A/N: Thanks one more time go out to Aerox for the fast beta turnaround. Everyone give him a round of applause.
Chapter 9: Sarah vs the Wildcard
Chuck watched as the minutes ticked away through the high-powered scope on his low-powered rifle. The graves were deepening with every minute that passed, and his initial thought on the tableau playing out several hundred yards away seemed to have been right on the money. At least judging by what he could see from his perch up in the tree, better than six hundred yards away. Admittedly it wasn't the greatest view, even with the high-powered scope atop the relatively low-powered rifle. But he could at least recognize the pair of goons who'd accosted Sarah back at the diner the day before, and the short-order cook and their waitress. The two goons Chuck recognized were busily digging a pair of graves, flipping shovels of dirt over their shoulders with metronomic precision. The whole time, two other men Chuck didn't recognize held them at gunpoint. The women were bound with their hands behind their backs and sat on the ground near the graves. He called Sarah when the digging goons had disappeared into the deepening holes up past their waists. "How far out are you?" Chuck asked. He put the phone on speaker so he could peer through the scope as he spoke.
"Just a few minutes. Status?"
"Not great, I think they're almost done digging. Unless they actually bother letting the diner goons dig the full six feet."
"Okay. Sheriff, pedal to the metal."
"Hang on," Chuck said. "If you do that, they might hear the engine noise or see a dust plume. We don't want to tip them off you're on the way."
"We may not have a choice on that, Chuck. We're still a couple miles out."
"Crap," Chuck said. "It looks like they're done digging. The gun-goons are waving the diner-goons out of the graves. I think they're about to execute the women."
Sarah grimaced. "This thing go any faster?"
"Not really. But it does have four wheel drive. I can cut the corner, it might save us a little time getting there."
"Or we might bog down."
"Or that."
"Fine, do it," Sarah said. "I'm going to climb out into the back, in case we need to roll up shooting."
His eyes widened when she shoved the rear sliding window of the pickup cab open and wriggled out through it, without even waiting for him to slow down, somehow keeping her balance the entire time. He only had a moment to spare on the sight. He had to concentrate on driving. "Actually," Chuck said. "I've got an idea on how to stall them."
"What?" Sarah shouted over the wind of their passage and cupped her hand over the speaker.
"I've been doing the math, and I think I can lob some 22s downrange and keep the bad guys' heads down until you get there."
"Chuck you're breaking up," Sarah said. "It sounded like you said you want to shoot at them. A 22 isn't going to be worth a damn at that range."
"Not if I'm trying to hit them, no. But their car's a different matter. Bigger target. Like I said. I've been doing the math. Can't decide whether I should correct for the earth's rotation or not in addition to wind gravity, air resistance, temperature and humidity."
Sarah felt her jaw drop open in surprise at all the factors he was apparently juggling.
"You did that math in your head?" she demanded, just a touch shrilly, even though she would later deny it.
"No, my trigonometry is a little out of practice. But I've got a graphing calculator app in my phone, and the Intersect helps out some too," Chuck said. "Okay, I gotta concentrate. Bye." She just heard the faint report of his suppressed .22 rifle over the line before it went dead.
Connor clambered awkwardly out of the grave, Billy a second or two behind him, climbing out of the one he'd dug. Connor was a little shocked he'd been allowed back out. But then, the two enforcers the boss had sent out probably didn't want to dirty their own hands digging graves for anybody. So he had another half hour or so of life left in him, if he could manage to drag out digging his own grave that long.
The enforcer-Connor thought his name was Melvin-gestured with his pistol for the women to get up. The second man was just rounding the car, and Connor stepped closer to Melvin while he was distracted. Connor still had the shovel. If he could only keep Melvin's attention somewhere else, another step would put him in range and... the rear tire on the car exploded. Melvin turned in shock. Connor lunged forward. Billy was slower, he'd been too far away to be contemplating a move. The second enforcer shouted a warning just as Connor swung the shovel. The blade cracked Melvin's gun-hand and his pistol went flying. Behind him, Billy let out a shout and charged. Connor swung again, but Melvin ducked, and he overbalanced when the swing whiffed over Melvin's head, sending the shovel crashing into the rear driver's side window in a shower of breaking glass.
