The next two days passed in a whirl. The first consisted of sitting in the control room listening while felon after felon was arrested. Over the whole day, all twenty of the felons were arrested and taken to jail. The ERT had purposely saved Roscoe to the last. They were hoping that he would have found out about the other arrests prior to the ERT coming for him. They wanted him terrified, and they wanted him to resist arrest. Their ideal would have been if he pulled a gun and they'd be able to shoot him.

They turned on their cameras, peeked through the windows and noticed the toasted bread still sitting in the toaster, the coffee in the pot, the pot of whatever they were heating up for dinner turned down low on the stove, and the dirty clothes on the floor in the trail through to the bedroom, clothes that weren't all men's. Flynn looked at Tank and smiled. They would love to interrupt him in the middle of making love.

Flynn took the back of the house and Tank took the front, they picked the locks, and each lead half of the team into the house. They silently cleared the main floor, crept up the stairs, and silently entered the bedroom. All twenty men crowded into the space as the woman moaned and gyrated. Tank shook his head in disgust. Even I could hear how fake it sounded over the comms. He crept forward, reached around and grabbed Roscoe's hands, and cuffed him behind his back.

"What the fuck?" said Roscoe, pulling out quickly and deflating even faster. Tank looked down and shook his head again.

"You're under arrest for sexual, physical and verbal assault of Eli Ellis, and the attempted murders of Brett LePage and Armano Bitonelli", said Tank. He read him his Miranda rights.

"You can't do that."

"Watch me. Let's go, pinkie winkie."

"I'm not a pinkie winkie, and you can't take me into the station without clothes on. It's cold out."

"You should be used to it. You don't heat your houses. Of course, maybe that's why you have a pinkie-sized winkie."

"I do not."

Tank snorted. "Teeny wienie?" We heard Roscoe sputter in anger. "Little love dart? I can go on all day."

Roscoe brought up his leg and tried to kick Tank. Tank caught his foot and twisted slightly, and Roscoe started to cry. "Sean? Get the shackles", said Tank calmly as he continued to hold the foot in the air and apply enough pressure to not injure but to cause pain.

"Let go of my foot", said Roscoe as Sean ran to retrieve the shackles from the car.

"No", said Tank.

"You can't do that. This is police brutality."

Tank snorted. "You threw your leg into the air. I caught it, as I am sure you wanted me to do. That is what you wanted me to do, wasn't it?"

"No."

"Well, if you didn't want me to catch your foot you obviously were attempting to assault me and that would be something else that I could charge you with. However, unlike a six-year old boy, I can stick up for myself. I have captured your leg that you were thrusting at me in a threatening manner and am holding it in the air. I am not injuring you even if I am applying a little pressure to hold you still and make sure you don't fall over. I am sorry if you don't like it, but you shouldn't assault people. There is always someone who is more skilled than you."

"You can't take me into the station with no clothes on."

"I can't? You wouldn't be the first person that I have taken in without clothes on. It is, in fact, a common occurrence, much more common than you'd suspect. It's okay. The station will give you a jumpsuit to wear. I hope orange is your color."

"You asshole. Do you know who I am?"

"According to your picture and the house address, you are Roscoe Cook."

"I'm the president of the Death Dogs gang."

I could hear Tank smile as he looked at Flynn. "Good. We have the right guy. I'd hate to have exposed myself to the tiny tan banana for no reason. Although, it will give my wife and me a good laugh tonight though."

Flynn smiled. "My baby's equipment is bigger."

Tank smiled. "So is my son's. I thought your baby was a girl."

Flynn grinned. "That's my point."

I snorted. There was nothing a cocky man hated more than was having his penis made fun of. I could tell that Tank and Flynn were trying to break him for their own amusement. They were both horrified as to the treatment that Eli had received, and they wanted to stick it to Roscoe as much as they could.

The woman who was with Roscoe finally noticed that Roscoe was no longer in her, and she stopped gyrating and moaning. "Roscoe, honey?" she said in confusion. She opened her eyes and looked in shock at everybody in the room. "Do I have to audition with all these guys?"

"Get the gun out, baby", said Roscoe. "It's under the mattress. Shoot these mother fuckers dead."

Tank looked at Estefan. "Get the gun out and wear gloves when you do it. I suspect it is an illegal gun and should be tagged and added to his line of charges."

The woman smiled at Tank. "I pick you next", she said. "Big guys get me hot, and I'd like to see your gun."

