Entered Into Evidence

Lucky Spencer poured himself another shot of whiskey and set the empty bottle on the mahogany bar. It was one o'clock in the afternoon and if he wasn't quite drunk, neither was he anywhere near sober.

Which was pretty much how he liked it these days.

He swirled the amber colored liquid in the tumbler once before swallowing it down

without stopping, his mind awhirl with thoughts and feelings that not even the most potent liquor in the world could still.

Not that that hadn't stopped him from trying.

The last time he had been completely sober had been six months after Elizabeth had died, when driven by a despair he could no longer cope with he had stolen a bottle of vodka from his father's bar and sat alone in the boxcar until it was gone.

It had been an eye opening experience. After months of being told that time would heal his pain, Lucky had discovered something that had at least managed to numb it. Alcohol. Wonderful mind dulling alcohol. With it, he could remember her without breaking down. With it, he could forget that he no longer had a reason for getting up in the morning. It was only when he was sober that the world seemed to be this bleak and lonely place where he no longer belonged, so Lucky had spent most of the last five years or so in some state of intoxication. Still, he was Spencer enough to manage to hold down a job, managing his dad's bar no less, and pretend to at least the majority of the world that he was okay. And if his parents or his sister or his brother ever thought otherwise, no one had yet dared to say anything to his face. In truth, except for the occasional family dinner, Lucky's life was pretty solitary.

Just the way he wanted it.

Shaking his head, Lucky reached for another bottle of whiskey.

"Isn't one p.m. a little early even for you?" The light mocking voice came from the beautiful young blonde who had just slipped into the not yet open for business club. At 19, Maxie Jones had her mother's looks and her father's charms, but if anyone dared to say that Maxie was anything like either of her biological parents she would probably deck them.

"Shut the door Scorpio." Lucky told her not breaking his rhythm as he poured another shot. "To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?"

Maxie sighed, hating the slight slur to his voice and the glazed look in his eyes. "Did anyone ever tell you that your fast on your way to being the town drunk?"

"Did anyone ever tell you that your fast on your way to being the town bitch?" Lucky retorted.

Maxie shook her head. "Forget it. I'll catch you when your fit for human company Spencer." She turned to leave.

"Maxie...." Lucky's voice stopped her. He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. It's been..... a hell of a day." A hell of a last five years he added silently. "Come on. Take a seat and tell me how my favorite rookie cop is doing." When he noticed her continuing frown at the shot of whiskey, he gamely pushed it away. "No drinking while your here. Scout's honor."

"You were never a boy scout Lucky."

"In my heart I was always one." He grinned at her. "Come on. Give in. If a guy can't count on his stepsister to cheer him up who can he count on?"

"They're not married. Just living in sin." Maxie grumbled.

"Whatever." Lucky paused. "I just need someone to talk to."

Maxie looked at him consideringly. He'd become one of her best friends, despite the heavy drinking. When her mother had ran off that summer with his father, Maxie had been a hurt, angry, and confused 13 year old. Nothing her mother said about having needs and wanting more out of life had changed the fact that after being abandoned by her father Maxie had now been abandoned by her mother. Her mother had talked about taking her and Georgie with them, but Maxie had balked at the idea of living like a gypsy. Maxie had been more like her stepfather than either of her biological parents. She wanted a stable home, to go to one school, to make friends she could keep forever. She wanted to be normal. So Maxie had refused to leave Port Charles with her mother and Luke. No amount of tears or threats from her mother could change her mind. They'd forced her to go once but the result had been disastrous, she'd hitched a ride with a truck driver back to Port Charles when they had stopped for lunch at a roadside diner. That was when her mother had given in and signed the paperwork that gave Mac custody of her. Her mother had been sad. Maxie thought Luke looked relieved. It didn't matter. They'd left and truth to tell Maxie hadn't missed them that much. Georgie she missed though, which was why she and Georgie wrote long letters back and forth. When Maxie had turned eighteen, she had saved up her money and legally changed her last name to Scorpio.

Strangely enough, in the midst of all that trauma, Maxie had found a friend and a comrade in Lucky Spencer. It was Lucky who had gone to Felicia to try to get her to understand that living with Luke Spencer was a lifestyle that Maxie wanted no part of. Lucky who had taken to coming around to take her to the movies or to Kelly's or just for a walk. He'd treated her like a sister and to Maxie he had been the big brother she had never had.

She'd tried to return the favor when Elizabeth was killed a few months later, but Lucky pushed away even her most determined efforts. The result was that Maxie could only watch as grief and alcohol turned Lucky into someone she barely recognized. Except for moments like this when those blue eyes seemed to belong to the Lucky of old.

She pulled an envelope out of her purse. "Georgie sent these. I thought you might like them."

