This Devil's Workday: Discovery of a Missing Cammie

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

On a phone call to Garrison, Adrienne realizes Cammie never returned to New York.

"Greetings from the Windy City!" Adrienne said into the phone when Garrison answered in New York. She'd had a particularly successful day in her business engagements and was feeling cheerful. "I'm just driving past Wrigley Field- should I pick up some Cubs tickets for you for Christmas? Oh wait I'm not taking you away from something am I?" Business hours had ended but Adrienne knew Kane's job didn't often allow him to keep a nine-to-five schedule and she didn't want to take him away from work.

"Just a ton of paperwork which I would happily set fire to. Hang on." Kane pulled the phone from his ear and leaned back in his office chair. "Hey Fred! I've got a call from Chicago. You want me to have her pick something up from Wrigley Field for you? How about that Milton Bradley jersey you were eyeing?"

"Fuck you." Duncan mildly called from his office in a sing-song voice.

"Nope, I think we're good here. What's up?"

"I already picked up a Soriano jersey for Duncan," Adrienne retorted. "Nothing's up. 'Just shopping for string bikinis for Australia- though the Cubs shop doesn't seem to have any right now so I'm quite put out by that- but I thought I'd ask if you have a colour preference."

"Of Cubs clothing? Nah, I'm a traditionalist." Kane joked, enjoying the thought of Adrienne in very little. "I talked to Dad. We're going to have to cool our heels for a day or so in Brisbane while he tacks the boat down. My sister is going to arrive a half day ahead of us, assuming Air Canada doesn't completely screw her over, and she'll book us a room."

"Aww crap, I already bought you a pink Cubs hat." The line 'because I wanted you to have a team to fall back on now that your Jays are going to suck so much without Halladay they'll force even you, their most die-hard fan to abandon ship and root for another team' was on the tip of her tongue, but she bit it back after a moment's thought. Their joking about each others' teams went pretty far, but there was a line between joking and genuinely upsetting him, and Adrienne sensed that this would cross that line. And start a classic Kane Blue Jays versus Every Other Team rant, which she didn't want to hear on the phone when she had no beer to distract her.

Besides, what he had said about the room blew the thoughts of baseball right out of her head. Her eyes widened and she had to take the phone away from her ear to stare at it for a moment as if it had suddenly taken on a Lokian persona of its own. "A room? As in, one for both you and I?" They hadn't even shared a room in Florida last year, before they'd started their weird experiment in dating. He hadn't even confirmed that they were really dating when she'd asked him previously. It had to be a trick.

"Well, I can get her to book you a private room if you really need one, but we're only going to be there one night. If you're more comfortable, I can crash in my sister's room and you can take the single." Kane casual reply showed no hint of awareness to the consternation on the other end of the phone.

"Well, now I sound like a prude," Adrienne mumbled in reply, sheepish. "No, it's fine, you just caught me off guard." Him voicing the other options made her realize how silly she was being about it. "I don't need a private room. I just..." Is Vikks going to get us a room with two beds? "...does your sister know we aren't sleeping together?" She realized at that moment that she had no idea what Kane had told his sister about their relationship. And it was obvious once more that she had no idea what their relationship was.

"You don't think my sister has already pestered every detail out of me yet? That's optimistic." Kane juggled the phone over to his other ear. "She's going to get us a double room. I figured since we're about to spend almost a week on a boat, we could likely survive having to share a washroom for one night."

"Uh..." don't ask what he told her, don't ask what he told her... "yeah. No, sharing a washroom is fine." Adrienne pinched her own wrist to snap herself out of the confusing train of thought she was having. Maybe she could find out from Vikks whether Garrison considered her his girlfriend, since the man seemed to be oblivious to the fact that not knowing if she was something more than his friend was driving her crazy. "I'll put up with a lot more than sharing a washroom with a Jays fan for the chance to spend a week of winter in the sun on a boat. Thanks again for letting me crash your family thing."

"Actually, this is more for my benefit. The last time I spent Christmas with my dad, I think I got a Hot Wheels set and some lego. It's been a while, and having a person with an outside perspective just might keep dad and I from killing each other or my sister."

"Oh." So that's what I am in this scenario. "So I'm your buffer, is that it?" she responded in a cheerful, joking tone. It was nice to know, at least. "Well, I am a hot buffer, and I have been working on my shooting lately so I can play sheriff pretty convincingly, I think. I can't guarantee you won't be the one getting shot though if the situation called for it, unless you were to offer me a sufficient bribe to shoot your father instead."

