TITLE: Syntax II: Logic and Proportion
AUTHOR: MustangSally

Just when you thought it was safe . . . 

****The hotly anticipated sequel to Syntax and Measure is here!**** 

During a hot, Washington summer, Skinner meets up with some old Marine
Corps buddies, Scully's cancer takes a turn for the worse and Mulder is
arrested for the murder of a prostitute.  All are drawn deeper into the
nightmare of lies and death that surrounds the drug Ghost.  Mulder's
quest for the truth has tempted him into liquid enlightenment, Scully
needs to find Tanaka Wachiru before the cancer kills her, and Skinner is
in over his head trying to help them both.  
There's only one person stupid enough or crazy enough to try to help
them - the irrepressible Detective Steve "Moo" Mucheski.

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: ATX. Whatever 
SPOILER WARNING:  Avatar, Gethsemene 
CONTENT WARNING: R for language/violence
CLASSIFICATION: XRA
The Disclaimer 
What? Me worry?

Comments actively sought by MustangSally at: RWBOWMAN@erols.com 

1/26

*One pill makes you larger*

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me. 

Allen Ginsburg

The stripper had implants and this, unaccountably, depressed him.  As
she slid her lithe body up and down the unfeeling chrome pole, washed in
dancing particles of light, her breasts stood immobile golden spheres,
unresponsive as the pole, dead as her eyes.
The beer was warm, flat, and expensive, the music was lousy and the
women were about as arousing as an auto parts store display.  Walt
Skinner was beginning to think that he should have stayed at the office
and gotten caught up on the avalanche of paperwork clogging his desk. 
The death of an agent caused a certain amount of paperwork; the return
to life of said agent increased the paperwork to absurd proportions.
It was a situation Skinner was certain no other AD had to endure.
He drank another beer.
"So she wants to get tickets to see Miss Saigon of all things.  Can you
fucking believe it?  I told her that I lived through that shit and there
was no way in hell that I was going to drop a hundred bucks to see a
bunch of kids sing about it."  Schmidt complained and ground his
cigarette out in the ashtray.
A tall cadaverous man with a Marlboro voice and a sour expression was
sitting across the table from Skinner, occasionally kicking him for
emphasis.  As usual, Schmidt was half-drunk and his tie was hanging
around his skinny neck like a limp chunk of seaweed.  Who was this man?
This wasn't the Schmidt that Skinner remembered.  This was a stranger.
When did we all get old? He wondered.
Martinelli had aged into a fat, bloat-faced dwarf and Robinson was
sporting a rug that would have embarrassed Burt Reynolds.  God knew that
Skinner hadn't aged that badly.  Or at least he didn't think that he
had.  
"I saw it.  Took Diane.  Had the guy from the car commercials in it." 
Martinelli offered.
"Jonathan Pryce." said Schmidt who knew such things.
"New round!"  Robinson yelled and paid the bored, topless waitress.
"To Goldberg!"
"To Goldberg!"
"To Goldberg!"
Sam Goldberg, forty-six had collapsed on the nubile body of his
mistress, leaving behind a shocked wife and two college-age daughters. 
The first of their group from basic training to die of natural causes,
Goldberg had been planted in Arlington like a rare plant seed, and now
his friends grouped to drink to his memory and profane his character.
Actually, they hadn't said much about him all evening.
Goldberg had been a tick and wasn't going to be missed.
Glasses were emptied,
"When the fuck did we all get old?"  Schmidt wanted to know and lit
another cigarette.
"Twenty years of bullshit does that."  Skinner offered.
"Speak for your own self.  I've bought my condo on Nassau and I'm
sitting my fat ass down there in less than ten years, with a woman young
enough to be my daughter."  Martinelli lit his illegal Cuban cigar and
smiled.
"I dig being old."
"You were never young."
"Wally, did you ever have hair?"  Robinson wanted to know.
"For ten minutes during the Carter Administration."
"They say it's the excess testosterone."  Martinelli massaged his own
bare scalp.
"That's because you don't have a dick."  Schmidt said with a sour smile.
"Fuck you."
"Fuck yourself."
The next dancer approached the pole, a petite brunette with muscles in
her legs like a racehorse.  Her breasts were thrust out by the
sway-backed posture imposed by her high heels.  Bobbing with each of her
movements, her breasts proved that they were the genuine article.  She
looked at Skinner with dusty eyes and the tip of her tongue grazed her
waxy lips.
"I think she likes you."  Schmidt leered.
"Yeah, girls get hot for a bald head."
On stage, the brunette began to caress her own breasts and grind to the
music.  Skinner looked at her feet trapped in the architecture of her
shoes.  Her toes were long and gnarled with flaking pink toenail
polish.  Ugly.
"Que pasa, campers?" the tall black man with the wide smile asked as he
slid into the chair next to Skinner.
"What did I miss?" he asked.
"Two blondes, a bad comedian and Martinelli here trying to con us into
thinking that he's getting laid."  Robinson brought him up to speed.
Colonel Michael Fitzroy grinned at Skinner.
"Jesus, they let you out without your J. Edgar junior garter belt and
heels?"
"Garter belt pinches my balls."
"I hear you got some weird-ass shit goin' down the other day." the MBA
had smoothed out Fitzroy's voice during working hours only, and he
refused to 'talk white' after work.
"Yeah, what the fuck happened?  Some asshole faked his own death.  We
had something on our Virginia affiliate but the Middle East was way too
hot that night."  Schmidt asked, looking at Skinner with a newsman's
greedy eyes.
"No story.  There is no story.  Mis-Identification of a body.  Clerical
error."  Skinner protested.
"Can you say OJ Simpson?"
"Fuck you, Martinelli."  Skinner said without rancor.
"Seems like you got more than enough of your fair share of fuck-ups
lately." Fitzroy remarked.
It was no surprise that Fitzroy knew.  The man was inducted into the
secret arcana of the Pentagon and Skinner often wondered if his war
buddy was the only thing keeping him out of the obituaries.
"You know what a lucky star I travel under,"
Body full of scars.
Pointless existence.
Dead wife.
Heart full of dust.
A gleaming jeweled serpent tattooed on skin like ivory velvet. 
The tongue of his memory tasted vanilla and salt.
Mulder should have stayed dead.
" . . .She could suck the dimes out of a parking meter."
"Who are you shitting, man?  You couldn't get laid if you was carpet."
The years washed by like muddy water in a swollen stream.
The fire cracked, glowing on the faces, shining on dog tags.  Cigarette
smoke, hashish, human sweat and burning wood.  Ten healthy young
animals, the tribe, gathered around the fire.  
"How bout you, Wally?  You getting' any?"
"Just the chick down at Papa Lao's." the eighteen year old Skinner lay
back against the tree and scratched at the peeling sunburn over his thin
ribcage.
"I had her too, baby.  That bitch is crazy for black dick."  Fitzroy
laughed and fired up the bowl again.
When the carved wooden pipe in the shape of a naked woman made it around
the fire to Skinner, he sucked on her hot feet, dragging the sweet smoke
deep into his lungs, feeling the edges of his mind soften.
"I heard you're getting' transferred."  Schmidt's angelic face and
choirboy voice shimmered in the light.
"Shit happens."
"Farther in?  Farther out?"
"Dunno.  I just want to kick Commie ass."
A laugh followed the pipe on its third trip around the circle.
"Someday we are going to look back on this and it's gonna be one of the
best days of our lives."  Anderson said in the musical voice of the
deeply stoned.
Machinegun fire ripped Anderson's body into hamburger.
Skinner screamed and reached for his rifle.
And his hand closed around a beer bottle.
". . . . So I decided that I'd go with the stock option rather than the
usual 401K.  Turns out that I could have made more on a regular CD than
anything else.  Fucking brokers."
Skinner blinked at the old men surrounding the table. Strangers, all of
them.  Taking off his glasses, he rubbed at his eyes.  Martinelli's
cigar smoke felt like sandpaper.
"I have to go.  Early meeting tomorrow."  Skinner found himself saying.
"You guys are a bunch of women."  Schmidt got unsteadily to his feet;
"I'm getting out of here before you start menstruating."
"Fuck you all." he added a moment later and weaved off.
"Gotta go," Robinson jerked his thumb at Schmidt, "they took his
license.  Network keeps trying to send him to dry out but he won't. 
Wants to die in the anchor chair.  Says it would be good for ratings."
"Next time, let's not wait until somebody dies."  Martinelli suggested.

"Can I have a word?"  Fitzroy asked in the parking lot.
Taking his car keys out of his pocket, Skinner waited for the other man
to speak.
"As your friend and in no official capacity whatsoever, I suggest that
you do something about your personnel problem."
"Meaning?"
"Remember how the commies used to put bombs on war orphans and send them
onto bases to beg?  Keep that in mind."
"What do you know?'
"Everything - and nothing."  Fitzroy smiled "Jack Czarnecki over at the
Department of Defense wants to play golf on the 20th.  Interested."
"Sure."  Skinner said and unlocked the car.
"Nice wheels."
The Porsche engine whispered to life.
"It was Sharon's."
"Bad ass motherfuckers."  Fitzroy banged Skinner's outstretched fist
with his own.
"Bad ass motherfuckers."  Skinner agreed.
The Porsche squealed as he pulled into traffic.
The July night was close and warm as a woman's thighs and he rolled down
the window to let the air blow over his head.
Bravo Alpha Mongoose
Bad Ass Motherfuckers.
Anderson, back broken, blood covering his eyes, was hoisted aloft by
their sweating hands and carried through the steaming night to the
medical unit.
Anderson screamed every step of the way.
Anderson screamed for God, his mamma, and Jesus Christ.
Anderson died within sight of the golden lights of camp.
Anderson had only been nineteen.
Anderson was buried in Arlington, nineteen forever.
Semper fucking Fi.
Skinner jammed the CD into the player.  Mick Jagger began to chant.

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste.


2/26

*And one pill makes you small.*

Skinner pulled the Porsche into a convenience store on that hot summer
night, pulled a handful of change from his pocket and made an
untraceable phone call.
"Hi, it's me."
"Hi yourself." the woman said.
"Are you busy?"
"I really don't need to see Death on the Nile again."
"Can you be at the apartment in half an hour?"
"Should I bring anything special?"
"No."
"See you then."
Dial tone.
In the convenience store, Skinner bought milk, a pack of Marlboros, and
a package of cheap sandalwood incense from the smiling Punjabi-clad
woman behind the counter.

Just as every cop is a criminal 
And all the sinners saints

The woman's hair burned in the dim doorway caressed her cheeks above the
slim, sculpted shoulders of her black jacket.  Walt crouched near the
sofa, feeling the old weights of the dog tags around his neck in memory,
smelled decay and blood.  Smelled the incense burning on the table.  The
moist air from the open window cooling the sweat on his chest. 
Remembered movements.  Ripe the cellophane from the pack, crumple it in
your hand and stuff it in your pocket so the trackers find nothing.  Old
Zippo lighter, scratching and flaring.  The tobacco smoke hit his
long-pristine lungs with a narcotic rush.  His hands welt numb.  Smoke
drifted like a wistful phantom.
"You wanted to see me, sir?" the woman's voice was low and measured,
deferential but not subservient.
"Sit down."
She did her arms straight on the arms of the wooden chair as though she
was waiting for the straps and the metal cap to be placed on her shining
copper head.  In a way she was.
Jagger howled over the drums in the background.
"I have dreams," He began from the floor; "I see the jungle.  I smell
the cordite and the blood.  I smell my own fear-sweat.  I can taste the
beer and the girl from Papa Lao's.  I remember every inch of the bodies
of the whores that I fucked.  I never could say the name of the girl at
Lao's.  We called her Peggy.  She was killed when the bar was
firebombed.  Her whole face was burnt off."
In the glow of the cigarette, he could still see the faint white ring
around his finger.
" I still live there.  I was born there."
"What do you want from me?" she asked in the same, calm tone.
"I have broken my most sacred trusts for you." 
Two swift paces brought him before her, and she looked up, the tropical
sea of her eyes flickering in the light from the candles.
"For me."
"And you don't know.  You will never know."
"Thank you."
He held his breath, standing there, looking into her sweet, upturned
face, smelling the sharp brightness of her perfume, seeing the glow on
her lips.
"Show me your gratitude."
She stood her head barely level with his chin.  Slowly, she shrugged the
jacket from her shoulders, folding it neatly on the chair, her white
blouse and short black skirt followed until she stood before him in a
white slip like Maggie the Cat.
Hands ragged, raw and bleeding in his mind, he reached out for the
pristine white of her slip, the burning ivory of her skin.  Her head
fell back like a woman entranced, she allowed him to crush her small
body against his larger one.  He inhaled the citrus of her skin and
hair, sniffing her shoulder and neck like a hungry dog.  Small hands
fluttered against his back, nails nipping at his spine.  Rock hard,
solid and thick with blood, he pressed against the softness of her
belly.  Her mouth opened under his, sweet as a Midwestern corn-fed
virgin's.  He plundered her mouth with his tongue, until she gasped for
air and wrenched away from him.  Wiping her mouth with the back of her
hand, she backed away, and gave him a wary, feline look.
"Don't touch me." 
"You owe me your life." 
He grabbed her upper arms and gave her a quick, hard, shake.  With a
small moan, she sank to the floor, the strap of her slip sliding down
her arm to reveal the weight of a full, salmon-tipped breast.
"I'm sorry." she whispered.
Back arched, she crawled across the floor to him, her breasts swaying
like buoys in the current of fabric of the slip.  On her knees before
him, she released his penis from the confines of his jeans and his
shorts.  Her eyes glistened as she drew the thick length of him into her
endless mouth.  Round cheeks hollowing, she sucked on him, her nimble
fingers kneading at his balls and his ass.  He groaned from the base of
his spine.  Sucking, pulling, tongue circling, her small teeth raking
the delicate skin.  In delicious agony, he began to pump his pelvis into
the softness of her face.  She moaned around the mouthful of him and
matched his tempo with smooth bobs of her head.  Shinning waves of her
hair brushing either side of his monstrously engorged penis.  Finally
the dam of his resolve broke and he shot into her yielding mouth with a
groan as he melted into an erotic limbo where the only cries he heard
were his own.

Have some courtesy, some sympathy and some taste
Or I'll lay your soul to waste.

In the bedroom, he spread her legs and rammed into her, feeling her
tighten around him and the plane of soft body shudder underneath his. 
Her full breasts heaved and shook under each thrust, her heels clasped
into the small of his back.  When he finally came, mindless and blind,
his teeth tore into her shoulder, leaving an imprint of dental
magnificence in the skin and muscle.
Finally, drained and feeling every second of forty-five years, he lay in
his back and closed his eyes.  The teeth of the zipper shut the body bag
over him.

Later, he lay naked in bed, alone, listening to the woman in the
bathroom running water and thumping quietly.
He reached for the bedside telephone, dialed a number in Maryland, and
waited through the rings.
The phone rang twice, was picked up, dropped, and fumbled against
rustling fabric a sleepy female voice made his tired penis twitch to
life again.
"Hello?"
He couldn't answer.
"Mulder?" she asked.
He hung up.

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game.

Logic and Proportion
3/26

*And the ones that mother gives you*

Mulder checked the address against the slip of paper in his hand.  He'd
never been in this bar before, The uninspired brick faced with the
Miller neon out front had never lurid him in with its tawdry glow.  Now
it was late and there was an armada of hurt that he wanted to sink in
the bottom of a glass.  Dad would have been so proud.
Leaving his jacket, tie, and gun in the trunk, he locked the car and
went into the air-conditioned interior.  Normal people.  People with
normal problems like infidelities and mortgages.  Normal people with
normal cares crowded the smoky interior.  The jukebox was playing Sheryl
Crow and the TV behind the bar showed an early-season baseball game with
the sound off.
College types, mostly.
He snagged a beer from the bartender who was more interested in the game
than anything else, and walked down to the end of the bar, far away from
the TV.
A young woman sat alone at the end of the bar, nursing a wine cooler
with a vaguely discontented frown.  She looked like a date that had been
abandoned for the baseball game or the pool table.  She wore Joan
shorts, white sneakers and a Johns Hopkins polo shirt, her shining
copper hair caught back from her face in a tortoiseshell band,
His gut clenched around the beer.
So young.  So lovely.  Her face as round and fresh as a peach.  Bright
skin, brilliant eyes the color of the Antigua sea.
She saw him and smiled.
"You're late." she teased.
"I got lost." he slid into the seat next to her.
"How was work?" she asked.
"Vile."
Small hand slipping over his on the damp bar, she gave him a gentle
squeeze.
"The Yankees are getting their ass kicked." she observed.
"It's early yet."
"A bad start is still a bad start."
Mulder drank his dark beer and fed his dark thoughts.  The sweet, sharp
fragrance of her perfume drifted over to him from the open neck of her
shirt, where gold gleamed.  The smell of her reminded him of mandarin
oranges and lemon oil.
The wetness of her lips tasted of wine when he kissed her.
"Let's go home." he whispered into her mouth.
"What about the game?" she asked.
"The Yankees will annihilate the Phillies.  It's a foregone conclusion."
"Fate?"
"Talent."

Hands roving over her ass, Mulder shut the door of his apartment with
his foot as he sucked on the sweet berries of her lips.  Giggling, she
pulled away from him and went to the tiny kitchen and began opening
cabinets.
"What are you doing?" 
"I have a surprise for you."
"I'm out of Redi-Whip.  There may be squeeze cheese, though." he smirked
and leaned against the doorframe.
As he watched she took two fat shot glasses out of the cabinet and
filled them halfway with vodka from the freezer.  Then she took a lemon
and a small bottle out of her backpack, sliced the lemon in wheels, and
put a slice to float in each glass.  The small bottle was opened and she
poured a thick green syrup over the lemon where it hung, suspended over
the clear vodka.
"Watch this."
She thumped the glass on the counter, and the two liquids mixed, turning
a pearly, opalescent hue and the lemon melted like a sugar cube in hot
water.  The mixture seethed in the glass like a living thing.
"God's Eye." she said.
The glass was cold in his hand and the drink pulsed like a liquid opal.
"Go on." she said and smiled.
It froze his mouth and throat, making a bobsled run for his stomach,
where it pooled like mercury.
Mercury.
Winged messenger of the Gods.  Golden sandals and the baton with the
white ribbons of truth fluttering in the breeze.  Coming down to earth.

Down, down, down I come, like glistening Phaeton,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades.
In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base,
To come at traitor's calls and do them grace.
In the base court?  Come down?  Down, court!
Down king!
For night owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.

Gelatinous, he slid to the floor, hearing Scully's voice.
"Why didn't you tell me?" voice reverberating through the hallways at
the hospital.
"There were no ova to harvest!  I might have wanted to have a baby!"
His own mumbling reply as the tide washed his higher centers far out to
sea and leaving him a sticky-tongued teenager caught in a lie.
"I didn't think you should ---"
"Didn't think?  You selfish son-of-a-bitch!  How dare you!"
The grit of the floor went up his nose when he hit, who would have
thought a sick woman of her size could knock him to the floor.
Someone so small hurt him so much.
As much as he hurt her.
The truth shall set you free . . . 
Selfish son-of-a-bitch.
The luminescent halo of the kitchen light surrounded her hair, a cool
set of lips pressing against his hot forehead.
"I forgive you."
He didn't cry.
He had no tears left.
Dry as a bone.
Dust.
Mouth moist, warm and full of life, flowed over him like a benediction. 
Healing hands over his chest, soothing.  Re-hydrating, filling with
water and life, he rolled on the cool bed sheets, clutching her to him. 
Moaning, feeling her wetness as he fell into the depths of her.  He lost
himself in the rain glittering in her hair in the graveyard years ago.
Mermaid.
Siren.
Swimming in the gray-green sheets, her breasts stained green from the
window light, she stroked under him, hard as the current, undeniable as
an undercurrent, pulling him out to sea.
Whitecaps breaking on the shore of his mind, sensory waves crashing
against his brain was wiping it clean as untrodden sand.
Her red hair grazed his feet.
Sweet smell of the sweet dark ocean, tang of salt and low tide washing
over all.
Curled close as an oyster in the sheets, Fox William Mulder slept and
had no dreams.
The woman dressed and left.

Logic and Proportion
4/26

*Don't do anything at all *

The devil's cock is monstrously cold.
The woman gripped the desk as his frigid cock slide on and out.  Biting
her lips, she spread her legs wider and laid her breasts on the leather
blotter.
The great seal of the United States watched everything.
Ash fell on her back.
She took him inside her until he collapsed on her strong young back.,
coughing wetly into her ear.
The man lit another cigarette.
The woman dressed and left.


Nothing else happened the rest of the night.