Connor shouted in rage and managed to plant a knee in Melvin's groin before his headlong rush sent them both crashing to the ground.
"Crap," Chuck said, working the action on his rifle to chamber another round. "Crap, crap, crap." Things were moving out of control now. It looked like a general bloodbath was in the offing. He peered through the scope again, the distant picture jumping into sight, if not focus. Two of the goons were down in a tangle, rolling around and trying to strangle each other. Impossible to tell who was winning. The waitress and the cook jumped into their graves to avoid the gunfire. One of the gun-goons opened fire, Chuck heard the crack of gunfire a second after the flash, and it looked like the slower diner goon crumpled. But there were those other two still grappling on the ground in front of their car. Chuck changed his point of aim again, angling up to put the round on an almost parabolic trajectory, held his breath and squeezed the trigger. It was almost three full seconds before the round landed, whipping through the already smashed back window and blasting out the passenger side. The gun-goon behind the car ducked back under cover. More gunshots reached Chuck's ear a little later, and he spotted one of the diner goons getting up. Chuck put another round downrange, and knocked out the front driver's side window. The two remaining goons exchanged fire briefly, both keeping down and using the car for cover, not even aiming, just sticking one hand over the hood and firing they ran out of ammo, Chuck expected the fight to be over, at least for a little while, and he swept the scope over the scene, trying to determine who was still breathing and who wasn't.
But the lull was short-lived. The surviving goon from the diner was busy searching for spare magazines in his victim's coat pockets, and it looked like the remaining gun-goon was doing the same in the front seat of the car. Chuck took his eye off the scope momentarily to get a quick look at the bigger picture. A dust plume was approaching rapidly from the south, which just had to be Sarah and the old sheriff. But it looked like they were still out of range to do anything about anything before the gunfight broke back out. Chuck hunched back down around the rifle and the picture jumped closer again. The gun-goon came out of the front seat with a shotgun and began slowly creeping around the front hood, keeping a careful eye out for the diner-goon. Chuck flinched upward reflexively, the Intersect and his own muscle memory working in tandem. He squeezed off the round and had to wait the same nearly three seconds for his subsonic round to make its long arcing way to its target. The round pinged off the hood of the car and grazed the shotgunner across the forearm. The man dropped down below the line of the hood where Chuck couldn't see him. Chuck grimaced. "Crap," he said aloud, trying to do the math on a trajectory that would let him drop a round just on the other side of the car. As long as the gunman stuck to his cover like that, he'd have to elevate too much, and the wind would send any rounds from his .22, God only knew where. He grit his teeth, realizing what the gunman was thinking. From his vantage he couldn't see much, but he knew the man was heading toward the still-open graves, where the waitress and the cook from the diner had jumped to get out of the line of fire.
Chuck gripped the rifle so hard he heard the wood stock creak as the gunman stood up at last, just a step from the graves. Chuck should have fired three seconds earlier, tried to anticipate the man standing, but even then the odds of him actually hitting the man and disabling him were far from good.
They were trapped and there was nothing Chuck could do as the gunman leveled his shotgun. And then the man's chest and side erupted in a cloud of blood and he crumpled to the ground in a puff of dirt, the shotgun tumbling from lifeless fingers. Chuck instinctively swung the scope around, and blinked in surprise. He'd forgotten about Sarah and Turner. Better than a hundred yards away, Sarah stood in the bed of Turner's pickup truck, with her Uzi leveled across the roof of the cab, bipod deployed and hunched tight in a secure shooting stance. It was better than a hundred fifty yards, which was long for a 9mm round. He didn't know why he was so surprised. His own efforts with the .22 at better than four times the distance had been at least effective as a distraction.
