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damned_lounge2009-11-01 05:07 pm
onsoullessfeet.livejournal.com) wrote in damned_lounge2009-11-01 05:07 pm
Entry tags:
Oktoberfest '09: "Redeal" by Sue and Grace
Title: Redeal
Authors: Sue & Grace
Beta:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jennifer read some of it.
Word Count: 7,589
Rating: PG-13? A bit of swearing.
Character(s): Phoenix (Herb Appleby), Manny (Tony Plana), Edgeworth (The Masochist), Meche (María Morales)
Pairing(s): Phoenix/Edgeworth, Manny/Meche
Summary: Post-Landels. As time goes by in their "real" lives, little things begin to remind them of who they really are.
--
Where he was from, he had a reputation. He couldn’t bear the thought of working at his old job again. The stress it caused him was what started this whole mess in the first place. When it came down to it, whether he was the talk of the town didn’t matter. He was a former mental patient. So the shrink, whom he found he couldn’t win over, gave him a ticket for the first train out of there, along with a word of advice:
Don’t come back.
Not the exact words she used, but he got the picture.
She told him this was his chance to make it big, start a new life for himself. For a guy like him, making it anywhere was impossible. He didn’t have the best track record, and that wasn’t even counting the time he thought his imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary. He could hold down a job, but he had to get one first. His rap sheet wouldn’t help him out there.
He just listened to the woman behind the desk in the hope he could glean something useful.
He didn’t set the stakes too high for himself. That way there was no room for disappointment, or so he thought. He got it anyway. No one wanted to hire the crazy guy. They had to turn him down or some of his reputation might rub off on them. Starting a business he could call his own was sounding better every day.
One day, he’d had enough of it. He was walking away from his last interview, cigarette in his teeth and eyes set on the bar across the way, when the guy came up to him and said he was hired. He had a way with words, or so he was told, that could breathe life back into the business. He wanted to get out of town and he needed someone to look after the joint when he was gone.
Tony had big plans for the little pub. The boss was so impressed by his efforts with the customers that he actually left town early. That paved the way for Tony’s expenses. He knew business in this town really boomed at night. Though not as many people knew his face around here, with his reputation, he and the ‘big boys’ were pals in no time.
In a matter of weeks, the renovations were finished and the bar was reopened. He had a handful of employees and a taste for expensive liquor he could get used to. Something was missing, though. He played around with the lighting a little until he realized he was wasting his time. Then he bought a piano, which didn’t help his debts, but became the center stage for a chance encounter.
It had been a long night. Most of his regulars had left already. The only company he had now was the guy nodding off at the counter. Maybe a bouncer was what he needed here. He shook his head and began to make his way upstairs.
That was when he heard the piano. Whoever was hitting those notes was no court composer. The playing was terrible. He took a few steps back, leaning over the rail to get a look at the offender.
He recognized the problem immediately. It was Herb Appleby, one of the patients who had been admitted the same day as him and released not long before.
He couldn’t really remember why he gave him the job. He was good for a laugh, breaking up fights, and not much else. But hiring him was probably the best business decision he’d made, because it took them less than a month to figure out he had a special talent.
He never lost at poker.
Now, Tony didn’t believe it at first. He was surprised when he lost to him, he could give him that, but at the time it just seemed like a fluke. Then he did it again. Before they knew it, people were lining up to see if they could beat him. Herb Appleby became the bar’s main attraction.
He always knew the kid had potential. That’s how he’d tell it, anyway.
--
Once upon a time, Herb had been engaged. He sort of remembered it, too, which wasn't bad for a guy who'd crashed his car bad enough to kill a girl and just about break his own brain in half. But there was something that was even more impressive, considering he'd only discovered it after the broken brain, the stay in the loony bin, and enough psych meds on his record to make most health insurance companies hesitant to even poke him with a ten foot pole until they were sure he was good and dead.
That thing was that Herb could beat anyone - anyone - at poker. He didn't even know how he did it. His ex had said he'd come back a changed man, and he guessed she was right, but the way he saw things now - not though people, but close, like they were made of smoked glass - suited him just fine. It seemed like it suited Mr. Plana fine, too. The boss got entertainment for his bar, something a lot better than a piano player or any kind of stupid shtick like that, and Herb got a paycheck for not much more than shuffling decks, stacking chips, and lounging at the beat-up little table in the basement.
It's wasn't perfect, but it was good. When you had a record like Herb Appleby's, you took good where you could get it. That was what he told himself, at least.
--
"Flowers, Herb." Tony had a rocking lilt to his voice that only swung into motion when he was joking, and it was such a better indicator than his face that, half the time, Herb didn't even look up when he spoke. "Really, I'd be touched, but I don't like marigolds."
"They're not for you. They're for the Masochist, when he shows up tonight." He took a seat at the bar, arranging the handful of late-September blooms tucked in a bit of what looked like leftover wrapping paper. "Have you still got that empty Patron bottle?"
"You're finally asking him on a date, huh." The voice was muffled by a foot of liquid-filled glass and another three inches of hardwood, never mind the clinking as Tony rummaged around under the bar.
"I think that he's allergic, actually," Herb replied lowly, smirking to himself and re-arranging the cluster of more-yellow blooms among the dark orange. "Besides, there was this lady selling them about a block away. I think the money goes toward some animal shelter or something."
The bottle clinked onto the countertop, followed by a pair of brown eyes and an eyebrow cocked in obvious intrigue. "Pretty?"
"Very pretty." A splash of water from the sink went into the bottle, and Herb waited until he was holding it to laugh and walk away. "And sweet. You'd get bored, Mr. Plana."
--
In retrospect, Herb would say later, his problems had probably started with the suit. If he was really going to be picky, he guessed he could take it a little further back, to the release of the smash hit blockbuster movie that, for Herb's purposes, had only been noteworthy because it glamorized poker. He never went to see it himself. Neither did Mr. Plana, but that didn’t stop him from deciding that dressing his card shark in a suit would be just the thing to pull in some extra business on Wednesday nights.
“Oh, no. No way. Not that.” Herb smirked and kept sorting through the department store discount rack, trying to ignore his boss and the pinstriped nightmare being held a foot from his face. “Not unless I get a bottle of moonshine and a Tommy gun to go with it.”
Unless one counted his expression going a little flatter and more nonplussed, Tony didn’t move. “Herb, you’ve got all your taste in your mouth. Now try this on and put away the blue thing. Blue isn’t dangerous.”
That was the ‘I write your paychecks’ voice. Herb laughed under his breath, taking the mobster’s nightmare and folding it over the suit already his arm. “I look good in blue,” he argued halfheartedly, even though the half-laugh and grin that worked so well at diffusing liquor-fueled disagreements didn’t work in the slightest when it came to charming his boss out of an idea. Tony seemed fixed, at least for the duration of this poker-celebrity experiment, on the idea of Herb seeming at once dangerous and attractive, with perhaps a hint of humor. Herb wondered if his job description had changed from “semilegal entertainment” to “romance novel protagonist” while he wasn’t looking.
He didn’t buy the blue thing, but not because he disliked it. It was because putting on the whole getup filled him with such a prickly, anxious déjà-vu that, at least five times while he was dressing, he almost stopped and threw the whole thing in the corner. Even once it was on, he felt inexplicably naked when he looked in the mirror and saw a bewildered, only half-familiar man looking back, left hand tracing up and down his lapel in the dreamy, unconscious certainty that something was missing there.
In the end, they bought the pinstripes. They bought a tie, too, though Herb never wore it – he just cruised in every Wednesday with his collar open, shirt unreliably ironed and face unreliably shaved, hair unreliably styled. The craze lasted maybe two months, and by the end of two months Herb knew the damage was done. He still saw the right shade of blue, and felt like his grave had been walked over.
--
He didn’t know if it was the kick he was getting from seeing all those big numbers, but it got to a point where he just couldn’t sleep at night. He told himself he was just keeping an eye on things--business rolled in at night, after all—but as soon as dawn rolled around, he was nowhere to be seen. When the town woke up, he fell into a deep sleep—a deep sleep full of nightmares of things he’d say he couldn’t dream up, but apparently not—and when he rose again in the afternoon, for the first few minutes, all he could think about was the woman he was leaving behind.
There were times he would just look up from what he was doing to stare at the door, waiting for someone to come in. But he wasn’t waiting for anyone. It only started to get to him because people were noticing. Herb, especially.
He began to wish his club could make a little bit extra. Even though it was third to the other businesses in town, it did well for itself. Herb tried to explain this to him. It didn’t help.
