FIC: Miles from Home
Sep. 4th, 2015 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pooh_collectorTitle: Miles from Home
Author: pooh_collector
Character: gen, Neal, Keller, Peter
Rated: G
Word Count: 1,860
Genre: Case Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Keller Being Keller, takes place sometime between Payback and Countdown
Warnings: None
Author’s Notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
runthecon. Thanks to my partner in crime ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
angelita26 for providing the plot to this sticky wicket. My prompt was miles from home. This may be continued at some point in the far-flung future.
Neal looked down at his ankle for the hundredth time in the past hour. The light was still glowing a steady green, much to his consternation. He had never before looked down at the hard piece of plastic that kept him tethered to New York, and to the FBI, and wished for it to be blinking an ominous red, but right now, he wanted nothing more and anything but.
If wishes were horses, he thought forlornly as he turned his attention back to the safe he was presently attempting to crack, he would use them, and the beggars who rode them, to trample Matthew Keller.
It had been late when Peter dropped him off just down the street from June’s and clearly he had lost something of his edge in the time he had been on the anklet, because he never noticed Keller and his goon behind him until it was far too late and he was falling to the floor in the back of a van on his way to unconsciousness.
By the time he woke, aching, lightheaded and queasy, they were already parked by the Long Island Sound, just down the street from the multi-million dollar home Keller wanted Neal to rob.
“Here’s the way this is going to go,” Keller uttered without preamble. “You’ve got exactly 90 minutes to get inside the house, crack the safe in the office and bring me what I want, or the Marshals are going to find you floating out there in the water next to one of those fancy yachts.”
In the back of the windowless van, Keller’s threat felt rather meaningless, but after reviewing the property’s floor plans, Keller slid open the door and then dragged Neal out onto the dark and deserted street. The van was parked in the darkened corner of the parking lot of a restaurant that sat on the end of a crescent-shaped harbor. Several mansions, like the one in the blueprints he had just studied, sat along the water’s edge and several yachts and a docked ferry boat rested in the still water. He knew where he was immediately, Greenwich, Connecticut, miles from home.
Out of habit, he glanced down at his anklet and was surprised to see the light was green. “Don’t you worry about that Caffrey.” Keller pulled out his phone and waggled it at Neal. “Neat trick, I found a guy who could reroute your tracking signal. As long as you’re in range of my phone, the Marshals are going to believe you’re right where you belong, at home in that palatial mansion you in live in on Riverside Drive.
“But don’t wander too far, or you’ll regret it when you’re back in Sing Sing.”
Neal scowled, but couldn’t come up with anything to say. What could he say? For the moment Keller had him right where he wanted him, completely unable to get out the situation without having too much explaining to do. So he let Keller lead him down the street to the house from the floor plans.
Keller passed him a pair of black leather driving gloves, donned a pair himself and then did the honors to get them passed the security system and into the French doors on the patio that faced the water. Neal stayed in the shadows while Keller worked the lock, watching the light of the moon as it bounced along the gentle swells in the Sound trying to think of some way to thwart Keller and not get thrown back into prison.
It took longer than it should have and a few colorful curses from Keller, but finally they were in the house. The patio led into the formal dining room. From there they made their way past the expansive living room and then down the hallway to the main floor office.
The safe sat behind a four foot by five foot portrait of a white-haired man standing with one hand tucked into the breast of his suit jacket and the other resting on the head of an ornate cane. How very 1850 Neal thought to himself as he found the latch that held the painting to the wall and swung it open on its hidden hinges.
With the painting out of the way, Neal could finally see the reason that Keller had gone to such trouble to kidnap him. It was a Waltham, top of the line wall safe.
“How the hell do you expect me to crack this in,” Neal glanced down at his watch, “70 minutes?”
“Hey, keep your voice down, will ya?” Keller whispered back.
A light went off in Neal’s head and his eyes grew wide. “They’re upstairs, aren’t they?”
“It was hard enough to plan a kidnapping and a heist for the same night, Caffrey. I couldn’t possibly ensure that no one would be home too. So keep your damn voice down. You wouldn’t want someone to wander down here.” Keller’s word were made all the more ominous when he lifted the back of his jacket to reveal the gun tucked into the waistband of his black jeans.
Neal shook his head and sighed, but said nothing more. It wasn’t the time and it certainly wasn’t the place.
“Oh, but I did bring you this,” Keller whispered as he pulled a stethoscope out from inside his jacket and walked across the room to hand it to Neal.
