Title: The Amateur Pigeon-Catcher, Part 2 (#25, J ‘N B Series)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk
Summary: AU; the suspicious bb!cop returns to the park.
Previous Parts: Another Day, Another Dollar, and a Daily Show? | Fight the Good Fight | Don’t Touch the Rock | A Tear Worth Gold | Another Day, Another Dollar, Part 2 | Pirates Read Too | The Case of the Mondays | Today’s Topic -Helmets! | The Case of the Mondays, Part 2 | Marked | Awesome Ideas Come from Awesome Brains | In the Keeping of a Spirit | The Case of the Mondays, Part 3 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 4 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 5 | Forewarned is Forearmed | The Case of the Mondays, Part 6 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 7 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 8 | The Case of the Mondays, Part 9 | Serenade | Another Day, Another Dollar, Part 3 | Tied to You | The Amateur Pigeon-Catcher

The fake glasses distort his vision enough that Jim contemplates removing them. But he’d worked particularly hard on his disguise (well, as hard as somebody who riffled through their childhood shoebox of “spy” equipment) and it irks Jim that he isn’t able to pull it off.

…Or perhaps it is better to say Jim is pissed that a park hobo immediately saw through his ploy and pegged him as a cop. Jim had had to bow out then before the dick started announcing to every man, woman, and child wandering down the sidewalk what Jim really was. How embarrassing to have been called out by a pigeon-rescuer!

Jim is, if anything, determined. He begged his superior officer to hold off on sending him back to the gritty routine of the streets; he had waxed poetical about his theories of ordinary-looking people doing unordinary trafficking in the most conspicuous of places, about how many lawbreakers the PD didn’t even have on their radar because of the way the system worked (i.e. crime prevention is a low priority when it’s easier to process the criminals already on the books) and how he could catch one such miscreant without so much as batting an eye.

While the department thinks he is another rookie puppy eager to please, the truth is Jim is nothing of the sort. He’s in the career of law enforcement for one simple reason: there are dirt-bags who think they are too smart to be caught. Jim’s father was one of those men, which is why his mother took her young son on a one-way trip across the country; she had come to the conclusion George Kirk wasn’t going to change his ways to suit her idea of a safe, wholesome family life. Years later, Jim finds himself agreeing with Winona’s sentiments. It had taken him a while to move past his anger at her, to mature into a man who understood what she had been trying to teach him all along (morals and order), but he realizes now this path he is on couldn’t have led him anywhere else.

He needs to prove to all of the slick criminals out there that someone is capable of seeing through their bullshit and forcing them to face their crimes. More than that, he needs to prove to himself he is that person. What has he been relentlessly driving himself towards these past years if he isn’t?

Jim is poor enough that buying a newspaper every morning to commence his stakeout in the park isn’t very feasible. The handful of quarters he spends on a paper is the day’s lunch money; since he cannot have it both ways—a newspaper and a hot dog—he opts for the food based on survival instinct alone. Hence why he’d been pretending interest in a week-old article of how his favorite basketball team had their asses handed to them and walked off the court crying in shame (much like their fans).

A paper is a paper, right? Jim is supposed to project the image of someone literate and occupied by a normal pastime on a park bench. He is good at playing normal; but obviously there are people who see too much and think too hard and seek to make Jim’s life more infinitely difficult than it needs to be.

Today he has a magazine in his possession—a hunting magazine from last month which ought to be less noticeable as a decoy. When he strides into the quiet park at the crack of a chilly dawn, stomach protesting a lack of breakfast, he uses the magazine to brush away a few stray leaves from an unoccupied bench and stretches out his legs when he sits down. In his peripheral vision, he spies Hobo’s bench. It, too, is unoccupied.

After a while Jim grows bored of looking at the same picture of ducks while sneaking glances at his surroundings, so he opts to toss the magazine aside and stare openly at people moving through his area of the park. A woman in her thirties jogs past him for the third time and deliberately cuts an approving glance at his body as she does so. He keeps his face clear of any indication he might return her interest, and her coy expression drops away into annoyance. She picks up speed as she jogs away and doesn’t return again.

His glasses slide down his nose. Jim pushes them back into place, almost ready to give up and move to another location (there doesn’t seem to be any activity here), when a familiar face appears in the distance. The man—Leonard McCoy if the guy is to be believed, and Jim often accepts nothing less than the name on a state-issued arrest warrant—picks his way across the lawn at a slow, ambling pace. He isn’t dressed the same as last time (Jim guesses this makes a solid case against McCoy being a homeless man) and is clean-shaven and semi-well-groomed. McCoy carries a plain white coffee cup in his left hand, probably from a nearby gas station, and occasionally lifts its plastic lid to his mouth. When Jim’s newest person of interest finally meanders in the correct direction to take a seat on the proclaimed bench, Jim cannot help the slight quirk of his mouth. This man likes habit apparently; he must be one of those people who find comfort in familiar objects and places. Jim is different: he acts as his own north star, as he thinks it should be, and the rest of the world is superfluous, except possibly for where he buys his next hot dog.