Logic and Proportion
5/26

*Go ask Alice *

"Oh Christ, here comes Laurel and Hardy."
Mucheski ignored the uniform's snide comment and pushed through into the
Crime Scene to let Scotty rip the man a new anal orifice.  
The heat of a summer night on the Potomac closed around Mucheski like a
dirty sock around a tired foot.  Part of his mind was still in the world
of his vacation where the sky was big, clear and stretched on from
morning to night in an endless sea of clouds and blue.  He reached the
top of the rock in his mind, took a deep breath of the clean western air
and  . . . the smell of blood in the hot summer air almost made him
gag.  Funny how he had never really gotten used to the smell of death,
the smell of microbes exposed to the brilliant light of day and breeding
free for the first time in an oxygen-rich atmosphere.  The moment a
human being died, they began to rot.
Deep breaths.
Through the mouth.
Welcome back from vacation Steve-O.
"This is bad," Larry said, handing him a pair of "sex gloves."
"Come on man, I'm not that green," Mucheski muttered as he slipped the
powdery latex over the bandages on his hands.
"This is REAL bad."
"Jesus." Mucheski said when he saw the body,
It was bad.
Real bad.
"One sick motherfucker," Annie remarked as she clicked and flashed on
the corpse.
Blood was still dripping onto the floor, as flies buzzed and dipped at
the sticky treat.
The woman lay on her back on her kitchen table, arms, and legs draping
over the sides in unnatural, uncomfortable angles.  He could see the
pearls of her spine through the gash in her throat.  Blue eyes lay like
peeled grapes in one outstretched hand.  Blood ran into her navel,
pooling between her legs where the deer-headed handle of a hunting knife
protruded.
He made it to the sink before the bile and coffee came up in a sweaty
wave.
"That's ten for ten," Larry said in an arid voice.
Mucheski washed the vomit down the drain, splashed water on his face,
and gave the print man the finger.  
Then he had to get out of the way to let Scotty barf up his guts.
"Eleven for eleven?"
"We're trying for an even dozen."
"Ghouls."
Wiping the water out of his eyes, Mucheski felt the hardness of the
contact lenses and stopped.  He looked anywhere but at the body.
Typical crowded student apartment, more books than furniture, laptop
computer on the coffee table, Georgia O'Keefe prints on the walls and a
lot of plants.  Behind him, Scotty groaned and wiped his face on his
shirttail.
"What happened?  Who found the body?"
"Apparently she used to jog with a neighbor, he came to get her, found
the door open and got the rudest awakening of his life."
Finally, Mucheski got the nerve and the gastric fortitude to look at the
body again.  
Matted with blood, her hair was a familiar color and texture.
God no.
And he was grabbing the dead woman's hip, rolling her over, to see the
whiteness of her dead back.
"What the fuck are you doin' " Scotty grabbed at his arms.
"I gotta see." Mucheski shoved his partner away.
"Do not fuck with the body!"  Scotty warned.
"Fuck you."
"DO NOT FUCK WITH THE BODY!"
Wiping blood away from her waxy skin with a gloved hand, Mucheski looked
at her back, a hand-span above her waist and saw - - -
Nothing.
Nothing but unmarked skin.
No serpent ring.
She wasn't Red.
Sagging against his partner, he let Scotty drag him away from the body,
from the table.  Scotty eased the woman back into place on the wood top,
arranging her arms and legs as they had been, replacing her eyes in her
hand, fussy as a florist over a centerpiece.  
"Nobody saw that.  Nobody saw my dumb shit of a white-boy partner
disturb the corpse, right?"  Scotty asked.
"See what man?"  Curly asked.
"Don't touch nothin'" Scotty reminded Mucheski.
"Fuck you."  Mucheski sighed and looked around the room, the horror and
the fear receded until he was seeing and thinking in the cop dimension
again.
Form is the same as Emptiness.
Emptiness is the same as Form.
Form is Emptiness and Emptiness Form.
"What have we got?" he asked the room in general.
"All the ID in the place says Louise Collins.  Ran it through the
computer before you got here.  No record.  Nothing as much as a parking
ticket." the young uniform offered.
"You think it's a trick turned bad?"  Scotty asked.
"I don't think she was a pro.  There's a class schedule on the
refrigerator, looks like she was studying Psych.  Might have been
hooking for book money."
"She might not have been a whore at all."  Mucheski said, looking at the
schedule from American University held to the refrigerator with a
Dilbert magnet.
"She had two grand in her wallet and this--" Curly held up the familiar
phallic bottle with the gold cap.
The atmosphere thinned around Mucheski's brain, he heard his ears buzz
with his pulse.
"Takana Wachiru." he said.
"Bless you."  Annie joked and clicked a shot of his white-lipped face.
"Shit." he added a moment later when Curly put bottle that reminded him
of the cough syrup bottles of his youth, only this one was half-full
with a thick green liquid that shone like powdered marble in the glaring
lights of the summer night.
"Ghost whore.  Take enough of that and you'd fuck all of Congress right
in front of a CNN news crew."  Mucheski said, holding the bottle of raw
Ghost in his gloved fingers and looking into the green path to hell.
"It's a shame to waste a perfectly good white girl like that," Scotty
said, rocking back on his heels "Mummy and Daddy are not going to be
happy."
"Friends, Romans, and assholes, lend me your ears," Mucheski announced
"I want phone records, I want credit card records, I want her e-mail
account read.  I want to know who she was fucking and how much the
bastards paid for the pleasure.  I also offer the official bribe of
dinner for two at the Lotus Garden for the first useable lead!"
Cut off a head of the Hydra and two more appear.
Who said that?
Skinner.
Fuck.

Let me tell you about the she looked.
The way she acted.
And the color of her hair.
Her voice was soft and cool.
Her eyes were clear and bright.
But she's not there.

The Zombies whispered out of the radio as Steve drove through the
night.  He had the top down and the radio tuned to the oldies station as
the miles crawled away underneath the Goodyears.  Scotty lit a cigarette
and threw the match out the window.
"You know, I was thinkin'."
"Don't strain yourself."
"Listen to me, I know you hate computers but I was lookin' through the
CopNet database last night--"
"Miss Bianca keepin' you short again?"
"Lissen.  I saw the exact same thing in an Virginia murder scene
description last week."
"You need another hobby."
"I'll print it out for you and give it to you in the office tomorrow."
Mucheski turned onto Scotty's street, driving too fast and making the
tires cry out in pain.  He stopped in front of the narrow house where
Scotty lived with Miss Bianca.  A light shone in the downstairs window.
"Well?"  Scotty asked.
"Deep subject."
"You gonna call her or not?"
"Not."
"Pussy."  Scotty got out.
"Go inside to your woman."
"Call yours."  Scotty slammed the car door shut and walked up the steps
to his night-quiet home.
Mucheski sat in the car, immobile, seething, knotted.
The whole thing was starting all over again.  He didn't have the energy
to deal with it again, there was nothing left.  Leaning back, he shut
his eyes.  Sixteen times he had called her, spoken to her calm
(softandcoolhereyeswereclearandbright) and emotionless answering machine
tape.  Sixteen times all for nothing.  No call back.  A "go to hell"
would have been preferable to the void.  The nothing.
Emptiness.
Emptiness without form and without end.

The memory of her seared him.

Logic and Proportion
6/26

*When she's ten feet tall *

The chattering madness of the Homicide Department nibbled at both of
Mucheski's remaining nerves.  He tried to concentrate on the crime scene
reports before him and found that it was like trying to think through
mud.  He'd slept badly the remainder of the night, finally finding peace
stretched out on the floor in the living room with the Home Shopping
Network's Gemstone Marathon flickering over him.  Now he had a stiff
back, the lingering image of brilliant blue eyes burned into his
cerebral cortex, and an illogical desire to buy star sapphires set in
genuine, buttery 14kt gold.  
Women and gems.  
Bad combination. 
Her value far above rubies . . .
"Yo' man, snap out of it."  Scotty plunked a Starbuck's cup in front of
Mucheski.
"You know, I never liked you."  Mucheski said and peeled the lid from
the coffee.
"No man, you love me."
Above his flying toasters tie, Scotty grinned, looking both smug and
well rested as he flopped a thick pile of folders in front of Mucheski.
"For your delight, we have a series of unsolved homicides all over the
tri-state area, all Ghost whores, all within the past six months, and
all with the same MO."
"Can't anyone just have a simple murder anymore?"  Mucheski wondered
"Just a shooting or a strangling instead of all this ritualistic
psychological bullshit?  It's like a cable station where all you get is
Silence of the Lambs and Seven."
"We live in decadent times, Grasshopper."
While he drank his coffee, Mucheski leafed through the folders, skimming
the contents with a familiar feeling of helpless, sick-making rage. 
Wasted lives.  Addled with chemicals, sex with strangers to feed the
hunger, brains shot to hell with biochemical reactions that reduced
healthy tissue to useless mush.  Empty lives.  Wasted lives becoming
wasted deaths with a slashed throat and the insult of a knife thrust
into the vagina. 
You are a whore and you deserve this.
Nobody deserved that.
All these women were someone's daughter, someone's sister, and had
someone to mourn for them and rage against the one who had taken their
little girl's life away.
"Has anyone managed to track down Collins' family?"
"Sister in Washington State, got an answering machine."
"Keep trying."
At the other desk, Scotty made phone calls with the receiver jammed
under his smooth bronze jaw, and a pen in his mouth. 
"Anything from the ME yet?"
"I'm on hold," Scotty made a face "Do you think that music on hold is
really appropriate for the ME's office?"
"Depends on the music.  Chopin Etudes?  Adagio?  'When the roll is
called up yonder'?"
"'Feelings'."
"Puke."
"'Trying to forget you, girl---'" Scotty sang.
"Don't make me hurt you."
According to the report, Larry had pulled a decent partial print off the
bottle of raw Ghost and that was being run through the computers and it
would be a day or so before an answer would be available.  Mucheski saw
no point in computers if they were going to take that long to do
anything.  Might as well go back to chipping stone tablets.
With the files stacked up in front of him, Mucheski began to make notes
on the killings.  Despite all rumors to the contrary, he was an
organized thinker.

All in their own homes
Throats slashed
Eyeballs removed
Nude, lying on their backs on tables
Genital mutilation - hunting knife
Ghost in raw and liquid form found on the premises
Prostitutes - part time

Looking at the list, he felt the familiar tingle of excitement at the
back of his scalp, there was something else that was gnawing on the back
of his mind, something important.  He went back to the files, looking at
each autopsy report, then another and another and another in an
increasing rhythm of horror.
Redheads.
Petite redheads.
The tallest was only five four.
Mucheski did what he swore he would never do.  He picked up the phone
and dialed a number in a building not too far away.
"Scully's extension."
A man.
Oh.
"Yeah, this is Detective MacLeod of the MPD.  May I speak with Agent
Scully, please?"
Pussy, Scotty lipped at him from the other desk.
Mucheski gave him the finger.
A sharp inhalation on the other end.
"Detective, Agent Scully is not here.  I can have her return your call
when she comes back from sick leave." the impatient, flat voice said.
"It's a matter of some urgency--"
"Look, she had surgery so don't hold your breath."
Mucheski's head vibrated from the amplified sound of the phone being
slammed down. 
Dickwad.
Digging out his Rolodex from his desk drawer, Mucheski began calling the
local hospitals with a sick feeling in the pit of his mind.
What the fuck was going on?
Surgery?
"Okay, so far it looks like Louise Collins had sex with no less than
three men shortly before her death.  Three different blood types in the
sperm.  They're going to run the DNA against the database of known
offenders.  But you know we'll be pulling a pension before those results
come through."  Scotty stopped and looked across the desk at Mucheski.
"Who pissed in your cornflakes?"
Hanging up the phone, Mucheski stood up and pulled his sunglasses out of
his jacket pocket.
"Gotta go.?" he said.
"Don't you ditch me.  Don't do it man."  Scotty warned.
But Mucheski was headed for the door at a brisk jog, scattering
slow-moving detectives in his wake.
"Fuckin' asshole."
Kicking the trashcan across the room didn't make Scotty feel any better;
it only made his knee hurt.  He found the note on Mucheski's blotter, in
his partner's precise penmanship.
Dana Scully
Room 429
Tumor excision
Flopping into Mucheski's chair, Scotty stared at the words for a few
long moments before he picked up the phone and dialed his own number.
"Hi baby, it's me.  No, I was just thinkin' 'bout you."

Room 429 was full of late summer sunshine and flowers.  Alone, Mucheski
looked around and noted that a packed suitcase lay open on the bed,
balloons swayed overhead, attached to a teddy bear with a "Get Well
Soon" banner draped across its furry chest.  Feeling oafish, he looked
at the Get Well cards stacked on the neatly made bed next to the
suitcase.  The usual cavalcade of tasteless cartoon animals urged her to
feel better and get back to work soon.  The one from Skinner stood out
like a tank in a field of flowers.  A museum card of a Cezanne still
life of fruit on a table.  The inside simply read "Feel better soon -
Regards, W. Skinner"
Real romantic.
Asshole, Mucheski thought and resisted the base urge to crumple the
glossy paper.
He didn't want to examine his feelings too closely; they resembled a
tank full of tropical fish.  Too brightly colored and moving too swiftly
to make out details.  The shark of anger hovered hungrily behind them.
"Well--"
The cards spilled to the floor as he turned a shower of bright mockery
on the institutional linoleum.
He wouldn't have known her.
A long, flowered sundress skimmed her ankles, a T-shirt under the dress
not quite covering the IV bruises on her arms.  Bare of make-up, her
face was ivory white, with slashes of pain on either side of her pale
lips.  White bandages were taped to her face covering one eye, extending
from her cheekbone up over her forehead to vanish under the edge of a
floppy straw hat.
His throat tightened as if she had strangled him.
She stood there, like a wilting orchid on a hot sidewalk, regarding him
with a brilliant blue eye.
"I would have sent flowers," he said, voice cracking like a teenager's.
"Everyone sent flowers.  Chocolate would have been nice."
"Six pack of Guinness?"
"Better still."
The little canvas sneakers made a faint squeaking noise as she came into
the room.  Mucheski could smell her sweet citrus scent as she knelt and
began picking up the cards.  Crouching next to her, he picked up cards
as well.  All the angry and spiteful things he had spent months planning
in his great speech took the last train to Clarksville and left him
stranded with the vague feeling that he had done something horribly
wrong and this was all his fault.  He wanted to reach out for her,
gather her into his arms, and kiss her good eye and her pale mouth. 
Something in the way she held her body made him keep a certain distance.
Their hands met over a grinning penguin.
"Are you going to tell me?" he finally asked.
She considered him through her shining eye for a long moment before
sitting cross-legged on the floor like a child.  When she spoke, her
voice was throaty with painkillers.
"I have cancer, I have brain cancer.  It has metastasized in my
bloodstream.  I've just had experimental surgery to reduce the mass of
the tumor and inject it with genetic material from embryonic mice.  Once
I heal, I get more chemotherapy."
"Mice? Embryonic mice?"
"I've been dreaming about cheesecake," she admitted.
He almost could have laughed if he hadn't felt quite so much like
throwing up.
"You could have told me." he said,  "I'm not a monster."
"You know you're pretty dim for a bright guy," the familiar spark of
annoyance came into her eye "When was I going to tell you?  Before we
had sex?  After?  In the middle?"
"So it's not the best pillow talk in the world, but--"
"My partner is coming to pick me up.  He should be here any minute."
So he was dismissed.  That was it.
Mucheski stood, went to the door, and turned.
He almost said something unforgivable, he almost let it loose.  He
almost lost it.  But he refrained.
"I will send you a cheesecake.  Take care, Red."
Asshole, asshole, asshole, he chanted to himself as he walked to the
elevator.
Fucking asshole.
A tall Yuppie type in a dark suit nearly knocked him over as he hurried
out of the elevator doors.
"Asshole."  Mucheski muttered and hit the button for the lobby.

Logic and Proportion
7/26

*And if you go chasing rabbits *

The morgue was a cool place.
Temperature-wise, anyway since it was seriously lacking in ambiance and
the smell of formalin, disinfectant, and death was enough to set the
flesh a-creeping.
The attendant slid the drawer open and peeled back the sheet as though
she was exposing a rare and precious jewel.
Mucheski's chest hurt.
Eyes closed demurely over the sockets and the gaping wound stitched
shit, Louise Collins lay dead before him.
Wearing Red's face.
A quick blink and the moment passed.
Not exactly
The dead girl's face was fuller and rounder, baby-fat still clinging to
her cheeks where Red's illness had eaten her flesh down to the bone.
Do not think about it, Steve, he warned himself.
There was no pale mole on her upper lip and her nose was upturned,
rather than Red's fine little Roman nose.  Collins' hair was definitely
a match in terms of cut and color, although there did appear to be dark
roots close to the scalp.  Mucheski reached out and touched her cool
flesh; his fingertips registering the scaling dry skin around the nose
and mouth that was the hallmark of a habitual Ghost user.  Her lips were
violet blue with death and hard under his touch.
He realized that he was caressing her face like a lover and snatched his
hand back.
Another sick rumor about Mad Cow Mucheski if the attendant bothered to
open her mouth.
Pulling the sheet up over her face, Mucheski left.

In Emptiness lies ignorance, wisdom, and all unskillful states of mind.
In Emptiness lies old age, decay, death, and all idea of overcoming
them,
There is no pain, nor cause of it nor any path, which would lead to it.
Even wisdom cannot aid, for aid itself is emptiness.

The hot sunshine was a blow.
Reaching in his jacket pocket for his sunglasses, Mucheski's fingers
closed around the cigarette pack Scotty had left in his car.
Cancer.
Death.
Willpower.
Shit.
He put a Newport between his lips and stared across the street at
nothing in particular, feeling like Phillip Marlowe.
A policeman's lot is not a happy one.
"Detective."
Was he wearing a *sign*?
A well-aged man dressed in the dull uniform of a government official
geek stood next to him with a silver Zippo outstretched.
"Light?"
"Thanks."
They stood for a moment while Mucheski metabolized the nicotine.
"Can I help you?"  Mucheski asked.
"I may be able to help you with the Collins girl's death."
Great, another fucking nutcase looking for fifteen minutes of
second-hand glory, like that fucking moron soaking up Versace's blood
with pages from GQ to sell as memorabilia.
"Really?"  Mucheski said in his officious cop voice.
"These prostitute murders, I have some information that may prove useful
to you."
"Unless you're planning to confess, you can just fuck off, Gramps."
Mucheski flipped open his Ray-Bans and put them on.
"Look buddy, the last thing anybody needs is another fuckin' kink-o
bastard getting off on somebody's tragedy, okay?  So take your sad old
ass home and jerk off over newspaper clippings."
He glared over the tops of his sunglasses at the old bird, who seemed
genuinely shocked.
"Shoo!  Before I arrest you for loitering with intent."
Mucheski jaywalked across the street to his car.
"Fucking pervert." he muttered to himself.


Sleeping, head down in his desk, Steve Mucheski dreamed about the
mountain again.  The mountain was full of treacherous handgrips and the
rock face gleaming with deadly ice in the pale winter sunlight.  Snow
glittered above.  Up ahead on the trail, it looked even worse, riddled
with crevasses and broken rock from avalanches.  He had to reach the
peak, even though he was carrying only a few yards of rope and an ice
axe that looked like it belonged in a museum.  For some reason, he was
also wearing a suit and wingtips.  He didn't own wingtips.  He clung to
the rock and looked up.  Something important was waiting for him at the
top, something so monumentally clean and pure that it would transform
his mind into light and blow the particles of his being into the far
corners of infinity.  He had to get to the top before he froze to death.
A man was climbing next to him, properly outfitted for winter climbing,
only he wore no hat, and his long, dark hair blew in the wind.
"It's a difficult track," the man said.
"But I have to make it to the top."
"It's dangerous to hurry.  You have to go carefully, learn from each
handhold."
"But--"
"Examine each step, the journey is as important as the goal.  You have
to be patient."
"But--"
The man frowned.
"What part did you not understand?" he asked in annoyance.
Awakening with a guilty jerk, Mucheski looked hastily around the
night-dimmed office and rubbed at his eyes.
Jeez.
Apparently is subconscious was not only capable of sending blatant
messages, but of annoying dream beings as well.  If that had been a
genuine sending, he had mightily pissed off the Enlightened One.
He had to quit eating hot peppers so soon before falling asleep.
"Well?"  Scotty asked around a mouthful of sandwich.
"So?"
"So how is she?  Did you talk to her?"
"Okay and yes."
"You really don't want to talk about this, do you."
"Your brilliance astounds me."
"Mucheski?"
"Yeah?"
The sergeant from the front desk threw an overstuffed brown envelope
into his lap.
"This came for you."
"I love you Claire." he said and began opening the envelope.
She snorted and walked off.
"Collecting your own sports memorabilia again?"  Scotty asked.
"Not quite."
Scotty's telephone rang and Mucheski was peripherally aware of his
partner talking to someone on the other end as he went through the
contents of the envelope.
Black and white photographs.  Grainy.  A yellow sticky note centered on
the first one.

You are an unconscionably rude young man.

He peeled off the note and looked underneath.
A young woman, with an upturned nose, her hair held back from her face
with a band, was entering a boring brick apartment building with her arm
around the waist of a tall man with dark hair in a pale dress shirt. 
The next photo was through a window, the couple embracing.  The third
photo was the now-topless woman with her back arched, the man's head
buried between her breasts.  The last was of her head centered over his
pelvis while his face contorted in a rictus of pleasure.
Great.
He was a pervert after all.
A file folder.
Personnel records.
Grades.
Medical files.
Newspaper clippings.
A name.
Shit.
Scotty hung up the telephone and Mucheski looked up into his partner's
gleeful face.
"We got the prints!  You are not fucking going to believe--"
"Fox William Mulder, Special Agent FBI."
Across the desk, Scotty's grin turned into a glare and he lit a
cigarette.
"I hate you.  Smartass motherfucker."
Mucheski threw the file folder across the desk at him.  Papers fluttered
around Scotty's head.
"He's Red's partner, you fuckhead!" he yelled.
"Well that's kinkier than a phone cord."
"Aww man."  Mucheski huddled in his chair "I do not need this shit."
"What are we gonna do?"
"Our jobs. What else can we do?  Call the judge, get the paperwork,
we're going to Virginia."