“Your generosity knows no bounds.”
Keller smirked at him. “I’ll cover the door. You do your thing and do it fast.”
Neal set to work, one tumbler at a time, slowly turning the dial as he listened intently through the stethoscope. With three down and two to go, Neal stopped for a moment and wiped the sweat away from his hairline. His watch informed him that he had 42 minutes remaining to either crack the safe or figure out a way to get out of Keller’s clutches. He obviously couldn’t run. He would end up being dragged back to New York in handcuffs when Keller’s parlor trick played out. His mind raced through options, but all of them ended badly with him in custody, shot, or drowned in the cold waters of the Long Island Sound.
Resigned for the moment, he returned to his task and before long felt and heard the next tumbler click in.
“Hurry it up, Caffrey. The clock is ticking.” Keller had stepped back into the study.
“If you can do it faster, be my guest,” Neal replied stepping aside and waving Keller over to the safe.
Keller glared back at him. “You always were a wiseass, Caffrey. One of these days it’s going to get you killed.”
Neal took the not so veiled threat for what it was and turned back to his work. It took some time, but eventually he had the final tumbler in place. All that was left was picking the key lock and pulling the safe door open.
He slid the kit that he kept in his breast pocket out and started to work on the lock while fruitless strategies to come up with a way out of this mess before he actually had to open the safe frantically tumbling around in his mind.
Before he knew it, but still late in the game according to his watch, Neal had the key lock undone. Keller must have been watching from the doorway because before Neal could pull the safe handle down and open, or screw the whole thing and spin the combination dial, he had pushed Neal aside and was pulling the door open himself, a look of glee on his face.
“I can handle it from here, Caffrey.”
Neal held up his hands and walked around Keller in the hope of catching a glimpse of what his nemesis was intending to steal. Despite the dim light in the room, Neal could see that the safe was stacked with items. But, Keller took only one thing. A small, black leather box. Then he closed the safe again and spun the combination dial with a flourish.
Minutes later they were back in the van. Keller looked down at his watch and smiled the sleazy smile that Neal had grown to hate so much. “Nice work, Caffrey. You made it with four minutes to spare.”
Remarkably, Keller let him stay conscious for the ride back to Manhattan. It didn’t take long for Neal to realize he would have had no one to gloat to if he hadn’t.
In a final act of pugnaciousness, Keller had his goon stop the van just inside the northern edge of Neal’s radius. “This is where we part ways, Caffrey,” Keller said as he slid the van’s door open.
Neal stepped out onto the street and then turned back to look at the man who he had once considered a friend. “I will find a way to bring you down.”
“What’s that, a threat Caffrey?”
“No, that’s a promise.”
The smile on Keller’s face fell microscopically, but that was enough for Neal to know that there were cracks in Keller’s self-assured façade.
The door to the van slid closed and moments later it was gone down the street. Without his phone, which Keller had taken, and without any cash in his pocket, which Keller had taken, Neal ended up walking the rest of the way to June’s.
Thankfully, his keys were still in his pocket so when he finally arrived home, at nearly four in the morning, he was able to quietly make his way inside and up to his apartment. He fell into bed and slept hard until his alarm went off two and a half hours later.
He slunk into the office only a few minutes late, feeling headachy and still vaguely nauseated, and dropped into his chair hoping for a quiet day where he could stay under the radar and go home at five and climb straight back into bed.
But it was not to be. Just a few minutes after he turned on his computer, Peter sauntered over to his desk and then stood before him, bouncing on his heels.
Neal knew that look. It was Peter’s we’ve got a hot new case look.
Neal gazed up at his partner, his eyebrows raised. “What’s up?”
Peter smiled at him. “We’ve got a new case that’s right up your alley. The Lone Star sapphire was stolen from its owner’s home in Connecticut last night.”
“He had it at home?” Neal asked, hoping that his fear wouldn’t show on his face.
Peter nodded. “I have to confess. The first thing I did when I heard about it this morning was check the data for your anklet.”
Neal nodded and tried to smile in acknowledgement. “After all this time, Peter. You still don’t trust me?” He replied. Somewhere in his mind, Neal had hoped that the events of the previous night had been nothing but a wicked nightmare brought on by too much wine and too many of Mozzie’s conspiracy theories. Now, he knew that was his nightmare was only beginning. “I’m wounded to the core.”
“That’s better than guilty. Come on and grab your stuff and let’s go.”
