Maxine and Tim wound up in the second most defensible room in the house: the laundry room. The walls were cinder block, and there was only one window that was tiny and fairly high up on the wall. They left the door open because the laundry room was the last line of defense for the bathroom. Anyone that tried to get to the bathroom would have to go by the laundry room.
Maxine took a deep breath to calm her shaking hands and looked at Tim.
"Hey, if you're a sniper, would you be looking in big windows or little ones?"
"Big windows if you're not a pro," Tim said. "But you could probably catch their attention through a little one."
"Let's try it," she said. "I'm gonna move some things in front of the window and see if this guy turns his rifle on it. If he breaks the window, we sit still, and then..." She crawled across the floor to the pantry there in the room and pulled out a container of ketchup. "We move something across the window that looks like a person, splatter this on the wall - make them think they've taken one of us out and it's safe to come in. But we'll be here with thirty bullets between us."
Tim stared at her.
"Call backup first, of course."
"Where the hell are you getting this idea?"
"I just think that if we've got one place to thin out these guys, it's in the bottle neck of this hallway."
"Alright, call for backup. We'll give it a shot. But we gotta do this first."
Twenty minutes later, Maxine and Tim had managed to move the washer and dryer so they had protection as long as they stayed in between the wall and the metal machines.
"Alright, I think we've got his attention," Tim said, referring to the rifleman.
Maxine smiled and readied her ketchup bottle as Tim quickly moved a mop in front - only to have a bullet tear through it. Maxine splattered the far wall with their improvised fake blood.
The tracer stayed trained on the wall, and Maxine moved to join Tim as they stared at the bullet hole in the wall and the laser beam.
"Alright, we're going to calculatedly blind fire back at the rifleman," Tim said immediately. "That way, if it all goes to shit, we can have a way out the back."
"Sure," Maxine said. Tim took his gun and held it in the window sill, lined it up as best he could with the laser and bullet hole, and fired. The man behind the gun howled in pain, which meant Tim had hit meat, but Maxine jumped to her feet to look out the window, and blew a hole in the head of the man on the back porch over a fence and some 25 or so meters away.
Tim admired her skill for a moment before he broke out the rest of the window with the barrel of his own gun and offered a foot hold to Maxine. "Get me that rifle," he ordered. She nodded and scrambled out, ran across the backyard, hopped the fence, and pried the rifle from the man's bloody hands.
Ugh. Gross.
She ran back to the house, and realized she couldn't get back in the way she got out. So, she slid the rifle through the window and promised that she'd find a better way in.
She got in the side door, and found herself in the kitchen. Her mind started racing. She could do so much damage if she only got a hold of -
Machine gun fire peppered in through the window in the living room, which gave a view of the kitchen. She hit the deck and belly-crawled through broken glass to get to the cabinets. She searched for anything - anything - in that kitchen that could help her and Tim. She pilfered through the lower drawers and found a box set of three disposable cameras from Sam's Club.
Jackpot.
She belly crawled near the wall, moving shit out of the way as she got to the front door - except for the cordless phone she found. She needed that for wire. Oh, and she needed that roll of duct tape under the couch too.
She yanked the knife out of her boot and cracked open the side of one of the cameras before she smacked the phone against the wall, pulled out the batteries, and yanked out a couple of wires. She wrapped the wires she just pulled out of the phone around the pair that were coming out of the disposable camera's capacitor. She attached the ends of the phone wires to the door handle via duct tape and made sure it was unlocked before she hit the button to charge the camera's flash. She taped the camera to the body of the door because, well, she had a short length of wire and if the camera was just hanging there it might rip the wires and duct tape off the inside handle.
She belly crawled to the hallway and then scrambled to her feet with her supplies, running to the bathroom to set up another. She looked at Scott, breathing hard. "You lock this door, and don't hit this charge button until after I leave, okay?"
Scott nodded, and Maxine noticed that the man had tears on his face.
She shut the door behind her and thought. Which would be the best way to enter the house? She and Tim needed their door open, so that was out of the question, but where to put the final taser?
Wait. That guy had seen her come in through the side door, or else why would he have peppered the kitchen with gunfire?
She had to move fast, so she didn't bother to crawl until the gunfire erupted again. She only hung out by the side door, thinking that if the gunman relayed that the side door had been tampered with, her taser would be wasted. So, instead, she used the cover of the kitchen counter to rig up the backdoor, and then she was back in the laundry room, gun at the ready and feeling a whole lot better about their situation.