Logic and Proportion
8/26

*And you know you're going to fall *

The front of the apartment building looked like a parade.  There were
enough police cars and emergency vehicles to make a Fourth of July
parade proud.  Mucheski parked the car and stared at his partner.
"I didn't tell nobody."  Scotty protested.
"What the hell is this?  An FOP meeting?"
They parked, leaving the blue disco light flashing atop the car.  A
uniform confronted them before they had gotten ten paces.
"You can't park there, buddy," the geek warned.
"MPD. Who's in charge here?" Mucheski enjoyed flashing his badge at the
buzz-headed geek.
"That would be Detective Allenwood, sir. Just a minute."
"Looks like our Foxy is a dangerous lad."  Scotty said in a rich brogue.
"Somebody screwed the pooch."
Allenwood sauntered over, heavy pistol hanging off one hip and a mulish
expression on an olive-skinned face.
"You're a little out of your jurisdiction, boys." she said.
"We have a warrant for the arrest of one Fox William Mulder for the
murder of Louise Collins."  Mucheski said, showing her the legal
document.
"Take a number.  We had a warrant for one Fox William Mulder for the
murder of one Elizabeth Pasquine.  He fucked her, cut her throat, cut
out her eyes, and then shoved the knife up her--"
"That's our boy." 
"No he's not.  The FBI's Internal Investigation Unit just left with him
in custody."
"The *what*?" Mucheski squeaked in disbelief.
It was like a slap in the face, the sheer stupidity of it.
"Internal Investigation Unit."
"There is no Internal Investigation Unit!"  Mucheski yelled.
"Then who the fuck were Agents Venkman and Spengler?"
"They're characters from Ghostbusters!  Don't you have cable?!" Mucheski
punched the side of the car.
"How the fuck was I supposed to know that?" she yelled back at him.
"Major problems.  Major problems," Scotty chanted to himself.
"Where did they go?"  Mucheski asked through teeth that felt like he had
lockjaw.
He was going to have a stroke.  He was going to blow a blood vessel
right there in the middle of Alexandria.
"They said they were taking him to Quantico.  Although now I doubt
that.  Let me put out an alert for the vehicle and see if we can't stop
them before they get out of state."
Mucheski got back into the car and out his head down on the steering
wheel.
"I must gave been bad in a former life." he groaned.
Incredible.
In-fucking-credible.
"As opposed to this one?"  Scotty asked.
Allenwood banged on the window.
"They're headed for the highway.  If we leave now we can get them before
they hit the county line."
She climbed into the back seat, a portable radio in her hands.
"Make a left at the end of the street."
"We be drivin', Miss Daisy."  Scotty drawled.
They peeled out; four squad cars lit like birthday cakes behind them. 
The unmarked's big engine came to life as Mucheski pushed it hard. 
Through the residential streets they sped, good thing that it was late
enough that there was next to no traffic.  The good people of Alexandria
got the hell out of the way of the cavalcade of cop cars cruised past at
crushing speeds.  Scotty hung onto the oh shit bar with a terrifying
grin on his face.
Blowing lights, blowing stop signs and generally ignoring every traffic
law, Mucheski pumped the car into high speeds and they flew over the
dark asphalt, under a full moon.
"I want a roadblock at the town line."  Allenwood yelled into her
radio."  We have armed men in a dark blue Explorer.  They are
impersonating Federal officers.  They are armed and dangerous."
"I make the Explorer at the corner of Cooper and Vine." the radio
crackled "Shit the fucker is moving fast."
"Go Speed Racer, go!"  Scotty urged.
The highway opened up ahead.
On the smooth stretch of road, Mucheski floored the pedal, and the
engine screamed.  The big car thundered up behind the brake lights of
the Explorer.  DC plates, Mucheski angled up alongside the taller
vehicle, trying to cut it off, force it off the road.
"You're goin' DOWN!"  Scotty yelled at the other car.
The chase cars screamed along behind, sirens screaming.
The Explorer made a quick right and Mucheski fought the inertia and the
big unmarked car slewed into place behind it.  Tires screamed and sparks
flew from the hubcaps.
The Explorer plowed through the dark streets of an Industrial park full
of night dark offices and warehouses.  The narrower road reduced their
speed somewhat, but Mucheski angled up next to the other car and jerked
the steering wheel hard to the right.
Sparks flew and metal clanged as the unmarked car banged into the side
of the Explorer.
"Go man GO!"
"Come on Motherfucker.  Play chicken."  Mucheski muttered and slammed
the Explorer again.
He got the faint impression of the driver's pale face, his mouth in a
round O of shock.
"Where the fuck are you?"  Allenwood demanded of the radio.
One thing that they hadn't counted on.
Just one little thing.
They had assumed that the men were armed with handguns.
They were wrong.
Automatic gunfire ripped into the passenger compartment of the unmarked
car.  Allenwood screamed.  The radio flew into the already broken and
raining glass front window.  Out of the corner of his eye, Mucheski saw
Scotty's head explode like Kennedy's in Dallas.
He screamed.
The unmarked car ricocheted off the Explorer and went into a low barrel
roll across a parking lot and into the grass.
Grass
Sky
Stars
Blood
Blood
Blood
Mucheski came back to himself in the still-shaking car, hanging
upside-down from the seatbelt.  The ruined mess that had been Scotty
hung like a pig at the butcher's next to him.  Allenwood was between the
front seat and the windshield, her head partly severed from her neck.
Mucheski moaned in pain, mental and physical.
He would have thrown up but he didn't have the energy.
The hot engine clicked.
He smelled gasoline sharp and piercing his brain.
Footsteps.
"You're out of your league, son."
Upside-down, aching in body and mind, Mucheski barely recognized the
pervert from the street corner.
The man with the information.
The man with the photographs.
The man with the cigarette.
The cigarette hit the ground as the man walked away.
The Explorer pulled away.
Fire
Gasoline.
Bad.
Badveryveryveryverybad.
Oh fuck.
With blood-slick fingers, he reached for the seatbelt latch, fumbled,
and tried again.  He cried in frustration like a child.
I'mgoingtodie.
Hard handgrips.
Learn from each of them.
No hurry to the top.
The journey is all.
The latch clicked open and he painfully crawled over Allenwood's
still-warm body, through her blood, under the hood of the car and onto
cold grass.  Tears blurring his vision, he crawled away from the wreck
as the flames crept deep within it.
Three feet.
Five feet.
Ten feet.
Fifteen feet.
Cradling his head with his arms, Mucheski buried his face in the dirt
when the car exploded into a mushroom cloud of deadly Buick.
Face in the dirt, Steve Mucheski sobbed under the full moon.

Logic and Proportion

9/26

*Tell them a hookah-smoking caterpillar *

If Skinner had still had hair, it would have been a bad hair day.  He
slept through his alarm, missing the opportunity for a workout at his
gym, spilled convenience store coffee on the passenger seat of the
Porsche, and now the fax machine was acting up.
"Did you press clear?" he asked Kimberly.
"Yes." she said between her teeth.
The two well-educated and intelligent sentient human beings stared down
at the collection of plastic and metal which was grinding a malevolent
grind and holding back paper like a child refusing to swallow a pill.  
"Did you wiggle the cable?" he asked.
"I wiggled the fucking cable, sir."
"Why don't you get a cup of coffee and let me take a crack at this." 
Skinner suggested.
Giving him a look that suggested that this was an impossible task,
Kimberly left, muttering under her breath.
Once his assistant had gone, Skinner looked at the machine.  It beeped
at him, whirred and ground more.  Apparently it was having a mood.  It
blinked.  Skinner made a fist and thumped the stubborn machine on the
left side.  Intimidated, the machine crackled and began obediently
spitting out dark lines of print across the white paper.  Finally, the
machine upchucked the last sheet of paper, squealed and then lapsed into
a sullen silence.  Skinner took the paper out of the bin, looking at the
pages with horror.  A grainy photograph and static police artist sketch.
"Mucheski, you son of a bitch."
Kimberly was coming back into the office as Skinner was leaving.
"Sir, where are you going?"
"Choir practice."

To everything.
Turn, turn, turn,
There is a season,
Turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under heaven.

Skinner finally found Mucheski in the third bar he entered.  The jukebox
caught in an endless loop of the Byrds.  The young detective was sitting
alone at the early morning empty bar, smoking a cigarette and leaning
over a neat row of empty shot glasses.  Skinner slid into the next
seat.  Mucheski rubbed his lower lip with his thumb but did not look at
the AD.
"I'm sorry about MacLeod." Skinner said.
"You and me both, Wally." he flicked ash into a half-full ashtray.
The newspaper Skinner brought fell open to the front page.
High Speed Chase in Alexandria
Officers Killed
Statewide Manhunt
Fox Mulder's unflattering ID photo sat cheek by jowl with the sketch of
the smoker.
Mucheski looked down.
"The Phillies beat the Yankees.  It's going to snow."
"These pictures are on the front of every newspaper in the country,
including USA Today."
"Doesn't make Scotty any less dead."
"That man is the connective tissue in a disease that has infected our
government to the highest level.  Until now he has been an unknown, a
shadow, and you, in your nave pursuit of Justice, have managed to put
his face on the table with Mr. and Mrs. America's breakfast."
"Did you know that Red had cancer?"
"Yes."
"Did I miss that article in the Law Enforcement Journal?" Mucheski asked
with a nasty little laugh.
"She finally told you."
"Yes, fuck you very much.  I guess I was supposed to read it in her
obituary, huh?"
The bartender hovered back like a hummingbird looking for a free meal.
"You want a drink, Wally?"  Mucheski asked.  "Prithee good barkeep,
gettest thou some spirits for my companion."
"Club soda."  Skinner told her.
"Watchin' the old waistline, Wally?  Gotta' keep in shape to fulfill the
carnal appetites of the luscious Miss Red."
The soda was so cold that it hurt Skinner's teeth.
"You're drunk." he told Mucheski.
"No shit, Sherlock."
Grinding out the cigarette, Mucheski put his hands over his face.
"They killed Scotty.  He was my partner.  He was my best friend." he
said in a flat voice that chillingly reminded Skinner of someone else.
"His wife is pregnant."
The music stopped.
The jukebox clicked, whirred, and started again.

To everything.
Turn, turn, turn,
There is a season,
Turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under heaven.

"Come on, kid, I'm taking you home."
Drunk and boneless, Mucheski let Skinner pour him into the Porsche. 
Head lolling back, he looked out the window at the beige-gray city in
the morning sunshine.
"This is all my fault.  I have to look at his wife and kid and know that
if I had just stayed farther behind the Explorer, instead of playing
SPEED, Scotty and the detective would still be alive."
"You're only human."
"Gee, Wally, I feel *so* much better."
"Get drunk, get maudlin, and get over it."
"Get sick, get well, hang around the inkwell . . .."
The Porsche pulled onto Mucheski's street.  There was a blue Ford
Contour parked behind the black Mustang and a small figure wearing a
baseball cap sat on the cement steps of the brick three-story building.
"Man in a coonskin cap wants eleven dollar bills and you only got ten."
The morning glories that wrapped around the porch pillar were not as
blue as her eye.
"I can't do this."  Mucheski whined.
"She came to you.  Don't waste the moment."
Skinner leaned over and unlatched the passenger side door.
"Get out of my car." he ordered.
Giving him an unspeakably dirty look, Mucheski slid out of the low
vehicle and made his way out the sidewalk.  The cement seemed to suck at
his feet like quicksand.  On the steps, Red stood up and raised her
eyebrow.
"Drowning our sorrows?" she asked.
"You don't have to be here," he said as he reached the porch.
"I'm here, deal with it."  she watched the Porsche pull away, "Give me
your keys."
Wordlessly, Mucheski obeyed.  She unlocked all the locks on the door and
they went into the cool interior.  In the dim vestibule, she unlocked
the inner door, and Mucheski could hear his tenant on the third floor
running through one of her arias, something sad and longing in Italian. 
He thought it was Gualtier Malde from Rigoletto but he was so tired that
he didn't think he could tell "All Along the Watchtower" from "Free
Bird" at that point.
"Pretty." he told Red and went into the living room, dropping his
blood-stiff jacket on the floor.
"Why don't you get cleaned up and into bed."
"I'm not totally and completely drunk, just, to coin a phrase,
comfortably numb."
"You'll feel better if you get some rest."
"It's not going to change anything."
The notes fell from above their heads like rain.
"Fine." he said, "I have to get Scotty's blood off me."
He fled upstairs.

Showered, Mucheski put on a pair of soft, old sweatpants and went into
the third bedroom.  The singing was still continuing upstairs.  
Madame Butterfly Un Bel Di, Vedremo.
He didn't know what Red was doing, nor did he really care.
Lighting a stick of incense in front of the golden Buddha, he sat
cross-legged on the bare floor.  Was it his imagination or was the
golden face of The Enlightened One looking especially pensive that day. 
He breathed and let the music fill him with droplets of sun.

The lake at Kashmir.
The call of the birds. 
The slapping of the water against the side of the houseboat.  In the
back of the boat he could hear his mother laughing with one of her
patients.  A woman sang on another one of the boats.  She sang Puccini
in a sweet voice as past and present blended.  The sun beat on his back
and he was ten years old again, hearing the music and his bare, callused
feet dangling in the cool water.
"Hey man."
The ten-year-old Mucheski looked up at the adult Scotty.
"Dude, I miss you."  Mucheski said.
"Sorry about that, man. "  Scotty was wearing his favorite optic orange
Nike T-shirt and baggy jeans as he had in life.
Scotty crouched next to the child Mucheski.
"It's cool.  I want you to know that.  Things are amazing.  It's like
bein' inside Aretha Franklin's voice, full of light and glory.  I can't
explain it."
"What about Miss Bianca?"
"She'll be cool.  You just keep an eye on her and that boy of mine. 
Make sure she don' start datin' assholes.  You know the woman got a
weakness for bad boys like myself."
Scotty looked over his shoulder.
"Before I go I want you to know that Ferret or whatever his ass is, did
not waste those chicks.  You're messin' with something real bad here. 
Takana Wachiru is a thing not a person and it is one bad ass
motherfucker. Be careful, man.  I do not want to be seein' you.  Get
it?"
Quickly, Scotty leaned over and kissed the child Mucheski on the
forehead.
"I be watchin' your lame ass," he said with a grin.
"Thank you."
"You be good to Miss Red, she needs you."
The water lapped against the side of the boat.

Mucheski opened his eyes, smelled the sweet smoke, heard the singing.
His face was wet.
Good bye Scotty.
Red was in the hallway when he came out.  Wordlessly, she touched the
side of his face.  Something hard inside his chest shattered like a
crystal goblet falling from a tabletop, sending brilliant shards
everywhere.  He let her put her arms around him and sweep him out to
sea.


Logic and Proportion
10/26

*Has given you the call *
A summer thunderstorm finally awakened Mucheski.  The lightning rippled
off the mini blinds in a staccato play of light over the bed sheets.  He
opened his eyes and watched the light stutter through the room. 
Carefully, he rolled over to watch Red sleep.  In the flickering light,
he looked at her sleep-soft self.
Curled up on her side like a hedgehog, Red lay dead center in the bed
while he clung to the outside.  Cats and women, in Mucheski's
experience, usually commandeered the best sleeping spaces.  During her
sleep, Red's ancient baseball hat had slipped up over her head and
Mucheski saw what the hats had been concealing.  Above the white bandage
that covered her eye, rose a thin centipede of stitches that followed
the curve of her hairline from nose to ear.  A strip of scalp had been
shaved line a Mohican's about an inch back from her stitches.
Her eye opened and a lazy smile crossed her face.
"Hey." he said.
"Hey yourself." she mumbled.
"Thank you." he said.
"Mmmpfh" she said and burrowed back down into the pillow.
"How do you feel?" he asked, touching her between the bandage and the
stitches.
"Sore."
He sat up in bed, not liking the thoughts that started when she had
opened her eye.
"I should make coffee." he muttered.
He heard her move, the sheets hissing over bare skin as she sat up
behind him, wrapping her arms around his chest and her legs around his
lower back.  He could feel the heat of her press into his spine.  He
thought ungentlemanly thoughts.
"I waited for you for three hours." he said in a tight voice.
"I'm sorry."
"I called you twice a day for eight days."
"I' m sorry."
The gauze on her eye scratched his back.
Mucheski turned and carefully lowered her back onto the mattress.  Her
eye was dazed, drunken, looking up at him as he hovered over her. 
Inhaling the orange and vanilla of her skin, he leaned over and kissed
her.  She became water underneath him.
"I'm dying," she said.
"I don't care." 
Those were the words that he said, but not at all what he meant.
I will move Heaven and Earth for you.
Heaven and Earth.
T'ien ti.
God.
They wrapped together on the sheets, arms around torsos, fingers twined,
and his nose in her sweet hair and her breasts pushed softly up against
his chest.  They lay like that for hours, finally sleeping again while
the soft summer rain tapped at the glass of the windows.


Dry as dust, dry as a bone.
Sand.
Sand choking him, filling his ears, eyes, mouth, nose, filling his lungs
and his bowels.
Out the window, moving fast, he saw the night desert, the moon standing
swollen on the mountains, drenching the landscape with a cold light. 
His head jarred against the wall of the van and he licked cracked lips,
smelled his own sweat, tasted dust, decay, and death.
His mind circled like a goldfish in a dry pond.
I met a traveler from an antique land
The process of dehydration probably took up to forty days
Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone
And then the body was lifted from the natron bed
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand
And the natron and temporary stuffing were removed
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies
Oh God Scully
The body was washed with water to remove all traces of natron and other
debris
Water
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
I have heard the mermaids singing
Since it was still quite pliable, it was straightened out into the
horizontal position
And on the pedestal these words appear
She could be dying now, bleeding to death in her pillow
It was at this stage that the embalmers
"My name is Ozymandias; King of Kings;
Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair!"
Lacrymosa
Of the 21st Dynasty inserted the packing material under the skin
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
Finally the body was carefully wrapped in layers of white linen
bandages, between which the embalmers inserted the amulets designed to
bring magical protection to the deceased.
"Water?" he asked the female shadow.
She gave him a straw that he suckled like a baby suckles his mother.  
He loved her for a moment.
But she slipped the mask back over his face, settling the elastic behind
his ears with care smoothed the sticky hair back from his forehead and
melted away.  He hated her.  He hated her though the scent of heaven
filled his mind.  
Heaven and Earth.

>From that deep abyss
Of wonder and bliss
Whose caverns are crystal palaces
>From those skyey towers
Where Thoughts' crowned powers
Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours

Above his limp form, the woman smoothed her auburn hair back from her
face and tucked it behind her ears in a gesture of impatience.
"I don't see why we don't just kill him and dump the body."
"You can't waste a perfectly good bargaining chip."
"You're killing him brain cell by brain cell."
"You think you're a doctor now? You over-estimate your importance here."
Stepping over the center console of the van, the smoker encroached into
the padded space behind the seats, the stained mattress compressed under
his featureless black shoes.  The woman pulled her dress down around her
thighs and glared up at him.  In a cocoon of pillows, the dreamer
dreamed with an oxygen mask feeding him a steady diet of Ghost and
oxygen.
"When I found you in the street, you were a diseased little whore
trading blow jobs for crack money.  I fashioned you from nothing and I
can return you to nothing.  To non-existence."
One nicotine-stained hand caressed the peach of her cheek, his thumb
resting on the glistening pillow of her lower lip.  She stared up at him
with cool blue eyes as she drew the thumb into her hot mouth.
The driver continued to drive down the narrow strip of black highway
bisecting the desert night.
Mulder dreamed on, oblivious to the two figures engaged in the rituals
of degradation and lust a few feet away.


Logic and Proportion
11/26

*Call Alice *

Lurid neon flashed across the windshield of the prowling Porsche. 
Working girls assumed provocative postures for the vehicle as if it was
the car that would have sex with them rather than the driver.  Drug
dealers postured and preened and pimps sneered.  The Porsche prowled the
streets, streaked with the red, green, and blue spillover light from the
clubs and bars.  The stereo was loud, but not so loud that the casual
passer-by would notice. 

