Rocky Road 5
by PlentyOHok@aol.com

They watched the taxicab’s tail lights shrink to pinpoints then disappear around a corner.

"Twice in one night!" Scully whined. "That’s twice in one night someone’s gone off with our ice cream!"

"Scully, she didn’t just go off," Mulder snapped peevishly. " She roared away into the night following a library book slot rescue, a car chase, and a gun battle. Is the missing ice cream really the highlight of those events in your opinion?"

"I’m just saying, Mulder…" Scully said, her delicate fuse shortening audibly. "I’m just stating the facts, that for the second time tonight, circumstances have contrived to relieve us of the ice cream that was a large part of the original focus of my visit to your apartment."

Mulder stared at her as if staring at her would help him understand what she was talking about. He ran his fingers through his already tousled hair, understanding nothing but knocking loose a few more chunks of safety glass and leaving his hair even more endearingly tousled. Without thinking, Scully reached to brush a piece of glass from his shoulder, but then diverted her hand to her own coppery strands, which were also tousled but in more of a slovenly way than endearingly. *Jesus* Scully caught a glimpse of herself in the window of Akbar’s All Nite Frozen Custard Stand. *Is that what wallowing around the floor of a taxicab with one’s just-partner does to one?* She smoothed her hair into place as best as she could.

"So what’s your point?" Mulder asked after a moment.

"My point is," she gestured impatiently, irritated that after five years together she still had to point out her point to him," Doesn’t it seem as though there’s some kind of conspiracy going on here?"

Mulder’s eyes widened. "No! A conspiracy? " He laughed rather unkindly. "I don’t believe it! Next you’ll be telling me that it involves aliens who are conspiring with a consortium of evil men to colonize the earth using a virus being stored in cornfields in Texas and tested in spaceships in Antarctica!

"Spaceships in Antarctica?" Scully’s eyes narrowed. "Mulder, let me remind you once again that what I saw was very little--"

"Oh don’t even start with that!" he cut her off snappishly and quite peevishly this time. After an intense mutual glare, they stood silently, looking everywhere but at each other. The night was chilly and damp, and the rising wind carried with it the smell of the weatherman’s promise of heavy rain. Finally Mulder spoke: "Scully, why the hell *did* you come to my apartment tonight?"

Scully met the gaze of his fleckling gray-green-hazel eyes and swallowed hard. *I could reach up right now and brush that glass from his shoulder, and straighten his collar against the cold, and rub my hand across his stubbly cheek, and press my small softness against the hard, lean, masculine angles that I know, I just know are underneath that black leather jacket.* She stopped herself. Why the hell had she come to his apartment tonight? *Oh yeah, the damned speech. Just partners and nothing more.* She looked away and pulled her own jacket close.

"Not now Mulder," she frowned. "It’s cold and late and it’s going to start raining soon. Let’s find a phone and get the hell out of here."

Mulder walked over to the darkened front of Akbar’s All Nite Frozen Custard Stand and pressed his face longingly against the glass. A red-lit exit sign barely illuminated several footlocker freezers stocked with 5-gallon cartons of frozen custard. "No phone here," he said, turning away. "I guess if they don’t put the custard away when they leave, that makes it All Nite."

Scully gave him a small smile then looked up and down the street. There was nothing on either side of the block except closed shops and offices separated by dark alleyways. "So, which way?"

Mulder thought for a second. "Let’s head back to Akbar’s All Nite Live Poultry Market. There must be cops, or at least animal control there by now. I mean, even in Washington DC you can’t decimate a whole coop of chickens with your congressional limousine and expect to get away with it!"

"The driving gun battle might have drawn some attention, too," Scully added with a grin as they started walking back towards where the limo had crashed. *With any luck, we’ll find a phone, beat the rain and get everything straightened out before the night is through.* She was feeling more hopeful with every step. *With or without ice cream, dammit!*

****************

They walked in silence for most of the two-and-a-half blocks back to Akbar’s All Nite decimated Live Poultry Market. The only noise besides the steadily growing wind was the "swick-swack" of their jeans’ legs passing each other: long drawn out swick-swacks for his steady gait; short, staccato swick-swacks for her quicker steps. They kept to the center of the street since there was no traffic and it seemed safer than the dark, dirty sidewalk.

*Even here, even here* Mulder found himself thinking in time to the swick-swack of Scully’s pants legs, like you sometimes find yourself doing to car windshield wipers. *Even here, even here, manholes steaming, manholes steaming, garbage stinking, garbage stinking, broken asphalt, broken asphalt--* Suddenly he had to stop walking to break the insidious rhythm of his thoughts. *Whew!*

"What?" Scully stopped, too, looking about nervously. "What’s wrong?"

