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[big bang theory/xf] nothing important happened today - r (2/3)
Title: Nothing Important Happened Today 2/3
Rating: R, for language, death imagery
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory (Penny/Sheldon)
Length: 27000 words
For notes and thanks, plus awesome art, please see the masterpost
continued from part one
Their first flight was uneventful, once Cooper had bullied the flight attendants into catering to his ridiculous demands.
"Can I see the case notes again?" Penny asked when he was finally situated to his satisfaction, after at least an hour and a half in the air. If he had twisted in his seat one more time, she would have chucked him out the emergency exit.
"Can you?"
"Yeah, can I?"
"No, you may not."
Mostly uneventful, Penny corrected in her mental notes. She would leave out the part about requesting to be moved to a new seat so she didn't murder her partner.
---
They changed planes in Dallas; their flight plan might have made sense to a lunatic, but it certainly didn't make sense to Penny. Not long after takeoff, Cooper finally fell asleep on his newest just-unwrapped and presumably still sanitized-for-his-protection airline pillow.
Penny peeled her fingers from the armrest between them, shaking out the stiffness as her hands slowly uncurled. For years her reputation had been no-nonsense, ready-for-anything. A tomboy, albeit one who never met a pink she didn't like. But there were still some things that had her quaking in her dozens of pairs of shoes, flying being chief among them. She'd grown up hearing too many stories: mid-air abductions, planes that vanished, the cousin who swore she witnessed an extra-tee ship that brought down a commercial jet. And that didn't even touch the impossibility of man-made tubes of metal flying through the air in the first place. The world had changed a lot, but something as simple as air travel — something that pre-dated the revelations, even — made zero sense to her.
She gave the flight attendant a grateful smile when the woman handed her a full can of diet soda and a small bottle of vodka. Maria was printed on the wing-shaped name tag on her tight blue vest.
Cooper had been calling her Miss Stewardess.
"On the house," Maria told Penny. Under the recently refreshed makeup it looked like her angry flush was still fading, leaving patches of bright color high on her cheekbones and brightening her eyes. "Not that anyone would blame you, but you wouldn't believe the paperwork if you pushed him out in mid-flight."
There was a general rumble of disappointment from the passengers around them who'd been subjected to Cooper's irritated, irritating, and high-handed manner before he succumbed to the Ambien Penny dropped in his ginger ale just after they boarded.
Before the last seats were filled, Cooper had already unwrapped and shaken out a tiny airline blanket in the aisle — whipping it into the faces of at least three of their fellow passengers — and draped it over himself. He struggled for a few minutes, fussing with the blanket the whole time before giving up. The thin square of fabric barely reached his lap, kept in place by one corner tucked into the crook of his elbow. His legs were jammed up against the seat in front of him, with his knees raised up almost as high as his chin.
Penny caught her breath the first time he slammed a kneecap into the latched tray table. She expected him to pitch a fit, full of demands and regurgitated passenger safety guidelines the way he had on the first flight. But he only grimaced and squirmed until he could slide his feet under the carry-on bag he had stuffed under the seat. Squinting through the gap between seats, she saw a strip of pink scalp partially obscured by wisps of soft white hair and a chunky knot of gold dangling from an elongated earlobe. The woman turned her head, revealing the loose, papery skin at her jaw and an unobtrusive hearing aid as she smiled at her companion.
After a few more minutes of Cooper's restless fidgeting, Penny muttered and started to stand, crouching under the overhead bin and reaching over to get the woman's attention. Rudeness be damned, she couldn't take another second of his thrashing.
Before she could speak, Cooper caught her elbow and dragged her back down into her seat.
"Just tell her to move her seat back," she hissed. He let go of her arm sooner than she expected and she cracked her other elbow into the narrow window.
"I'm fine," he protested, looking nothing but as he shifted yet again. He kicked the bag under the seat in front of him.
"But—"
"I'm not going to make someone's meemaw move just to give me another two inches of space."
She thought he was joking at first; he'd done nothing but insist on his comfort to the exclusion of everyone else almost from the moment they met. But his face flushed once the words burst out of him in a furious whisper, and he turned away and closed his eyes. Within minutes his breathing slowed and his expression softened as the drugs kicked in.
Penny kept an eye on him to make sure he was really out. She took a swig of vodka from the bottle, leaving the diet soda untouched in case she needed to drop another pill.
In sleep, Cooper looked almost normal, if you didn't notice his rigid posture and the peculiar way his arms folded over his chest. His head lolled against the pillow wedged between him and the seat back, his long neck fully exposed. His mouth dropped open, enough to make his breath audible but not quite enough to tip him over into snoring. There were dark shadows under his eyes that she hadn't noticed before, and creases across his forehead and around his eyes. A half-day's growth of hair shadowed his jaw and chin, patchy in places. He probably wouldn't have a full beard if he did let it grow.
She thought he was somewhere in his early thirties, but like this he looked almost a decade younger, closer to her own age. Even under the harsh lights of the cabin — the same lights that turned her reflection into a horror show in the cramped bathroom of the last plane.
Twenty minutes later, Penny was flagging down Maria for another tiny bottle. Cooper had moved only a little in his sleep, slumping ever so slightly toward her. But his folded arms had slipped, the blanket drifting farther down into his lap. He looked more like a regular guy, at last, and less like a tightly-wrapped mummy she was trying to smuggle across the country. She hoped he wasn't a snorer; his mouth drooped farther open with every minute.
When Maria brought the vodka, Penny said, "Can you let me know when you're ready to do the cart so I can get his elbow out of the aisle? He should be down for the count, but just in case...."
Maria checked her watch. "We should be starting the snack service in about five or ten minutes." She carefully reached over Cooper and touched Penny's wrist. "Thank you for whatever you did to knock him out. He's flagged on the passenger manifest as a nuisance but, well. None of us had any idea just how bad it would be in real life."
It was the weirdest thing. Listening to Maria say exactly what Penny had been thinking while Cooper slept between them, she had an almost irresistible urge to defend him while he couldn't do it for himself. He was rude, sure. An abrasive, condescending, smug, infuriating jackass — did she mention rude? But then there had been that minuscule flinch when she called him Moonpie, and the whispers that followed him across the campus that time she'd seen him at Quantico.
She bit down on the side of her tongue and smiled at the flight attendant, grateful when she moved away to answer a summons a few rows behind of them. When they brought out the cart and started up the aisle, Penny rearranged the tiny blanket to capture both of his arms across his chest. She leaned over to tuck the edge of the blanket in between his hip and the armrest and nearly toppled over on top of him when someone tapped her on the back and cooed, "Oh, doesn't he look precious?"
Penny pushed off of him and plopped back down in her own seat. The old woman sitting in front of Cooper was turned around in her seat. The only part of her that was visible over the seat back was the top of her head, from just under her eyes up to the wispy twist of hair on top of her head.
"My husband used to do that," she said. "That man could have fallen asleep on top of a freight train. Just sit him down and he was out like a light."
"Oh! We're not—" Penny rushed to say.
"Have you been married long?"
"No! We're—"
"Oh, on your honeymoon then? Isn't that sweet! I'll leave you alone then." She gave Penny an obnoxious wink. As she turned around to face forward again, she stuck a finger in her ear and twisted. There was a loud squeaking noise as her hearing aid powered down.
A couple who did look like they were headed for a honeymoon beamed at her from across the aisle, then looked back at Penny. They held up their hands, waggling their ring fingers almost in unison.
"Congratulations," she said weakly, then sank back into her seat and tried to hide behind Cooper's shoulder without actually touching him. Was everyone in the world insane and she'd only just started noticing?
Hiding didn't last long. With nothing else to do she found herself staring out the window, directly into the huge turbine dangling from the ridiculously fragile-looking wing. Wisps of cloud streamed over and under the metal, sometimes looking so much like smoke that her heart leapt up into her throat. The flight attendants rolled back up the aisle, collecting empty cups and pretzel bags as they went. Penny waited until they passed and the 'fasten seatbelts' light dinged off, then unclipped hers and leaned forward. She'd stuck her magazine in her bag as she juggled her badge and plane ticket, then threw the whole thing in the bin overhead without thinking. So now she was stuck either imagining their imminent death by Canada goose or reading the fascinating SkyMall catalog that had half the pages ripped out. There wasn't even a barf bag in the pouch under her tray table.
Cooper shifted. The blanket came untucked and his elbow emerged again, sticking a good three inches out into the aisle. Penny grabbed at his sleeve and he jerked when her fingers brushed against the skin of his wrist. One foot kicked out, dislodging the bag wedged under the seat in front of him.
When he was settled again, Penny leaned forward and carefully pulled the bag free. She had intended to just move it to her side, to give him more room, but found herself unzipping the front compartment instead. She pulled out a folder and twisted the release on her tray so she could spread out the documents.
Sneaking glances at him every few seconds to make sure he wasn't about to catch her snooping, she went through everything in the small carry-on bag. There wasn't anything particularly interesting, just some newspaper clippings from around the country and case files that didn't seem to have anything to do with the two dead bodies in Pasadena.
