"And is it everything you thought it would be?"
"It's nothing like I thought it would be. It's better, just in totally different ways. I mean, obviously some parts of it suck. The paperwork is crazy. Dead-ends are frustrating. You are frustrating. We took your taunts personally. Why do you do that?"
"Let's just say that the FBI aren't always the good guys they think they are."
"What does that mean?"
"It means what it means," Paul said.
"Uh-uh, not good enough. Scully buys me more than that, Paul."
He looked in her eyes and said nothing. She waited. He grinned. "Maybe you'll find out one day. But not today."
Her petulant frown was more cute than angry.
"Did you ever find any aliens?" Paul's eyes lit up with the jab.
Jerri laughed. "Screw you, Renner." She laughed again. "So anyway, that wasn't an answer, so it's your turn."
"Quite the interrogator, aren't you?" He smiled to take the edge off the question.
"It's my job. How'd you get where you are?"
"Gillian Anderson doesn't buy you a story that long, but it'll buy you a start. I was a normal middle-class kid from a middle-class town. My mom died when I was little, and my father never remarried." He smiled to hide the memory. "My dad's a great guy. I'm an only child, so he and I were best buddies. To make a long story short, I had a choice to go to a community college or into the service for the GI Bill to go to a better school. Well, every bumfuck town in this country is packed full of entry-level workers with community college degrees, so I picked the military."
"Which branch?" Jerri asked.
"It doesn't matter." He smiled at the annoyed look on her face. "I found out that I was real good at violence. Firearms, hand-to-hand combat, explosives, whatever. If it involved killing something, Paul Renner was your boy. Well, when Uncle Sam owns your ass and you have a skill he can use, he's a dirty old uncle who likes touching you in your naughty place." He paused. "I think that's more than enough payment for Agent Scully. Where'd you grow up?"
"Pittsburgh," Jerri said. "All the bad parts of a big city combined with all the bad parts of a rural Midwest town."
"Oh, come on, I've been to Pittsburgh lots of times. It's a great town."
"Yeah? Says you."
"That's right," he said, folding his arms. "Says me." He grinned, amused at himself. "Okay, no home town talk. Inspired by Agent Scully, you dyed your hair red and applied to the FBI. How'd that go?"
She rolled her eyes. "It's natural. And I applied three times before I got an interview. I have a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice, but so did everyone else. I think the janitors at Hoover have a BA in Criminal Justice. Anyway, once they called me for an interview, I knew I was in. I can talk my way through anything. They made me an interrogation specialist. Good Cop, mostly, although I can play bitch queen with the best of them. It's not chasing UFOs with David Duchovny, but it's interesting in its own way.
"They skipped me off to the New York field office for a couple years. Then Gene requested that I join his team, and here I am." She cracked her neck and stretched. "Your turn. You're in the service and found your niche. What next?"
"I traveled the world," Paul said. "Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia. Always outside the U.S., no uniform, no dog tags. They'd give me a target and a deadline, and off I'd go. Sometimes I'd have to plant evidence, sometimes remove it. Sometimes I'd have to make it look like an accident or a random thing like a mugging. Sometimes it had to look like it was on purpose. At times, months would go by and I'd just sit on base doing nothing, getting paid to wait for the next job."
"What base?"
Paul ignored the question. "Sometimes they'd bounce me from job to job so quick I'd barely have time for a shower and a cup of coffee before the next briefing started. So, anyway, after four years of dedicated service to my country, I left to go to college and put that well-earned tuition money to good use."
"Which college?"
"Do you want to hear the story or not?"
"You know I do."
"Then quit asking questions you know I won't answer." The amusement in his voice disappeared as he went back to the story. "So I got an associate's degree in Computer Science and transferred to a great four-year school for my bachelor's. Two months in, after two and a half years of no contact, I get a phone call. A threat to national security needs to be removed, and they need me to do it.
"So I tell them I've been out of the service for a couple years, and the guy says word-for-word, 'civilian contractors are always compensated higher.' I point out that this arrangement is illegal. He counters that, without my uniform or my tags, what I was doing was illegal all along. To make a long story short, we negotiated a fee, and on a warm summer night on D Street in Tacoma, Washington, as a service to my country, I killed a man."