his attention. He was out of the ICU after a few drug-addled days, and then spent a week getting himself to the point where he could walk on his own and handle his daily needs. He had no insurance, but the hospital didn't seem inclined to kick him out. When he called the hospital's business office, he was cheerfully informed that his bill was being covered by a Mr. and Mrs. Tabernacle, including all expenses.

Huh. How about that.

He also got the nurses to bring him a daily paper, not only supplying him with crosswords but also the ongoing developments of the investigation into Krebbs. It seemed that the local police, the FBI and the IRS were all fighting over him now. Peter grinned. Nothing like having a former FBI agent turn up shot and covered with blood to give all kinds of grounds for warrants to snoop into Krebbs's confidential records, and what they'd found had been enough to put him away nicely, even on top of the attempted murder charge.

By the time the hospital declared Peter fit to release, he was going out of his mind with boredom, but he'd also had an opportunity to make some decisions. He was going to try for the accounting career. The idea of seeking an entry-level accounting job still didn't appeal to him much, but he was confident that he could work his way up. And even if it seemed like a rather sterile career compared to the FBI, he though that he'd end up enjoying the problem-solving aspect in the long run. He could make good money at it, and the odds of getting shot were a whole lot less.

He made his slow and painful way up the walk to the condo. At least he didn't have to navigate all the stairs at his old, crappy apartment. That was the one tiny silver lining. But all the food in the refrigerator would be spoiled; he wasn't sure if there was a thing to eat in the house. And right now, he was too weak and weary to feel like going out and getting anything.

The door wasn't locked.

"Oh, for crying out loud," Peter muttered. Rationally, he knew that the most likely explanation was that the place had been burgled in his absence, and he was going to open the door to find his lovely new condo wrecked and stripped of all its things.

But his heart still lifted, hesitantly and shyly teetering on the edge of springing into full-blown joy as he opened the door.

The condo smelled like baking bread and fresh-baked cookies. Someone had clearly been in a baking frenzy recently, judging by the plates of various edible treats on the countertop. Elizabeth was on the couch, reading, with a smudge of flour on her nose; Neal was reclining with his head on her leg and his hand draped on a glass of wine.

"Peter!" Elizabeth cried, and they both jumped up to usher him to the couch.

"I thought you'd long since gone," Peter said, dazedly allowing himself to be settled on the couch with pillows around him. "You weren't at the hospital."

"I told you, we don't do hospitals," Elizabeth said.

Neal leaned a hip against the end of the couch. "Even for each other. Remember that one time in Copenhagen --" Elizabeth glared at him. "Right. We don't talk about the time in Copenhagen."

"You could have at least called," Peter said, trying not to sound accusatory. Mostly he was just so damn happy to see them that he could have wept, and vaguely annoyed at himself for being so emotional about it; he decided to blame it on the painkillers.

"You're really upset about this," Neal said, surprised.

"I'm not upset." Peter realized he probably wasn't doing a good job of not sounding upset. "I just -- I thought you were gone, and I have no way to get in touch." No way to know if you're getting yourselves hurt or killed out there, doing all the insane things you do. No way to know if I'll ever see either one of you again.

"I'll call next time," Neal promised. "Except there won't be a next time, because next time you won't get yourself shot."

"Now you're blaming me for getting shot?"

"Cookie?" Elizabeth asked diplomatically, proferring a plate.

Peter took one. It was chocolate chip, still warm, the chips soft and gooey. His childhood favorite. He wondered if they'd actually done enough counter-surveillance of their nemesis to find out something like that. He wouldn't put it past them.

"Good?" Elizabeth wanted to know, and he nodded, his mouth full of chocolatey cookie goodness.

Neal vanished into one of the bedrooms and reappeared with a stack of paper, which he set on the coffee table. Peter stuffed the last of the cookie in his mouth and picked up the top sheet. It was an expense statement for Solving World Hunger, Inc. Mouth too full to ask, he raised his eyebrows at Neal.

"When you're back on your feet," Neal said, "we found a really good one. A charity director right here in town who's been skimming millions from dozens of charities over the years. It's perfect."

Peter choked. "We're not freelance crime-solvers," he groaned when he could speak, putting a hand over his eyes. "I mean, you. You! There is no we here."

"Of course we are, if we want to be," Neal said, unperturbed. "Or we could be. Like the A-Team, but with better clothes." He turned to Elizabeth. "Do you think we could forge a private investigator's license? That would be awesome. There was a time when I wanted to be Magnum, P.I. as a kid."

