Disclaimer: Don't own Collateral, but I did watch the extra scene, which wasn't all that much to shout about. Michael Mann is very conservative with his scenes, isn't he? That guy puts film together like a surgeon…too bad he killed off a perfectly good character in a rather cheap death! (SIGH) Anyway, this chapter comes a lot from the extra scene, and from the earlier scene with the two cops. Thought I'd forgotten about that scene, huh? Well, pretty much everything from the movie is going to find its way into this story one way or another.

Special thanks to Piper (Winged Seraph—what happened to Plan B? It got taken down, and I was enjoying it! We can't afford to lose a good Collateral fanfic, girl! Get it fixed and back up there!), Dawnie-7 (been with me a while, girl, where would I be without you?), asd (don't know your real name, but your comments are appreciated, even if they're brief) and my new reader, Hockey-Gurl (don't worry about not reading this fic before, it had been lost amidst the sea of Misc. fiction before the Collateral category was posted and I didn't want to move it until I could resume it)

As for the rest of youI know you're out there! Leave me a note! (Especially YOU, Eccentric Banshee, after all the grumbling you did! LOL)

Chapter Seven: Don't Let Me Get Cornered

"So what did you get on Clark?" Ray Fanning asked as he tossed down onto his desk chair in the busy room. The two officers who had gone over the crime scene started to flip out their notebooks, one of them cooperative, the other having a slight attitude, as most men did when they were a little too old to be wearing the uniform and yet hadn't gotten their shiny detective's star.

The younger, more cooperative one, started to read. "Shots were heard fired at approximately 11:07 p.m. One witness saw a taxi parked in the alley right before it happened. Another witness claims to have seen a man and a woman arguing briefly before the cab left the alley. The man was standing outside the cab, as if he were leaning into the driver's window. Then he got into the back and the car took off."

"Did this witness get a good look at the man or woman?" Ray asked.

The younger man turned to his older partner. The other shrugged. "Says the woman was mostly in shadow. Thought she was wearing a hat."

Ray felt a strange, prickling sensation in the back of his neck. "Was she younger, older, what?"

The cop shook his head. "Couldn't say. The man was a gray blur. This guy didn't exactly have the best vision – glasses like coke bottles."

"They weren't that thick," the younger man said, earning him a dirty look from his partner.

"A gray blur?" Ray pressed. "You mean he was dressed in gray?"

"And had gray hair, too," the younger cop supplied from his notes. "Gray head to toe. Thought he might be an old man who was hassling a driver."

"Well, we're not here to conjecture," Ray muttered, the tingling in his spine getting worse.

"No, that's your job," the older cop muttered briefly. Ray ignored it.

Richard came into the office. "Let's roll," he said. "I got the stake out on Felix, we're gonna go talk to the Feds."

This earned an even more bitter guffaw from the older cop. "Yeah, go talk to the Feebs, they's smarter than us anyway."

Ray shot him a perplexed look before he followed Richard out the door.

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When Ray entered the abandoned restaurant that the Feebs were using to spy on Felix Reyes-Torena, he had a particular feeling. Not one of premonition or something equal nonsensical, but as if he were stepping through a door that would forever change his life.

The introductions were made. Agent Frank Pedrosa wasn't thrilled to see them. It was apparent that he'd been instructed to help them, but he wasn't doing it willingly.

Questioned were asked. Vague questions, Ray had to admit, but the guy had an attitude and he wasn't going to give anything away. Pedrosa gave an equally vague answer. No help. Dead ends.

Ray chuckled slightly, looked away. Richard, the smarter one when it came to public relations, started to talk. He mentioned the names Sylvester Clark and Ramón Iella, and Pedrosa came to life as if someone had just hooked him up to a car battery.

"Are you telling me that Clark and Iella were both killed tonight? Murdered?"

"Apparently by someone who's quite professional with a gun," Ray said, unable to keep the smugness out of his voice. It's our case, guys, drool all you want but you can't have it.

There was a phone call on Richard's cell, disabling the man's ability to converse for a moment. Pedrosa had started to grill Ray about the condition of Ramón's apartment, how he had found him, if anyone had seen anything. No one had even known anything was going on. The closest information anyone could give was that at about that time, someone had seen a taxi sitting in the alley.

A taxi. There was that feeling again.

"Ok," Richard said, hanging up his phone, "that was a call reporting another dead body, same wound pattern, a Daniel Baker?"

"That's three," Pedrosa said, turning to the younger woman who had been identified only as Zee.

"Three what?" Ray asked dumbly.

