It's been ten years since I first blackmailed Vinnie into letting me be a bounty hunter. 10 years since I meet Ranger, and almost 10 years since I captured Joe Morrelli. 10 years does a lot to a person, I am no longer the soft bounty hunter that ends up in the trash.
Yes, it took me longer to get to my comfort level than I thought. But after the kidnapping incident with Scrog, I had to change. A month after Ranger walked into my kitchen and risked his life for Julie and I, Joe left town for an deep undercover assignment, two weeks after that Ranger was in the wind. And I was truly alone.
Since I knew I could not continue to rely on the two men in my life, I chose to fall back to my Merry Men. A week after Ranger left, I asked the guys to train me, to really train me, so every day I was woken up by one of my Merry Men and we would go for a run. I was also taught the fine art of breaking and entering, how to borrow a vehicle, self defense, the art of disguise, weapons, skip tracing, and most of all how to trust my instincts. In exchange I continued to work distraction jobs, one area I didn't need training.
Two months after Ranger had left Bobby finally convinced me to get a permanent tracking device, which was only to be activated in an emergency. With Lulu by my side I had a small implant placed under the skin on my left hip… I should have had someone else with me. After the procedure, we decided to go out drinking and the next morning I woke with a small bat signal right about the implant. I guess we decided my bat signal needed some flair.
Six months latter Lulu, Connie and I were out at the beach, trying to survive the New Jersey summer, when Joe found me. He had just got off assignment and came to find me right away. When he left I told him I couldn't promise to wait for him, but that I loved him. It had been over eight months and I was still unsure how I was going to react, but my instincts were saying that I would always love Joe, even though it would never last.
That day he came to the beach and found us sunning ourselves. I didn't feel him come up to us, and I probably would have ignored him completely if he wasn't blocking my sun. I opened my eyes to tell him off, and provide him with some proper Italian sign-language, realized it was him and jumped up and hugged him. When we finished our hug, he looked me up and down like I was lunch, until he saw the tattoo. I was so shocked to see him that it took me a couple moments to realize that he was angry. Then he looked me in the eye and stated "It was bad enough when Rangeman was on your panties, now it's on your skin!" and cocked his hand to punch me. Thankfully my training kicked in and I sent him to the ground, where I proceeded to handcuff him. After I held him down for an hour, he finally calmed enough to release. We didn't talk for months, and I made the girls swear to not say anything to the Merry Men. I told them that he had never hit me before, and I would want to hit him if he had Terry tattooed on a private body area.
A couple weeks later, Rangeman stopped taking Vinnie's high price bonds. Nobody said anything to me, but I figured that the Merry Men had heard that I took down Joe, and they figured I was ready to take the high price bonds.
A year and a half after Ranger left, he returned. Life had changed quite a bit. With the takedown of three large bond FTA's I had secured enough money to buy a small comfortable house which was just outside of Trenton. I had also hidden the purchase, so I could keep the crazy's from breaking in and bothering me. The night he came back, I found out he broke into my old apartment to find it redecorated in typical burg fashion (thankfully the 65 year old women who was moving in was still at her old place), then he proceeded to Joe's house (where Joe's new fiancé had moved in a couple months prior). Apparently he figured I had moved into Joe's house full time, because he then went directly to Sal's and drank a bottle of whiskey. Tank had to pick him up at three am from the police station, as Ranger had got into a fight with a group of gang members three blocks from Sal's. All of the gang members were in the hospital; Ranger was just drunk and pissed. I didn't see him for another month, as the Merry Men decided to hide me from Ranger, without telling me he was home.
I finally found out he was home, because the nurse from the ER called me (still his emergency contact), when he was shot. Thankfully the three to the chest were stopped by the vest, the shock of the shoot out, with the shock of the one bullet that made contact, and Ranger was in full shock when he arrived in the ER. His injuries were not life-threatening, but the system shock was making everything go fubar. When I got to the ER, I dove past the Merry men, taking Lester down when he tried to pick me up to stop me, and found Ranger surrounded by medical staff who could not figure out what to do. I immediately went to his side, and started whispering in his ear all the things I had wanted to say, but never could. I kissed his face, each kiss leaving him covered in my tears, and I ran my fingers through his hair. It took two hours for him to come fully out of his state of shock after I had shown up.
Three months later, I finally agreed to let Ranger join me for dinner. I had to lead him to my home, as the Merry Men refused to let him break my new found security. At dinner he told me that he heard everything I told him in the hospital, and that he felt the same for me. I'm proud to say I remembered to scramble the video feed, before we destroyed dinner and made love on the kitchen table.
We woke up the next morning to a voicemail from Jackson, one of the new staff members at Rangeman, who called to advise me that per security guidelines he would have to turn the video feed back on in five minutes. That had been three hours prior to our waking. Thankfully once Jackson realized he was staring at a naked Ranger protectively holding a naked me, he turned the video back off and left another voicemail apologizing, and requesting that Ranger not kill him. He would have made it without extra mat time if Jackson would have left out the complement on my tattoo.
Two months later Ranger proposed to me, and I told him that I would never be able to provide him with children. I told him of the night when I was at college when I was raped by three different men. I told him about the abortion I had two months later, and I told him about the infection that ate away at my body, while I just cried, thinking that it was guilt that hurt so bad. Ranger held me the entire time, never getting angry, never getting mad, he just held me and told me he loved me. The next day he asked me to marry him again.
It took me months to find the words to his question. While we were hunting down a federal FTA when ended up in Vegas, we had been tracking him for a month, and finally I took him down in Cesar's Palace. I was wearing a very slinky dress – Thank god for body tape – with 4 inch FMPs. The Merry Men were distracted by the showgirls walking by, Ranger was distracted by me. I realized that the FTA recognized the Merry Men, and was about to make a quick exit out the back, when I started running after him. By the time Ranger and The Merry Men caught up to me, I had my gun drawn on a knocked out FTA who was cuffed to a bike rack. The Merry Men were all stunned, and trying to figure out where I had hid the gun and handcuffs. Ranger was just proud. After the Merry Men carried my FTA to the car, I saw the answer to Ranger's proposal, and we were married that night.
Since then Ranger and I have continued life as normal. He still owns Rangeman. I still work for Vinnie. Ranger still goes in the wind, only now I get the phone updates and not Rangeman. I still offer distraction services to Rangeman.
Other things have changed; Rex died a year after we were married. Lester, Tank, and Hal all are married with children. Binkie was killed in action. Connie married Hector (as dreamed he was not gay, and does speak English).
Tonight we are celebrating my ten year anniversary as a bounty hunter and the 28 years before that, and I have to wonder what took me so long to find my place in the world. Maybe we all needed to get ready for the real Stephanie Plum to arrive. Maybe we were never ready.