"If big guys get you hot, I'm surprised you were with Wee Willy here", said Tank.

"I am not Wee Willy", said Roscoe. I could hear him mentally stamping his feet in petulant frustration.

The woman smiled. "He paid. I would do you for free."

Tank laughed. "Not on your life. And to tell you the truth, if this was an audition Roscoe wasn't going to pay you either. If I were you, I'd get tested for STIs. The last I checked Roscoe's medical records, he was fighting a few of them."

The woman turned white, got up and slapped Roscoe on the face. "You asshole! You said I was the first person you'd ever had sex with without a condom."

Tank laughed. "And you believed him? Roscoe here is an asshole of the worst kind. He has sex with little boys, hits them and yells at them. He has tried to murder two people this week. He will be going to jail for a long time."

"Let me get my clothes. I'm going home". She ran around the room gathering her clothes together and hastily throwing them on as Sean ran into the room and held out the shackles to Tank.

"I'll just hold him while you put the shackles on", said Tank. Sean crouched down as Roscoe started to hop on one leg in the insane attempt to get his leg up and kick Sean in the face. Tank shook his head again. "You're going to fall, Roscoe. Unless you were particularly skilled or particularly lucky, you will not be able to get your leg high enough from a hop to be able to hit Sean." Roscoe continued to hop as Sean put on one side of the shackles and, as Tank started to lower the other foot, Roscoe lost his balance and fell on his ass on the dirty carpet.

"Fuck! I think I got a sliver in my ass", he said.

"That's what I was thinking earlier", said the prostitute as she pulled her sweater over her head.

"What is your name?" said Flynn.

"Lily Tremore."

Flynn looked down the list, took out a pair of cuffs, and restrained her behind her back. He told her that she was being arrested for prostitution and read her the Miranda rights. He turned to Tank. "Lily isn't auditioning. Lily is Roscoe's main prostitute."

Tank smiled and turned to a still-blubbering Roscoe. "You'll just have to deal with the sliver. None of us are removing it. In fact, none of us want to touch your ass at all. As my niece would say, you might give us the cooties. After all, you've got everything else."

Tank marched Roscoe out of the house while Flynn escorted Lily. "He's naked", said the officer receiving them.

"Yes", said Tank. "He was fornicating when we entered. Since he was trying to assault us, we needed to restrain him as quickly as possible. He doesn't seem to understand that we can take him in any condition we find him. He doesn't like this much, but personally I suspect the real reason is that he is scared to show off his diminutive ding-dong. I mean, some men call theirs The Colonel, but I think his has to grow a bit to make it past the Cadet stage."

Tank finished up with the police and walked away. As he did, I said, "I hope that sliver gets infected."

I could hear Tank sigh. "I think it already is. That is, after all, why Eli has to be treated for STIs."

"I was talking about the wooden one", I said.

Tank snorted. "So was I, but his wood was more of a twig...and boy, did I have fun pointing it out to him. Some people are very sensitive about their manly size, and usually the assholes are the most sensitive of all. And Roscoe? He's an asshole of the worst kind." I smiled as Tank wrapped up the day, arranged to meet the men at seven-thirty the next morning to arrest the prostitutes, and told everyone to have a good evening.

"Good job, guys", said Ranger. "You got a lot of very bad people off the streets today. Please give your earbuds to Flynn for recharging and disinfecting. See you tomorrow and have a good evening. Meet in the Equipment Room at seven-thirty. I'm ending the transmission now." He turned off the command center and looked at us. "Good job. Let's go home."

The next day, the rest of the prostitutes were arrested and taken to jail. The guys and I didn't listen to the transmission. We spent the time at our desks trying to get caught up on all the work that we hadn't done earlier in the week. We did go to the debrief though. The men were flying high. In the past week they had saved the lives of two people, rescued a little boy, and arrested thirty felons. It was a home run, a game changer, and my team was feeling pretty good about things.

Ranger and I were very glad to kick back and spend some time with the family over the weekend. On Saturday, we had the gang over for dinner to celebrate Amelia's birthday and Dirk's and Miguel's and Nick's and my promotions. Ranger made four large trays of lasagne and an enormous caesar salad and three loaves of garlic bread. Everybody had a good time but the best part of the evening was Eli's smile when he walked into the apartment and saw Ethan and Alix waiting for him to arrive.

