bestsellingego | Entries tagged with kate beckett

The NYPD doesn't have an official gym. Not anymore, anyway. Not since the basement in the bottom of the 12th had been found to contain "unusually high levels of asbestos" and not since everybody agreed that it was probably not a good idea for New York's Finest to run on treadmills located underneath five hundred pounds of the stuff. For the last five years, the District Attorney and the mayor had been trying to talk their constituents into springing for a new facility, but response was as sluggish as the blood flow through a diabetic's arteries. In the interim, the New York City branch of the FBI has offered use of their gym to any officer who wants to come in and burn off a few blue calories.

And that's where Castle is today.

Or, would be, more accurately, if he could get past the security cartel in the lobby. Despite the fact that Beckett had finally gotten around to getting him his own sent of presentable credentials, the G at the security desk isn't buying the whole "authorial ride-along" shtick, and Castle has had to sweat through three inter-departmental phone calls, a background check, and a number of pissed-off-looking agents who have filed in behind him, already looking like they just need an excuse to knock a guy's block off.

"I'm with Detective Kate Beckett," he tries again, hoisting his gym bag along his shoulder. "B-E-C-K-E-T-T. Badge number...hell, I don't know her badge number. Page her. She's expecting me."

The badge behind the desk cups his large hand over the mouthpiece of his phone. He looks like the kind of guy who uproots tree stumps in his spare time. "I don't have a record of you on the books, Mr. Castle. You're certain she was meeting you today?"

"Yeah, today. She's got to get re-certified in hand-to-hand combat next week. We were going to practice a few moves."

Stony silence. Castle hears a couple of Gs chuckle in line behind him.

"What?"

"No offense, Mr. Castle, but unless you're gonna' take dictation during her re-certification, she's probably gonna' do better on her own."

Castle casts a glance down to his top-of-the-line sneakers and never-been-sweated-in NYU t-shirt. "You think I don't have what it takes? I'll have you know, I can be pretty intimidating when I want to be. I made a waiter cry once."

The badge chuckles into his collar and returns to his phone call. Castle scans the lobby, touching his stomach with the tips of his fingers, looking dejected. A few seconds later the guy hangs up, gives Castle a tight smirk, and says, "All right, man. She's on her way down to collect you. 'Careful you don't knock her in the head with those forearms of yours."

"Watch it. I can take a maître d' out in two seconds flat."

[ Timed to the day after this. ]

It hadn't been that bad.

Nero had fiddled, but Rome hadn't burned beyond recognition and by the time Castle got back to his apartment, the party was waning. No busted chandeliers; no farm animals in the living room. The baby grand showed signs of being shifted, but a bouquet of half-emptied champagne glasses on the lid suggested that the movers must have given up shortly into the endeavor.

Overall, Martha Castle had considered it a successful evening.

Castle had sulked for a while and then dragged himself to his daughter's bedroom to see how she'd weathered the storm. He found her with a physics textbook propped open on her stomach, a Maglite shining the way for protons, electrons and whatever else Castle guessed you found in a physics textbook that his Liberal Arts education did not provide for.

He dropped a kiss to the top of her head.

"You know, I used to read other things by flashlight after I thought Gram had gone to bed."

"The New York Times Book Review, right?"

"Something like that." He deposited himself in a chair. "Sorry about tonight. I should have been here to stop the floor show."

Alexis Castle made a bookmark of her index finger and shut the textbook on her lap. "It's okay," she said. Drew her legs up to her chest. "I'm sorry I pulled you away from Detective Beckett. I know what it's like, when..." She trailed off.

Castle pitched forward. "You 'know what it's like when' what?"

"Come on, dad. I'm in high school."

"Oh god. Please don't tell me --"

His daughter held up her hand, sliding off the edge of the mattress. She crossed to her father and hung off his neck in a warm, happy loop. "Relax." She patted his chest. "I meant that I know what it's like when you like someone and you're not sure if they like you back, so things get weird and --"

"Do you like someone? Who do you like?"