"Witnesses," Pedrosa replied, forgetting all the previous hostility and vague words. His eyes brightened and he looked nearly grateful. For a moment he almost seemed ready to hug both Ray and his partner.

"We've got to get to the last one," Zee said, picking up her phone. She started making calls.

"What? Who?" Ray demanded, using the opening he had. Pedrosa seemed willing to talk now.

"Peter Lim, the last State Witness in our Felix Reyes-Torena indictment. We have to get him to a secure location."

"How do you know the guy is even—" Ray stopped himself, forcing himself to calm down. "Look, to do that, you're going to need help."

Pedrosa had already picked up his coat and the whole team was moving out of the small, caged area where they had set up camp. The monitoring screens were abandoned, forgotten, as they moved the whole party through the empty entrails of the restaurant and headed for the parking lot.

"You don't even know who this guy is!" Ray was arguing, even as Richard dogged his heels, trying to get him to shut up. "For all you know, he could already have taken down Lim and be on his way out of town!"

"That's a chance we'll have to take," Pedrosa snapped. "What other choice do we have?"

"Wherever Lim is, move your stake-out," Ray said. "Flush out this guy."

Pedrosa nearly laughed, shook his head. "Ain't gonna work, my friend. The guy they hired to do these hits is a very highly trained professional. He's not going to let himself get caught. And we can't risk our final witness on something like that."

"What, a real meat-eater super assassin's got you scared? What if he's already there when you reach Peter Lim? What are you going to do?"

"Take his ass down and save our witness," Pedrosa replied bluntly.

They were packing up their car, and had forgotten about both the L.A.P.D. detectives by then, and Ray found himself standing in an empty lot with Richard.

"I don't like this," Ray said.

"'Course you don't," Richard replied, bored. "Happened just like I said it would."

Ray turned to him, his eyes wide. "Look, I'm…" He hesitated, considered his words. Richard was going to think he was a fool, but he couldn't risk it. "Look, both times, they saw a taxi leave the crime scene."

"Yeah?"

"And the second time, a man and a woman were arguing. It was a woman driving the cab, and she was wearing a hat."

Richard studied him. "Ray, not every hat-wearing female taxi driver in L.A. is your sister."

Ray struggled to keep calm. "I just can't leave this alone. I'm going to follow." He looked at Richard, looked past the neat appearance, past the lazy cop, and searched for a man who was, occasionally, his friend. "Will you watch my back, or do I have to do this alone?"

Richard considered for a moment, then let out a deep, heavy sigh. "I'm going to go, just to show you that you're wrong. And when I do show you that you're wrong, you are going to owe me a serious amount of beer the next time we're off shift together."

Ray almost smiled. Almost.

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They had left the suburbs and were finally back on the main drags through town. In the silence of the car, Callie found herself staring through the windshield. The shattered windshield that looked like a spider web of glass. On top of that, the side window had been broken, so now all she could hear was a roaring in her ears from the wind that whipped past them, and she was particularly irritated about how it kept messing up her hair, which had, once upon a time, been in a neat braid, but Vincent had taken it down.

Aggravated, no, beyond aggravated, more into full-on, pissed-off mode, she was going perhaps a tad bit faster than was wise.

"Where are we going?" she asked when she finally hit a stop-light and could hear herself speak.

"You didn't hear me before?" Vincent asked, his voice sounding distant from the back seat.

"No, I can't hear shit because those punks broke my window," Callie snapped.

"Koreatown, a club called Fever, you know it?"

She sighed. "Yeah." The light changed, she pressed the accelerator.

And then heard the sound of a siren behind them.

Instantly, everything froze. She pulled up to the curve on automatic, her hands starting to shake, her belly queasy and her throat constricting. It had only been a matter of time, her driving around with this shattered windshield. Lenny was going to kill her, if Vincent didn't do it first.

"Get rid of them," came Vincent again, terse, commanding.

"It's the L.A.P.D.," she managed. "What do you suggest I do?"

"Be creative," Vincent returned. "You're a cabbie, you're a girl, talk your way out of a ticket."

She scowled at the second reference. Oh hell, her poor body couldn't take any more adrenaline. She could hardly think as it was. She felt…high, exactly, that was it, high, like she'd smoked twenty joints and then washed them down with a bottle of vodka. She hadn't been in this bad a shape since her twenty-second birthday, because she'd missed out on really getting to celebrate her twenty-first. When she came down, God knew what was going to happen…

Vincent was looking around, watching the cops get closer. She snuck a glance at him in the rearview, saw the tense expression on his face. "Look," she said, pushing through the chemical haze, "just don't…don't do anything, okay, let me do this."

"Then don't let me get cornered," he replied. "You don't have the trunk space."