Sarah pulled up from the red-dot sight and breathed a sigh of relief, before pounding on the roof of the pickup with her fist, and clutching a handhold through the still open rear-window on the cab. Turner hit the gas and they quickly covered the last hundred or so yards. The old ex-sheriff hit the brakes again and skidded to a halt with his truck blocking in the car, so even if the remaining goon managed to get in and get it started he'd have to make his escape in reverse. Sarah leapt down and found the remaining thug from the diner in her sights. "Don't even think about it. The man still held an empty pistol, the slide locked back, but he had started over for the fallen shotgun. The man looked at Sarah, and then back at the shotgun, gauging his chances. Saraha put a three round burst into the ground between his feet. The man dropped his pistol and put his hands in the air. "Huh. Smarter than I gave you credit for," she muttered. Sarah closed the distance, careful to keep her Uzi trained on the man, and retrieved the shotgun. Meanwhile, Turner came out of the pickup with his deer rifle, and tossed the surviving cartel-thug-slash-deputy a pair of handcuffs.
Sarah peered over the edge into the grave. "Hey," she said, "quick thinking, jumping in the grave like that."
"We were trying to run away," the cook said. "Wendy tripped and knocked us in here."
Sarah shrugged and slung the Uzi over her shoulder. "Still, it worked out for the best. Here, let me give you a hand up."
"Who the hell are you, lady?" Wendy the waitress asked, accepting the hand.
Sarah grinned and hauled the woman up the side of the grave with a grunt of effort. "A concerned citizen," she said. "But introductions can wait. We need to move. When they don't report back in, the cartel will send reinforcements."
"Actually," the cook said when Sarah stooped to help haul her up out of the grave as well. "I heard one of them on his cell."
"Oh, well," Sarah said. She thrust the shotgun at Wendy the waitress, who held it like it was going to bite her, and shimmied out of her pack. "Guess I'd better hurry planting the charges."
"The- wait, what?" That from Turner, who was prodding their prisoner along ahead of him. "You said you were bringing those 'just in case'."
Sarah's grin bloomed again. "Yeah. In case we got an opportunity like this one."
Chuck frowned and slung his rifle, shimmying down the tree as Turner pulled his truck up to the copse of trees on the hill. Sarah slid out of the truck-bed and handed off the shotgun to Turner while Chuck came over. The ex-sheriff kept a watch on their prisoner."What's up?" Chuck said. "Why'd you text me not to call your cell?"
Turner grimaced and shook his head. "I'll let her tell you," he said. "Alright, ladies, now I'm giving you a sacred trust. Not just anyone gets to drive this ol' heap. We need to keep you out of sight for a while yet, and it's probably best if we get Connor here somewhere his friends won't find him." He nodded to Chuck and Sarah. "I'll come by and pick you up, just give me a call."
The other did a Chinese fire-drill and drove off, leaving Chuck and Sarah.
"So, what was he talking about?"
"Well... I just figured, with all the HE I've been mixing up, it'd be a shame not to put some of it to good use."
It was only another ten minutes or so before a pair of black SUVs rolled up on the abandoned sedan and the dead bodies. Men piled out of both SUVs, shouting and waving guns around. It took them a little while to get settled down looking for the bodies. Sarah could tell they were shouting through the scope on Turner's deer rifle. Judging from the hardware, the Cartel was taking the threat of gunfire seriously. Luckily, they hadn't really thought it through yet, and found the one spot where a sniper could be camped out effectively. Their training, what there was of it, obviously wasn't up to dealing with Sarah Walker. Perhaps they just weren't accustomed to the skill it took to put rounds on target from upwards of 600 yards, but they should have been. Pretty much any military the cartel would have run up against in South America had snipers who were good to at least 800 yards. Sarah wasn't about to try and duplicate Chuck's quixotic attempt to lob subsonic rounds better than a third of a mile. The standard .308 rifle bullets in her borrowed rifle went about twice as fast as a standard .22, and almost fully three times as fast as the subsonic rounds Chuck had been using.. Sarah gave the gunmen a few moments to run around and find all the bodies. It looked like the drivers were staying in their vehicles, which wasn't optimal, but she could work around it. The vehicles were right about where she thought they'd be, and her outlying charges should cripple the engines at the very least. "Okay, we're on," Sarah said, and hit dial on the cell phone she'd taken off the gunman she'd killed earlier, and held it to her ear. The six cartel gun-thugs stopped their shouting and looked around.
