This fic is being written for a prompt on the kinkmeme. I'd post the link, but FF tends to eat those. If anyone wants it, lemme know :D

Over the Abyss
A Sherlock story
By JadedofMara

The physician who killed me
Neither bled, purged nor pilled me
Nor counted my pulse but it comes to the same
In the height of my fever, I thought of his name. ~ Nicarchus

Chapter One: Nominal Inconsistencies

It was nearing five in the evening, and it was still blazingly hot, somehow. It had hit a high of eighty-six earlier, and had he not experienced the 60 degree weather of the past month (or been as keen an observer as he was), he could have sworn it was July, not October. The orange, slanted light glancing off the store windows opposite was the only clue to the season or the hour. Indian Summer, his neighbor Carlitos called it. Apparently, a week of this happened every year.

The heat wouldn't last though. It was one of the strange vagaries of weather he'd had picked up on in the four weeks he'd spent as Marcus Winters. Just at dusk, the winds would come in off the ocean and drop the temperature ten degrees (he had to remember to keep in Fahrenheit, a slip like that could get people killed). As soon as it was fully dark, the temperature would ping back up, and they'd be in for another gentle Californian night.

By then, he would be on the move. Tonight, it was all ending, and thank god for that. This business had gone on far too long, with far too little to hold his interest. Two more days of lying low at his tiny apartment, and then he'd be off to New York (and one step closer to home).

(He didn't allow himself the luxury of dwelling on such things anymore, not after the disaster that was New Zealand, but he was down to the last three. After tonight, it was just Schonberg and Moran. With any luck, he'd be home for Christmas. Or Easter. Possibly.)

Of course, inherent in the relocation was clearing out completely. In two days, Marcus Winters, the well-liked out-of-work dancer he had become for his stay in California, would be the subject of a missing person's investigation. His apartment would be found utterly destroyed, and his distinctive, bright orange '64 Volkswagen beetle would be discovered with not quite two pints of blood dashed all over the interior. There would be some drama in the apartment complex, but the case would run cold, and Carlitos and Joey would eventually forget about their favorite neighbor.

(The blood would be taken fresh, stolen from a convenient blood drive about a quarter of a mile distant from his decided abandonment point. He'd learned his lesson from Janus Cars, and some of the LAPD might have brains. Marcus Winters had type O-positive, he'd need to watch out for that.)

At the moment, however, Marcus' impending disappearance was the last thing on his mind. He was waiting, camped out on a bus stop bench and ignoring every line that came past, just people watching. It was all the fun he could have on a job this dull.

The target was a six-foot-one, blond human trafficker with the incongruous name of Vargas. He might have baby-faced Hollywood looks and a guileless smile, but Vargas was utterly without scruples. His talent for secrecy enabled him to run a frighteningly efficient trade of human chattel, and made sure that his operation went mostly unnoticed by local authorities, who had only traces to go on. Very few people knew of Vargas' existence, even in the criminal classes. He was very good at what he did.

(He himself had only found Vargas based on Irene's old information. She'd met Vargas when she was asked to provide training in her methods to a select group of his imports. There were seven photos under his name: a client list, an order verification notice, a partial personnel file, and four of Vargas himself in varying states of debauchery. There was also a whole paragraph devoted to 'what he liked'—light bondage, silk negligee, and to be called 'Monsieur' in bed, apparently.)

Compared to most of Moriarty's left-overs, though, Vargas could hardly count. Because of his devotion to absolute secrecy, Vargas had trouble getting clients. It was the reason he had thrown his line in with Moriarty in the first place. With Moriarty gone and none of his survivors much interested in the Los Angeles sex trade, Vargas was still operating on the old contracts. It was still a lucrative business for the best trafficker in North America, but it was routine by now. The same orders, the same drop offs, and a truly startling number of humans changing hands, every detail obsessed over by Vargas and his crew. Their concentrated efforts made them go undetected by the police, but once the routes were known, they became an easy mark. None of them would be expecting a police force. (Or an assassin. And certainly not a dead one.)

