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asphaltcowgrrlTitle: Sin City Slaying Chapter 2
Fandom: Romani Detective Original Ficiton
Pairing: Andrej Zeklos+Hilary Maxwell+Trish Rollins
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,326
Summary: Zayne is still out of town and Andrej’s struggling with his case.
Author’s Note: Written for the rare pairs challenge at 1_million_words. Finished a chapter last night, so I’m posting a chapter today. Helping to motivate me to finish this already. Also, Andy is rather obsessed with Zayne so far this story. Not sure what’s going on there. Haha.
Andrej set the bag of food on his desk and looked around. Trish and Hilary must have gotten a case of their own because neither was at their desk. It was for the best, he figured, because it would give him a chance to transcribe his notes into the case file in peace. Out of habit, he wrote his notes in Romanian, which made Zayne a little crazy at times. He’d tried breaking the habit, but it seemed his brain functioned better in the language he’d been speaking for forty years rather than the one he picked up only twenty or so years ago, and he gave up trying.
Taking the veggie sandwich out of the bag, he set it on a napkin. The bag of chips he tossed onto Zayne’s desk before he remembered that Zayne wouldn’t be joining him. A sigh escaped Andrej at the realization, but he left the chips – barbecue, Zayne’s favorite – where they were. Someone else would swipe them and as far as he was concerned, they could have them.
“Why did you have to go now,” he muttered into the empty bullpen.
He unwrapped the sandwich and pushed it far enough away that it wouldn’t accidentally get onto the file or its contents. Andrej took a bite of the sandwich and then started working on his notes, filling in missing pieces he’d left out for brevity’s sake and arranging the tidbits into a cohesive sort of order. So far, he didn’t have a lot to work with, but it was clear that Kyle Anderson, while loved by the fans, wasn’t much appreciated or liked by his peers.
The first half of his sandwich had disappeared by the time his phone rang. Andrej set his pen aside and wiped his mouth, reaching for his phone midway through the second ring. “Zeklos,” he said, eyes still on his transcription work.
“Hey baby,” Zayne’s smooth, southern voice drawled across the phone line. “Miss me yet?”
“Of course,” Andrej said, soaking up every ounce of Zayne that he could. “It is lonely at night without you here.”
Zayne snorted. “And I figured the ginger would have solved that problem for you by now.”
“Jay is not always able to stay the night with me,” Andrej said.
“One of these days we’ll get him to move in and stay,” Zayne said.
Andrej wasn’t sure that that was true, but he did appreciate Zayne’s attempt to lighten the mood. “How is your mother?”
“Oh, she’s fine,” Zayne groaned. “I have my doubts she was ever sick in the first place, but you can’t actually say that shit to anyone, can you?” A door closed somewhere behind Zayne and he could hear his boyfriend sigh. “I love that woman, but the older she gets, the more demanding she gets.”
“What do you mean,” Andrej asked, picking at the second half of his sandwich. He tore a corner off and lifted it to his mouth.
“She and my dad know that this – meaning you and me and the narco – is my normal for now. But it doesn’t stop her from asking if I’m ever going to be able to convince ‘that nice young girl’ I’d been dating to have a baby for me. Us. Whatever.”
Andrej choked on the bite of sandwich he was chewing and reached for his water. “I am sorry. What nice young woman is your mother referring to, Zayne?”
“Hilary,” he laughed. “I mean, yeah, she’d be the best mom I could find, but there ain’t no fucking way she’d agree to that. Not for me anyway.”
“If you are insinuating that she would do it for me, you are crazy,” he said. It was bad enough that Trish had tried to get him to donate the necessary genetic material so that she could have a baby. He’d never been more relieved than when she’d told him she’d adopted a puppy instead.
“Yeah, I tried to tell my mother that, but she was having none of it,” Zayne said. “I’m going to ask Hil to call her direct and set her straight.”
“Do you think that is a wise idea?”
“Probably not, but I can guarantee you that my mother will let the dream die after that conversation.”