They didn't find the phone before it went to voicemail, and Sarah had to hang up and try it again before she got someone on the line.
"How the fuck you get this phone?"
"Come on now," she said. "Is that any way to talk to a lady?"
"You know who we are? You know what happens to people play games with us? Kill our guys?"
Sarah grinned at the bluster. "Yeah. Well, see that works both ways. And I'm not playing games, as should be evident from what's left of your 'guys.'"
"Fuck you."
"Not in this lifetime," Sarah said. "But before you say anything to make me... annoyed with you? I should point out I've got you in the sights of a very capable little deer rifle, and there are half a dozen pipe bombs buried around that car you're leaning against."
"Bullshit. You're just trying to bluff me."
"Put me on speaker. I don't want to kill your friends if they'd be willing to listen to reason."
"Fuck you!"
"Is that your final answer?"
"You know who you're fucking with?"
"Do you? First and only offer, tough guy. Lose the guns, get in the SUVs and drive south until you hit Mexico, or you're all dead men."
"You know what we're gonna do to you when we catch you, bitch?! We're gonna-"
Sarah held the phone away from her ear so she didn't have to hear the continued filth spewing out of the gunman's mouth, as he expanded on his point. Finally the man stopped for breath, and Sarah swivelled the phone back to her lips. "Gotta say. Seems unlikely," she said, and hung up. A moment, later, she tapped speed-dial 1. Three seconds later, after the signal had bounced to the nearest cell-tower and back to where she'd hardwired her own burner into the pipe bombs she'd buried at strategic locations around the scene of the firefight earlier. The sight-picture in her rifle-scope disappeared in a boil of dust, fire and smoke, and when it finally came back, none of the six gunmen were moving. For that matter only one or two of them were still in one piece rather than several. The two SUVs had settled on their blown out tires, and the abandoned car was on its side. It looked like one of the drivers had been killed by flying debris; the windshield was smashed in and there was an awful lot of blood on it. The other driver had managed to get out of his vehicle and was staggering and in shock, covered in dirt. He had a gun out, and she saw the muzzle flash, then a little later the report. Crack-crack-crack in the distance as he kept firing. He was shooting at random, and there was the odd chance he might actually manage to put a bullet through her or Chuck, so Sarah put him out of her misery with a single aimed round to the chest.
"What?" Sarah said. Chuck was looking a little green around the gills. "I gave them a chance."
Turner wasn't much better when they called him to come pick them up. The whole truck-ride back to his farm was spent in surly silence. As they pulled up to the barn, Sarah finally broke the silence. "You were the one who was complaining about the odds earlier. It was 10-to-one, now its a little worse than five-to-one and we've got a prisoner to interrogate. I call that a good day's work."
"Jesus Christ," Turner muttered. "Did you even give them a chance to surrender?"
"I did," Sarah said. "They declined my terms."
"Shit. I thought you were just going to bluff them."
"That's what they thought. You can't let the bad guys call you on something like that and get away with it, Sheriff."
"Stop callin me that. I ain't the sheriff no more. And lucky for you. I'd have to arrest you for-shit how many dead?"
"Well, counting the one I shot before he could kill the hostages thats nine," Sarah said. Chuck had been uncharacteristically quiet during this exchange, and Sarah risked a glance at him. The greenish hue had faded a little, but he still didn't look so hot.
"I'm not counting that one, he was about to shoot Wendy and Nancy."
"Then why worry about the others. They'd have killed us if we gave them the opportunity. Though judging from my phone conversation, they have 'plans' for us before we go. So, I'm not too particularly concerned with the legal niceties at this point. And neither should you be, if you want to live through this."
"Where's the prisoner?" Sarah said. Turner nodded toward the back. "Got him cuffed to the radiator in the guest bedroom."
Sarah nodded and cracked her knuckles. "Good. I'll go get started."