Tracy reported that Eli was settling into their home life. He wet the bed at night and had nightmares, but Tracy and Joe rolled with the punches. They bought Eli pull ups so that he wouldn't have to sleep in a wet bed, and they told him that he would probably only have to use them for a short period of time, that it was common to need them during times of change. He seemed to accept the reasoning behind it, so I figured that Tracy and Joe had done a good job of explaining things to him.

Joe and Tracy brought Eli to our apartment during the day, and the kids had a wonderful time playing with each other. Tracy had started to teach Eli how to read. He was learning incredibly fast, and he often sat with a book puzzling out the words when Tracy was busy doing other things. Alix often joined him, and they figured out the words together.

Ten days after the gang members and prostitutes were arrested, the TPD Board called an emergency meeting and invited Ranger, Tank and me. The Chief started the meeting by talking about the tragedy that had happened. "There is a little boy that was raped approximately five times a night for the last ten months that didn't have to be raped. That means that there is a six-year old boy who was raped over fifteen hundred times because of the way we chose to handle the situation. We have an officer who is still in the hospital, who had to go through emergency surgery to heal multiple broken bones. He has suffered a severe concussion and will be on sick leave for months. The way we handled the situation was to keep Brett, our undercover officer, in place for the last ten months as he tried to get evidence against the gang members. Ten months of his salary is fifty thousand dollars, not including the cost of benefits, pension and other associated employment costs. Ten months, fifteen hundred rapes, life-threatening injuries and fifty thousand dollars – all to come up with less evidence than Rangeman came up with in a week for the price of less than twenty thousand dollars. I know you want to keep all our research and policing services to be done in-house. What I want to know is whether you think, in light of the actual numbers, whether it makes sense. Do we have the right to subject our citizens to incredible torment just for the sake of keeping our research services in-house, when we have a cheaper and more effective alternative?"

"I just don't think that policing should be farmed out", said one of the Board members.

"I understand that", said Ranger. "The FBI, the DEA, the countless other state and municipal police forces that we work for were equally concerned about that at first. They have solved that problem by limiting the area of influence that we have. We are not interested in becoming your police force. The TPD does good work and should be recognized as such. However, we currently are contracted as your SWAT team, and we currently create capture plans and fulfil research requests for your thorniest problems. Those are the areas we specialize in. We couldn't do your job, nor do we want to try. But we can support your work through those avenues that we do best. What we are proposing is that we create capture plans and fulfil research requests for all your research needs, not just the thorniest problems. It may not eliminate the need to put your officers in danger, but I would hope that it would reduce it significantly. It may provide the information necessary to protect those men and women. That is what we specialize in. Let us help you."

The men and women looked down at the cost-benefit analysis that the Chief had prepared for the case that Brett had been working. They looked at Tank. "What do you think?" they said.

"It didn't have to happen", said Tank. "Two men almost died. A little boy will be dealing with PTSD for a long time. And it didn't have to happen."

They looked at me. "Ms. Plum, what do you think?"

My hands shook a bit, and they grew damp with anxiety. I had never done an out-and-out sales meeting before, and I was seriously thinking of turning down the promotion if this was the kind of thing that I would have to do. Everybody looked at me and I could feel my face turn red. "This assignment was one of the hardest that my staff and I have ever had to do. Not because we didn't know how to do the work – we did. We do this sort of work every day, all day long. We are fast, we are thorough, and we take pride in doing a good job. This assignment was hard because we knew it was a situation that shouldn't have happened. If we had been called in ten months ago, nine months ago, six months ago, what actually happened could have been avoided. One talented officer is in the hospital and will have debilitating injuries for months. One six-year old boy was brutally traumatized, raped multiple times per day, physically and verbally abused repeatedly. He is currently being treated for STIs. His extensive bruising will heal, but the multiple scars will not. It is a mess. We were called in on Monday two weeks ago. By that Friday we had worked with the police to shut down the most vicious gang in Trenton today, people that were all too vicious to be awarded bail. We found extensive proof to charge those twenty gang members, and we had taken ten prostitutes off the street, prostitutes who were believed to be carrying STIs. We had found the officer who had been brutally beaten and left to die. We saved another man, a badly injured man, that hadn't been reported as missing. And we had rescued a little boy who is now learning how to play for the first time in his life. Who is learning how to smile and make friends and be silly and have fun. In a week we did what Brett had been trying to do for ten months. I understand your desire to keep policing as a municipal service. I agree with that. The TPD is a good organization, a valuable organization that excels at policing. However, I also think that there are ways that we can restrict what Rangeman does to just what we do best, and leave you doing what you do best. I think we can work together and come up with a solution that works for you. You asked me what I think, Members of the Board. I think fifteen hundred brutal sexual assaults on a small boy, not much older than a baby, speak for themselves."