He decided it might clear his head a little if he went on a date. He had been told before that he didn’t know how to hold on to a woman, but he wasn’t doing it to prove that he could. It was see a woman or sulk in his office for the rest of the night; he was gonna become his best customer if he didn’t start getting out.
A month later, he began to forget the whole thing. They were more than friends now. He was on the level with her. Then, one day, she called him out on his past behavior, saying he was always keeping an eye out for a dame—it was obvious, she said—and did he break it off with her or what? He said he didn’t understand. She blew a gasket. He didn’t make much of an effort to calm her down. He had always been straight with her, but she may have had something.
The way he saw it, he had everything and nothing.
Back at the club, he wondered what he was even doing there. That was when Herb decided to walk in. Tony promptly went for the stairs to his office.
“Hey, boss.” As he passed him, he noticed he was raising an eyebrow. “Wait. Why did you come back here? What happened with the date?”
He paused at the bottom of the stairs to look back at him. “I wanted to get an early start tomorrow,” he replied, not missing a beat.
Herb was looking skeptical after that remark—he hadn’t even seen Mr. Plana in the morning, not since their days at the institute. He shook his head. “I don’t get it. You hadn’t seen her in days.”
“Yeah, well, she had a rough week.”
It was almost as if he wasn’t listening, Herb thought. His curious and concerned gaze followed his boss up the stairs. His boss ignored it.
--
On his fourteenth game in the basement, The Masochist first managed to start a conversation.
"Do I know you from somewhere?" He'd asked from behind the cards, rearranging them redundantly.
Herb shrugged. "Newspaper, maybe. Online news. That's the only place I can think of."
"What got you in the newspaper?"
"Ran my car off a bridge. Killed my little sister." He basked in the horrified silence, and maybe it was just the easiness of knowing he wouldn't be pestered again, but the game seemed especially short that night. He didn't open his mouth again until the Masochist was at the door, coat in hand, and only then lifted an eyebrow as he offered the vague soundbite of explanation. "Not on purpose."
"I beg your pardon?" He turned, brows furrowed, hesitating.
"My sister. It was an accident." He didn't know what had gotten into him; he never tried to defend his own innocence, these days. It was a habit you got broken of pretty quickly once you realized your own brain was mixed-up beyond repair, and you'd been pinning blame in all the wrong places. But in that moment, he wanted this guy - this stupid, obsessed, ostentatious guy - to know. He wanted more than that, even. He wanted him to believe.
The Masochist's face smoothed into something unreadable, and he nodded, leaving without another backward glance. "I'd assumed as much."
--
If Herb had been asked where his gut told him the trouble had started, sure, he would have said the suit. But if he’d been asked for the first thing that had been quantifiable evidence – something his therapist, one phone number change and three Greyhound bus rides away, would have called an episode - it was probably in the bathroom, a handful of months later.
On his way out, Herb looked into the bathroom mirror, studying himself, the practically invisible constellations of scars down his hands and arms that he'd always just assumed were left over from the accident. He leaned in closer and squinted at his own face. There were two little pale points, perfectly symmetrical, just up under the insides of his eyebrows. He had a half-memory of wearing a too-large pair of sunglasses while he was younger and that was the fashion, being hit in the face with a volleyball during a game and getting the nosepieces rammed up under his browbone hard enough to draw blood.
Why didn't that seem right?
He scrutinized the reflection for another solid minute, then sighed, leaning back and raking his hand through the same unmanagably thick black hair he always meant to get cut, because even if the naturally-occurring spikes were cool, he was getting little old for that. The man mirrioring his actions earned a sidelong glance and derisive snort, tired and still a little hungover.
"Who the hell are you, anyway?"
*
The world started again. Herb, flat on his back on the questionably clean tile, squinted up through the haze of cigarette smoke as someone spoke.
"Hijole, kid. Tell me you're gonna get that outta your system before customers show up."
Tony was stooped over him, hands on his knees, looking down at him as if he were an alarming yet fascinating insect. He was blurry; Herb blinked a few times, and his vision cleared enough to recognize worry buried somewhere in that expression too. "Nnh?" His throat felt scratchy, dry.
"The screaming and just about breaking the door off the hinges,” Tony explained, though having to spell it out flattened his features into the familiar ‘you have got to be kidding me’ stare. It seemed like Herb got more and more of those, these days.
"Oh." That wasn't a joke. Tony wouldn't joke about something like that. For once, Herb wished he could feel something more than mildly distressed, though that might have been more than his usual laconic affect. He was tired, achy down to his bones, even the ones that he could tell hadn't been slammed against walls or the floor. He sat up slowly, plastering a smile into place. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm good to work."
Tony unfolded himself to his full five and a half feet, regarding his employee uncertainly before sighing and ashing his cigarette in the trash can on the way out. "Your call."
--
“Ever get the feeling you’re not worth it?” he said to Herb one night, out of the blue. He had a habit of saying things that turned heads, but that wasn’t his intention this time. Not really.
Herb slowly set his glass down, casting a wary eye on his boss.
“You found the scotch, didn’t you.”
“You should learn to hide things better.”
“I’d learn from the best if he didn’t shut himself up in his office all day.”
Tony brushed it off by tilting his head and taking a long drag on his coffin nail. He blew out a ring of smoke. “How’d the game go?”
“Why are you even asking?” Herb replied with a smirk, swirling around his grape juice. “You know who my opponent was.”
Tony looked over at him after a moment. “Think he’ll ever quit?”
--
It had been a landmine. The piano guy hadn't seen it coming, and in retrospect Herb had realized that the consequences had been just as senseless as blowing off his leg because he'd stepped a little too far to the left. He played well, and he had a nice voice, and he did that pale-pretty-brooding thing so well that he probably brought in business all by himself. That didn't change what had happened, though.
Romance Friday, by the bar calendar. Night twenty-one, by The Masochist's calendar. Game twenty-seven, by the alternate calendar. It had been two games since he'd last tried a conversation, and three since he'd succeeded. Herb was clearly losing his touch.
"Why do you stay down here on Fridays, Appleby?" he asked, as ever without any kind of preface, raising his voice above the piano and low crooning that filtered down into the basement.
Herb re-arranged a card, though the distraction was just for show. He didn't even need to prattle to know he had this one in the bag. "It's because I hate love songs."
The Masochist snorted in his ostentatiously refined sort of way, lifting an eyebrow without looking up from his hand. "Cute. The real reason?"
"Besides the entertainment being questionably legal?" Herb shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I don't like people."
"You're lying."
The cool challenge was not as off-putting as the eyes boring into his with unprecedented scrutiny, and Herb actually stuttered through the attempted incredulous laugh, taken aback. "Wh- what?"
The other player put down his hand and circled closer, taking a sleek silver pen from a pocket hidden within his coat. "It doesn't happen when you're playing, but . . . your eyebrow. Right here, under the inside corner. It flinches when you-" The line of gleaming metal swiveled up at a little silver point scar maybe two centimeters out, and Herb could've sworn he felt his heart stop and every light in the room go supernova. For a second - it felt like just a second, at least - he was pinned down to his chair and helpless, incoherent with pain, the figure leaning over him ready to take the shining thing and aim for his brain and just shove -
"-do? Appleby- damn it, say something-" the Masochist was ranting, and Herb first dizzily wondered who the hell cursed that crisply. He said 'damn it' like he'd never actually spoken the words before, only seem them printed in a book.
"Ah- sorry. Don't know where that came from." He closed his eyes tightly, digging a hand in the headache-spot over his temple and wishing his brain would settle back down. He had to stop doing this. He didn't want to go back to being on meds.
"Here- don't do that." The rebuke was surprisingly gentle, and Herb complied to the strong hand trying to dig his hand back out of his hair and lift him to his feet. He glanced up at the other man, and he'd barely caught a glimpse of his face before the guy looked like he recognized something, or maybe remembered it. And he kissed him.
That wasn’t the funny part. The funny part was that Herb didn’t haul back, slap him, and kick him out of the room. Actually, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world, and Herb went from holding himself up on that hand to running his palms over shoulders, pressing himself into the gesture as easily as if he'd been expecting it. It must've been what it felt like for a train, getting derailed by a penny.
He knew it must've been minutes later, because it felt like making out had when he was in high school, when the whole concept was so new and awesome that he could go on for ages just exploring the variations on it. Then his brain started to come down, and he leaned back enough to gather together a few words and start to re-learn what his own spit tasted like. "I- uh," he murmured lamely, averting his eyes. "Sorry about the pen, I-"
"It's alright. I think we both-" He laughed lowly - he had a very nice laugh - and Herb let himself keep settling and just listen. "I mean, some people whisper in my ear, or yell too close, and I just can't stand it-"
"What?" He leaned back, as he at last got his thoughts back into order hit by the one-two punch of 'I was just kissing the fucking Masochist' and 'what the hell is he getting at?'