The intercom came on and the captain mumbled something about descent, then the seatbelts sign lit up. Penny stuffed everything back into Cooper's bag and stowed it at her feet. She buckled herself in and closed her eyes, hoping it would deter Maria from trying to commiserate with her again as she made a last check of the cabin before landing.
A week ago, Penny had been exhausted, frustrated, a little hungover. Bored silly. Then: exhilarated, once she got the news that she was wanted at the Felt. Terrified, nervous... It seemed like she'd run through every possible emotion by the time she reported to Director Gablehauser's office.
She showed up almost twenty minutes early, a heroic feat given the delays reported all along the Camden line. But Gablehauser's secretary, a prune-faced woman with a shock of red hair, left her cooling her heels for another fifteen after her appointment time. When she was finally ushered into the inner office, a cloying, sickly-sweet smell almost made her gag.
Gablehauser was everything his reputation promised, all slick and hustle with even white teeth and too orange a tan to be anything but artificial. His hair was perfect, slicked back with what had to be industrial-strength product and probably a little gray-covering color as well. He stood when Penny entered, offered her a hand to shake — complete with index finger gliding over the inside of her wrist as he let go. He held on to the back of her chair as she sat, as though they were in the middle of a restaurant and he was checking out the view down her dress.
There was another man in the office, leaning against the wall in between a shaded window and a tall filing cabinet. Judging by the height of the window, he was just under six feet, with brown hair and a full beard. He nodded at Penny but didn't introduce himself. Gablehauser didn't introduce him either, keeping his full attention focused on Penny for most of the next two hours.
It felt more like two days.
The conversation started out normal enough, getting-to-know-you kind of stuff that she'd expected. Gablehauser was careful not to look like he was prying, careful to stick to questions that a human resources representative would have found tame. In the corner behind him, the other man drummed his fingers on the cabinet and shifted from one foot to the other. After twenty minutes or so, he cleared his throat and reached into his pants pocket to pull out a pack of cigarettes.
Gablehauser turned to look at him for the first time, opened his mouth to say something and then shut it just as quickly and turned back to Penny with a pained smile.
The smoker came out of his corner and dropped into the chair next to Penny. He tapped his lighter against the paper and cellophane pack balanced on his knee, and Gablehauser tore a drawer open with what sounded like a curse under his breath. He rummaged around for a few seconds, then pulled out a glass ashtray and shoved it across the desk so hard it would have flown off the end if the smoker hadn't caught it.
"Gee, thanks," he sneered. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
Penny couldn't stop herself. "Do you mind?"
"Relax, sweetheart, they're cloves," he said, disdain dropping away from every word the way ashes floated down to coat his shirt and lap before he brushed them into gray smears.
It just went downhill from there. While Penny was still bristling, Gablehauser took advantage of her distraction to press his offer. He told her in no uncertain terms that the only reason she'd been pulled from the training course was because they needed her for one thing, and one thing only.
The Creepy Clove Smoker smirked.
"Ignore him," Gablehauser barked. "I'm the one who calls the shots here, Agent. And I'm the one who decides whether your career lives or dies. If Agent Cooper so much as sneezes without a handkerchief, I want to know it before you're done wiping the snot off your face."
In her lap, her hands balled into fists. She fought to keep her expression neutral.
Gablehauser sat back and smoothed down his red silk tie, then stacked his hands on top of his head. He smiled, the white of his teeth jarring against his orangey skin. "Of course, if you play along, there's no telling how far you'll go."
---
The drive to Pasadena took almost three hours. Without seeing a map, she couldn't be sure but Penny was convinced it had taken twice as long as should have. At a minimum. One thing they hadn't covered in training was how to convince a senior agent to drive more than twenty-five miles an hour.
"Maybe they should add a course in how not to get intoxicated on airplanes," Cooper shot back.
Or maybe she could get special tutoring in How To Keep Your Mouth Shut For A Change.
Cooper signaled a turn that Penny had to squint to make out. It was at least a hundred yards away. Maybe two. She'd never been great at judging distances; it was a lot easier to gauge a yard when it was already marked on the field for you.
"Those bottles are bigger than they look, bub." She smoothed the seatbelt already lying flat across her chest. "Bub, sir."
Apparently his unscheduled nap restored his glare to full strength. Penny swiped at her cheek to get it off.
The turn Cooper was aiming for took them onto First Street and right down through the main business district. She recognized most of the buildings from the slide show and tried to snap to attention. Contrary to what she let Cooper think, her alcohol tolerance was pretty high — a handy side effect of a misspent youth and a healthy appetite for a good time. At most, she was feeling warm and cozy from the travel-sized bottles Maria had handed over free of charge. Her head and vision were still clear.
Even the frustration of crawling down the highway at speeds that would embarrass her grandma didn't chap her ass too much. Which, when she thought about it, was a pretty good sign that maybe she wasn't as sober as she thought.
The blinker came on as they crossed Front Street, creeping around the giant fish sculpture someone had plunked down in the middle of a perfectly good intersection. Penny glanced at the directions Cooper had pulled from a file folder and clipped to the dashboard with some gadget he fished out of a pocket. Their motel, the Pasadena Inn, was on Tillamook, more than a mile away. A small line of text under the motel's fifties-looking logo caught her eye.
"It says check-in isn't until eight." She lifted the corner of the page to read the radio's clock. It was just after three, local time. Which she knew was as exact as it could be; he refused to turn on the engine until he'd reset and recalibrated every single gadget and readout in the entire car. "We've got five hours, Cooper."
He slapped her hand away, slowing even further as he did. "You can tell time! I wondered, this morning."
"So, where are we going?"
"The motel."
"For what?"
"To check in."
New Year's was too far off, so Penny had made a New State resolution instead: to not let him get under her skin. It wasn't going as well as she'd hoped.
"Why don't we check in at the police department first? Instead of pissing off the people who are going to be cleaning our toilets for the next few days?"
"'Cleaning our toilets'," he repeated with a snicker. "Good one."
It felt like she'd left her brain somewhere over Boulder or back home in Maryland. Maybe the vodka hadn't been such a good idea. Maybe it was more potent when you guzzled it in mid-air as you tried to keep from jumping out of your skin every time something creaked.
Cooper pulled up to the motel's lobby entrance and turned off the car. Penny waited in the car, pretending to be engrossed in picking at the nail polish on her fingernails while he went in to check them in early.
The front doors were propped open with a concrete block and a large concrete ashtray. A dusty display window next to the doors gave a good view of the dingy-looking lobby in all its harvest gold and orange, plaid and paisley splendor. A stocky, well-built man was hunched over the desk, his dark hair smoothed down with some kind of product. He straightened as Cooper approached, but he didn't smile.
As Penny watched, the clerk's face got redder and redder. She wished she'd learned how to read lips somewhere along the way. Finally it looked like the clerk was able to get a word in edgewise. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, narrowed his eyes, and then bent back down to whatever he'd been doing before they pulled up.
Cooper came storming out less than ten seconds later, muttering under his breath and glaring at the man through the window.
"No dice?" Penny asked as he started adjusting his seat and mirrors again. She wasn't even trying to disguise her smug tone.
"We'll check in with local law enforcement first," Cooper said, as if that had been his plan all along.
---
"Didn't know they let the feebs leave DC," someone mock-whispered behind Penny.
She whirled around to give whoever it was a piece of her mind but couldn't tell which of the fat, stupid, local cops was the culprit. They were all smirking. Snickering into their mustaches or multiple chins. If only they'd arrived in Pasadena a few hours earlier, she thought. She didn't doubt for a second that that very morning there would have been a cloud of powdered sugar hanging in the air as they chortled over their totally hilarious snide comments.
Maybe she should have stuck with waitressing. At least there you got tipped sometimes.
Cooper was standing on the other side of the room by the fingerprint and photo station. He had a thin folder open in his hands and another waiting on the counter, the sum total of the local investigation into the deaths of Alicia Azlynn and David Underhill. It seemed like the FBI had invested more time and energy in getting Penny and Cooper to Pasadena than Pasadena had spent on two of its recently deceased.
The Chief of Police — who'd introduced himself as a captain for some reason — was with him, arms folded over his belly. He was a large, round man with a kind-looking face and hair that looked like it was losing a long-standing battle against male pattern baldness. As Cooper flipped through the few pages stapled to the inside cover and made his own snide comments, the Chief stood placidly by, like a cow waiting for its cud to come back up.
The man was wearing sweatpants on duty, for crying out loud.
Someone came up behind Penny and cleared their throat. She turned slightly to see a pale skinny man with curly hair. One side of his mouth quirked up in a brief smile. "So, do they even have guns in the FBI, or do you all just carry staplers around?"
Before she could spit out a retort, his smile widened into a grin and he made a gesture like he was warding her off.
"Just kidding, I swear. I'm Sussman. Stuart! Well, Detective Sussma— you can, uh, call me Stuart."
