The Private Detective
Chapter 1: The Rescue
Disclaimer: I own nothing related to the X-Men, and I am making no profit from this. The only thing that I claim as my own is the original character(s).
***Ok, folks, here's my first X-Men fanfic. It will take place in the X-Men movie universe after the events of The Last Stand. Honestly, the X-Men universe is mostly a setting, although several of the X-Men will be important to the plot. A large amount of focus will be on the O/C. Also, while it hasn't quite earned the rating yet, this will be a mature story. I mean it. Parts of it will be quite dark and will deal with rape, torture, and the modern slave trade. If you can't handle that, leave now. Lastly, I'd just like to clarify that I have nothing against people of Albanian nationality/heritage in real life. They are used and described here merely as a plot device. Now, read on, enjoy, and review afterwards.***
Albanians. He fucking hated Albanians. Actually, that statement was too general. He knew several Albanian men and women who were wonderful people. However, in this context, speaking of the criminal world, he fucking hated Albanians. It was something about the way that they conducted their affairs. Obviously, anyone operating with any degree of success in New York's criminal underworld had to be fairly ruthless, but these people took it to the next level. While most organized criminal enterprises preferred more subtle methods such as blackmail, intimidation, bribery, and the occasional black eye or broken kneecap, and resorted to extreme violence only when other methods failed, the Albanians used violence and murder as a first choice. They would even beat and kill on a whim for no reason other than to prove to the rest of the underworld that they were capable of it. Even the Mafia tried to steer clear of them.
If there was one thing that the Albanians knew how to do well, it was human trafficking. It was a business that had been established quite a while ago back in Europe, and now, they were expanding to the United States. Moving across multiple adjoining countries in Europe was relatively easy, but moving merchandise in and out of the US was quite difficult. It was much easier for the Albanians to set up shop in America and keep that segment of their business confined within her borders. Their modus operandi was fairly simple in principle. Kidnap young women, force drugs into them in order to get them addicted, repeatedly torture and violate them to break their spirits, and finally, sell them to gangs, brothels, and even individuals for use as sex slaves.
While simple in principle, the methods were more complicated in practice. It took organization and considerable resources to kidnap the women and then keep them contained. The whole enterprise was further complicated by the obvious need to keep everything absolutely hidden. It was a filthy business, and the Albanians knew it. They had discovered that while the police could often be persuaded to look the other way in matters of racketeering and drug trafficking, they would relentlessly pursue human traffickers with a drive and determination that frightened even the traffickers. Other gangs and even the Mafia had proved willing to break their code of silence to report the human trafficking rings to the police. However, the police, and even the other criminals couldn't pursue what they couldn't find, and so over the years, the methods of concealment had developed to the point that the entire operation was essentially invisible from the outside. Fortunately, he was very good at finding things and people who didn't want to be found.
Jack Ingram drove toward the docks, continuing to ponder the people that he would soon be facing. He was a private detective who had been hired to retrieve the daughter of a New Yorker. Over the past year or so, he had become known as something of a specialist in retrieving women from the sex trade. The police did all that they could to track down the women and their captors, but it was a difficult job to do if one was bound by the constraints of the law. He was sure that one day the police would build their case against many of the big players in the trade and get a huge portion of it shut down, but it would take at least another few years. Meanwhile, women continued to disappear.
Jack knew that the only realistic way to get a woman back was to find her within four days of her abduction. After that, she would truly disappear, and even he would have a difficult time locating her. This particular woman's father had been put into contact with Ingram three days previously, and Ingram had waded through the fetid marsh that was the modern slave trade to find her. Her location had been given to him by the former boss of a Manhattan brothel after all five of the boss's fingers had been individually removed from his left hand in a brutal interrogation that ended with him being shot in the head behind his whorehouse. Given the nature of the Albanian gangs, Jack didn't like to leave behind a lot of witnesses. Few people would miss him, and the police were quite willing to let that particular homicide investigation fall by the wayside.
Jack parked his car at the designated rendezvous that the Albanians had given him. On this particular recovery, he was going undercover as a buyer. He would be operating under the pretense of purchasing the girl that he was liberating. As he walked across the dock to the building where the "sale" was to take place, he looked like an average citizen out for a walk along the pier. In the cold and wet weather, his trench coat, fedora, and sunglasses would raise little suspicion, while preventing any passersby from noticing any features that they could later identify. Underneath the coat were concealed various weapons and devices that Jack used on the job. Knives, lock picks, a .45 automatic, and various other items made up his kit, but perhaps the most valuable asset that he possessed was his mutation.
