Mako trudged slowly back home in the direction of his apartment, having woke up some time later freezing cold in the mud. He'd forced himself to get up, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do. By some miracle, he didn't have a cold or worse. He'd always been lucky in that regard when he was younger when he slept outside every night, while Bolin had gotten pretty sick sometimes. It was probably something to do with being a firebender.
Mako kept on rubbing at the dirt which was now caked into his clothes. The rain had stopped by the time he woke up, but the sewage drains were now flooded and a lot of paths were cut off by huge puddles. But Mako didn't bother walking around them, such was his mood. He'd put on decent enough clothes earlier, but these were now for the bin. He might even give them to a homeless charity if he could get half of the dirt off, it was that bad. None of his outfit was ripped, and was thick enough, so it'd probably be greatly appreciated.
He rubbed his weary eyes as he again ran over the fight with Hazukk in his head. It had been a complete embarrassment. What was I thinking, it was raining so badly, he thought. I'm already on thin ice with Beifong too, this could be the final straw. If I get demoted, it'll be a light punishment.
The limp in his leg had been gone by the time he woke up, although there was still a light bruise there when he put pressure on it. The spots Hazukk had hit on his back hadn't damaged anything properly, but it'd probably be sore for the next while if anything touched them.
I really need to stop getting injured all the time, he thought. I broke my arm with that giant spirit weapon against Kuivera, my rib against the Triple Threats a while ago, I got beat up against Shinoda and that waterbender very nearly cut me open. It's not too long before I get my head messed up pretty badly if I'm not careful enough.
He passed a police recruitment poster with Chief Beifong's face on it. It had been doodled on to give her a moustache, but he remembered that he had to give her a report.
I'll go in on Monday. And I can't let her know that I got into a fight with Hazukk. I'll just say that we had an argument, and that he's never coming back.
Mako caught a whiff of petrol, and noticed a streetlight bounce off a small trail going to the left up ahead. His curiosity got the better of him, and he followed the trail. The detour would only take him a few minutes extra to get home. He followed the trail through a few winding streets until it turned suddenly onto a larger street. His eyes followed the fuel down to the far end to where a white van was parked. It wasn't too far from the bank that Mako got his money out of every week or so. He decided to go there, seeing as he needed money for food. That was, if they'd let him in, given his current appearance. He stopped suddenly just ten metres away from the main doors. He switched on, and ran back behind a post-box a little further back.
Both the guards there were slumped down, presumably unconscious, since they didn't have any obvious injuries on them. They were both big men too, so whoever took them out must have been very strong. Mako didn't have much energy left himself, so he decided to wait there instead of rushing in. It was a pity he didn't have his radio on him.
But just forty seconds later, the doors were kicked open from the inside. A cloud of thick grey gas expanded out of the entrance. Mako strained his eyes to see who was coming out, and he got his answer a few seconds later when seven people, all covered from head to toe in black, emerged from the gas in a huddle, protected by a bubble.
"Triple Threats," Mako whispered to himself, hiding even more of his body behind the post-box. Now, he was watching with only one eye as the gas was blown away from them as an airbender expelled their protective shield in all directions. The other six people, who were fairly bigger than the airbender, had two gear bags each on their shoulders.
The airbender (Ra, was it?) turned around and blew all the gas back into the bank. The doors slammed shut when there was none left, and they all proceeded to sprint to the van which had been leaking a trail. No police sirens rang throughout the night as they all hopped in the back and drove off, none of them noticing the leak. The second they disappeared around the corner onto a smaller street, Mako sprinted to the nearest guard.
"Wake up!" he shouted, shaking him violently. "What happened, I'm a cop!" The airbender had done a very clean job of blowing all the gas back inside, thankfully, so Mako didn't bother holding his breath. A few bystanders looked at him, strangely, unsure of what to make of what had just occurred.
"Stop shaking him like that," an old woman near him said. He looked around and glared at her.
"Call the police, this bank's just been robbed, for crying out loud!" he demanded, taking her aback. She just stood there, and looked as if she was about to give him a lecture for shouting at an old woman. He ground his teeth together in frustration. It's not that hard, he reasoned mentally. Just call the police, why are some people so thick, you're not always in charge!
She just walked away petulantly, ignoring him, and Mako had to use a fair bit of his self-restraint, which had been missing earlier, not to shout at her more. He had no time to spare, but as he kept on shaking the guard, he didn't wake up.
Mako felt for a pulse just under the man's chin, and breathed a breath of relief when he found it. They weren't dead, as he'd anticipated. Mako then put his mind back on the job, and grabbed the key ring on the guard's belt. He had been forced to memorise the standard car key when training to be a detective, and it was paying off now.
