A/N: I've finished the story up to the last chapter, and am just revising the others...stayed tuned for a massive update =)
"Damn cops," Huang muttered for the third time. Or fourth; Hei wasn't really keeping count. The four of them were holed up in a safe house near the docks. Yin sat silent and still as a statue, while Mao lay in her lap, eyes closed in boredom. Huang was pacing, cigarette burning to ash between his lips. Hei sat next to Yin on the battered sofa, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. He was still in his Black Reaper gear.
"Hei did try to warn you it would go bad," Mao said, not bothering to open his eyes.
"We have one more shot at this," Huang said sharply, jabbing his cigarette in the air to punctuate each word. "One more shot, then we're out on our asses. And by out, I mean dead."
"It would help if we knew where he was headed next. Park was the only target we knew about. Too bad he's dead."
Huang eyed the cat. "You ran him right into police custody." He turned to Hei. "But Mao's right; so don't think you'll be getting any brownie points for that, even though we did need his mouth shut."
Hei ignored the reprimand, if that's what it was. Huang would have been even more upset if Park had lived to give the police any information about his connection to the Syndicate, slight though it had been.
"We have another target for KV-464," he said in a low voice. Mao opened one eye.
"Who?" Huang asked.
It was Yin who answered. "Li."
"Hm." Mao opened the other eye and raised his head. "Through our dead mole, we leak the information to KV-464 that Li survived his attack, and can positively ID him to the police. KV-464 will come after him…all we have to do is set up the ambush."
"Not the police," Hei said. With the luck they'd been having lately, even a fake operation involving Section 4 would go horribly wrong. "Say I'm going to sell the intel to the Syndicate. That will worry him more."
Huang grunted. "Maybe you idiots aren't as useless as I thought."
"We should shoot him this time," Mao said. "No more fighting in close quarters, not now that he's bringing knives to the party. He'll probably have a gun next."
"He won't expose himself to sniper fire, especially if he suspects the Black Reaper will be there," Hei said. "I'll need to do it, up close and personal. I'll be too close for Huang to get a good shot."
"Yeah, I might accidentally shoot you. And don't think I would mind doing it." Huang stabbed out his cigarette and lit another.
"Well, the details will take some ironing out," Mao said as he jumped down from Yin's lap and stretched. "I'd say we have a day or two to get it set up. Plenty of time to catch up on my napping."
"We may be getting other orders," Huang reminded him. "But I'll pass the idea on. I can't think of a better one, in any case."
"And we all know you're the brains of this outfit." Mao dodged Huang's kick on his way out the door.
-V-
"So in other words, none of us has any idea what the hell happened here," Kirihara said to nobody in particular, transferring the ice pack from her nose to the back of her neck. Her nose had nearly been broken by the door swinging open in her face, and she'd woken from BK-201's attack with a splitting headache.
Her team looked appropriately abashed. The whole thing had been a disaster. After the house had gone dark, Matsumoto had stayed outside to cover the front entrance. Kouno had gone in after KV-464 only to get knocked out by someone coming down the stairs. BK-201, most likely, though Kouno hadn't seen a thing.
Saitou, after cuffing Park and securing him in the back of his car, had come charging up to the house to cover Kirihara. Except then he'd tripped on a cat, and knocked himself unconscious on the back step. A nice black eye was already starting to show under his own ice pack. Kirihara was finding it hard to feel sympathy for him at the moment; but in the end it was probably for the best. KV-464 would have run right into him otherwise, and in the dark like that, chances were that Saitou would have been hit with the contractor's ability before he had a chance to get off an accurate shot.
Kirihara herself had woken to Matsumoto's hand shaking her shoulder, flashlight blinding her. Now she was sitting on the front step outside Park's house. They'd called in the EMTs to look after everyone's injuries - amazingly, nothing worse than some nasty bruises and a minor concussion, in Kouno's case - but the fuse box had been completely blown by BK-201's power surge; the crime scene unit would have to wait until it was daylight to do a thorough investigation. Not that there was any rush.
Footsteps tapped on concrete as Matsumoto came walking around the side of the house. "Where's Park?" Kirihara asked. She'd wanted to start questioning him immediately.
The older man's expression was stony in the orange glow of the streetlamps. "I couldn't move him," he said. "Didn't want to disturb the crime scene."
"Crime scene? What crime scene!"
She and her team jogged to the back alley, where Saitou's car was still parked. Matsumoto pointed his flashlight behind the car. Kirihara walked over to look: Park lay facedown on the pavement, hands still cuffed behind his back, his head and upper torso lying in a pool of wet blood gleaming red under the beam of light. His throat had been cut.
"Damn. KV-464 must have seen him when he ran from the house, and taken the opportunity to finish the job," Kouno said, squatting to get a better look at the dead man.
But Saitou shook his head. "I locked the car doors, I'm sure of it. And the safety locks in the backseat were engaged. There's no way he could have gotten Park out of the car."
"You were knocked out," Kouno pointed out. "He could have gone back and gotten your keys."
Saitou reached into his pocket. "They're here. Why would he take my keys and then put them back? Especially with BK-201 still after him?"
"BK-201," Kirihara said suddenly, taking Matsumoto's flashlight from his hand. "Look. The locks on all the doors are all still down, except that back door. He used his ability to unlock just that one door, pulled Park out, and then cut his throat once he had him out. Considerate of him, actually," she added. "You'd never have gotten all that blood out of the upholstery otherwise."
"I thought it was KV-464 who was after Park, not BK-201," Saitou said, looking sick at the thought of so much blood in his car. She probably shouldn't have said that. Why had she even thought it? She realized with a sudden stab of terror that that very well could have been her on the ground, dead and bloodless. She reached up to her throat; she was sure she could still feel the pressure of that merciless hand.
"If they were both after Park, why were they fighting then?" Kouno asked, bringing Kirihara back to the scene in front of her. "If it were me, and I realized that another contractor was after my mark, I'd let him have it. That's more rational, right?"
"Unless they didn't know the other was here," Matsumoto put in. "Both after Park, he split and they were stuck with each other."
Kirihara rubbed her temples. Her head was killing her, and none of this made any sense. Her case was crumbling to dust around her. She sighed. "We'll wait for the crime scene report. We should at least be glad that none of us were injured any worse than we were. Let's call this in; it's going to be a long night."