"What did you do?" Tim asked, breathing raggedly. She explained that it was a prank she'd learned in basic training, but it still had the potential to kill if the man grabbed the door handle just so.
Since they figured they couldn't be dealing with more than six men - five now that the rifleman was dead - they could easily thin out the group and have Scott safe in no time.
Maxine readied her pistol as she heard a whole lot of nothing. There was absolute silence outside the house. Tim contacted their backup and advised them to use the side door if they had no other open entrances - it was the only one that was safe, after all.
Maxine heard footsteps in the backyard, and Tim silently moved from his position to the end of the hallway, so he could spin around the corner and shoot the man soon-to-be stunned by the current from the camera that was running through the knob.
He heard the sound of boots on the patio deck and then -
"OW! SHIT!"
He wheeled around and fired off two shots through the glass of the backdoor. He hit both men, one shot in each of their hearts. They went limp like rag dolls, hitting the ground, and Tim retreated quickly back to the laundry room. He sat on the floor behind the washing machine, breathing heavily like Maxine was.
This guerrilla warfare shit was exhausting. Maxine felt like she was inches away from a panic attack, so she started counting to ten in every language she could: English, Spanish, Japanese, Swahili, Arabic.
Maxine didn't have a lot of bad memories from her time in the service, but the one she did have involved a situation a lot like this. They were prepping on land to clear out a bay for an amphibious op some 20 clicks east of the infil site. Some bad guys got wind of it and she wound up hunkered down behind a rock outcropping with a dying team mate on her lap as gunfire rained down on her.
Tim, however, was looking very much like he was in full-flashback, eyes dilated and breathing heavy and sweaty. He squeezed his eyes shut and tilted his head back against the cold concrete, and she wondered if he was gonna be okay, until she heard a slight movement in the hall.
Tim had his rifle out and fired a shot into the man's head before she could even turn to look. Another man came around the door frame to take a shot at Tim, but Tim beat him and fired a bullet through his heart.
Maxine and Tim were both poised behind their make-shift sandbags and ready to fire given the opportunity. The next pair of footsteps were cut off by a familiar voice:
"US MARSHALS, DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND GET YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR!"
Raylan.
"You guys okay?!" Raylan called as she heard the sound of cuffs snapping.
"We're fine!" Maxine responded. "Scott's in the bathroom." Rachel went to open the bathroom door, but before Maxine could advise her otherwise, she got shocked hard enough for her to yell "FUCK!"
"Thank God," Maxine sighed as she and Scott stepped out of the house, Tim bedraggled-ly staggering behind her. She handed him off to Raylan and Rachel, who she gave a sympathetic look to for shocking. Rachel just smiled, gave her a pat on the shoulder as an apology for one crazy-ass first day on the job, and then walked away.
Tim sat down on the porch steps, sighing and raking a hand down his face. "Are you alright?" Maxine asked him. He hadn't done too hot in the laundry room, and she knew how crazy PTSD episodes could get.
"Yeah, I will be. Give me a bit."
"I always count to ten," Maxine said after a moment of silence. Tim huffed, mainly because he thought he implied that he'd like her to be quiet. But, she had saved his ass and her own back there with that camera trick, so he figured he should at least consider hearing her out.
"I start in English. Then Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Swahili," she told him.
"I don't speak Spanish or Japanese or Swahili."
"Arabic? Kurdish?" she chanced. Had he done his service in Afghanistan or in Iraq? Because that would be a whole different list of possible languages if he served in Afghanistan.
Tim huffed. "Yeah." She sat and waited as Tim counted in Arabic under his breath, then in English, then in Kurdish.
"Better?"
"A little."
"These happen often?"
Tim didn't say anything, which she took to be a 'yes.' They sat in silence again until Art came up with two cups of coffee, one for each of them.
"Thanks," Maxine said, taking her cup. Tim was still cradling his head, so Art hung on to his on the off-chance the Iraq veteran would look up. Art cleared his throat and said, "Maxine, the paramedics want to check you out because of the whole 'playing with electricity' and 'crawling across glass' thing."
"Oh, yeah, sure," she said, standing and walking over to the waiting stretcher by the ambulance.