Jack Ingram had realized that he was different shortly after he began puberty. He had never been particularly fast or strong in junior high, and he had always been prone to illness. However, when he finally began to change in high school, he noticed that he seemed to be undergoing some changes that were not part of the typical pubescent experience. His muscles seemed to develop almost overnight, and without any deliberate training, he was soon one of the fastest and strongest athletes in his school. His reflexes also became extraordinarily quick. His changes happened so fast that everyone assumed that he had entered the realm of performance enhancing drugs in order to compete with his teammates. However, after he proved that he was clean, everyone eventually just assumed he had hit a rapid growth spurt. Given that his newfound abilities made him a phenomenon on the football field, no one was really complaining.
His physique wasn't the only thing that changed. Once disease-prone, Jack simply stopped getting sick, and no matter how many brutal hits he endured on the field, he never suffered an injury. However, Jack never realized how different he truly was until one night during his senior year. Walking home after a party one night during a driving thunderstorm, Jack had slipped on the wet sidewalk in front of a store and crashed through a plate glass window. As he fell through, a shard of glass slashed his wrist down to the bone, and he began to bleed profusely. Given that this happened before the prevalence of cellular phones, and given that Jack had been alone on that deserted sidewalk, he had been quite certain that he would bleed to death from his injury. However, to his amazement, when he looked at his wrist a second time, he saw the wound repairing itself before his very eyes.
Naturally, Jack had kept quiet about his abilities. He graduated at the tail end of the 1980s. The eighties. During that time, mutants were thrown in with gays, trans-genders, AIDS, and everything else that deviated from what was "normal." It was a time when "different" meant "dangerous," and in the interest of self-preservation, he had lived his life as any normal, non-mutated college student would. He had heard of a school in Westchester that was a safe place for mutants, but given that his mutation didn't involve strangely colored skin, extra appendages, or the ability to shoot bolts, beams, or fire from various orifices, he had decided that he would be safe enough in the regular society. After his brief career as a cop ended on less than stellar terms, he decided to employ himself as a private detective and help those to whom the police were unable or unwilling to render aid. It was this career choice that ultimately led to him standing on the pier now, preparing to retrieve a stolen woman and wreak havoc on her captors in the name of justice.
They approached him on the pier. Two Albanians wearing three piece suits and wielding silenced Mac-10s.
-"You are the Mr. John Randall?" asked one of the gangsters.
-"John Randall, that's me," replied Ingram.
-"Marco is telling us that we are to be expecting you. You please to follow us," the second gangster said in slightly broken English.
The gangsters led him into a non-descript building on the dock. The three men walked into the entryway which led immediately to a staircase and walked up the stairs to the room where the transaction would take place. The building was devoid of any permanent fixtures, furnished instead with a few cots, a large card table and several folding chairs. In one corner sat a small propane stove, and next to it, a few boxes containing canned food, pasta, and other non-perishable goods. Clearly, these men had no intentions of staying here long. Just long enough to offload their merchandise, and then it was off to pick up more women and store them somewhere else. The man called Marco walked into the main room flanked by two bodyguards and addressed his customer.
-"Ah, Mr. Randall," he said in perfect English. "How nice to finally meet you. It is a pleasure."
-"If you can give me what I want, the pleasure will be all mine," Jack replied.
-"Of course, of course," said Marco. "Unfortunately, I must be a bit unpleasant with you at first. My men will need to search you for weapons."
-"Of course," said Jack.
Two of Marco's bodyguards proceeded to pat down Ingram, searching for weapons. Just as Jack expected, they immediately found the .45 caliber Glock pistol and the double edged stiletto in his waist band, as well as the folding knife in his pocket. Satisfied that they had disarmed him, they stepped back and nodded their approval to Marco. Jack smiled inwardly; for supposed "professionals," these clowns had done an awful job of searching him. What they had failed to find were the three throwing knives concealed directly underneath the weapons that had been confiscated. It was a common mistake not to double check an area where a weapon had been found. Once the weapon was confiscated, many people assumed that the spot was clear. It was a mistake that would prove to be extremely unfortunate for the gangsters in the very near future.
-"Well now, Mr. Randall," said Marco, smiling. "Now that we've taken care of that, I believe that we can do business."