Chuck put a hand on her shoulder. "Sarah," he said. The first word he'd said in a while. She paused and really met his eyes for the first time since she'd set off the pipe-bombs. She blinked and turned away, unsure how to deal with the sudden surge of emotion he'd somehow been able to send to her without words. It wasn't what she'd been afraid of; she'd been darkly expecting anger, or rejection or disgust. Sarah hadn't been remotely prepared for the concern and love she'd seen in his eyes. He wasn't trying to push her away, despite the fact... she could see it now, that she'd been doing just that same thing to him. Or at least preparing herself to do it. She'd been getting ready to build a wall between them out of her willingness to kill and his reluctance to. "We can get the information another way. You don't have to be the one to make him talk."
She found herself smiling. "Come on," she said. "Making people talk is a specialty."
Sarah led the way down the hall. "Seriously, we can find some other way," Chuck said.
"I appreciate it, Chuck. Really, sincerely, I do. But I kind of don't need you harping on this. Let me work, ok?"
Chuck grimaced and shook his head. "Sorry," he said, and that was all. Sarah was actually a little surprised by that. They came into the back bedroom and Chuck braced himself in the doorway, arms crossed defensively. Obviously he wasn't happy about the prospect of her torturing the prisoner. At least Turner seemed to have taken it in stride after the unplanned bloodbath half an hour ago.
The surviving 'deputy' from their encounter at the diner sat sullenly in a folding metal chair, hands cuffed to the frame and his feet duct-taped to the chair-legs. More duct-tape was over his mouth. As far as restraints went, duct tape wasn't really the best. It'd do in a pinch, but it could also be defeated by a determined prisoner if he was left alone long enough. The cuffs were pretty secure, since Sarah didn't expect the man to have a lockpick secreted on his person. He didn't seem the type for that kind of planning-ahead. But even then, a sufficiently determined prisoner could probably break one or both of his thumbs.
Sarah went over and ripped the duct-tape off the man's mouth.
"Aow! Fuck!"
"Hey, language," Sarah said. "Anyway. I want you to confess everything. Chuck will record it on his phone. I want every detail you can remember, of the operation."
"Uh, no."
"Well," Sarah said. "I only ask nicely once. But I'll give you a chance to reconsider. You know, your pals look like they're not too thrilled with you. Gravedigging at gunpoint the new fad?"
He winced and then pressed his lips together to avoid saying something incriminating.
"You know we've got the shovels and the tarps from the back of your car. Those will tie you to at least one body dump, I'm pretty sure. If you can give the FBI a bigger fish, you might even be able to swing witness protection, if the fish is big enough."
"You're FBI?"
"Not hardly," Sarah said.
"I want a deal."
"I did just say we weren't FBI, didn't I, Chuck?"
"You did," Chuck said. And then went quiet was a little discombobulating having Chuck be the taciturn one in their partnership.
"You tell us everything, and when the FBI finally does get off their collective hindparts we'll tell them how cooperative you've been."
"I want a deal in writing."
Sarah smiled sweetly. "Okay. Done asking nicely now. Chuck, go get me a hot coal, some butter and a pair of barbecue tongs."
"Wait, what?" Chuck and the prisoners said almost as one.
"Everybody talks," She said. "Sooner or later."
Their prisoner seemed to deflate momentarily, then he had a sudden resurgence. "You're bluffing! You wouldn't really..."
"Oh, but I would," Sarah said, locking eyes with the corrupt 'deputy'. "And I have. I'm something of an expert at making people talk. Chuck? My supplies."
"I'll see if Turner has any charcoal briquettes. Probably take a good fifteen minutes or so."
"That's fine." Chuck left and Sarah put the duct-tape back over the man's mouth. She sat on Turner's guest bed, tugged up the leg of her jeans to access her knives, retrieved one blade and tested the balance carefully. Then she set it aside and got her nail file and clippers out of her purse, and she did her nails. Without a care in the world. The silence stretched out, and the minutes crept by. Since she had the time, Sarah popped off her shoes and socks and did her toenails as well, whistling absently to herself to while away the time.
