abrightboy | The Lengths That I Would Go To

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The Lengths That I Would Go To

The killer was moving around the country. Malcolm Bright could see the pattern, but he wasn't working for the FBI these days and they weren't exactly taking his calls. Short sighted of them, but they did fire him on suspicion of being crazy. The NYPD's jurisdiction was New York. With the killer beyond its borders, they handed it upwards and left it at that.

Let it go, Bright, had been Gil's sage advice. You can't catch every killer in America single-handedly.

Challenge accepted, some part of him retorted, though he'd only nodded mutely and forced a smile. Gil knew he hadn't simply let it go, but he wasn't going to have him followed to stop him doing anything stupid, either. He didn't have the will or the resources to keep tabs on Malcolm Bright 24/7 and Malcolm Bright knew it.

His mother, on the other hand, had extensive resources, so he simply didn't tell her he was leaving town. He did arrange for Ainsley to feed his bird, so the truth would come out eventually, but he'd be several states away by then.

He rode the bus. There was something oddly comforting about the anonymity of being in a crowd of strangers who had no interest in him whatsoever. He stared out the window and watched the country go by. When he stepped off the Greyhound in Lexington, Kentucky, he walked to a nearby hotel and checked in, then headed straight to the US Marshals office. There was no point in trying to talk to the FBI. If he was going to stop a killer from killing again, he needed someone in law enforcement to listen to him. The pattern suggested the next murder would happen in one of the rural communities around Lexington and it would be precipitated by a young woman's disappearance. He needed law enforcement with local knowledge, specifically.

He wandered into the Marshals' offices in a tidy three piece suit, charcoal grey with a burgundy tie perfectly knotted at his collar. He got a few suspicious sidelong glances but nobody asked if they could help him. He cleared his throat.

"Um, hello? I'm wondering if there's anyone here I can talk to about murder." He held up his hands. "Stopping murder, specifically, not... like... smalltalk."

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"I don't suppose you noticed a woman in his company? Maybe he brought her back here late? Maybe she seemed to be passed out drunk from the bar?" Malcolm asked. "Did anyone report any noise complaints from the room?"

The kid shook his head. "Came in alone, paid in cash. We're kinda light on business this time of year," he explained nervously.

Raylan sucked his teeth again and nodded, lifting his finger towards the security room. "We're gonna have to take those tapes. That gonna be a problem?"

The kid shook his head and Raylan nodded at Malcolm. "I'll call the room in, you get the tape and we'll head over to Arlo's for the night, unless you feel like a 3 hour drive back, only to come back tomorrow."

He pulled out his phone and headed out the door to get Rachel and Tim on the line.

Malcolm fetched the tape while Raylan was on the phone, but his anxiety was ramping up. When Raylan was off the phone, he had to clarify.

"...You mean... sleep? At-at Arlo's? For the night? I... need some things from my hotel room," he said with a frown.

"Yeah," Raylan replied, confused once again by the oddities of the man he'd found himself saddled with. "That thing people do most of the time when the sun ain't up."

Sliding into the driver's seat of his car, he closed the door and adjusted his hat as Malcolm slid in next to him, sighing.

"Need some things," he echoed, though with his accent it came out a bit like 'thangs' as his hazel mixed eyes gauge Malcolm. "And it's things you absolutely can't do without for one night," he half questioned, half stated.

"...I didn't know we weren't going back," he said, which wasn't really an answer to the question. "Did you know we weren't going back?" he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

"No, but that's why God made Motels and government paid rooms," Raylan returned just as conversationally. "Lemme ask you this, what is it, exactly that you need? Harlan ain't good for much but we got.. most of what everyone else has got. You need a special neck pillow or something?"

"No. ...No, nothing like that. I have..." What? What wasn't weird and also plausible? "Medication that I'm taking." Ah. Not weird and even true. But also concerning. Mitigate, mitigate..... "But I can just take it in the afternoon. When we get back. No big deal." He glanced at Raylan. Convincing, right?

