Chapter 9-2
693 Words
“Frank.”
“Yo,” he didn’t turn at Jake Hellman’s call. He could feel her out there. Over by the concrete barriers, that’s where he’d bet Beat would go. At least to start, but then she’d move… that way… left. She’d be nothing but a shadow of a shadow, but he knew she was there. That kiss wouldn’t have let her just run. There’d been more than heat, more than his need… or hers. It was as if they understood each other.
“Frank. She’s gone.”
“Right, sorry.” He turned and blinked against the ghoulish brightness of Jake’s red-lensed flashlight. They said that red didn’t mess with your night vision. It did, just not as much. He’d felt, against all reason, that another thirty seconds and he’d have been able to see Beat, nickname definitely worked, out there in the darkness.
The Ford Fairlane sat on the empty dirt road. All of the doors wide open, and the dome light now definitely shot his night vision all to hell.
He ran the scenario through his head again. They’d stopped the car with a log dragged across the road, improvised road block. Driver had pretended to not understand what was going on, only speaking in something that might have been Czech or maybe just gibberish. The person-of-interest role played by Agent Belfour hiding on the floor of the back seat.
But she hadn’t acted like a victim. No, she’d acted like a bodyguard. The hidden asset.
“Jake, where’s the driver?”
“I’ve got him tied up on the other side. All nerves.”
“It’s a switch-out. He’s the target, she’s the guard.”
“You sure?” But even as Jake asked, he raced around the hood of the car while Frank circled behind the trunk.
The driver was gone.
No. He wasn’t. He’d rolled into a roadside ditch, hidden himself. Given away by his white shirt and light-colored khakis.
Wait. Not hidden. He’d gotten himself low.
Frank dove at Jake and tackled him down into the ditch on top of the driver just as a flashbang went off under the car, simulating an explosion that would have blinded them for several minutes as well as labeling them both as severely wounded if they were outside a fifteen foot radius, dead if they were inside it.
Simulated car bomb.
The Fairlane still rested in the middle of the lane instead of being blown into a thousand bits of shrapnel.
Before the light of the flashbang had fully faded, Frank had the driver up on his knees beside the ditch, and placed the barrel of his empty sidearm up against the man’s temple. He held the man around the chest, pulling him close like a shield.
He put his back to the car to ensure he made the smallest target possible.
“You okay, Jake?”
“Mostly.” Jake’s head and sidearm popped up out of the ditch for a second, then ducked back. “You ever play football?”
“Nose tackle.”
“Uh, I can tell.” Jake’s head popped up where he’d crawled fifteen feet farther down the ditch and he scanned the trees.
Closest Frank had ever gotten to football was the big screen at Slade’s Bar. But the Hispanic gangs of the Upper East Side were nasty in a street fight and Frank had learned that the best defense was indeed a good offense. Hammer them to the ground before they could respond.
But he’d more recently learned to keep that part of his past hidden. People didn’t want to know about his street background. Most agents in the various training scenarios wanted to think their partners could’ve gone All-American, rather than gone lifetime sentence for manslaughter.
The driver, still wrapped in Frank’s grip, flinched hard and looked down at his chest. Then he spoke his first clear words of the evening, “Oh s**t!”
Three splotches of red oozed down his chest. He’d been shot from somewhere in the dark woods on the far side of the ditch. Three shots so fast, that he’d never stood a chance.
“Hate it when I’m sacrificed.”
“Shut up, you’re dead.” The smell of fresh paint stung Frank’s nose, almost making him sneeze.
“Don’t I just know it.” The paintball pellets must have stung through the driver-agent’s light cotton shirt. Frank could feel the man shrug, then fall limp in his arms.
That’s when Frank made the mistake of letting him slide to the ground.
Knowing instantly that he’d screwed up, Frank dove to the right, but was too late.
A line of paintball shots stitched across his own chest.
He lay on the ground, technically bleeding out, as Agent Beatrice Ann Belfour slid out of the trees.
“Bang! You’re dead.”
- Writer