Eventually, Chuck came back with the requested items, including a steel mixing bowl and a pair of mitten-like hotpads to carry the hot coals in. Sarah nodded in appreciation, but then peered into the bowl and tsked. She used the tongs to lift one of the coals out and wave it in front of her face. "Oh, sorry. I'm going to need them a little hotter, a nice red-orange ought to do it. Sorry for the inconvenience." She patted him on the arm and put the coal back in the bowl, before retaking her spot on the bed. Sarah nodded to the prisoner, who was sweating profusely despite the AC working full bore. "It'll just be another couple of minutes, and we can get started," she told him. Then she leaned forward and blew gently on her toenails to dry them a little faster.
Behind his duct-tape gag, the prisoner began trying to talk, insistently. "What's that?" Sarah said. "Got something to say? Want to tell me all about your friends?"
He nodded vigorously.
Sarah sighed. "You know you just made us waste some perfectly good charcoal briquettes, don't you?" She ripped the duct tape off, and the prisoner started babbling all his worldly secrets.
"So, what was the butter for," Chuck said. "Just out of morbid curiosity."
"No idea," Sarah shrugged.
Chuck glared at her. "Really," he said. "I'm not judging, I just..."
"Seriously. I had no idea. It's... look, it was all psychology. The guy's in a no win situation anyway, right? Prime for psy-ops tactics. And that's what it was. They taught it to us at Langley. It's sort of a bluff that's not a bluff."
"Huh?"
"Meaning, if I had to I'd have burned him a little with the coal, but that was the last ditch effort. They say the prospect of death focuses the mind. CIA has found that in a lot of cases, the prospect of torture is more effective than the torture itself. You take a couple of items; a tool or utensil, a seemingly innocuous household object or food item, and one overtly threatening item. The subject's imagination comes up with something more horrific than you'd probably ever think of, and presto. Everybody talks."
"That's what they mean by that saying?"
Sarah shrugged. "We don't like to advertise that our officers aren't trained heavily in torture, so it all works out. Granted, sometimes the ploy doesn't work. But I've got a half dozen other tricks like that one to use. Really it all comes down to controlling your effect, not in any way shape or form letting the subject see any unease on your part about what you're going to do to them. Then when your assistant gets back with the requested items..."
"You find something objectionable and apologize for the delay, which completely fries their brain?"
Sarah shrugged again. Then she frowned. "You suspected I was up to something, didn't you?"
"Yeah, I saw the twinkle in your eye when you said you knew how to make people talk," Chuck said. "I don't ever remember that twinkle being involved in maiming or killing somebody. But torturer-Sarah was still kind of spooky."
"Are you afraid of me?"
Chuck laughed, "Girl, I've been afraid of you since our first date."
Sarah's eyebrows rose. "Really?"
"Well, one minute we're dancing, the next it's all throwing knives and lock-pick-guns and car chases and guns in my face, oh and bomb defusing. Granted, I'm amazing, but it was a little much when the most excitement I was really expecting was maybea goodnight kiss when I dropped you off at your place. Didn't get any better when I flashed on you killing a bunch of dudes and shooting out a security camera the next day."
"But you obviously got over it, or I'm pretty sure last night wouldn't ever have happened." Sarah grinned at the blush that comment put on his cheeks.
"Yeah, fear management is one of my specialties," Chuck said. "In completely unrelated news. While our friend in there was spilling his guts for an hour, I decided to do some work on my end. I mean, I'm already inside the phone company's records from getting the tracking data on the diner goons' phones. And I've got the numbers for all the other cells I isolated in the phone tree."
"Great, what does that mean?"
"I've got realtime tracking on all the cartel boys' cell phones now. It looks like they sent a fair number of guys off around town looking for us. But they're staying clumped up. Harder for us to hit them all at once maybe?"
Sarah grimaced and shook her head. "That's not what they're doing. Damn, I thought we'd have more time."
"Sorry, could you explain? I think I missed an episode."
Sarah rolled her eyes. "They've got a shipment coming in. A couple tons of raw cocaine," she said. "And we were wrong about the missing people. They didn't 'disappear' them all. Just the trouble makers. The rest they're using as a slave labor force to unload the trucks and cut the coke with sugar or whatever it is they do. I'm not an expert on cocaine. Anyway. With the pressure we've put on them, this is their last shipment. They can't afford to lose the revenue on the shipment, but our continued ass-kicking means those hostages just became a big liability."