Jim picks up his hunting magazine again, this time turning to a picture of a dead deer laid out over the hood of a Dodge Ram, and bows his head. But he is watching McCoy now, as a test of sorts, and thinks of all the things he would say to the annoying bastard if he could. Eventually the target of his ire will subconsciously begin to itch under his intent stare—of simple, quiet, cop Jim Kirk—and if Jim is honest with himself, he might be counting on the moment McCoy realizes they are only strides apart and, subsequently, decides to come over to this bench to pester him.
(Let them see who wins this time!)

Jim sets an expiration date of five minutes on his expectations. After that, McCoy or no, he will move on to a spot closer to the public fountain. Satisfied, he turns his attention to a pair of grinning youths kicking a soda can between them and squints against the sunlight glaring off of his plastic lens. A fly lands on the exposed skin of his left biceps and he swats it away absently.

Barking isn’t unexpected in a park where tame pets are allowed. But when a small brown dog comes pelting down the sidewalk as if its feet aren’t even touching the ground Jim pays attention. It races headlong past Jim’s bench, yipping excitedly, as it makes a beeline for another bench—and the man with the mop of brown hair and the coffee cup. Dogs have short attention spans, however, because as soon as it comes within two feet of McCoy it grins and makes a wide circle and veers off across a grassy hill. Jim would dismiss this event as the result of some owner who lost his dog (and thank God Jim isn’t wearing his uniform otherwise said owner might expect Jim to catch the dog, like that one time a little girl had cried and cried until Mr. Jim the Policeman climbed a tree and rescued her cat) but McCoy stands up from his bench and cries out sharply the name “Bones!”

Bones, the little dog with its tongue lolling out of its mouth (what is it, a chihuahua or a rat with long fur? Jim wonders) ignores the demand of the human and chases after a squirrel which chitters angrily at the yapping animal once it is on a tree branch safely out of reach.

McCoy is stalking across the grass now toward the dog, his squashed coffee cup abandoned between two slates of the bench. Jim, who really ought to be moving along since five minutes have passed, rolls up his magazine and taps it against his thigh in indecision. He is saved from acting, however, by the approach of a tall figure in a coat and a hat—who is also trailing a dog-less leash. The stranger pauses by Leonard’s bench before joining the man at the boundary between grass and sidewalk. They bend their heads together in quiet communication and to Jim’s surprise neither person seems interested in the escaped pet. It isn’t until the taller man reaches into his coat pocket and the motion is stalled by a quick gesture from McCoy that Jim becomes very interested in their interaction. McCoy mutters something to his (new?) acquaintance, who stiffens minutely. With an abrupt turn, the man whistles.

Bones, previously frolicking in a flowerbed of daffodils, bounds toward his owner and wags his tail so hard that his back end shimmies. The small dog is reattached to the leash without ceremony; owner and dog back away from their third companion. Jim notes the closed expression on Leonard McCoy’s face, a shutter against loud thoughts which Jim has seen on too many perps under interrogation, and for the first time that morning, Jim’s gut rumbles with instinct rather than hunger. Then, as if he senses Jim’s train of thought, McCoy—not a park hobo but maybe something more devious?—turns to meet Jim’s gaze. His smirk at Jim is mirthless yet somewhat wry. He returns to his bench to yank his coffee cup out of its wedged spot and heads in the direction opposite Jim, pace slightly hurried.

Jim, heart racing, tosses his magazine into the nearest trash bin as he abandons his plans in order to follow the man, whom Jim knows—Jesus f-ing Christ, of all things the perp had even introduced himself!—is what he has been looking for all along. But by the time Jim takes a corner to catch up to his target, Leonard McCoy has vanished along a trail of the park like a ghost.

-Fini

The Art of Beginnings

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• Another Day, Another Dollar, Part 4 (#40, J ‘N B Series) (40/40) – from March 29, 2013
• The Light In Which We’re Cast (#39, J ‘N B Series) – from March 20, 2013
• Playing Life to Win (#38, J ‘N B Series) – from March 14, 2013
• An Intergalactic Fandom (#37, J ‘N B Series) – from January 15, 2013
• We Fight to Win (#36, J ‘N B Series) – from January 4, 2013