Kane choked on his coffee for a moment, coughing and trying to regain his breath. "Shit! Oh, damn, buffer. I thought you said something else. Yeah, don't go armed around my father. He's got those crazy superspy judo chop moves, and can shoot a fly out of the air. It's actually pretty damn creepy."

"I'm going to pretend you thought I said 'butler'," Adrienne retorted. "And I wasn't serious about going armed, because if I did you'd have to arrest me according to the terms of my deal with the FBI. Oh hey, speaking of FBI," she added as an afterthought, "I've been in contact with someone from the office here in Chicago and I was telling Cammie something he'd told me about her friend's case when I talked to her on the phone yesterday. Neither of us understood what it was he was telling me though, so I told her she should ask you about it since you speak FBI? Has she been by to see you?"

"Uh no?" Garrison said, as he sat up. "Cammie's supposed to still be in Chicago with you."

"Ha, ha," Adrienne snorted, bemused. "I'm not buying any bikinis to show you if you bullshit me like that again."

"Threats aside, she's not at the mansion, or at least, if she is, she's ninja'ed her way back. I thought she was in Chicago with you still."

Adrienne pulled the car over, flipping off the resulting angered motorists who blared their horns as she crossed several lanes and pulled into a parking lot. "I sent her home on friday. We agreed it was better if she went home because she was too emotional over the situation to deal with the police rationally, so I was supposed to do it for her, and... fuck!" she cried out, slapping the dashboard angrily. "That fucking little shit lied to me!" It wasn't really the lying that pissed her off, it was the fact that Adrienne hadn't anticipated it. "I trusted her!" Their conversations of the past few days replayed themselves in her head and she remembered what Cammie had said about having friends she could stay with in town. "She's probably shacked up with her fucking biker buddy!

"Oh, fuck; Kane," she mumbled when a kernel of something other than anger made its way into her head, "she was trying to find this house... she thought her friend had been murdered because of this house she was staying at..." she trailed off as panic swamped her, images of Cammie's friend Amy being beaten and tortured filling her vision. "But she's probably just shacked up with her friends, right?"

"Slow down. If Cammie's decided to hare off on her own," which was not only possible but likely, Kane didn't bother to add, "she's going to have to start looking somewhere, and doesn't have a network to lean on. So even if she is out playing Nancy Drew, she probably hasn't gotten far enough to get herself into danger. I'll let the mansion know, and see if they'll send a team to collect the delinquent. Don't you do anything stupid in the meantime."

"She used to live here," she told Garrison, though his words did succeed in calming her somewhat, "she's got a network. Gang connections and bikers. Not that I'm worried or anything," she added quickly, "I'm sure she's just holed up somewhere. But yeah, maybe sending the X-Men after her would be -hey! Why do you think I'd do something stupid?! It's not like I care about finding her, except to throttle her."


"Yeah, sure. You don't care at all." Kane said in a flat voice, obviously not believing her protests. "I'm going to give the field office in Chicago a call, see if they've heard anything. Cammie isn't exactly concerned about fitting in, and there's a good chance she might already be sitting in a holding cell after doing something dumb."

Adrienne frowned at the phone and felt like protesting some more, but she let it go, knowing that arguing with Garrison about his behavioural observations would be useless since he was more skilled at understanding people than anyone else she knew. "Okay, thanks. Maybe she's been arrested in a different precinct where the cops don't know she was with me and didn't know to call me," she added, trying to convince herself. Or hell, maybe Cammie had been arrested and had used her phone call to call Kurt or someone else to get her out. "She is fairly skilled at doing dumb things. I'm sure she's fine though. If she's in jail I think I'm going to leave her there."


"We'll come to that when we come that, I guess. Maybe call around to these 'old friends' of hers, see if they've seen her? It shouldn't take the team more than a couple of hours to get to Chicago, and if it's just a question of yanking her out of some sleazy apartment and off the biker she's banging, we can stop worrying that she's going to show up on the evening news as part of their crime watch." Or as a statistic, but Kane bit off that comment before he said it.

"I'll call Snow Valley too, see if they can use their spy expertise to locate her. And I'll get some readings on some biker bars," Adrienne answered, nodding at the phone, "see if she visited any to find her old buddies. I should have brought my leather pants," she grumbled.


"Just be careful. Some of those places can get pretty rough, especially when someone far outside their income level wanders in. I don't want you getting hurt.



"Aww, be still my heart, Slick," Adrienne crooned with a smirk. "I'll be fine. I can blend in at a biker bar, no problem."



"Yeah, this is going to end badly." Garrison said as he let Adrienne go and dialed the mansion. Ororo was not going to be happy about this.