Chapter Text
“10-80. Suspect is moving west on Elm on foot. Officer in pursuit.” He hits the brakes as the front tire hops onto the curb and slams the car into park. Aziraphale leaps out of his cruiser and races down the street, boots slapping the sidewalk noisily. It is mid-summer and it is peak tourist season. The sidewalks are packed with slow moving groups ogling the city and snapping photos of Lou Malnati’s. Aziraphale rages internally. It’s just fucking pizza, get out of the way! He’s keeping pace with the suspect until a smiling young couple steps directly into his path to take a selfie. He nearly topples over them, knocking the phone out of the stunned woman’s hand in the process. “Police! Out of the way!” He loses sight of the suspect behind a city bus as the distance between them increases and Aziraphale curses under his breath. He slows, scans the street. There. He spots the man again. A blur of copper ducking into a parking structure down the street.
A burst of static. A muffled voice. “10-17. Backup en route. Officer Fell, what’s your twenty?” Aziraphale scowls, ignores the scratchy chatter coming from his radio and picks up speed again. He rounds the entrance to the looming grey structure and as he moves out of the blistering afternoon sun to the quiet shadowy concrete depths he is hit with a wall of cool air. He stops. Listens. It is never really quiet in the city. Not entirely. He can hear the bustling street outside, vacationers and buskers and retail workers sucking down cigarettes in the alley before they have to hurry back to the till. An ambulance wails in the distance and a helicopter hovers several blocks away. Music drifts in from a restaurant down the street, windows thrown open to let in the summer air. The radio on his hip bursts to life again. “Officer Fell, please report, what’s your twenty?” Aziraphale turns the little black knob on the top of his radio and the scratchy voice fades.
He creeps further into the structure, eyes adjusting to the dim space. The garage itself is quiet except for an echo of feet hitting the pavement above him. He weighs his options: take the wide spiraling lanes of the garage up in pursuit or use the stairwell and try to cut him off. The stairs will get him higher faster, but if the suspect changes direction he may lose him for good. He eyes the heavy metal door and dimly lit stairwell behind it. He makes a split second decision, takes a chance. He bounds up the stairs three at a time, palm hovering over his holster for a breath before he thinks better of it. The structure is shorter than he is anticipating and he bursts out of the stairwell and back into the blinding sunlight just in time to hear an engine roar to life.
Opposite him, at the other end of the parking garage, a sleek dark BMW, windows tinted black, lays rubber on the asphalt and fishtails around the bend back down into the garage. Aziraphale curses then turns on his heel and races back into the dank stairwell, throwing himself down the stairs at breakneck speed. He can hear the car’s tires squealing as it tears around the curves of the parking structure. At the bottom of the stairs he flings the door wide, stumbles back outside and skids to a stop. The BMW is sitting at the exit just 20 feet away, the driver casually feeding a crisp white ticket into the slot at the booth. As the long arm of the barricade springs to life and lifts into the air the redhead behind the wheel turns to where Aziraphale is standing, tilts his sunglasses down and looks Aziraphale up and down with a smirk. He winks before peeling out and disappearing around the corner into traffic.
Aziraphale stares, mouth open, as the barricade slowly sinks back down at the exit. That smug fucking bastard. The radio crackles quietly on his belt and he cringes. His lungs are screaming at him. His heart thumping wildly in his chest. He drops his hands to his knees and tries to catch his breath. “Fuck.” He hears sirens approaching. “Fuck.”
-
“Aziraphale, I swear to God, if you ever pull a fucking stunt like that again you’re finished. I’ll ship you down to the fourth so fucking fast you’ll get whiplash.” Captain Michaels is leaning over her desk fuming and jabbing a finger in his direction. Aziraphale half expects steam to come rolling out of her ears or for the top of her head to pop off. Michaels is steely eyed and hard and didn’t get to where she is today by playing the part of a withering violet. She finished academy top of her class and hit the ground running. Even then, though, it was an uphill battle. Chicago PD was the epitome of an old boys club and she earned herself no favor for failing to stay in her lane. She worked twice as hard for a fraction of the recognition but in the end it had paid off and today she ran one of the most prestigious precincts in the city. That meant that every powerful man in the PD was out to cut her down at the knees, and Aziraphale had just handed over the axe.
“Sir, if I may…”
“Shut up! I’m not fucking finished yet.” Her eye twitches and Aziraphale clamps his mouth shut. He can see the bulging, wormlike outline of a vein in her forehead. “Do you know what happens to fresh young blood like you down there? They’ll chew you up and then fuck your old lady and then they’ll spit you out just in time for you to catch lead from some piece of shit Disciple. When someone asks for your twenty, you fucking report back. I don’t give a fuck if you’re bleeding out on the pavement. If you hadn’t been trying to play superman we might have finally caught that piece of shit.”