"Oh, hell," Chuck said. "As soon as they're done with this shipment they're going to kill them?"
"That's what Connor seems to think."
"Connor?"
"Our special guest," Sarah said. "He actually has a name. Who'd have thunk it, right?"
"Let me get on my computer. I've got an idea," Chuck said.
"Okay, roll with it. I've got a couple of ideas too. How attached are you to the 'bago?"
Chuck frowned and paused on his way to his laptop. "Uh, what?"
"We've got two sets of baddies looking for the thing now, it's just a liability," and I've got enough explosives and left-over diesel I could turn it into a pretty good FAE."
"Um... a what?"
"Fuel air explosive."
Chuck's mouth fell open for a long moment. Finally he stopped gawping and closed his mouth. "Is that necessary?"
"Hopefully not, but it's good to have an ace in the hole. If we can use the 'bago to draw them in, they'll have no choice but to surrender or wind up like their friends from this afternoon," Sarah made a comical fake explosion noise. "And if they wise up, we can probably get the diesel smell out. Eventually."
"Huh. I think I'm not 'diesel fumes' attached to the bago. If we do that, we might as well just leave it behind and finish the road trip in the other car. As far as plans go, it certainly has the advantage of being unexpected. You sure you can get the proportions right? Stoichiometry is kind of tricky sometimes."
Sarah batted her eyelashes. "But I've got the king of the nerds to help me."
Chuck heaved a put-upon sigh. "I've already got hacking to do, now you want me to do volumetric concentrations too? What'll you be doing while I'm doing all the math?"
"Lighting a fire under the FBI," Sarah said, the twinkle back in her eye.
"Special agent Chalmers," the bored voice said. "Reception says you have information on a kidnapping?"
"Well, yes. Thirty counts of kidnapping, four or five murders, vote buying, drug trafficking. I've got a couple of witnesses for you, and a prisoner involved who's willing to turn states' evidence." There was a muffled curse and a clump from the other end of the line as Special agent Chalmers nearly fell out of his chair.
"What!? Say that again?"
"I think you heard me the first time," Sarah said. But she explained on for a minute or two, and gave the FBI the list of names they had developed from the phone records and the coordinates for the processing plant. "Anyway, things have gotten kind of urgent in the last couple hours. There was a firefight with several cartel gun-thugs, resulting in roughly a dozen bodies,and the Cartel is going to be trying to tie up loose ends with their hostages and get out of dodge quick."
"Jesus," Chalmers said. "How many civilians dead? How many cartel."
"Like I said. A dozen."
"You said a dozen bodies..."
"Yeah. Good guys 12, bad guys nothin, if you're keeping score."
"Who the fuck are you?"
"Names are a funny thing, you know?" Sarah said. "Let's just say until quite recently I was employed by some Other Government Agency in a... paramilitary capacity, and leave it at that, shall we?"
"Oh Christ," the FBI man said. Other Government Agency was well known government slang for CIA.
"Moving along," Sarah said. "It's almost dark, and the cartel's getting in a new shipment of product. Once they get their prisoners finished processing it, they're going to liquidate the workforce. If you can get HRT off their fat asses in time to join the party you're welcome to. But if not, they can clean up after I'm done kicking ass."
"What'd I ever do to you?"
"Not me. Six months ago the outgoing sheriff came to you, and you told him to go suck eggs," Sarah said. "And in the process you let a town get terrorized for half a year, FBI."
Another voice intruded. "Actually they told me not to teach grandma to suck eggs. It's a slightly different-"
"God, you're worse than my dad, I'm on the phone sheriff Turner. Anyway, FBI. If you can get Hostage Rescue here in under two hours, they're welcome to tag along. But I'm not waiting any beyond that. The clock is ticking. You've got two hours till go time."
TO BE CONTINUED...
A/N: I realize this is an M rated story, and just by its very nature fewer people will be seeing it to even read it, much less leave reviews. I just want to say one more time how much I appreciate every one of those reviews because of that fact. Please keep them coming.
