Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters you recognize, they all belong to the wonderful Janet Evanovich. No copyright infringement is intended.
A/N: Just before posting Chapter 20, I went through the first nineteen chapters to edit. No plot changes have been made. The editing was for spelling, word choice and continuity.
They killed her. The words echoed in my mind as I sunk to the floor. Aunt Mary was dead, and it was my fault. I took deep breaths trying to calm my heart. They killed her. They killed Aunt Mary. She's dead, and it's my fault. It just kept echoing in my mind. I looked up just in time to see Bo's fist fly into my face.
"It's your fucking fault bitch. My mothers dead because you wanted to play little miss double agent." I saw Ranger move towards him and I shook my head.
"I didn't want to play little double anything you stupid shit, the CIA blackmailed us. Yeah, you didn't know that did you," I added when I saw his eyes widen a little. The only ones who knew why we did what we did was the team that came to Miami. "And for the record, it may be my fault they took her, but it's your fault they killed her. You just had to see how many buttons you could push. You just had to fuck Renito's daughter and walk out the next morning. If you hadn't fucked up before they wouldn't have even known we were related."
I heard Ranger suck in a breath when I mentioned Renito. Renito was the head of the Fangs, and he was not known to be a nice man. The Fangs competency at organized crime was equivalent to my competency as a BEA before I was trained, however, if you wanted someone competent in torture Renito was second only to The Governors. Bo's fist flew out again at my tirade but this time I caught it.
"Hit me again, Bo, and you won't have to worry about what The Governors will do to your body." My voice was back to being cold and emotionless again, I knew that. I also knew that Tank, Bobby and Lester would be looking at me because so far they hadn't heard me like this. Evidentially Bo didn't believe me because he went to swing again but Ranger grabbed him by the back of the shirt and pulled him away. I guess Ranger did believe me.
"Children," he said, oh I know he wasn't talking about me, "Now is not the time for the blame game," blame game what the hell happened to my Ranger, he would never say something like blame game. "We're trapped in a safe with god knows how many governors out there waiting to do god knows what with us. Can we focus."
"We need a plan." I looked at Bo and fought the urge to roll my eyes. No shit Captain Obvious.
"We could try to over power them the next time they come to the safe." Tank thought out loud. "It would obviously be dangerous but I don't think we could come up with a plan anymore dangerous then sitting here, waiting to be picked off one by one." Ranger looked ready to disagree.
"Tank's right Ranger. There's nothing else we can do. I don't know how it's possible but they managed to lock us in here…"
"Secondary lock, babe." I looked up at him, no clue what he was talking about.
"Huh?"
"Secondary lock. Some of the older vaults have a second lock that can be used in an emergency, and are often concealed. The only way for us to find it would be to shoot the shit out of the door. It would use up all of our bullets, which assuming we found it, and destroyed it, would leave us virtually defenseless."
"Ok, so that just confirms what I was saying, Tank is right. Right now we have to options. We can sit here and be good little captives until we've been tortured to death or we can do our best to fight our way out of this. Granted we may still end up dead, but at least we'll go out fighting." Or we would just be wounded and then we would spend the next week wishing we had been killed, but why point that out now. It'll make for good conversations if we make it out of here.
Ranger closed his eyes, probably trying to think of some alternate plan that didn't have us squaring off against double or triple our number in Governors. Then I saw Julie and realized what his hang-up was. Julie, she had no vest, no weapons, and hell, I wouldn't want my daughter in the middle of a shoot-out either. I also wouldn't want her to be tortured to death. Ranger's vest had somehow disappeared, because I know he had one when we came in here.
"One of the guys downstairs managed to get it off when we were fighting. I was more worried about the guy in front of me with a knife to my throat then the guy behind me yanking at my vest." I sighed, there would be nothing to make this day easy. Tank had already giving his to Bobby because he was wounded, Bo didn't have one to start with, and looking at Bobby I really didn't want to ask Lester to give his up.
