I'm borrowing from JE, I deserve no credit.

Jenny (JenRar) you are an amazing beta. Thank you for your hard work on this story, and for your encouragement of me to write it in the first place.

Chapter 6 - Hal - That's Dr. Halosaurus to You

I never lie. It's part of why I went into science, because it was a way of justifying anything I said in concrete, thus provable, points. But knowing that Stephanie had the ability to take her own life with something as simple as the push of a button was too much for me, and when I saw that she was basically looking at that as her get of jail free card, I had to say something to stop her.

I knew that Stephanie put our lives above her own, so the lie about the rope having metal in it jumped out of my mouth before Lester or Manny had a chance to come up with anything better. I never would have attempted it if she'd been facing me, because she could read people so well, and even though she was pretty out of her normal zone, she still would have seen through my lame attempt at a stall tactic.

The expressions on the guys' faces should have been insulting. They appeared to be grateful, but more than that, they were absolutely floored with shock. I might have taken offense, but I knew that I rarely spoke up unless it related to something in my field of expertise, so they had every right to feel that way.

I knew they'd been telling her stories about themselves to keep her mind occupied. Psychology wasn't my science, but their logic made sense. When I heard Manny call in Cal, I knew it was because they needed to keep her distracted. I didn't have any interesting stories to tell her – my life was as Middle America and dull as they came – but I could talk about what I knew and buy them enough time to get Cal in here. If anybody could keep going with personal stories that were engaging and surprising, it would be him. We were about as different as two people could be, but I still liked Cal. He'd keep Stephanie distracted while the rest of us got to work.

"It looked like you put up a good fight before they got you," I said, moving myself forward a little to be closer to Stephanie's ear, so I wouldn't have to talk so loud.

"I tried," she said, twisting her head slightly, but not enough to see me, "But it wasn't enough to stop them. I guess I should have taken my self defense lessons with Tank a little more seriously."

I didn't know she was taking self-defense with Tank. That's a great idea. If I'd known, I would have volunteered to help teach her. I get a bum rap as being the quietest person at RangeMan, but that isn't entirely true. In reality, I'm comfortable talking, as long as it's a topic where I have some knowledge. I'd been through all the physical training the other guys have been through, and I love to teach. I always assumed I'd get hurt at some point in the line of duty, and then I'd see about teaching as a second career. So far, I'd been lucky enough to stay in this line of work so I could have both the heady challenge and the occasional rush of adrenaline chasing down the scum in Trenton. But it was nice to have a Plan-B in case I needed it.

I shook my head to clear the thought of me in front of a dry erase board. That was Woody's place right now, and we all needed to focus on the job in front of us.

"How did you know I put up a fight?" she asked, giving me the perfect opening to talk to her.

"I was given the job of processing your apartment as a crime scene to see if I could find any clues about who took you," I told her honestly. I figured since this involved her, there was no reason to filter any of the information as classified. I always thought we kept too much from her as it was. Sure, she loved to talk, but she never betrayed a confidence, and there were times I felt like if we'd told her the whole truth, she might have made different decisions that would have kept her safer.

She made a strange sound at the idea of me seeing her apartment, and then said, "It must have been a wreck."

"I've seen worse," I answered her honestly, and then realized that kind of disclosure wasn't helpful, so I tried engaging her. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Yeah," she said as permission, but it didn't have her usual enthusiasm.

"The door to your apartment was hacked up with an ax. Why didn't you call 911, or grab a panic button to alert us someone was there?" I asked the question that had bothered me the most since I first arrived at her home.