"She still trying to place peacemaker?" Lucky asked softly as he picked up the pictures which showed Luke and Felicia playing in the surf in some tropical environment.

"Mac says Georgie is headed for a career as a diplomat."

Lucky laughed and then grew quiet.

"Lucky?" Maxie's soft voice rang out. "What's wrong?"

Lucky hesitated, his eyes drifting longingly to the shot of whiskey.

"I ran into Emily Quartermaine last night."

"Oh."

"Is that all you can say?"

Maxie shrugged. "What do you want me to say?"

"She killed Elizabeth. She should be rotting in jail."

"Mac says she will be. He says that the retrial is just a formality. With no new

evidence or anything, Alexis doesn't have a pray of getting her off." Maxie grabbed a soda from the small refrigerator behind the bar. "Mac says its a shame." She opened the Pepsi and took a sip. "Mac thinks she didn't kill Liz." She said the words daringly as she darted a look at Lucky through the corner of her eye. As far as she knew, this was the first time he had ever spoken about Liz's murder to anyone.

"That's what she said." Lucky released a deep breath. "That's what she said on the stand five years ago, but I didn't believe her then. I was sure she had killed Elizabeth. But when she said that she was innocent last night....."

"You believed her."

"Yes! No!." Lucky slammed the bottle on the bar. "Hell I don't know. Emily is guilty. A jury convicted her. They had evidence."

"Juries can be wrong..." Maxie said simply and smiled when he glared at her. "Not that this one was." She amended her statement hastily. "Still, you and Emily were pretty close when you were kids. Do you think she could have killed Elizabeth?"

Her words were too direct an echo of his conversation with Emily last night and Lucky winced. "Not the Emily I knew before I died. But when I came back..." he sighed.

"I don't know. She had changed you know. She was dating Juan and then they broke up and Nikolas.... I don't know. We'd drifted apart. I don't think I saw her more than two or three times in the last six months before Elizabeth...... And before that, we were never as close as teenagers as we were when we were kids. I had Elizabeth and Emily..."

"Was jealous? Then Dara was right and Emily had the motive to kill Liz. I mean look at all the guys who picked Liz over her. You. Nikolas. Even her own brother. Not that Jason and Emily were ever romantic or anything....I meant only a totally twisted mind would ever imagine that they were and.." Maxie blushed. "Sorry. I guess I haven't out grown putting my foot in my mouth after all."

Lucky paid her no mind as his thoughts drifted back. "She never seemed jealous."

"So...."

"So what?"

"Come on Spencer, I know you. Even if I didn't know you that well back then, I do now. You wouldn't convict someone, especially someone you care about, without a reason. So why did you believe Emily was guilty."

Lucky stared down at the shot glass. "I never doubted Emily's guilt because I was there." Heedless of Maxie's disapproval, he emptied the shot glass in one swift movement.

"What? But you never...no one ever said...how?"

"I never told anyone." His eyes were bleak and hard. "There didn't seem to be a point. I didn't want to testify, to stand in that witness chair and tell the world the private details of my relationship with Elizabeth and Dara, Dara seemed to have enough evidence without me."

"My God...." Maxie released the breath she didn't even know she had been holding. "Lucky I'm so sorry I..." She shook her head. "How horrible to see someone you loved killed..."

"What?" Lucky looked at her in a distracted manner. "No. I wasn't in the diner."

"Then?" Maxie began in confusion and then stopped. "Maybe you should tell me what happened from the beginning." Without meaning to, she used the same tone of voice on Lucky that she used when questioning suspects and witnesses on the beat.

Lucky's gaze grew distant. "Elizabeth had been distracted all day. We'd spent most of the day together, just hanging out in my apartment. She was....not herself. Preoccupied. Worried."

"About what?"

"She wouldn't tell me except that it had to do with Emily. She had something to tell Emily and she was afraid of how Emily would react."

"But she wouldn't tell you what she was going to tell Emily?"

"No. I didn't push her that hard. God I wish now that I had. But Elizabeth was...she knew the relationship she had with Emily had gone downhill and she wanted to fix it. Emily had been her first real female friend and it bothered Liz that she had lost that. So when she said she wanted to handle the situation with Emily on her own, I didn't say anything. But I was still worried, you know. Whatever it was, if Emily reacted as badly as Liz was afraid she would, then I wanted to be there for her." He poured himself another shot of whiskey. "I knew she was going to call Emily and ask her to meet at Kelly's, so I came back that night and I hung around outside of Kelly's. There were no customers and I waited what must have been an hour until Emily showed up." His face paled at what happened next. "Emily had been there maybe five minutes when the police showed up and all hell broke loose. I knew something was wrong and when I walked in and saw Elizabeth...her face was so pale...and cold...and there was blood everywhere. Emily was there, in a booth talking to the police officer and there was blood on her hands. I looked at her and I looked at Elizabeth lying dead and I just knew." He emptied the shot glass.