He blushed a little when she shook his hand.
"Did you guys really come all the way out here for those two abductees?"
Penny forced a smile. He looked harmless, but she'd seen his name all over the notes Cooper had let her look at before he kicked her out of the office at the Felt. Stuart Sussman was the investigating officer who had signed off on both of the tiny files Cooper was looking through. Not that it meant anything in a town this small. He was probably the investigating officer on half of the cases that passed through the station.
She wasn't sure how to respond — had they come all this way just for these two people? There were hundreds of extra-tee abductions and dumps across the country every year, maybe thousands, and the Terror had a veritable army to handle them. What was it that Cooper found so interesting about these two? And what did he think he could do about it? He was just a basement-dwelling burnout, with a reputation for weirdness that was dwarfed the respect he earned in his short time as an analyst. Come to think of it, she wondered, how had he even gotten clearance to take on this nothing of a case?
And where did all this leave her?
The silence stretched out until the very air between them felt brittle. She wasn't the only one to notice, either. Stuart made an awkward gesture toward the desks, gave her a sheepish smile, and excused himself.
Penny felt her head turn to watch him go but not much else registered. She barely remembered his question, and couldn't have answered it even if she wanted to. Her breath caught in her throat at the realization that no matter what she did here, her career at the FBI was destined to be a very short one. Like her dad used to say, she was screwed if she did and screwed worse if she didn't. Gablehauser hadn't pulled her out of the Academy to set her on the fast-track to an office on the top floor, no matter what promises he'd made about what she could expect if she fell in line.
The director hitched her star to a black hole, and there wasn't a single damn thing she could do about it.
She stalked over to Cooper and snatched the folder away. A quick glance showed that the locals had far less information than what Cooper had gathered, in a much shorter time and at a considerable distance. She looked over at the chief, whose expression hadn't changed one bit.
She smiled. "I don't suppose we could take a look at the dump site, could we?"
His brow furrowed for a second, then he hitched up his sweatpants. Penny tried not to notice when the drawstring, already precarious, threatened to give way altogether. From the look of things, the chief should have traded up a size or two a few dozen doughnuts ago.
Cooper gave her a strange look over the man's shoulder.
"What? There is still a dump site, isn't there?"
"Of course there's still a dump site," Cooper said. He added a lifted eyebrow and tilted his head toward the chief, whose features had smoothed back out into a pleasant, if vacant, smile.
Penny saw his eyebrow and raised him another one. Whatever that meant to him, it was apparently the right thing. He grabbed the other file folder off the counter and stepped toward her, then pivoted on his toes like a sentry at Arlington.
"We'll be on our way." His voice had taken on an oddly formal tone, at odds with the rude words that came out of his mouth next. "I'd thank you for your help, if you'd been any help at all."
The chief didn't seem to mind, though. He smiled at Cooper's rapidly retreating back, then patted Penny on the shoulder before wandering away in the opposite direction.
Stuart caught up to her at the exit. Cooper was just outside, at the top of the steps leading down to the street. He had a hand over one eye and was staring straight up at the sky. The skin of his neck stretched tight over his adam's apple. He looked like some kind of human crane, all sharp angles and disproportional limbs. She wondered how knobby his knees were.
"I'll tag along, if you don't mind," Stuart said as he held the door open for her.
"And if we do mind?" She didn't bother to disguise the bite in her voice. He might be just a small-town cop, but he wasn't anywhere near as oblivious as his boss. He knew exactly what message he was sending.
But instead of giving back as good as he got, he smiled again. "Then I guess I'd just tag along anyway."
---
Stuart drove them out to the site in a squad car. Cooper refused to get into the back seat, so Penny found herself staring at the back of his head through the wire barrier.
For most of the drive, Stuart kept up a running monologue about the town, the people they passed, businesses that used to be where new ones were failing. Her eyes were probably starting to glaze over.
Cooper was oblivious. Early that morning when Penny thrust a map at him and told him to navigate their way from Leonard's to Baltimore, he claimed that reading in the car made him sick to his stomach. But now he was poring through the thin files again. What he was looking for, Penny couldn't even begin to guess.
They parked in a turnout that Stuart said was about half a mile from the clearing where the bodies were found. Cooper led the way down the path, his long stride taking him far ahead of her and out of sight around a bend just a few yards into the woods. Stuart trailed behind at enough of a distance that she almost forgot he was there by the time she reached the end of the trail.
Cooper was standing in the middle of a patch of the dark green growth Penny recognized from the photos. The yellow blooms had died, leaving only a few stubborn, stiff, browned flowers still clinging on here and there.
"That's right about where they were," Stuart called to her partner.
"I know. Penny, let me see your recorder."
She dug it out of her pocket. Cooper caught it easily, surprising both of them from the look on his face. He didn't acknowledge her again for a while.
When he bent low and started running his hands through the plants like he was testing something, Penny rambled around the clearing. She wanted to see if she could identify all the angles captured in the photographs. Hoping something would jump out at her, something that would let her in on why exactly Cooper had flown them all this way when it looked like every other extra-tee dump she'd ever heard of or read about.
She still hadn't found anything by the time Cooper made a satisfied noise and straightened. It was the same sound he'd made back in the office when she finally managed to get her login to work on the telnet connection. He clicked off the recorder and slipped it into the pocket of the tan windbreaker he'd added to his outfit once they landed in Oregon. At least it covered up the eye-searing shirt he had on under his sweater.
"We're done here," he announced, heading back the way they came without waiting to see if anyone would follow.
They'd been in the woods for less than ten minutes.
When they got back to the police station, at Cooper's insistence, Stuart locked the empty interview room and helped another officer drag a folding table into the adjacent observation room. Penny carried in the chairs while Cooper ignored everyone.
Once they were alone, he opened his bag and started spreading out the files he'd brought with him from DC.
"What are you—"
He cut her off. "They might still be watching. Or listening. Sit down and act like you know what you're doing."
Penny flattered herself that she was a pretty good actress when she needed to be but there was no disguising that she was completely out of her depth here. She felt like the rookie she was, flailing along behind him while he indulged in whatever crazy was in his head.
She sat. "What am I supposed to be doing?"
"Just go through the files, look like you found something every so often. Take notes," he said in a low voice.
He peered at her over the pile of metal and wires he was pulling from his bag. "Pretend you're in class: you haven't read the assignments yet and you're trying to keep the instructor from calling on you."
That Penny could do. Lord knew she had plenty of practice.
"What are you doing?"
"It would take too long to explain."
Like she had anything better to do?
While Cooper tinkered with the mess he'd made on the table, she flipped through files. Again. She'd already looked through most of them while he was passed out on the plane, and they didn't make any more sense on a second pass. It was like trying to read in a foreign language; some things looked familiar, or tickled at her brain like she should know what they meant. Every time she opened her mouth to ask him a question, he either ignored her completely or fumbled with some piece of equipment and glared.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. Her headache from the night before was starting to roar back to life.
"Can we go get something to eat after this? I haven't had anything since Dallas."
He jerked when she spoke, almost as if he'd forgotten she was there, and blinked.
"You know, food? Eat?"
"There's a Bob's Big Boy near our motel. That's why I chose it," he said, and went back to his pile of junk.
"Okay," Penny said under her breath.
Was this another test? Was he doing this on purpose to see how long it would be before she cracked? Or was this just Cooper being Cooper?
Whatever it was, she was tired of playing along by his rules. She shoved the useless files into a jumbled stack on the edge of the desk and opened the police files on the two abductees instead. When Cooper continued to ignore her, she started reading things out loud. Maybe if she annoyed him well enough, he'd get flustered and distracted long enough for her to talk him into getting out of this cramped room.
"Wow, she weighed more than me? Must have been the implants. I wonder where she got them done; Pasadena doesn't seem like the kind of place where...."
Cooper's head shot up when she trailed off. "What?"
Penny looked up. "She's not from here," she said. She yanked off the paper clip holding a tiny newspaper clipping to the back of the folder. Nothing more than a gossip column with a few lines devoted to the hot new barmaid at a local dive, it had been covered up with pages of handwritten pages that looked like someone ripped them out of a child's notebook. Cooper grabbed the clipping out of her hand, almost ripping it in his haste.
"She moved here six months ago?" He scratched his earlobe. "There was nothing about that in the files I had."
"Well, apparently you missed something."
"But I don't miss things," he protested weakly.
---
Penny stabbed her country-fried steak again, sawing with the dull knife in an attempt to get a chewable piece bigger than the end of her finger. The overcooked meat skidded around the plate, fork scraping on the ceramic with a god-awful screech.
The woman in the next booth huffed a loud sigh. "Animals," she grumbled to no one in particular.
Penny scraped the fork again. Everything about this place got her hackles up: the grinning doll heads all around the room, the tables squeezed too close together, her partner sitting on the other side of the booth bitching about the amount of onion on his Big Boy. Her country-fried steak tasted like country-fried ass, and the gravy on her mashed potatoes looked like mucus. Her Diet Coke was flat. And if the old guy at the table by the salad bar didn't stop coughing, she was going to have to hold him down and pour water down his throat.