It was still September and your daddy was quite surprised
To find you with the working girls in the county jail
I was smokin' with the boys upstairs 
When I heard about the whole affair
I said Whoa no, William and Mary won't do now
I did not think the girl could be so rude
And I'm never goin' back to my old school

The air conditioning left a thin residue of cold white on the rims of
the windshield.  Cool.
The neon sign above the club was a named woman, her blank body Barbie
doll smooth, crawling in and out of a doghouse with a spiked collar
around her neck.  Three positions in her program, running over and over,
and over above the sweaty streets.  The three steps of degradation in an
endless loop.
The club was called the Kennel.
The interior was darkness spangled with mirrors here and there throwing
back images of mockery and flashes of light in a delirium of naked limbs
and suit fronts.  Skinner made his way through the darkness and light
and the perfectly ordinary looking men at the small tables.  An empty
table in the back was his final destination and he sat there, feeling
the guitars throb in his sinuses.
Aside from the obvious bachelor party crew, the men in the club were
white, well dressed, and gazing up at the woman onstage with an amused
detachment.  These were the men Skinner blended into; these were the men
he worried about.  He saw a well-known lobbyist at a table with some
dark-skinned men of unknown nationality, a news commentator, and some
vaguely familiar faces tat may or may not have been from the Justice
Department,
Above them, outside, the neon woman continued to crawl out of the
doghouse.
The Kennel was, relatively speaking, classier than the club where
Goldberg's Memorial had been held was.  The women were younger,
prettier, firmer, and had no visible scars from plastic surgery.  The
blonde onstage modeled her fetching Hillary Rodham Clinton suit for the
crowd of men and then began to remove it in a delicate, ladylike
fashion.  Skinner took a business card from his pocket and wrote a
message on the back and called the waitress over.
"Is Jack working tonight?" he asked.
"Yeah, but the girls aren't supposed to see the gentlemen."
"Just see that she gets this, okay?" he gave her the card and a folded
twenty.
"Whatever you want, boss-man." she said with a painfully false
flirtation.
The blonde was down to a tasteful stars and stripes g-string and pasties
while the sound system blasted Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled
Banner.
Time flowed.
"That Texan bastard Johnson sent us here to die."  Martinelli whined
over his beer.
Eighteen year old Wally Skinner lit another cigarette and looked up at
the stage where a Vietnamese woman in a bad blonde Marilyn Monroe wig
was taking off a wrinkled 1950's cocktail dress.  The scratchy PA system
played "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend."
A kiss on the hand might be 
Quite continental
But diamonds are a girl's best friend
"This is all just a plot for the right-handed white military industrial
complex to legitimately kill the Brothers."  Fitzroy threw back a shot
of rotgut whiskey.
He grinned, teeth bright in the dim light.
"Th' only good nigger is a dead nigger." he said in a biting imitation
of an ignorant white.
"I thought," Schmidt struggled through the semi-canatonia of the
seriously drunk, "that we are freeing the people of Vietnam from the
oppression of the Communists."
"Bull shit."
"Pull the other one."
"I won't come in your mouth."
The men laughed and Schmidt blushed.
"Wally's been quiet."  Fitzroy poked him in the ribcage "What do you
think were doin' here surfer-boy?"
"Dying."
The word fell out of his mouth like a toad and lay on the tabletop in
mute, warty ugliness.  Frowns formed on faces.
"To Anderson."  Skinner said and raised his beer bottle.
"To Anderson."
"To Anderson."
"To Anderson."
"Fuck 'em all."  Schmidt added a moment later.
"Mister?"
Skinner blinked and focused on the waitress.  She had a rose tattooed
above her left breast and she looked like her feet hurt her.
"Jack will see you now," she said.
Backstage was a hive of little rooms, narrow hallways, and discarded
mineral water bottles.  The 'dancers', their make up surreal slashes in
the florescent light, pushed past him as though he was furniture. 
Skinner followed the waitress through hot air that smelled of feminine
flesh.  He started to sweat under his suit.
"In here, mister."
The dressing room was a cramped space with a rack of costumes down a
long wall and an unflattering mirror on the other.  Two naked women were
putting on make-up while a third touched make-up to an ugly bruise on
the brunette's thigh.
"Hey."
Turning, Skinner saw Jack leaning up against the Fire door, a black
nylon bathrobe embroidered with tasteless faux-Asian tigers wrapped
around her long limbs.  She had the door partially open and was exhaling
cigarette smoke out into the alley.
"Can you believe that you can't even smoke in a fucking stripper's
dressing room?" she asked.
"Just because we're dancers, honey, does not mean that we wanna die of
cancer." the blonde snarled at her.
"Fucking bitch."  Jack said.
"Dyke." the blonde returned.
"Step into my office."  Jack suggested, holding the fire door open.
As Skinner walked by her, he saw the wet gleam of black leather at the
gap in her robe.
"So what's on your mind, Walter?"
Jack's natural voice, which Skinner had hardly heard before was
low-pitched and had an exotic aftertaste.  South African?  Australian? 
Irish?  Clipped consonants and rich vowels.  He realized that he knew so
little about this woman, and what he did know, and she about him, was
dangerous in the extreme.
"I need to hire you."
She looked at her watch.
"I'm here until two."
"In another capacity.  In the capacity of your former career."
Exhaling smoke through her nostrils she stared at him with pale olive
eyes heavily ringed with liner and surrounded by a dense fur of false
lashes.
"You can't afford me."
"Yes I can," he said, thinking of Sharon's life insurance policy and the
use that he was about to put the blood money.
Blood for blood.
"What can you tell me in five minutes?  I have to go on."
"This is the situation: my best agent is being investigated for murder
and has gone missing."
"That sounds like an internal problem to me.  The sod probably just
buggered off."
"He was kidnapped."
"The plot thickens."
In the wan light of the overhead lamppost, Jack didn't look a damn thing
like Scully.  Her nose was longer, bony almost, and her eyes tipped up
at the corners like a cat's.  Her thinner mouth was prone to vulpine
smiles and she was allover thinner and harder than the agent.  Her
copper hair fell to her shoulders in loose waves.  
The only place she looked like Scully was in his mind.
Skinner shook his head and watched the red light from the neon dance
glow on the opposite brick wall.
"The general idea is to find my agent and liberate him to face the
charges leveled against him."
"Liberate?" she smiled "I like the sound of that.  It sounds dangerous."
"As soon as I find out where he is."
"Ah.  Well you call me when you know.  I'm definitely your man for the
job."
Leaning across the space between them, Jack kissed him on the mouth, her
lipstick sliding against his skin.
"You call me." she said and went back inside.
In the alleyway, Skinner took out his handkerchief and wiped the waxy
red from his lips.


Logic and Proportion
12/26

*When she was just small *

Major Problems.
Their first fight.
"Absolutely not.  No fucking way."
Red just looked at him as though he were lint on her sleeve.
"Be reasonable.  We have to find Mulder.  He must know something about
Takana Wachiru or t'ien ti.  Otherwise, Cancerman wouldn't have taken
him."
"Cancerman? Did I miss the cape?  Cancerman and Boy Tumor?  The
Cancermobile and the Cancercave?"
The minute the words were out of his mouth, Mucheski could have bitten
off his tongue and spit it in the sink.
"I'm sorry, that was - insensitive as hell of me."
"At least my illness doesn't consume *you* every waking moment." she
said in a dry voice that may or may not have been humor.
Stalemate over the scratched kitchen table.  Mucheski fumed at himself
and Red managed to look coolly superior.
God she looked cute.
With her partially shaved head and baseball stitches in her scalp over
the bandage, she looked like someone's tomboy kid sister who had lost an
argument with a tree branch.  In the buttery morning light, her face was
still soft with sleep and she looked eleven hundred times better in his
old practice jersey than he ever had.  
"Okay, why do we need to find him?"
"Because he's my partner.  Wouldn't you have done the same for Scotty?"
"Scotty isn't -- wasn't some half-baked psycho who thinks that aliens
kidnapped his sister and replaced his brains with tater tots."
"Mulder's brains are not tater tots."
"Mashed potatoes, after he got that asshole to drill a hole in his
skull."
The blue coffee mug hit the no wax floor with a pop and bounced,
splattering coffee on Red's bare legs.
"How did you know that?" she hissed, her eye gone cold as the South
Pole.
"Cancerman gave me Ferret's--"
"Fox."
"Whatever.  Personnel file.  Up to date to last week.  There were even
surveillance photos of your partner and a woman we believe to be either
Louise Collins or Elizabeth Pasquine involved in sexual activity.  The
two victims--" 
Careful.
"-- Resembled each other somewhat."
"Sex."
"Yes."
"With a woman?"
"What, is he queer or something?"
"Not to my knowledge, no."
She looked into the middle distance while the coffee dripped down her
legs.
"I have to find him.  It seems to be my lot in life to go chasing after
Mulder."
"I'll find him, you are recuperating from surgery."
The blue eye flashed like the lights atop a cruiser.
"Bite me." she snapped.
"Any time, any place." 
Mucheski smirked at her.
She glared back at him.
Major Problems.

In his office, Skinner picked up the telephone.
"I need all the phone calls originating from and received by a
cellphone."
He didn't have a warrant and he didn't care.

Back at his desk in the MPD Homicide office, Mucheski tried not to look
at the neat stack of boxes next to Scotty's empty desk.  The only
consolation was that Red was sitting at Scotty's computer, poking at the
keys with the nonchalant air of an expert.  She had changed into a drab
gray suit she had produced from her trunk along with all the things that
women needed to travel.  Now she was neatly made up, her hair styled
over the bandage and stitches, looking so fresh and crisp that she hurt
his eyes.  
Maybe things would be different this time.  Maybe she wouldn't leave him
in the rain like some poor bastard from an Elvis Costello song with his
heart and ego in shreds.
Maybe not.
Regardless of the sex, regardless of the tears, regardless of the way
that he caught her looking at him in unguarded moments, there was
something inside of her that she would not reveal to him.  Something
locked in a reliquary like the mummified finger bone of a saint.  At the
slightest provocation, she would withdraw into her private sanctum
sanctorum and shut the door in his face.
Was Ferret invited in?
He looked back through the fire-singed folder given to him by the
smoker.  Nothing new popped out at him, and the references to the case
in Rhode Island where Ferret had been cleared of charges of killing an
older couple made him write down the name and phone number of the
officer in charge.  Mucheski planned to call him once Red was out of the
room.  
Was Ferret really a killer?
Certainly, he'd killed before, in the line of duty, but to make love to
a woman, slit her throat, gouge out her eyeballs, and thrust the knife
into the orifice he had just withdrawn from that wasn't the same thing
at all.  That was the work of a seriously sick motherfucker who wouldn't
have passed the psych screenings to make it to be a dogcatcher, let
alone an FBI agent.  That sister and the aliens thing was enough to make
Mucheski wonder if the board of Admissions for the FBI hadn't been
smokin' a little hooch the day Ferret was discussed.  But Mucheski
imagined that a man who spent a good percentage of his adult life
dealing with the cesspit of the serial killer wasn't stupid enough to
leave fingerprints and semen at the scene of the murder.
Ergo, he couldn't be the killer because he knew too much about killers.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Fuck.
Just setting aside the Patterson case, now known at the Patterson
Syndrome where the Profiler takes on the characteristics of the killer
in an obsessive manner, for just one fucking minute.
Wait.
Ferret had brought Patterson in.
Another brilliant therory shot to shit.
Mucheski's head was starting to hurt.
Okay, back to the file.
Just the facts, Ferret.
Ferret's last self-assigned case (God, Skinner really was a pussy to let
his underlings pick their own cases), was investigating crop circles
outside Iowa City.  Apparently the circles had been found and pet birds
began laying non-viable eggs and giving humans a lot of attitude
protecting the eggs.  A woman had been attacked by her own parrot. 
Ferret's report stated that he thought that the aliens were conducting
fertility tests on the birds and the birds were suffering from
PostTraumatic Stress Syndrome.
What a fucking nutcase!
No wonder they locked him in the basement.
"Do you have any aspirin?" he asked Red.

They were gone and he was alone.
The Dark One had left, his minion guarding the door outside, and the
siren had shut herself in the tile temple to resume her natural form.
Leaving him alone.
Lying on the hotel bed, Mulder lifted his vaporous arms and slid the
mask from his face.  The cold air of the hotel seared his burning
lungs.  He saw the beige plastic telephone glowing like a pearl on the
distant shell of the bedside table.  
Closer, closer let not a sound betray
Brittle dry fingers, leaving dust of a thousand years in their wake,
fumbled at receiver and number pad.  
Blood ran from his cracked lips onto the holes of the mouthpiece.
Trilling, trilling, trilling the distant grasshopper in a pocket.
"Scully."
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins.
All my sins
All my sins
Sins
Remembered.
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.
"It's me." cracking, bleeding words.
"Mulder where are you?" high and shrill in panic, unlike her, so unlike
her.
She must be frightened to death, alone, cells eating at her, devouring
her piece by piece.  
"Can you forgive me?"
"Where are you?"
Swallowed a mouthful of bone dust. 
"I need help."
Mulder!
Come away, come away, death
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair, cruel maid.
Mulder? Can you hear me?
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.
A thousand sighs to save
Lay me, O where
Mulder please, you're making no sense.
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there!
Nude, sweet water dripping from her hair, sluicing down the white marble
of her body, she covered him with her watery limbs, taking the pearl
away from him and replacing it in the shell.  He whimpered with
frustration at this and at his thirst as she pressed him into the
seabed.
"Shh." she soothed, her wet mouth closing over his dry one.
He drank her.
The wet amber of her hair dripped into his burning eyes.
"I'll take care of you."
She drenched him, hair, and body, and he fell into an aqueous awareness

of her cool wet skin sliding against his hot flesh.
Take, O, take those lips away 
That so sweetly were foresworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
But my kisses bring again,
	Bring again;
Seals of love, but sealed in vain,
	Sealed in vain.

The phone rang in a square building, a man grabbed the phone, listened,
made a quick series of notes before taking his car keys and striding
into the blinding afternoon sunshine.

"Operator?  This is Special Agent Dana Scully.  I need the number that
just called into this cell phone.  My badge number is . . .."

Logic and Proportion
13/26

*When men on the chessboard*

The call had come from some armpit of a town outside Springfield
Illinois.  Red had insisted on driving rather than flying on the grounds
that cars were less traceable than plane tickets.  When Mucheski pointed
out that they were the hunters and not the hunted, she only gave him a
dry look and asked him if he had any tweezers she could use to take out
her stitches.
He couldn't watch.
He packed.

Ten hours of hard driving later, it was getting on to two in the morning
and they hadn't yet hit Chicago.  Red dozed in the passenger seat; her
head against the window, so all he could see was her shining hair
against the black landscape.  Mucheski let her sleep, keeping the radio
low and concentrating on the ribbon of the turnpike.  Signs for hotels
and rests stops flashed by and he knew that he'd shortly have to pull of
the road and find a room for the remainder of the night,  
He yawned.
Delight that Red was actually talking to him again was eroded by this
whole fucking Ferret Quest, Inconvenient as all hell.
Note to self- When Ferret is found, punch his teeth down his throat.

"Don't smoke in my car."
"Don't be tiresome, Walter."  Jack said and lit up anyway.
He drove through the night, hands hard on the steering wheel.  Jack's
black duffel bag rested on the floor of the passenger seat, between her
booted feet.  She'd handled in respectfully, and Skinner saw the lethal
bulges in the black nylon when Jack had carried it to the car.
"What are you packing?" he asked.
"Nothing special, machine pistols, sniper rifle, night-scope, plastique,
whips, chains, and Jell-O."
Through the glow of the dashboard, she gave him a sideways smirk.
"The Jell-O was a joke."
"I hate Jell-O."
"Watch out, Walter, people are going to start saying that you have a
sense of humor." she said and flicked ash out the window.
"I have a sense of humor, I just choose not to use it."
"Prove it.  Tell me a joke."
"I don't tell jokes."
"Wuss."
He glared at the dark road.
"How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?" he asked.
"Dunno."
"Fish."
Half a dozen miles passed.
"Keep practicing and you could have your own sitcom." she teased.
More miles passed in the dark car, the CD player murmuring some subdued
Steely Dan.  Jack shifted in her seat, looking out the side window at
the distant yellow lights of sleeping towns.
"Who's the girl?" she asked.
"What girl?"
"The girl with the drab designer suits and the Liz Claiborne perfume. 
The girl who you like so much."
"A woman I know."
"Why don't you ask her on a date or something?  She can't be married or
you'd have me wear a wedding band."
"It wouldn't have worked."
"You know that for sure?"
"Yes."
The Porsche continued through the night.

Mucheski lay on the hotel bed and watched Red putter around the room in
her stocking feet, enjoying the false domesticity of the moment.  She
took her night-things out of her suitcase, and brushed her autumn hair
in front of the mirror above the dresser.  She was beautiful and she had
no idea.
Her eye caught his in the glass.
"I need to take a shower."
"Go right ahead." he said.
When he heard the bathroom door lock behind her, Mucheski's heart took
the express elevator to the basement.  All his plans of helping her wash
her back were ruined.  He sighed and stared at the stucco ceiling.  What
the hell was he supposed to do?  He'd offered her his heart once and
she'd pushed it away like an unwanted dessert.  
Knock it off, Steve, you'll just drive yourself crazy.
What was it in him that drew him to strong, independent, even brilliant
women who were perfectly willing to sacrifice him without a second
thought?  First Joy and now Red.  It wasn't that he wanted a doormat of
a woman, but it would be nice to be high enough on her list of
priorities that she actually thought about his feelings rather than just
thinking of him as a recreational object.
Steve Mucheski.  Sex toy.
Gross.
Groaning, he stood up and stripped off his shirt, sneakers, and socks. 
Taking off his glasses, he put them on the bedside table.  Had it been
his imagination or had Red seemed a mite annoyed when he'd booked them a
single room with a King size bed.  The glasses-less world was reduced to
a softer haze, and he relaxed somewhat.  He looked at his uninspiring
body in the mirror, and checked the progress of his healing tattoo, an
armband on his left bicep, in a vaguely tribal pattern that he'd seen in
a dream.  Sure that the meaning of the markings would be revealed to
him, Mucheski passed his fingers over the still-reddened skin, following
the waving black swirls of ink.
The bathroom door opened, and Red came out, going over to the garment
bag on the back of the door to hang up her suit and blouse.  Her pajamas
made him smile.  Baggy shorts and baggy v-neck T-shirt in a pattern of
oversized cartoon drawings of teapots, teacups, coffee cups, and coffee
mugs on a white background.  Catching his amused look, she lifted her
chin in defiance and gave him a dirty look from her good eye.
"From my mother, for the hospital."
"They're cute."
She wrinkled her nose and frowned.
"They fill the job description."
Reaching out, he touched the wet hair clinging to her face. She flinched
away from him.
"Don't." she said.
"Why not?"
Be cool, Steve, be cool.
Thou shall not freak.
"I have cancer, remember."
"Did you have cancer this winter?"
"Yes."
"And you knew, right?"
"Yes, I knew."
The breath that he sucked in burned his lungs.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Her eye darted to the blank television screen, and when she spoke, the
words came from inside the sanctuary where he was not permitted.
"I don't want your pity."
Barbed wire, the last word, taut and glittering with pride's blood.
Anything he could have said would have been wrong.  Reassurances as
substantial as oil rainbows on the highway.
Her skull was so small in his hands, delicate, and fragile as a
blown-glass sphere, complete with the flaw from blowing rod separating
from its glowing offspring.
Oranges, vanilla, and soap filled his head and her mouth tasted
endearingly of toothpaste.  Her lips were still cold from the tap water
and the bandages tickled his cheekbone as her mouth warmed under his.
Please, he thought, don't let me screw *this* up.
Cold hands found the skin on his chest, resting briefly palms-down as if
to push him away before sliding up his neck and underneath his hair. 
Soft over a core of muscle and sinew, she melded to him, toes, knees,
thighs, belly, and breasts, her arms locked around him.  They swayed
imperceptibly to silent music.  His throat ached, tightened around the
insipid nonsense that threatened to bubble up from the frightened part
of him.  Stepping back, she slid her fingertips down his arm, briefly
resting on the new black lines before twining her small, strong fingers
with his nerve-chewed ones.
"Come on," she said.
Two paces to the bed, an arm outstretched to kill the electric light. 
Her eye sparkled in the thin thread of light from underneath the door. 
Lying alongside her, Mucheski stroked the warm skin of her belly.
"I missed this." she murmured.
He ran his finger under the waistband of the silly shorts, she
stretched, and the shirt inched further up her body.  Leaning over, he
kissed her again, invading her mouth as slowly and deliberately as
possible, and she rose up against him, one hand on the small of his back
and the other stroking his collarbones.  He kissed her mouth, her eye,
the thin red line of scar along her hairline, the bandage over her other
eye, the space above her eyebrow where the tumor grew.
See it's okay.
I don't mind.
How can I pity you when you astound me?
Down the hard tendons of her throat, her neck, her scapular notch, he
headed south.  She sighed and arched her back.  Hands under the baggy
pajama top, he eased it over her head before he found the hot weight of
her breasts with his hands, with his forefinger and thumb, he caught
both tips and teased the hard coral peaks.  She strained against him,
breath hitching in her chest, rising up on her elbows, trying to catch
his mouth with hers.  But he retreated to her midsection and worked both
the baggy shorts and the scrap of beige cotton that passed for panties
down her legs and over her feet, until the whiteness of her body was
uninterrupted by clothing.  Her face was dazed and somewhat embarrassed
when he began to suckle and nip at each breast in turn.  Her knees
squeezed his ribcage and her fingers clutched at his hair as he worked
at her flesh.  Underneath him, she lay with her head and her shoulders
half-braced against the headboard of the bed, wet hair sticking to the
varnished wood and to her face.
Taking his time, he worked his way back down her body, ribcage, tight
navel, and the soft skin where hips and thighs met.  She was, he
realized, panting outright, making little gasping noises every time he
touched her.
With a smile into her thigh, he moved between her legs and put his mouth
on her.
She tasted like marzipan.
After only moments of determined sucking on Mucheski's part, she
convulsed underneath him, shaking and crying out as the climax rolled
through her small body.  Once the ripples had subsided, she grabbed at
his shoulders with a fierce grip and pulled him up her body.
"I want you in me now." she said with a growling intensity that made his
bones quiver.
With shaking hands, he unbuttoned his jeans and pulled the denim and
undershorts down to his knees like a teenage rutting in the back of a
Chevy Malibu.
Finally.
Finally he slid into her, the dazed, intent expression on her face
inflaming him more than any caress could have.  She closed down around
him, tight, wet, and hard.  He moaned with the sheer bliss of it and
began to move; slowly stroking in and out of her, grinding his teeth at
the effort the control cost him.  She must have been wound tighter than
a cheap watch, he thought as she arched up again and whimpered. 
Involuntarily, her hips rose up to met him and he plunged even deeper
within her.
He didn't know how much longer he could hold out.  Needed to thing about
something else.
The stock market,
He didn't know shit about the stock market,
Bears and Bulls
Bulls and bears.
The Bears never really got over losing Ditka.
They had a good roster but the leadership was weak.
No trophies this year.
Greenbay could do it again.
Her fingernails raked the skin on his ass.
He crushed her to him as consciousness dropped to something less than an
intelligent level.  The universe itself seemed to close down to the
woman whose breasts were stuck to his sweaty chest, whose hands ran hard
down the bones in his spine, who moaned into his open mouth.  Another
climax hit her and her teeth and nails dug into his body as her
innermost muscles squeezed down on him in hard, lush strokes.  That was
it.  Mucheski gave up.  He came for what seemed like two and a half
weeks, all the frustration and sweaty nights of the past few months
wiped from his mind, along with other more intellectual thoughts, as his
spine turned into ice and melted.  
Reduced to protoplasm, he melted onto her.  Couldn't think, couldn't
speak, couldn't move.  He crashed into the hard/soft bank of her body,
his head fitting into the curve of her shoulder as she smoothed his hair
and murmured words that were not words.  He drifted down, weak arms
around her waist, hot cheek against her shoulder.