Aziraphale drops his eyes, fists his hands at his sides. His grey t-shirt is soaked though with sweat under the armpits and on his chest. He can feel it dripping down his spine and soaking into the waistband of his jeans. The overpowered air conditioning makes goosebumps rise on his arms.
“For six months we’ve been tracking this guy. Six fucking months. The media are having a fucking field day with it. And he was right there. Right in the middle of the city and he just,” she waves her hand through the air, “slips away. Because of you.” She drops back into the seat behind her and narrows her eyes at him. “Get the fuck out of my office. I don’t want to see you again until you have that report in hand.”
“Yes sir.”
He hesitates as she opens her mouth to speak then closes it again. For a fraction of a second her face softens before she summons another scowl. “Look. I know this guy is your white whale. But you’ll never snag him alone. You have to work with me here. With your fellow officers. Stop fucking around.”
He nods. “Yes sir.”
She waves her hand toward the door. “Now get the fuck out. For real.”
Aziraphale nods and trudges out of her office back into the bullpen. He collapses at his desk and drops his face into his hands. It was sloppy work. He knows it and he is kicking himself over it. He should have responded to his fellow officers. To dispatch. He glances at the file on his desk. Everything they had on the man. The file is thin. Sparse. He flips through it quickly. The media had penned him a modern day Robin Hood. Aziraphale thought it was a rather fitting moniker, if not a little obvious. They named him so because for the last six months the wealthiest residents of Chicago had fallen victim to a touch of wealth redistribution, so to speak.
His first victim was Percy Wallstead, CEO of one of the largest private law firms in the city. Mr. Wallstead raked in an easy eight figures annually and his attractive young wife plastered social media with photos from their luxury yacht every winter as it cruised around the Caribbean. His law firm was rumored to be in the pocket of the mob, although no one in Chicago PD seemed interested in chasing down those leads. You may think the mob hadn’t had its claws hooked in the city since Capone was shipped off to the Rock. You’d be wrong. The gang violence may get the press, but it is the shit going down in quiet that should be scaring people. Aziraphale had a hard time feeling bad for a guy that took home more every couple of weeks than he did all year.
Aziraphale’s white whale, Mr. Robin Hood, managed to phish just one measly little password from his box of rocks wife and drained just one of his many accounts. One point five million dollars there one instant and gone the next. Poof. Not a trace. The following day charities all over the city had received rather generous anonymous donations. No one seemed able or willing to officially trace the donation back to Mr. Wallstead’s now empty rainy day fund, but for anyone willing to pay attention, to do a little math, it was pretty obvious. Aziraphale had heard through the grapevine that a couple of other offshore accounts, tax havens, really, had turned up empty as well, but Mr. Wallstead never mentioned it during the investigation. Funny that.
After Mr. Wallstead was one Mr. Miroslav Komarov. Officially, Mr. Komarov had made his fortune in real estate, scooping up downtown lofts when the bubble burst and selling them off at a profit. Unofficially, everyone knew he was trafficking weapons and girls out of Eastern Europe. There was a dedicated team trying to nail Komarov to the wall, but they couldn’t seem to get a charge to stick. They’d set up a bust and end up in an empty warehouse with their thumbs up their asses. Witnesses would end up with a needle in their arm in a crack house on the south side. Evidence would get mishandled or contaminated or disappear.
Mr. Komarov had woken up on a Tuesday morning one priceless painting lighter than the night before. The painting hadn’t been tracked down, but intel said it was moving through back channels into the vault of a private collector. Aziraphale had word that a shipment of Kalashnikovs had disappeared too, but that was obviously not a job for the police. Tuesday morning the goods are pilfered and by Wednesday night the medical bills for two dozen kids undergoing chemotherapy at St. Jude were paid off by an anonymous donor. The same day the police get a tip that there are a half a dozen women sitting in a shipping container south of the loop. Officers pop the seal and half a dozen women get spared a short sad life “working” for Mr. Komarov.
It took no time at all for the media to scoop up the story and it spread like wildfire throughout the city and then shortly after to national news. Robin Hood was trending on twitter and evening news networks hosted heated debates over the morality of the vigilante. The case went international when the intrepid do-gooder managed to abscond with the Maserati of a Saudi Royal and pay for the housing for a dozen refugee women and their families on the far north side.
Since Wallstead and Komarov and the Saudi, Robin Hood had managed to steal, scam, hack, burgle, and grift his way through a half a dozen other victims. All obscenely wealthy and all with seriously questionable histories. Aziraphale was impressed, to be honest. It was hard not to be. Robin Hood left no trace and erased any links between the job and the anonymous donations. It was impossible to get a beat on him.