Everything was set, and he just had to wait for his plans to come to fruition. Even the tricky bit on this job wouldn't be too difficult, which was a welcome change from the norm. Detectives Rivera and Daniels might be competent, and could pose a problem to his plans, but they'd be otherwise occupied tonight.

His dealings with the police had been awkward at first. When he'd invented his Marcus Winters persona, he had intended to go after Vargas alone, so it was less professional than he would have liked. The main point of it had been to fit with the areas of town which lent themselves to the easy concealment of his target's operations, and to make enough of a splash that the wrong people wouldn't take a closer look. His usual method of sliding into the ranks of his targets' thugs had been doomed to failure by Vargas' suspicious nature, and his fall back plan of an outright attack was equally out (the location of man's headquarters wasn't known even by Irene). So he had improvised. He'd played up the charm, the energy, the gay, and broke out the dancing talent he hadn't touched since his mother stopped forcing the lessons on him at sixteen.

Marcus Winters took classes at the bigger studios and passed out his much-doctored resume to every one of them. He wore a lot of bright colors, cheap fabrics, and drove a car which wouldn't hit sixty mph. He smiled a lot, put product in his bleached hair, spoke in a nasal falsetto, and made friendly conversation with his neighbors. He definitely did not take special notice of the twelve nubile females who spoke no English in the Saturday Stripercise class on Las Puentes Boulevard, or of the trio of muscle-bound men who picked them up in unsuspicious groups of four.

Still, he'd played it off well. He'd caught Detective Rivera's attention and cemented her respect by linking four of her cold cases to Vargas' operation after just five minutes in her office, and his overt trustworthiness and exuberance made his story of just having stumbled upon the case believable. He also managed a certain aura of mystery that had Rivera's young partner Daniels dreaming up romanticized tales of mob bosses and sniveling underlings, and lone, brave informants. He was fairly certain that Rivera at least knew he wasn't exactly 'Marcus Winters', but she had enough appreciation for his information to believe him and follow down his leads.

Rivera and Daniels were both able enough to be worthy of his concern. It wouldn't do for him to be caught at this stage of the game, and he was more worried about exposure by them than he was of being identified by Vargas.

(That was the beauty of his method. It had been easy to pick off the larger, savvier players during the feeding frenzy that had occupied Moriarty's power vacuum; in the case of Sicilian di Tomas—not Catalan di Tomas—and the two Libyan branches, they'd managed to take each other out entirely on their own. Those that fell through the cracks had time to become complacent. It was the mid-level goons that had given him trouble, but he had learned, and he was healing.)

Their taskforce, on the other hand… Well. He could afford wriggle room with those idiots. They wouldn't expect him to be able to do much more than a triple pirouette and a curtsey; he'd be able to ditch his watchdogs with ease.

Vargas was making the delivery of the twelve young women from the Stripercise class to a Nathan Kinston tonight at 11:45. It was the first opportunity he'd had to catch Vargas out in the open since he'd been here, and though it was far from ideal, he didn't want to wait around southern California any longer than he had to. There were innocents in the way this time, and he couldn't be bothered to think about them while he took down Vargas. That was what the police were for.

Daniels would be going after the client. Rivera, the women. There would be a perimeter to prevent escape, and Marcus would be behind that line with a pair of officers, ready to give the signal when he saw Vargas and his thugs on the approach.

That was the plan as LAPD knew it, and far be it from him to disillusion them. They didn't want to be worried about a thirty-six-year-old unemployed dance teacher in the middle of their ambush, and he couldn't blame them for that. They wouldn't have one either.

(If a dead consulting detective instigated a fire fight and an unfamiliar bullet was found between Luis Vargas' baby blues, they wouldn't learn about it from him.) And if Marcus Winters was missing two days later, well… Informants were killed all the time. His new documentation was lined up, he had his train tickets, and Maxwell Price, Julliard drop-out, would in New York by then.

The wind kicked up, as it always did. Marcus Winters waved to a pair of fellow Pilates students as they passed on the opposite sidewalk. (He never thought of himself in his own name anymore, not even when alone. It was worth a lot more than his own life to forget his alias these days.) He checked his watch for good measure, and stood to meet them, shrugging into his chartreuse polyester shell.

Another update in about two days. Read and Review!

~ Jaded