Sometime close to four in the morning, the black Porsche pulled into a
rest stop at the Illinois border.  The occupants emerged, stretched
stiff limbs, traded driver and passenger positions, and then the low
sports car resumed the road.

TITLE: Syntax II: Logic and Proportion
AUTHOR: MustangSally

Logic and Proportion
14/26

*Get up and tell you where to go *

Sometime after the sun began to burn through the cheap curtains, he
awoke, more clear-headed than he had been in days.  The sleeping woman
next to him was a warm human comforter.  There was a vague memory of
having made love to her in a strange, fragmented confusion of sight,
sound, and sensation.
A smell of flowers in sea air.
Someone had put his brain through a blender set on frappe.
Lifting his aching head, he looked over at the bedside table and saw
that the telephone was gone.
Naked, shaking and weak, he stumbled into the bathroom as he had on so
many other bleary mornings throughout his life.  The mirror, as usual,
failed to be kind, throwing back at him the image of a face that was all
nose and shadow-stained eyes.  There was a healing bruise on the
underside of his jaw and the impression of human teeth on the inside of
his left thigh.  He showered in the harsh, chlorine-laden water, the
pressure pounding his skin red while he scrubbed away sweat, saliva, and
sperm from his body with the intensity of a rape victim.
Amazingly enough, Mulder did not cry.
There was a battery-operated electric razor on the back of the toilet
and clothes on the vanity: a pair of jeans, plain gray T-shirt, socks,
and underwear.  Mulder used the razor and put on the clothes.  He wasn't
altogether surprised to find the girl sitting up in the rumpled bed with
the sheets bunched around her body when he came out of the bathroom. 
She looked at him with narrow eyes.
"You're straight."
"No thanks to you." he said and sat on the desk chair at the opposite
side of the room.
God, it felt like the worst hangover in the world, worse than anything
from pub-crawling in London.  Sweaty, queasy and in pain, Mulder found
it an effort to sit upright.
"I don't suppose you want to tell me what the fuck is going on?"
She shrugged.
"I do my part, get paid and go home."
"Your part included seducing me two months ago, Lisa."
"My name's not Lisa.  And I didn't seduce you, you came after me like a
horny dog." she flicked her hair over her shoulder and gave him a bitter
little smile," You know you ought to be more careful about the women you
sleep with."
"Maybe I *like* getting fucked over and stabbed in the back."
"Look, you seem to be a pretty nice guy, and I might have gone with you
anyway, but this was business, okay?  Don't give me attitude."
"Attitude? I've been stoned off my ass on God knows what in the back of
a Ford Explorer for almost two days and you don't want attitude?"
"Ghost.  You've been stoned on Ghost."
Oh great, brilliant even.  Ghost was only the worst of the new family of
organic recreational drugs that had surfaced from the retro-hippies.  A
drug so addictive that there were unproven theories that a person could
get hooked after only one use.  Mulder wished he had paid attention to
the briefing that he'd gotten months ago, but, as usual, he'd been
preoccupied.
Shit.
"God's Eyes are straight Ghost dissolved in alcohol.  Best that there
is.  No fucking around with sprays.  Right into the bloodstream, baby."
A look of lazy pleasure crossed her heart-shaped face.
"Liquid Bliss."
"You're a Ghost whore."
Titling her head to the side, she regarded him through the fall of her
hair.  He wanted to touch it, to see if the reality matched his memory
of watery silk.
"And you're not?"
"Excuse me?"
"Wait until you really need it, man and you'll fuck your mother for a
hit." she smiled "Do you have any idea how much you've inhaled lately? 
You're gonna have a monkey the size of King fucking Kong on your back."
That bastard.
The man with the cigarette.
Wouldn't kill Mulder outright so he was trying to gaslight him again,
give him another obsession, like he didn't have enough trouble with that
already.
"We'll see about that."
False bravado, but it cheered him somewhat to say it.  Almost made it
bearable.  Almost bearable.  His entire fucking life was almost
bearable.
"You know they'll kill you once your usefulness is over." he told the
girl who was not Lisa.
Letting the sheets fall from her body, she glared at him and made her
way into the bathroom.  He heard the taps run.  Going to the window, he
parted the cheap curtains half an inch and looked out into the parking
lot.  He could see the Explorer parked in front of the room and a
muscular looking generic goon in a dark suit leaning against the bumper,
watching the room.  
Quickly, he searched the room.  The telephone was nowhere to be found,
and there were two duffel bags in the closet.  One bag contained men's
clothing in his sizes, still smelling of fabric softener, assorted
toiletries, and a pair of sneakers in his size.  The bag still bore the
price tag from a well-known department store.  Obviously, they planned
on keeping him alive long enough for him to go through ten pair of
boring white briefs.  That was the best news he'd gotten all morning.
The other bag held NotLisa's things, a tangled assortment of panties,
bras, shorts, and trendy tops.  There was an odd combination of
postcards and cheap jewelry in a souvenir bag from the Smithsonian.  Her
backpack handbag was a mish-mash of chewing gum wrappers, make-up,
sunglasses, and loose change.  Her wallet contained a thousand dollars
in hundreds and twenties, a Pennsylvania driver's license made out for
Mary Elizabeth Yoder of York and a picture of a well-scrubbed elderly
couple in the static pose of a photography studio.  There was also a
blurry snapshot of a brown dog.
After putting everything back where he found it, Mulder sat on the bed
and put on the sneakers.  She emerged from the bathroom, her hair wild
around her face.  While he watched, she went to the duffel bag and
started pulling clothes out of it.  Her nudity implied that he was about
as important as the family pet.  It was an insult.
"They won't pay you.  They'll butcher you the way they did the other
girls and leave your body by the side of the road for the birds to eat."
"And what's your offer? Witness Protection Program?  Fuck you." she
pulled out a pair of microscopic bikini panties and began to shimmy into
them. 
He could smell the perfume of soap on her skin.
"You know what they did to the woman in DC?  They cut out her eyes,
shoved the knife up her cunt and then they cut her throat." his voice
and words were deliberately brutal.
"So?"
"You want to end up like that Mary Elizabeth?"
She looked at the bottle of lotion she held in her hand and then began
to stroke the lotion down her legs.
"I heard them talking.  The old guy said that they were taking you to
Washington State to Takana Wachiru.  They figured that this would smoke
out some chick named Sally and a DC cop with a funny name to come after
you."
"Scully, not Sally."
What DC cop?  What the hell was that about?  Scully had never said
anything about a DC cop.  Admittedly, there were parts of Scully that he
traveled without a map, at his own peril.
"What's Takana Wachiru?"
Pulling on a psychedelic print T-shirt so short that it barely covered
her unfettered breasts, Mary Elizabeth regarded him from under her hair.
"Takana Wachiru is the one who created Ghost.  She lives in a compound
on a mountain like a goddess and all the little junkies do her bidding."
Addict.
Junkie.
Ghost Whore.
At the mere mention of the drug, Mulder felt his mouth fill with saliva
in a classic Pavlovian response.  The anticipation of the sharp
pleasure, the expansion of the mind and the golden aftermath that was
ever so sexual, made his heart take a dance beat in his chest.  Classic
addict reaction, he had paid some attention at Oxford, after all.  But
he hadn't studied Ghost, hell no one had heard of it in those days, so
he had no idea what kind of time frame he had before the detoxification
hit him like a nuclear bomb.  Days?  Hours?  Minutes?  He had no idea. 
Scully would have known, she was a fucking encyclopedia in size seven
pumps.  But she wasn't there.  She was, presumably, with the cop with
the funny name.
The girl had out on a pair of baggy denim shorts that hung from her
sharp hipbones.
"You have to help me," he said.
Mulder could see his reflection in her pupils, and watched himself be
wiped away when she blinked.

Logic and Proportion
15/26

*And you've just has some kind of mushroom *

"An hour to Springfield."  Jack declared, folding the map.
"Remind me that I want to see Bart and Homer."
"No relation to the Principal are you?" she asked.
He almost smiled.
"No."
They watched the turnpike slide by through two pair of dark sunglasses.
Opening the bag at her feet, Jack removed a shockingly large handgun and
began a ritualistic checking of the mechanisms.
"Don't get pulled over for speeding, Walter, it would be rather
awkward."
"This entire situation is awkward."

Punching in the phone number for the MPD Crime Lab, Mucheski used the
calling card that he had bought with this coffee at the convenience
store where Red was still inside investigating the ice cream selection.
"Curly."
"Hey man, it's Moo.  What have you got for me?"
"Where the fuck are you?  Don't you know Scotty's funeral is tomorrow? 
And the Captain is flowing heavily over your disappearance."
"Tell her that I freaked out and had to go on a spiritual retreat."
"You're after the motherfucker aren't you?"
"What would you do?  Get me up to speed and do it fast."  Mucheski put
on his sunglasses and took out a pen and his notebook.
"Collins had enough Ghost in her system to get Congress high.  You were
right about that.  Problem is that the chick in Alexandria was clean as
a nun.  He didn't even fuck her, just jammed her with the hilt of the
knife to make it look like it."
"Copycat?"
"You're the detective.  Detect.  Also, we went over the Alexandria
murder scene, and there were that Ferret guy's fingerprints all over the
fucking place.  Perfect finger prints, no latents, no partials,
textbook."
"Meaning?"
"They were perfect.  Too perfect.  Bullshit.  I think and I have no idea
how, the prints were planted."
"Fuck.  You mean Ferret's not the man?"
"Yeah, he could be our guy if he was the stupidest motherfucker Fed to
ever get his badge out of a crackerjack box."
Through the bright haze of the morning, Mucheski saw the familiar Johns
Hopkins Blue Jays cap come out of the store.
"Gotta go man," Mucheski said and slammed down the phone.
He could still hear Curly yammering at the other end of the line.
She was eating Ben and Jerry's out of the carton with a plastic spoon,
her dark glasses covering both good and bad eyes.
"Don't even try." she said.
"I was calling my mother."
Spoon stuck between her lips, she still managed to narrow her mouth.
"We're going to miss Scotty's funeral." he looked over at the car for a
moment, "but this is more important."
"Sometimes you are too good to be true." she said and held out a
spoonful of ice cream.
The casual intimacy of it rocked him down to the soles of his hightops.
"Yeah, I'm a fuckin' pod person.  The real Mucheski is still in the
trunk." he muttered around the ice cream.
They crunched across the gravel of the parking lot.
"The map says two hours to Springfield." he said, "We'll get there just
at checkout time."
"Bag the map." she said, walking over to the skinny boy pumping gas.
As Mucheski watched, she assumed an unusually flirtatious air.
"Hey, can you tell me the *shortest* way to Springfield?"  She asked and
flashed the pump-monkey a thousand-watt smile.
The boy smiled back at her.
You rock my world, Mucheski thought.

"That is not a road, that is a crease in the map."  Skinner said between
his teeth.
"Actually, I think its coffee."  Jack said and scratched at the mark
with a fingernail.
Pulled into a hard packed area of dirt, running though a field of
unidentifiable green-brown plants, the Porsche looked extremely
insectoid in the morning light.  Skinner fumed.  A few hours sleep while
Jack had driven was doing nothing for his mood, and this stupid
complication was not helping.  The road ended ten feet ahead.
"There was a gas station a few miles back, we could stop there and get
directions."
She looked up at him with mischievous eyes.
"I forgot, you're a man, you can't do that."
"Nice of you to notice."
"How could I not?  I've sucked your---"
Clods of dirt flew into the air as the sportscar made a violent U-turn.


"Help!  Oh God help!  He's having a seizure!"  Mary Elizabeth shrieked
in an unearthly voice.
The goon opened the door, only to have Mulder slam the desk chair down
over his thick proto-humanoid skull.  The man went down like a steer at
a slaughterhouse.  While Mary Elizabeth shut the door, Mulder rolled the
man over on his back and began going through his pockets.  Taking his
wallet, no ID, naturally, and his gun, Mulder stuck the gun in the back
of his jeans and dragged the heavy body into the bathroom.  Quickly, he
tied the man to the pipes underneath the toilet with his own shoelaces. 
When he came out of the bathroom, Mary Elizabeth handed him the duffel
bag with the men's clothes in it.  Mulder slung the bag over his
shoulder and jangled the man's car keys in his hand.
"Let's get out of here."
Shaking her head, she stepped back.
"No, I'll just disappear for a little while."
"They will kill you."
Smiling, she patted his arm.
"I'm a Ghost Whore.  If you really wanted to help me, you'd put that gun
to my head and shoot me like a rabid dog."
"But--"
"Shut the fuck up and get out of here."
Stunned at the rejection of help, he followed her out into the parking
lot to the blue hulk of the Explorer.
"I did a really rotten thing to you and I'm sorry.  Please be careful,"
she said in a simple tone.
"I'll be fine."
"There's a couple of cans of Ghost in the bag, for when things get bad,
and they will." she leaned over and kissed his cheek.  "Don't fuck this
up."
While he watched, she slung her bag over her shoulder and made her way
around the pink concrete side of the hotel and evaporated.  He watched
for a full minute after she had gone, holding the keys in his hand,
thinking unformed thoughts.  Flight awoke in his muscles and he
remembered why he was leaving.  Thinking through the post-Ghost haze was
difficult, but not impossible.  He climbed into the high front seat of
the Explorer and started the engine.
As he pulled out of the back lot of the hotel, he saw sunlight flash on
the windshields of a pair of late-model American sedans.
Tinted windows, anonymous sedans.
Sweating with fear, he hit the gas.



"Make a right up here."  Red looked down at the directions she had
scribbled on a napkin.
"A what?"
"Right!  Make a right!"
"Don't yell at me."
"I'm not yelling!" she yelled.
Mucheski slammed on the brakes, flinging Red forward in her seat so the
napkin flew out of her hands and the tightening of the shoulder harness
made her yelp.
"What the hell?"
It couldn't be.  Impossible.
The blue Explorer.  It had to be.  The scrapes from the unmarked car
crazed the paint on the driver's side.
"Son of a bitch."  Mucheski said from between his teeth.
Kicking up sprays of dirt from the parking lot, tires squealing, the
blue Explorer peeled out of the parking lot.  A Lincoln Continental and
an Oldsmobile Cutlass fast on its rear bumper.  Mucheski made the call;
he jammed his foot on the gas.
The light Contour surged forward, catching up with the Olds in a matter
of blocks, The windows were tinted dark so he couldn't see the driver. 
Barely he was aware of Red giving him some kind of shit from his right,
The chain of cars blew a light, sending innocent motorists into spins,
and then they were on an open road, surrounded by farmland.
The speedometer of the contour hit eighty and they were gaining on the
Olds.  Red clutched the doorframe and held her hat down on her head with
the other hand.
"I trust you have a reasonable explanation for this?" she yelled 
"It's the Explorer, The one from the other night.  I know the dents I
put in it.  It was what the bastard who killed Scotty was driving."
"You're seen Speed too many times!"
The road curved ahead, Mucheski grabbed the steering wheel and looked at
the side of the road as the long lines of crops flew past in a beige
blur.  There was no ditch at the road's edge and the field to his right
had been cut.  He needed to get in front of the Olds and the Lincoln and
get at the Ford.
This was going to ruin the shocks.
Red yelped as the car careened off the road, went hurtling over the
packed dirt of the denuded field.  Hanging onto the wheel, Mucheski
fought for control over the car as it rushed to memo the road.  A low
strip of uncut crop lay between them and the slice of the Explorer's
roof that he could see.  Mucheski gave the car more gas.  Engine
screaming, the Contour burst through the grain, bounced and leapt back
on to the hardtop, grassy stalks scattered in their wake.  
A flock of frightened crows spiraled up into the hot blue sky.
They were almost between the Lincoln and the Explorer.  While Red
fumbled her sidearm out of her holster, Mucheski drew level with the
Lincoln while the Olds followed behind him.  He inched over and the big
car moved further to the right to avoid the Contour.
:"You afraid of me motherfucker?" he shouted, "You better be afraid of
me!"
He sideswiped the Lincoln and the nervous driver slammed on the brakes,
sending the dark sedan into an insane spin, and into the plowed field.
Next to him, Red was laughing.
"Rebel Without a Cause!"
The rear window exploded as gunfire raked the side of the car.  Red
yelled and he swerved with adrenaline.  She was half crouched in the
seat, trying to get a bead on the driver ahead, seeing human shapes
through the broken front glass of the Olds.
Up ahead, Mucheski saw the Explorer hightailing over a railroad
crossing.
Red squeezed off a shot and the Olds swerved, then recovered.
The lights at the railroad crossing were blinking.
"No way, "Red yelled, "You're out of your fucking mind!"
The speedometer hit the maximum and quivered.  He could se the train,
fifty yards, forty, thirty twenty, spitting distance.
If he screwed this up they were going to be recyclable.
The Contour hurtled like a meteor over the tracks, tires clipping the
rails and sending the car airborne as the rush of the train passing with
a whistle scream of annoyance, pushed the car even further with the
concussion of unseen air.  Mucheski screamed, Red yelled and the car
bounced no less then tree timed fore continuing down the road with a
decided list to one side
Mucheski caught his breath and hit the pedal again, going after the
Explorer.
The road was rough here, barely paved and the field dry and bare.  The
Contour's abused suspension shrieked as Mucheski tortured it.  The car
lurched foreword, bouncing unevenly, as the speedometer stated climbing
again.  Realizing that he had probably destroyed the suspension, and
most likely cracked the frame somewhere, Mucheski hoped that Red had an
understanding insurance company.
Puling ahead of the four-wheel drive vehicle, Mucheski slammed on the
brakes, throwing the Contour into a controlled slide.  He jerked the
steering wheel and the car swung in a gravel-wave in front of the
Explorer.  The Explorer stopped, engine idling ominously.
Mucheski had his gun out and had leapt from the car almost before it had
come to a complete stop.  He flung open the door the Explorer and
grabbed the driver by the shirt, throwing the man to the ground, not
even thinking that he could have been armed.  He only had the impression
of thinness and dark hair before he slammed the man's face in the dirt
and jammed his gun into the back of his skull.
"Don't even think about moving you cocksucker."  Mucheski shouted in
full cop fury.
Seeing the gleam of metal at the small of the man's back, Mucheski
removed the gun and shoved it in his own jeans.
"You killed my partner, you son of a bitch." 
The muzzle of his gun was buried in the man's dark hair.
"Steve, don't " Red yelled and he almost heard her feet on the hard
dirt.
He could hardly talk, hardly breathe, his head was full of the sound of
breaking glass, bending metal and his own screaming.  Somehow it seemed
that his voice was coming out from a deep and evil part of his chest.
"Steve, HE didn't kill Scotty," she touched the tight springs of his
back.
"What?" he demanded.
"Tell him, Scully," the man said, his voice muffled in the dirt.
"That's Mulder."
"Ferret Mulder?"
"Fox." the man corrected him.
"If I say your name's Ferret, asshole, its Ferret."  Mucheski jammed the
gun a little harder into the man's head.
"Steve you're being a dickhead.  Let him go."
Slowly Mucheski backed away, keeping his gun ready.
The man rolled over and crawled to his feet, the road dust billowing off
his jeans and T-shirt.  
He stared at Mucheski. 
Mucheski stared back.
"I knew you'd come and rescue me." Ferret said Red.
She had her arms crossed over her chest and a dangerously controlled
look on her face.
"You son of a bitch. What the hell have you gotten yourself into this
time?"


Logic and Proportion
16/26

*And your mind is moving low *

He was a repulsive specimen altogether, with his John Deere cap, his
work pants exposing the crack of his withered ass; Skinner looked at the
man and tried not to wince.  These were the people that he was supposed
to be protecting.
Great.
"I din' see what happened.  Just a hell of a noise.  I heard down at the
coffee shop that some damnfool out-of towners drove through Watkins
field, then they ran the train tracks in front of the eleven fifteen,
frightened the hell out of the conductor.  Musta been from New York,
that's all I kin say."
"Who was driving the car that jumped the tracks?" Jack asked the hotel
manager.
The man looked at the long length of her and hitched up his baggy pants.
"Well, Miss, I heard that it was some damn hippie."
"Mucheski."  Skinner growled and headed back to the car.
Mucheski, Mulder, and Scully, it sounded like a law firm that went
chasing ambulances.  Of course Mulder had made a break for it.  The
cleaning woman had released the man she had found tied up in the
bathroom and he had repaid the favor by shooting her.  She was not
happy, but expected to recover.  Now there was a convention of local
cops screwing up the evidence in the hotel room and offering to call the
local Bureau office, which was precisely the last thing that Skinner
wanted.
Cleaning his glasses with his handkerchief, Skinner leaned against the
hot side of the Porsche and watched Jack continue to question the hotel
manager.
Strange woman.
He considered the lines of her body in the taught black jeans and the
tank tip, Yes he had made love to her more than once, but it had never
been her that he had been making love to.
Strange situation.
As she walked back, he took in the muscularity of her stride and decided
that he liked it.
"So looks like your boy didn't need to be liberated after all," she
said, her sunglasses catching the end of the day's sun.
"We might have gotten here before the fact had there not been a
map-reading problem."
"I was always lousy at geography.  
"Now *they* are after him."
"And to which *they* are we referring?"
"The usual one, the Agency that Has No Name."
"Bastards. When I used to work for the Family, we used to get bonuses
for taking out one of *them*.  They had great covers and they could
fucking disappear in a heartbeat.  I erased one in Rockefeller Center,
right near the Christmas tree.  I turned my back for a second to lose
some tourists, and the fucking body was gone.  Imagine how happy my Boss
was to hear that I'd lost the body."
"Do I detect a note of professional envy?"
"Wasn't I good enough to be recruited?" she opened the door to the
Porsche and fell into the seat, "I bet they have a dental plan, too."