While the media and the public largely praised the actions of Robin Hood, at the precinct they called him the snake. Always able to slither in and out without being detected. Slippery and sneaky and threatening. Shed one identity and pick up another on a whim, always camouflaged. No one had even gotten eyes on him until today. Today, the snake had made a mistake.
His latest victim was one Ms. Veronica Ashby. She was a 23 year old heiress that spent her days on the mag mile and her nights in the latest trendy spot draped head to toe in designer digs. Her favorite pastimes included overdosing in dark booths in the VIP section of exclusive nightclubs and screaming at her criminally underpaid staff. She was also fond of tax evasion, purchasing looted antiquities from the Middle East, and collecting unfathomably expensive jewelry. She had also been investigated briefly for the death of her PA who was found face down at the bottom of her staircase. The case had been mysteriously and abruptly dropped for reasons that Aziraphale couldn’t identify. For the next two weeks Ms. Ashby was supposed to be on a luxury vacation in Thailand spending her days blitzed out of her mind on designer drugs and lounging on a white sand beach.
This morning Robin Hood, the snake, whatever you want to call him, had managed to slip past the doorman at 132 E. Delaware and take the elevator to the 66th floor where Ms. Ashby’s luxury condo was located. He even managed to jimmy the lock and slip into her bedroom completely undetected. When the snake snatched the 65 carat 1.5 million dollar emerald necklace from its custom built glass pedestal, though, he hit a bit of a snag. Weight sensors can be a tricky thing, you see.
He might never have known if he hadn’t been clever enough to be tapped into the security company’s line. The call went out immediately and within minutes they were dispatching a detail, armed thugs already stepping into the elevator at the ground floor as he was jamming the necklace into a satchel at his waist. The call went out to local dispatch as well. Aziraphale was in the vicinity and responded to the call immediately. Heaven only knows how the man slipped past security and onto the street below, bursting out of the building and onto the busy sidewalk below. He hit the ground running, losing the security detail quickly. But he stuck out like a sore thumb among the sweating masses in his dark long sleeved Henley. Aziraphale crossed paths with the blur of a man a few blocks north as he raced up State Street toward what Aziraphale now knows was his getaway vehicle laying in wait.
As they raced through the crowded sidewalks Aziraphale was awed by the man’s speed. One look at those long legs, though, made it clear how he managed to stay ahead of Aziraphale so well. Aziraphale was in shape, but he was more of a jogger than a sprinter. Preferred weights to cardio. And dessert to both. And if he carried a little extra padding around the middle, it was nobody else’s business. He was in better shape than half the cops he knew, dammit, and he was certain he was one of few that would have been able to track the snake for as long as he did.
Before today the snake was a ghost. A faceless entity that was in and out without a trace. Now the ghost had a corporation that could be tracked. That could be identified and subjected to the swift hammer of justice. Aziraphale frowned and got started on his report.
-
When Aziraphale left the precinct the sun had dipped below the horizon and some of the muggy heat of the day had abated. Still, though, the damp rings under his armpits grew as he walked through the brightly lit garage toward his car. They say the summers in Chicago make enduring the bitter cold winters worth it. Aziraphale wasn’t sure that he agreed. Every summer the worst of the worst would come out of the wood work and crime would spike. Guns and drugs and assault. A heaviness would settle over the city that the lake breeze couldn’t blow away. He wiped at his brow with the back of his hand and climbed into the stifling heat of his cruiser.
Though the traffic had thinned from the rush hour crush, it still took Aziraphale almost 45 minutes to cross the city and pull into the lot of the seedy little dive. Inside was dimly lit and a handful of patrons were bellied up to the bar, basking in the cool air from the ancient, shuddering window unit. Aziraphale sat heavily on a barstool, seat cracked and repaired with duct tape. This was the kind of place where no one knew your name and the bartender didn’t give a fuck about your problems. Aziraphale took a look around. The oak bar was heavily worn and smooth on the edges where decades of patrons had leaned in drunken stupor. The wall behind the bar was mirrored and in between the bottles of liquor he could see the single line of faded booths behind him, tabletops a palimpsest of carved graffiti. A heavily bearded man was passed out in the booth in the corner, snoring softly and drooling on his arm, fist still clenched around a bottle of cheap swill.
The bartender catches his eye from the other end of the bar and raises his brow. Aziraphale knows how he looks. He looks like a fucking cop. Even in plainclothes he is too clean shaven. Too put together. He can feel the man to his right scoping him out, can feel him linger on the cuffs still clipped to his belt, peeking out from the hem of his shirt. Aziraphale holds up a finger and the bartender digs a beer out from under the bar and pops the top before plunking it down in front of him with a scowl.
It is cheap and weak but it is cold and he downs it all at once before setting it down in front of him and signaling for a second. He nurses this one more slowly and savors the relative anonymity of the bar. He never managed to make friends at the precinct. Didn’t join happy hour. Didn’t attend the Christmas party. Never had much interest to be quite honest. He preferred to work solo.
