BLACK FLAG

By L.B.

X-OVER FANDOMS: X-Files/Homicide, Life On the Streets

PAIRING: Krycek/Lewis

SUMMARY: Krycek is one step ahead of Lewis in a strange murder case.

Notes: This bit of absolute silliness is dedicated to Maura, who came up with a title sight unseen and to Beth, beta and knower of things Krycek.

Whatever's wrong with it is all my fault, not theirs.

BLACK FLAG

By L.B

The call came in to the Baltimore Homicide Unit at the worst possible moment for Detective Meldrick Lewis. It was two hours before the shift change and it had been a busy night for everyone. So much so, they all had a good excuse to duck the call and leave Lewis working a murder without a secondary.

Lewis thought of asking Gee Jr. to ride along, but decided that there was no way he was risking his ass in the passenger seat with that guy again. One trip to the hospital for motor vehicular mishaps was plenty.

The upshot of it all being he had to pick up a body dumped out in Leakin Park on his own. In spite of all the partners he'd been through, Lewis had never quite got the knack of working alone. Life might have been good for him if he could find someone who was only about the job, but he'd had lousy luck in that department.

So, cursing the general disposition of the universe all the way, Lewis got himself to Leakin Park without any major traffic violations. That anyone but him knew about.

The body lay on the rocks just clear of the streambed. If there had been any leaves, the underbrush would have hidden it, but as it was, it lay brutally exposed on the bare rock. As he got closer, Lewis realized that the reason he couldn't identify anything about the body was not because of decay. The corpse was coated in a brownish film. A film that reeked of, well, cockroaches.

"What's this shit?" he muttered to the nearest uniform. "It looks like some bug spat on him."

"Uh, I wouldn't touch that, Detective Lewis," the uniform, who couldn't be a day above twenty-two and still had that fresh out of the academy stride, said nervously.

"No, you wouldn't. Because you wouldn't mess with evidence by touching the body before homicide got here. Would you?"

"No, Detective. But I'm telling you because Darney touched it and it burned his hands."

"Darney did, huh? And where might Darney be?"

"He responded to the call. The FBI agent told him to get to the hospital. He said it left chemical burns."

Lewis turned around very slowly and casually, so that the uniform was unready for the full force of his gaze. "FBI agent? What FBI agent?"

"He said his name was Agent Krycek. He took a sample of the brown shit and the witness."

"The witness? There was a witness and you let him go?"

"Her go. The girl who found the body. I didn't let her go, I mean. Agent Krycek--"

"What the fuck? Did the Feds claim jurisdiction here?"

"Agent Krycek said... well, he seemed to know what he was doing."

"Did he? What was her name?"

"Her name... um, Darney wrote it down, but he got brown gunk on the paper."

"You happen to maybe, remember her name?"

"Randy something? Lindy? I'm not sure."

"So, let me get this straight. You got absolutely nothing on the person who called in the body, not even her name, and you let some Fed skip in out of nowhere and make off with her?"

"Well. He seemed to know what he was doing.

"He seemed to know what he was doing? He seemed to-- Know what, I'm starting to think he was the only one on the scene who had a clue. Rookie, gimme your badge number."

"I--"

"Shut up and give me the badge number."

****

"Who the fuck is this Agent Krycek and who was the idiot who let him take my reports?" Lewis yelled at the morgue attendant, who flinched and pointed to the secretary. Lewis stalked over to her and stood in her face, waiting.

"Well, he seemed to know what he was doing, Detective Lewis. Shouldn't I have given them to him?" The secretary just gave him a confused smile.

"How long you worked here for? No, don't answer that. I don't even wanna know." Lewis stormed out of the office, slamming the door for as much emphasis as he could get.

******

"Detective Lewis, in my office!" Gee's sharp voice drew Lewis out of the consideration of the nothing he had on his Doe into a consideration of what his commanding officer would make of the situation. Neither picture looked pretty. Lewis knocked on the wood of his desk that this was about something else and walked over toward Gee's office.

Sitting in the chair was a man Lewis' instincts didn't quite know what to make of. Green eyed with well-drawn features and a suit that reeked of the Federal government; he was almost certainly some department's pretty boy.

But then there was something far to watchful about him, like a war veteran or a mob solider.

"Detective Lewis, this is Special Agent Alex Krycek," Gee said. "He has something to tell you, so I'll leave you to him." With one last sharp, almost angry glance toward the Fed, Gee stood up and retreated from the office.