"She can take mine, and I'm sure we've got enough guns on us to give her one or two." He looked at me for a minute. I wondered if he was trying to figure out why I would give my vest up to his daughter, after not talking to him for years. Well if that's the case then he was just stupid. "Always." I told him. He almost smiled and I nodded. I unclipped the vest and handed it to Julie who seemed reluctant to take it.
"I don't want you to…" She started before being cut off by one of Ranger's glares. "But dad…"
"Julie." The tone of his voice was obviously enough because she grabbed the vest. It was a little big on her, but it was better than nothing. I felt someone looking at me and turned to see Tank looking at me. Kind of like it was his first time seeing me since I was back. He nodded at me, and I smiled. Tank was impressed with me. Goody. Maybe I could impress the Governors into liking me. Don't roll your eyes at me, I was being sarcastic.
"We should take inventory of all our weapons, pool them together and distribute them evenly. We'll have a better chance of no one running out of ammo that way. I think we've got enough knives that everyone should be good for hand to hand to." We all started pulling out our weapons counting off how many we had of what. We ended up with 18 guns, 14 knives, 3 stun guns, and a pepper spray. After going through and checking the ammo we had 16 guns that were useable. Both Bobby and I had emptied one of ours.
We gave Julie a gun, a knife, a stun gun and the pepper spray. Ranger was reluctant to give Julie a gun until I reminded him of A) Scrog and B) the countless hours he had dragged her to the shooting range for. He balked at the knife because it meant his little girl would be fighting hand to hand. This got him a large groan of 'Daaad, isn't that why you forced me to go to karate for the last five years.' If we hadn't been in such a serious situation I would have pointed out that Karate literally meant 'empty hand' not 'with knife'.
After Julie's weapons had been settled we divided the rest up. I took two guns, two knifes, and a stun gun. Lester took two guns and three knives, Bobby took two guns, one kinfe and the last stun gun. I was worried that Bo would pounce on the guns and take them all for himself, but he only took three guns and two knifes. That left eight guns and six knifes with only two people left, so I grabbed another gun and tossed another knife to Julie. I got a slight glare from Ranger. Ranger managed to scoop up four guns and two knives, leaving Tank with three guns and three knives.
We all stood there silent. No matter how things went down, we were going to be talking about a mass murder. Either the seven of us if we didn't make it out, or an unknown, but undoubtedly large, number of others if we did. The worst thought was that even if we did make it out we might suffer casualties. Julie broke the silence.
"If any of you die because you were trying to save me, I'm going to haunt your crazy asses."
"Language Julie." I think everyone, even Tank, did an eye roll at that. I guess he was joking though because though he kept a straight face for about five seconds he and Julie both started laughing.
Damn, I really want in on this Manoso humor. After that short exchange we were silent for god knows how long. Jeez, four years ago if I stayed this quiet for his long people would have thought I was dead. I noticed Tank looking at me again and I raised my eyebrow. He just shook his head. I took it to mean either you don't want to know, I'll tell you if we survive, or not in front of Julie. Finally Ranger spoke again.
"I want to have two lines. Steph, Bobby and Julie in the back with…"
"Excuse me," I said, most people would be glad they weren't in the front line, but when was I ever most people? "Why am I in the back?" The corner of his mouth twitched up.
"You don't have a vest babe."
"Neither do you, or Tank, or Bo." I raised a challenging eyebrow. "Bo, you stay in the second line with Julie and Bobby."
"If you think I'm going to take orders from you, after…"
"Damn it, Bo!" Ranger snapped and everybody turned to look at him, "I'm sorry about your mom, I really am, but unless you want to end up with her, you need to focus until we're out of here."
"Who the hell are you to talk to me that way you just…"
"All of you!" Tank this time "You need to just…" He was cut off as the vault door opened.
"Maybe if I leave all of you in here together, you'll kill yourselves off and I won't have to lift a finger." It was Matson, and he was alone. No Fangs, no Governors, no anyone to back him up. Sure he had a gun, but he was alone. I felt Ranger shift beside me, felt as his hands moved up, and felt the rush of air as Ranger fired just over my shoulder and straight into Matson's chest.