Outside the building where the transaction was taking place, a man crouched behind a stack of crates, slowly working his way toward the building. His keen eyes picked up the lone guard walking alongside the wall. He was smoking a cigarette and listening to music on his iPod, totally unaware of his surroundings. It would be the last mistake he would ever make. Silent as a shadow, the man snuck up behind the clueless guard, and with one fluid motion, he wrapped his hand around the guard's mouth to silence him as he impaled the guard through the back with three long adamantium claws. Having dispatched his enemy, the Wolverine sheathed his claws and pressed an ear to the wall, using his enhanced sense of hearing to discern what was going on inside the building.
Logan had been on the trail of these Albanian gangsters for three days. Ever since they got word of Kitty's disappearance. Logan kept replaying the details in his mind. She had been out in the city with Bobby when she had been taken. It had been three men, or four; Bobby couldn't remember. He and Kitty had been walking through an alley at dusk to reach a movie theater, when someone stepped in behind them and fired a tranquilizer dart into Kitty's neck. Before Bobby could react properly, he was shot in the chest. Lacking the focus to use his powers, due to the sedative, he had been unable to help Kitty. All that he was able to do was get a rough physical description of the three or four men before one of them hit him between the eyes with a collapsible baton. When he came to, Kitty was nowhere to be found, and he immediately called the mansion and reported what had happened. Since then, Logan had been hot on the trail of Kitty's abductors, and his investigation had ultimately led him to this pier, as some asshole was showing up to purchase a sex slave.
Logan thought about the customer that he had seen enter the building. If things went Logan's way, the customer would purchase Kitty and bring her outside. Ambushing and eviscerating one man would be much easier than engaging a room full of heavily armed gangsters. Of course, the bullets would be ineffective against him, but if he went charging in there, Kitty was liable to catch a round or two, and it was a safe bet that her phasing abilities had been somehow suppressed by the traffickers. That was his plan, he decided. He would wait for the customer to leave. If the customer had purchased Kitty, then he would recover her outside on the dock. Otherwise, he would do the best that he could with a frontal assault. He crouched outside the building to wait. However, when his ears picked up the cacophony of yells, loud crashes, and gunfire, he quickly changed his plan.
-"So Mr. Randall," began Marco. "You have what we require?"
-"Fifty-thousand dollars. US. As agreed upon," replied Jack as he opened the aluminum briefcase filled with money.
Marco moved to take the case, but Jack stopped him. "Not so fast," he said with a smile. "We agreed that I get to inspect the merchandise before I pay."
-"Of course," replied Marco. "Bessan, show Mr. Randall what he's buying. I must say Mr. Randall, you're making an excellent purchase. We've given her several, ah, test drives, as you Americans say. I guarantee your satisfaction."
It was a tribute to Jack's finely-honed skills in this field that he didn't so much as flinch when he was informed that these foul men had already repeatedly raped the girl that he was here to rescue. He'd expected as much, but that didn't make it any easier to hear. Still, he had a role to play if he was to pull off this rescue, so he chuckled along with the gangsters while making a mental note that Marco would die slowly and in an extremely painful fashion. Bessan led Jack into the dimly lit holding room where a young woman was chained to a wall. It was Elizabeth Franklin, the woman that he was here to rescue. Next to Elizabeth was an empty set of shackles. Jack noticed the fresh blood on the shackles, and inferred that they had not been empty for very long. Jack cursed inwardly. He knew that the gangsters kept two or three women at a time, and he had hoped to liberate them as well as Elizabeth. As Bessan walked over to the far wall, his back to Jack, to turn on a light, Jack signaled with his hands for Elizabeth to be silent and made his first move.
In addition to the knives that the gangsters hadn't found on him, Jack had also concealed a garrote inside the band of his wristwatch. Quick as a flash and aided by his enhanced speed, he looped the wire around Bessan's throat and tightened it viciously. He began talking aloud; acting as though he was inspecting Elizabeth in order to mask his actions to the men outside. Not wanting to waste time waiting until his victim had fully suffocated, Jack simply strangled him to the point of unconsciousness before finishing him off with a precise knife thrust to the heart. He then moved toward Elizabeth, preparing her for what was to come next.
-"Listen to me Elizabeth," he whispered. "I'm not going to hurt you. Your father hired me to free you, and I'm fixing to get you out of here. I'm going to deal with the men outside. Whatever happens, you stay in this room until I come and get you. Do you understand?"
Unable to speak, due to the ball gag in her mouth, Elizabeth simply nodded.
-"Good," said Jack. "I'll be back in a minute."
And with that, Jack readied two of his throwing knives, took a moment to mentally prepare himself for the brief but intense fight that was about to take place, and opened the door.