He clicked the key ring off of the man's belt and went over to one of their cars parked thirty metres away. It was required that every BUR (Bank of the United Republic) bank had three pursuit vehicles of any kind outside the entrance for security reasons, but they were all second-hand hunks of junk. Mako didn't have his motorbike handy though, so it'd have to do. The door clicked open easily and he twisted the key in the slot. Nothing happened.
"Come on," Mako urged, and twisted it again, harder. It replied this time with a splutter, and he twisted it for a third time. The engine revved into life. "Bingo," he mumbled.
Mako drove off after the trail as fast as he could without drawing attention to his car. If anyone looked inside, they'd probably assume that he stole it, but he doubted he'd get any hassle. He decided against turning on the headlights as it might illuminate the 'BUR' trademark in between the headlights. It was so rusted at the minute that you had to go up close to make it out, but he wasn't taking any chances.
After about an hour or so, Mako entered chartered Triple Threat territory. He knew that he wouldn't be able to get too far now in his borrowed car, so he traced back a few blocks and parked it inconspicuously. He locked the door and slowly made his way after the trail. He came up to a restaurant and recognised it as a hideout he'd spent time in as a kid.
"Still holed up in the same places, huh?" he muttered. He made his way around the back until he came to a turn. He stopped, and peaked around.
He saw one man guarding the back door, and the van from earlier a little bit further on. It was pretty cramped, an apartment block covering the small alley in a shadow. The trail ended here with the van and the robbers seemed to have long since gone inside. The goon waiting out the back wasn't paying attention to his surroundings, more interested on his cigarette. He took a big fat long drag out of it, then groggily watched it dissipate into thin air. Mako set down his borrowed car keys in complete silence, and looked closer. He saw keys on the waist of the guard, which he assumed were the ones to the door he was leaning on. Mako took a deep breath.
The guard closed his eyes for a minute, and blew fire into his cold hands. He'd been put on guard duty for the second week in a row. He hated the job, and couldn't wait-
His eyes flew open as a brick clunked onto his head. He toppled to the ground, but Mako wasn't done yet. Mako shoved his hand over the guard's mouth, and rammed the brick into his forehead. Then, Mako dropped the brick and dragged the guard over to the bins at the very end. He propped the man up against the wall and held a fire dagger to his throat. The gangster's face was covered in blood, and he was panting loudly, spitting on Mako at the same time.
"Cut that out," Mako snapped, a hell-bent expression on his face. "How many people are in there right now?"
There was no reply for a couple of seconds. "Listen pal, I don't give two shits about your life, and I've got no qualms about slitting your throat right this very instant, so if you value your life, you'll talk!"
The guard gulped. "The seven from earlier are the only ones right now! We're leaving tomorrow anyway, and the money's getting shipped off in a few days to the Fire Nation for crack! That's all I know, honestly!" he blurted out, not taking much convincing to squeal.
"Thank you," Mako said sarcastically, and then rammed his elbow into the guard's temple. He crumpled onto the ground, and would have a bad concussion when he woke up, but that was no concern of Mako's.
The detective made a small lighter on his index finger and cut the keys off the man's trousers. He tiptoed over to the door and tried four keys until the fifth one worked. Mako nudged the door open as quietly as he could and saw no-one immediately. He guessed that they'd be upstairs, so he shut it and crept into the kitchen. There was no one else there, as the man had said, and Mako passed by a clock. It read half twelve.
"Late enough," he said to himself, and walked over to the vent. He climbed into the counter, opened it fully and pressed his ears against the cold metal. Voices drifted down into his earshot.
"…was clean earlier! It been expensive, that gas, but we bagged ourselves nearly double what we set out for!"
"We only needed five mill, yeah?" another voice replied. "We've got 750k to pay for the guy who gave us the gas and them blueprints, then one and a quarter mill extra to split between the rest of us. So it's not nearly double, ya thick, Fadrh!"
"Would you ever shut yer hole for once?" the man called Fadrh replied. "If we weren't working together, I'd crack your head open right now, no bother!"
"I'm ready right now," the other man challenged him, and Mako heard chairs scraping as they got up. It was the logical thing to contact the force right now seeing as he heard them admit it to each other that they'd robbed the bank, but Mako needed to see if there was anything else he could pick up on.
"Cut it out, boys," a feminine voice interrupted, and the others burst out laughing. Mako's ears perked up even more. A woman in the Triple Threats? That was impossible, they were the most misogynistic group of men he'd ever met, and that was an understatement. There was no way they had a woman up there, being treated as an equal. But they wouldn't listen to anyone lower than that.
"Oh look, Ru thinks she's all big now since she's been on one or two jobs," the first man said. "Just because you're the only airbender in the Triad doesn't mean that we'll go easy on you if you get too big for your boots".