"Nothing," he said and started walking again, but more slowly this time. There, that was better. Scully fell in step beside him again. *Even here, pissed off at me and the great ice cream conspiracy, with chickens squawking faintly in the distance* which he realized they were getting close enough to hear, *she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.* He stole a sideways glance at her perfect profile. *Has she really wanted to hump me senseless all these years?*

As they reached the end of the second block and turned right around the corner, the squawking of chickens grew even louder. Thirty yards down the street, at least a dozen large birds strutted and flapped and clucked frantically around the carcass of the congressional limo that had launched itself onto their coop. It still sat where it had landed, doors open, headlights (which had been turned off) pointing slightly skyward and only the two rear wheels on the ground.

Surprisingly, there was not a sign of any emergency personnel, nor of the owners of the poultry market. As they approached the limo, however, they could discern a black-clad figure carefully stepping around bits of wood and wire from the coop in stealthy pursuit of the biggest, loudest chicken of the bunch.

"Here chicky-chick, here chicky-chick," the man enticed. "Come here, you bony-footed bag of giblets."

He lunged for the chicken, attempting to grab it. But the chicken scooted up the curb with loud squawks, and the man in black tripped and fell sprawling across the sidewalk. "Get back here, darn it all!"

"Agent Spender!" Scully whispered incredulously, elbowing Mulder. "What’s he doing here?"

Spender scrambled to his feet and began stalking after the chicken once more. Though Mulder and Scully were now only ten yards away, he still hadn’t noticed them, intent as he was on his fowl prey. As they looked at the chicken, they noticed something black flopping from its beak.

Suddenly the chicken turned on Spender and charged him, wings flapping furiously. Spender leapt back, knocking into the rear of the limo.

"Cut it out you sack of chicken poop!" he whined at the bird.

"Chicken shit, Agent Spender," said a voice from inside the limo and, like a hideous jack-in-the-box, Diana Fowley unfolded from the rear seat where she’d been hidden in darkness. "It’s chicken shit! Christ, can’t you even swear like a man?"

Mulder froze. "Diana?"

She whipped around to face them. "Fox!"

Just then, the chicken strutted near and Mulder reached down and swiped the black thing out of its beak: a wallet badge like the one they all carried. He flipped it open to the light and read: "Special Agent Jeffrey Spender, FBI." Snapping it shut, he sneered at Spender, "You let the suspect take possession of your badge, Jeffy. That’s not going to look very good on your report of this incident."

Spender angrily rushed Mulder, who flapped his arms and lunged forward, squawking "brak-brak!" Spender flinched, much to Mulder’s amusement.

"Give me that, you oaf," Spender snarled, snatching the badge from him.

"I’m afraid there’s not going to be any report of this incident, Fox," Diana purred, closing the antenna of her cell phone against her hip and ambling seductively towards them, eyes only for Mulder.

"Why were you following us, Agent Fowley?" Scully asked, cleverly interrupting Fowley’s concentration on her partner, and even more cleverly "accidently" stepping on her partner’s foot to interrupt his concentration on Fowley. "Why did you shoot at us?"

Fowley stopped. "I don’t know what you’re talking about," she said, doing her best to sound bored.

Mulder pointed to the limousine. "Since I don’t see any other cars around, we have to assume you were driving this one."

"All right, if you want the truth…" She paused, as though they might want to change their minds, then shrugged. "Fine. We were on a stakeout in the vicinity of Akbar’s All-Nite Market when we happened to notice the two of you engaging in some rather unprofessional conduct both inside the market and outside in a public taxi."

"Unprofessional conduct," Scully repeated the phrase like a dare.

Fowley moved closer, reaching inside her jacket to pull out a sheaf of Polaroid photographs. She thumbed through them until she found the right one and held it out. It was a close-up of Scully gesturing at a packet of condoms being held up by the clerk.

"After making a spectacle of herself over a box of condoms," Fowley spoke as though narrating from a case file, "Agent Scully rushed out of the market to join Agent Mulder in a public taxi."

Mulder snorted in disgust. "You just happened to be on a stakeout inside Akbar’s All-Nite Market?"

Scully took a step towards her, angrily pointing at the Polaroid. "Those condoms were a mistake!"

Fowley sneered, "Really? Were they the wrong color or did you mean to get the ribbed kind?"