"Daa-aad." She squeezed her arms around his neck until Castle laughed and relented, swinging his arm around her middle to reel her in for a fierce bear hug. "You know, it is dis-gus-ting how much I love you," Castle told her. His daughter smiled. "Love you, too." She kissed his cheek and got back into bed. Castle clicked on her bedside light and, off her look, said, "You'll ruin your eyes the other way." He could trade in parentisms when he wanted.

Castle didn't see Beckett at all the next day. He'd gotten caught in a late lunch with Gina, who had wanted to see the first three chapters of the Heat Wave sequel, and Castle had broken breadsticks into tiny pieces and groused about 'genius' and 'deadlines' and how neither of them made good bedfellows. In the end, he had promised two firm chapters and an outline for the rest of the novel, thus securing his ex-wife/publicist's temporary pardon. He was still checking his body for ants when he left the restaurant.

He had left a message for Beckett at about five thirty and she'd confirmed that they were still on for dinner. He thought about shoehorning in a meal at Le Cirque, but even his star power wasn't enough to get an eight o'clock table. On the other hand, Atelier was reasonably quiet midweek, and its proximity to Central Park meant that Castle didn't have to splurge for a cab. Plus, the decor and menu -- French provincial -- wasn't too overwhelming to the uninitiated. Even so, Castle was looking forward to translating some of the more consonant-heavy menu items for Beckett's benefit.

He's in good spirits when he winds up on her doorstep. No tuxedo, but definitely some thorough polishing going on. A nice tie has even found its way around his neck.

He pushes her buzzer with his thumb.

[ Set about a week after this. ]

A white SUV with a ski rack rattling with gear makes a sudden, unsignaled turn into their lane. Castle checks the license plate, then glances excitedly at the paperwork in his lap, even as Beckett struggles to keep their squad car between the yellow lines.

"One-oh-five," he declares, "that's the prefix for Montauk. All right!" He scratches something in the margins of the paper propped up on his knee. "I don't have an 'M' yet. Doesn't matter that Montauk is already in New York, right? Oh well. I'm counting it anyway." This is the second hour of license plate Bingo and, either Castle's doing it wrong, or the cars on the freeway aren't cooperating with the spirit of the game.

It's been a week since he and Beckett found themselves living out a literal reenactment of the contents of Chapter Ten of Heat Wave; seven days since they took separate cabs to work; one hundred and sixty-eight hours since he and Beckett even recognized the fact that they'd seen each other at their worst and, after a couple of minutes of fumbling around between Beckett's sheets, at their best. It hadn't even been a matter of avoidance -- the opportunity to sit down and have a real talk just hadn't presented itself. Less than six hours after Castle left her apartment, Beckett got a new case and the two of them had spent the last week tracking down leads.

Esposito always liked to say that Beckett had a taste for the "freaky ones," and this case was no different. A wealthy patron of the New York City Ballet had been found dead in his apartment, his body covered by a pelt of tropical fire ants. It had taken CSU a couple of hours to remove the body (after several calls to Animal Control proved fruitless -- "We don't really...deal...with insects") and the amount of tissue deterioration had given Lanie a hell of a tough time determining time of death.

Now they're on the road to Philadelphia, bound for Drexel University, where the world's pre-eminent expert on the 280 different species of fire ants is their last-ditch hope for a solid lead.

Castle has taken advantage of the three-hour plus drive by starting several games of license plate Bingo, none of which have so far engaged his companion's interest.

He cranes a look out the window.

"Hey! Palm Beach!" He marks off another square on his sheet. "As in 'Florida', as in fourmis de feu -- the French term for fire ants. I swear, after this case, I'm never going to look at the menu at Le Cirque the same way again."

[ Set in the days following this. ]

"I just don't know what to do with these earrings."

Martha Castle descends the stairs in a cyclone of teal and gold silk, her red hair teased high and as bright as a match head. She slams a pair of gold filigree earrings down on the counter where Castle is busy arranging an edible tour of the Orient, courtesy of the Mandarin Garden take-out place down the street. He gives the earrings a sideways glance. Grins. Watching his mother get wound up before a night out on the town is more entertaining than most spectator sports. He shovels a mound of fragrant white rice into a container.

"Judging from the size and shape, I bet they'd probably be pretty good airfoils for short-term flight."