She hung her head. "I'd asked Eddie for some help with a skip, and he said he would do what I needed, only if I'd agree to babysit his kids so that he could take my cousin out to dinner. He promised it would only be for a couple of hours, and they went later so that the kids would be asleep. I was only supposed to stay in case something went wrong at the house. But the second their car left the driveway, the children jumped out of bed and came charging downstairs, and I couldn't get them back to sleep until after mid-night. Eddie and Shirley didn't get home until a couple of hours after that, so I was completely exhausted. When I got home, I dropped my purse, with my cell phone clipped to it, near the front door and collapsed on the bed, still in my clothes, and went to sleep. I had a horrible nightmare that I was still babysitting and the kids were nailing the door shut to the room I was in. By the time I woke up and realized the sounds weren't in my dream, but in reality, I couldn't get to my purse in the den for a panic button or my stun gun. I picked up the phone next to my bed, but it was dead, so I couldn't call 911."

"How many kids do they have?" I asked, unsure why she seemed to think babysitting was such an ordeal.

"Three, but they're wild animals who have been allowed to watch large amounts of reality TV, so they have all these ideas they want to try out. If you let your guard down even for a minute, they'll give you a haircut, and then try using bubblegum to stick your hair back on so you won't notice," she explained with a shiver that told me that wasn't a fully hypothetical example.

I wasn't sure if she was cold, or if the thought of being around the kids was that terrifying, so I decided to let her get out of that place in her mind.

"I could see that you managed to hurt one of them, because we pulled a thirty eight slug out of the wall," I told her, trying to compliment her for hurting them, but still a little confused about how she managed to get to her gun if her purse was in the den.

She let out a bitter sounding laugh, not at all her usual happy sound. "They pulled me out of my bedroom, and I got mad. I don't know why being forced to leave that room pissed me off, but it did. They'd already cut my arm," she said, looking down at her left side to a makeshift bandage that appeared to be a sock that was at one point white, but was now stained with dried blood and tied tightly to her with a pair of women's hose. I guess that explained why that drawer in her bedroom had been rummaged through.

She jerked her head away from the wound, as though looking at it made it hurt more. "So after they dragged me out of the bedroom, I kicked the guy holding me in the balls, and then ran to the kitchen. They'd been expecting me to try to escape, so they were guarding the front door, not the cookie jar. I told you guys it was a great place to leave my gun. I pulled it out and fired without thinking when the biggest guy came at me."

"You must have hit him, because there was a good bit of blood on the cushion in your den that wasn't yours," I pointed out, impressed that with a single shot in a high stress situation, she'd been able to hit her target.

"I got him in the arm, in just about the same place he'd stabbed me, and so it seemed fair. Of course, I regretted not taking the box of bullets Ranger kept trying to force on me, because I only had the one shot, and it seems that if you shoot a big goon, it only makes them mad, instead of scaring them off," she said, basically admitting to the end of her resistance.

"Why didn't any of your neighbors come check on you?" I couldn't help but ask. I mean, she lived in an apartment building full of people. Where was the common sense of dignity that said when you hear screaming and gunfire, you try to help?

She shook her head and sounded so sad when she said, "A few of them were away, visiting family, one is completely deaf when he isn't wearing his hearing aids and he rarely leaves his apartment, and Mrs. Slovinski across the hall told me once that if I didn't start hanging out with a different class of people, it was going to catch up with me one day. I have a feeling she heard the noise and ignored it to teach me a lesson."

I reached out and touched her hair, wishing I were Santos for the first time in my life so that I would have something to say that would make her feel better. "You think she ignored the sounds in your apartment because she wanted you to stop associating with us?"

She shrugged her shoulders, like she didn't know. "I got a letter from the owners of the building last week telling me that my lease was coming up for renewal and they would be speaking with the surrounding residents before automatically rolling it over for another year. They'd gotten a good number of complaints about me over the last few years, so I think my time there was limited. I was pissed at first, but when I looked at it from their point of view, I understood. I mean, they're old, and they don't deserve to be in danger because someone in their building can't take care of themselves."

That was just like her, to see someone else's point of view instead of standing up for her own right to live wherever she wanted. She paid her rent the same as everyone else in the building, and she didn't deserve to be thrown out just because her life was more interesting than theirs.

"Does this mean you're going to take the empty apartment on four?" I asked, trying to sound excited, while I wrapped one of the corkscrew curls around my index finger, amazed at how it felt.