"That she was guilty?"

"Who else could it have been? I was there. No one else went in or out. The place was quiet."

The bar was quiet as Lucky finished his tale and Maxie sat in silence, her mind thinking carefully through what Lucky had just said. Something didn't add up....

"Who called the police?"

"What?"

"Think about it Spencer. This is the PCPD we're talking about here and as much as I love Mac and respect Taggert and Garcia, they don't just show up when they're needed. You said it was quiet. No screams, right? Nothing to alert the police. So somebody had to call them. Maybe somebody who was in the diner, who heard Liz call Emily, who knew Emily was coming, knew what Emily would stumble on and then....."

Lucky looked at her stunned, then shook his head. "No way. I was watching the place. No one else went in or came out."

"Not that you saw." Maxie could feel a growing excitement. "But were you watching all the exits. I mean don't the rooms above the diner have windows? Isn't it possible that someone could have slipped in through one of those windows and then...."

"If that's what happened....." Lucky began to shake and buried his head in his hands. "God. My God. What have I done? All these years I thought she was guilty. I treated her like shit. I told her that I wanted her to die. I told her that I wanted her to spend the rest of her life in prison...."

"Lucky?" Maxie touched his arm gently and forced him to look up at her. "Come on Spencer, this isn't you. It's this whiskey talking." She grabbed the bottle of whiskey and dropped it on the floor, not caring that it shattered on impact. "Okay, you might have made a mistake. You weren't thinking clearly. You haven't been thinking clearly since you lost Liz. Some of its grief and loneliness, most of it's this damned alcohol you shove down your system like it's water. If, and I stress if because all we have is a theory, if Emily is innocent than we don't have much time to prove it. Her trial starts in five days. That means we have less than a 120 hours to solve a case that's five years old. I don't like those odds, but I'm willing to give it a shot. And I have a feeling that if we work together we can do this."

Lucky shook his head sadly. "I can't. I feel sick. Emily has spent five years in prison because of me."

"If you feel sick its the beginnings of a hangover," Maxie said pragmatically. "And as for Emily going to prison, you didn't do that the system did. But you can do something to keep her from going back to prison. Or you can basically sit and wallow in guilt with a blood alcohol level higher than my last boyfriend's IQ." She paused. "Come on Luck. I need you if I'm going to do this. I can get my hands on the old reports and the evidence and all that, but I need your help with the computers and stuff. I need the Spencer-Scorpio connection if we are going to find out once and for all who killed Elizabeth." She paused. "You do want to know who killed your fiancée."

Lucky's eyes narrowed. Someone out there was to blame for this and it wasn't him. If Emily was innocent, and in his heart of hearts he had to admit that he was beginning to be sure she was, than that meant someone else was guilty of killing Elizabeth. Guilty not only of killing Elizabeth, but of letting Emily go to prison for the rest of her life. That person had to pay. The anger he was beginning to feel started to burn away the self-pity and the alcohol. He looked up at Maxie. "A Scorpio and a Spencer working together again." He smiled a real smile for the first time since she entered. "This should be interesting."

"That Lucky is the understatement of the century." She looked over at him. "So where do you want to begin."

With a purpose he hadn't felt in years, Lucky reached for the leather jacket lying across the bar. "You need to go to headquarters and see what information you can dig up. I imagine Taggert did his usual thorough job which means we should be able to find some loopholes he didn't think of."

"And you?"

"I have an apology to make. That is if she doesn't slam the door in my face."

"She won't." Maxie grinned. "Reginald will, but she won't. If I were you I'd think of an alternative entrance. I don't think any of the Q's are going to be wild to see you."

"Good point."

"And Lucky?"

"Yeah."

"I'd probably consider a shower or something. You pretty much stink at the moment." Pause. "Maybe that carwash down the street can help."

"Funny Scorpio. Very very funny."

Maxie smiled as she watched him go, her green eyes thoughtful. Maybe everything was going to be okay. Maybe the old Lucky had come back. And together they would find the evidence to prove Emily innocent.

Or at least she hoped so, not at all sure of what Lucky would do if Emily was found guilty again.

Shrugging, Maxie turned to head back to headquarters when her eyes alighted on the pictures of Luke and Felicia she had brought Lucky.

Lucky had found a new beginning today. With any luck, his relationship with Emily would also begin anew. Maybe it was time she and her mother started over. For a second, Maxie held the picture in her hand, tempted to call the number Georgie had given her. Just to say hi.

But then the memories of all those nights when she had had to put Georgie to bed herself because Mac was working late and Felicia was off on another adventure with Luke intruded and silently Maxie put the pictures back down.

Something's weren't meant for new beginnings. And with that thought, Maxie left the dimly lit bar and entered the bright sunshine outside.