Author: pooh_collector
Character: gen, Neal, Keller, Peter
Rated: G
Word Count: 1,860
Genre: Case Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Keller Being Keller, takes place sometime between Payback and Countdown
Warnings: None
Author’s Notes: Written for
runthecon. Thanks to my partner in crime angelita26 for providing the plot to this sticky wicket. My prompt was miles from home. This may be continued at some point in the far-flung future.Neal looked down at his ankle for the hundredth time in the past hour. The light was still glowing a steady green, much to his consternation. He had never before looked down at the hard piece of plastic that kept him tethered to New York, and to the FBI, and wished for it to be blinking an ominous red, but right now, he wanted nothing more and anything but.
If wishes were horses, he thought forlornly as he turned his attention back to the safe he was presently attempting to crack, he would use them, and the beggars who rode them, to trample Matthew Keller.
It had been late when Peter dropped him off just down the street from June’s and clearly he had lost something of his edge in the time he had been on the anklet, because he never noticed Keller and his goon behind him until it was far too late and he was falling to the floor in the back of a van on his way to unconsciousness.
By the time he woke, aching, lightheaded and queasy, they were already parked by the Long Island Sound, just down the street from the multi-million dollar home Keller wanted Neal to rob.
“Here’s the way this is going to go,” Keller uttered without preamble. “You’ve got exactly 90 minutes to get inside the house, crack the safe in the office and bring me what I want, or the Marshals are going to find you floating out there in the water next to one of those fancy yachts.”
In the back of the windowless van, Keller’s threat felt rather meaningless, but after reviewing the property’s floor plans, Keller slid open the door and then dragged Neal out onto the dark and deserted street. The van was parked in the darkened corner of the parking lot of a restaurant that sat on the end of a crescent-shaped harbor. Several mansions, like the one in the blueprints he had just studied, sat along the water’s edge and several yachts and a docked ferry boat rested in the still water. He knew where he was immediately, Greenwich, Connecticut, miles from home.
Out of habit, he glanced down at his anklet and was surprised to see the light was green. “Don’t you worry about that Caffrey.” Keller pulled out his phone and waggled it at Neal. “Neat trick, I found a guy who could reroute your tracking signal. As long as you’re in range of my phone, the Marshals are going to believe you’re right where you belong, at home in that palatial mansion you in live in on Riverside Drive.
“But don’t wander too far, or you’ll regret it when you’re back in Sing Sing.”
Neal scowled, but couldn’t come up with anything to say. What could he say? For the moment Keller had him right where he wanted him, completely unable to get out the situation without having too much explaining to do. So he let Keller lead him down the street to the house from the floor plans.
Keller passed him a pair of black leather driving gloves, donned a pair himself and then did the honors to get them passed the security system and into the French doors on the patio that faced the water. Neal stayed in the shadows while Keller worked the lock, watching the light of the moon as it bounced along the gentle swells in the Sound trying to think of some way to thwart Keller and not get thrown back into prison.
It took longer than it should have and a few colorful curses from Keller, but finally they were in the house. The patio led into the formal dining room. From there they made their way past the expansive living room and then down the hallway to the main floor office.
The safe sat behind a four foot by five foot portrait of a white-haired man standing with one hand tucked into the breast of his suit jacket and the other resting on the head of an ornate cane. How very 1850 Neal thought to himself as he found the latch that held the painting to the wall and swung it open on its hidden hinges.
With the painting out of the way, Neal could finally see the reason that Keller had gone to such trouble to kidnap him. It was a Waltham, top of the line wall safe.
“How the hell do you expect me to crack this in,” Neal glanced down at his watch, “70 minutes?”
“Hey, keep your voice down, will ya?” Keller whispered back.
A light went off in Neal’s head and his eyes grew wide. “They’re upstairs, aren’t they?”
“It was hard enough to plan a kidnapping and a heist for the same night, Caffrey. I couldn’t possibly ensure that no one would be home too. So keep your damn voice down. You wouldn’t want someone to wander down here.” Keller’s word were made all the more ominous when he lifted the back of his jacket to reveal the gun tucked into the waistband of his black jeans.
Neal shook his head and sighed, but said nothing more. It wasn’t the time and it certainly wasn’t the place.
“Oh, but I did bring you this,” Keller whispered as he pulled a stethoscope out from inside his jacket and walked across the room to hand it to Neal.
“Your generosity knows no bounds.”
Keller smirked at him. “I’ll cover the door. You do your thing and do it fast.”