I'd always loved her hair – it was a guilty pleasure that I'd never admit to. I wouldn't say it was a fetish like the weird thing Bones had for a woman's fingernails, but I had gone to bed on more than one occasion finding relief after imagining what it would be like to feel her hair on my cock. I would never disrespect Stephanie by saying anything about it, but I'd bet the texture and the light tickling it would bring would be my undoing super fast.

I never thought I'd have the chance to touch it, and with it literally right in front of me, I couldn't stop myself. I'd read once that our scalps have twice as many nerve endings as any other part of our skin, outside of our sexual organs. Based on that, I buried my hand farther in her hair, trying to get down to her head to rub those underappreciated nerve endings.

I heard a moan and discounted it, knowing how verbal Stephanie was when she was enjoying something. But when she leaned back and asked if I was okay because she'd never heard me make a noise like that, I realized I was the one that had lost control of my vocal chords. There was no way to explain my way out of this, so I used both hands at the base of her hairline at her neck and applied pressure in small circles until I felt her begin to relax. Her hair was covering my wrists and arms, and I felt like this was heaven in the middle of hell.

She was being so brave and far exceeding anything we could expect of her, considering her condition. Perhaps it was the real possibility that she might not make it out of this that gave me the boldness to finally touch her. Now that I had my hands in her hair, I couldn't remember why I was so reluctant to do this before. The ends were that kind of untamable roughness that you'd expect from looking at it, but at the base, the hair was unexpectedly softer, and my fingers wouldn't stop moving.

"Based on the pattern of the fight I saw, I'd say if they hadn't cheated and sedated you, they might not have gotten you out of there." I knew I needed to say something unrelated to the experience I was having with my hands buried in her hair. Science was always a safe subject matter, so I decided to stick with what I knew before I blurted out something stupid and embarrassed myself.

She shrugged again, before her head fell back slightly, proving I was relaxing her. I wasn't the smoothest person on staff, so seeing the effect I was having on Stephanie was a bit of a rush, emboldening me to move up on her scalp.

She hissed, and I recognized a good sized good egg at the right side of her head. A knock hard enough to make that big of a swelling had the potential to translate into a major concussion.

"What happened?" I asked her, moving away from the injury after feeling around it to estimate the diameter and height to report on later.

"I don't remember," she said softly. "It happened after they hurt my leg, so I don't know if I fell and hit my head, or if they knocked me out with the bat they'd used on my calf."

Son of a bitch. These guys were dead as soon as we could track them down. I needed to get my brain out of my fingertips and stop lusting after a damn head of hair. I was the detail guy, and it was time to get the frigging details to finish this – now.

I pulled my hands away, and Steph made a noise that didn't sound pleased at the withdrawal. It was a compliment that I didn't know how to thank her for, but I knew I'd remember it at night when I was alone, and I'd smile over it.

"I saw evidence of three people, but can you remember how many people were there?" I asked, getting my crime scene hat back on firmly.

"There were four – the one that did all the talking, the guys called him Jefe, but I thought that was a nickname, not his actual name," she said, proving that her natural intuition of reading people was spot on.

"It means boss," I explained, knowing how much she liked having mysteries cleared up.

"Hmm..." She made a sound as she tucked away that tidbit, before moving on. "There was the muscle that I kicked in the groin and shot in the arm. There was another guy that took my gun away, and then smiled at me when he saw I didn't have any more ammunition. I got the feeling he thought it was cute that I only had one bullet and no more. And there was a forth guy – he was the one with the needle. He didn't say a word the whole time, and once I woke up, I didn't see him again."

"We know who took you," I told her, feeling that she deserved the truth. "It was an enemy of Ranger's from one of his missions. His name's Hernando Juarez, and he's after Ranger because the mission where they crossed paths caused the death of Juarez's brother, Alberto, and Alberto's wife, Maria. When they couldn't get any information out of you, they decided to use you as bait."

"I didn't tell them anything. I promise I didn't," she said, as though desperate to be sure we all knew she hadn't betrayed us.