"If you're forging it anyway, you could even call yourself Magnum," Elizabeth pointed out. Neal looked delighted.

Peter glared at them both, since apparently he was the only sane adult in the room. "What's the matter, crime just isn't dangerous enough for you anymore?"

"It's gotten a bit dull," Elizabeth said. "It's all the same, really, after a while. You can only have so many diamonds before you just don't want another one."

"Alleged diamonds," Neal said hastily, seeing the speculative way Peter was studying her. "And besides, this sort of thing ..." He looked away, dropping his eyes to the side. "It does feel good, in a way."

"At the very least, it makes a nice change," Elizabeth said. "You do get a warm glow. It's just like the glow of pulling off a heist, except --"

"Better," Neal said. "Provided people have the sense not to get shot."

Peter stared at them, aghast and yet, oddly proud. Somehow, against all odds and contrary to all expectation, he'd actually managed to reform them. Sort of, and on their terms, but still.

Now all he had to do was stop them from getting themselves killed in their brand-new stupidly dangerous and impractical vocation. Clearly, someone had to be the responsible adult around here. (What they really needed was a leash, but sadly there was nothing he could do about that.)

"So. Charity fraud," he said, and reached for another cookie. "Tell me the details."

~

Comments

[veleda_k]

You know, it's not often that fanfic truly surprises me. That's not to say that I necessarily find any of it boring or predictable, there's just... lack of surprise.

But this did surprise me! Just when I thought I knew where you were going, you'd introduce a new angle. First it's about Neal and Elizabeth trying to help Peter out, then it's about all of them rescuing Neal, then it's White Collar meets Leverage, then Peter gets shot(!), then that sweet, unconventional ending. What a ride.

This is so much sweeter than I would have expected given the events of the last fic, and yet it works so well. Elizabeth and Neal charm me with their efforts to take care of Peter, and Peter's protectiveness of them is so touching and so him. And how wonderful was the scene in Krebbs's house, with the three of them arguing about who should stay and who should go?

There are so many fantastic lines, that I can't resist quoting a few of my favorites.

"Do I question your life choices?"

"Well ... yes," Neal said. "All the time. Especially when you're trying to arrest me for them."


And besides, he wasn't the kind of person who moved in on a friend's wife.

-- check that, on a near-total stranger's wife. On anyone's wife. (Hee! Don't deny it, Peter.)


Pro tip: try not to fall off the getaway vehicle next time.


"Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"I don't think I want to do anything you would do," Peter protested.


"Exactly," Neal said. "At this point in the con --"

"I'd rather call it a sting," Peter said. (Oh, Peter. Never change.)


But his heart still lifted, hesitantly and shyly teetering on the edge of springing into full-blown joy as he opened the door. (That is just such a lovely line.)


And, okay that was more than a few. Sorry.

This was a wonderful fic, and I'm so glad you decided to revisit this verse.

[sholio]

This is really an amazing compliment - thank you so much! ♥ I know what you mean about most fanfic being rather predictable (and often, not in a bad way - but you still pretty much know where it's going) and, as a lover of narrative surprises myself, it's absolutely wonderful to me to have been able to give you that experience. Plus, quotes of favorite bits = the very most fabulous feedback! ♥

One thing I was going for in this fic was to reflect the canon dynamic but with a role-flip between Peter and Neal: that is, rather than Peter and Elizabeth taking Neal under their wing and inviting him into their world, it's Neal and Elizabeth doing that for Peter ... with rather similar results, in the end.

I'm really delighted you liked it so much. Thank you!

Creative

[(Anonymous)]

I have to agree that this is a nice story. Most fanfic is nothing but emotion, torture and angst and no plot. This is creative and uses the characters very well.

I really enjoyed this on a Sunday afternoon.

Re: Creative

[sholio]

Thank you so much! I'm really glad to give you a nice Sunday read. :)

[madripoor_rose]

Oh, this is absolutely wonderful! I love how the dynamic's changed with Neal and El being together, and what happened to Peter's career.

And you did a great job with the Glass City! Though I probably wouldn't have been able to resist putting in Neal's appalled reaction to a hungarian hot dog from Packo's.

[sholio]

Thank you very much! ♥ And I'm delighted to hear the city isn't too far off the mark. I've never been near Toledo, but I do have a few years' experience with Midwesternalia, and between that and Google Image Search, I was hoping I could write about the place adequately ...