Lying on the hotel bed, Skinner looked up at the light fixture.  How
many hotels in how many years in the field?  Sometimes he thought that
he'd stayed in every department-sanctioned budget motel in the country. 
Bad mattresses, dirty bathrooms, roaches, and discarded condoms had been
his companions through many nights.  Small wonder that his marriage had
disintegrated, When he'd finally been promoted to AD and sent to
Washington he hardly knew Sharon anymore.  Hardly knew himself.  Didn't
know what he wanted.  Barely cared.
Keeping Mulder under control had been a welcomed full-time distraction. 
Hell, he didn't know the names of half the other agents, but Mulder took
up so much of his time and attention, Skinner sometimes felt that he
only had one agent.  He ignored the other agents while focusing on the
problem one like a parent who leaves the good children to their own
devices while riding herd on the problem child.
Like right now.
What the fuck and I dong anyway?  Lying on a hotel bed in Illinois
wondering what that crazy son-of-a-bitch is doing now.  I should just
throw his ass to the wolves and let him figure it out for himself for
once.  Only he would take Scully down with him.
Scully.
Don't go there, Walt.
Don't.
Knocking on the door.
"Are you decent?"
Jack held a partially depleted bottle of vodka in one hand and a
cigarette in the other as she pushed through the door past him.
"There's fuck all nothing on the TV tonight and the bloody bar has a
Karaoke machine.  It's full of copier salesmen singing 'Do you know the
way to San Jose'."
Flopping into a cross-legged heap on the bed, Jack poured herself
another water glass of vodka and smiled up at Skinner.
"So what did I interrupt?  Fantasizing about that dreary little girl
again?"
Sometime after checking in, Jack had changed into a loose tunic and
trouser set the color of coffee and scrubbed all the make-up from her
face.  There was a drift of freckles across the bridge of her hard
nose.  Skinner handed her an ashtray and she ground out the cigarette. 
She gave him the glass of vodka and he let the arctic heat of the vodka
course into his tired bloodstream.
"That big dick sportscar of yours has wreaked havoc on my neck."
"Gets me in the lower back." he said and drank more.
"So much for luxury, huh?" she rolled her head on her shoulders and he
could hear the crunching of the discs.
Putting the glass down on the floor, he sat down on the bed behind her
and put his big hands on her shoulders and began kneading.  It was only
after he began that he wondered why.
Under his hands her muscles were hard as concrete.  Almost as dense as
her bones.  Although he'd touched her body before he had never noticed
exactly how pronounced her muscles were against the framework of her
skeleton.  After the tight fibers released he continued up to the tense
cords on wither side of her neck to the base of her skull where the skin
was soft and white when her hair slid away from his fingers,
She sighed.
One good twist of his wrist and he would snap her neck like a
breadstick.
He paused.
The thought must have run from his fingers into her brain. 
She tensed.
Through the thin knit of her top, he could see her hard nipples standing
out like pebbles.  Almost without thinking, he watched his own blunt
fingertips trail down the raw silk slope of her shoulder, her collarbone
to find the full curve of her breast and squeeze the warm weight of it,
fingers chafing the nipple between finger and thumb.  Jack leaned
against him, her breath catching in her throat.
"This is me," she said.
"So it is."
The other hand traversed up underneath the tunic to circle the other
breast, mirroring the movements of the first.  Jack twitched under his
touch when he placed his teeth against the back of her neck.  Leisurely,
the hand in contact with her burning skin made a path down and
underneath the elastic waistband of the trousers, finding more hot skin
and nothing between her and the fabric.  So the wench wasn't wearing
panties, she must have planned this.  He bit the back of her neck and
she chuckled.  He reached further in and found her hot and wet to the
touch.  Teasing her for a moment, until she hissed and he could see her
teeth grip her lower lip.
Abruptly, he dropped her and rose from the bed.  While she watched from
narrow feline eyes, he shut off the overhead light and locked the door. 
She watched him approach her pupils large in the room lit only by the
dying sunlight through the curtains.  Slowly, he leaned over her on the
bed, not touching her, but forcing her backwards with his body until she
lay on her back, wary.
Her mouth burnt his like scalding coffee.
Familiar.
Unfamiliar.
When her hands reached up to clasp his shoulders, Skinner grabbed her
wrists and forced them back onto the mattress while her snaky tongue
flicked against his hard palette.  He released her wrists and pulled her
tunic up underneath her arms before leaning down to take first one
breast and then the other in his mouth, the resilient flesh in his mouth
and against his face making him harder than before in the confines of
his trousers.  When a moan came from her belly, he moved down her body,
tasting her clean skin and pressing his thickened pelvis into the
cushion of her thigh.  The trousers were quickly stripped off and he
settled between her legs.  She gasped when his mouth touched her for the
first time, legs tightening around his shoulders.  Dark and deep and
dangerous she was under his mouth, and he suckled at her wet crevasse
with the deliberate skill he used in all aspects of his life.  She
moaned, her head tossing against the mattress, her hair smoky around her
thin white face, abandoned.  He could feel every wave of pleasure
running through her body, and this only made him grind harder against
her as he drove his hard tongue deep into her.  Clawing at the
bedspread, she moaned and shuddered as her last nerve gave way,
stretched to the limit and she tipped into the abyss.  He waited a
moment, his chin wet with her, watching her writhe in the aftermath
until she looked up at him with deep, dazed eyes.  
On his knees, he unbuttoned the white expanse of his shirt, letting the
cool air brush against the skin over his chest, and he unclipped his
cuff links and put them on the bedside table.  The entire time he
undressed, Skinner felt every iota of her stare boring into him like a
low-level laser.  Once he was nude, she sat up and pulled the tunic over
her head and flung it to the floor.  Her hands roved over the hard
expanse of his chest, tracing the muscles as though she were memorizing
them.
"You know, you're not in bad shape for an antique." she murmured,
"Please, I'm a classic, not an antique."
Dipping her head she tongued his left nipple and it dove a spike of
pleasure straight down to his throbbing penis, He pressed his big hand
on the back of her head as she gnawed on more and more flesh into her
hot, open, mouth.  With little ceremony she pushed him back into the bed
and straddled the hard mass of his pelvis.  She raked her nails down his
chest, making him wince with the exquisite agony of it.  With both hands
she guided the hard length of him deep into her body and settled on her
spread knees.  I
It was like being dipped into a fry vat.
Skinner couldn't repress a groan
Hands on the sides of his chest she leaned over him and greedily kissed
him on the mouth.  He kissed her with equal hunger, his hands over the
sand washed silk of her breasts,
She rocked against him, grinding hard, painfully almost, never easing on
the sliding heat up and down his shaft.  He groaned and she pressed her
hands into his flat stomach her hair draped down her face, clinging to
her skin.  Riding him hard clutching him in and out while sweat
condensed on their bodies.  The only sound in the room was damp flesh on
damp flesh and labored breathing.
For a few moments he was afraid that this would go on forever, the ebb
and flow of sensation along the strings of his nerves until they were
both raw and bleeding.  He could have gone on for days like this.  But
then Jack began some strange voodoo, clenching herself in time with the
movements until the friction of her body around his body made her begin
to convulse and writhe over him.  The pressure, constriction, and
sweetness around him with the sight of her sweaty face twisted with
utter abandon finally sent him shooting off into space.  A flow of
liquid oxygen seemed to shoot freezing, out of his cock and into the
heart of her fire.  Skinner groaned involuntarily saw meteors, crushed
an errant breast in his hand, and watched the lights fly through his
brain.  
Sticky sweating and spent, Jack collapsed atop him.  His softening cock
still held in place by her inner muscles.  When he could move again,
Skinner kissed her wet face, she was half-drowsing already.  He rolled
her over on her side, tucked his knees behind her legs, and pulled the
covers of the ugly motel bedspread over their limp bodies.
Hand on her breast he finally slept.

Logic and Proportion
17/26

*Go ask Alice *

"Keroac said that the best thing about going on the road was the pie,"
Mucheski said, pushing back his plate "I'm beginning to think that he
may have been wrong."

Mulder, eating a BLT, only looked at him from down the counter, and
Scully barely hesitated between cheese fries.  They sat at the counter
like Nighthawks, Scully's hair flaming in the neon-bleached truck stop
caf.  The waitress had wandered into the kitchen after turning the
rasta samba on the radio up.  A pair of denim and flannel truckers fed
at a back booth, other than that the caf was theirs.

In a hesitating tone, Mulder had given forth a highly edited version of
his abduction form his apartment, his subsequent incarceration, and the
assistance of Mary Elizabeth.  Mucheski had listened to the tale with
interest, leaning on the counter over his salad, while his posture
called Mulder a liar.  Scully has asked questions with her usual calm
intelligence between mouthfuls of a grilled cheese sandwich.

She looked like hell, dressed in a sloppy T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers,
her hair falling onto her pale face.  Her eye was a horror.  Nestled in
swollen green-black bruises, her eye was an ocean of clear blue in a red
desert.  The white of her eye had gone garnet from the operation's
trauma to the fine blood vessels.  There was a thin scar from the
stitches between her eyebrow and swollen eyelid.  The entire socket was
puffy and raw-looking.  It made his eye hurt to look at it. 

It occurred to him that he'd never once asked her how she felt.

Mucheski seemed oblivious to it.

Who the hell was this guy anyway?

A DC cop?  He looked more like a java-swilling grad student than a cop
with his goatee, long hair, and earrings.  What coffee bar had he
crawled out of anyway?  Mulder also didn't like the easy familiarity
between Mucheski and Scully.  The way that they looked at the map with
their heads nearly touching, the way he called her 'Red' and the way she
didn't rip him a new asshole for doing so.

"This Mary Elizabeth Yoder.  What did she look like?"  Mucheski asked
from over his cup of bitter, boiled coffee.

The soda glass clicked against Mulder's teeth and he looked up into a
speculative gray gaze.

"She looked like a girl."

"Blonde, brunette or redhead?"

"Brownish.  Auburn maybe."

"Tall or short?"

"Somewhere between five and five and a half feet?"

"Thin?  Chubby?  Stacked?"

The barbarian knew.  Somehow he knew that Mulder's lover had been a
younger, healthier version of Scully.

Shit.

"So you've been banging this chick since June and you only have the
vaguest idea what she looks like?  Funny, you don't strike me as being
the kind of guy who's afraid to shag with the light on."

Bastard.

"Moo, what's your point?"  Scully asked.

"I'm questioning a murder suspect."

"Mulder did not kill those women."  

"My boys at the lab tell me that they found his fingerprints all over
both crime scenes.  What do you have to say about that, Ferret?"

"Don't call me Ferret."

Mucheski smirked.

"Did you kill Louise Collins?  Did you kill Elizabeth Pasquine."

"I don't even know who you're talking about."

Mucheski smiled.

"I think you're wrong there, buddy.  Your fingerprints were all over
like some fucking moron junkie who doesn't know shit about crime scene
science.  You must have been too far-gone to remember anything you're
been taught.  You know what else, man, sperm matching you blood type was
found all over and in every possible orifice of the Collins girl.  She
must have been a real whore, she let you fuck her in the--"

"That's enough, Moo."  Scully broke in.

"Blood type?  Don't talk to me about blood type until you get the DNA
testing back."

"What?  From Club Fed?  After what they're fucked up lately, I'm better
off having the testing done at Wal-Mart."

"Fuck you."  Mulder spat.

"No, fuck *you*."

"Where the fuck do you get off telling me about murder scenes?  What the
hell do you take me for?  A civilian who doesn't know an UNSUB from a
Club sandwich?  I'm a trained Profiler.  I catch serial killers for a
living.  You don't know shit!  Go back to you coffee and your doughnuts,
man a speed trap and leave catching murderers to people with an
education."  Mulder hissed over the counter.

Mucheski paled.

 "And furthermore," Mulder continued in the same, low and venomous
voice,  "I am not intimidated in the least by some moronic
proto-humanoid knuckle-dragging doughnut-biter whose idea of questioning
a suspect is to take him in the back room and beat the shit out of him. 
What are you going to do next?  Whip out the rubber hose and then drag
me back to DC in shackles or just sell me tickets to the next FOP
raffle?"

"Listen to me you punk," Mucheski reached out and grabbed Mulder's arm
in a chillingly tight grip," you're a neurotic, paranoid, borderline
psychotic who nearly fits the profile of a serial killer himself. 
You've got a porn collection that rivals Larry Flint's, you're a loner,
with delusions about his sister being abducted by fucking space aliens,
and I'm amazed that the Feds gave you a gun and a badge.  But I'm sure
with the proper lithium and anti-depressant regime; you'd be fully
functional in society.  Until then you're just a fucking loser who has
to find two-dollar Ghost whores for blow jobs!"

"Moo, shut up!"

"And lest I forget," Mucheski continued as Mulder's arm jerked in
Mucheski's grip and a water glass fell to the floor, "you are a fucking
freak who can't get it up unless the little cunt happens to look like
his partner.  Don't you question my ethics or my professionalism, you
fucking low-life Ghost pervert."

Attracted by the noise, the waitress emerged from the kitchen.

"You folks all right?"

"Fine." they replied in a discordant chorus.

"Check please?"  Scully asked.

The motel was a series of small cabins clustered like a child's village
aground a garden of stone gnomes.  The only remaining cabin had a
weather-beaten deer statue in front and the Explorer in back.  They had
abandoned the Contour in Illinois.  Feet crunching on the orange stones
and sand, they walked back in an uncomfortable silence.

Scully unlocked the door and Mulder's eyes stung from the warm air full
of Lysol.  At least the place was clean, shabby, but clean.  There was
one large room outfitted with the normal bed, dresser, and bedside
tables.  In addition there was a foldout sofa in a tired brown plaid
that matched the tired brown decor.  Even the moth-eaten deer head
mounted over the bed was tired and brown.  There was no telephone or
television and the bathroom hadn't seen a new fixture or upgrade since
Johnson had been in office.  Mucheski flopped down in the sofa and took
off his glasses.

"Well folks, it's been fun, let's do this again real soon, NOT."

"Shut the fuck up."  Mulder groaned and sat on the bed.

"Shut up yourself."

"Make me."

"Bet I could."

"Bet you couldn't."

"Shut up both of you."  Scully snapped her voice raw with exhaustion "We
have a map from the Explorer with the route plotted out on it.  We're
going to follow that route and hope that it leads us to the source of
the Ghost, the killer, and Takana Wachiru.  I'll go alone if I have to. 
You two can stay here and fight over who has the bigger dick."

She collapsed into the sofa next to Mucheski, her face pale.

To Mulder's surprise, Mucheski reached over and rubbed her back with one
hand.  She visibly relaxed under his touch and sighed.

"Why don't you got catch a shower while Ferret and I set up the bed,
okay?"

"Whatever."

Mulder watched her rise to her feet, gather her duffel bag, and move to
the bathroom like an old woman.  The door closed behind her.

"How is she doing?" he asked Mucheski.

"Pretty good, not great, but okay."

They unfolded the sofa, made it with the clean sheets stacked on the
bed, then stared at each other.

"What--" Mulder began.

"You get the sofa."

"It's like that?"

"You got a problem with that?"  Mucheski bristled.

"She's too good for you."

"Man, tell me something I don't know."  Mucheski muttered.

By the time Scully emerged from the bathroom, Mulder was curled up in
the sofa bed, and Mucheski was sprawled out on his back on the bed.  She
looked from one to the other.

"We voted, you get the floor," Mucheski teased.

"Right," she put down her bag and poked at Mucheski's leg, "Shove over
fat-boy."

"Wench."

"Jock."

"Yuppie."

With a click, the light went out.


Logic and Proportion
18/26

*I think she'll know *

The next morning nothing had changed.

It was as though he had dreamed the whole thing.

Jack drove, eyes hidden behind thick-rimmed sunglasses, crisp creases in
her black jeans and black T-shirt, her hair tied back from her face in a
scarf, she looked like a French movie actress from the sixties.

Funny, she really didn't look at all like Scully.

Not in the least.

Paul Simon crooned on the radio.

I'm not the kind of man
Who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on 
Old familiar ways
And I ain't no fool for love songs
That whisper in my ears
Still crazy after all these years

"So what do we do now?"

Belatedly, he realized that she was talking about the journey, and he
had to quickly recoup.

"The phone records from the hotel indicate that two telephone calls were
made from the room.  One call to Agent Scully's cellphone and the other
to a Churchward Farms, purveyor of organic foods."

"So that's what your mysterious phone call was about this morning."

"Exactly.  We have to go to Churchward Farms, the reasonable assumption
is that this is where the t'ien ti is being grown and processed. 
Greenhouses would not be out of place even if the greenhouses were
simulating the climate of the plains of Northern China."

"A hotel phone?  It's a set-up.  There is no more easily traced phone
call than from a hotel.  The phone system there tracks the calls so the
guests can be billed."

"Trap?"

"Challenge.  Meet me at Churchward Farms if you dare, copper. 
Somebody's staging a showdown at the OK greenhouse."

A bump in the road made the bag shift between Skinner's feet.  The guns
rattled.

"Your boy is bait."

For what?

For whom?

Kidnap Mulder and elicit a response, a standard, predictable response.

God.

They were after Scully.



Mucheski yawned and shook himself awake.  The sun was setting through
the heavy pine trees lining the roads.  They had been driving for days,
straight through, taking turns sleeping in the back of the Explorer,
only getting out for gas and biological necessities.  Red was behind the
wheel now, her damaged eye looking almost normal.  She could see well
enough to drive and had insisted on taking her turn at the wheel. 
Ferret was asleep in the back after his shift, which was just as well as
far as Mucheski was concerned.  The man was as easy to get along with as
a Teamster with heat rash.  

The boy just wasn't right.

Mucheski felt the strangeness of the man's vibe like a damp wind,
cutting into him.  Something was fundamentally wrong with Ferret.  There
was a void, emptiness somewhere underneath the T-shirt covering his
chest.  A would like the t of the Fisher kin, impossible to heal.  The
pain made him bite like a trapped animal.

He had no peace.

Just an endless gnawing.

Mucheski felt the man's vacancy pull at him, pulled himself back from
the undertow, tried to remain calm and positive.  Tried to stay
centered.
Red had retreated into her fortress, pulled up the drawbridge, and
filled the moat with alligators.  After a few short days stuck in the
car with the dysfunctional twins and Mucheski had never been so lonely
in his life.

"This road ends at the base of the mountain," he said looking at the
map, "there's a campground there.  We should stop there, get rested, and
cleaned up.  There seems to be cabins."

"And the final destination is where?" she asked

"Just beyond the campground, halfway up the mountain, is the spot marked
X."

"I would kill for a shower," she said.

Right then Red had to jerk the Explorer half off the rutted road as a
tanker truck barreled down the narrow road, sending broken tree branches
in its wake.  The orange sunset flared off its metal sides.

"Son of a bitch!"  Red swore as the behemoth thundered past, "what the
hell is he doing back here?"

"Side of it says liquid propane.  Good thing you pulled off when you
did.  Otherwise, Ka-Boom."

"Ka-boom." she agreed and put the Explorer back into gear.



Well, it wasn't the Ritz, but it would do.

Three rooms. Kitchenette and living area, bathroom and bedroom.  The
ever-present foldout couch, the ever-present furniture that the
Salvation Army would have rejected.  The whole place smelled like mildew
and rotting wood.  Mucheski the bags on the sofa and looked around.

"You know, we gotta stay someplace nice on the way back.  There were
shacks in Kashmir better than this."

"Kashmir?  What were *you* doing in Kashmir?"  Ferret asked.

"I was born in Madras, we used to spend summers in Kashmir."

"How cosmopolitan."  Ferret drawled.

"Fuck you, prep-school faggot."

So much for being positive.

Ferret bit his lip and looked out the window screen at the forest
outside.  Looking at each man with an expression of disgust, Red sat on
the sofa and took off her hat.  Just a few days out of surgery and the
trip had worn her reserves of strength down to almost nothing. 
Tiredness showed in the shadows under her partially healed eye and the
slashes of pain on either side of her mouth.  Wanting to crush her to
him and start running away from this black hole of a human being called
Mulder, Mucheski settled for sighing and running his hand over the tired
line of her shoulders.  This small action elicited a sharp, inquisitive
look from the Ferret.

"What do you say I take the car and go back to that general store we
passed?  Get some food?  You candy-ass Federales can rest while I go and
forage.  Anybody want anything special?"

"Squeeze cheese?"  Red asked.

"Sure.  What about you, Ferret?"

"I'm fine, thanks."

"Get him sunflower seeds, he likes those."  Red instructed.

Mucheski felt as though something was nailing his feet to the floor. 
Every fiber of his being was screaming at him not to leave them alone
together, Something dark and ugly was rolling beneath the surface of his
mind.  He tried to examine it, but the thought slipped away barely
brushing him with a slimy fin.  It was probably just jealousy, paranoid
sexual anxiety.  It wasn't as though the two of them had been alone in a
room with a bed before.  Years they had spent sleeping in the same
hotel, in the same car, the same airplane, and if anything were going to
happen, it would have by then.