"Gutterson, do I need to give you the rest of the week off?" Art asked once she was out of earshot. Tim thought it was rather dumb that he waited, because she obviously knew about his PTSD already if she knew how to help him.
Tim shook his head. "No, no. I need something to do. I'll be in, in the morning," Tim said quickly. He was silent for a bit until he said, "That old woman across the street. Is she okay?"
"Yeah, she got whacked over the head with a rifle, but her dog managed to do some serious damage on the gunman. He didn't get too far after."
Tim smiled and nodded, glad she was alright at least. He rubbed his forehead. It had gotten cold after the sun went down. He held out his hand and Art handed him his coffee. He took a large drink of it to warm him, but also to burn through the bad memories and the horrible feeling he had in his stomach.
Tim stood, toeing the ground with his boot.
"I'll drive back to Lexington," Maxine volunteered as she walked back up to the porch. "We can swing through somewhere and get dinner. Sound good?"
Tim didn't respond, he just took a sip of his coffee. Maxine and Art stood by, just waiting for him to do something. He glanced between them both and then motioned for Maxine to take the lead, realizing that she required a response. "Go on, I'll buy us dinner."
Maxine snorted. "No, we're going Dutch on this one. I ain't lettin' you get any ideas in that head o' yours."
"What sort of ideas could I possibly get?" Tim questioned, following her down the sidewalk to their SUV. Scott or Allen or whatever his name was, thankfully, had an armed convoy taking him to Lexington for safe-keeping. That meant Tim got to go home earlier and try to sleep before failing and going on a run for a few hours in the middle of the night to chase off his demons before going back to bed to not-sleep and just stare at the ceiling.
It sucked, sure, but really, it was more pleasant than it sounded.
"I dunno, you tell me. But I think it's safe to say that any ideas you may get are bizarre and wrong because of all the hair gel that's probably seeped through your scalp to your brain."
Tim smiled a little at that and sat in the passenger seat as Maxine adjusted the seat and mirrors. She liked to sit a little closer to the wheel than Tim did, but she was still longer in the waist than he was. She backed out of the driveway and maneuvered her way through the traffic and out to I-64.
Maxine was trying her damnedest to give him something constant to keep him from sinking too deep into his memories, but she also had to keep him distracted and conversing.
"You know," Maxine started. "I grew up not too far from here."
Tim didn't reply, but he gave her that look with a tilted head he gave Raylan when he was listening.
"I lived in a little town called Wayne, where half the population was below the poverty line and those that weren't worked for the government. Anyway, it's about a thirty or forty minute drive from here."
Tim considered not replying, but for whatever reason, he did. "I grew up in Tulsa But I prefer to think of Kentucky as my home now. Kind of fallen in love with the place."
"Coal boy, huh?" Maxine teased.
Tim snorted. "Just enough of a coal boy to know natural gas is the way to go. My dad worked fracking shale, so."
Maxine nodded, eager to get him and keep him talking. "So, what was crack-shot Tim Gutterson like in high school?"
"I was a little shit," Tim replied, smiling as he sipped at his coffee. "I shouldn't have been, because I was scrawny and a little pussy, but I was." He paused, wondering where to go from there. "My two older brothers were football players, and they were good at it, but I was too scared for a contact sport. I ran track."
"Were you any good?"
He shrugged. "I made it to state one year in hurdles."
"Did you win?"
"Oh, hell no."
The next day, for the AUSA meetings they had to bullshit their way through, Maxine decided to dress as professionally as she could manage. She slipped on a plaid-button up and a black mini skirt (she had a pair of jeans in her locker to change into later) and a black blazer which she intended to ditch the minute the AUSA guys left.
"So you're telling me," AUSA number one asked. "That you used the laser to tell which angle he was at and just blind fired?"
"The plan was to just get him spooked enough to clear the window and let Maxine have a shot," Tim repeated.
"You didn't think to identify yourself first?" AUSA number two demanded.
Maxine looked at him like he was stupid, interrupting Tim's response. "They were already after Scott - Sorry, Mr. Tate. They really wanted him dead, they had the whole place surrounded. They wanted us all dead. They'd probably kill their hostages too. It wouldn't matter if we were both federal marshals because they would've killed us and anyone who could've pegged them. So, no, I didn't identify myself. I didn't think it'd make much of a difference."
Art watched from the doorway, impressed. He saw a whole lot of potential in this new marshal of his.
