The Girl I Left Behind Me

By

UCSBDad

Disclaimer: Sir! I do not own Castle, Sir! Rating: T: For language. Time: Three months after the end of season eight.

"Description?" Kate demanded.

"Not much. Older, grey haired, conservatively dressed."

"Damn! Theresa Bolger? What the hell is she up to?" Kate shook her head to clear it. "How soon can SWAT get there?"

"Three hours." LT said. "There's a hostage situation in a grammar school and some nut with a bomb in a Catholic Church at Mass. Then there's a …"

"Okay, we get the picture. It's up to us."

"There are three units there, Captain. One's watching the back, one's blocking the garage, and the other is in the lobby."

"Tell them not to move." Kate yelled as the elevator doors closed.

They arrived at their building to find two officers, McNabb and Caruso, in the lobby. Eduardo, the doorman, was holding his bandaged head as an older woman that Castle recognized as living on the second floor comforted him.

"What happened, Eduardo?"

"She just walked up to me and sprayed me with something, Mace, the officers said. Then she hit me with a pistol."

"Did she say anything?"

Eduardo shook his head. "Not a word."

The woman spoke. "Mr. Castle, I was coming down the elevator and when it stopped, she just pushed past me and got in. It was then I noticed the gun in her hand. I don't think she even knew I was there."

"Mr. Castle." Eduardo said, "there's no one else on your floor this weekend. Except for Alexis and her friend, that is."

Kate nodded and looked around her. "Ryan, you and Hastings stay here in case she gets past us. Esposito and I will go…"

"With me." Castle said.

"Rick, I can't let…."

"Try to stop me." He said, softly.

"We're going too." McCarty said.

"You need a Fed." Shaw added.

Kate swore softly to herself. "Okay, but no one do anything unless I give the word. We go up the stairs."

Arriving at the door to the Castles' loft, Kate gingerly tried the door. Locked. She could hear someone yelling inside, Bolger from the sound of it, and the two girls. She took out her key and began pushing it into the door as softly as she could. Then the key stuck for just a second, then shot forward, making a noticeable sound. She could hear Bolger stop talking.

Kate opened the door to her worst nightmare. Theresa Bolger had her left arm around Alexis' and Dalal's necks and had a pistol jammed into the side of Alexis' head.

She spoke calmly. "Ms. Bolger, you don't want to do this."

Bolger laughed. "The hell I don't. I've wanted to do this since I was in college. It was all going to change, you know. We were going to smash your whole pig fascist capitalist police state and liberate the oppressed. We were going to build a whole new, perfect world. And then it all went wrong somehow. People stopped caring. They stopped working for a new world. They changed. When I tried to bring them to their senses, they said things like, "Oh, we were so naïve back then." Well, I'm not naïve now!"

"Ms. Bolger, neither Alexis or Dalal have done anything to hurt you or anyone else. Why don't…"

"This Arab bitch stole my money! And the redhead is just another rich little piggy. Oh, I know her. I know all of you! I know how you got your cop job, and your promotion and your millionaire husband. You just spread your legs and got what you wanted. I worked for years and got nothing. I tried to tell the oppressed to stop shooting each other, robbing each other, selling drugs to each other but they wouldn't listen. Those two idiot Jamaicans wouldn't listen. All they wanted was help in laundering the money once they'd stolen it." Bolger laughed. "They don't need to launder the money now, do they?"

"Ms. Bolger, we can…." Kate began.

"No we can't, you capitalist whore!"

Afterwards, Kate couldn't remember hearing the shot. She saw Bolger's head snap back with a red hole in her forehead and a spray of brains out the back of her head. The gun spun to the floor and Bolger collapsed.

She turned quickly to see McCarty lower his pistol.

"What the hell were you thinking?" Castle screamed. "You could have killed Alexis!"

Meanwhile Peake had pushed past Kate and checked Bolger, just briefly, then checked Dalal.

"Daddy!" Alexis screamed, while sobbing hysterically.

Rick turned from his confrontation with McCarty and rushed to Alexis.

Kate turned on McCarty. "What did I tell you? Nobody was to do anything unless I said so. You could have killed Alexis."

"No." McCarty calmly replied. "I've made that shot hundreds of times, both downrange and in the Funhouse."

"The Funhouse?" Kate had no idea what he was talking about.

"Close Quarters Battle Range at Fort Bragg. It's a bunch of houses with dummies made to look like terrorists. They can even move and fire weapons with blanks, although we use live ammo. To make it more interesting they'll put Delta Force people in as "Hostages." So far, we've only shot the dummies and never the real people. Same thing in real life. It teaches you to think quick and shoot quick. And shoot to kill. And, I don't work for you, Captain Beckett. I don't have to follow your orders."