The green eyed man smiled pleasantly at Lewis and offered his hand. Something about him set Lewis' teeth on edge. Lewis ignored the offered hand.

"You the idiot that's been messing with my case?"

"Your case? Jonathan Kranger was a federal employee. The FBI would like to claim jurisdiction." Krycek's gaze was sharp and speculative and it didn't quite mesh with his words.

"Jonathan Kranger?"

"You haven't even made an ID yet? Looks like you're damn lucky you have me here."

"I don't suppose you gonna tell me how you made an ID if you didn't have the body?"

"I had the ME's report, the secretary at the morgue gave it to me. If you run a print check you'll find him in the computers, just like I did."

Krycek pulled a document out of his briefcase and held it out to Lewis, who snatched it away and leafed through it. It was indeed the ME's preliminary report.

"You usually go around borrowing reports, Agent Krycek?"

"Only when the secretaries are handing them out."

"You got to the scene awfully fast. Somebody notify you?"

"Not exactly. I'm just lucky that way."

"Since you know so much, why you even bothering to talk to me?"

"I'd like to know what you have."

"Well I should have had a witness, an ME's report, and a body. But you seem to have got your hands on all of them without any help from me."

"Body? You mean you lost the body?" Krycek's causal demeanor disintegrated under a flood of raw rage and Lewis had to struggle to remain unimpressed. "How did you lose the body?"

"I didn't lose nothing. The body disappeared out of the damn morgue before the autopsy."

"Who in the hell has it?"

"Well, I'd say you did."

"You'd be wrong. Fuck this! Proklyatoya Hoynyo," Krycek hissed. He pulled himself out of his chair a little awkwardly and for the first time Lewis noticed one of his arms was a prosthetic. When the man was standing, even that slight clumsiness disappeared and Krycek's movement's regained the grace of an extremely fit man. He didn't notice Lewis' startled stare with a deliberateness that had to be intentional, and Lewis respected that by not commenting.

"Where are you going?" he growled instead.

"To solve a murder, what does it look like?"

"My murder, you mean."

"What are you going to do, argue it with Washington?"

"If I have to, yeah."

Krycek took a deep breath. "I don't have time to dance around you, Detective Lewis."

"Ain't much you can do about it, is there?"

"You think?"

"I got better things to do than listen to you threatening me," Lewis said.

Krycek muttered something vaguely foreign sounding under his breath. "I'm not. I'm making you an offer. You want to help me put this down?"

"You mean, I do the work, and you get the credit?"

Cold laughter met that response. "You have no idea how little the credit matters to me. I'm only interested in finding the killer of Jonathan Kranger."

"Excuse me if I find that hard to believe."

"You haven't seen anything yet. You coming?" Krycek turned away without bothering any further with Lewis. Lewis stared at his back, shrugged, and followed rather than be left out of it.

*****

Kranger's secretary was a smiling woman with a perfectly tailored suit and an equally tailored smile to match. She answered their questions with the terrifying cheerfulness of someone who spent her days putting people on hold.

"He was weird," the woman said.

"How was he weird, did he seem nervous?" Lewis waited, with pen poised over his notepad.

"I suppose. He told me there was a giant cockroach from the Andromeda Galaxy trying to eat him."

He put the paper down slowly and carefully and then just looked at her for all he was worth. "What did you say?"

She shrugged.

"You really like to ask that question, don't you, Lewis?" Krycek put in cheerfully.

"Shut up. You telling me this guy was a loonytoon?" Lewis turned back to the girl.

"Well, I thought so. Until the UFO's started chasing him."

"What kind of UFO's?" Krycek asked, pulling out a pad of his own. Lewis stifled his own response to the question.

"Are there kinds?" She shrugged. "It had a whole bunch of lights."

"Was it round or kind of rectangular?"

"Now that you mention it, it sort of reminded me of a hive. Do you think cockroaches build hives?" She tilted her back, almost flirtatiously. Krycek barely spared her a glance.

"How the hell should I know?"

"You asked. The whole thing was pretty hard to see, anyway."

Lewis took a deep breath. "Did he have any enemies?"

"You mean, besides the cockroaches?" she asked.

"Besides the cockroaches."

There was his ex-girlfriend. What was her name-- Liddy? Liry? I don't remember."

