Kindergarten Heero Part 2
Heero glared furiously at the dark-haired woman who'd just let his witness - his witness! - walk out without agreeing to cooperate. "Let me take care of this, Chief Jaye," he told his boss darkly. "Noin will do a lineup," Heero promised, his eyes narrowing.
"What are you going to do, handcuff her to the bumper of your car and take her for a ride?" the woman asked sarcastically.
Not even deigning to dignify that remark with a response, Heero simply snarled and stalked away.
"Difficult man," Chief Jaye told the woman with an apologetic shrug. "Tough to get to know him."
"Oh really? I'd have never guessed," she replied sardonically, following Jaye as he limped towards his office.
***
Heero climbed out of his car, jaw set in determination. Noin would change her mind about picking Khushrenada out of a lineup. He was not going to lose the bastard. Not when he was finally so close to locking the snobby slimeball up for decades. He'd been after the man for years now. Everyone on the force knew Khushrenada was the biggest drug dealer in the area; only Tsuberov came close to him in terms of sheer volume. The problem was proving it. Sending him to jail on murder charges would at least get him out of the picture. With the mastermind gone, they could work on gradually tearing apart the rest of his organization.
A few quick kicks and punches cleared his path into the building that he knew Noin was currently in. He paused for a moment and turned back towards his car, glaring coldly at the thugs daring to touch it. "That," he pointed casually with the shotgun in his hand, suppressing a smirk as thugs scattered, "is my car. I LOVE my car." He cocked the gun and sighted down the barrel. "I would be - displeased - should anything happen to it."
"We'll just - ah - keep an eye on it for ya, then," one of the hoodlums said hurriedly, using his gang bandanna to polish his fingerprints off the gleaming hood.
"Hn." Heero smirked as he turned and stalked up the staircase, shotgun in hand. He hoped that he wouldn't have to actually shoot anyone. The paperwork that entailed was a real bitch. He kicked the door open and dove into the room, shotgun booming a response to the shot sent his way. No one was foolish enough to try a second shot; they scattered and ran like rats deserting a sinking ship. And after the second person he flattened with a single blow, no one bothered trying to block his advance either.
Even Noin's new "boyfriend" looked somewhat less than brave, sitting on the couch beside her and trying to look like he wasn't ready to wet himself. "Who are you?" the man demanded, standing and moving to keep the coffee table between Heero and himself.
"Me?" Heero said, raising one eyebrow. He cocked the shotgun again. "I'm the party pooper." He fired, the blast tearing into the makeshift carseat sofa that the man had been in front of just as the erstwhile boyfriend clambered over it and dove over the counter behind it. He smirked as the man fled.
"Hello, Noin," he said coldly as he seated himself beside her in the now-deserted room.
"What do you want?" Noin demanded shakily.
"You know what I want Noin. You just haven't given it to me yet. But I'm very patient. I'll just keep you company until you do."
"You can't do that!" she exclaimed in horror.
Heero gave her his best ferocious smirk and draped an arm heavily around her shoulder. "Hn. I have nowhere else to go. Nothing else to do. I am going to be with you days, nights, weekends, holidays. I will be with you until the end of time."
"NO!" Noin protested, shrinking away from him.
"Of course, if I was busy with something else, say, preparing a murder case against Khushrenada..." he raised one eyebrow and gave her a meaningful look.
With a defeated whimper, Noin crumpled. "Alright, alright, I'll do it."
***
Heero snarled in frustration. Noin had picked Khushrenada out of the lineup, sure. But now the problem was her own record. Someone with a restraining order to keep her away from Khushrenada's live-in lover and a whole string of convictions for narcotics possession was not going to make a particularly credible witness. The judge had denied bail but Heero couldn't bring himself to get too excited over that. Not when it was all too likely that Khushrenada would end up getting off in the end.
Jaye limped along beside Heero as he stalked through the court building. "Your best bet is Khushrenada's estranged wife, Leia Barton-Khushrenada. Noin claims she saw her in Astoria, Oregon, and Otto trailed her to meet her and Treize's kid at Astoria Public Elementary. Noin didn't see the kid, just Leia, and she says all Otto said was that the kid was 'cute'," the police chief informed him. "Schbeiker's got the files with all we've got on the two of them. Find them. We'll give the wife immunity in exchange for her testimony and the money she took from him."
Heero grunted unhappily. He didn't like any of this. And the fact that Jaye was forcing him to take along a "partner" only made things worse. This was his case! He worked alone; he didn't need a damn "partner" along to mess things up. Especially not a talkative bottomless-pit of a partner. The woman had absolutely no concept of focus and duty. As far as he could see, all she ever thought about was her stomach. He wrinkled his nose distastefully as Schbeiker hurried to join Jaye and himself, a chili-dog with the works from a vendor's cart in her hand. "Don't you ever stop eating?" he demanded in disgust.
"Hypoglycemic; have to eat or I get a little nuts," she mumbled around a mouthful of food.