Andrej laughed because that was likely the realest thing Zayne had ever uttered. “We can only hope that is true. I am not sure any of us are ready for a baby in our lives, myself included. And I have raised enough children to know.”
“We’d have to get Rosewood to help,” Zayne joked. “He has more siblings than you do, although I have a feeling you were more hands on with yours than he was.”
It was true to a point. “Jay did help his mother a lot with his younger siblings,” Andrej said. “However, she did not rely on him like my mother did me.”
“Different worlds,” Zayne said, hitting the nail on the head. “Anyway, you texted me earlier, what’s up? I know you wouldn’t have asked me to call if it wasn’t important.”
“I have a case,” he said, choosing his words carefully. Andrej knew it was important for Zayne to be where he is and the last thing he wanted was for his partner to feel like he had to rush home. “It is rather high profile.”
“Shit,” Zayne spat. “Sorry, Dahl, didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“Sure you didn’t,” Andrej heard Zayne’s older sister, Dahlia, mutter in the background. “Ya potty mouth.”
Zayne chuckled into the phone. “I sometimes wonder how I survived growing up in this house,” he said. “There is zero privacy in this place.”
“It has to be better than the house I grew up in,” he said.
“I have no doubt,” Zayne said. “But seriously, I saw in the paper this morning that someone offed that prick Kyle Anderson. Please tell me that’s not the case you caught. Especially not with me gone.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so he opted for the truth. Zayne would find out sooner or later anyway. “Unfortunately, that is exactly the case the captain gave me this morning.”
“Damn,” he muttered, quieter than he’d been before, Zeklos noticed. “You need me to come home?”
“No, Zayne,” he said, although he wanted to scream YES at his partner. “You stay and do what you need with your family. I can handle this.”
“The paper said that they’re looking to close the case in three days. I can’t remember the last homicide we closed in three days, Zek. Not even the one where we found the murderer holding the damn murder weapon five feet from where the body was.”
Andrej laughed despite the situation at hand. “That was one of our more interesting cases, was it not?”
“It definitely was,” Zayne agreed. “And his idiot lawyer didn’t help the case any.”
“No, he did not,” Andrej said. “But we found the evidence needed to convict him all the same.”
“We’re just that good,” Zayne said, pride lifting his words up as he spoke them.
“We are an excellent team,” Andrej said, wincing as the crushing weight of missing his partner and lover draped itself over his shoulders. “I will manage, but please come home soon.”
“I’d be on a plane headed your way right now if I could,” Zayne said. “But I promised I’d stay a week and that means…”
“Three more days,” Andrej said, sighing. “Enjoy it, you have no idea of when you might get home again.”
“True,” he said, “but I hate that I’ve left you in the lurch.”
“You have done no such thing,” Andrej said. “I need your help, but even if you were here, it is unreasonable to expect us to solve this in three days.”
“Ain’t that the god’s honest truth,” Zayne said. “Okay, baby, I need to get going. Selena keeps poking her head in here trying to figure out who I’m talking to. Mom will be right behind her before long.”
“Go, be with your family, Zayne. I will be here when you get home.”
“Thank the heavens for that,” he said, smiling into the phone. “Call me if you need me. I promise that I’m here for you.”
“I know, Zayne,” Andrej said. “I will keep you updated.”
“You’d better,” he teased. “I’ll call you tonight. Be careful.”
“I am always careful,” Andrej said, ending the call. He tossed his phone onto his desk and frowned. It was going to be a long couple of days waiting for Zayne to return.
Andrej’s head was bent over his notepad when Trish tapped him on the shoulder. “You okay,” she asked when he looked up. “I don’t think you’ve taken your eyes off that paper since Hil and I came back.”
He looked over his shoulder and saw Hilary watching him, too. “I am sorry I worried you,” he said. “But I am very busy with this case. I have only just gotten Mr. Anderson’s phone records and financial statements.”
“What are you working on,” Trish asked, looking over his shoulder. “Ah, phone records. Hand me the financials and we’ll help you.”
