I've got writer's block right now, so any suggestions and screams regarding plot, character behavior, illogicalities, etc. are extremely welcome! (And don't worry, I'll write in a violent firefight eventually…)
Interval 5 – Requiescat in pace
He picked up at the second ring. As she listened, breathing filled the receiver, indications of accumulated stress that was reluctant to melt away.
"Senator," she said.
"Aristide?" the Senator breathed. "The prototype?"
"He was released from custody earlier. The vehicle transporting him and the Korean medic crashed near Owasco. They found themselves on the business end of a shotgun. Road rage, as you can see."
"Have you received confirmation of this?"
"Don't worry." A pause for effect, she thought. "He's extinct."
"What about the captain?"
"Accidentally drowned, while taking a swim."
"Excellent." The Senator sounded relieved. "You did good. Things will only get better from now on."
"There are still minor issues to clear up," she said. "The media, for example."
"That can be arranged," the Senator said stiffly. "For now, get some rest, Genevieve. Eat dinner, play with the kids… do… whatever it is that you do normally. We can talk more in the morning."
As she put the receiver back onto the phone cradle, Genevieve said quietly, "But you forget, Senator. I don't have any children."
-
No sound. Still no sound. The inside of the car was so quiet her ears were ringing softly. Some time before (a century, it seemed), the sounds of gunfire and shouting had ceased. The eerie silence of death hovered over the ditch.
After five minutes of forcing against the door trapping her leg, Jin felt the warm trickle of blood running down into her sock and leaned back against her seat to rest. She was still able to feel her toes – now that was a good sign.
A brilliant plan hit her full in the face, as plans usually did. She popped the glove box open and searched blindly until her fingers closed around the cool plastic handle of a screwdriver. Panting, Jin jabbed the tip against the seat with desperate effort. When it pierced the fabric, she ripped a large hole into the seat and dug the foam out with trembling fingers.
When at last her leg was loose, she found that she couldn't move it without incurring a great deal of pain. She gritted her teeth, lifted her leg clear of the seat and set it gently down on the car carpet. Jin couldn't make herself look at the spreading dark patch on her jeans. She let herself collapse over the hand brake and inched forward on her elbows.
The passenger door was pushed open with difficulty. It opened a crack before a gust of wind forced it against the frame again, and it bounced lightly. The door opened again. This time, the young Asian woman slipped out like a landed fish, and lay against the grass for a second before pulling herself up and leaning against the hood of the sedan.
"Quentin?" she called, but a sudden throb in her head made her voice catch in her throat, making the call too soft to be heard. She tried to peer over the hood, but the sun was in her eyes. She took a hop forward and her dangling leg throbbed with pain. She didn't even want to bend down and touch her ankle or her calf. She knew how bad they were.
Jin got as far as the trunk before a sudden jab of pain forced her to rest. When she looked up, panting, she saw him. Surrounded by several inert bodies, he was kneeling in the grass, head down, shoulders bobbing every time a sob shook his body.
"Quentin! Are you all right? Are you hurt?" She made a move toward him, lost her balance and pitched forward.
Frozen in place, propped up on her elbows, the front of her shirt streaked with dirt and blades of grass, Jin wanted to scream, but no sounds would come out of her mouth. The man looking over his shoulder wasn't Quentin, drowning in his tears in a sea of bodies, it was Paxton Fettel, a strip of skin hanging down his bloody chin.
"Jin," he said hoarsely. It wasn't Paxton's voice. Jin blinked. Come to think of it, the two brothers didn't look at all alike.
He got up to help her to her feet. As he moved away from the bodies, she saw the object of his ministrations: one of the attackers was missing his face.
"We… we have to get out of here," she said faintly, as he crouched in front of her to look at her leg. She was highly uncomfortable with having him so close, though he didn't seem to have noticed that anything was out of the order. She grabbed his shoulder when he tried to touch her leg. "It can wait. First, we have to leave."
Upon examination of the gray sedan, it was determined that its back tire had been punctured by a bullet. Jin hobbled toward the black SUV, climbing onto the passenger seat. She found the keys still plugged in the ignition and started the car.
Quentin arrived a minute later. He threw the guns onto the backseat, ran to open the passenger door and looked shocked when he saw Jin.
"Aren't you going to…?" he asked, looking away, but he cut off. "There's a car coming."
Jin stared at him with round eyes. Quentin slammed the door and ran to the driver side. When he slid into the driver's seat, Jin put her hand on the gearshift and moved it to D1. The SUV began to inch forward slowly.
"Just press your right foot on the smaller pedal," she said. "And don't press too hard. The other one is the brakes."
"Okay." Quentin nodded, sliding his fingers around the steering wheel.
The vehicle gave a sudden forward lurch and stopped with a squeal.
"Take it easy," Jin advised. "Ease up on the gas."
The SUV started moving forward again, running off the road for a moment before moving more normally away from the scene of carnage.
"Genevieve Aristide is after us," Quentin said.
-
"What the hell happened here?" the officer mused, rubbing the back of his neck. He closed his cell phone with a slight snapping sound.
The gray Nissan Sentra that lay in the crime tape-lined ditch was so badly damaged the door wouldn't open. The part of its left side that wasn't entirely caved in and deformed was riddled with bullet holes. Shining casings littered the ground. A few uniforms were moving around the vehicle, taking pictures or sampling the evidence. On the road, a line of body bags and an ambulance lay like a child's play set, abandoned before suppertime.
He walked away from the road and crouched down. On the grassless, soft soil near the road were tread marks belonging to an SUV. The road all around him was littered with splinters of headlight plastic and chips of black paint. He glanced back up, squinting in the receding red sunlight.
It was so strange, strange that this gunfight had happened here, out near Lake Owasco. None of the corpses had identification on them. It was as though they'd never existed, up until the moment they were shot. Their matching uniforms didn't make any sense. And there was no way to identify the bodies, except by DNA and fingerprinting. Hopefully, the DNA testing could reveal the perp's identity as well.
This was no wild animal attack.
There weren't any guns with which to match the casings and the holes. There were no witnesses, except the man who dialed them in the first place. He had passed by here and saw a black SUV leaving the scene. He couldn't remember the plate number.
The front passenger door of the Sentra, ajar, was pushed open further as a CSU emerged.
He opened his cell phone again, and dialed the number for the umpteenth time: still no answer, after 16 rings. Where was the captain? He knew very well what being on shift meant.
"Vincent," he called to the CSU. "Did you find something?"
"There's some blood on the passenger window," Vincent said, sealing up a swab. "I doubt it's from our victims – none of them exhibit wounds like that. Oh, and the driver's seat's ripped. There was a screwdriver. Hopefully we'll be able to lift some prints from it. Some blood there too."
"Do we know who the Sentra belongs to?"
"It's registered to a Rowdy Betters," Vincent said, suppressing a chuckle at the strange forename.
"Let's put out an alert for a black SUV. And let's find this Rowdy Betters," he said. "I'm sure he'll be itching to see this."
-
If you detected any problems, please review to tell me so! And a big kiss/hug/beer to you for having read to the end! I know how much you hate those cops, they won't turn up again…;)