"Landel's Institute. I was a patient there too.” He arched an eyebrow, and the scrutinizing looks, the strange silences, came into horrible focus with his next words. “Haven’t you ever thought you weren’t remembering everything? ‘Wright’?”
"What do you even- you-" Herb sputtered, shoving him toward the door hard enough that he was disappointed when he didn't knock the bastard over. "You son of a - you knew! You knew this whole time!"
"Appleby, you're not listening-"
"I don't need to listen to you! I don't need to believe you!" That last one looked like it stung. Good. Get him out of here, with his stupid mind games and power plays. Making up for being lousy at poker by trying to string along some bullshit story for the mental case, was he? Nice try, but Herb knew that being crazy wasn't the same as being helpless. "My life is enough without assholes like you thinking that a search on the internet and some undergrad psychology is going to win them a game. You're on the blacklist. Now get out."
The other man's face smoothed into a granite-cold neural as he straightened his coat with an offended tug, but he stopped in the middle of turning toward the door, voice crisp and concise. "Thomas Pierce. Murder. Those are your search terms."
"Fuck you," Herb hissed, prickly as a cornered cat, one hand curled into a fist.
"Look it up, Appleby." His flashy dress shoes tapped up the staircase, and Herb sunk into the nearest chair, shaking.
He'd waited until the bar closed to stalk up to Tony, dry-eyed and grim. "Fire him," he ordered, voice cooled to its normal pitch one more.
"I haven't died and made you the boss yet," Tony replied carelessly, sweeping a mop across the floor in front of the bar. "Nice try, though."
"He goes or I do," he replied, unmoving.
Tony stopped, plunking the mop into the bucket harder than was necessary. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"The piano guy." Herb looked of to the side, into the middle distance, eyes lidded in affected carelessness. "I'm sick of the love songs."
"Herb-" Mr. Plana rubbed a hand over his face, muting what sounded like a string of aggravated and possibly obscene words. It must not have been a very good night for him, either. "-listen. We're gonna talk about this tomorrow, when I'm sober and you're not so crazy."
They did not, actually, talk about it again. However, within a week they had a new piano guy, some guy with a shaved head. He just played jazz, and he never sang. For awhile, that was enough.
--
"You know it won't help."
Herb straightened in his chair, hands freezing in mid-motion, to look over at his boss, who he just realized had stopped reading the paperwork all over his desk to come and watch his employee do something he'd already told him not to do. Herb thought he probably looked comical holding a tiny band-aid over the nasty set of nail marks lining the right side of the customer's face, but he was adamant; he wasn't going to tell a customer to get out when they were sitting there in an unbreakable cycle, sobbing and drinking and sobbing and drinking some more (Let them drown their sorrows, the boss said). The man didn't have the legs to stand on anymore. He'd passed out some time ago.
Although Mr. Plana hadn't seen the events leading up to it, he was acting like he already knew them, but it was more likely he'd just heard the entire thing. Basically, there had been a scuffle at the bar, something between a husband who couldn't pay his tab and his dissatisfied wife, and Herb had intervened. One thing led to another and soon enough, the wife was heading out the door, leaving her husband with a promise she was leaving town in the morning and never wanted to see him again. Oh, and the nasty nail marks: something she left him so he would remember in the morning.
"You know I don't care," Herb shot back a little tiredly, rubbing one of his eyes as he gently pressed the band-aid in place. He sat back in his chair to glance over the scratches, starting to get frustrated at himself because he didn't know why, but they nagged at him. At first, he thought he just felt terrible for the poor guy, but the longer he'd sat there treating him, the more he'd realized the man's 'wounds' were jarring him for a decidedly different reason than 'That's gotta hurt'.
"You're right. I'd be losing customers if you did." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mr. Plana slowly shaking his head.
Sarcasm felt like background noise to Herb these days. He was silent for a few moments, cupping his head in one hand. "...I guess I just hate seeing blood." It wasn't that, of course, he was sure of it, and he knew he probably wasn't making an admirable effort to hide it. There was just... He shook his head.
"You look like you could use a drink," his boss remarked, and that surprised him so much he actually met his eyes for the first time all night. Maybe he looked as fed up as he felt.
"You aren't kidding," he replied simply, smirking. Leaving the room and the customer behind was probably the best thing he did all night--something he acknowledged as soon as those scratch marks were out of view.
--
Maria Morales looked doubtfully around the basement, putting down her battered plastic basin on the poker table and unfolding the two frayed towels inside it. “This is where you work, mister . . .?”
“Appleby,” Herb replied with a sheepish grin, looking over his shoulder and fixing his hair self-consciously. He knew it just looked absent-minded, but when you’d spent hours in therapy trying to become comfortable with the idea that your name actually belonged to you, you got self-conscious about failing at introductions.
Besides, giving a good introduction was probably a good idea before you led a woman you barely knew down into a poorly-lit basement.
Yep, I look trustworthy alright. The guy with the sweatshirt, the table of poker chips, the obvious lack of transportation, and- A high-pitched yap interrupted his internal monologue, and he smirked, wandering with his flashlight through the half-open storage door and finding the upended old laundry basket held down by a flat of beer bottles. -and the puppy.
He picked up the squirming mutt, wincing as it yelped and finally getting a grip on it that didn’t touch the blood-matted yellow fur on one of his right legs. “Hey, hey- easy-“ Ms. Morales was waiting by the door, and he put down the animal into the carefully-arranged nest of towels, looking up apologetically. “I don’t know what happened to him – he was in a parking lot about half a block away, and . . .” He trailed off – the woman was frowning down at the dog, quiet and thoughtful, in a way that made Herb wordlessly realize that he might not want to know what the people working at the animal shelter learned about how these things happened. At length she smiled quietly, tucking the bin in against one hip and freeing her hand to scratch behind a pair of floppy ears. He puppy looked up in that hopeful eyes-only way, tail wagging, and she laughed under her breath. “Aw, pobrecito. You’ve been brave, haven’t you.”
Herb would have laughed when the dog barked, as if in answer, except for the fact that it came about the same time as footsteps above them. “We should probably get you out of here. My boss won’t-“
“Herb!” And there he was, the man of the hour, tromping down the stairs with a determined glint in his eye. “You know the policy on animals in the bar.”
“And what exactly is the policy on animals in the bar?” Ms. Morales turned smoothly, slim arms wrapped firmly around her Tupperware of towel-and-puppy, and arched an eyebrow in the newcomer’s direction.
Mr. Plana was looking at Maria oddly – not unlike a man looks at a person who has just punched him in the gut – and Herb was smart enough to not reply with the actual policy, which was ‘not unless they’re going to be appetizers.’ “The, uh. The policy in the bar doesn’t matter, since we’re technically in the basement. And not the bar.” Herb cleared his throat, as if that would chase out the last bits of patently obvious bullshit. “Trick question, huh Mr. Plana?”
“. . . yeah.” The first response was quiet, lost in the distracting spectacle of his jaw feeling out its half of speaking, and it took a cough to dredge up a bit of his rough-edged self-assurance. “Yeah. Trick question.”
It didn’t take a psychic to tell that Maria wasn’t buying it, and it would’ve taken an idiot to miss the point, once she opened her mouth. “Tell me,” she told Tony, turning to stare him down in a way Herb’s brain struggled to connect to the lady who sold flowers on the corner and did house calls for the humane society. “Do you stop yelling at your employees for every woman, or am I just special?”
“You’re just- I mean, I-“ Tony was still struggling to piece together a sentence when Maria effortlessly asked him to get out of her way in a tone that was undeniably an order, and swept out of the room, puppy still firmly in hand.
“. . . have you met?” Herb asked at length, breaking the tense silence.
“No,” Mr. Plana looked like that troubled him, but Herb could tell in the way he didn’t question anymore that the answer was honest, or as honest as it could be. “We haven’t.”
--
It wasn’t every day that Tony Plana got wound up over a woman, but there was no denying that this was the case even a week after meeting María Morales. One way or another, she had made an impact on him.
‘Cause one way or another, he knew her from somewhere.
He shook it off at first. The hunch was still too strong to ignore. It began to tip him over the edge. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He needed to find out why.
People gave him strange looks that morning. In fact, so did he. When he got in front of the mirror, he gave himself the up-and-down; he had strayed from the expensive half of his wardrobe today. He was looking humble for a change, dressed in the same outfit he wore when he first strolled into town. He wasn’t used to the idea of dressing down to meet somebody, but then again, none of the people he’d met had worked at an animal shelter. He didn’t even know where it was. There couldn’t be that many of them, right?