Lewis nodded, delighted to be finally getting somewhere. "You know anyone who would remember her?"

She shrugged. "You could call his family. I think his mother lives at Roswell. You know, in New Mexico."

"No kidding," Lewis muttered weakly. "Roswell."

******

"Oh, sure. Kranger. Good guy. Always paid his rent on time. He in some kind of trouble?"

"You could say that. We found his body face down in Leakin Park," Krycek said cheerfully.

The nasty look he got from Lewis and the upset one from the landlord both bounced off him equally well.

"That's just... Why did it have to be him? The bitch in 4b always gets the cops called on her; she plays her stereo so loud. And the 2g. His place stinks so bad I think one of these days you guys are going to find a decaying corpse in there!"

"We're sorry bout that, Mr. Elders. When was the last time you saw him?"

"Just the other night. He told me to keep out his ex-girlfriend if she came around. He said she'd gotten weird on him."

"Yeah? Do you know her name?"

"Of course. Her name is... um, Raquel something? Raquel Libby?"

"Could you give us a description?"

"Sure. A little thing. Big brown eyes. Blue hair. I wonder how she got that color. Pretty girl."

"You know where this pretty girl lives?"

"Not a damn clue. She did have a kind of shifty look, now that I think about her. But... well..."

"Yeah?"

"I've gotta ask you, did you find any cockroaches?"

"Cockroaches?" Lewis asked in a resigned tone.

"He was always finding them in his apartment. We would fumigate and he next week he'd be complaining again. And I have to tell you, those were the weirdest looking bugs I've ever seen. He thought they were going to kill him, you know."

"You gonna tell me they flew around in little saucers?"

"Well, no. I'd say they were more like hives. They used to drive poor Kranger absolutely nuts."

*****

"You don't believe, do you?" Krycek asked as the Cavalier sped down Thames Street.

"In aliens? Nah. I don't get paid enough to invest in aluminum hats to keep the mind rays out, man. I figure denial's cheaper."

"Maybe you just need a raise."

"A raise? Yeah, I hear that. Kinda surprised to hear your kind of talk from a fed, though. Don't they teach you to deny the shit exists when they hand out government suits?"

"I think all the government agencies keep strange things in their basements; why would the FBI be any different? Hey! Look the fuck out!" Krycek called, broken out of the conversation as they rolled half over the curb, barely missing a fire hydrant. Lewis stopped the car right there, oblivious to the possibility of parking tickets or pedestrians who might want to use the sidewalk at some point.

"We're here. Relax."

"You drive worse than my grandmother."

"I'd like to see you do better." Lewis waved his automotive mishap aside.

Krycek gave him a long, nasty eye-fuck. "You'll get the chance. I'm not crazy enough to sit in a car with you at the wheel again."

"Yeah, whatever. We got ourselves a homicide to solve."

"Sure. Let's go off and catch ourselves a UFO to interrogate."

"You know, you're scaring me, Krycek."

"What, already?" Krycek turned around and stared at him as if he'd finally said something truly strange.

"I ain't even gonna ask what that's supposed to mean."

*****

Lewis dialed Kranger's mother's number and listened to the carefully prerecorded message. He managed to avoid taking it out on the phone with great strength of character. Krycek took one look at his face and grabbed the receiver to hear the message himself. His response was to raise a single eyebrow, shake his head, and take a long swallow of coffee, all the while enjoying the ringside view of Lewis' frustration.

"This is futile," Lewis said.

"I thought it was kind of funny, actually." Krycek grinned.

"Course you did. I'm sure you leave messages on your machine that say you'll call when you get back from destroying the alien hybrids all the damn time."

"Why would I leave something like that on an answering machine? Who the fuck knows who would hear it?"

"You know, much more of this and I'm gonna think you ain't joking."

"You're paranoid, local boy."

"So you tellin me you ain't out to get me, Mr. Eff Bee Eye?"

Krycek's green eyes sparkled wickedly. "I can't confirm or deny."

"Yeah, whatever."

"You know, it's nearly midnight. I've been up since the day before yesterday."

"You getting tired out on me, man?"

"Not exactly. I just think that as long as I'm in Baltimore, I don't want to miss out on the fine selection of bars. Raquel Linny or Libby Raquez or whoever she is will still be out there tomorrow."

"Sure she will. But I'm planning on finding her tonight. I'll call you when I close the case."

Krycek smirked. "You do that."

