Summary: Hypothetically we come to the conclusion of a long game of cat-and-mouse, where Stephanie has become the finally quarry, tracked by a predator hungry for Bounty Hunters.
A.N: I guess this could be viewed as a sort of exert of something that could have been if I could be assed writing it…Really it's just my need to write a non-romance, non bloody Babe/Cupcake piece (I hate the war) with a bit of Stephanie's vunrability played as the main character resolved. It was fun, I'd be sorely tempted to turn it into a full-blown story, but I've got too many projects running at the moment so I can only offer this up for now.
Disclaimer: They aint mine, and I remain a poor animation student.
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And then the inevitable happened. He nosed his gun at me. However, that was where many of the similarities to my usual situations ended. See, I was alone. Besides that, I was out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, stuck down the side of a road that I was sure I had never in my life actually driven down before. No Lula here to accidentally pop one with her Glock, or her high heels, or her handbag. No Grandma Mazur to riot at the top of her archaic lungs in the background, providing all the distraction I needed to escape. No cops. No Ranger. No Morelli. Just me and hunter of bounty hunters, José. And above it all I didn't even have my damn cursed gun to face him with. It was still in the glove compartment of my smouldering, upside-down Buick.
All I had left now was my tongue, which in all fairness had dragged me out of more than a few worst scenarios, as well as helping me through some pretty amazing ones too… I drew breath to speak, to let it work some of its haphazard magic, and he shot. He shot at me. And, unlike so many (but not all) before him, he didn't miss me.
There was no pain at first, but there was an overwhelming shock constructed mainly from the fact that José had the cheek not to follow the age old ways of banter before shooting.
I croaked and his sodden, rodent-like face darkener into a slow, hesitant smile, bedraggling his torn, pale lips. He tilted his brow down a fraction, giving him a sort of Clockwork Orange look. I had never seen the film but I had seen the look, and though I still hadn't registered any pain from any wound, I was suddenly terrified beyond comprehension. He was going to kill me, but long before that he was going to make me suffer, just as he had with all the other bounty hunters he'd been hired to lay away long before I had even took on the profession.
My knees ducked as suddenly my mind switched to auto-pilot and I braced myself to make a break for the embankment. But suddenly my whole upper body flared in agony. From the waist up I could not bare to move. My legs had twisted round but the rest of me only collapsed on top of them. I released a wail and became a shuddering pile in the rain-clogged mud.
There was laughter. Real, hearty laughter. José was squelching towards me, his loafers ruined but his conscience fairing far worse I imagined. It appeared that it was permanently out of commission now, after years of service to the demolishment of the bounty hunter work force.
Something clicked and I guessed it wasn't his good side. More likely it was his highly customised Berretta, 'Ol' Bessie'. A signature part of his legend. The one and same gun that had just been shot at me and had shot down my Buick and spun it off the road, starting this whole horrible new mess to begin with.
The pain kicked at me again, not to be outdone by the gun advancing towards me or the man leading it. Sprawled face down in drowning foliage, trying desperately to gain some elbow leverage, my entire chest burst with a terrible heat and I screamed, ready to be sick. Little blackholes spun around the outside of my hazy vision, bile collected in my throat and I felt something warm and thick seeping out from under my t-shirt. Round about where my shoulder usually connected to my breast.
All typicality had indeed ended. This wasn't a graze from a bullet or singed eyebrows or sunburn from standing too close to blown-up cars. This was a direct gunshot to my chest. It hadn't killed me at an instant only because José hadn't meant for it to. He wanted it to hurt before he landed one in my heart. Or my head. I didn't think he was the fussy kind of man when it came to the murder itself.
I had never stood a chance. Not after refusing Ranger and Morelli's help. Not after refusing to hear the gory details of those taken under by José's hands in the past. I had always been a bit proud and a bit stubborn and I guess after everything I'd been though, it was those traits that were going to get me killed. But I never let myself think about the possibility of it being tonight. If I thought that then José had won the war already.
The pain grew to a point where I thought I could pass out before he or I had the chance to do anything else. His moonlit shadow straddled me as I lay half turned up in the mud, tears of purest agony stuck in my eyes. I still had my stun gun jammed into my belt, and though I felt a necessity to hurl I pulled it into my grip and readied for a fight.
He smiled his Hollywood-psycho smile, yellow teeth glinting in their perfect little rows. He was a man of almost no words, a professional, and it seemed he had nothing to say to me now as one sweaty hand descended into my direct field of vision.
Franticly I switched the stun gun on and blindly thrust for his neck. There seemed to be a moment of suspended animation, and then half his face exploded.
I croaked again, unable to properly gasp. I hadn't touched him!
For just a split second the remaining half of his face widened in shock, his remaining bulging eye clearly in more agony than I could ever imagine. Then he tottered to one side and collapsed in an S shaped heap, trapping my legs with his torso.
I dropped the stun gun. I never wanted to touch the fucking thing again. It sunk in the mud a little and I threw up all over it. There, I thought with some satisfaction before the pain came back and I was sure again that I was going to pass out without any idea of what the hell was going on.
A pair of black Caterpillar boots came crashing to a halt in front of me, black jeans sagging slightly at the knees as the breaks were applied. I was becoming vaguely aware that there were lights shining over the boarder of the verge high above me, but everything else was slipping in and out of focus, beyond my control. It was so dark, so rainy, so much mud…
A hand cupped my chin. I was still somehow propped onto my elbow but another hand was encouraging me to lie down, slowly. I obeyed, blinking rapidly in an attempt to get the water out of my eyes. The pain was immense and I wanted to be sick again even though there was nothing left in my stomach to be sick with. But I trained myself to focus and slowly it worked.