Cooper pushed away his plate. "This is completely inedible," he grumbled. He kept his voice down, though. Their waitress had already put the fear of God into him when he tried to return his onion rings for the third time.
He reached into his bag and pulled out one of the folders they had snuck out of the police station.
"We're not stealing it," Cooper had said when Penny tried to talk him out of it. "We're borrowing it overnight in the course of our investigation, which is a permissible activity as codified in section 16.2 of the Bureau's rules of engagement on domestic investigations!"
His voice went alarmingly squeaky on that last.
"Then why don't you just ask if we can have it?"
He just glared at her until she threw up her hands and let him do whatever he wanted.
The woman in the next booth had apparently had enough of their manners — she'd complained about little else the whole time they'd been sitting there — and got up to leave. As she passed their table, she muttered something about hooligans, then shrieked like someone was chasing her down with a meat cleaver.
Penny reached for the holster hidden in the small of her back and scanned the room, steeling herself for an imminent attack. But nothing looked out of the ordinary, except for the woman now running for the exit, the restaurant manager hurrying after her, and the photos Cooper had fanned out all over his side of the table.
The autopsy photos.
"Jesus, Sheldon!" She let go of the butt of her gun and practically leaped across the table. "This is so not the time."
He batted her hands away from the pictures. "My meemaw's the only one allowed to call me Sheldon."
Penny gaped at him. "What?" What? What did that have to do with anything?
"My meemaw's the only one allowed to call me Sheldon. You can keep calling me Cooper, or any colorful epithet of your choice."
He pushed on the hand she had planted on top of a particularly gruesome shot of the inside of Dave Underhill's chest cavity. She dropped back onto the bench on her side of the booth.
"I'd prefer it if you didn't call me Moonpie again, though," he went on. "It's a family nickname that has unfortunately taken on new and less flattering meaning in the last few years, given my..."
He looked up and met her eyes for the first time since— Actually, Penny couldn't remember the last time he'd looked her in the face. It seemed like most of the past two days she'd been talking to the back of his head or the side of his face or, once, unforgettably: his pointy elbow a split second before it banged her in the forehead as he pried his suitcase out of the trunk of her car.
"My reputation," he finished, spitting the word like he couldn't stand the taste of it on his tongue.
Penny kept her attention on her food, embarrassed anew at having called him that to his face. She wanted to apologize but her brain went blank. She couldn't think of a single thing to say that she could be sure wouldn't come out just as insulting so she resolved to keep her mouth shut.
Unfortunately, her mouth had never had any trouble running off before her brain could catch up.
"Are you close to your meemaw?" What?
"I haven't seen her in twenty years," Cooper said.
Penny darted a glance up, hoping she hadn't upset him all over again. What was with her? Since when did she even care?
"She and my older brother were abducted when I was eight."
And apparently the rest of her body was now working in concert with her mouth and totally without her permission. She watched as if from a distance as one of her hands reached across the table and covered Cooper's. He didn't pull away and Penny braved another look at his face. He was staring out the window next to them, his jaw working like he was fighting to keep something in.
"What happened?" She tried to use the no-nonsense investigator's tone she'd been practicing late at night, but it came out little more than a whisper.
He pulled his hands out from under hers, folded them on the table. "I told you, they were abducted."
What could she say to that?
---
The bar where the gossip column said Alicia had been working was just a block away from the restaurant, so Penny pocketed the keys and started walking. Cooper had no choice but to follow.
Inside, Penny hung back while he bellied up to the bar and passed a picture to the bartender, who took one quick glance and shrugged.
"Oh, I'd remember her," he said, giving Cooper a conspiratorial look. "She single?"
"She's dead."
The man blanched, the color draining out of his face so fast Penny thought he might pass out. "Oh, shit," he stammered. "I'm sorry, I didn't know. I just started here about two weeks ago."
He wiped his forehead with a bar towel and leaned heavily against the counter behind him. Penny moved in closer when she saw his eyes dart around the room and was glad she did when he turned to Cooper and whispered, "Did they get her?"
Cooper dropped his voice. "Tell me what you know about them."
The bartender's eyes shot up toward the ceiling. The bar towel fluttered out of his hand as he crossed himself.
Penny turned away and caught a glimpse of someone ducking back into the kitchen. She stopped and waited, and sure enough, someone stuck their head out again. It was almost funny watching the girl's eyes get bigger when she realized she'd been seen.
She reached back and swiped the photo Cooper had left on the bar.
"Excuse me," she called, holding the picture out toward the girl. "Did you know her?"
The girl adjusted the headband holding her bright red hair off her face. "Yeah, I guess."
"So she worked here?"
"For like five minutes. She didn't look much like that picture either: darker hair, not as skinny. She just up and didn't show one day. I figured she found something better."
Penny nodded and tried to look friendly. "I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself. I'm Penny, and the guy at the bar is Cooper. We're trying to figure out what happened to her. What's your name?"
"Ramona," the girl said. She tilted her head to get a better look behind Penny. "Cooper, you say?"
"That's what we call him. Were you friends with Alicia?"
Ramona gave her a withering look and went back to checking out Cooper. "I knew her well enough to know she was no good, how about that?"
"What about David Underhill? Did he ever come in?"
"Dave?" Ramona laughed. "He practically lived here. He taught at the college, you know, so smart. He was totally wasted on this town."
Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, Penny reminded herself that married didn't always mean what she thought it should. "Sounds like you knew him pretty well."
"Oh, everybody knew Dave."
"Did Alicia?"
The question was enough to finally drag Ramona's attention away from the way Cooper sat stiffly on a stool, tapping his fingers against the rail. The look on her face was pure venom.
"What do you think her 'something better' was?"
She stalked away, making a beeline for the bar. Something alerted Cooper to her approach and he looked briefly over his shoulder. Ramona tossed her hair when their eyes met, then wedged herself into the space between him and the next stool. She leaned in when he leaned back slightly, until her breast brushed against his upper arm. And then she started twirling a lock of hair around one finger.
Cooper didn't seem to notice, just tilted a little farther away from the woman. He didn't break off his conversation with the still-sweating bartender either. Penny caught the look Ramona shot at the poor guy, who stammered something unintelligible and all but ran for a customer at the other end of the bar.
Penny choked back a laugh at the bewildered look on Cooper's face. He twisted on his seat, away from Ramona, and stood.
"Did you see that?" he asked, indignant. "What a rude man."
"Must have been something you said." Apparently it was Penny's turn to get the stink-eye as Ramona's oblivious prey slipped away. She pretended not to notice and pulled the car keys out of her pocket. "You ready to head back? It's after check-in time, finally."
"Why are your keys out? We walked here." He peered at her eyes and sniffed the air as she got closer. "Are you drunk again?"
"I'm not drunk, Cooper. Let's just go."
But he was like a terrier with a rat in its teeth once the idea got in his head.
"I realize that this is your first assignment, and you're hardly what I would call field-ready in any sense of the term, but this is unacceptable behavior, Penny. You can't just stumble around in an alcoholic haze from one location to the next as if...."
She tuned him out as they walked up the street toward the restaurant where they'd left the car. She was still puzzling over what Ramona had told her. If Alicia and Underhill were involved, there was no sign of it in any of the official documents they'd seen. Hardly surprising, given that it had taken all of five minutes to close their cases. But why these two people? Why had the extra-tees picked them? And why were they taken at different times?
They crossed the parking lot of the convenience store a few lots down from the bar. Cooper was still going strong, adding a wave of his arms every now and then.
"Granted, there doesn't seem to be a great deal to do in the vicinity but drink and eat substandard—"
She stopped and smacked her forehead. "Oh, that's it! Cooper, where did the Underhills live? It's not around here, is it?"
He looked peeved at having to interrupt his monologue on the ills of unprofessional conduct. "No, they had a house on Rubicon, by the university. Why?"
"Because he drank here," she headed back to the bar. "And I bet that's not all he did!"
"Why on earth would he be on this side of town when there's a perfectly good—"
But Penny was already too far away to find out what was perfectly good elsewhere.
Ramona was still standing where they'd left her, wedged between two stools. She was chewing out the bartender, who looked like he wanted to sink into the floor. When he saw Penny barrel through the door, he made a noise like a startled cat and ducked out of sight below the bar.
"Underhill," Penny said, "he met his girlfriends here, right? Or picked up whoever was available that night, whatever. Where did he take them?"
Ramona stiffened like the proverbial poker. "I really wouldn't know," she said. But her eyes flicked to the side, and it was all Penny could do to keep from reaching out to shake her.
"Where did he take you, Ramona?"
She flushed an angry red, the blotchy color spreading down over her neck and chest. "The motel on Tillamook. The Pasadena Inn."
The same motel they were staying in. Well, that could be interesting. Penny breathed a thank you and turned to go.
"Wait," Ramona called after her. "Your partner, is he... You know, available?"