He narrowed his eyes at the redhead. “Do you not have a case of your own?”
“We do,” she said, wiggling her fingers at him. “But it’s a pretty simple burglary case.”
“Rollins is right,” Hilary said. “The uniforms on scene had all the evidence they needed to convict the perp, but we were called out to make sure nothing was missed. We’re back to being free agents for the moment.”
“Right,” Trish said, hand still outstretched. “So, let us help before we get assigned something else.”
“Thank you,” he said, reluctantly handing over the folder containing Kyle Anderson’s varied credit card and bank statements. “I have not had a chance to look at them at all so I cannot even tell you where to begin.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hilary said. “We’re good at this stuff. Not quite as good as Zayne is, no matter how much he hates it, but we’re not bad either.”
That made Andrej chuckle. “You both do good work.”
“Thanks, dad,” Trish teased, handing a chunk of the pile off to Hilary.
“Do we know what killed him yet,” Hilary asked, spreading the papers across the top of her desk.
“Two gunshots to the chest,” Andrej said. “Carla was going to run a tox screen just to be safe, however. I have not heard back from her on that yet.”
“That will take a while,” Trish agreed. “Better find our motive while we’re waiting then.”
As if it were that easy, Andrej thought. But he turned back to the phone records he’d been scanning, multicolored highlighters by his side. He hadn’t gotten too far into the stack of papers before he’d realized he was going to need more than one color. Three sheets in, he’d discovered multiple calls to and from many of the musicians Adrien had mentioned as having a beef with the dead singer. The majority of them coming from the woman named Wheeler Abrams. Andrej made a note to check into Ms. Abrams and find out what her actual name was. Wheeler was a little too unusual to be real.
“That’s a lot of highlighters,” a familiar voice said.
Andrej looked up, smiling at the sound of James’ voice. “I have a lot of suspects at the moment,” he said. “And they all seemed to be very chatty with our victim.”
“Now that makes for a fun case,” James said. He pulled out Zayne’s chair and propped his feet on the desk, much as Zayne would have done had he been present. “I’d ask if you were making any progress yet, but I know you’ve only just started.
“This is unfortunately true,” Andrej sighed.
“So, I’m going to guess that dinner is out of the question tonight?”
“It very well may be,” Andrej said, giving him a defeated look. “My captain and the district attorney are hoping to have this solved before the awards show.”
James blinked. “But that’s like in four days.”
“Three,” Andrej said, frowning.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “Call me when you get home then,” he said. “I’ll bring you some food and maybe see if I can help you with any of this.”
“That is not necessary, Jay,” Andrej said, worried that he’d be too preoccupied with solving this case to pay any attention to his boyfriend.
“I know it’s not,” James said, dropping his feet to the floor. “But I’m doing it anyway. Call me when you get home, okay?”
“Okay,” Andrej said, not wanting to argue with James in front of everyone. “I promise.”
“Good, because I’ll be pissed if you don’t,” he threatened. “And I might even be ticked off enough to call Zayne and tell him you’re not taking care of yourself.”
“Please do not,” he begged. “Zayne is having a hard enough time handling his family. Do not make him worry about me, too.”
“Then don’t forget to call me,” James said, brushing his fingers across the top of Andrej’s head, diffusing the tension in the air. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Goodbye, Jay,” Andrej said, shoulders slumping as the redheaded narcotics detective left the room.
“Yikes,” Trish laughed. “He’s gone all protective ape on you. What the hell happened?”
“Zayne left,” Hilary pointed out. “I’m going to say that Andy being partnerless at work is enough to make the narco get overprotective.”
It didn’t honestly even take that much, Andrej thought. James was just better at hiding it when Zayne was around. “Can we get back to work please? We can discuss my love life another time.”
Trish cackled. “As if you’d actually let that happen,” she said. “But okay. For your sanity, we’ll shut up now.”
“Thank you,” he said, forcing his eyes back onto the phone records and away from the place where he’d last seen James.