Slowly Mucheski turned and made his way out to the Explorer, brushing
away the dark thing that followed him.

She was in the shower, he could hear the sound of the water hitting her
body, hear her sigh with contentment as she washed the dirt of the road
from her Bakelite body.  He was sitting with his back to the door,
listening.  The bottle glittered between his shaking fingers.  Glittered
in the dying orange of sun through the dirty windows.  Flecks of light
splattered the walls like fractured fragments of rainbow.  Mulder's
mouth watered and he felt the deep and gnawing pain in his chest.
There was story he had heard about a group of raw recruits to the Roman
Legions stationed in frigid Gaul.  So hard and so stoic they were that
one young boy had a captive fox clutched to his chest the frightened and
feral fox and chewed through the boy's tender flesh to his heart The boy
had fallen dead in the snow and the bloody fox had run free.  The boy's
face had registered nothing even as he fell over dead.

He rolled the cold glass bottle across the forehead damp with sweat.

Release.

Oblivion.

Hello Oblivion, how's the wife and kids?

To stop the screaming in his soul for just a few moments.

The spray cooled his mouth and his mind. 

The sea crashed behind him, a solitary gull crying out something that
may have been a name.

Soothe!  Soothe!  Soothe!
Close in its wave soothes the wave behind.
And again another behind embracing and lapping every one close
But my love soothes not me, me.

His hand reaching for the doorknob.
The wet strands of her hair were clinging to her wet face, the pink of
her towel-roughened skin.  She turned and fixed him with her clear azure
gaze.

Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins.
All my sins
All my sins
Sins
Remembered.

Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

Low hangs the moon, it rose late,
It is lagging, O I think it is heavy with love, with love.
It is so smooth and clean now, I can rest.

"Scully?"

Logic and Proportion
19/26

*When logic and proportion*

The radio was playing in the tiny grocery store as Mucheski perused the
shelves.  Harry Connick, Jr. was crooning Gershwin.

They're writing songs of love, but not for me
A lucky star's above, but not for me.
With love to lead the way, I've found more skies of gray
Than any Russian play could guarantee
I was a fool to fall and get that way
Heigh-ho.  Alas!  And also lack-a day!
Although I can't dismiss the mem'ry of her kiss
I guess she's not for me.

What would they eat?  His idea of food radically differed from that of
his peer group.  Could Red and the Ferret be happy with veggie burgers
or was he going to have to go against his principles and buy a couple
pounds of hamburger?  What was the deal with Red and the squeeze
cheese?  What if it were some strange craving - what if she were
pregnant?  He had no idea when her last period had been and the most
recent sex, although a transcendent experience had been au natural. 
Actually Red being pregnant wasn't the worst thing in the world.  He
could imagine her with a frazzled expression and a baby (his) on her hip
laying down the law to an unfortunate miscreant without the slightest
hesitation at all.  An attractive prospect altogether.  He could stay at
home and watch the baby and she could go cut up corpses to her heart's
content.

He realized that he was standing in the grocery store with a jar of
bread and butter pickles in his hand and a dopey smile on his face.


It all began so well, but what an end!
This is the time a fella needs a friend.
When ev'ry happy plot ends with the marriage knot,
And there's no knot for me.


Major problems, Steve-O, you're thinking about nesting.  Look at what
happened when you started thinking about nesting with Joy.  She dropped
you like somebody else's booger-filled Kleenex and ran straight into the
arms of that uptight congressional aide with the BMW.  What was that
asshole's name?  Barry?  Barney? Billy? Bobby? Beaufort?

He dropped a can of the tub and tile caulk known as squeeze cheese into
the basket and went searching for sunflower seeds for the Ferret.

The bell on the screen door jingled, reminding him of the country store
in The Waltons that he used to watch dubbed in Hindi in Madras.  You
hadn't lived until you saw John Boy speak Hindi.  The wooden door
snapped shut like a mousetrap.

"Carton of Morleys."

Mucheski almost dropped the basket.

Peeking between the Captain Crunch and the Spoon Size Shredded Wheat, he
saw the smoker at the counter peeling a few bills off a large roll of
cash.

The Cancerman Cometh.

It could have been funny if it hadn't been so fucking frightening.

"There you go.  Nice day, isn't it?  They're saying it's going to rain,
and my arthritis agrees.  A sure sign it's going to rain when my knees
get stiff," the gray haired woman behind the counter with the "I brake
for Bingo" sweatshirt chattered at the dour smoker.

"Have you seen these three young people?" 

Mucheski saw the smoker hand a paper over to the woman.

"Can't say that I have.  The girl's mighty pretty.  She your daughter?"

"She's run off with these young men.  I'm afraid they're in quite a bit
of trouble.  I have to find them as soon as possible."

"Have you gone up the hill to Churchward Farms?  I hear they're some
kind of cult.  She might be up there.  Lots of young people up there." 
The woman had the deliberate enunciation of someone with dentures; she
sounded like a hockey player.

"There's a reward."

"I'll post it up there with the notice about Lynsa's lost cat."

"Thank you." the smoker managed to sound ungracious.

The screen door shut behind him.

Mucheski breathed again.

"You can come out now.  The car is gone."

Chagrined, Mucheski walked over to the counter and found the woman
smiling at him.

"Why didn't you turn me in?"

"I didn't like his face.  Nor yours for that matter, it's a rotten
picture, son."

He looked.  It was.

"I don't know what kind of trouble you're in young man but that man had
a gun."

"Believe it or not, I'm a police officer and he is one of the bad
guys."  Mucheski showed her his badge.

"You're a police officer?  Lord, what is the world coming to?" she shook
her head and gestured at the front door, "you better use the back door,
just in case."

"Thanks.  What do I owe you for the groceries?"

"Oh just get out of here, I'll write it off as shoplifting."


Dana Scully, naked and dripping wet, looked into the drug-filmed eyes of
her partner.  For the first time since that horrible night in Rhode
Island when he had pointed a gun at her, she was frightened by the
person that she trusted must in the world.

Options.  Options.  Her brain tried to analyze the situation and kept
stalling as it reached for a higher gear.  

"Mulder." she said in the most normal voice she could manage.

God she felt so exposed.

Potential weapons were in short supply in the bathroom.  Short of
ripping a towel rack off the wall and braining him with it, she was
barehanded.  And bare-assed but that was beside the point.  He was
watching her with rapt fascination.  Guilt danced a merry jig in her
mind for a moment.  Part of the vain female side of her was pleased to
see her usually oblivious work mate looking at her with lust.  Yes,
she'd made love to him a million times in her idle daydreams, but she'd
also made love to Patrick Stewart and George Clooney so it wasn't as
though that *counted*.  In all likelihood if either of them had been
stoned out of their minds on Ghost and trapped her in a bathroom, she'd
be equally upset as she was now.

Maybe less upset.

For Patrick Stewart anyway.

"Did you ever do Ghost, Scully?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Its wonderful.  For that brief amount of infinitely flexible time, the
Universe seems benign.  It's all warmth and sweetness that envelops
you.  Coddles you, rocks you in her arms.  It's crawling into bed with
your parents after a nightmare, cold beer on a hot day, a slam dunk in
the last thirty seconds of a game, your first kiss, and riding down the
Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible."

Her body remembered.

God, he didn't even sound like himself.  The dull flatness of his normal
voice had turned lyrical and rhapsodic.  How bitterly pathetic that the
only time she's ever heard him speak in joy was at the effects of this
filthy drug.

"Why don't you put the bottle down and I'll make some coffee." she
suggested.

"I don't want any fucking coffee," his voice lashed out like leather
studded with steel hooks.

Stepping backwards, her shoulders hit the wall.  Overhead she heard
thunder behind the tiny bathroom window.  A window so small even she
couldn't fit through it.  He throat closed around a stone of fear.  So
this was it them this was how it was all going to end.  He'd fling her
to the floor and rape her, satisfying his own drugged lust and forever
rend the perilously fragile thing that connected them.  

Not with a bang, but with a whimper muffled into a shoulder.

He took a step forward into the humid bathroom, and she flattened
herself up against the wall.  She *could* make him stop, could knee him
in the groin, crush his testicles in her hands, stick her thumbs in his
eye sockets, or slam to palm of her hand into his nose, driving a spike
of cartilage into his brain.  But she didn't want to hurt him and she
certainly didn't want to kill him.

Outside the thunder rolled over the trees and the rain fell in a sheet
of water onto the thin wooden roof.  Flat against the wall, she froze
when his fingers began to draw thin lines of mud from his filthy hands
down the white slopes of her body.



"Shit fuck."  Mucheski swore as the Explorer thundered up the soupy road
at breakneck speed.  
He had to get back to the cabin before Cancerman and the tumor boys
did.  Yeah, he could have called Red on the cellphone but she had
impressed upon him the importance that calls could be traced and
monitored.  No dice.  He had to do it the old fashioned way, in person.
The rain fell so heavily that all he could see was a solid wall of water
up ahead.  A wall of water and taillight.  Squinting through the rain he
made out the familiar rear bumper of the American sedan he'd left at the
railroad crossing in Illinois.  He took out his gun, and wasn't
surprised when an arm poked out of the rear door, and gunfire ripped the
Explorer.  He jammed on the gas and rammed the sedan from the back. 
Glass broke, metal bent, and the airbag went off like a firecracker in
his face.  Stunned, he fell back into the seat, listening to the rain
and the horn jammed down with the force of the bag.

The first one out of the car that wrenched the door open of the Explorer
got his face blown off for his troubles, the second was gut-shot, but
the third grabbed Mucheski's gun arm and forced it back out of the way,
bending it back against the door frame.

Mucheski heard his own bones break.

The mud was cold and soothing when it enveloped him.

"Get up, you little bastard." someone yelled.

He was thrown over onto his back, the force making the pain slice
through his arm.  He screamed.  Blinking rain out of his eyes, he looked
up into the dull face of the smoker.

"Detective Mucheski has it ever been pointed out to you that you are a
pain in the ass?"

"F-Frequently" Mucheski managed.

"You are a nobody, a nothing, playing with things you can't begin to
fathom."

"F-fuck you." he gasped.

The muzzle of the gun was the size of a cannon.

The smoker smiled and pulled out his cellphone.


The trilling of the cellphone seemed to jar Mulder out of his trance. 
Typical, Dana thought bitterly, he'd be in a coma and the fucking thing
would wake him up.  He dropped the hand that was cupping her breast and
walked into the living room.  After hurriedly pulling on her clean
T-shirt and underwear, Dana followed.

Talk about being saved by the bell.

Mulder held out her phone.

"It's for you."

"Agent Scully?"

That cancerous cock-sucking motherfucker.

"Yes?" she hissed.

"I thought you'd like to say good-bye to Detective Mucheski."

"Red! Whatever he wants don't do it!"  Mucheski's yelling was tinny out
of the cellphone.

"Moo?" she whispered.

"Any last words?" the smoker's voice was distant.

"I'll fucking *haunt* you, man!"

The sound of the gunshot ripped through Dana's brain.  The connection
was lost and all that remained was dial tone.

Logic and Proportion
20/26

*Have fallen sloppy dead *

"Moo!  Moo!"  Dana screamed into the phone.

"You have no idea how absurd you sound" Mulder said from the depths of
his haze.

"You selfish bastard!  You fucking moron!"  Dana slammed Mulder up
against the wall with her fist twisted in his shirt, "this is all your
fault, you worthless sack of shit."

Her saliva flicked his face.

"You kill everything you touch!  You killed your father, you killed
Melissa, you killed my dog, and you're killing me!"

She shook him so hard that his head bounced off the wall.

"Now you've killed Steve.  You're not fit to polish his shoes!"

As he slid down the wall, Dana released her grip on his shirt and went
over to her bag and dug out a pair of jeans and a tank top.  She pulled
the jeans on, jammed her feet in her sneakers, and began buckling her
gun belt around her waist.  Mucheski's jacket went over the white tank
to hide the gun.

"I swear to God, Mulder, you better pray that he's not dead or I will
crack your fucking skull open and find out what variety of shit you use
for brains." she vowed and plunged out into the rain.

Bastard selfish fucking bastard.

She should have left him to Cancerman.

Cancerman and the Tumorboys.  Her eyes stung.

She swallowed, hard, and headed for the logging road, toward the town. 
He had to be somewhere between.  Had to be.  There wasn't enough time
for Cancerman to get him elsewhere.  She ran through the rain, mud
sucking at her feet.  Up ahead she heard gunshots, more gunshots. 
Automatic weapon fire.

Not hunting season.  Deer rarely fired back.

The roar of an engine made her leap behind a tree.  A mud-splattered
sedan thundered past, She could see men in the sedan, clustered in the
back sear, The car was one of the chase cars from the now infamous train
chase.  Once the car had gone around a bend in the road, she continued
running.  Rain blinded her, tears mixed with the cold water ran down her
face when she saw the crumpled mass of the Explorer.  The front end was
caved in as if crushed by a giant foot.  The airbag expanded like a
puffball mushroom.  The passenger compartment was empty.

Empty			Gone

Empty			Gone

Empty			Gone

A pool of blood was rapidly watered by the falling rain.  Blood was the
gasoline that powered the human engine, spilled carelessly into the mud
like dirty wash water.  Baby with the bath water, baby with the bath
water.  Splatters clung to the mud on the Explorer.  Touching it, she
watched the red swirl into the whorls of her fingertips.  Something
silver shone in the ruined wreck of the passenger seat.  Silver ring. 
The tiny silver decagon that he wore on left pinky.  She slipped it onto
her index finger and wiped wet hair away from her face.  No body.  If
there was no body she could keep a little hope.  Wrap it around her with
his leather jacket.

No please. He told me that he loved me and I ran.  I left him at the
Washington Monument in the rain.  I went to Starbucks and drowned myself
in a latte.  How could I have been so selfish?  I'm as bad as Mulder.  I
was afraid, dear God, I'm afraid now.

Please don't let him be dead.

I couldn't take another one.

His smile slightly chipped front tooth, full of mischief.  The way he
looked up at her from his desk when she cleared Scotty's things away. 
The occasional laser-hard look of irritation.  And the precious
astonishment on his face when they made love.  The way that he smelled,
clean manskin and patchouli.  

The ring bit into her finger.  She bit into the side of her mouth. 

The rain washed the blood from her finger.  The rain washed the blood
from the Explorer. The rain washed the blood from the ground.

God.

Are you there God?  It's me, Dana.

Why did you do this to me?

Give me a little happiness in the bleak wasteland and now take it away?

Why?

Why, damn you, why?

Throwing her head back to the sky she let the rain pound into her face. 
Dana Scully opened her mouth and screamed her rage and pain to the
Universe.

Then she knelt in the mud and wept.

Finally the reservoir was dry and her heart had scabbed over enough for
her to stand up and begin to walk back up the logging road toward the
cabin.



She rounded the bend and ducked behind another bush.

"You fuckhead.  What are we going to do now?"

'I don't know put branches under it or something."

A small truck the size of an overnight courier's truck, was stuck in a
shallow mud puddle.  As she watched, Dana saw the two men stuck broken
pine branches under the left rear tire.  The side of the truck read
Churchward Farms in a familiar blocky script.  The same script she had
seen on the fake beer cases containing raw Ghost.  What were the chances
that some design firm in the same area would choose the same typeface
for nearly identical logos?

Farfetched, okay, but Mulder got E-07's signed for less, son of a bitch.

The wheel spun, caught, and the truck trundled away.  Avoiding the sight
line of the rear mirrors, Dana ran behind the truck for a moment,
grabbed a handgrip on the side, and pulled herself up on the rear
bumper.  She almost grinned, remembering how she Bill and Charlie had
watched the base garbage menperform the same feat decades earlier.  

The truck trundled through the wood, bouncing on the rough road, until
it reached an open area.  Dana released the handgrip on the back of the
truck and dropped down behind a bush to watch.  A branch slapped her in
the face and she spit out leaves.
There were buildings in the clearing, the rain cold on her overheated
body, her breath visible in the air.

Men and women, wearing a casual uniform of vari-colored t--shirts and
jeans moved in and out of metal Quonset huts and long, narrow
barrel-vaulted buildings made of translucent white plastic.  The people
all had the somnambulistic gait of the heavily medicated and a blissful
inward-directed haze twin to that she had left plastered on Mulder's wet
face.

Ghostheads.

They moved gracefully between the buildings heedless of the rain as
quiet and content as a monastery full of happy monks.  So this was it,
this was the breeding ground for the lichen.  Unimpressive in the
extreme.  She had expected something more exotic, a Tibetan temple, a
sixties flashback with psychedelic Volkswagen minivans, a commune full
of tie-dyed hippies.  Rather than something that looked like a summer
camp for fundamentalist Christians.  The Ghostheads looked downright
respectable.

She sighed, pushed at her hair, feeling the prickle of the stubble of
the shaved portion of her scalp.  It still irritated her female vanity
to have part of her head shaved and ugly.  Not that it had seemed to
bother Mucheski.

Don't think about that now, Dana Katherine, you've got to focus.

None of the Ghost Zombies spoke and the silence was decidedly eerie.  It
looked to Dana that they were taking plastic bucketful's of something
presumably raw Ghost lichen, from the translucent greenhouses, and
putting it into large tanks standing on cement platforms.  The tanks
seemed to be full of familiar opaque green slime.  The stench of rotting
vegetation seared her sinuses like ammonia.  One would have to be
permanently stoned to put up with the smell.

Men burst into the clearing and Dana ducked back into the bush, her
vision now reduced to a narrow slice surrounded by green leaves.  Men in
dark suits and dark trenchcoats half- were dragging a tall, older man
through the mud.  Dana recognized the sauterne features of the smoker. 
Two of the other men were shouting unintelligibly into cellphones.  The
smoker was whisked into one of the Quonset huts and the door slammed on
a babble of angry voices.

Her set of objectives was clear.

She had to find out if they had killed Mucheski, and then --

Then what, Dana, you going to kill them?

That's not playing by the rules.

Fuck the rules.

A Range Rover, covered with mud, pulled up at the Quonset hut where the
smoker had been taken.  The driver opened the rear door and held an
umbrella over the head of a small woman.  The umbrella covered her head
but Dana admired the cut of her glossy black trenchcoat.  Burberry,
probably.  She swept from the Rover to the hut, the suited men dancing
attendance.

Takana Wachiru.

Oh joy.

Three electronic chimes rang out and the Ghost zombies quietly finished
their tasks and filed into the other huts.  After waiting a few moments,
Dana emerged from her hiding place and hurried to the cover of the
greenhouses.  The greenhouse was utterly unlike any she had ever been in
before.  Instead of the warm, humid atmosphere she associated with
forcibly grown roses, this air was cold and dry, no doubt mimicking the
natural habitat of t'ien ti on the plains of Northern China.  Waist high
tables made of two by fours and plywood lined the walls, sheets of dark
slate covering them.  The sheets were covered by a dull green glaze of
lichen.  She leaned over and touched the oily green fuzz on one of the
tables.  It was velvet under her finger, and incredibly, seemed to
shrink under her touch.  Amazing that type of response was far from
common in a plant, usually only found in carnivorous succulents such as
the Venus Flytrap and the Pitcher plant.  The t'ien ti was turning out
to be a botanist's wet dream. 

Moving down the tables she saw where the lichen had been scraped away
from the slate.  Plastic spoons were lined neatly on plastic and the
waiting buckets on the floor.  It looked like a painstaking process to
cultivate the lichen.  It seemed much more difficult than growing
cannabis between rows of corn.  Obviously the income from the drug made
even such labor-intensive cultivation possible.  Not that having
Ghostheads for a free work force hurt any.

Voices outside.

She dropped to the ground, rolled under a table and waited, listening to
her heart until the door whined open.  A pair or main's dark suited legs
and a woman's petite feet in beautiful taupe Gucci pumps stopped
directly in front of her nose.  Flattening herself against the wall, she
held her breath like a child under the bed in a game of hide and seek,
only the consequences would be worse than just being 'It'.

"Why did you bring him back here?" the cut glass and sherry female voice
asked.

"We didn't have a lot of fucking choice.  What the hell were we supposed
to do?  Carry him to the nearest hospital?  That would have been real
smart." an aggravated tenor, " We will move him to a secure medical
facility.  We will be taking your Range Rover." 

"This is an unacceptable complication and could jeopardize the security
of this location.  You should have left him in the woods to die."

"After what he did for you?  That's nice, you poisonous bitch."

Hissing.  Metallic and inhuman hissing.

" I warn you--" she began.

"What?  You going to drop me in a vat of refined Ghost and make me into
one of your fucking zombies?  Try it, lady."

The hissing sound again, from her position under the table, Dana saw the
male legs take a shaky step back.  The legs twitched as the pumps went
toe to toe with them.  The man's legs jerked.  A gout of blood like
coffee from an overfilled cup splashed on the floor.  Gargling noises,
choking noises.

The body fell directly in front of Dana, his bloody, empty eye sockets
staring blindly at her, the blood still spurting from his throat,
splashing her face with hot stickiness.  She froze, tried not to make a
sound tried not to move, although her brain screamed within her skull. 
Dying fingers convulsed at the mess of his rent throat.

First one and then the other eyeball fell to the floor.  One eyeball
bounced and rolled to just beyond Dana' nose and stared at her.

She shook.

The taupe pumps, now splattered with blood, turned and clicked down the
wooden slats between the tables.  The sweet iron smell of blood filled
Dana's head.  She heard the door close and only then could Dana drag a
sobbing breath into her burning lungs.  She scrambled out of her hiding
place, avoided stepping in the warm blood, and hurried to the door to
open it a fraction.  She saw the woman crossing the compound to the
smallest of the Quonset huts, open the door and go in.

