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Pusher

“I say we run down those telephone numbers.”

All three numbers in the ad belonged to payphones located within a few blocks of each other. Mulder and Scully took one, and Burst’s team covered the other two. With surveillance in place at all three locations, it was merely a matter of waiting, watching, and periodically calling.

After the first hour, and six calls gone unanswered, Mulder grumbled, “Glad I’m not actually trying to respond to the ad. You’d think he would have at least picked a line he could connect an answering machine to.”

Scully shrugged. “If this is all a game to him, he probably doesn’t care about catching every single call.”

Once they determined the locations of the payphones, the team had attempted to triangulate a likely residential location for their suspect, someplace from which he could monitor all three phones, but they’d come up empty. The prevailing theory was that he either had some way to surveil them from a distance, either through the use of technology or accomplices, or he picked up phone calls at random while walking by. In any event, using public telephones certainly didn’t seem like the most efficient way to solicit contract killings.

Yawning, Scully continued, “Anyway, he’s probably just out somewhere. Or maybe asleep. Who knows? Come on, you’re acting like we’ve never sat on a stakeout before.”

He shot her a look, and she couldn’t help but smirk.

For another hour, they listened to the radio. It was a call-in sports talk show, and Scully only half paid attention, letting her thoughts wander in serpentine loops from her week’s to-do list to Sunday dinner with her mother to the plot of the novel she was currently reading. Every once in a while, Mulder would startle her with some outburst or exclamation in response to one of the radio commentators, and every ten minutes, one or the other of them would turn down the radio and call the payphone.

The call-in show ended, replaced by a rebroadcast basketball game, and they shut the radio off again.

“So, Scully, what would you do with the power to bend people to your will just by talking to them?”

She thought a moment before answering. “Nothing. I’d trade it for the power to convince Queequeg to stop chewing on my kitchen chairs.”

“You can’t just trade your power for a different one,” Mulder scoffed. “That’s cheating.”

“Fine, then I’d use it to make all the county sheriffs and local law enforcement officers want to cooperate with our investigations instead of having to deal with the territorial song and dance every time.”

“Oh yeah, that would be handy, wouldn’t it? Good choice.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Do I even want to ask what you’d do?”

“It wounds me that you doubt my virtue,” he said with mock affront. “For your information, I would use it to keep our suspects from getting away. Can you imagine if ‘Stop, FBI!’ actually made people stop? No more chasing anyone down dark alleys. For that matter, no more being chased, either. Tell me that wouldn’t be amazing, Scully.”

“All right, you’ve got me there,” she said, shaking her head and grinning. “That would be pretty great.”

They passed the rest of the hour coming up with increasingly outlandish uses for the ability Mulder and Burst believed this “Pusher” possessed; at the end of it, Mulder had hypothetically talked his way into a starting point guard position with the New York Knicks, and Scully was the most sought-after guest lecturer at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. Then it was time for another sports talk show, and they fell quiet again. It was just after two in the morning, and the host of this particular show spoke in a rather droning monotone. Scully felt her eyelids drooping and blinked, shaking her head to try and wake herself back up.

“You can rest a little if you want,” Mulder said quietly. “I’ll keep watch, and you can take over for me if I get tired.”

“Okay,” she said, letting her head fall back against the headrest and closing her eyes, gratefully.

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