Fandom: Romani Detective Original Ficiton
Pairing: Andrej Zeklos+Hilary Maxwell+Trish Rollins
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,326
Summary: Zayne is still out of town and Andrej’s struggling with his case.
Author’s Note: Written for the rare pairs challenge at 1_million_words. Finished a chapter last night, so I’m posting a chapter today. Helping to motivate me to finish this already. Also, Andy is rather obsessed with Zayne so far this story. Not sure what’s going on there. Haha.
Andrej set the bag of food on his desk and looked around. Trish and Hilary must have gotten a case of their own because neither was at their desk. It was for the best, he figured, because it would give him a chance to transcribe his notes into the case file in peace. Out of habit, he wrote his notes in Romanian, which made Zayne a little crazy at times. He’d tried breaking the habit, but it seemed his brain functioned better in the language he’d been speaking for forty years rather than the one he picked up only twenty or so years ago, and he gave up trying.
Taking the veggie sandwich out of the bag, he set it on a napkin. The bag of chips he tossed onto Zayne’s desk before he remembered that Zayne wouldn’t be joining him. A sigh escaped Andrej at the realization, but he left the chips – barbecue, Zayne’s favorite – where they were. Someone else would swipe them and as far as he was concerned, they could have them.
“Why did you have to go now,” he muttered into the empty bullpen.
He unwrapped the sandwich and pushed it far enough away that it wouldn’t accidentally get onto the file or its contents. Andrej took a bite of the sandwich and then started working on his notes, filling in missing pieces he’d left out for brevity’s sake and arranging the tidbits into a cohesive sort of order. So far, he didn’t have a lot to work with, but it was clear that Kyle Anderson, while loved by the fans, wasn’t much appreciated or liked by his peers.
The first half of his sandwich had disappeared by the time his phone rang. Andrej set his pen aside and wiped his mouth, reaching for his phone midway through the second ring. “Zeklos,” he said, eyes still on his transcription work.
“Hey baby,” Zayne’s smooth, southern voice drawled across the phone line. “Miss me yet?”
“Of course,” Andrej said, soaking up every ounce of Zayne that he could. “It is lonely at night without you here.”
Zayne snorted. “And I figured the ginger would have solved that problem for you by now.”
“Jay is not always able to stay the night with me,” Andrej said.
“One of these days we’ll get him to move in and stay,” Zayne said.
Andrej wasn’t sure that that was true, but he did appreciate Zayne’s attempt to lighten the mood. “How is your mother?”
“Oh, she’s fine,” Zayne groaned. “I have my doubts she was ever sick in the first place, but you can’t actually say that shit to anyone, can you?” A door closed somewhere behind Zayne and he could hear his boyfriend sigh. “I love that woman, but the older she gets, the more demanding she gets.”
“What do you mean,” Andrej asked, picking at the second half of his sandwich. He tore a corner off and lifted it to his mouth.
“She and my dad know that this – meaning you and me and the narco – is my normal for now. But it doesn’t stop her from asking if I’m ever going to be able to convince ‘that nice young girl’ I’d been dating to have a baby for me. Us. Whatever.”
Andrej choked on the bite of sandwich he was chewing and reached for his water. “I am sorry. What nice young woman is your mother referring to, Zayne?”
“Hilary,” he laughed. “I mean, yeah, she’d be the best mom I could find, but there ain’t no fucking way she’d agree to that. Not for me anyway.”
“If you are insinuating that she would do it for me, you are crazy,” he said. It was bad enough that Trish had tried to get him to donate the necessary genetic material so that she could have a baby. He’d never been more relieved than when she’d told him she’d adopted a puppy instead.
“Yeah, I tried to tell my mother that, but she was having none of it,” Zayne said. “I’m going to ask Hil to call her direct and set her straight.”
“Do you think that is a wise idea?”
“Probably not, but I can guarantee you that my mother will let the dream die after that conversation.”
Andrej laughed because that was likely the realest thing Zayne had ever uttered. “We can only hope that is true. I am not sure any of us are ready for a baby in our lives, myself included. And I have raised enough children to know.”