"Trust me, you do not want to go there."
continued in part three
Rating: R, for language, death imagery
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory (Penny/Sheldon)
Length: 27000 words
For notes and thanks, plus awesome art, please see the masterpost
continued from part one
Their first flight was uneventful, once Cooper had bullied the flight attendants into catering to his ridiculous demands.
"Can I see the case notes again?" Penny asked when he was finally situated to his satisfaction, after at least an hour and a half in the air. If he had twisted in his seat one more time, she would have chucked him out the emergency exit.
"Can you?"
"Yeah, can I?"
"No, you may not."
Mostly uneventful, Penny corrected in her mental notes. She would leave out the part about requesting to be moved to a new seat so she didn't murder her partner.
---
They changed planes in Dallas; their flight plan might have made sense to a lunatic, but it certainly didn't make sense to Penny. Not long after takeoff, Cooper finally fell asleep on his newest just-unwrapped and presumably still sanitized-for-his-protection airline pillow.
Penny peeled her fingers from the armrest between them, shaking out the stiffness as her hands slowly uncurled. For years her reputation had been no-nonsense, ready-for-anything. A tomboy, albeit one who never met a pink she didn't like. But there were still some things that had her quaking in her dozens of pairs of shoes, flying being chief among them. She'd grown up hearing too many stories: mid-air abductions, planes that vanished, the cousin who swore she witnessed an extra-tee ship that brought down a commercial jet. And that didn't even touch the impossibility of man-made tubes of metal flying through the air in the first place. The world had changed a lot, but something as simple as air travel — something that pre-dated the revelations, even — made zero sense to her.
She gave the flight attendant a grateful smile when the woman handed her a full can of diet soda and a small bottle of vodka. Maria was printed on the wing-shaped name tag on her tight blue vest.
Cooper had been calling her Miss Stewardess.
"On the house," Maria told Penny. Under the recently refreshed makeup it looked like her angry flush was still fading, leaving patches of bright color high on her cheekbones and brightening her eyes. "Not that anyone would blame you, but you wouldn't believe the paperwork if you pushed him out in mid-flight."
There was a general rumble of disappointment from the passengers around them who'd been subjected to Cooper's irritated, irritating, and high-handed manner before he succumbed to the Ambien Penny dropped in his ginger ale just after they boarded.
Before the last seats were filled, Cooper had already unwrapped and shaken out a tiny airline blanket in the aisle — whipping it into the faces of at least three of their fellow passengers — and draped it over himself. He struggled for a few minutes, fussing with the blanket the whole time before giving up. The thin square of fabric barely reached his lap, kept in place by one corner tucked into the crook of his elbow. His legs were jammed up against the seat in front of him, with his knees raised up almost as high as his chin.
Penny caught her breath the first time he slammed a kneecap into the latched tray table. She expected him to pitch a fit, full of demands and regurgitated passenger safety guidelines the way he had on the first flight. But he only grimaced and squirmed until he could slide his feet under the carry-on bag he had stuffed under the seat. Squinting through the gap between seats, she saw a strip of pink scalp partially obscured by wisps of soft white hair and a chunky knot of gold dangling from an elongated earlobe. The woman turned her head, revealing the loose, papery skin at her jaw and an unobtrusive hearing aid as she smiled at her companion.
After a few more minutes of Cooper's restless fidgeting, Penny muttered and started to stand, crouching under the overhead bin and reaching over to get the woman's attention. Rudeness be damned, she couldn't take another second of his thrashing.
Before she could speak, Cooper caught her elbow and dragged her back down into her seat.
"Just tell her to move her seat back," she hissed. He let go of her arm sooner than she expected and she cracked her other elbow into the narrow window.
"I'm fine," he protested, looking nothing but as he shifted yet again. He kicked the bag under the seat in front of him.
"But—"
"I'm not going to make someone's meemaw move just to give me another two inches of space."
She thought he was joking at first; he'd done nothing but insist on his comfort to the exclusion of everyone else almost from the moment they met. But his face flushed once the words burst out of him in a furious whisper, and he turned away and closed his eyes. Within minutes his breathing slowed and his expression softened as the drugs kicked in.
Penny kept an eye on him to make sure he was really out. She took a swig of vodka from the bottle, leaving the diet soda untouched in case she needed to drop another pill.
In sleep, Cooper looked almost normal, if you didn't notice his rigid posture and the peculiar way his arms folded over his chest. His head lolled against the pillow wedged between him and the seat back, his long neck fully exposed. His mouth dropped open, enough to make his breath audible but not quite enough to tip him over into snoring. There were dark shadows under his eyes that she hadn't noticed before, and creases across his forehead and around his eyes. A half-day's growth of hair shadowed his jaw and chin, patchy in places. He probably wouldn't have a full beard if he did let it grow.
She thought he was somewhere in his early thirties, but like this he looked almost a decade younger, closer to her own age. Even under the harsh lights of the cabin — the same lights that turned her reflection into a horror show in the cramped bathroom of the last plane.
Twenty minutes later, Penny was flagging down Maria for another tiny bottle. Cooper had moved only a little in his sleep, slumping ever so slightly toward her. But his folded arms had slipped, the blanket drifting farther down into his lap. He looked more like a regular guy, at last, and less like a tightly-wrapped mummy she was trying to smuggle across the country. She hoped he wasn't a snorer; his mouth drooped farther open with every minute.
When Maria brought the vodka, Penny said, "Can you let me know when you're ready to do the cart so I can get his elbow out of the aisle? He should be down for the count, but just in case...."
Maria checked her watch. "We should be starting the snack service in about five or ten minutes." She carefully reached over Cooper and touched Penny's wrist. "Thank you for whatever you did to knock him out. He's flagged on the passenger manifest as a nuisance but, well. None of us had any idea just how bad it would be in real life."
It was the weirdest thing. Listening to Maria say exactly what Penny had been thinking while Cooper slept between them, she had an almost irresistible urge to defend him while he couldn't do it for himself. He was rude, sure. An abrasive, condescending, smug, infuriating jackass — did she mention rude? But then there had been that minuscule flinch when she called him Moonpie, and the whispers that followed him across the campus that time she'd seen him at Quantico.
She bit down on the side of her tongue and smiled at the flight attendant, grateful when she moved away to answer a summons a few rows behind of them. When they brought out the cart and started up the aisle, Penny rearranged the tiny blanket to capture both of his arms across his chest. She leaned over to tuck the edge of the blanket in between his hip and the armrest and nearly toppled over on top of him when someone tapped her on the back and cooed, "Oh, doesn't he look precious?"
Penny pushed off of him and plopped back down in her own seat. The old woman sitting in front of Cooper was turned around in her seat. The only part of her that was visible over the seat back was the top of her head, from just under her eyes up to the wispy twist of hair on top of her head.
"My husband used to do that," she said. "That man could have fallen asleep on top of a freight train. Just sit him down and he was out like a light."
"Oh! We're not—" Penny rushed to say.
"Have you been married long?"
"No! We're—"
"Oh, on your honeymoon then? Isn't that sweet! I'll leave you alone then." She gave Penny an obnoxious wink. As she turned around to face forward again, she stuck a finger in her ear and twisted. There was a loud squeaking noise as her hearing aid powered down.
A couple who did look like they were headed for a honeymoon beamed at her from across the aisle, then looked back at Penny. They held up their hands, waggling their ring fingers almost in unison.
"Congratulations," she said weakly, then sank back into her seat and tried to hide behind Cooper's shoulder without actually touching him. Was everyone in the world insane and she'd only just started noticing?
Hiding didn't last long. With nothing else to do she found herself staring out the window, directly into the huge turbine dangling from the ridiculously fragile-looking wing. Wisps of cloud streamed over and under the metal, sometimes looking so much like smoke that her heart leapt up into her throat. The flight attendants rolled back up the aisle, collecting empty cups and pretzel bags as they went. Penny waited until they passed and the 'fasten seatbelts' light dinged off, then unclipped hers and leaned forward. She'd stuck her magazine in her bag as she juggled her badge and plane ticket, then threw the whole thing in the bin overhead without thinking. So now she was stuck either imagining their imminent death by Canada goose or reading the fascinating SkyMall catalog that had half the pages ripped out. There wasn't even a barf bag in the pouch under her tray table.
Cooper shifted. The blanket came untucked and his elbow emerged again, sticking a good three inches out into the aisle. Penny grabbed at his sleeve and he jerked when her fingers brushed against the skin of his wrist. One foot kicked out, dislodging the bag wedged under the seat in front of him.
When he was settled again, Penny leaned forward and carefully pulled the bag free. She had intended to just move it to her side, to give him more room, but found herself unzipping the front compartment instead. She pulled out a folder and twisted the release on her tray so she could spread out the documents.
Sneaking glances at him every few seconds to make sure he wasn't about to catch her snooping, she went through everything in the small carry-on bag. There wasn't anything particularly interesting, just some newspaper clippings from around the country and case files that didn't seem to have anything to do with the two dead bodies in Pasadena.