He took his hat and hit the streets. The town wasn’t that big, so it wasn’t hard to navigate. Felt strange doing this, almost as if he should have done it earlier.
An hour passed. He was beginning to wonder if now would be a good time to head back. If he’d thought it a minute earlier, he might have missed her. A smile automatically spread across his face as he noticed her on the other side of the road. She seemed to be carrying something.
He didn’t know what he was thinking, but when she finally saw him, he walked over without invitation. Bad idea. She made a motion with the thing in her hand—turned out to be a champagne bottle—suggesting she was ready to heft it at him if he didn’t stop right there.
Well, he did.
He thought she seemed kind of embarrassed, but with how angry she looked, he got the feeling she was beyond being reasoned with right now.
But he would have stood there for as long as it took if it meant getting to talk to her. Maybe she knew that. Maybe that was why she turned and hurried away without a word.
--
He felt like an idiot. He was going off gut instinct, but it wasn’t working. Yet he still had to know why he thought that woman was...
The woman he dreamt about.
Why he thought it was a good idea to pursue this never quite occurred to him. He just knew he had to try.
Time for Plan B.
Since he couldn’t address the problem directly—she wasn’t going to listen—he went for the next best thing: the shrink. Maybe there had been some kind of mix-up at the pharmacy, but he didn’t want to be told that. He guessed he had been hoping she would somehow validate the feeling he knew María Morales. She didn’t. Instead, she was baffled. She brought up his file, saying there was nothing to suggest he had any affiliation with María. An idea began to form in his mind. He made his excuses, saying he’d see how it went and come back if it didn’t get better in a week. But he didn’t come back again.
If you didn’t count the break-in, anyway.
He managed to convince Herb they were hiding information from him. It could have been because he vaguely threatened to fire him if he didn’t agree to help. The kid just got his drivers’ license (Tony could drive, but it felt like so long ago since he’d done it that he didn’t know if he still could), so he was understandably nervous by the time they got there. He asked him to stall the heap out front while he found a way into the building and gave it a dust.
Security was pretty lax, he was glad to see. He supposed anyone in their right mind wouldn’t think to break into their shrink’s file cabinets, but when did he ever say his right mind was at work here? There were actually two files, each written by a different person. He waited until they were back at the club before starting on them.
The place was dark and empty when they got back. He flicked on a few inside lights—not enough to attract outside attention—and Herb followed the silent instruction to keep quiet. Tony pulled down a stool from the bar and opened up the first file. Looked like the shrink’s handwriting.
According to her professional opinion, he was put into weak positions because he let himself get beaten down; his delusions helped him conquer this, and he often felt the need to manipulate others as a result.
That was just the first page.
He gave a small sigh and glanced up at his selection. Where did Herb put all the hard stuff?
--
Herb thought he had hit rock bottom for a moment there, but coming out of it, he felt good. He spent about an hour in the bathroom, he thought, but it didn’t feel like that much time had passed. ...It was refreshing to look in the mirror and see he wasn’t sweating bullets anymore.
When he entered the bar area again, he--
“Whoa!”
He leapt toward the counter, zeroing in on the glass in Tony’s hand. He quickly snatched it up before it tilted too far, saving the sheets of paper underneath it from a sticky fate.
“What are you doing?” he said, slightly irritated. “You took those files to read, not—...”
He stopped talking as he took in the scene. Beside his boss was an empty bottle. On the floor was broken glass. Butts heaped in ashtray. Smoke everywhere.
Boss’s head down.
Okay, this is bad.
He decided against plucking the cigarette from between his fingers. He quietly brought a stool down and sat next to him. “Hey. You okay?” No answer. He nudged him a little to see if he was awake. Nothing but a hand twitch. “Come on,” he said, still quiet. “You don’t want customers seeing you, right?” Forget that it was three in the morning and they were closed for the night. It made him sit up and put out his cigarette, mumbling something under his breath. Herb asked for the louder version.
“I could’ve—” The rest of that sentence was unintelligible, which told Herb to start breathing through his nose as he helped the man to his feet.
It was so odd seeing him in this state. Despite the height he had on him, Herb couldn’t help feeling smaller at times because of the way Mr. Plana carried himself. He kind of admired him for that. After tipping a few, though, he acted like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. It didn’t suit him.
“You’ve had enough.” Stating the obvious, much? “Why don’t we get you to your office?”
Tony complied by shaking his head and shuffling toward the stairs—with Herb’s guidance. They went one step at a time, pausing briefly when Tony suddenly forgot how to walk. His whole weight was on him, pretty much, by the time they got to his office. It didn’t really bother him.
Once he’d sat his boss down on the bed, he gently removed his arm from around the man’s back. One firm hand on his shoulder held him in place.
Mr. Plana groaned and rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. He blinked at his employee for a moment.
“What are you...” he slurred, before giving up.
“Get some rest,” Herb replied with a soft smile. That was his cue.
--
At first, Herb had only meant to clean up the bar a little. Sweep up the broken glass, empty out the ashtrays, air out the room until he’d struck a reasonable balance between freezing to death and spontaneously developing no less than three forms of cancer. But eventually, the bar was clean, and it was just him, the long bike ride home into a not-the-greatest part of town, and the pair of files he’d just driven a terrifying, decrepit old beater to retrieve.
Herb, the files, and a bottle of beer adjourned to the basement.
It took him awhile to work through both of them, and he was tempted to give up by the time he got through the thicker of the two. Herb was sure his file looked about as flattering, but he’d like to think that he was smart enough to not read something like that about himself while feeling sorry for himself and within arm’s-reach of hard liquor.
The second file was full of photocopies, but that didn’t matter. There were more interesting things in there. Several of them sent the same creeping déjà-vu feeling washing over him as he flipped through the papers – police report, mug shots, cramped memos with descriptions of weapons and incidents. There was the Landel’s Institute letterhead, scattered throughout the file. And there was the name, right on the police report – Morales.
He couldn’t put into words why he ripped the single sheet with her name on it out of the file. Maybe he believed, even a little, all the things he’d read about in the first file, and he wanted to protect from that the nice woman who saved puppies and kitties. Maybe he wanted to spare his boss, who got all kinds of ideas into his head, who’s already had a rough time of it. But if he was going to be honest with himself – and he actually was, maybe more often than he wanted to be – he was starting to feel like this all went deeper than a handful of paranoid, crazy people stumbling around in the dark. There was an intuition that this was all too wrong and too deep sparking in the back of his brain. Sure, it was the same one that used to make him call himself a different name and say he’d never had a sister or a driver’s license or a fiancee, but it felt so right and he was so thirsty and desperate for anything, anything at all that felt like home.
That, and even he could tell that something flickered across the boss’ face when the woman’s name came up, and even if that first encounter in the basement had torpedoed their chances, he wanted to give that one glimmer of a chance – the kind of chance that you didn’t get when you came out the gate talking about conspiracies and mental hospitals.
When Herb gingerly set the files down on his desk, Tony snorted mid-snore, slitted an eye open, mumbled a low ‘whhryadoinurb.’
“Just cleaning up, boss,” Herb reassured with a grin, feeling the crumpled page crinkle in his pocket.
“Mmph.” Mr. Plana turned his face down into the mattress. “Get th’toilet while you’re at it.”
--
It was the sort of thing that took time – time for Mr. Plana to come back to the file and actually read the rest of it, time for him to process the gaps in his memory, time for him to let those well-oiled gears start turning. Herb didn’t mind. For the first time in years, he felt calm. Still jittery when things jumped in out of the edge of his memory, still confused, but there was an acceptance underpinning all of it. He felt like he could wait years, if that was what it took, to catch the right opening and find the truth.
For crazy, it felt pretty smooth.
“Herb,” he asked at length, one sunny late-afternoon as they stood outside the bar, Tony smoking and Herb watching him smoke. “You ever feel like something’s not right?”
“Every second of every day,” Herb answered smoothly, looking down at the small bouquet of sunny daisies and re-arranging it with a small smile. “But I believe in finding a reason to keep moving, too.” He looked at his watch, then pressed the bunch of flowers into Mr. Plana’s hands without looking up from his wrist.
“Herb, you’re not my type.” Tony looked critically down at his cigarette, visibly measuring how much closer to the filter he really wanted to smoke it. “For one thing, I bet you don’t kiss on the first –“
“Mr. Appleby?” The high-pitched voice raised itself over the approaching click-click of fashionable heels, and Herb looked up with a grin, pocketing his hands.
“Ms. Morales. Thanks for coming by.”
“Mm.” She looked doubtful about something – if by ‘something’ one meant the baffled-looking man standing on the sidewalk, flowers in hand, staring at her as if she’d just materialized from thin air. He wobbled back a half-step as his employee patted him on the shoulder.