"God, I hate AUSA agents," Maxine lamented, plopping down at her desk on Rachel's left. Raylan snorted from Rachel's right. "Yeah, tell me about it."
"Are they all assholes?"
"Nope," Raylan replied. "Just most of them, most of the time. I've met one or two that are alright."
"How many have you met?"
"Enough that he needs to start counting them on his toes," Tim said, slipping back into the office with a bag.
"What's that?" Maxine asked, nodding to the doggy bag in his hand.
"Only the best buffalo wings you can get in Lexington. I needed some comfort food before I dealt with these assholes." He took a container out of the bag and offered it up to Maxine. "Want some?"
Maxine arched an eyebrow. "Now, Timothy. What did I say about you gettin' ideas?" Sure, she wanted Tim as badly as Pavlov's dog wanted that treat, but she had to play it cool around him. She had to stay aloof.
"I dunno, I think my hair gel this morning exacerbated my existing condition."
She smiled and took the container when Art called Tim into the conference room. Tim gave them an eyebrow raise and then looked to the ceiling as if to say, 'God, please, help me.' He wheeled around on his heels and walked off to the conference room. Maxine held up the container to Rachel and Raylan. "Y'all want some?"
"No, thank you," Rachel smiled. "I've had those 'best buffalo wings you can get in Lexington' a few too many times. The novelty's begun to wear off."
Raylan shook his head and gestured down at his shirt. "It's white, I wouldn't want to stain it."
"Suit yourselves." She took a big bite out of a wing and nodded. These were pretty magnificent. She was too busy admiring the buffalo wing to notice the look Rachel and Raylan shared.
"I hate AUSA agents," Tim lamented as he sat at his desk, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyelids. "They make you spend the day answering the same questions over and over, give you paper work to fill out, and then you get behind on the paperwork for the case you were doing before they decided to stick their nose in it."
"I hear that," Raylan snickered.
"Rachel?" Maxine asked. Rachel looked up to peek over the cubicle wall. "You ever been investigated by the AUSA?"
"Nope."
"Goody-two-shoes," Raylan taunted.
Tim leaned back, stretching. Maxine tried not to stare at how the muscles and sinew of his arms moved under his skin. "Fuck off, Raylan, you're just jealous that Rachel's got a better head on her shoulders than you do - a prettier face too."
Raylan snickered. "I'm sorry, but are these bruises upsetting you?" He gestured to the bruises on his face that he apparently got trying to break up a bar-brawl.
"I think Tim is just concerned about your beauty pageant career," Maxine said dryly, turning back to her paper work.
"Didn't you hear? I was banned from those. It wasn't fair to the competition."
"Oh, I'm sure," Rachel laughed.
"Quit flirtin'," Art commented, poking his head out the door. "Tim, Raylan? You're doing transport today. Maxine? The truck driver that flipped his car on 64, the one that held you and Tim up to get in place, gave up the guy who paid him. Some chop-shop owner in Covington."
Maxine went out later to pick up said fugitive because she needed a break from the mountains of paper work. Seriously, it was like the fucking Tibet-Nepal border on her desk top. The perp ran a chop shop down in Covington, and had been off the grid for the past six months, apparently working with Persian human traffickers.
"Shit," she muttered, noticing all the cars. She took down the license plate numbers in her head and then headed in to the garage as confidently as she could. The garage was a chop shop, but it doubled as an official, genuine business, from what she could tell. She paused at the door and surveyed the area, ignoring the BEWARE OF DOG sign. Three mechanics under or inside cars, tinkering. Two men by the door to an office, seemingly just conversing, but she noticed the lug wrenches in their grips. Through the office windows, she spotted the man she was looking for: Alex Young.
"Hey, boys," she greeted, stepping inside and smiling kindly. "Can I talk to Alex?"
"And why should we let you, sweetie?" one of the doormen said, smiling at her. He had a mouth like someone who chewed dip, that was for sure.
"Because if you don't I'm going to have to arrest you for obstructing a federal case." She pulled her jacket back and revealed her badge and her side-arm.
That was the shot heard round the world. They both came at her with their make-shift weapons. She ducked the first one and yelped like a wounded dog when the second wrench got her in the ribs. She managed to grab her attacker's wrist and jerk it an unnatural way. He cried out in pain and she took him down with a kick to the back of the knee, and pulled out her gun, spinning around while she kept her boot pressed down onto the man's injured wrist.