The intercom came on and the captain mumbled something about descent, then the seatbelts sign lit up. Penny stuffed everything back into Cooper's bag and stowed it at her feet. She buckled herself in and closed her eyes, hoping it would deter Maria from trying to commiserate with her again as she made a last check of the cabin before landing.
A week ago, Penny had been exhausted, frustrated, a little hungover. Bored silly. Then: exhilarated, once she got the news that she was wanted at the Felt. Terrified, nervous... It seemed like she'd run through every possible emotion by the time she reported to Director Gablehauser's office.
She showed up almost twenty minutes early, a heroic feat given the delays reported all along the Camden line. But Gablehauser's secretary, a prune-faced woman with a shock of red hair, left her cooling her heels for another fifteen after her appointment time. When she was finally ushered into the inner office, a cloying, sickly-sweet smell almost made her gag.
Gablehauser was everything his reputation promised, all slick and hustle with even white teeth and too orange a tan to be anything but artificial. His hair was perfect, slicked back with what had to be industrial-strength product and probably a little gray-covering color as well. He stood when Penny entered, offered her a hand to shake — complete with index finger gliding over the inside of her wrist as he let go. He held on to the back of her chair as she sat, as though they were in the middle of a restaurant and he was checking out the view down her dress.
There was another man in the office, leaning against the wall in between a shaded window and a tall filing cabinet. Judging by the height of the window, he was just under six feet, with brown hair and a full beard. He nodded at Penny but didn't introduce himself. Gablehauser didn't introduce him either, keeping his full attention focused on Penny for most of the next two hours.
It felt more like two days.
The conversation started out normal enough, getting-to-know-you kind of stuff that she'd expected. Gablehauser was careful not to look like he was prying, careful to stick to questions that a human resources representative would have found tame. In the corner behind him, the other man drummed his fingers on the cabinet and shifted from one foot to the other. After twenty minutes or so, he cleared his throat and reached into his pants pocket to pull out a pack of cigarettes.
Gablehauser turned to look at him for the first time, opened his mouth to say something and then shut it just as quickly and turned back to Penny with a pained smile.
The smoker came out of his corner and dropped into the chair next to Penny. He tapped his lighter against the paper and cellophane pack balanced on his knee, and Gablehauser tore a drawer open with what sounded like a curse under his breath. He rummaged around for a few seconds, then pulled out a glass ashtray and shoved it across the desk so hard it would have flown off the end if the smoker hadn't caught it.
"Gee, thanks," he sneered. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
Penny couldn't stop herself. "Do you mind?"
"Relax, sweetheart, they're cloves," he said, disdain dropping away from every word the way ashes floated down to coat his shirt and lap before he brushed them into gray smears.
It just went downhill from there. While Penny was still bristling, Gablehauser took advantage of her distraction to press his offer. He told her in no uncertain terms that the only reason she'd been pulled from the training course was because they needed her for one thing, and one thing only.
The Creepy Clove Smoker smirked.
"Ignore him," Gablehauser barked. "I'm the one who calls the shots here, Agent. And I'm the one who decides whether your career lives or dies. If Agent Cooper so much as sneezes without a handkerchief, I want to know it before you're done wiping the snot off your face."
In her lap, her hands balled into fists. She fought to keep her expression neutral.
Gablehauser sat back and smoothed down his red silk tie, then stacked his hands on top of his head. He smiled, the white of his teeth jarring against his orangey skin. "Of course, if you play along, there's no telling how far you'll go."
---
The drive to Pasadena took almost three hours. Without seeing a map, she couldn't be sure but Penny was convinced it had taken twice as long as should have. At a minimum. One thing they hadn't covered in training was how to convince a senior agent to drive more than twenty-five miles an hour.
"Maybe they should add a course in how not to get intoxicated on airplanes," Cooper shot back.
Or maybe she could get special tutoring in How To Keep Your Mouth Shut For A Change.
Cooper signaled a turn that Penny had to squint to make out. It was at least a hundred yards away. Maybe two. She'd never been great at judging distances; it was a lot easier to gauge a yard when it was already marked on the field for you.
"Those bottles are bigger than they look, bub." She smoothed the seatbelt already lying flat across her chest. "Bub, sir."
Apparently his unscheduled nap restored his glare to full strength. Penny swiped at her cheek to get it off.
The turn Cooper was aiming for took them onto First Street and right down through the main business district. She recognized most of the buildings from the slide show and tried to snap to attention. Contrary to what she let Cooper think, her alcohol tolerance was pretty high — a handy side effect of a misspent youth and a healthy appetite for a good time. At most, she was feeling warm and cozy from the travel-sized bottles Maria had handed over free of charge. Her head and vision were still clear.
Even the frustration of crawling down the highway at speeds that would embarrass her grandma didn't chap her ass too much. Which, when she thought about it, was a pretty good sign that maybe she wasn't as sober as she thought.
The blinker came on as they crossed Front Street, creeping around the giant fish sculpture someone had plunked down in the middle of a perfectly good intersection. Penny glanced at the directions Cooper had pulled from a file folder and clipped to the dashboard with some gadget he fished out of a pocket. Their motel, the Pasadena Inn, was on Tillamook, more than a mile away. A small line of text under the motel's fifties-looking logo caught her eye.
"It says check-in isn't until eight." She lifted the corner of the page to read the radio's clock. It was just after three, local time. Which she knew was as exact as it could be; he refused to turn on the engine until he'd reset and recalibrated every single gadget and readout in the entire car. "We've got five hours, Cooper."
He slapped her hand away, slowing even further as he did. "You can tell time! I wondered, this morning."
"So, where are we going?"
"The motel."
"For what?"
"To check in."
New Year's was too far off, so Penny had made a New State resolution instead: to not let him get under her skin. It wasn't going as well as she'd hoped.
"Why don't we check in at the police department first? Instead of pissing off the people who are going to be cleaning our toilets for the next few days?"
"'Cleaning our toilets'," he repeated with a snicker. "Good one."
It felt like she'd left her brain somewhere over Boulder or back home in Maryland. Maybe the vodka hadn't been such a good idea. Maybe it was more potent when you guzzled it in mid-air as you tried to keep from jumping out of your skin every time something creaked.
Cooper pulled up to the motel's lobby entrance and turned off the car. Penny waited in the car, pretending to be engrossed in picking at the nail polish on her fingernails while he went in to check them in early.
The front doors were propped open with a concrete block and a large concrete ashtray. A dusty display window next to the doors gave a good view of the dingy-looking lobby in all its harvest gold and orange, plaid and paisley splendor. A stocky, well-built man was hunched over the desk, his dark hair smoothed down with some kind of product. He straightened as Cooper approached, but he didn't smile.
As Penny watched, the clerk's face got redder and redder. She wished she'd learned how to read lips somewhere along the way. Finally it looked like the clerk was able to get a word in edgewise. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, narrowed his eyes, and then bent back down to whatever he'd been doing before they pulled up.
Cooper came storming out less than ten seconds later, muttering under his breath and glaring at the man through the window.
"No dice?" Penny asked as he started adjusting his seat and mirrors again. She wasn't even trying to disguise her smug tone.
"We'll check in with local law enforcement first," Cooper said, as if that had been his plan all along.
---
"Didn't know they let the feebs leave DC," someone mock-whispered behind Penny.
She whirled around to give whoever it was a piece of her mind but couldn't tell which of the fat, stupid, local cops was the culprit. They were all smirking. Snickering into their mustaches or multiple chins. If only they'd arrived in Pasadena a few hours earlier, she thought. She didn't doubt for a second that that very morning there would have been a cloud of powdered sugar hanging in the air as they chortled over their totally hilarious snide comments.
Maybe she should have stuck with waitressing. At least there you got tipped sometimes.
Cooper was standing on the other side of the room by the fingerprint and photo station. He had a thin folder open in his hands and another waiting on the counter, the sum total of the local investigation into the deaths of Alicia Azlynn and David Underhill. It seemed like the FBI had invested more time and energy in getting Penny and Cooper to Pasadena than Pasadena had spent on two of its recently deceased.
The Chief of Police — who'd introduced himself as a captain for some reason — was with him, arms folded over his belly. He was a large, round man with a kind-looking face and hair that looked like it was losing a long-standing battle against male pattern baldness. As Cooper flipped through the few pages stapled to the inside cover and made his own snide comments, the Chief stood placidly by, like a cow waiting for its cud to come back up.
The man was wearing sweatpants on duty, for crying out loud.
Someone came up behind Penny and cleared their throat. She turned slightly to see a pale skinny man with curly hair. One side of his mouth quirked up in a brief smile. "So, do they even have guns in the FBI, or do you all just carry staplers around?"
Before she could spit out a retort, his smile widened into a grin and he made a gesture like he was warding her off.
"Just kidding, I swear. I'm Sussman. Stuart! Well, Detective Sussma— you can, uh, call me Stuart."
He blushed a little when she shook his hand.