“We’ll talk tonight, boss,” he told him, and headed back down to the basement.
--
Authors: Sue & Grace
Beta:
jennifer read some of it.Word Count: 7,589
Rating: PG-13? A bit of swearing.
Character(s): Phoenix (Herb Appleby), Manny (Tony Plana), Edgeworth (The Masochist), Meche (María Morales)
Pairing(s): Phoenix/Edgeworth, Manny/Meche
Summary: Post-Landels. As time goes by in their "real" lives, little things begin to remind them of who they really are.
Where he was from, he had a reputation. He couldn’t bear the thought of working at his old job again. The stress it caused him was what started this whole mess in the first place. When it came down to it, whether he was the talk of the town didn’t matter. He was a former mental patient. So the shrink, whom he found he couldn’t win over, gave him a ticket for the first train out of there, along with a word of advice:
Don’t come back.
Not the exact words she used, but he got the picture.
She told him this was his chance to make it big, start a new life for himself. For a guy like him, making it anywhere was impossible. He didn’t have the best track record, and that wasn’t even counting the time he thought his imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary. He could hold down a job, but he had to get one first. His rap sheet wouldn’t help him out there.
He just listened to the woman behind the desk in the hope he could glean something useful.
He didn’t set the stakes too high for himself. That way there was no room for disappointment, or so he thought. He got it anyway. No one wanted to hire the crazy guy. They had to turn him down or some of his reputation might rub off on them. Starting a business he could call his own was sounding better every day.
One day, he’d had enough of it. He was walking away from his last interview, cigarette in his teeth and eyes set on the bar across the way, when the guy came up to him and said he was hired. He had a way with words, or so he was told, that could breathe life back into the business. He wanted to get out of town and he needed someone to look after the joint when he was gone.
Tony had big plans for the little pub. The boss was so impressed by his efforts with the customers that he actually left town early. That paved the way for Tony’s expenses. He knew business in this town really boomed at night. Though not as many people knew his face around here, with his reputation, he and the ‘big boys’ were pals in no time.
In a matter of weeks, the renovations were finished and the bar was reopened. He had a handful of employees and a taste for expensive liquor he could get used to. Something was missing, though. He played around with the lighting a little until he realized he was wasting his time. Then he bought a piano, which didn’t help his debts, but became the center stage for a chance encounter.
It had been a long night. Most of his regulars had left already. The only company he had now was the guy nodding off at the counter. Maybe a bouncer was what he needed here. He shook his head and began to make his way upstairs.
That was when he heard the piano. Whoever was hitting those notes was no court composer. The playing was terrible. He took a few steps back, leaning over the rail to get a look at the offender.
He recognized the problem immediately. It was Herb Appleby, one of the patients who had been admitted the same day as him and released not long before.
He couldn’t really remember why he gave him the job. He was good for a laugh, breaking up fights, and not much else. But hiring him was probably the best business decision he’d made, because it took them less than a month to figure out he had a special talent.
He never lost at poker.
Now, Tony didn’t believe it at first. He was surprised when he lost to him, he could give him that, but at the time it just seemed like a fluke. Then he did it again. Before they knew it, people were lining up to see if they could beat him. Herb Appleby became the bar’s main attraction.
He always knew the kid had potential. That’s how he’d tell it, anyway.
Once upon a time, Herb had been engaged. He sort of remembered it, too, which wasn't bad for a guy who'd crashed his car bad enough to kill a girl and just about break his own brain in half. But there was something that was even more impressive, considering he'd only discovered it after the broken brain, the stay in the loony bin, and enough psych meds on his record to make most health insurance companies hesitant to even poke him with a ten foot pole until they were sure he was good and dead.
That thing was that Herb could beat anyone - anyone - at poker. He didn't even know how he did it. His ex had said he'd come back a changed man, and he guessed she was right, but the way he saw things now - not though people, but close, like they were made of smoked glass - suited him just fine. It seemed like it suited Mr. Plana fine, too. The boss got entertainment for his bar, something a lot better than a piano player or any kind of stupid shtick like that, and Herb got a paycheck for not much more than shuffling decks, stacking chips, and lounging at the beat-up little table in the basement.
It's wasn't perfect, but it was good. When you had a record like Herb Appleby's, you took good where you could get it. That was what he told himself, at least.
"Flowers, Herb." Tony had a rocking lilt to his voice that only swung into motion when he was joking, and it was such a better indicator than his face that, half the time, Herb didn't even look up when he spoke. "Really, I'd be touched, but I don't like marigolds."
"They're not for you. They're for the Masochist, when he shows up tonight." He took a seat at the bar, arranging the handful of late-September blooms tucked in a bit of what looked like leftover wrapping paper. "Have you still got that empty Patron bottle?"
"You're finally asking him on a date, huh." The voice was muffled by a foot of liquid-filled glass and another three inches of hardwood, never mind the clinking as Tony rummaged around under the bar.
"I think that he's allergic, actually," Herb replied lowly, smirking to himself and re-arranging the cluster of more-yellow blooms among the dark orange. "Besides, there was this lady selling them about a block away. I think the money goes toward some animal shelter or something."
The bottle clinked onto the countertop, followed by a pair of brown eyes and an eyebrow cocked in obvious intrigue. "Pretty?"
"Very pretty." A splash of water from the sink went into the bottle, and Herb waited until he was holding it to laugh and walk away. "And sweet. You'd get bored, Mr. Plana."
In retrospect, Herb would say later, his problems had probably started with the suit. If he was really going to be picky, he guessed he could take it a little further back, to the release of the smash hit blockbuster movie that, for Herb's purposes, had only been noteworthy because it glamorized poker. He never went to see it himself. Neither did Mr. Plana, but that didn’t stop him from deciding that dressing his card shark in a suit would be just the thing to pull in some extra business on Wednesday nights.
“Oh, no. No way. Not that.” Herb smirked and kept sorting through the department store discount rack, trying to ignore his boss and the pinstriped nightmare being held a foot from his face. “Not unless I get a bottle of moonshine and a Tommy gun to go with it.”
Unless one counted his expression going a little flatter and more nonplussed, Tony didn’t move. “Herb, you’ve got all your taste in your mouth. Now try this on and put away the blue thing. Blue isn’t dangerous.”
That was the ‘I write your paychecks’ voice. Herb laughed under his breath, taking the mobster’s nightmare and folding it over the suit already his arm. “I look good in blue,” he argued halfheartedly, even though the half-laugh and grin that worked so well at diffusing liquor-fueled disagreements didn’t work in the slightest when it came to charming his boss out of an idea. Tony seemed fixed, at least for the duration of this poker-celebrity experiment, on the idea of Herb seeming at once dangerous and attractive, with perhaps a hint of humor. Herb wondered if his job description had changed from “semilegal entertainment” to “romance novel protagonist” while he wasn’t looking.
He didn’t buy the blue thing, but not because he disliked it. It was because putting on the whole getup filled him with such a prickly, anxious déjà-vu that, at least five times while he was dressing, he almost stopped and threw the whole thing in the corner. Even once it was on, he felt inexplicably naked when he looked in the mirror and saw a bewildered, only half-familiar man looking back, left hand tracing up and down his lapel in the dreamy, unconscious certainty that something was missing there.
In the end, they bought the pinstripes. They bought a tie, too, though Herb never wore it – he just cruised in every Wednesday with his collar open, shirt unreliably ironed and face unreliably shaved, hair unreliably styled. The craze lasted maybe two months, and by the end of two months Herb knew the damage was done. He still saw the right shade of blue, and felt like his grave had been walked over.
He didn’t know if it was the kick he was getting from seeing all those big numbers, but it got to a point where he just couldn’t sleep at night. He told himself he was just keeping an eye on things--business rolled in at night, after all—but as soon as dawn rolled around, he was nowhere to be seen. When the town woke up, he fell into a deep sleep—a deep sleep full of nightmares of things he’d say he couldn’t dream up, but apparently not—and when he rose again in the afternoon, for the first few minutes, all he could think about was the woman he was leaving behind.
There were times he would just look up from what he was doing to stare at the door, waiting for someone to come in. But he wasn’t waiting for anyone. It only started to get to him because people were noticing. Herb, especially.
He began to wish his club could make a little bit extra. Even though it was third to the other businesses in town, it did well for itself. Herb tried to explain this to him. It didn’t help.
He decided it might clear his head a little if he went on a date. He had been told before that he didn’t know how to hold on to a woman, but he wasn’t doing it to prove that he could. It was see a woman or sulk in his office for the rest of the night; he was gonna become his best customer if he didn’t start getting out.