She felt the world swim. Then it exploded back into focus when the cop on her passenger's side tapped on the window. She rolled it down.

"Hey, my partner's going to help you out over there," the guy said, pointing. Callie knew it was a standard diversionary tactic, just to be prepared in case the driver was a threat. Her conversations with Ray had a tendency to come in handy now and again. She turned the other way to see the second one, this one a woman, Latino and very pretty with a stern face, dark hair pulled severely back, approach with her flashlight dipping into the car.

"License and registration please," she said, her tone flat, formal. Callie automatically reached up and pulled both these items out of their flap underneath her visor, always ready for an emergency. The woman took them, looked at them carefully.

"I'm pulling you over because your windshield is smashed and your cab in unsafe to drive," she went on, meeting Callie's eyes this time. Callie nodded, squinting in the beam of the flashlight.

"I was on my way back to the barn, officer, right now," she said, her tone complacent.

"Then why are you carrying a passenger?" the cop asked, motioning her flashlight to Vincent. Callie didn't dare turn and see the expression on his face.

"Well, his stop is on my way," she said. "It's been a long night, officer, can you please just let me take the car in?"

"Sorry, your vehicle is unsafe to drive," the woman said. "We're going to do a vehicle inventory before the tow-truck gets here, so I'm going to have to ask you to step out of the car. You, too, sir," she said, bending and looking directly at Vincent now.

"Is that really necessary, office? I'm just a half-a-mile from my stop."

"Yes, sir, I'm sorry. Come on," she said, motioning with her hand and giving the rest of traffic a bored glance. "Let's go. Pop the trunk."

Callie heard Vincent's voice close to her, even though he was still all the way in the back seat. "You open that trunk, they go inside."

She had to think of something. She glanced up at the officer, searching her face. Then, it hit her. Bingo.

"I'm sorry…are you Laura Cervantes?" she asked, leaning out of the window.

The woman looked surprised, blinked, looked down again. "Officer Cervantes," she corrected, her voice cool.

"Well, you might know my brother…Detective Ray Fanning, Narcotics?" Her heart was going to fall out of her mouth any second now, she was sure of it. She was amazed her lungs had the capacity to pass breath over her vocal cords so she could produce sound.

One eyebrow arched. "You're Calliope," she said. "Yes, I remember you."

Callie managed a smile. "Well, if you call my brother, I'm sure he'll be more than happy to explain that you could let me off with a warning and let me make my own way to the garage. Save the taxpayers the charge of a tow-truck?"

Officer Cervantes looked at her partner over the top of the car. He was studying the windshield, the way the glass had shattered. "How did this happen, anyway?" he asked. "Looks like something went right through the center."

"Uh…I think it was a…" Oh, come on, girl, be creative but don't be stupid. "I think that I got too close to a truck, on the freeway, you know? Spat a bunch of gravel right into my windshield." She chuckled, forcing it to sound natural. "Thought we'd been shot at for a moment, you know?"

The cop didn't look convinced. Apparently, he was one of the brighter bulbs on the Christmas tree. He could tell the difference between a hole going in and a hole going out, and this one was going out, not in. Because Vincent had been aiming his gun inside the cab when he'd fired.

"Maybe we should call your brother, Miss Fanning," Officer Cervantes said slowly. "I think maybe you're going to need his help. Could you please step out of the car, now?" She pulled on the handle, let the door slip open, then backed away, eyeing Vincent in the back seat more cautiously now.

Callie froze. She casually glanced down, moving just her eyes, to the gear by her hand. She had always appreciated the cars that put the gear shift on the floor. Her hand gently moved toward it, and she realized that in her state, she had not put the car in park, but only in neutral.

Her hand grazed the gear, pressing in the button. It moved down, slid into drive. She kept her foot tightly on the break so as not to give herself away.

Officer Cervantes had shifted her attention now to Vincent. The woman's sharp eyes seemed to miss nothing, and possess nearly an X-ray power. Her cop instincts were telling her something was very wrong about this situation.

Lady, you have no idea.

She heard the faintest click in the back seat. Vincent had pulled back the hammer on his gun. It was more than likely someplace where the cops couldn't see it. After all, Vincent was a professional. Shooting the woman cop one more pleading glance, she realized that there was no turning back now. It was kill or be killed.

She was not going to let Vincent murder two police officers. She slammed the accelerator.

The car jerked forward so fast that her open door flipped back from the force and snapped itself shut, just barely. Vincent jerked, going half-way into the air before he righted himself enough to lean out the window and fire a single shot.