Jack's first move was to throw his first knife into Marco's leg. The excruciating pain and serious blood loss would effectively take the leader out of the fight while Jack dispatched the bodyguards and then returned to give Marco more detailed attention. The three remaining bodyguards reacted almost instantly, drawing their weapons to take him down, but Jack moved faster. Grabbing the nearest gangster, Jack used him as a human shield while throwing his second knife into another man's shoulder. The man screamed in pain and fired a wild burst from his Mac-10 into the ceiling as he stumbled backwards. The third guard rushed Jack, hoping to gain an advantage while Jack had his hands full holding up the other gangster. Using his enhanced strength, Jack shoved the man he was holding into his companion, sending them both crashing through the card table.
Seeing the wounded gangster rising from the floor, Jack leapt across the room and, using his third knife, grabbed the man's Mac-10 out of his grasp while stabbing him repeatedly in the upper torso. Dropping the lifeless body, Jack whirled around, throwing the knife at one of the men rising from off of the broken table and hitting him between the eyes. Raising the machine pistol, he fired the last 15 rounds into the chest of the final guard. The whole fight lasted slightly less than thirty seconds. He walked over to Marco and realized that the man was done for. The throwing knife had completely bisected the femoral artery, and blood was pouring from the wound. Jack frowned; he had been hoping to make the bastard suffer for a lot longer. Yanking the knife from his leg, Jack went to retrieve Elizabeth, leaving the screaming, cursing Marco to bleed out on the floor.
Elizabeth had heard everything that had happened through the door to her room, and was shaking in fear. She was sure that the four gangsters would kill Jack and then come in to kill her, or worse. So, when she saw Jack walk through the door, she breathed a sigh of relief. Having retrieved the key to her restraints, he quickly released her and removed the gag.
-"Oh my god," sobbed Elizabeth. "Thank you so much."
-"It's ok, it's ok," said Jack, holding on to her, trying to calm her down. "But listen, we have to get moving. Somebody may have heard the fighting, so we need to leave."
-"She was right. You did come," Elizabeth said.
-"What? Who was right?" asked Jack.
-"The girl who was with me in here," Elizabeth explained. "Someone bought her early this morning. But when she was here, she kept saying that Bobby was coming to rescue her, and that I'd be free too."
Jack was confused by this. "My name is Jack Ingram," he said. "Your father hired me to get you back. Whoever that girl was, I didn't know about her. Look, we have to go now. Follow me."
The two of them walked back into the main room. It was a testament to her strength that Elizabeth never flinched at the sight of the bodies and blood on the floor, or at the sight of Marco screaming in pain and thrashing in the throes of his impending death. Jack swiftly retrieved his throwing knives, pistol, stiletto, and folding knife, as well as the briefcase full of money, and walked towards the stairs, Elizabeth at his heels.
Logan listened intently to what was going on after the sounds of combat had died down. The "customer" seemed to be the last man standing, and he was bringing a girl out of the building with him. Strange, he thought. Displays like this were usually the stuff of drug deals. Sales of humans tended to go much more smoothly, at least according to his police contacts. It certainly made sense. Few men would want to incur the wrath of an Albanian syndicate. Logan frowned; the female voice was certainly not Kitty's. Either she had never been there, or during the fighting… Logan shook his head. He would not complete that thought. He crouched just around the corner, out of sight of the doorway to the building. He would wait for this "customer" to leave the building with his merchandise, and then he'd make his move. The buyer and the Wolverine were about to have a long and very painful conversation.
Jack walked down the staircase towards the front door and motioned for Elizabeth to leave in front of him. Jack was nervous. It was the final stage of these proceedings that were the most dangerous. The time when the gangsters' backup that you never knew about showed up and gunned down you and the person you were supposed to rescue. It had happened only once before in Jack's career. He had obviously healed, but the woman who he had tried to rescue had been killed. It was an incident that haunted him during these jobs; an incident that he would not allow to happen again. He was so focused on his thoughts and on the path ahead of him leading toward his car, that he never noticed the Wolverine slip up behind him. He never knew what hit him when the adamantium-reinforced fist crashed into his right temple, sending him to the ground in an unconscious heap.
***And there you have it. The first chapter. I hope that you enjoyed reading it, and I promise to continue the story. However, if you want to see any more of it, you must review. Please, guys. Take the time to write a brief comment/critique. I like knowing that people are reading, and I also like knowing of things that you liked and things to improve on. I'm especially interested in what you think of the OC so far. Until next time, dear readers.***
- Mark Spectre