"We know that, Stephanie," I assured her, using her full name to be sure she heard me. "It would have been okay if you'd given them something, but we all know you better than to think that you did."

"You guys have given so much to take care of me that I had to do whatever I could to return the favor," she explained with a sense of urgency coming through in her voice.

I returned one of my hands to the back of her head and gently rubbed her hair once more. "I'm going to go analyze the goo you're standing in and figure out what they've done to you so that we can get you out of here. You fought for us by not giving them anything to find Ranger with, and now, you have to trust us to fight for you. We're getting you out of here, and then together, we'll figure out how to be sure you're never in this situation again."

I used to laugh at Joe and Ranger when they'd discuss locking her up in a safe house, knowing firsthand how unlikely it was that she'd allow it. But at the moment, the idea of wrapping her in bubble wrap and securing her in a tall tower surrounded by a moat and a dragon might be fiction, but it sounded like a good first line of defense to me.

I pushed myself forward so that I could kiss the back of her head, thankful that she couldn't see me, because I didn't think I'd have the courage to kiss her if I could see her face.

Then I grabbed my kit, snapped it shut, and nodded at the guys so they'd know I was leaving. I was a few feet away when Stephanie called my name.

"Hal!"

I twisted my torso so that I could see her and waited to see what she needed to say.

"I'm sorry I stunned you."

I knew my face turned red at the memory of the first time I'd come face to face with Stephanie when Ranger wasn't around. She'd sweet talked me out of my stun gun, and then turned it on me.

"I'm not. In some ways, you did me a favor."

"Didn't the guys pick on you?" she wondered, obviously not expecting my response.

"Mercilessly, for about four days, but it gave me something to talk about besides chemistry, so they stopped looking at me as just a big guy who doubled as a mad scientist and saw I had a sense of humor, too. Then Cal had to call the control room for a ride when two wheels of his RangeMan SUV were stolen while he was in a strip club, so I was relegated to yesterday's news and allowed to pick on him for not being more aware of his surroundings."

I looked at Cal, who was holding a set of ropes to support Stephanie, and he was smiling. The guy never held a grudge, so I wasn't worried about telling Steph the truth.

When I glanced back at Stephanie, she was giving me one of her real smiles. It wasn't splitting her face like they sometimes did, but it told me my response had given her a brief moment of real joy, so I felt as though no matter what else I did, I could remember this moment as one of my greatest accomplishments.

I moved a few more inches away, before she said, "If I do manage to make it out of this—"

I interrupted her to correct that supposition. "You mean, when you get out of this."

She rolled her eyes a little and said, "Okay, when I get out of this, will you do that thing you just did with my hair again?"

All right, I was going to have a much more painful belly crawl back to the door with what was now pressing against the rough concrete through my cargos. "Name the time and place, and I'll be there."

She smiled again, and I decided I'd better move before I said or did something that would make me the headline gossip item for the day.

I moved as though a drill sergeant were barking orders over my head. The farther I got away from the spell of being close to Stephanie, the more I burned to find some answers to help get her out of the hell of that pit.

As soon as I cleared the rigged area, I jumped up and ran to the parking lot, hoping that no one had been stupid enough to touch my laptop. I'd brought up my chemistry diagnostic programs, which were huge files and took a while to boot up. With as much time as I had been in the warehouse, they should be ready to roll, as long as no one touched it. I knew Bones was out there, and I hoped my sidekick in science had run off anyone that had gotten too close to my workstation.

Tank came over the truck where the laptop was ready, and I continued to work, knowing he was going to want results in addition to whatever information he was about to request verbally.

"You get what you need?" he asked, pointing to the small tube in my hand. "That doesn't look like much."

"I couldn't risk taking too much," I explained, before answering his first question, "but I'm sure this will tell me what we need to know."

"How long will it take to get an answer?" he pushed. Tank could be a patient man and understood that some things took time, but I also knew this answer needed to be given faster than as soon as possible.