“We’d have to get Rosewood to help,” Zayne joked. “He has more siblings than you do, although I have a feeling you were more hands on with yours than he was.”
It was true to a point. “Jay did help his mother a lot with his younger siblings,” Andrej said. “However, she did not rely on him like my mother did me.”
“Different worlds,” Zayne said, hitting the nail on the head. “Anyway, you texted me earlier, what’s up? I know you wouldn’t have asked me to call if it wasn’t important.”
“I have a case,” he said, choosing his words carefully. Andrej knew it was important for Zayne to be where he is and the last thing he wanted was for his partner to feel like he had to rush home. “It is rather high profile.”
“Shit,” Zayne spat. “Sorry, Dahl, didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“Sure you didn’t,” Andrej heard Zayne’s older sister, Dahlia, mutter in the background. “Ya potty mouth.”
Zayne chuckled into the phone. “I sometimes wonder how I survived growing up in this house,” he said. “There is zero privacy in this place.”
“It has to be better than the house I grew up in,” he said.
“I have no doubt,” Zayne said. “But seriously, I saw in the paper this morning that someone offed that prick Kyle Anderson. Please tell me that’s not the case you caught. Especially not with me gone.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so he opted for the truth. Zayne would find out sooner or later anyway. “Unfortunately, that is exactly the case the captain gave me this morning.”
“Damn,” he muttered, quieter than he’d been before, Zeklos noticed. “You need me to come home?”
“No, Zayne,” he said, although he wanted to scream YES at his partner. “You stay and do what you need with your family. I can handle this.”
“The paper said that they’re looking to close the case in three days. I can’t remember the last homicide we closed in three days, Zek. Not even the one where we found the murderer holding the damn murder weapon five feet from where the body was.”
Andrej laughed despite the situation at hand. “That was one of our more interesting cases, was it not?”
“It definitely was,” Zayne agreed. “And his idiot lawyer didn’t help the case any.”
“No, he did not,” Andrej said. “But we found the evidence needed to convict him all the same.”
“We’re just that good,” Zayne said, pride lifting his words up as he spoke them.
“We are an excellent team,” Andrej said, wincing as the crushing weight of missing his partner and lover draped itself over his shoulders. “I will manage, but please come home soon.”
“I’d be on a plane headed your way right now if I could,” Zayne said. “But I promised I’d stay a week and that means…”
“Three more days,” Andrej said, sighing. “Enjoy it, you have no idea of when you might get home again.”
“True,” he said, “but I hate that I’ve left you in the lurch.”
“You have done no such thing,” Andrej said. “I need your help, but even if you were here, it is unreasonable to expect us to solve this in three days.”
“Ain’t that the god’s honest truth,” Zayne said. “Okay, baby, I need to get going. Selena keeps poking her head in here trying to figure out who I’m talking to. Mom will be right behind her before long.”
“Go, be with your family, Zayne. I will be here when you get home.”
“Thank the heavens for that,” he said, smiling into the phone. “Call me if you need me. I promise that I’m here for you.”
“I know, Zayne,” Andrej said. “I will keep you updated.”
“You’d better,” he teased. “I’ll call you tonight. Be careful.”
“I am always careful,” Andrej said, ending the call. He tossed his phone onto his desk and frowned. It was going to be a long couple of days waiting for Zayne to return.
Andrej’s head was bent over his notepad when Trish tapped him on the shoulder. “You okay,” she asked when he looked up. “I don’t think you’ve taken your eyes off that paper since Hil and I came back.”
He looked over his shoulder and saw Hilary watching him, too. “I am sorry I worried you,” he said. “But I am very busy with this case. I have only just gotten Mr. Anderson’s phone records and financial statements.”
“What are you working on,” Trish asked, looking over his shoulder. “Ah, phone records. Hand me the financials and we’ll help you.”
He narrowed his eyes at the redhead. “Do you not have a case of your own?”
“We do,” she said, wiggling her fingers at him. “But it’s a pretty simple burglary case.”