Neal set to work, one tumbler at a time, slowly turning the dial as he listened intently through the stethoscope. With three down and two to go, Neal stopped for a moment and wiped the sweat away from his hairline. His watch informed him that he had 42 minutes remaining to either crack the safe or figure out a way to get out of Keller’s clutches. He obviously couldn’t run. He would end up being dragged back to New York in handcuffs when Keller’s parlor trick played out. His mind raced through options, but all of them ended badly with him in custody, shot, or drowned in the cold waters of the Long Island Sound.
Resigned for the moment, he returned to his task and before long felt and heard the next tumbler click in.
“Hurry it up, Caffrey. The clock is ticking.” Keller had stepped back into the study.
“If you can do it faster, be my guest,” Neal replied stepping aside and waving Keller over to the safe.
Keller glared back at him. “You always were a wiseass, Caffrey. One of these days it’s going to get you killed.”
Neal took the not so veiled threat for what it was and turned back to his work. It took some time, but eventually he had the final tumbler in place. All that was left was picking the key lock and pulling the safe door open.
He slid the kit that he kept in his breast pocket out and started to work on the lock while fruitless strategies to come up with a way out of this mess before he actually had to open the safe frantically tumbling around in his mind.
Before he knew it, but still late in the game according to his watch, Neal had the key lock undone. Keller must have been watching from the doorway because before Neal could pull the safe handle down and open, or screw the whole thing and spin the combination dial, he had pushed Neal aside and was pulling the door open himself, a look of glee on his face.
“I can handle it from here, Caffrey.”
Neal held up his hands and walked around Keller in the hope of catching a glimpse of what his nemesis was intending to steal. Despite the dim light in the room, Neal could see that the safe was stacked with items. But, Keller took only one thing. A small, black leather box. Then he closed the safe again and spun the combination dial with a flourish.
Minutes later they were back in the van. Keller looked down at his watch and smiled the sleazy smile that Neal had grown to hate so much. “Nice work, Caffrey. You made it with four minutes to spare.”
Remarkably, Keller let him stay conscious for the ride back to Manhattan. It didn’t take long for Neal to realize he would have had no one to gloat to if he hadn’t.
In a final act of pugnaciousness, Keller had his goon stop the van just inside the northern edge of Neal’s radius. “This is where we part ways, Caffrey,” Keller said as he slid the van’s door open.
Neal stepped out onto the street and then turned back to look at the man who he had once considered a friend. “I will find a way to bring you down.”
“What’s that, a threat Caffrey?”
“No, that’s a promise.”
The smile on Keller’s face fell microscopically, but that was enough for Neal to know that there were cracks in Keller’s self-assured façade.
The door to the van slid closed and moments later it was gone down the street. Without his phone, which Keller had taken, and without any cash in his pocket, which Keller had taken, Neal ended up walking the rest of the way to June’s.
Thankfully, his keys were still in his pocket so when he finally arrived home, at nearly four in the morning, he was able to quietly make his way inside and up to his apartment. He fell into bed and slept hard until his alarm went off two and a half hours later.
He slunk into the office only a few minutes late, feeling headachy and still vaguely nauseated, and dropped into his chair hoping for a quiet day where he could stay under the radar and go home at five and climb straight back into bed.
But it was not to be. Just a few minutes after he turned on his computer, Peter sauntered over to his desk and then stood before him, bouncing on his heels.
Neal knew that look. It was Peter’s we’ve got a hot new case look.
Neal gazed up at his partner, his eyebrows raised. “What’s up?”
Peter smiled at him. “We’ve got a new case that’s right up your alley. The Lone Star sapphire was stolen from its owner’s home in Connecticut last night.”
“He had it at home?” Neal asked, hoping that his fear wouldn’t show on his face.
Peter nodded. “I have to confess. The first thing I did when I heard about it this morning was check the data for your anklet.”
Neal nodded and tried to smile in acknowledgement. “After all this time, Peter. You still don’t trust me?” He replied. Somewhere in his mind, Neal had hoped that the events of the previous night had been nothing but a wicked nightmare brought on by too much wine and too many of Mozzie’s conspiracy theories. Now, he knew that was his nightmare was only beginning. “I’m wounded to the core.”
“That’s better than guilty. Come on and grab your stuff and let’s go.”
no subject
Date: 2015-09-04 07:30 pm (UTC)You already had me at the mention of Keller in the header, but it got better and better with each paragraph. Deliciously angsty and definitely demanding another chapter!