A month later, he began to forget the whole thing. They were more than friends now. He was on the level with her. Then, one day, she called him out on his past behavior, saying he was always keeping an eye out for a dame—it was obvious, she said—and did he break it off with her or what? He said he didn’t understand. She blew a gasket. He didn’t make much of an effort to calm her down. He had always been straight with her, but she may have had something.
The way he saw it, he had everything and nothing.
Back at the club, he wondered what he was even doing there. That was when Herb decided to walk in. Tony promptly went for the stairs to his office.
“Hey, boss.” As he passed him, he noticed he was raising an eyebrow. “Wait. Why did you come back here? What happened with the date?”
He paused at the bottom of the stairs to look back at him. “I wanted to get an early start tomorrow,” he replied, not missing a beat.
Herb was looking skeptical after that remark—he hadn’t even seen Mr. Plana in the morning, not since their days at the institute. He shook his head. “I don’t get it. You hadn’t seen her in days.”
“Yeah, well, she had a rough week.”
It was almost as if he wasn’t listening, Herb thought. His curious and concerned gaze followed his boss up the stairs. His boss ignored it.
On his fourteenth game in the basement, The Masochist first managed to start a conversation.
"Do I know you from somewhere?" He'd asked from behind the cards, rearranging them redundantly.
Herb shrugged. "Newspaper, maybe. Online news. That's the only place I can think of."
"What got you in the newspaper?"
"Ran my car off a bridge. Killed my little sister." He basked in the horrified silence, and maybe it was just the easiness of knowing he wouldn't be pestered again, but the game seemed especially short that night. He didn't open his mouth again until the Masochist was at the door, coat in hand, and only then lifted an eyebrow as he offered the vague soundbite of explanation. "Not on purpose."
"I beg your pardon?" He turned, brows furrowed, hesitating.
"My sister. It was an accident." He didn't know what had gotten into him; he never tried to defend his own innocence, these days. It was a habit you got broken of pretty quickly once you realized your own brain was mixed-up beyond repair, and you'd been pinning blame in all the wrong places. But in that moment, he wanted this guy - this stupid, obsessed, ostentatious guy - to know. He wanted more than that, even. He wanted him to believe.
The Masochist's face smoothed into something unreadable, and he nodded, leaving without another backward glance. "I'd assumed as much."
If Herb had been asked where his gut told him the trouble had started, sure, he would have said the suit. But if he’d been asked for the first thing that had been quantifiable evidence – something his therapist, one phone number change and three Greyhound bus rides away, would have called an episode - it was probably in the bathroom, a handful of months later.
On his way out, Herb looked into the bathroom mirror, studying himself, the practically invisible constellations of scars down his hands and arms that he'd always just assumed were left over from the accident. He leaned in closer and squinted at his own face. There were two little pale points, perfectly symmetrical, just up under the insides of his eyebrows. He had a half-memory of wearing a too-large pair of sunglasses while he was younger and that was the fashion, being hit in the face with a volleyball during a game and getting the nosepieces rammed up under his browbone hard enough to draw blood.
Why didn't that seem right?
He scrutinized the reflection for another solid minute, then sighed, leaning back and raking his hand through the same unmanagably thick black hair he always meant to get cut, because even if the naturally-occurring spikes were cool, he was getting little old for that. The man mirrioring his actions earned a sidelong glance and derisive snort, tired and still a little hungover.
"Who the hell are you, anyway?"
*
The world started again. Herb, flat on his back on the questionably clean tile, squinted up through the haze of cigarette smoke as someone spoke.
"Hijole, kid. Tell me you're gonna get that outta your system before customers show up."
Tony was stooped over him, hands on his knees, looking down at him as if he were an alarming yet fascinating insect. He was blurry; Herb blinked a few times, and his vision cleared enough to recognize worry buried somewhere in that expression too. "Nnh?" His throat felt scratchy, dry.
"The screaming and just about breaking the door off the hinges,” Tony explained, though having to spell it out flattened his features into the familiar ‘you have got to be kidding me’ stare. It seemed like Herb got more and more of those, these days.
"Oh." That wasn't a joke. Tony wouldn't joke about something like that. For once, Herb wished he could feel something more than mildly distressed, though that might have been more than his usual laconic affect. He was tired, achy down to his bones, even the ones that he could tell hadn't been slammed against walls or the floor. He sat up slowly, plastering a smile into place. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm good to work."
Tony unfolded himself to his full five and a half feet, regarding his employee uncertainly before sighing and ashing his cigarette in the trash can on the way out. "Your call."
“Ever get the feeling you’re not worth it?” he said to Herb one night, out of the blue. He had a habit of saying things that turned heads, but that wasn’t his intention this time. Not really.
Herb slowly set his glass down, casting a wary eye on his boss.
“You found the scotch, didn’t you.”
“You should learn to hide things better.”
“I’d learn from the best if he didn’t shut himself up in his office all day.”
Tony brushed it off by tilting his head and taking a long drag on his coffin nail. He blew out a ring of smoke. “How’d the game go?”
“Why are you even asking?” Herb replied with a smirk, swirling around his grape juice. “You know who my opponent was.”
Tony looked over at him after a moment. “Think he’ll ever quit?”
It had been a landmine. The piano guy hadn't seen it coming, and in retrospect Herb had realized that the consequences had been just as senseless as blowing off his leg because he'd stepped a little too far to the left. He played well, and he had a nice voice, and he did that pale-pretty-brooding thing so well that he probably brought in business all by himself. That didn't change what had happened, though.
Romance Friday, by the bar calendar. Night twenty-one, by The Masochist's calendar. Game twenty-seven, by the alternate calendar. It had been two games since he'd last tried a conversation, and three since he'd succeeded. Herb was clearly losing his touch.
"Why do you stay down here on Fridays, Appleby?" he asked, as ever without any kind of preface, raising his voice above the piano and low crooning that filtered down into the basement.
Herb re-arranged a card, though the distraction was just for show. He didn't even need to prattle to know he had this one in the bag. "It's because I hate love songs."
The Masochist snorted in his ostentatiously refined sort of way, lifting an eyebrow without looking up from his hand. "Cute. The real reason?"
"Besides the entertainment being questionably legal?" Herb shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I don't like people."
"You're lying."
The cool challenge was not as off-putting as the eyes boring into his with unprecedented scrutiny, and Herb actually stuttered through the attempted incredulous laugh, taken aback. "Wh- what?"
The other player put down his hand and circled closer, taking a sleek silver pen from a pocket hidden within his coat. "It doesn't happen when you're playing, but . . . your eyebrow. Right here, under the inside corner. It flinches when you-" The line of gleaming metal swiveled up at a little silver point scar maybe two centimeters out, and Herb could've sworn he felt his heart stop and every light in the room go supernova. For a second - it felt like just a second, at least - he was pinned down to his chair and helpless, incoherent with pain, the figure leaning over him ready to take the shining thing and aim for his brain and just shove -
"-do? Appleby- damn it, say something-" the Masochist was ranting, and Herb first dizzily wondered who the hell cursed that crisply. He said 'damn it' like he'd never actually spoken the words before, only seem them printed in a book.
"Ah- sorry. Don't know where that came from." He closed his eyes tightly, digging a hand in the headache-spot over his temple and wishing his brain would settle back down. He had to stop doing this. He didn't want to go back to being on meds.
"Here- don't do that." The rebuke was surprisingly gentle, and Herb complied to the strong hand trying to dig his hand back out of his hair and lift him to his feet. He glanced up at the other man, and he'd barely caught a glimpse of his face before the guy looked like he recognized something, or maybe remembered it. And he kissed him.
That wasn’t the funny part. The funny part was that Herb didn’t haul back, slap him, and kick him out of the room. Actually, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world, and Herb went from holding himself up on that hand to running his palms over shoulders, pressing himself into the gesture as easily as if he'd been expecting it. It must've been what it felt like for a train, getting derailed by a penny.
He knew it must've been minutes later, because it felt like making out had when he was in high school, when the whole concept was so new and awesome that he could go on for ages just exploring the variations on it. Then his brain started to come down, and he leaned back enough to gather together a few words and start to re-learn what his own spit tasted like. "I- uh," he murmured lamely, averting his eyes. "Sorry about the pen, I-"
"It's alright. I think we both-" He laughed lowly - he had a very nice laugh - and Herb let himself keep settling and just listen. "I mean, some people whisper in my ear, or yell too close, and I just can't stand it-"
"What?" He leaned back, as he at last got his thoughts back into order hit by the one-two punch of 'I was just kissing the fucking Masochist' and 'what the hell is he getting at?'