Callie didn't know if she hallucinated the scream in her panic, or if it was real. She wouldn't know for hours to come, but Vincent had hit the lady cop's partner. It was possibly the smartest move he could have made, in his situation, because the other cop was now unable to pursue, but instead had to call for medical assistance and then request that back-up be sent.

Back-up that would take time to get there. They were driving a cab. There were over four thousand cabs in L.A. alone.

"Head for the airport," Vincent rasped, by her shoulder.

"The airport?" she echoed. "Why?"

"Just do it!" he snapped, his voice temporarily reaching a rather high pitch, shaking her eardrums in spite of the wind that rushed past her head, flipping her hair in every direction.

Callie, at this moment, was convinced the squad car was following her. She looked up into her rearview but Vincent completely blocked the view, his gray head all over the back seat, looking in ever feasible direction. So she obeyed and made a run for the freeway.

She had never driven so fast in her life. She had seen chases on the news, L.A. was full of them, from intense, short, high-speed chases, to low-speed chases where the car just wouldn't stop and eventually the police had to blow out its tires. She had seem them all, been raised on them. She knew how they worked.

It would be a matter of minutes before a helicopter spotted them.

"There's the 105!" Vincent snarled, pointing with the barrel of his gun. "Go!"

It was so late at night, traffic was considerably less and the freeway was nearly empty. Callie had little trouble maneuvering her way through traffic, although the terrific speed at which she was driving made her a little nervous that she might flip the car over, or possibly lose control of it in some other way. She dodged in and out of traffic, thinking she could hear sires and see flashing lights out of the corner of her eyes. She didn't bother with the traditional exits, but instead sped on past them toward the back end entrance of LAX.

There were cabs everywhere.

The traffic was still tremendous at the airport, even at this hour of the night, but she knew what she was doing. Maneuvering through heavy traffic was nine tenths of a cabbie's job. She managed to duck and weave her way around several large airport shuttles and rental buses, and even when she was sure she did see flashing lights coming from her right, her flying hair simply would not let her get a closer look.

So she focused on the job. She drove.

Finally, finally, they came out and blended back into traffic, just as neatly as before. She almost went back to the 105, but Vincent stopped her.

"Take the 405," he ordered, his voice cold, angry.

She obeyed. She hated the 405, but it was much less obvious than going back the way they came. Or maybe the police were smarter than she gave them credit for – after all, a wry voice said, look at your brother – and they would figure them out. At any rate, as she moved into the heavier traffic of the next freeway, she began to calm down, the adrenaline leaving her system, sending her crashing into a numb state, and her brain was finally unleashed so that she could think calmly.

They had gone through the airport to blend in with the other taxis. And because no helicopter could enter that restricted airspace. It was a brilliant plan, and she had followed it to the letter.

So why was Vincent pissed at her?

"This exit," Vincent said, his voice strained. She turned off the exit, and found herself in a rather lonely corner of Los Angeles, surrounded by industry that was long since closed, small, shack-like businesses that boarded their doors and windows at night, and wide, empty streets no one dared to walk. She rolled to a stop at a light, which seemed to be stuck on the color red.

"That was stupid," Vincent said, the anger now simmering.

"What was stupid?" she asked, feeling like an idiot savant, able to do tremendous things behind the wheel of a car but unable to function like a normal human being. Even her tongue felt swollen as she tried to talk.

"Attempting to bolt like that," Vincent continued, the steam of his rage starting to ease off on the sides. "It would have been better if we'd just shot them."

Callie jerked a little. "You mean if you shot them," she corrected.

Vincent, she realized, now that she could turn her head a little more, the paralytic shock starting to wear off, had continued to jerk his head around in every possible direction, and he turned to her briefly, disdain in his face. "Yeah, me," he snapped. "Doesn't matter now, you're wanted for evading arrest. You're right in this with me."

She glared at him. "She wasn't going to arrest us," she said coolly. "She was going to arrest you."

"How do you figure?"

"She figured. She had you all figured out. I could see it." Callie looked away. "I'd rather be a fugitive than be responsible for you shooting two perfectly good police officers."

Vincent chuckled, a low, throaty sound in the back of his mouth. "So you were trying to be a hero, huh?"

The light finally changed. She jerked the accelerator again, causing his head to flip back for a second, making an unpleasant jerking motion. "Fat lot of good it did," she grumbled. "Did you manage to kill one of them?"

"The one on my side, I think. I'm not sure." He said it so casually, as if they were having a normal conversation. "Now, Koreatown. Let's go."

Callie slipped into a sullen, angry silence throughout the drive.

A/N: People who review will get free rides through the airport with Vincent in the back seat…provided they don't mind running from the police at the time. Void where prohibited by law.