"Did you guys really come all the way out here for those two abductees?"
Penny forced a smile. He looked harmless, but she'd seen his name all over the notes Cooper had let her look at before he kicked her out of the office at the Felt. Stuart Sussman was the investigating officer who had signed off on both of the tiny files Cooper was looking through. Not that it meant anything in a town this small. He was probably the investigating officer on half of the cases that passed through the station.
She wasn't sure how to respond — had they come all this way just for these two people? There were hundreds of extra-tee abductions and dumps across the country every year, maybe thousands, and the Terror had a veritable army to handle them. What was it that Cooper found so interesting about these two? And what did he think he could do about it? He was just a basement-dwelling burnout, with a reputation for weirdness that was dwarfed the respect he earned in his short time as an analyst. Come to think of it, she wondered, how had he even gotten clearance to take on this nothing of a case?
And where did all this leave her?
The silence stretched out until the very air between them felt brittle. She wasn't the only one to notice, either. Stuart made an awkward gesture toward the desks, gave her a sheepish smile, and excused himself.
Penny felt her head turn to watch him go but not much else registered. She barely remembered his question, and couldn't have answered it even if she wanted to. Her breath caught in her throat at the realization that no matter what she did here, her career at the FBI was destined to be a very short one. Like her dad used to say, she was screwed if she did and screwed worse if she didn't. Gablehauser hadn't pulled her out of the Academy to set her on the fast-track to an office on the top floor, no matter what promises he'd made about what she could expect if she fell in line.
The director hitched her star to a black hole, and there wasn't a single damn thing she could do about it.
She stalked over to Cooper and snatched the folder away. A quick glance showed that the locals had far less information than what Cooper had gathered, in a much shorter time and at a considerable distance. She looked over at the chief, whose expression hadn't changed one bit.
She smiled. "I don't suppose we could take a look at the dump site, could we?"
His brow furrowed for a second, then he hitched up his sweatpants. Penny tried not to notice when the drawstring, already precarious, threatened to give way altogether. From the look of things, the chief should have traded up a size or two a few dozen doughnuts ago.
Cooper gave her a strange look over the man's shoulder.
"What? There is still a dump site, isn't there?"
"Of course there's still a dump site," Cooper said. He added a lifted eyebrow and tilted his head toward the chief, whose features had smoothed back out into a pleasant, if vacant, smile.
Penny saw his eyebrow and raised him another one. Whatever that meant to him, it was apparently the right thing. He grabbed the other file folder off the counter and stepped toward her, then pivoted on his toes like a sentry at Arlington.
"We'll be on our way." His voice had taken on an oddly formal tone, at odds with the rude words that came out of his mouth next. "I'd thank you for your help, if you'd been any help at all."
The chief didn't seem to mind, though. He smiled at Cooper's rapidly retreating back, then patted Penny on the shoulder before wandering away in the opposite direction.
Stuart caught up to her at the exit. Cooper was just outside, at the top of the steps leading down to the street. He had a hand over one eye and was staring straight up at the sky. The skin of his neck stretched tight over his adam's apple. He looked like some kind of human crane, all sharp angles and disproportional limbs. She wondered how knobby his knees were.
"I'll tag along, if you don't mind," Stuart said as he held the door open for her.
"And if we do mind?" She didn't bother to disguise the bite in her voice. He might be just a small-town cop, but he wasn't anywhere near as oblivious as his boss. He knew exactly what message he was sending.
But instead of giving back as good as he got, he smiled again. "Then I guess I'd just tag along anyway."
---
Stuart drove them out to the site in a squad car. Cooper refused to get into the back seat, so Penny found herself staring at the back of his head through the wire barrier.
For most of the drive, Stuart kept up a running monologue about the town, the people they passed, businesses that used to be where new ones were failing. Her eyes were probably starting to glaze over.
Cooper was oblivious. Early that morning when Penny thrust a map at him and told him to navigate their way from Leonard's to Baltimore, he claimed that reading in the car made him sick to his stomach. But now he was poring through the thin files again. What he was looking for, Penny couldn't even begin to guess.
They parked in a turnout that Stuart said was about half a mile from the clearing where the bodies were found. Cooper led the way down the path, his long stride taking him far ahead of her and out of sight around a bend just a few yards into the woods. Stuart trailed behind at enough of a distance that she almost forgot he was there by the time she reached the end of the trail.
Cooper was standing in the middle of a patch of the dark green growth Penny recognized from the photos. The yellow blooms had died, leaving only a few stubborn, stiff, browned flowers still clinging on here and there.
"That's right about where they were," Stuart called to her partner.
"I know. Penny, let me see your recorder."
She dug it out of her pocket. Cooper caught it easily, surprising both of them from the look on his face. He didn't acknowledge her again for a while.
When he bent low and started running his hands through the plants like he was testing something, Penny rambled around the clearing. She wanted to see if she could identify all the angles captured in the photographs. Hoping something would jump out at her, something that would let her in on why exactly Cooper had flown them all this way when it looked like every other extra-tee dump she'd ever heard of or read about.
She still hadn't found anything by the time Cooper made a satisfied noise and straightened. It was the same sound he'd made back in the office when she finally managed to get her login to work on the telnet connection. He clicked off the recorder and slipped it into the pocket of the tan windbreaker he'd added to his outfit once they landed in Oregon. At least it covered up the eye-searing shirt he had on under his sweater.
"We're done here," he announced, heading back the way they came without waiting to see if anyone would follow.
They'd been in the woods for less than ten minutes.
When they got back to the police station, at Cooper's insistence, Stuart locked the empty interview room and helped another officer drag a folding table into the adjacent observation room. Penny carried in the chairs while Cooper ignored everyone.
Once they were alone, he opened his bag and started spreading out the files he'd brought with him from DC.
"What are you—"
He cut her off. "They might still be watching. Or listening. Sit down and act like you know what you're doing."
Penny flattered herself that she was a pretty good actress when she needed to be but there was no disguising that she was completely out of her depth here. She felt like the rookie she was, flailing along behind him while he indulged in whatever crazy was in his head.
She sat. "What am I supposed to be doing?"
"Just go through the files, look like you found something every so often. Take notes," he said in a low voice.
He peered at her over the pile of metal and wires he was pulling from his bag. "Pretend you're in class: you haven't read the assignments yet and you're trying to keep the instructor from calling on you."
That Penny could do. Lord knew she had plenty of practice.
"What are you doing?"
"It would take too long to explain."
Like she had anything better to do?
While Cooper tinkered with the mess he'd made on the table, she flipped through files. Again. She'd already looked through most of them while he was passed out on the plane, and they didn't make any more sense on a second pass. It was like trying to read in a foreign language; some things looked familiar, or tickled at her brain like she should know what they meant. Every time she opened her mouth to ask him a question, he either ignored her completely or fumbled with some piece of equipment and glared.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. Her headache from the night before was starting to roar back to life.
"Can we go get something to eat after this? I haven't had anything since Dallas."
He jerked when she spoke, almost as if he'd forgotten she was there, and blinked.
"You know, food? Eat?"
"There's a Bob's Big Boy near our motel. That's why I chose it," he said, and went back to his pile of junk.
"Okay," Penny said under her breath.
Was this another test? Was he doing this on purpose to see how long it would be before she cracked? Or was this just Cooper being Cooper?
Whatever it was, she was tired of playing along by his rules. She shoved the useless files into a jumbled stack on the edge of the desk and opened the police files on the two abductees instead. When Cooper continued to ignore her, she started reading things out loud. Maybe if she annoyed him well enough, he'd get flustered and distracted long enough for her to talk him into getting out of this cramped room.
"Wow, she weighed more than me? Must have been the implants. I wonder where she got them done; Pasadena doesn't seem like the kind of place where...."
Cooper's head shot up when she trailed off. "What?"
Penny looked up. "She's not from here," she said. She yanked off the paper clip holding a tiny newspaper clipping to the back of the folder. Nothing more than a gossip column with a few lines devoted to the hot new barmaid at a local dive, it had been covered up with pages of handwritten pages that looked like someone ripped them out of a child's notebook. Cooper grabbed the clipping out of her hand, almost ripping it in his haste.
"She moved here six months ago?" He scratched his earlobe. "There was nothing about that in the files I had."
"Well, apparently you missed something."
"But I don't miss things," he protested weakly.
---
Penny stabbed her country-fried steak again, sawing with the dull knife in an attempt to get a chewable piece bigger than the end of her finger. The overcooked meat skidded around the plate, fork scraping on the ceramic with a god-awful screech.
The woman in the next booth huffed a loud sigh. "Animals," she grumbled to no one in particular.
Penny scraped the fork again. Everything about this place got her hackles up: the grinning doll heads all around the room, the tables squeezed too close together, her partner sitting on the other side of the booth bitching about the amount of onion on his Big Boy. Her country-fried steak tasted like country-fried ass, and the gravy on her mashed potatoes looked like mucus. Her Diet Coke was flat. And if the old guy at the table by the salad bar didn't stop coughing, she was going to have to hold him down and pour water down his throat.