"Landel's Institute. I was a patient there too.” He arched an eyebrow, and the scrutinizing looks, the strange silences, came into horrible focus with his next words. “Haven’t you ever thought you weren’t remembering everything? ‘Wright’?”
"What do you even- you-" Herb sputtered, shoving him toward the door hard enough that he was disappointed when he didn't knock the bastard over. "You son of a - you knew! You knew this whole time!"
"Appleby, you're not listening-"
"I don't need to listen to you! I don't need to believe you!" That last one looked like it stung. Good. Get him out of here, with his stupid mind games and power plays. Making up for being lousy at poker by trying to string along some bullshit story for the mental case, was he? Nice try, but Herb knew that being crazy wasn't the same as being helpless. "My life is enough without assholes like you thinking that a search on the internet and some undergrad psychology is going to win them a game. You're on the blacklist. Now get out."
The other man's face smoothed into a granite-cold neural as he straightened his coat with an offended tug, but he stopped in the middle of turning toward the door, voice crisp and concise. "Thomas Pierce. Murder. Those are your search terms."
"Fuck you," Herb hissed, prickly as a cornered cat, one hand curled into a fist.
"Look it up, Appleby." His flashy dress shoes tapped up the staircase, and Herb sunk into the nearest chair, shaking.
He'd waited until the bar closed to stalk up to Tony, dry-eyed and grim. "Fire him," he ordered, voice cooled to its normal pitch one more.
"I haven't died and made you the boss yet," Tony replied carelessly, sweeping a mop across the floor in front of the bar. "Nice try, though."
"He goes or I do," he replied, unmoving.
Tony stopped, plunking the mop into the bucket harder than was necessary. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"The piano guy." Herb looked of to the side, into the middle distance, eyes lidded in affected carelessness. "I'm sick of the love songs."
"Herb-" Mr. Plana rubbed a hand over his face, muting what sounded like a string of aggravated and possibly obscene words. It must not have been a very good night for him, either. "-listen. We're gonna talk about this tomorrow, when I'm sober and you're not so crazy."
They did not, actually, talk about it again. However, within a week they had a new piano guy, some guy with a shaved head. He just played jazz, and he never sang. For awhile, that was enough.
"You know it won't help."
Herb straightened in his chair, hands freezing in mid-motion, to look over at his boss, who he just realized had stopped reading the paperwork all over his desk to come and watch his employee do something he'd already told him not to do. Herb thought he probably looked comical holding a tiny band-aid over the nasty set of nail marks lining the right side of the customer's face, but he was adamant; he wasn't going to tell a customer to get out when they were sitting there in an unbreakable cycle, sobbing and drinking and sobbing and drinking some more (Let them drown their sorrows, the boss said). The man didn't have the legs to stand on anymore. He'd passed out some time ago.
Although Mr. Plana hadn't seen the events leading up to it, he was acting like he already knew them, but it was more likely he'd just heard the entire thing. Basically, there had been a scuffle at the bar, something between a husband who couldn't pay his tab and his dissatisfied wife, and Herb had intervened. One thing led to another and soon enough, the wife was heading out the door, leaving her husband with a promise she was leaving town in the morning and never wanted to see him again. Oh, and the nasty nail marks: something she left him so he would remember in the morning.
"You know I don't care," Herb shot back a little tiredly, rubbing one of his eyes as he gently pressed the band-aid in place. He sat back in his chair to glance over the scratches, starting to get frustrated at himself because he didn't know why, but they nagged at him. At first, he thought he just felt terrible for the poor guy, but the longer he'd sat there treating him, the more he'd realized the man's 'wounds' were jarring him for a decidedly different reason than 'That's gotta hurt'.
"You're right. I'd be losing customers if you did." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mr. Plana slowly shaking his head.
Sarcasm felt like background noise to Herb these days. He was silent for a few moments, cupping his head in one hand. "...I guess I just hate seeing blood." It wasn't that, of course, he was sure of it, and he knew he probably wasn't making an admirable effort to hide it. There was just... He shook his head.
"You look like you could use a drink," his boss remarked, and that surprised him so much he actually met his eyes for the first time all night. Maybe he looked as fed up as he felt.
"You aren't kidding," he replied simply, smirking. Leaving the room and the customer behind was probably the best thing he did all night--something he acknowledged as soon as those scratch marks were out of view.
Maria Morales looked doubtfully around the basement, putting down her battered plastic basin on the poker table and unfolding the two frayed towels inside it. “This is where you work, mister . . .?”
“Appleby,” Herb replied with a sheepish grin, looking over his shoulder and fixing his hair self-consciously. He knew it just looked absent-minded, but when you’d spent hours in therapy trying to become comfortable with the idea that your name actually belonged to you, you got self-conscious about failing at introductions.
Besides, giving a good introduction was probably a good idea before you led a woman you barely knew down into a poorly-lit basement.
Yep, I look trustworthy alright. The guy with the sweatshirt, the table of poker chips, the obvious lack of transportation, and- A high-pitched yap interrupted his internal monologue, and he smirked, wandering with his flashlight through the half-open storage door and finding the upended old laundry basket held down by a flat of beer bottles. -and the puppy.
He picked up the squirming mutt, wincing as it yelped and finally getting a grip on it that didn’t touch the blood-matted yellow fur on one of his right legs. “Hey, hey- easy-“ Ms. Morales was waiting by the door, and he put down the animal into the carefully-arranged nest of towels, looking up apologetically. “I don’t know what happened to him – he was in a parking lot about half a block away, and . . .” He trailed off – the woman was frowning down at the dog, quiet and thoughtful, in a way that made Herb wordlessly realize that he might not want to know what the people working at the animal shelter learned about how these things happened. At length she smiled quietly, tucking the bin in against one hip and freeing her hand to scratch behind a pair of floppy ears. He puppy looked up in that hopeful eyes-only way, tail wagging, and she laughed under her breath. “Aw, pobrecito. You’ve been brave, haven’t you.”
Herb would have laughed when the dog barked, as if in answer, except for the fact that it came about the same time as footsteps above them. “We should probably get you out of here. My boss won’t-“
“Herb!” And there he was, the man of the hour, tromping down the stairs with a determined glint in his eye. “You know the policy on animals in the bar.”
“And what exactly is the policy on animals in the bar?” Ms. Morales turned smoothly, slim arms wrapped firmly around her Tupperware of towel-and-puppy, and arched an eyebrow in the newcomer’s direction.
Mr. Plana was looking at Maria oddly – not unlike a man looks at a person who has just punched him in the gut – and Herb was smart enough to not reply with the actual policy, which was ‘not unless they’re going to be appetizers.’ “The, uh. The policy in the bar doesn’t matter, since we’re technically in the basement. And not the bar.” Herb cleared his throat, as if that would chase out the last bits of patently obvious bullshit. “Trick question, huh Mr. Plana?”
“. . . yeah.” The first response was quiet, lost in the distracting spectacle of his jaw feeling out its half of speaking, and it took a cough to dredge up a bit of his rough-edged self-assurance. “Yeah. Trick question.”
It didn’t take a psychic to tell that Maria wasn’t buying it, and it would’ve taken an idiot to miss the point, once she opened her mouth. “Tell me,” she told Tony, turning to stare him down in a way Herb’s brain struggled to connect to the lady who sold flowers on the corner and did house calls for the humane society. “Do you stop yelling at your employees for every woman, or am I just special?”
“You’re just- I mean, I-“ Tony was still struggling to piece together a sentence when Maria effortlessly asked him to get out of her way in a tone that was undeniably an order, and swept out of the room, puppy still firmly in hand.
“. . . have you met?” Herb asked at length, breaking the tense silence.
“No,” Mr. Plana looked like that troubled him, but Herb could tell in the way he didn’t question anymore that the answer was honest, or as honest as it could be. “We haven’t.”
It wasn’t every day that Tony Plana got wound up over a woman, but there was no denying that this was the case even a week after meeting María Morales. One way or another, she had made an impact on him.
‘Cause one way or another, he knew her from somewhere.
He shook it off at first. The hunch was still too strong to ignore. It began to tip him over the edge. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He needed to find out why.
People gave him strange looks that morning. In fact, so did he. When he got in front of the mirror, he gave himself the up-and-down; he had strayed from the expensive half of his wardrobe today. He was looking humble for a change, dressed in the same outfit he wore when he first strolled into town. He wasn’t used to the idea of dressing down to meet somebody, but then again, none of the people he’d met had worked at an animal shelter. He didn’t even know where it was. There couldn’t be that many of them, right?
He took his hat and hit the streets. The town wasn’t that big, so it wasn’t hard to navigate. Felt strange doing this, almost as if he should have done it earlier.