"We'll talk about this later." Kate snapped.

Esposito drew her aside. "When I was in Special Forces, they ran some of us through that place. I sat between two dummies dressed as jihadis and I was scared shitless. But the D Boys put two rounds in each of the dummies' heads and I didn't get a scratch."

Peake interrupted. "Dalal is pretty beat up, but she'll be okay. Luckily the bitch didn't know anything about really torturing someone. But I think we should get both Dalal and Alexis to an ER and have them looked over."

Kate got busy calling an ambulance, a morgue wagon and CSU as well as notifying One PP of a fatal shooting.

Three days later, after getting a search warrant for Theresa Bolger's office and apartment, Kate and Jordan Shaw held a meeting with the team in Kate's office.

"Ryan, what do you have?" Kate asked.

"It took some digging to find the old police and FBI records from the late sixties and early seventies, but Bolger was exactly what she told us she was. She made a lot of violent speeches about overthrowing the government, represented all sorts of violent radicals, but never actually did anything illegal. She was suspected by both the FBI and the NYPD of funneling money to violent groups, but no one ever proved anything. Once the sixties ended, she became your basic anti-establishment lawyer, specializing in accusing the police of brutality and corruption. That's about all I got."

"Espo, what did you find with the search warrants?"

"No money, that's for sure. But we found out how she met Earl Cousins. She represented his little sister and kept her out of jail. Cousins was happy to shoot up a couple of New Yorkers for a nice payday and to repay the woman who helped his sister. I guess he didn't figure on getting killed."

"Any idea as to why Bolger hired Cousins?" Shaw asked.

"A couple of theories, but that's it. One, she wanted to distract us by starting a gang war so she could make off with the cash. Or, maybe it was politics. Roarke is a wealthy white man and a gangster, just the type she'd want dead. Maybe she went after Jeremy Wong because the Chinese dropped Maoism and became capitalists. We'll probably never know."

"Any idea how she got the MAC 10?"

"No idea."

"No one has any idea where the money went?" Kate asked.

"We're positive Dalal didn't take it." Espo said. "We talked to everyone who saw her when she escaped and no one saw a duffel bag full of money or anything except a naked chick running. If one of the homeless people in the area grabbed it, he'd be on a spree buying 20 year-old Scotch and we'd have heard about it. I'd bet one of Bolger's "oppressed" people got involved somehow, released Dalal to give Bolger someone to chase and took the money and ran."

"We've got nothing on Amriki." McCarty said. "He's just sitting in his mosque telling everyone that Islam is a religion of peace. If some gang banger did grab all that money, it's good for us, not so good for the NYPD."

"How are Dalal and Alexis?" Jordan Shaw asked.

"Both are doing better." Castle said. "I'm sending them both to Kate's old shrink, Dr. Burke. Meanwhile, Dalal is staying with us until her homelife settles down. Oh, and she's planning on going to City College of New York next fall to study business. Her brother will continue to study baking and she'll run the bakery. I might even invest."

"Just because it's a good investment, of course." Kate teased.

"Of course."

McCarty's phone buzzed and he glanced at the caller ID. "Excuse me, I'll need to take this alone." He stepped out of Kate's office and into an empty one.

The team was discussing wrapping up the case when McCarty came back in. "We need to go, Peake. We got some intel."

"About the money?" Shaw asked

"Yup. Do you remember Hamid Saleh, the janitor at Amriki's mosque that tried to rat him out? It seems he slipped past TSA on a light plane and crossed into Mexico four days ago. Intel has him at Ghat in southern Libya. There's an old Libyan air base there and the town is controlled by local Tuaregs who are only too happy to let a jihadi with over a million in cash set up shop."

"Over a million?" Shaw said.

"Apparently he was a bigger fish than anyone realized. He must have had an eye on Bolger and/or the hawal and took a chance when he saw one. " McCarty smiled and held out his hand. "It's been a pleasure working with you, Agent Shaw."

Shaw took his hand. "A pleasure, and a few other things, working with you, Mr. McCarty."

As everyone gathered around McCarty, Kate noticed that Hastings and Peake had snuck out of her office. She could see them, standing in the bullpen. She could only see Hasting's face, but she didn't look happy. Then again, she didn't look heartbroken. When the two came back in, they had neutral expressions.

"Will you come back to see us?" Kate asked. "I know that a lot of your family would really like to see you again."