Aziraphale had always wanted to be a cop when he was a kid. As a relatively privileged white kid growing up in the city his interactions with the police had always been positive. The local beat cops knew the neighborhood and were just as likely to shovel snow for the widow down the block as they were to throw his father in the drunk tank when he’d had one too many and then give him a ride home the next morning. They ran the local holiday toy drive and played a quick game of pickup at the park and walked the neighborhood instead of wasting their days in their cruisers. At least, that is what Aziraphale saw when he was a boy.
When he finally joined the PD things had changed. Or maybe things had stayed the same and he just didn’t know. The top brass only cared about the numbers and most of the cops he knew didn’t give two shits about the communities they swore to protect. Half of them actively and openly despised them. He wasn’t on the job six months before he watched his partner take a bribe. The next night that same partner drove off with a local working girl who would end up in the ER with a broken jaw. Three months after that two officers in his precinct roughed up a local CI so badly he suffered permanent nerve damage. And that was a man helping them. He shuddered to think what was going on behind closed doors. Aziraphale was quickly learning that the good guys were not so good. And often times the bad guys were not so bad.
Aziraphale is on his third beer when the door swings open and brings in a gust of oven hot air from the street. Much like the rest of the patrons, Aziraphale doesn’t look up. He stares down at his beer, glancing only briefly in the mirror behind the bar then back down to his hands. His eyes snap back up. Red hair pulled back into a messy low bun. A few stringy sweaty strands falling loosely around his sharp features. Framing a five o’clock shadow. There are a pair of sunglasses dangling from the unbuttoned collar of his dark long sleeved Henley. The man takes a seat at the far end of the bar and gestures to the bartender.
Aziraphale would recognize that face anywhere. That cocky smirk before the BMW peeled out and raced toward Clark Street is etched into his brain. As the bartender slides the man a whiskey, neat, in a dirty rocks glass, Aziraphale throws a wad of cash onto the bar and slinks out the door, head dipped low. Back outside in the heat of the night Aziraphale takes a deep breath, fingers the cuffs on his hip and lurks in the darkness just outside the reach of the streetlight. It is quiet here, for the city at least. The humidity eating up the noise of the train and the traffic on one of the main thoroughfares a few blocks west. The seedy little dive bar sits back on a dark side street and while he can see some folks lounging on their stoop down the block passing a forty, there isn’t any foot traffic.
Ten minutes later the man walks out the door, hands stuffed in his pockets. He glances around briefly, exhales noisily through his nose and starts down the sidewalk toward where Aziraphale is leaning against the exterior of the building. He doesn’t even glance in Aziraphale’s direction as he passes, just saunters by, hips swinging in a cocksure strut. Aziraphale pushes off the wall and falls into step behind him. Matches him step for step. He hangs back by a few feet, but as they approach the parking lot he closes the distance between them with a few hurried steps. The man doesn’t have time to turn around before Aziraphale snaps the cuffs on his right wrist and wrenches his arm behind his back.
The man lurches forward, scrambles and tries to yank away but Aziraphale is faster. Stronger. He gets a hand on his left forearm and pulls it back roughly to meet the other, clicking the cuffs closed tightly at his lower back. The man growls, “Fuck.”
Aziraphale says nothing. He grips the man by the back of the bicep bruise tight and pushes him, stumbling, across the parking lot toward the dark corner where he had parked earlier in the night. At the car Aziraphale slams the man into the driver’s side door and kicks his feet apart. The man, chest flush against the car window, grunts and twists his head around to try to get a look at Aziraphale. Aziraphale skims his hands over the man’s shoulders and down his sides. “You carrying anything?” The man turns away and ignores him. He runs his fingers under his waistband then drops to a knee and pats the back and sides of one leg. Repeats the actions on the other.
Aziraphale stands, grabs the man by the bicep again and spins him around, pressing him back against the car again with a hand to his chest. The man winces as his cuffed wrists squeeze between his body and the unforgiving metal of the dark sedan behind him. Aziraphale runs his hands over the man’s chest and drops again to pat down the front of his legs. He runs his hands roughly over his ankles and calves before sliding them up the fronts of his narrow legs. Aziraphale skims his hands up his inner thighs. His fingertips graze the front of the man’s crotch and he tenses.
Aziraphale rises to his full height again and leans over the man, palms pressed to the hood of the car on either side of the man’s shoulders. They glare at one another, faces no more than a foot apart. Aziraphale can smell the man’s musky cologne and the Wild Turkey on his breath. He narrows his eyes and the man’s lip quirks into a snarl. Aziraphale exhales. In the blink of an eye the man leans forward and crushes their mouths together.