Participants:
| Scene Title | A Strange Absentee Threesome Indeed |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Insert innuendo about a hooker giving a Federal Agent a free ride here. |
| Date | April 24, 2009 |
The Backseat of a Taxi
Squeaky squeaky.
It's early in the afternoon on a rainy but otherwise uneventful Friday. The good Lord — or the sky gods or whomever it is that dictates the weather while Helena Dean continues to shirk her duties and remain stuck in the future — has seen fit to shake the clouds and unleash a temporary torrent no more than a minute after Felix Ivanov had signed the last of his release paperwork. Such a thing probably qualifies as no more ironic than, say, a man with superhuman speed being escorted out of St. Luke's fine facilities in a wheelchair pushed by a lazy-eyed orderly as if the man within was an invalid, incapable of moving under his own ability — but, that's just protocol. The last thing the hospital needs is for a former patient to slip and fall three steps shy of the threshold and find themselves right back in the same bed, still warm.
There's a taxi cab waiting underneath the sheltering canopy, presumably summoned for the freed Fed.
He can at least wander over, check it out. Fel's steady enough on his feet, if a little tentative in his manner. He pads over - dressed in t-shirt and jeans, which presumably Lee brought while he was still out of it, and peers in search of the cabbie. The rain doesn't seem to bother him much.
The cabbie is located precisely where you might expect a cabbie to be — in the driver's seat. He currently has a newspaper unfurled over the steering wheel in an apparent display of utter passivity while Felix makes his overly suspicious inspection. The backseat, however, is not empty. As the agent approaches, the young woman slides over to the passenger-side door and opens it in order to more easily accommodate the man's entry into the vehicle. "Get in," Bebe says, her head partially poked out over the edge of the doorframe.
In every noir movie ever, this proves to be a bad idea. And in every noir movie ever, the detective does, anyhow. Who is Felix to buck eighty years of cinematic tradition? Obediently, he gets in. "My own chauffeur?" he says, tone arch, but with nervousness beneath.
"I know it's hardly the welcome home ride a hero deserves but, it's the best I could do on such short notice. I couldn't afford to rent a limo," she says with a smile, sliding back over on the seat in order to allow Felix his breathing room while she offers destination directions for the cabbie. "Le Rivage." Oh, hey. Lookit that. She knows where he lives. Someone must have read the Registry.
Once the taxi is in motion, Bebe turns to observe the man seated by her side and says, "Besides… someone has to make sure you get home safely."
"You're very kind," Fel deadpans, though there's that tentativeness beneath, still. "And thank you. To what do I owe the honor?" Still keeping his tone light, teasing.
Bebe's smile is ever-present, if somewhat shrunken so as not to seem patronizing or excessively false. It's a mask, certainly, but not an unpleasant one to wear or witness. "The question you really ought to be asking yourself is 'to whom'?" Then again. The sweeping noise of the windshield wiper blades as they creak across the rain-spattered glass inserts itself perpetually like a metronome keeping time between all of their pregnant pauses. "The woman I work for -" The woman…? "- sent me to find out what happened to you."
The woman, indeed. Fel is literally given pause, like a spaniel come upon a quail's nest. He eyes her expectantly. "Last I knew," he says, finally, "You worked for Mr. Logan. Has that changed?" His tone is all business.
"John Logan might pay me…" At least, in theory, she gets some sort of cut from time spent staring at the ceiling with someone else on top of her at the Happy Dagger, right? "…but, I certainly don't work for him." Semantics. Technicalities. "So." Regardless. "Did you go looking for trouble or did trouble find you?"
"This time, it literally came looking for me," he says, with a faint sigh, all but deflating. "So you don't work for him. Is your employer the one who healed me?" he asks, bluntly, resting an arm along the top of the bench seat, and eyeing her.
Seemingly bored with the sights to be seen in the backseat, Bebe's brown-eyed gaze has been cast beyond rainwater washed windows and out onto the cityscape. "Yes," she easily confesses to the glass. "Her name is Mu-Qian. But, you already knew that…" She really was there that day in Old Lucy's, it seems; not a figment of an paranoid bartender's overactive imagination after all.
Felix confesses, blinking at her from behind his glasses, "I still don't understand why she did what she did." His expression is oddly open and rather young for him.
"Because I imagine having a Federal Agent indebted to you might be useful when you're interested in solving a murder," she says, tone of voice deceptively light despite the heavy weight of the words. Go ahead. Let that sink in a second. She'll wait. The cabbie, meanwhile, remains just as deaf and dumb to the conversation as he's been paid to do. He's taking the long way, too, either under instructions or in order to pad their fare. "She has a few suspects in mind — Eileen Ruskin, Ethan Holden — she called them people of interest… people her husband used to work with."
For her part, Bebe doesn't appear to have a clue as to the identity or affiliation of the people she's naming — she's just repeating what she was told; playing the part of the messenger and wearing a slightly different pair of invisible wings.
Oh, oh, oh. You've said the magic words. Felix all but bristles. "Yes," he says, with that hissing edge to his words. "Those are names I know and they are also of interest to me…."
Bebe's attention, previously given almost exclusively to the skyscrapers, returns to the cab and her companion as he hisses his consent. "Good. That should make things easy." She allows herself a little liberty in giving Felix the eye while regarding him ever so slightly from the side. "She wants whatever you have on them… all of the information you can provide."
Felix hesitates, at that. But nods, finally. "I… shall we meet in person?" he wonders, glancing uneasily at the cabby.
Bebe's bobbed head shakes from side to side slowly. "Sorry, handsome, that's not how this works." Wonder how many times she's spit out that line. "You give whatever you've got to me. I hand it over to her." In other words, Bebe's the tasty cream filling for the sake of this particular threesome.
A strange, absentee threesome, indeed. "Both are alive. Both are presumably on Staten. As far as I know, Holden is not Evolved. Ruskin is… I'd originally known her power as avian telepathy, but it seems to have become degeneration," Fel says, crisply. "Holden is ex-SAS."
TO BE CONTINUED