Shortly afterwards, our portion of the meeting was over and we left the room. The three of us went back to the Rangeman building. As we got up to Ranger's office, Ranger received a call from the Chief telling us that the TPD would like us to prepare the conditions for negotiation. "Certainly", said Ranger. "I'll get my legal department to work on that right away." He hung up the phone and looked at Tank and me. "We did it", he said. "They are going for the whole research package."

I plopped down on Ranger's sofa and sighed.

"What's wrong, babe?"

"It didn't have to happen. That's the part that gets me upset. Eli will recover, but it will be hard for him for a long time. Brett will also recover, but he may never be the same again. The human cost is always what gets to me, and to me, the human cost this time was too high."

"I know, babe. But you are doing something about it. Yes, Eli and Brett suffered this time. But you can't concentrate on the people who have suffered before you were allowed to help. You have to concentrate on the people who aren't suffering because of what you have done now, what you are going to do in the future. You have the power to change things, babe. Focus on that. Not what you couldn't do, but what you can."

When I didn't look any happier, Ranger decided that I needed to leave the office early and spend some time playing with the kids at the playground, some time watching Eli play with the kids and learning to have fun. There had been a fresh snowfall the night before, and Ranger thought that we'd all like to make a snowman. To help shake my mood, he said that he would come and play in the snow with us as well.

We got back to the apartment and heard the kids laughing together as they practiced their self-defense. Alix was leading them through a session, and apparently she made the training just as fun as Julie. She had learned a lot from Julie over the last few months and it showed. I rather thought that, as Alix grew older, she would also be able to take Tank down. After all, Julie had been able to do it when she was seventeen – and she not only did it once, but she had done it several times. It had shocked the hell out of the staff, but Ranger and Tank were incredibly proud of her. She was light and agile and on the smaller side of average, while Tank was heavy and on the larger side. The first time she did it, they took her out to lunch to celebrate.

Ranger and I walked into the family room, crouched down and gave all four of the kids hugs and kisses. "You're home early", said Joe.

"We needed a break from the sadness of what has happened", said Ranger. "The TPD is planning on using us for all research needs in the future as long as we can hammer out a deal. Steph is upset though, at the human cost that got us to this point."

"I'm upset at that as well", said Joe. "It didn't have to happen. The TPD knows of your expertise, yet regularly limits the number of cases that I am allowed to bring to you. I am allowed four, and at any one time I have a waiting list of thirty. Staff need help and management isn't giving it to them. People are getting frustrated because they aren't feeling supported. I am one of those people."

"When we go to the full-research option with the TPD", I said, "what will that do to your role as liaison?"

Joe smiled. "I got a call from the Chief this morning, and now that I know that your meeting went so well that call makes a lot more sense. He said that I currently work as a liaison for the Crimes Against Persons division and it is a position that is in addition to my regular job. However, he was wondering whether I would be amenable to change from being a detective to become a full-time liaison. The role would give me a little more autonomy to work with you, and he said that he would like me present on the takedowns and leading the department when cases like the one a couple of weeks ago come up. I would be triaging all research requests. Apparently the Board is still a little concerned about handing over the reins on the research, and they want me to be a watcher and represent the TPD's interests. This new position comes with a significant pay raise and a promotion to Lieutenant. He said the Board talked about it and decided that, since I was the only person who had the experience, they wouldn't have to post the position. They could just award it to me."

I grinned. Joe worked hard and was paid little in comparison to the amount of effort he put in. He regularly worked overtime that he wasn't paid for and his hours were erratic at best. I was happy for him. "It's a Lieutenant's position rather than a Sergeant's?"

"They said that they didn't feel that a Sergeant had enough of an administrative role to account for the work that would need to be completed."

I gave him a hug. "That is awesome. Are you thinking of taking the job?"

Joe smiled. "I am. Fifty thousand more and more standard hours and working with people I like and a promotion to boot? Hell yeah. I'll take it. It's my dream come true."

"Hooyah", I said.

Ranger groaned.

~ The End ~

I hope you enjoyed the story. # 50 will be out soon, so stay tuned.