“Rollins is right,” Hilary said. “The uniforms on scene had all the evidence they needed to convict the perp, but we were called out to make sure nothing was missed. We’re back to being free agents for the moment.”
“Right,” Trish said, hand still outstretched. “So, let us help before we get assigned something else.”
“Thank you,” he said, reluctantly handing over the folder containing Kyle Anderson’s varied credit card and bank statements. “I have not had a chance to look at them at all so I cannot even tell you where to begin.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hilary said. “We’re good at this stuff. Not quite as good as Zayne is, no matter how much he hates it, but we’re not bad either.”
That made Andrej chuckle. “You both do good work.”
“Thanks, dad,” Trish teased, handing a chunk of the pile off to Hilary.
“Do we know what killed him yet,” Hilary asked, spreading the papers across the top of her desk.
“Two gunshots to the chest,” Andrej said. “Carla was going to run a tox screen just to be safe, however. I have not heard back from her on that yet.”
“That will take a while,” Trish agreed. “Better find our motive while we’re waiting then.”
As if it were that easy, Andrej thought. But he turned back to the phone records he’d been scanning, multicolored highlighters by his side. He hadn’t gotten too far into the stack of papers before he’d realized he was going to need more than one color. Three sheets in, he’d discovered multiple calls to and from many of the musicians Adrien had mentioned as having a beef with the dead singer. The majority of them coming from the woman named Wheeler Abrams. Andrej made a note to check into Ms. Abrams and find out what her actual name was. Wheeler was a little too unusual to be real.
“That’s a lot of highlighters,” a familiar voice said.
Andrej looked up, smiling at the sound of James’ voice. “I have a lot of suspects at the moment,” he said. “And they all seemed to be very chatty with our victim.”
“Now that makes for a fun case,” James said. He pulled out Zayne’s chair and propped his feet on the desk, much as Zayne would have done had he been present. “I’d ask if you were making any progress yet, but I know you’ve only just started.
“This is unfortunately true,” Andrej sighed.
“So, I’m going to guess that dinner is out of the question tonight?”
“It very well may be,” Andrej said, giving him a defeated look. “My captain and the district attorney are hoping to have this solved before the awards show.”
James blinked. “But that’s like in four days.”
“Three,” Andrej said, frowning.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “Call me when you get home then,” he said. “I’ll bring you some food and maybe see if I can help you with any of this.”
“That is not necessary, Jay,” Andrej said, worried that he’d be too preoccupied with solving this case to pay any attention to his boyfriend.
“I know it’s not,” James said, dropping his feet to the floor. “But I’m doing it anyway. Call me when you get home, okay?”
“Okay,” Andrej said, not wanting to argue with James in front of everyone. “I promise.”
“Good, because I’ll be pissed if you don’t,” he threatened. “And I might even be ticked off enough to call Zayne and tell him you’re not taking care of yourself.”
“Please do not,” he begged. “Zayne is having a hard enough time handling his family. Do not make him worry about me, too.”
“Then don’t forget to call me,” James said, brushing his fingers across the top of Andrej’s head, diffusing the tension in the air. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Goodbye, Jay,” Andrej said, shoulders slumping as the redheaded narcotics detective left the room.
“Yikes,” Trish laughed. “He’s gone all protective ape on you. What the hell happened?”
“Zayne left,” Hilary pointed out. “I’m going to say that Andy being partnerless at work is enough to make the narco get overprotective.”
It didn’t honestly even take that much, Andrej thought. James was just better at hiding it when Zayne was around. “Can we get back to work please? We can discuss my love life another time.”
Trish cackled. “As if you’d actually let that happen,” she said. “But okay. For your sanity, we’ll shut up now.”
“Thank you,” he said, forcing his eyes back onto the phone records and away from the place where he’d last seen James.
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Date: 2020-02-24 04:37 am (UTC)Hah, funny you mention James being overprotective. That comes up later, too. You're in my brain today, I think. Tell Zayne to go to bed while you're in there. He has work tomorrow. :D