Ranger. And he looked, well, worried. All his attention seemed to be focused on me, and not in the way it usually was. He had shoved José's heap to one side and was now kneeling over me, speaking slowly, though I was finding the words hard to hear with all the rain pouring into my ears.
"What--?" I asked stupidly, vaguely able to tell by his eyebrows that he had asked me something and was waiting for an answer.
"Can you feel my hand?" he repeated patiently, and I realised he was indeed holding my hand, the one attached to the arm with the gaping, leaking hole at the top of it. I caught a glimpse of all the blood and paled.
"Stephanie," he demanded, and it frightened me in a strange, illogical way to hear him say my name. "The cops and the ambulance are on their way. Morelli's ahead of them. I'm taking you back up to the roadside, but only if you don't have any neck or back injuries."
He had a hand on my collarbone, dangerously close to the cusp of my breasts, but I felt no liquid fire down below. All I felt was pain and I began to cry.
"Hey," he husked, and gave me a smile and a look of sympathy that calmed me somewhat. He was tucking plastered bits of hair behind my ears, wiping mud off my face and all the while checking swiftly for any signs of disabling injury. One of my ankles hurt like hell and I couldn't even tell which one but it was defiantly one of them. That seemed to be all else though, apart from the Hole and various cuts and bruises from rolling about in my car before I had come face to face with José.
Yeah, if it hadn't been for the shooting then this would have been just another cracker for the books, another story to tease my mother with over Sunday roast.
Ranger slid one arm under my trembling knees and the other carefully across my shoulder blades. With a swift heave he had me up against his warm chest and I immediately began to feel myself swoon.
"Hey," he called again, softly, "not yet."
He still looked worried, and that was beginning to concern me. In terms of Ranger he was showing a rainbow of emotions just now; worry, undertoned by annoyance, and I don't think at me…
I was pushed further into his chest as he began to climb the embankment. His firm grip tightened still. And all I could feel was the pain and the urge to cry a little more.
The lights that I had spotted got closer: Three cars, two black – Ranger's – and one red. I distantly recalled it to be the one that had helped knock my worthy Buick off the road.
"My car—" I began, but my throat had seized up with dried bile and I choked all over the broad chest of Ranger's black polo neck.
"Don't worry about it, Babe."
I seemed to relax a little as he called me by the familiar nickname. Somehow his version of 'Stephanie' was just terrifying.
"It's immortal, remember."
And he offered me a smile that made my brain freeze, because it was unsure. I had never seen Ranger unsure in all the time I had known him.
A toneless ringing started in my ears and my face felt fuzzy and hot. I seemed to forget in a lapse of mental strength that I was in Ranger's arms and I felt instead like I was floating up the verge, ascending to a better place…
"Stephanie!"
My attention snapped back. Not Ranger this time, but another altogether familiar voice. We had stopped moving, or rather Ranger had climbed the verge and was now standing on the rain-slicked road. I seemed to manage to become a smaller and smaller bundle in his arms, soaked through with rain and mud, shivering uncontrollably. Another car had joined the line and again I could only register its colour, blue…
"Man alive what happened this time?!"
Morelli… Not his usual curious, teasing tone though. It was faltering, amazed but not in an awed sense…
Ranger was talking back, informing. Usually I would be worried for myself, wedged like this between these two men and my very different desires for each of them. But the ringing was getting louder, adding what felt like a real physical pressure to my eardrums, as if I had dived into some deep water way too fast. My face was amerced in pin-pricks, in utter agony. I clawed at it weakly, and the talking stopped.
"Steph…"
Suddenly there was the familiar cool touch of Joe's palm on my forehead, fighting away the prickles. I realised I had squeezed my eyes shut, trying to ward away the desire to cry again, though failing as tears streamed down my cheekbones.
Joe blurred in and out of focus as I forced my eyelids to open. He smiled slowly, but the concern was as scary on him as it was on Ranger.
Sirens began wailing in the distance. Suddenly the warmth from Ranger's chest was gone from my cheek, and I suffered a delusional moment where I thought he was going to drop me because I had eaten one too many tastykakes. Then I was rolled into Morelli's arms and he gave me a small squeeze as I blinked up at him, confused and now very, very tired.
"Stay with me till the paramedics get here, 'kay? You do that for me and I'll make you fucking triple-chocolate fudge ice cream cake for your breakfast."
I nodded silently, trying a smile, and Joe gave me a lost, overwhelmed head-shake.
A car door was shut. An engine turned over and lights disappeared. I tried to adjust in Joe's hold but he only wrapped me up tighter.
"Ranger's gone. No one needs to know he got José. If anyone got José, it was you. There's not a court in this State that'll convict you of anything but self defence."
And I knew that he felt an eternal gratitude to Ranger, in the sullen, private way only men could for each other.
The ambulance lights were suddenly above me, hurting and blinding me. I squeezed my eyes shut and suffered that same delusion that I was being dropped. And then I was on a stretcher, the rain had stopped and pallid yellow lights illuminated my world, my chest still in an agony I could hardly believe.
A strange man and a strange woman were pouring over me. It took all my mental strength to realise I was in the ambulance, that it was moving, that Joe was still there, at my side now, holding my hand, telling me things to comfort me, although I could hardly hear him.
There was a pin prick in the crook of my good arm and suddenly the urge to cry was fading. Slowly with it the pain slackened. The faces around me swam and I felt relieved and sleepy. I caught one last thing from Joe before I went completely under. With a sad smile he muttered, "Cupcake, you gotta get a new job."
-Fin