"I might come back to see all of you. I like seeing how good cops work. As to the rest, we'll see."

"Would you two mind if a couple of Special Forces soldiers appeared in a future Nikki Heat?" Castle asked.

"Does Nikki have a twin sister?" McCarty asked.

"No."

McCarty shrugged. "I guess you can do it. But call me so you get the details right. Just call the base locator at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and tell them you're a friend. Someone will know how to get in touch with me."

And then they were headed through the bullpen and out of the 12th Precinct.

A week later Castle was in a writing haze in his office when someone grabbed his hand.

"Castle!"

He looked up to see his wife's boobs in his face. She was unzipping her skinny jeans as well. "I just had my final medical exam and I'm cleared for all pre-injury activities." She glared at him. "Are you just going to sit there? Do I have to do this all by myself?"

"No! Of course not."

The two headed for their bedroom, leaving a trail of clothing behind them.

Much, much later, the snuggled together, tired and happy.

"Are you okay?" He asked, a little worried.

"I'm kind of sore."

He ran his hand over her most recent bullet scars. "Sorry. I'll be gentler in the future.

She took his hand and pulled it lower so that it was between her legs. "I'm sore there and I expect you to make me a lot sorer, understand?"

"As soon as I recover from the last three rounds."

Kate rested her head on his shoulder. "Victoria Gates came to see me today."

"Ah, what did Deputy Chief Sunshine have to say?"

"She told me that tracking down renegade CIA agents was not in the job description of NYPD precinct captains and, if in the future, any Fed, up to an including the President needed my help, I'd damned well better help from my office. She also said that she knows how hard it can be as a new precinct captain and that I should call her when I needed help and not be my usual stubborn self."

"Did she mention me?"

"She did. She said that if you ever want to write about an ex-IA officer turned precinct captain, you should be sure to write her as being warm and cuddly."

"I'm not sure my talent will stretch that far."

Kate giggled. "I suggest you not even try." Then, "I also had a talk with Captain Manucci from Personnel. Although I'm cleared for desk duty as a precinct captain, I'm still considered as being disabled in the line of duty. If I wanted to go back to being a detective, I wouldn't be allowed. He said that I could retire right now and make a little more than if I retired after twenty and wasn't disabled."

"We don't need the money, Kate, or are you deciding being a captain isn't for you?"

"I've always tried to pull my own weight financially, in spite of having a ruggedly handsome husband who spoils me outrageously…."

"That's the job of ruggedly handsome husbands. I can show you in the job description." Castle interrupted.

Kate gently slapped his arm. "And, I do think I can do some good as a precinct captain, making sure Espo and Ryan get a few more promotions and seeing that Ann Hastings gets a good start as a detective."

"But…?" Castle asked.

"I still want to try to go back to law school and be a lawyer like my mom. Help people who the system has forgotten. And I always wanted to be a mother, just like my mom. Are you ready to be a daddy again, Rick?"

"Why Captain Beckett, I thought you'd never ask."

Much later…..

"Fucking A!" Gunner cried. "Did you see that?" He ducked his head down inside the armored HUMVEE.

The ambush by the combined US-Malian force had reduced five Libyan technicals and a new Land Rover to burning hulks. Two of the Americans got out and headed for the Rover. In the air, they saw burning pieces of paper. The younger one looked at some that had landed on the ground.

"A couple of burning US hundreds."

The older one shrugged. "If anyone ever asks you if you've seen a million dollar bonfire, you can say yes."

They got as close to the burning Land Rover as they could and peered in the back.

"Could be our good buddy Hamid. "Doc said.

"You'll need to get DNA when the fire burns out."

They walked back to their vehicle.

"You ever think Beckett was wrong and that you would have been happier as a New York cop married to what's her name?"

McCarty laughed. "What? I've got fresh air, sunshine, healthful exercise and interesting people to meet and kill." He pulled a protein bar out of his jacket pocket and took a bite. "And great food. What about you? Would you be happier with the blonde cop or even the redhead?"

Peake shook his head. "I'd be so bored in a week, I'd want to eat my .45."

"You're crazy. Both of us are."

"But we're fun."

Both laughed.

The End

Author's note: I've started work on the next installment of the adventures of Lord and Lady Castle in Renaissance Italy, however those usually run long so don't expect to see it too soon. But, I have another story in progress set between episode 3.24 and 4.01. It's AU. I also will be working on a story set thousands of years in the future, but Rick will still be a writer, and Kate a cop, and other familiar faces will show up.