"Medication." To rhythm with 'uh-huh' in its cadence. He wasn't gunna ask. "Nothing that the Marshall's service can do to..." He gestured uselessly over his steering wheel. "We got CVS's and shit."

He wasn't sure if he should ask what it was for. "You sure?"

"It's prescription," he said. "It's fine. What's 'Arlo's place'?"

"My daddy's house," he replied, turning over the engine so he could roll down the window. He wanted to wait to see Tim's SUV pull up before he pulled away. "I grew up here in Harlan. The Givens have been here for some 3 generations, least til I went down to Miami."

There was Tim. Raylan raised a hand and nodded before putting the car into reverse and getting them on the road again.

"Gives me a place to stay when I'm down here workin' on something. At least til I get it off the market. You ever sold a house before?"

"... No. When I worked in DC, I rented a place." A beat. "I still rent a place." From his mother. "In New York."

He looked over at Raylan. "Do your dad still live there?"

"Damn." Clearly, he was hoping for some pointers.

Raylan kept his eyes on the road, face unchanging as he answered. "Yeah, in the grave plots out front. You'll see 'em - hellva lawn decoration. I think that's why the place won't sell. No one wants generational land with people already in its dirt."

But moving Arlo and his mother and Helen was.. well, unthinkable.

"...There are graves in the front?"

Malcolm grew up in a generational home, but the Miltons were not buried in the yard of the posh townhouse.

"That's... personal. Why do you want to sell it?"

"Three full and one waiting with my name on it.. Literally." Not exactly the friendliest reminder that life was short and he'd be in the ground sooner than he meant to be.

Raylan glanced over from his driving for a half second as he answered.

"Because it's personal. And I'm not using the land, or the house. Don't want it, never did. Once it sells and I get finished with some.. cases down here-" Namely Boyd Crowder- "I'm getting on with my life."

Raylan continued. "You got anything in New York besides your rented apartment?"

"My family lives there," he said distractedly, watching the line of Raylan's jaw; the tension in his face. "You didn't want to come back here. Something happened that made you. Something personal or something professional? ... Something professional. You had some sort of setback at work that sent you here. Personal came after. When you get rid of the house, where will you go?"

Sorry, Raylan, he can't always shut it off.

His jaw was telling, tensing subtly in all the right moments as Malcolm pieced him together. He'd told Malcolm about his shooting people, the idea that he'd been pushed out into a more tolerant or a more controlled situation, as Art mighta put it, wasn't a hard leap to get to.

If Raylan was stupider, it might have seemed like magic, but magic was one of those things Raylan didn't believe in either.

"Back to Miami. They got just as many fugitives there." And with less personal history.

They turned off the main road onto a smaller one with just enough dirt across and in it that one might thing it wasn't paved somewhere underneath all of that, and pulled up to an equally unimpressive house. It might have been impressive once but now..

"Ain't a soul around for a good half mile," Raylan sighed, not exactly with a thrilled tone. "Come on, I think there's still beer in the fridge."

He hauled himself out of the car, adjusting his hat as he stared for a second too long at the headstones that would greet them on the sidewalk before striding that way and nonchalantly past them.

Nobody around for half a mile and the two of them in a very big house. Maybe he'd survive the night without causing an incident after all.

He looked up at the house after following Raylan's glance to the headstones.

"This is... grand," he noted. He raised a finger. "You know, the gravestones might not be the problem. It might sell faster if you put in a little... cosmetic work. What do they call it? Curb appeal. Power wash the siding. Plant some flowers. That sort of thing." He looked at Raylan, because the man had to know it looked like something from a movie about people getting lost in the woods and murdered at a creepy old house. "Do you really want to sell it?" he asked, watching for the same telling tension in the man's face.

"Might be worth more if I just razed the place to the ground. I'm not down here long enough to do that kinda thing, and you already see the state of our windows. Small town assholes with shit else to do but break into an old house and tear the copper out of my walls. Almost got that one fixed," he replied as he pulled the screen door open and unlocked the door, flipping on the porch light and the inner lights as he glanced around.

"Yeah, I do. Truth is, I never much liked this place. Arlo didn't make me love it either. Make yourself comfortable."