Quietly, Dana followed, her legs feeling like al dente pasta.  At the
door of the hut she heard the clatter of the woman's expensive heels
continue and fade, descending.  Dana waited until she could no longer
hear the footsteps.  She drew her gun.

Moving specter-silent, she opened the door and stepped into the
darkness.

Logic and Proportion
21/26

*And the White Knight is talking backwards *

And the woods.

The woods.

The woods are dark and deep and I have miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost?

Shit.

Half-stones, the entirety of English literature filling his head,
chilled-consumed by a gnawing, burning emptiness somewhere in his chest,
Mulder stumbled through the ripping slipping slimy woods.

Child of the concrete jungle, the domesticated park, the manicured back
yard, he was as useless in the woods as white cotton gloves.  Parallel
to the road concealed from automotive eyes but attacked by branches of
bushes that slapped at his face like and angry woman.  The gutted hulk
of the Explore caught his attention and he rabbited across the
unprotected width of the road to examine the crime scene.  A few traces
of blood remained and the dissolving outlines of footprints.  Scanning
the branches by the side of the soupy dirt road, the investigative part
of his brain arose from a sensual slumber, yawned, rubbed its eyes and
began a methodical if bleary evaluation.

Broken branches.

Low to the ground.

Years of decayed leaves and pine needles turned to the rainy sky, black
under the cornflake topping.  Twist the tail of a snake.  Could be a
grass snake, could be a cobra.

He followed the drag marks, noticing the odd wet splash of fresh blood
at irregular internals.  Who ever had dragged himself through the wood
hadn't been mortally wounded, it was more or less a slow leak.
Protruding from a particularly dense bush, Mulder a saw a sneaker.  A
dirty Starsky and Hutch Adidas with blood marking the stripes.  This was
definitely not the kind of shoe that the suited goons usually wore.

"Mucheski?"

"Fuck you Ferret."

Definitely Mucheski.

Crawling underneath the bush, Mulder realized why the foot was
protruding from the bush.  An evil splotch of red stained the young
detective's jeans leg even as he tightened the leather strap of his belt
around his thigh in a makeshift tourniquet.  

"You okay?"  Mulder asked.

Mucheski glared up at him, one lens of his glasses shattered into a
cobweb.

"I'm fine."

Sounded familiar.

"What happened?"  Mulder asked.

"Beats the shit out of me.  Your smoking buddy must be a piss-poor shot,
that's all I can say."

They sat for a moment, listening to the rain, it was surprisingly warm,
and dry underneath the bush where Mucheski had crawled off like a dog
hit by a car.

"We ought to head for town, get some help."

"Hello!  This is a femoral bleeder here, shithead, I'm in fucking shock,
and I am not hauling my ass back to town.  You go and get help if you
can keep your nose out of the fucking Ghost long enough."

Mucheski slumped back against the base of the bush, his face gray with
blood loss and shock.

"Fine!"  Mulder half-shouted "Bleed to death out here, see if I give a
shit!" he plunged from the bush, began to run down the dark road again.

He heard the car engine, saw the headlights, and froze like a deer.

Gunfire flashed in the night.

Overhead, a frightened owl streaked across the moon.

In the darkness, a woman screamed.

Logic and Proportion
22/26

*And the Red Queen's lost her head*

The darkness sucked at her like a night-dark lake.  She stepped
gingerly down the barely visible steps.  Sideways, an advancing step
leaned at the Academy.  Her gun was held out in front of her in a
comfortable grip.

Underneath, the footsteps faded.

As her eyes became accustomed to the light Dana noted that the rough
walls of the stair w were splashed with irregular gradations of blue
luminescence.  She touched a patch, felt the familiar shrinking oily
sensation if t'ien ti under her fingers.  Her skin was splattered with
glowing blue flecks where she had touched it.

The smell filled her head.

Sweet as honeysuckle.

Haunting as musk.

Sharp, mellow and spicy.

Ghost.

The walls undulated in blue fields around her pulsing like a living
organ.  She tried to only breathe through her mouth and the pulsing
subsided.  She continued downwards.  As she went deeper into the
ground, the television blue light grew brighter and the steps ended in
a passage.  A wider passage blanked into blackness by sharp turns.

The rabbit hole.

She continued, her hands now sweating freely around the grip of her
service weapon.  Lightheaded, tingly and euphoric-terrified.  Her
liquid breath swirled through the cavern of her chest filled her skull
showing a blue glow where the tumor had been.

Reaching the corner, Dana stepped into a pool of mist.  It caressed
her feet, shine, thighs like a warm and living hand.  Insistent and
longing like a lover's touch.  Her hands faltered on the pistol grip.  
A deep, warm wave of sensual pleasure flooded her, filling her from
the bottom like water in a shallow pond.  Reviving her, soothing, away
the ache, the tiredness, and the pain like a warm bath of
sweet-scented water.

A pool, blue as the moon, swirling pearl and emerald in the unearthly
blue light of the Ghost lichen, steamed in the cool air, dropping the
mist onto the floor.

The woman, Takana Wachiru, dropped the last scrap of her clothing and
stepped into the edge of the liquid, Body a pale blue gas flame in the
azure room.  Beautiful delicate, slender learn arms and legs, tiny
exquisite breasts and a derriere the shape of an inverted heart.  
Shaking free of the pins her hair tumbled to her chin, a shining
garnet in the witchy light.  She turned and her eyes locked into
Dana's. She smiled.

"Oh good you're here."

Heart slowing like that of an ether-stunned frog, on the dissecting
tray, Dana lowered the gun.

The Ghost whore from the Inner Eye.  The woman Dana had thought dead
in the explosion and the fire.  The weeping cowering twit was Takana
Wachiru?

The Ghost mist and the information made her mind flounder in the warm,
deep water.

"Well you can call me Mandy but I have gone by other names.  I've been
called Lisa, Anna, Mary Elizabeth and some men enjoy calling me by
your name."

Mary Elizabeth?

Oh God, Mulder's little slut.  Mary Elizabeth Yoder from York.

The Ghost vapor tightened around her, relaxing the fear and the terror
hardening her muscles.

"Come here."  Takana Wachiru suggested in her lovely voice,

Taking a step forward Dana's foot bumped into something hard, soft,
and solid.  She waved the mist away and looked down at the body.

The dead body.

Eyeballs gouged from their sockets.

Threat opened to the pearls of vertebra; a butcher's portion of
drained red meat surrounding the exposed bone and ribby cartilage
hanging shreds of muscle and cut blood vessels.

Almost unrecognizable mutilated blood rag thrown aside during surgery.

=====sponge=====

Mary sweet Mother of Jesus.

Please God, no.

Mulder.

Dead.

Dead Again.

====suction please====

Dead shredded rigor-mortis stiffening muscles empty eye sockets,
thrown on the floor.  Another body, Skinner, his blood staining the
tender skin of his head, a woman who Dana did not know was lying
across his legs, her face also a bloody mess.  Skinner's glasses were
broken on the floor.  This made her gut clench.

=====retractor======

Buzzing.

She was buzzing like a high-voltage wire, full of fatal force, the
light flickering in her eyes.

"You fucking bitch."  Dana snarled, aiming the gun at the woman's
head.

"Red?"

Mucheski, kneeling, his hair wet and matted, face pale and shocky, his
glasses gone, Takana Wachiru stroking his hair.  She smiled again.

"One left." she said.

"Bitch."

Her muscles were gelatin, and the strobing light made it hard to see
through the mist, which had thickened, to a nearly solid wall of
vapor.

Pale peach lacquered nails pressed above the lids of Mucheski's stormy
sky eyes.  His skin whitened.  A beseeching glance was thrown to Dana
before he closed his eyes forever.

And blood.

=====seizure someone get the====

Oh sweet Mary the blood poured down from the rent skin, like
Gloucester, ruined eyes.  Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet
birds sang.

====hold her====

Screaming.

Jesus, help him!

No God please!

Not again!

====flatline=====

Ran down his face in scarlet torture torment torrent.
Bleeding
The blood is the life
This is my blood.
Screaming

====get the rhythm, damnit====

She screaming, he screaming, all screaming.

Screaming turned to bloody bubble froth from steel hard fingers
plunging onto pale and unprotected throat.

No.

The bloody bits of brain and skull splattered in a tired leather sofa
in Alexandria, the blood pooled under auburn hair on a hardwood floor
in Annapolis.  Not blood on a barroom floor.

A thousand dead bodies paraded past her eyes as naked pale corpses,
their eyes full of darkness and their mouths mouthing silent curses.
Silent deadly curses.

====this is not normal====

She growled her lips pulling back from her teeth in an ugly
she-wolf-rage.  The woman dripping green, dripping red with the blood
of her lover was an easy target.

Dana shot her, emptied her cartridge of bullets into the woman's white
body time and time again until her features were red mush and she fell
backwards into the pool.

====stable====

The last convulsive twitches of a body, the heat leaving skin, eyes
dry and still.

====recovery room=====

Scully what have you done?

Bathed in blood, baptized, bloody and born she arose from the earth, a
brilliant light in her eyes and---

====Beep me if there are any changes====

To a waking world of light and pain.

She moaned, distant in her own ears, tossing on a sea of nausea.

"Scully?"

"Mulder?"

She faded out again.

Logic and Proportion
23/26

*Remember what the dormouse said *


`They told me you had been to her,
And mentioned me to him:
She gave me a good character,
But said I could not swim.
He sent them word I had not gone
(We know it to be true):
If she should push the matter on,
What would become of you?
I gave her one, they gave him two,
You gave us three or more;
They all returned from him to you,
Though they were mine before.
If I or she should chance to be
Involved in this affair,
He trusts to you to set them free,
Exactly as we were.
My notion was that you had been
(Before she had this fit)
An obstacle that came between
Him, and ourselves, and it.
Don't let him know she liked them best,
For this must ever be
A secret, kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me.'
				Lewis Carroll


Someone was pounding an icepick into her eye.  A big, dull icepick. 
Dana groaned and opened the eye sans icepick only to have the wall of
light hit her retinas and make her whimper.  She retreated into darkness
again.

"Honey, can you hear me?"

"Mom?" she managed through dry, cracking lips.

"I'm here, sweetheart.  I'm here." 

Cool hands touched her face.

The pillow was hot and prickled her skin.

"So thirsty," she muttered.

"Here you go." 

Water

Cool water in a straw, reminding her of childhood illnesses, mono, strep
throats chicken pox, and chicken soup.  The water filled her mouth and
eased her swollen tongue.

She tried opening her good eye again, and finally managed to focus on
the beige oval of her mother's face.

"Where's Dad?" she asked.

"Oh honey . . .." 

"She's disoriented.  She'll be fine." tuneless voice, dark suited shadow
hovering beyond her mother's shoulder.

Not the right man.

The other one had been fair, this one was dark.

"Honey, you try to get some rest."

"Mmmmm."  Dana agreed and plunged back into the soothing world.



"Welcome to the hole in the head club."

Propped up in bed, Dana gave her partner a wry smile.

"Has anyone told you that you're completely un-supportive and utterly
without compassion?" she asked.

"I guess I'll have to give this to someone else then," he said, bringing
the familiar Ben and Jerry's carton from behind his back.

"That better be Wavy Gravy."

Mulder slouched over to the side of the bed and relinquished the carton,
while Dana opened the ice cream and produced a spoon from the bedside
table.

"Am I forgiven?"  Mulder asked.

"No, but this is a start." she said around a mouthful of ice cream.

He perched on the edge of the bed.  The summer heat had rumpled his suit
and flattened the hair he was so vain of into a limp mass on his head.

"The charge nurse told me that you slept in the bedside chair while I
was in ICU." she accused.

"They let you so anything once you show them you have a gun." he gave
her one of his rare smiles and put a cool, dry hand on her forehead for
a moment.

"You had us going there for a minute, throwing a seizure in recovery
like that.  The surgeon was afraid that you had sustained brain damage."

"It's not uncommon during surgical procedures for patients to seizure."
she snapped and looked at the dark, fuzzy square of the window, "Can you
do me a favor?"

"What?"

"Hand me my chart, no one will tell me how I am."

The garage door closed behind his eyes and Dana felt a chill in her
stomach that had nothing to do with the ice cream.

"That good?" she asked in a dehydrated tone.

"They couldn't excise all the tumor.  There is still a portion clinging
to a nerve cluster.  Nerves they don't want to compromise."

"So I still have cancer."  She put the ice cream down on the bedside
table with a decisive thump.

The spoon clattered to the floor.

"The fuckers won." she said.

"They haven't won.  You have more time now.  The gene therapy will
shrink the tumor and you'll be fine.  As long as you are alive, they
haven't won." the fanaticism burned like uranium in the muddy water of
his eyes.

She sighed and looked at the goldenrod and olive pattern of his tie. 
Maybe she was suffering brain damage, as he seemed to be wearing a
tasteful tie."

"I just get tired," she admitted.

"Well, get some rest," he said and gave her a playful punch on the
shoulder, "annoy some nurses, I always do."

"You annoy everyone." she pointed out.

"Yeah, but I have a certain elfin charm."

She rolled her eye and groaned.

"Go away, Mulder, you're making my headache worse."

He got up and made his lanky way over to where her mother had arranged a
shrine of good-well cards and flowers on the dresser.  Dana watched him,
enjoying the sight of him whole, healthy, sane, and sober.  His usual
fidgety, angular self.  It was only a mater of time before the image of
the jittery Ghosthead faded in her mind.

"Mulder, what do you know about hallucinatory experiences during
surgical procedures to the head?"

Giving her a sharp look, he put down the card from the FBI pathology
lab.

"Are you saying that you had an *experience *, Scully?"

"I'm saying I had a vivid hallucination and I am not attributing it to
anything other than a documented medial phenomenon."

"The ancients of South and Central America would treat individuals who
suffered from visions, hallucinations and other bizarre behaviors by
cutting square holes in their skulls to release the evil spirits."

"Or relieve subdural swelling caused by an electro-chemical imbalance in
the brain or an injury.  The procedure itself would have caused
hallucinations." she returned, the endless cycle of the argument
continued in well-worn grooves.

This comforted her.  This was familiar territory.

"Vivid images and sensations that they believed to be prophesy and the
power of the prophecy could drive a man mad."

"What you are saying essentially nullifies your entire experiment in
Rhode Island."

"Those were recovered memories, not hallucinations." he said with a
defensive air.

"The check is in the mail."

Too tired to continue the argument, Dana sank back into the pillow, the
melting ice cream forgotten.  Mulder sat on the edge of the bed again,
and sighed.

"They're discharging you on Thursday?"

"Drive-through surgery."

"I'll take you home."

"Fine."

He made his way to the door.

"Mulder?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks." 

"Finish it before it melts," he said, knowing full well that she was not
referring to the ice cream.

With a replacement spoon, Dana devoured the rest of the carton of soupy
ice cream, reflecting that maybe the world wasn't such a bad place after
all, if there was Wavy Gravy in it.  Wavy Gravy was enough to make the
hardest-hearted skeptic believe in miracles, at least Epicurean 
miracles.

Logic and Proportion
24/26

*Feed your head *

The chattering madness of the Homicide Department nibbled at both of
Mucheski's remaining nerves.  He tried to concentrate on the crime
scene reports before him and found that it was like trying to think
through mud.  He'd slept badly the remainder of the night, finally
finding peace stretched out on the floor in the living room with the
Home Shopping Network's Gemstone Marathon flickering over him.  Now he
had a stiff back, the lingering image of brilliant blue eyes burned
into his cerebral cortex, and an illogical desire to buy star
sapphires set in genuine, buttery 14kt gold.

Women and gems.

Bad combination.

Her value far above rubies . . .

"Yo' man, snap out of it."  Scotty plunked a Starbuck's cup in front
of Mucheski.

"You know, I never liked you."  Mucheski said and peeled the lid from
the coffee.

"No man, you love me."

Above his flying toasters tie, Scotty grinned, looking both smug and
well rested as he flopped a thick pile of folders in front of
Mucheski.

"For your delight, we have a series of unsolved homicides all over the
tri-state area, all Ghost whores, all within the past six months, and
all with the same MO."

"Can't anyone just have a simple murder anymore?"  Mucheski wondered
"Just a shooting or a strangling instead of all this ritualistic
psychological bullshit?  It's like a cable station where all you get
is Silence of the Lambs and Seven."

"We live in decadent times, Grasshopper."

While he drank his coffee, Mucheski leafed through the folders,
skimming the contents with a familiar feeling of helpless, sick-making
rage.  Wasted lives.  Addled with chemicals, sex with strangers to
feed the hunger, brains shot to hell with biochemical reactions that
reduced healthy tissue to useless mush.  Empty lives.  Wasted lives
becoming wasted deaths with a slashed throat and the insult of a knife
thrust into the vagina.

You are a whore and you deserve this.

Nobody deserved that.

His brain stuttered, caught between tracks, like a scratched CD.

A skeleton danced through the back of his head.

The Starbuck's cup slipped from his boneless fingers.

===All dressed up and nowhere to go
===Walkin' with a dead man over my shoulder

===It's a dead man's party
===Who could ask for more
===Everybody's coming
===Leave your body at the door
===Leave your body and soul at the door.

Parade of images.
Scotty's face, eyes open in death, the back of his head a pulpy red
mess.  
Red's face on a body on a slab, naked and exposed in the cold light of
the morgue.  
A woman laughing.  
A dark-haired man huddled in fear.  
His own eyes popped like over-ripe grapes from the shell of his skull.  
An endless line of muttering dead.

The hard paper cup with the green and black goddess on it bounced when
it hit the floor.

"Okay, so far it looks like Louise Collins had sex with no less than
three men shortly before her death.  Three different blood types in
the sperm.  They're going to run the DNA against the database of known
offenders.  But you know we'll be pulling a pension before those
results come through."  Scotty stopped and looked across the desk at
Mucheski.

"Who pissed in your cornflakes?"

Mucheski stood up, shaking.

"Gotta go." he said.

"Don't you ditch me.  Don't do it man."  Scotty warned.

But Mucheski was headed for the door at a dead run, scattering
slow-moving detectives in his wake.

"Fuckin' asshole."


The same hospital, the same floor where the killings had taken place
that winter.  The same fucking floor.

Room 419.

How did he know that?

Why was he there?

Mucheski pushed the door open, and crept in on silent sneaker feet,
saw the empty bed near the door and the light glowing behind the thin
privacy curtain.  He looked around the edge.

The c-clamp around his chest loosened.

Propped up against the tired white pillows with the reading lamp
making her hair flame around her pale face, she had the Lancet on her
bent knees and her reading glasses on her nose.  Aside from the beige
bandage over one eye, she looked fine.

She looked up.

Blue sapphires set in buttery 14kt gold.

"Steve?"

"Red?"

She looked at him and her one eye narrowed.

"What happened to your hair?" she asked.

Running his hand through what remained of his hair after the barber
had scalped him Mucheski shrugged.

"Apparently I wasn't projecting the right image for the Department.  
I told them that with my close rate compared to the average they
should let me wear a strapless ball gown and pearls if I wanted to."

"You may as well join the Bureau." she teased.

"How did you know I was here?" she asked a moment later.

"I don't know." he admitted.

They fell silent for a moment, listened to the hum of the air
conditioner.

"Uh, I really owe you an apology, "she began, "I never should have
stood you up at the Washington Monument like that, and I should have
returned you calls."

"No shit." he agreed.

"I have cancer, and I wasn't prepared to let you watch me die." she
admitted.

"So you're not dying anymore."

"Let's just say that I'm dying more slowly than before." she gave him
the shadow of a smile.

"I should know better than to expect a straight answer from a doctor."
he complained with a self-deprecating smirk.

"I get out on Thursday.  I will call you."

"I *might* call you back." he threatened.

The air conditioner hummed some more in the silence and Mucheski
finally jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the door.

"I gotta go.  I left Scotty at the station, and I'm sure he's coughing
up a hairball right about now."

"Be careful." she warned.

"What?  And ruin a perfectly good string of dumb luck?" he gave her a
crooked grin and headed out into the hot night.

He just wanted to see if she would really call before he got his hopes
up again.

Logic and Proportion
25/26

*Feed your head *


`Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation

The woman in the dark suit let herself into the Crystal City apartment
with her own key.  She found the living room in total darkness and the
liquid sounds of the Doors emanating from the stereo.  The man sat
bare-chested on the beige sofa and stared at the textured ceiling.

"What are you doing here, sitting in the dark all alone?" she asked, her
low voice full of amusement,
"Waiting for you."

Slipping into his lap, she put her hands on the broad shelf of his
chest.  His mouth seared the thin skin under her ear and his hands
nearly spanned her waist.

"How was work?" she asked,

"Damn meetings, more damn meetings, and one last damn meeting."

"Well let's just get your mind off that, shall we?"

Logic and Proportion
26/26

*Feed your head *

Old Towne Alexandria, streets thick with tourists and consumers moving
slowly a hot summer night.  Mulder sat at the bar, nursing a beer and
thinking about going home.

There wasn't anything to do at home, either.

"Excuse me, is this seat taken?"

He looked up at the young woman gesturing at the empty barstool next to
him.  She was a tiny thing, all melting blue eyes, schoolgirl ponytail,
and deliciously soft breasts under a tight crop-top.

Maybe things weren't that boring after all.

"Help yourself," he said, meaning every syllable of it.

She settled her shapely ass on the barstool and turned her blue eyes on
him.

"My name's Mary Elizabeth.  What's yours?"