Martha gives her son a sour look and plants her hand over the earrings, holding them up as evidence. "I'll have you know that these were given to me by a Broadway producer whose version of Annie Get Your Gun was delivered from the jaws of tragedy by me --" she fans a hand against the brocade at her throat "-- in a knockout performance." She begins affixing the earrings at her lobes. "He was very grateful."

"Yeah, to be rid of the curse of the displaced maharaja who used to own the things."

"That's the Hope Diamond. And someone should adopt you."

"Speaking of good parenting, where's Alexis?"

Martha drops a tube of lipstick and her cell phone into an ornate clutch purse. "At a group study session for her astronomy class."

"On a Friday night?"

The Castle family matriarch shakes her head ruefully. "I keep telling her that the only stars she really needs to care about are between Hollywood and Vine, but," she waves a dismissive hand, "you know how young people are."

Castle arches an eyebrow. "Educated?" He starts to start geometric take-out boxes on top of each other. "What am I gonna' do with all this food? I ordered extra because I thought you and Alexis were staying in tonight. I'm up to my eyeballs in udon."

Martha checks her reflection in a compact and shrugs. "Call detective Beckett. Aren't the two of you working on a case? Something about murder, mystery and macabre intrigue?"

"Just about."

Martha leans in and presses her lips against her son's cheek. "Do something with yourself, will you? You've been moping around here for three days. We're too pretty to have real problems."

Castle squeezes his mother's hand and sees her out the door. Suddenly, the apartment is much too quiet. He flicks the stereo system to life and cues up the Shuffle function on his iPod. 'Gives the entire thing up to the Fates and gets Aerosmith's "Love In An Elevator" right out of the gate.

Terrific.

The precinct is quiet. Most of the officers have gone home for the night, leaving behind their humming computers and the residue at the bottoms of two dozen chipped coffee cups. Most of the men at the precinct have families to go home to. The ones that don't, well, they volunteer to work the night shift. They roll into the precinct in pairs, jostling their belts, rattling the half-empty coffee carafes and bitching about last week's cast-off on Dancing With the Stars.

Castle sits against the wall outside Booking, a cup of oily coffee congealing between his fingers. He hasn't spoken to Beckett in twenty-four hours. He's starting to get nervous.

The shooting range was not at all how Castle had pictured it. In his mind, hardened beat cops with bristle mustaches stood around in pairs, comparing their pieces with one another while watching other members of their tribe blast the crap out of tin cans on a fence. He had a whole scene hashed out in his head before he even got to the range: Nikki Heat in Kevlar and a pair of pumps, having an arm-wrestling contest with some cop named O'Reilly -- no, Connor ... no, Espisito -- and then going out to the range with her Glock to sharpshoot a couple of pigeons. Castle had it planned down to the detail on Espisito's badge when he pulled into the parking lot of a squat gray structure. He snorted. It looked more like a bunker than the place where New York's Finest trained their itchy trigger fingers.

Beckett had insisted that they drove separately. That was fine with Castle. He had a GPS and a turbo engine and an overall jonesin' to see both pushed to their peak usages. The car was an incentive for him to finish his latest opus. Of course, the car had come before he'd axed his main character and once he turned in the final draft, he'd worried for two nights that his publisher would come around to his apartment, asking for the car keys.

Castle swung out of the driver's seat and adjusted the sunglasses perched on the end of his nose. A pair of plainclothes cops (you knew them by their walk) came up the walk past him. Their holsters were empty. Castle felt cheated. Here he was, on Beckett's good graces, willing to play along for once. The least she could do was rig up a couple of her boys in blue with some sub-machine guns. A writer had to have inspiration, after all.

He spotted the turned back of Detective Kate Beckett standing across the parking lot, her mahogany-coloured hair reflecting dizzying fractals of sunlight. She had her hands on her hips (he was used to that pose) and she was looking upwind, toward the peak of the parking lot. He was too far away to tell, but Castle just knew that she was tapping her toe inside of one of those pricey shoes.

His smile erupted into a billion watts. "Hello there," he said, trundling the loose gravel beneath his feet as he descended from on high to meet her, "I've changed my mind. I'm not interested in guns anymore. Does this place do C4? I kind of feel like busting prairie dogs the old fashioned way."