"Which bar you going to, anyway?"

"Well, I've heard rumors about the Waterfront place. I think I'll try The Cat's Eye."

"That dive! What kinda rumors you been hearing anyway?"

"Usual suspects. Watered down drinks and lousy food. And I hear they have this guy, Chuck, playing there on Fridays who can scare away the cats."

"I told Bayliss not to hire that guy," Lewis fumed.

"Oh, yeah. And the secretary at the morgue with the set of legs that reached her neck said you owned it. That couldn't be a good sign."

"I'll have you know that The Waterfront is the best damn bar in Fell's Point."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. And I'll prove it. Come on, what you waiting for?" Lewis tugged on his coat and took strides that fell just short of running as he hurried to the stairs.

*****

"Awful empty for the best damn bar in Fell's Point," Krycek gestured around the brown paneled room. One unconscious patron was holding up a stool in the far corner of the bar. Otherwise, it was so empty it would have echoed if the acoustics were better.

"It's the quality that counts, not that quantity."

"That's not what my girlfriends say after they get a taste of my dick."

"That small is it?" Lewis smirked.

"We'll see who has it and who doesn't. You up for a game, Lewis?" Krycek nodded to the empty pool table that dominated the bar.

"Can you play with that arm of yours?" Lewis said.

Krycek grinned at him fiercely. "Hell yes."

"How much you willing to bet on that?"

"Fifty bucks." Krycek glanced over to the empty bar and the liquor behind it. "Let's make it interesting, every time someone sink a ball, they take a shot of Stoly on the bar's tab."

"You mean on my tab," Lewis muttered.

"Yeah, well I'll pay you back. I'm good for it." Krycek was all injured innocence and for a blinding second he reminded Lewis of someone else entirely.

"You're on, man." The two gripped each other's hands. Lewis quickly lay out a row of shots. Despite the offer of money, they both had to scrounge through their pockets to get together enough loose change to play. The single remaining penny between them was flipped, giving Krycek the break.

He sank one easily on the break and glanced up from his leaning position on the table to smile sweetly at Lewis.

Lewis frowned, mildly unnerved by the electric green gaze that seemed to verge on hungry. He silently vowed to wipe the floor with the Fed. Krycek just kept smiling and raised a glass in a mock toast.

Lewis finally sank the eightball with a beautifully executed and completely unintentional ricochet. He grinned drunkenly and victoriously, just as if he'd meant to do that.

"Couple more years of practice and you might actually make a player. Pay up, man." Lewis held out a hand.

Krycek reached into his pocket and pulled up lint and a FBI badge. "I'm a little short."

Lewis shrugged. "Yeah, whatever. You can owe me. I'm sure I'll see the money 'bout the same time you pay for that bottle of Stoly."

"Stoly barely counts as liquor. In Russia you make vodka in your bathtub. You have to cut it with bread to get it down." Krycek nodded his head.

"Bread?" Lewis asked.

"Moldy bread." Krycek nodded even more emphatically.

"Do you walk to school uphill both ways too?"

"No. Worse, you take the city bus." Krycek had propped himself up against the pool table, masking any unsteadiness. Lewis knew he wasn't doing as well. The room was too damn hot and closed in. "You know, this isn't fair. A bet's a bet."

"Forget about it. I didn't have the money neither."

Krycek leaned forward, practically in Lewis' ear, so close that his breath brushed gentle patterns on the delicate skin. He smelled of old leather and bitter baking chocolate. "I could give you something else."

Lewis felt the words as though they had a direct connection to his groin.

"Yeah? Like what?" he asked roughly, knowing damn well what and not sure if he cared as much as he should.

Krycek moved too quickly to react to anyway. A mouth brushed against his before he had a chance to seal his lips after the last word spilled out.

Any protest died unvoiced. It tasted soft but strange, rich with the bitterness of alcohol. Lewis heard the strangled sound from his own throat as that tongue brushed gently over his. Green eyes drank in his gasps with greedy intensity as the iron fingers of Krycek's one hand dug into the muscle of his shoulders.

"You like that?" Krycek whispered hoarsely, his lips brushing against Lewis' as he formed the words.

"Yeah," Lewis replied, steadily as he could, reveling in the feel of the velvety mouth against his own.

"You're drunk."

"I'm drunk. You are too."

"Yes," Krycek agreed. "Bez golovne pyanetz."

"What?"