Mako racked his brain to the first time he had encountered the airbender, back when the jewellery shop had been raided. He'd just assumed at the time, given their shaved head, that the airbender had been a man and he had a more pressing issue of not getting blown up, but… it actually made a tiny bit of sense. He pictured the body and realised that it actually had been kind of curvy compared to a man.
And their face was more like a woman's, he supposed. But he just couldn't get his head around the fact that he Triple Threats had accepted a woman. He wasn't misogynistic, some of the strongest people he knew were women (Korra, Lin Beifong, Asami), but he'd have never expected it from the Triple Threats in a million years.
"We don't want to blow up the whole room, do we?" Ru said. Definitely a woman. "You lot have had fights before that end up causing the rest of us money! Just let it go!" More laughter.
"Ya know, maybe throw in a little favour for us all and we might reconsider," the second man teased, emphasising the word 'favour'.
"Go fuck yourselves!" Ru responded, and they all burst out laughing again. This continued for another hour pretty much, the woman called Ru being the butt of all their jokes and eventually she stopped trying to defend herself. Mako almost felt bad for her, but then remembered that she tried to kill him using explosives.
Finally, Ru had had enough and stormed out of the room. Mako, who had been dozing off, snapped alert and ran as quietly as he could to the door he had come in from. Ru took significantly longer to get down the stairs than it took Mako to gently open and shut the door. He bolted over to behind the bins and checked on the guard he had beaten up earlier.
He was still there, and there were a couple of nasty scabs on his face. He might have been infected, but Mako didn't have the luxury of waiting to find out. All Mako took was one glance to confirm he wasn't awake, then nearly fell over in getting back to the door. He leaned his back on it, pretending to be the guard, then felt it push against him a few seconds later as Ru came out. He kept his head down, to avoid making eye contact with her, but she didn't even look at him. She just kept on her way. Mako let out a sigh of relief.
Mako stayed there for a minute before going after her. She was clearly new. It was the norm for new members to get the piss ripped out of them for a while before they gained respect (though she was even getting a lot more than Mako remembered happening to him). She didn't remember what the guard looked like, and he definitely didn't hear her try to unlock the door. He assumed that they'd split the money up later, because she only had a thin enough coat and baggy trousers on when she left, no bag.
Ru power-walked very quickly through the streets, and made it hard for Mako to stay on her trail without getting detected. There was no one else about at that time of morning, so Mako had to stay about fifty feet behind her and constantly duck into alleys as so not to be seen. He had a little bit more energy from the time he spent sitting down listening to them, and adrenaline was pumping through his veins.
They were walking along a canal when suddenly, she started to air-jump from vine to vine to the top of a vine-ensnared building. If he'd had to climb up the vines, Mako would've lost her, but thankfully there was a ladder going up the side. He waited until she disappeared onto the roof, then scaled it at a careful pace as the rungs were slippery.
"Stop!" he called out as he hauled himself over the ledge and started to run to her. She was about to head inside a door at the top when she froze. She turned around slowly, and her heart skipped a beat when Mako stopped just ten metres away and pointed his finger at her.
"Who are you?" she questioned.
"My name doesn't matter," Mako said. "But what does matter is that I'm a detective from the Republic City Police and I'm detaining you for robbery." He held out his badge for a moment, then put it back, never taking his eyes off of her. "I know where you live now too, so soon enough all your money will be returned to its rightful owner. Don't make this harder on yourself! Come quietly!"
"I don't know what you're talking about, honestly!" Ru denied desperately. Then she peered at him, as the moonlight caught off of his eyes. Her mind flashed-back to her first job not too long ago. She'd dealt with the last cop by blowing him of his bike. They'd made eye-contact for a brief moment back then, and even though he was caked in dirt, they were the same amber pupils. Realisation dawned on her face.
"Remember me, huh?" Mako taunted, his fists up.
"How did you find us so soon?" Ru cried. She was very whiny for a Triple Threat. "We didn't hear any police sirens, I thought it was a perfect getaway!"
"You're in no position to be asking me questions!" Mako told her. "How I tracked you down is my business, and realistically, you should be serving a lot of time in jail for the crimes you've committed, but right now, I'm feeling lenient. If you tell me who your client is, when exactly the money's leaving and where he got that gas you used to knock out the people in the bank, I'll put in a good word for you. I promise."
"Just hear me out for a minute," she pleaded, dismissing how he already knew so much. "It's not as cut and dried as it seems!"
"I don't care," Mako said, and fire lit up on the end of his knuckles. "I'll give you one last chance. Take my offer or leave it. Otherwise I'll have to bring you to the station by force!"
Ru didn't reply, but instead tugged as hard as she could at the door handle. Unfortunately for her though, it was locked, despite how the building had clearly been abandoned years ago. She cursed and fumbled around for her keys.
"I gave you a chance!" Mako shouted, and closed the gap in between them to five metres. The last thing he wanted was a long range fight with an airbender.