For a second it looked like Mulder might have to step between the two women, but then Scully summoned enough control of herself to whirl away from Fowley. With a quick, hot glower at Mulder (*You handle this before I have to bitch-slap her*), she stomped over to the limousine.

Mulder stared after her for moment, entranced as always by the sight of stomping-mad Scully in jeans, then dragged his eyes back to Fowley. "Diana, we went to the market because somebody accidentally took Scully’s bag when she bought ice cream earlier, and Scully ended up with their bag."

"Well, Fox, if that’s your story, then you stick to it!" Fowley gave him a jowly, knowing half-smile that Mulder knew would make millions of people across America want to bitch-slap her, if only they could somehow see her. "Nevertheless, there’s more."

She shuffled through the rest of the photos as she continued talking. "There’s an especially interesting series of shots after Agent Scully returns to the taxi. Here, two heads are visible. Then here, you disappear. Then here, Agent Scully disappears too." She looked pointedly at him, her eyes two steel stakes mentally aimed right for his groin. "Where did the two of you go? I mean, what could you possibly be doing out of sight in the back seat of a taxicab?"

*She’s jealous* Mulder realized with a terrifying jolt of alarm. *She’s remembering what she and I used to do out of sight in the back seat of taxicabs.* Mulder endured the rare experience of having no smart ass response come to mind and stood mutely. *Damn, maybe I should just let Scully have at her,* he glanced around to see where Scully was, just in case. At that moment, she erupted from the back passenger side of the limousine, which she’d been searching through during Fowley’s show-and-tell.

"Mulder!" she shouted and started towards him, victoriously holding up a brown paper grocery sack.

"Hey," Agent Spender spoke up. "You have no right to remove--"

Before he could finish, the bag split open, dumping the contents onto the ground with an audible "plop." The four agents stared together at the soggy mess on the ground at their feet.

"You did this," Scully pointed to Fowley, her voice dripping with venom the way chocolate ice cream now dripped from the smooshed ice cream carton onto the cracked pavement of the street. She then pointed at Mulder, spattering him with an "I told you so" glare the way bits of nuts and marshmallow now spattered the pack of sugarless gum she’d bought hours earlier. "And you mocked me when I suggested there was a conspiracy."

Knowing she was right, Mulder’s trusty well-honed FBI profiler survival instincts told him to focus on Fowley. He raked her with an angry stare. "You had the bags switched deliberately, didn’t you Diana! You set us up!"

"Believe me, Agent Mulder," Spender spat out, unable to keep quiet. "It wasn’t hard."

"I’m sure it’s never hard for you, is it Jeffy!" Mulder spat back, not taking his eyes off Fowley.

Fowley shook her head, unfazed. "That’s enough, Agent Spender."

"You’re pathetic," Spender continued, scornfully. "Old man Akbar wasn’t too keen on helping at first, said you two had bought enough porno mags and ice cream there to put his son through college and he didn’t want to lose such good customers."

"Watch your mouth, Spender!" Fowley warned through gritted teeth.

"I’ve never bought a porno mag at Akbar’s!" Scully said indignantly.

"But then we mentioned talking to the INS about his 25 cousin Akbars who are visiting this country illegally to help him run all his businesses…" Spender sniggered. "He didn’t even charge us for the HoHo’s."

"Shut the hell up you twerp!" Fowley snarled.

Scully walked over to Fowley and held out her hand. "I’ll take those photographs now."

Fowley hesitated and looked to Mulder, who nodded. She grimaced and roughly slapped the sheaf of Polaroids into Scully’s hand. Just as she did, fat droplets of rain began to splatter down on them, and the wind ratcheted itself upwards, kicking up paper trash and whistling across gaps between dark buildings.

Suddenly, headlight beams rounded the corner and pinned the four agents where they stood. Seconds later, a cab pulled alongside them. With equal parts dread and excitement, Mulder noted the "Akbar’s All Nite Taxi Service" insignia on the door, but he was quickly both relieved and disappointed when a hairy elbow appeared at the window and a gruff voice shouted over the wind, "You the people called for a cab?"

"That would be us," Spender said, opening the rear door. "Room for two."

Agent Fowley moved away, curling her lip in a horrifying perversion of a smile. "I’d offer to let you use my cellphone to call for your own cab, but you know the FBI’s policy on unauthorized lending of office equipment." She ducked out of the rain and into the cab behind Spender. "Besides, I’m sure you two will find something to do on such a dark and stormy night. Just remember, next time we’re going to nail you for good!"

She slammed the door shut and, a moment later, the cab moved on.

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