I shrugged. "Usually, I'd say I could figure it out in a couple of hours, but I know we don't have that kind of time, so I'll do everything I can to make it happen faster." It was a shitty answer, but it was all I could offer at the moment.

Tank turned his head away from me and looked at the warehouse for a moment before responding. "Come find me when you have something." Then he walked away without making a sound.

It was a strange thing that someone with Tank's bulk could be as stealthy as Hector when the situation called for it.

I could hear Stephanie asking Cal questions and knew that he was telling her some yarn from his past. If we needed to distract her, then Manny called in exactly the right person for the job. Lester seemed to be unusually subdued at the moment, which meant Cal was up as next best storyteller at RangeMan.

As much as I loved hearing her voice, just to know that she was still with us and doing okay, I also knew it was a distraction, so I forced myself to pull out the receiver from my ear in order to focus on the job at hand – I had to classify the pale green substance in this tube.

I held it up in front of my face and tilted the container, watching it move. It appeared to have been thickened, as there were few explosive agents that were as slow in moving as this was. I pulled out a small glass slide and told Bones to grab the old fashioned microscope in my padded bag. It was at the same level as what any college lab would have, but it did the job in the field well enough. When I needed something better, I had one that I'd saved all year for in my apartment at the office. Hopefully, what I needed to see would be visible enough here.

He handed me my equipment, and I placed the slide under the scope, hoping like hell to see something familiar enough to point me in the right direction. And as soon as I focused the eyepiece, I knew I'd hit pay dirt. In front of my eyes looked like a million bubbles of oil suspended in water. The cell size was tiny, which meant I was looking at a water in oil emulsion compound. Some people called it water gel explosives. There were several different variations of the gel portion, but since Stephanie had said a liquid would be added, I could safely rule it down to only a couple. And either one would be highly volatile if mixed with liquid aluminum.

Whoever had done this was smart. She might suffer some dizziness or headaches from the prolonged exposure, but those side effects would be equally attributable to her other injuries, as well. The ingredients could be easily ordered online or picked up at an expanded hardware store, which would make it impossible to trace back to them.

"Ram!" I called out, knowing he'd need to know as soon as possible to begin strategizing a containment plan as a worst case scenario. This stuff was being used in place of dynamite in many settings now, because it was stable to transport but created just as much damage as the old sticks did. If it went off, there was a real possibility that whole building could blow.

Tank came over at the same time Ram did. I hadn't bothered to call him, too, because I knew he'd show up at the first hint of progress being made.

"She's standing in a water gel explosive. If it gets hit with some liquid aluminum…" I left the result out there, knowing Ram would understand.

"Son of a bitch!" Ram shouted, using my go-to expletive. I tried not to swear – my parents had taught me better than that – but at the moment, I really understood the need to get that out.

"One of you two want to put that into English so I can figure out what to do next?" Tank asked, sounding unusually on edge about being left out of the explanation.

Ram spoke up, and I allowed him to explain, "Separately, neither of the compounds are dangerous, but when you mix them, they create the new go-to version of a terrorist bomb, because it is an instantaneous and huge scale explosion. Depending on the amounts and percentages mixed, it could easily rip the roof off that warehouse, raining this whole parking lot with shrapnel and debris. To play it safe, we should relocate at least a half mile away, and even then, we should have some kind of cover to protect us from the particles falling from the initial blast."

"She doesn't have the option of playing it safe, so we aren't bugging out on her. I'll give the men the option, but I'm not commanding anybody to go, and I sure as hell ain't budging," Tank announced firmly.

He could be as professional and stoic as the next commanding officer, but when he was pissed, he tended to use terminology designed to make his point of view crystal clear to what he called the least distinguished user. Even the dumbest among us would get that RangeMan didn't leave one of our own behind, and Stephanie was the very best one of us.

"What other options do we have?" Tank asked, knowing his point was clear on the first issue.