Cooper pushed away his plate. "This is completely inedible," he grumbled. He kept his voice down, though. Their waitress had already put the fear of God into him when he tried to return his onion rings for the third time.
He reached into his bag and pulled out one of the folders they had snuck out of the police station.
"We're not stealing it," Cooper had said when Penny tried to talk him out of it. "We're borrowing it overnight in the course of our investigation, which is a permissible activity as codified in section 16.2 of the Bureau's rules of engagement on domestic investigations!"
His voice went alarmingly squeaky on that last.
"Then why don't you just ask if we can have it?"
He just glared at her until she threw up her hands and let him do whatever he wanted.
The woman in the next booth had apparently had enough of their manners — she'd complained about little else the whole time they'd been sitting there — and got up to leave. As she passed their table, she muttered something about hooligans, then shrieked like someone was chasing her down with a meat cleaver.
Penny reached for the holster hidden in the small of her back and scanned the room, steeling herself for an imminent attack. But nothing looked out of the ordinary, except for the woman now running for the exit, the restaurant manager hurrying after her, and the photos Cooper had fanned out all over his side of the table.
The autopsy photos.
"Jesus, Sheldon!" She let go of the butt of her gun and practically leaped across the table. "This is so not the time."
He batted her hands away from the pictures. "My meemaw's the only one allowed to call me Sheldon."
Penny gaped at him. "What?" What? What did that have to do with anything?
"My meemaw's the only one allowed to call me Sheldon. You can keep calling me Cooper, or any colorful epithet of your choice."
He pushed on the hand she had planted on top of a particularly gruesome shot of the inside of Dave Underhill's chest cavity. She dropped back onto the bench on her side of the booth.
"I'd prefer it if you didn't call me Moonpie again, though," he went on. "It's a family nickname that has unfortunately taken on new and less flattering meaning in the last few years, given my..."
He looked up and met her eyes for the first time since— Actually, Penny couldn't remember the last time he'd looked her in the face. It seemed like most of the past two days she'd been talking to the back of his head or the side of his face or, once, unforgettably: his pointy elbow a split second before it banged her in the forehead as he pried his suitcase out of the trunk of her car.
"My reputation," he finished, spitting the word like he couldn't stand the taste of it on his tongue.
Penny kept her attention on her food, embarrassed anew at having called him that to his face. She wanted to apologize but her brain went blank. She couldn't think of a single thing to say that she could be sure wouldn't come out just as insulting so she resolved to keep her mouth shut.
Unfortunately, her mouth had never had any trouble running off before her brain could catch up.
"Are you close to your meemaw?" What?
"I haven't seen her in twenty years," Cooper said.
Penny darted a glance up, hoping she hadn't upset him all over again. What was with her? Since when did she even care?
"She and my older brother were abducted when I was eight."
And apparently the rest of her body was now working in concert with her mouth and totally without her permission. She watched as if from a distance as one of her hands reached across the table and covered Cooper's. He didn't pull away and Penny braved another look at his face. He was staring out the window next to them, his jaw working like he was fighting to keep something in.
"What happened?" She tried to use the no-nonsense investigator's tone she'd been practicing late at night, but it came out little more than a whisper.
He pulled his hands out from under hers, folded them on the table. "I told you, they were abducted."
What could she say to that?
---
The bar where the gossip column said Alicia had been working was just a block away from the restaurant, so Penny pocketed the keys and started walking. Cooper had no choice but to follow.
Inside, Penny hung back while he bellied up to the bar and passed a picture to the bartender, who took one quick glance and shrugged.
"Oh, I'd remember her," he said, giving Cooper a conspiratorial look. "She single?"
"She's dead."
The man blanched, the color draining out of his face so fast Penny thought he might pass out. "Oh, shit," he stammered. "I'm sorry, I didn't know. I just started here about two weeks ago."
He wiped his forehead with a bar towel and leaned heavily against the counter behind him. Penny moved in closer when she saw his eyes dart around the room and was glad she did when he turned to Cooper and whispered, "Did they get her?"
Cooper dropped his voice. "Tell me what you know about them."
The bartender's eyes shot up toward the ceiling. The bar towel fluttered out of his hand as he crossed himself.
Penny turned away and caught a glimpse of someone ducking back into the kitchen. She stopped and waited, and sure enough, someone stuck their head out again. It was almost funny watching the girl's eyes get bigger when she realized she'd been seen.
She reached back and swiped the photo Cooper had left on the bar.
"Excuse me," she called, holding the picture out toward the girl. "Did you know her?"
The girl adjusted the headband holding her bright red hair off her face. "Yeah, I guess."
"So she worked here?"
"For like five minutes. She didn't look much like that picture either: darker hair, not as skinny. She just up and didn't show one day. I figured she found something better."
Penny nodded and tried to look friendly. "I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself. I'm Penny, and the guy at the bar is Cooper. We're trying to figure out what happened to her. What's your name?"
"Ramona," the girl said. She tilted her head to get a better look behind Penny. "Cooper, you say?"
"That's what we call him. Were you friends with Alicia?"
Ramona gave her a withering look and went back to checking out Cooper. "I knew her well enough to know she was no good, how about that?"
"What about David Underhill? Did he ever come in?"
"Dave?" Ramona laughed. "He practically lived here. He taught at the college, you know, so smart. He was totally wasted on this town."
Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, Penny reminded herself that married didn't always mean what she thought it should. "Sounds like you knew him pretty well."
"Oh, everybody knew Dave."
"Did Alicia?"
The question was enough to finally drag Ramona's attention away from the way Cooper sat stiffly on a stool, tapping his fingers against the rail. The look on her face was pure venom.
"What do you think her 'something better' was?"
She stalked away, making a beeline for the bar. Something alerted Cooper to her approach and he looked briefly over his shoulder. Ramona tossed her hair when their eyes met, then wedged herself into the space between him and the next stool. She leaned in when he leaned back slightly, until her breast brushed against his upper arm. And then she started twirling a lock of hair around one finger.
Cooper didn't seem to notice, just tilted a little farther away from the woman. He didn't break off his conversation with the still-sweating bartender either. Penny caught the look Ramona shot at the poor guy, who stammered something unintelligible and all but ran for a customer at the other end of the bar.
Penny choked back a laugh at the bewildered look on Cooper's face. He twisted on his seat, away from Ramona, and stood.
"Did you see that?" he asked, indignant. "What a rude man."
"Must have been something you said." Apparently it was Penny's turn to get the stink-eye as Ramona's oblivious prey slipped away. She pretended not to notice and pulled the car keys out of her pocket. "You ready to head back? It's after check-in time, finally."
"Why are your keys out? We walked here." He peered at her eyes and sniffed the air as she got closer. "Are you drunk again?"
"I'm not drunk, Cooper. Let's just go."
But he was like a terrier with a rat in its teeth once the idea got in his head.
"I realize that this is your first assignment, and you're hardly what I would call field-ready in any sense of the term, but this is unacceptable behavior, Penny. You can't just stumble around in an alcoholic haze from one location to the next as if...."
She tuned him out as they walked up the street toward the restaurant where they'd left the car. She was still puzzling over what Ramona had told her. If Alicia and Underhill were involved, there was no sign of it in any of the official documents they'd seen. Hardly surprising, given that it had taken all of five minutes to close their cases. But why these two people? Why had the extra-tees picked them? And why were they taken at different times?
They crossed the parking lot of the convenience store a few lots down from the bar. Cooper was still going strong, adding a wave of his arms every now and then.
"Granted, there doesn't seem to be a great deal to do in the vicinity but drink and eat substandard—"
She stopped and smacked her forehead. "Oh, that's it! Cooper, where did the Underhills live? It's not around here, is it?"
He looked peeved at having to interrupt his monologue on the ills of unprofessional conduct. "No, they had a house on Rubicon, by the university. Why?"
"Because he drank here," she headed back to the bar. "And I bet that's not all he did!"
"Why on earth would he be on this side of town when there's a perfectly good—"
But Penny was already too far away to find out what was perfectly good elsewhere.
Ramona was still standing where they'd left her, wedged between two stools. She was chewing out the bartender, who looked like he wanted to sink into the floor. When he saw Penny barrel through the door, he made a noise like a startled cat and ducked out of sight below the bar.
"Underhill," Penny said, "he met his girlfriends here, right? Or picked up whoever was available that night, whatever. Where did he take them?"
Ramona stiffened like the proverbial poker. "I really wouldn't know," she said. But her eyes flicked to the side, and it was all Penny could do to keep from reaching out to shake her.
"Where did he take you, Ramona?"
She flushed an angry red, the blotchy color spreading down over her neck and chest. "The motel on Tillamook. The Pasadena Inn."
The same motel they were staying in. Well, that could be interesting. Penny breathed a thank you and turned to go.
"Wait," Ramona called after her. "Your partner, is he... You know, available?"
"Trust me, you do not want to go there."
continued in part three