'Get a little nuts? If this is what she considers normal, I don't think I want to know what she's like otherwise...' Heero gritted his teeth and walked faster, forcing her to half-run to keep up.
Jaye swore and gave up, unable to limp that fast. He called after them, "Just try to get along, you two. That's an order!"
Snarling, Heero walked even faster. He did not need a partner. He could handle this himself.
***
Reading through the mission briefing on the plane, Heero decided that maybe having a partner wouldn't be so bad after all. He didn't want her job. Being a kindergarten teacher wasn't exactly his line of work. He'd never had anything to do with kids; he'd been an only child. Never even had any cousins. He wasn't too thrilled about pretending to be married to her, though. Marriage was something else that he didn't have any experience at. He'd never had time to waste on that sort of thing; work took his full attention.
"If we're going to work together, I think we'd better know a little bit about each other," Hilde suggested. "So, tell me about yourself, Yuy. What made you decide to become a cop?"
Aggravated by the explosion noises coming from the kids behind them, Heero turned around and yanked the robot away from one of the kids who kept fighting play-battles along the top of his seat's back. He barely got turned around before Hilde removed the winged toy robot from his hands and returned it to the kids. He glared at her with no noticeable effect. She just raised her eyebrow and waited for him to answer her question.
"My family has always been in law enforcement. My grandfather was a police officer, my father was a police officer, my mother was a police officer... Of course I became one too. It was expected of me," Heero said abruptly. He left out the other reasons for his choice. He saw no reason to reveal anything that personal to the woman he'd been forced to partner with merely to satisfy her curiosity.
"Sounds like how I ended up being a kindergarten teacher. Whole family was in the education field. I got out after a few years, though. Figured I'd better or I'd be so sick of kids that I'd never want to have any of my own. So I went through the police academy." Half under her breath, she muttered, "Never thought that'd land me back in a kindergarten class again."
Heero's seat jerked as the kids behind him kicked his seat. He turned and glared at them, hissing "Stop it" in an icy tone before facing forward again. He flipped through the thin folder of information on Leia Barton-Khushrenada and her daughter. "These pictures are awful," he complained. The daughter was merely a few months old in her photo yet the girl would be in kindergarten now; any similarity would be faint if it existed at all. And the woman - the photo was an angle-shot that didn't even get a full head profile and it dated back to her wedding.
Hilde burped. "Excuse me," she said, rubbing her stomach. "Must have ate something that disagreed with me..." She picked the photos up and made a face at them. "I know they're pretty bad. All we've got though. She didn't even have a driver's license; limo took her everywhere."
"Family?"
The kid kicked Heero's seat again. He growled under his breath. Turning around, pencil in hand, he glared furiously. "Stop. It. Or I will do this," he threaded the pencil between his fingers and applied pressure, cracking it into two splintery pieces, "to you." The kid swallowed hard. "Understood?" Heero demanded. The kid nodded hastily and Heero faced forward again, hoping that was the last trouble he'd have from him. He did not like kids.
Hilde shook her head, "Nope. No family. Orphan. Raised in a church orphanage. Place closed five years ago when the last priest died of old age. The nun that helped run it died soon after. Most of the kids were in and out; either adopted or sent to other family members once they could be located. Still trying to track down the few other kids that did actually grow up there with Leia but..." She shrugged, obviously not holding out much hope. "Most of the records are gone; place kept everything on paper - apparently the clergy running it were elderly and didn't take to computers - and once they shut it down stuff just got trashed." She pulled out one blurry photo and tossed it in front of Heero. "That's all we've got from there so far. Second one from the left in the back row is Leia; she was the only girl that old. No ID on any of the others yet."
Heero stared at the picture, memorizing the shape of the faces and trying to imagine what they'd look like thirteen years later. Especially the laughing boy that Leia's arm was wrapped around. The rabbit ears sticking up behind Leia's head explained just why he was laughing so mischievously. Heero looked the rest of the photo over carefully but his eyes kept being inexplicably drawn back to that laughing face next to Leia.
"Here's your breakfast, sir," the stewardess said, interrupting Heero's perusal of the photo. He hurriedly cleared the folder and photos off of his tray so that she could set down his meal.
Hilde made an odd noise beside him. "Are you hungry?" he asked reluctantly, visions of her eating both their breakfasts passing through his mind.
She shook her head and paled at the question. "No." Hilde burped again and raised her hand to her mouth hastily. Suddenly, she was on her feet. "Out of the way, let me out," she chanted frantically. "Before I barf all over you..."
Heero hurriedly yanked his legs out of her way and lifted his breakfast tray while she scrambled through. He stared after her, unsure whether he should follow or not. The stewardess came down the aisle and asked in concern, "Is she alright?"
"Compared to what?" he answered in aggravation as the sounds of someone being violently ill drifted through the plane. 'Of all the partners in all the police departments in the whole fucking world, I had to get stuck with the useless weirdo.' He dropped back into his chair and poked disinterestedly at his meal. For some strange reason, he'd lost his appetite.
TBC...
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