"There is no harm in moving her in the gel. As long as nothing triggers the release of the aluminum, she's safe, but when you mix the two the explosion occurs immediately, so there is no way to pick her up and make a run for it. The force of the explosion would kill anyone in that building without even considering what the fire and heat would do to their bodies," Ram reported, letting us know just how bleak it was.

"So how do we find the aluminum so it doesn't release into the gel?" Tank asked, proving why he was in charge at the moment. It was the next best solution.

"The pit is roughly three and a half feet in diameter so there is room around Stephanie, but despite the light in the warehouse, it's still dark around her, so it's hard to see," I said, trying to explain what it was like in there so they'd understand how hard it was to work.

"Is she in a hole they made in the ground, or was it there already?" he followed up.

"I didn't see any equipment, and the length of time necessary to dig something like that would have been greater than they had. The walls were pretty solid, so I'm guessing it was there, and they just dumped her in." I hated speculation, but we didn't have time to research every possibility right now.

Tank turned his external comm unit on to connect with Woody, and then said, "I need the prints for the warehouse where we're located five minutes ago. I want to know what the building was used for, and if there were any sub floor containers disclosed."

He turned back to me and said, "Anything else you need to share?"

I'd put a sample into the external scope and begun the process of running it through the identification database, so until I had an exact hit, there was nothing else for me to bring up.

I was about to say no, but for some reason, my mouth decided to work, and I said, "She's got a major knot on her head, near the back right hand side. There's a possibility she was knocked out with a bat. I don't think it's possible for her to have survived a hit hard enough to make that big of an egg without a concussion, too. She's tough and fighting hard to hang on, but she's got some serious injuries that we're going to need to treat as soon as possible. The human body can only handle so much, and she hasn't been trained to handle all that she's going through right now."

She had a concussion, a broken leg, a stab wound, and who the hell knew what else. I couldn't begin to guess what kind of damage that would do to her head, but the damage just from the physical injuries was enough to make me pause. She wasn't going to get out of there by her own steam. Whenever we cleared the way for her extraction, we needed to have a system to carry her in place. If we were still crawling around to avoid detection, we would need a sling or cart to assist us.

"I'll touch base with Manny about rigging something to help get her out when the time comes," I added, hoping that we were given the chance to use whatever Manny designed.

"I'll get Brown here, too," he said, highlighting the strange absence of our medic. Bobby was usually the first person on site for situations involving Stephanie. I'm sure there was a logical explanation for him not being here. There's no way he was missing this intentionally.

Tank was about to walk away, when I called back out to him. I don't know if it was the stress of the situation or what, but my mouth seemed to have a mind of its own today. I never voluntarily talked this much.

"After I get the exact compound she'd standing in, there won't be anything else for me to do from a tech standpoint. Do you need any help locating Juarez?"

I'd used my academic background to fight this battle as far as I could. I was up against a wall with what science could do, and now the other side of my personality was itching to rise to the surface. Sure, I'd used the GI bill to pay for my education, but people often forgot I still went through the same military training and service they had. There was a fight to be had, and I damn sure didn't want to be relegated to the lab for it.

Tank nodded, understanding what I'd left unsaid. "I've called in the wolves to handle the search. But once we have a location, I'll keep your offer in mind for the assault."

"Yes, sir," I replied, hoping I'd get the call.

The wolves were an internal codename for Hector, Binkie, Junior, and Zip. They could find a shadow in a room with no light, and they could sure as hell find some low life human traffickers. Their skills were all unique and effective, but when they combined, they hunted like a pack of wolves, which is where the name came from. They tended to fan out and use their various strengths to zone in until they surrounded their target. It was part instinct, part technology, and mostly just deadly honed skills that allowed them to always get their man. To date, when they'd worked together, they'd never failed to find their target. I felt better knowing they'd been called up as a unit and set off trying to find something to do to stay busy until Tank called us all in for the fight. Calling them up was always a last resort because when they hunted, just like real wolves, the prey usually got hurt.

The wolves might be in on the hunt, but once they'd found Juarez, I knew Tank would call in the fighters, and my trigger finger itched to get that call.