An hour passed. He was beginning to wonder if now would be a good time to head back. If he’d thought it a minute earlier, he might have missed her. A smile automatically spread across his face as he noticed her on the other side of the road. She seemed to be carrying something.
He didn’t know what he was thinking, but when she finally saw him, he walked over without invitation. Bad idea. She made a motion with the thing in her hand—turned out to be a champagne bottle—suggesting she was ready to heft it at him if he didn’t stop right there.
Well, he did.
He thought she seemed kind of embarrassed, but with how angry she looked, he got the feeling she was beyond being reasoned with right now.
But he would have stood there for as long as it took if it meant getting to talk to her. Maybe she knew that. Maybe that was why she turned and hurried away without a word.
He felt like an idiot. He was going off gut instinct, but it wasn’t working. Yet he still had to know why he thought that woman was...
The woman he dreamt about.
Why he thought it was a good idea to pursue this never quite occurred to him. He just knew he had to try.
Time for Plan B.
Since he couldn’t address the problem directly—she wasn’t going to listen—he went for the next best thing: the shrink. Maybe there had been some kind of mix-up at the pharmacy, but he didn’t want to be told that. He guessed he had been hoping she would somehow validate the feeling he knew María Morales. She didn’t. Instead, she was baffled. She brought up his file, saying there was nothing to suggest he had any affiliation with María. An idea began to form in his mind. He made his excuses, saying he’d see how it went and come back if it didn’t get better in a week. But he didn’t come back again.
If you didn’t count the break-in, anyway.
He managed to convince Herb they were hiding information from him. It could have been because he vaguely threatened to fire him if he didn’t agree to help. The kid just got his drivers’ license (Tony could drive, but it felt like so long ago since he’d done it that he didn’t know if he still could), so he was understandably nervous by the time they got there. He asked him to stall the heap out front while he found a way into the building and gave it a dust.
Security was pretty lax, he was glad to see. He supposed anyone in their right mind wouldn’t think to break into their shrink’s file cabinets, but when did he ever say his right mind was at work here? There were actually two files, each written by a different person. He waited until they were back at the club before starting on them.
The place was dark and empty when they got back. He flicked on a few inside lights—not enough to attract outside attention—and Herb followed the silent instruction to keep quiet. Tony pulled down a stool from the bar and opened up the first file. Looked like the shrink’s handwriting.
According to her professional opinion, he was put into weak positions because he let himself get beaten down; his delusions helped him conquer this, and he often felt the need to manipulate others as a result.
That was just the first page.
He gave a small sigh and glanced up at his selection. Where did Herb put all the hard stuff?
Herb thought he had hit rock bottom for a moment there, but coming out of it, he felt good. He spent about an hour in the bathroom, he thought, but it didn’t feel like that much time had passed. ...It was refreshing to look in the mirror and see he wasn’t sweating bullets anymore.
When he entered the bar area again, he--
“Whoa!”
He leapt toward the counter, zeroing in on the glass in Tony’s hand. He quickly snatched it up before it tilted too far, saving the sheets of paper underneath it from a sticky fate.
“What are you doing?” he said, slightly irritated. “You took those files to read, not—...”
He stopped talking as he took in the scene. Beside his boss was an empty bottle. On the floor was broken glass. Butts heaped in ashtray. Smoke everywhere.
Boss’s head down.
Okay, this is bad.
He decided against plucking the cigarette from between his fingers. He quietly brought a stool down and sat next to him. “Hey. You okay?” No answer. He nudged him a little to see if he was awake. Nothing but a hand twitch. “Come on,” he said, still quiet. “You don’t want customers seeing you, right?” Forget that it was three in the morning and they were closed for the night. It made him sit up and put out his cigarette, mumbling something under his breath. Herb asked for the louder version.
“I could’ve—” The rest of that sentence was unintelligible, which told Herb to start breathing through his nose as he helped the man to his feet.
It was so odd seeing him in this state. Despite the height he had on him, Herb couldn’t help feeling smaller at times because of the way Mr. Plana carried himself. He kind of admired him for that. After tipping a few, though, he acted like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. It didn’t suit him.
“You’ve had enough.” Stating the obvious, much? “Why don’t we get you to your office?”
Tony complied by shaking his head and shuffling toward the stairs—with Herb’s guidance. They went one step at a time, pausing briefly when Tony suddenly forgot how to walk. His whole weight was on him, pretty much, by the time they got to his office. It didn’t really bother him.
Once he’d sat his boss down on the bed, he gently removed his arm from around the man’s back. One firm hand on his shoulder held him in place.
Mr. Plana groaned and rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. He blinked at his employee for a moment.
“What are you...” he slurred, before giving up.
“Get some rest,” Herb replied with a soft smile. That was his cue.
At first, Herb had only meant to clean up the bar a little. Sweep up the broken glass, empty out the ashtrays, air out the room until he’d struck a reasonable balance between freezing to death and spontaneously developing no less than three forms of cancer. But eventually, the bar was clean, and it was just him, the long bike ride home into a not-the-greatest part of town, and the pair of files he’d just driven a terrifying, decrepit old beater to retrieve.
Herb, the files, and a bottle of beer adjourned to the basement.
It took him awhile to work through both of them, and he was tempted to give up by the time he got through the thicker of the two. Herb was sure his file looked about as flattering, but he’d like to think that he was smart enough to not read something like that about himself while feeling sorry for himself and within arm’s-reach of hard liquor.
The second file was full of photocopies, but that didn’t matter. There were more interesting things in there. Several of them sent the same creeping déjà-vu feeling washing over him as he flipped through the papers – police report, mug shots, cramped memos with descriptions of weapons and incidents. There was the Landel’s Institute letterhead, scattered throughout the file. And there was the name, right on the police report – Morales.
He couldn’t put into words why he ripped the single sheet with her name on it out of the file. Maybe he believed, even a little, all the things he’d read about in the first file, and he wanted to protect from that the nice woman who saved puppies and kitties. Maybe he wanted to spare his boss, who got all kinds of ideas into his head, who’s already had a rough time of it. But if he was going to be honest with himself – and he actually was, maybe more often than he wanted to be – he was starting to feel like this all went deeper than a handful of paranoid, crazy people stumbling around in the dark. There was an intuition that this was all too wrong and too deep sparking in the back of his brain. Sure, it was the same one that used to make him call himself a different name and say he’d never had a sister or a driver’s license or a fiancee, but it felt so right and he was so thirsty and desperate for anything, anything at all that felt like home.
That, and even he could tell that something flickered across the boss’ face when the woman’s name came up, and even if that first encounter in the basement had torpedoed their chances, he wanted to give that one glimmer of a chance – the kind of chance that you didn’t get when you came out the gate talking about conspiracies and mental hospitals.
When Herb gingerly set the files down on his desk, Tony snorted mid-snore, slitted an eye open, mumbled a low ‘whhryadoinurb.’
“Just cleaning up, boss,” Herb reassured with a grin, feeling the crumpled page crinkle in his pocket.
“Mmph.” Mr. Plana turned his face down into the mattress. “Get th’toilet while you’re at it.”
It was the sort of thing that took time – time for Mr. Plana to come back to the file and actually read the rest of it, time for him to process the gaps in his memory, time for him to let those well-oiled gears start turning. Herb didn’t mind. For the first time in years, he felt calm. Still jittery when things jumped in out of the edge of his memory, still confused, but there was an acceptance underpinning all of it. He felt like he could wait years, if that was what it took, to catch the right opening and find the truth.
For crazy, it felt pretty smooth.
“Herb,” he asked at length, one sunny late-afternoon as they stood outside the bar, Tony smoking and Herb watching him smoke. “You ever feel like something’s not right?”
“Every second of every day,” Herb answered smoothly, looking down at the small bouquet of sunny daisies and re-arranging it with a small smile. “But I believe in finding a reason to keep moving, too.” He looked at his watch, then pressed the bunch of flowers into Mr. Plana’s hands without looking up from his wrist.
“Herb, you’re not my type.” Tony looked critically down at his cigarette, visibly measuring how much closer to the filter he really wanted to smoke it. “For one thing, I bet you don’t kiss on the first –“
“Mr. Appleby?” The high-pitched voice raised itself over the approaching click-click of fashionable heels, and Herb looked up with a grin, pocketing his hands.
“Ms. Morales. Thanks for coming by.”
“Mm.” She looked doubtful about something – if by ‘something’ one meant the baffled-looking man standing on the sidewalk, flowers in hand, staring at her as if she’d just materialized from thin air. He wobbled back a half-step as his employee patted him on the shoulder.
“We’ll talk tonight, boss,” he told him, and headed back down to the basement.
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