"That's you. That's me." Krycek's hand drifted lower, brushing over Lewis' lower back. "I have a room, down the street. At the Admiral Fell."

Lewis steadied himself against the pool table, trying to even out his breathing with partial success. "I worked a murder there once. Some tourist got offed by a hooker."

"Good metaphor. You should be careful what you bring home"

"Sure. Let's get out of here."

"Brilliant plan. They're not kidding about homicide and thinking cops." Lewis growled softly and pushed Krycek back against the pool table, claiming another bittersweet kiss.

*****

Lewis groaned and stretched out across the bed. All his arms found were empty sheets. He rubbed at his eyes, as if that could rub away the vagueness of last night's adventures. When the gray film that seemed to cover his eyes finally parted he found himself lying alone on a four poster bed.

A quick look around yielded no immediate signs that anyone might be in the room with him. The bag Krycek had knocked off the bed last night was gone.

Lewis sighed in relief, rolled over and went back to sleep.

When he was fully awake, he found a note on the dresser in Krycek's neat hand.

The witness is Rachel Lindry. 5805 Western Run Rd. Hope this settles the bet.

*****

Rachel Lindry was thirty-five, looked twenty and acted ten. Lewis interviewed her and held his breath on whether or not anything she said would be admissible anywhere, given her mental state.

"Do you know what this is about, Ms. Lindry?"

"He said you would ask me. He said to just tell you the truth."

"Yeah, well that's a real good idea."

"I saw it. It ate the body."

"What did you say?" Lewis barely stifled a groan.

"A ship... a starship came. The bug came out and ate the body."

"Okay."

"It ate the body and covered it with a net. It covered it up."

"You told this to Agent Krycek?"

"Yes. I tried to help. I used my knife to try to get the brown off. My silvery knife with a moon on the hilt."

Lewis turned his head to the ceiling and muttered something obscene under his breath. "So. You saw a flying saucer. A giant insect flew out. And covered a man with a net?"

"Oh, yes... well it was gluey stuff. Brown gluey stuff."

"You tried to get this stuff off with your knife?"

"My silvery knife with a moon on the hilt. But it got stuck in the brown. I couldn't get it out at all."

"You didn't forget to say hi to Elvis too?"

"What?"

"Never mind. You're sure you told all this to Agent Krycek?" Lewis repeated blankly.

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"He said that was very nice. He was very nice."

"Yeah. I'm sure he was."

Lewis rubbed his goatee and stared at the girl. She smiled back obliviously. He was about to say something else, when the door to the box opened and Naomi leaned in.

"Call for you, Lewis," she said.

"I'll be right back. Don't get abducted by aliens or nothing."

"I'll try not to." She waved at him as he walked away.

When the door was safely closed on the nutcase Naomi handed him a report.

"Congratulations, the morgue found your body."

"They found it, huh? You telling me it was just lying around all this time?"

"So says the morgue. Looks like it got mistagged."

"Mistagged? How could you mistag something covered in acidic brown gunk?"

"How the hell should I know? I'm just the lowly secretary, why not go down and ask them yourself?"

Lewis bit his tongue and did just that.

The body, when he saw it, looked just like any ordinary couple day old corpse. Not a hint of any giant cockroaches from Alpha Centuari or wherever. Lewis bit his lip and asked.

The morgue attendant shrugged. "Oh, that? It dissolved."

"It dissolved? This don't bother you at all?"

"It made the autopsy much easier, I can tell you that. Oh, by the way Agent Krycek was right, the body was Jonathan Kranger. Easy ID. He worked for the defense department."

"You gonna tell me how he died?"

"Stab wound. You'll be happy to know we found the knife still in the heart. A beautiful hilt."

"What kinda hilt? No. Don't tell me, let me guess. It had a moon on it."

"Yeah. How did you know that?"

"It's just been that kind of case." Lewis rubbed at his nose. "Now excuse me while I go make sure a murderer gets an I-love-me jacket that's a good fit."

"We still have a sample of the brown substance. The lab hasn't been able to do much with it. We think--"

"You know what, send it down to Quantico. No... send it to DC. Send it to the fucking basement. Yeah, that's it." He couldn't make himself give a shit. He wanted a normal case. He wanted a normal partner. He damn well knew the universe didn't care what he might want.

"Detective? Wait, we think it might be of extra-terrestrial--"

Lewis just held out a silencing hand and stalked away.

The End