Red Herring

I do not own any part of The Mentalist and am making no profit from this work of fanfiction.

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"Damnit, Jane, you should have listened to me out there! There are procedures for these situations, do you even understand that, there are rules!?"

"Well, I was in kind of a tight spot," Jane defended himself mildly.

"You shouldn't have been there at all. You should have stayed in the car. I told you to stay in the car."

"Well, I did, at first. But, you know, it got really hot."

"Hot."

"Yes, I was sweating. I hate that. And you had been gone for a long time. So I just came up to see how things were going . . ."

"And walked into a firefight."

"A very small firing incident, yes. And I'm sorry for that. Really. I am." Jane reached to touch Lisbon's hand where it rested on her desk, but she jerked it back.

"Don't move, said Lisbon calmly, coming from around the corner, into the line of fire. "Let's all try to relax, okay? You okay, Jane?"

"I'm okay," said Jane, checking quickly to see if it was true.

"Get your voice out of my head! You're trying to take over my mind, I know you are, but I swear, I'll shoot you first!"

"You don't want to do that," warned Lisbon softly. Jane could see her eyes tracking the gun, judging its distance and direction. She didn't look at him at all.

"She's right," he said, taking a chance by stepping a little closer, holding his hands in front of him, open and empty.

"Jane," said Lisbon.

"Have we found out who he was?" asked Jane.

"Yeah, Jason Sanborn, 28. Diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic," said Lisbon shaking her head, motioning to the open file on her desk. "Institutionalized until the state shut down the program, no history of violence, ended up homeless on the streets of Sacramento."

"I'm sorry."

"If you actually feel remorse, why don't you ever do what I tell you to do?"

"Sometimes I do try," offered Jane hopefully. "But I've just got to think outside the box, you know? I can't exactly consult the playbook every time."

"Consult the playbook," repeated Lisbon slowly. "That's foolish to you, right?"

"Back up, Jane." Lisbon worked to maintain a non-threatening posture while keeping the gun absolutely level. If he fired, would Jane have time to get to cover? Would Jane even know to run for cover when the shooting started? Jane wasn't trained for combat. He was likely to pop up his head at a bad moment and get hit – even if he managed to stay out of the cross-fire, which he also wasn't trained to do. "Jane!" She bit off another exclamation. Just like training a dog, she reminded herself; don't repeat commands.

If he made it out of here alive, she was going to kill him.

"Well, not foolish, no, but it certainly does hamper the creative process . . ."

"I suppose that's your privilege as a consultant," said Lisbon, with only the slightest, most imperceptible hint of distain in her voice at the word. It would have gone unnoticed by anybody except Patrick Jane, but he was watching her face intently and caught the faint wrinkling of her nose, as if, for a microsecond, she smelled something unpleasant.

"Oh really," he prompted, intrigued by this response. "Please do explain."

He made a movement that Jane couldn't follow, but it ended with a crack of gunfire, and the gunman fell forward, on to his knees, and then slumped on the floor. Now Jane could see the widening cavern opening in the back of his head . . .

"Jane, back up," ordered Lisbon, pulling out the radio clipped to her hip; "Central, this is Lisbon, we've got a suspect down." She spoke with one hand holding down the button on the radio while she covered the suspect with the other. Jane didn't understand why; he was obviously dead.

The radio coughed and clattered in response, but Lisbon apparently understood it since she responded, "Copy that."

"It's not your mess at the end of the day, Jane, you're not a cop. You're not the one that killed somebody today, that was me. And when you chose to shoot somebody, and end their lives, when you make that decision, let me tell you it feels damn good to have an objective standard to fall back on, and not some spur-of-the-moment hunch!"

Okay, maybe he'd hit a nerve. "Lisbon - "

She set her jaw. "I don't need sympathy, Jane. I sleep just fine at night." She did, too – he could tell by the steadiness of her hands as she stacked papers and her nice pink fingernails. If she wasn't sleeping, they'd be blue or grey. He should know. "I'm just saying, the reason I can live with my choices is because I have rules to follow. That's what it means to be a Professional. It's not because we're stupid, or lack imagination, or whatever else you tell yourself when you're ignoring what I say to you. We do it because it's the only way to live with the consequences of the decisions that we have to make. That's what keeps me from being an obsessive lunatic – "

Like you, were the words hanging in the air.

Lisbon blew out a breath. "Jane, I'm sorry. I'm tired and it's probably not a good idea to have this conversation right now."

Dead instantly, she thought, judging the position of the wound. She felt the usual sense of deflation as the glanced at the slack, empty face. Not pity, exactly; not regret. She supposed it would have been possible to take a different shot, to take out his kneecaps or strike a shoulder, but wasn't how she was trained. Leaving someone on their feet was a good way to end up dead.

"No, finish it. I want to hear."

"It's just - you've got one plan – kill Red John, and then it's over. But in my job, I have to shoot the bad guy and show up for work the next day, ready to go again. I'm the one with the protocols because in the end, the big decisions are my responsibility. And you may not respect that, this may be a game to you, and that's fine, because you're not the one who killed somebody today - killed however many people this year. "

"I know." He leaned close to her pale cheek, pressed a gentle kiss to the corner of her mouth. "I'm sorry you had to kill someone, Lisbon." Again.

"I'm not," she replied firmly. "Because I know it was the right call."

Before Jane could answer, they were interrupted by the phone at Lisbon's desk. She picked it up on the second ring, spoke crisply into the line; "Senior Agent Lisbon, Serious Crimes." While she listened, she made eye contact with Jane, mouthed new case. "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Got that. Okay, we'll be there in a couple hours."

Someday she'd be too slow, too slow to save Jane on his next fatuous mission or too slow to figure out what he meant and finally lose control of him altogether. Someday he'd go off the rails and she'd be two steps behind him the whole way, not putting the pieces together until too late. Then she'd know real failure, when Patrick Jane tricked her and used her and ended up dead, or a butcher who would have been better off dead than what he was.

She hung up the phone, took a breath, and then turned to brush past Jane, gathering her jacket and shoulder holster off the coat rack. She leaned out of the doorway into the bullpen.

"Let's pack it up, guys, we got a body."

From beyond the door Jane could hear the squeaking of chairs and the sound of drawers being opened and closed, as the agents geared up for the field.

-

Chapter Two:

"What's she like," asked Buchanan, looking after her appreciatively.

"Lisbon?" Jane frowned. "She's got control issues."