Moving right, through the sitting room, one might call it - a couple of couches and a coffee table that had seen better years, and into the open kitchen. Malcolm was right - the house was fairly grand. For all the dirt and age on the outside, the inside was open and cozy. Not poorly decorated, though the touches were scant in some places, and definitely decorated by someone other than Arlo or Raylan.

Edited 2020-01-12 17:41 (UTC)

"You never liked it because of the problems in your relationship with your dad, or is it more than that?" Malcolm asked, looking around. Everyone's adult self was made in their childhood home. Of course, it didn't take a skilled profiler and an introduction to that home to guess Raylan's relationship with his father was strained. He called the man by his name, not 'dad'. Malcolm did that too. It was dissociative.

He turned and looked at Raylan as something else in that equation occurred to him. "There are two women buried out front. One more recently than the other. Which one was your mother?"

Everything made more noise out this far, from him opening the fridge to the beer he cracked open, to him setting it and one for Malcolm if he wanted it onto the kitchen table before starting another habitual practice.

The hat had to come off sometime.

"The one less recent. The other is my Aunt Helen. Helped raise me after Mom died, took on Arlo as her husband a few years after. Hellva woman. Hellva shot too, you let her get a shotgun in her hand." The hat was set on the table, his jacket getting pulled off and put around his chair, followed by his tie before he sat and started working on his cuffs.

"Probably can't see it out there on those things, it being this dark, but my mother was Frances. Frances McKinley Givens," he said behind the lift of his beer bottle.

"You wanna know how Arlo got those headstones? Bought 'em with stolen cows. Even better, you wanna know his last words to me? 'Kiss my ass'." Raylan lifted his eyebrows in a 'how do you like that' kinda look before taking another drink.

"His grave was the most recent. ...Did he buy his own stone with stolen cows or did he just have.... extra ones hanging around?" Malcolm asked, shrugging off his own jacket to hang it on the back of his chair, which would only accentuate that he showed up in Kentucky in a proper bespoke three piece suit.

He took a seat at the table, but didn't open the beer.

"Was there context for his last remark, or was it a sort of... general sentiment?" he added curiously.

Raylan scoffed a chuckle. "He bought 'em in bulk, all on the same day." He hated Arlo as much as a son could hate their father while not denying them, but there was and would always be a little respect for the way Arlo was. If only because he was terribly like his father, with much smarter life choices.

Generally speaking. Some would say Raylan was just as stupid.

Malcolm's 3 piece was not overlooked, earning another amused tilt of Raylan's expression. He'd noted it before but without the jacket, it drew much more attention.

"Both. Stubborn old bastard wouldn't help stop something with his dying breath." Raylan didn't add 'Not even for me' because with Arlo Givens, that didn't really mean much. "Died in a prison bed after shanking one guard and slitting another's throat before catching one himself from another prisoner." Couldn't have happened to a more deserving person, he thought.

"That what you always wear to this kinda work? Three piece suits? A few days and I'll bet money you'll lose that waistcoat or jacket. Gets hot out here, ya know."

Malcolm's attention perked up a little when Raylan mentioned his father had died in a prison hospital, but he didn't comment on it. He wasn't going to go offering information about his own father, in a hospital prison for the rest of his life.

He looked down at what he felt was his understated suit and tie, running a hand down the front of his waistcoat.

"I have... other clothes," he said. "At the hotel." A beat. "But yes. Is the answer to your question." It helped that his colleagues in New York also felt he overdressed.

"Who you dressing up for? The corpses or an M.E.?"

Malcolm didn't seem like the type who would do interoffice romances, seeing how as he didn't have an office, which left Raylan with a few choices. A cop on the Force or someone that interacts with the bodies and crime scenes.

"Um," he looked confused by the question. "None of the above?" Though their M.E. did have a crush on him, so maybe it had unintended side effects? "I suppose," he mused, clearly turning his analyzing eyes on himself in real time, "that anyone that's a bit of a mess on the inside can pretend they're not by being well put together on the outside."

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Somewhere, 'You'll never leave Harlan Alive' is playing

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