"US Federal Marshal!" She screamed in as masculine a way as she could. "LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS!"
The two men under cars slid out on their wheelie-contraptions, hands up. The third man, who had been in the engine, slowly spun around, hands up but eyes narrowed angrily.
"Alright, now we're getting somewhere," she sighed, rubbing her forehead with her free hand. "ALEX YOUNG, GET OUT HERE NOW OR WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE THIS A LOT -" That's when she heard glass breaking from inside the office.
Shit.
She bolted out the front door and around the side of the garage the office was on, where a window had just been busted out. Alex Young was running for it, all 6' 3" of him making it down rows of junk cars. She leveled her pistol and took the shot, nailing him in the back of his right knee. He hit the dirt and she sighed, relieved.
Until she heard the growl. She spun around and raised her gun just in time for a pit bull to sink it's teeth and clamp it's jaw down on her right elbow - her gun elbow. She yelped and dropped her pistol, she fell to the ground with the weight of the dog knocking her off balance. The dog went for her face, and she grabbed her boot knife. Thank God for preparedness, she thought as she thunked the knife through the dog's skull, right before it came in contact with her cheek. The dog stilled and she gingerly removed her arm out from underneath it. She hissed as she noticed the spray of blood coming from it. She knew arterial bleeding when she saw it.
"Oh, hey there, dog-whisperer," Art greeted as Maxine walked in the next day. Her arm was wrapped up in layers and layers of gauze (she needed seven stitches, thank you) and her left side was black and blue, with a fractured rib from the asshole with the lug wrench, who's wrist she broke.
"Hi, Art," she greeted, holding out the two containers of coffee. It was her day, because it was Thursday after all. Tim had Mondays, Art had Tuesdays, Raylan had Wednesdays, and Maxine had Thursdays. Rachel was responsible for Fridays. On weekends, it was every man for themselves.
"Why, thank you, Maxine," he replied, taking the containers. "We need you to give us any information on the other chop shop workers you can."
"Alright, sure," she replied.
"Tim, help her out with the files, please?"
After she got attacked, the chop shop workers got the hell out of Dodge, and local law enforcement wouldn't be able to find them without photos and car descriptions because, most likely, they were under fake names.
"Sure thing," Tim complied, rubbing at his forehead.
She told him all she could and the duo wound up sprawled on the conference room floor, going through files of all of Alex Young's associates, and their associates. Tim's computer was going through the DMV database for the people those cars belonged to. They were just waiting for the 'ding.'
"So, what did you do yesterday?" Maxine asked.
"We were transporting a pregnant convict to her ultrasound, got jumped and cuffed and she got sprung. But then it turned out the guys that sprung her just wanted to sell her baby on the black market or something. It was about the time we finally found her and her captors that you wound up in the hospital."
"Well we were just busy yesterday, weren't we?" Maxine said, smiling, but she let it slip off her face when she noticed Tim's steely look. Something clearly happened yesterday.
"Shit, Tim, did you shoot someone?" It was merely SWAG that led her to that conclusion; a "scientific wild-ass guess."
"He had a gun pressed to her stomach," Tim said, not meeting her eyes. Maxine merely nodded, because she understood. In his position, she would've done the same thing.
At the end of the day, they had BOLOs out on every vehicle and every perp they could nail down, and after Maxine got her knife back from evidence, Tim stood at her desk, looking very much like he wanted to ask something.
"Yes, Timothy?" she asked, looking up at him.
"How did you remember those plates?" he finally asked. She couldn't help but notice that he didn't really move his mouth when he talked.
"They're a lot like deck levels on a ship and bulkhead numbers. You come up with -"
"Memorization tricks," Tim finished.
"Yeah," Maxine smiled.
"They did that at Sniper School. They started training us to gather intelligence, make you memorize items on a table or memorize the items on a person and then, after 12 hours of intense training, recite them back. I understand coming up with systems for stuff like that."
Maxine nodded, turning back to her computer, reading up on the perps they had BOLOs out on. He still stood there, shifting from foot-to-foot.
"What can I do for you now, Tim?"
"I was wondering. Um..." He glanced over at Raylan, who was grinning at his computer screen like he was a possum eating shit. Rachel was, thankfully, occupied by talking to Art. He would've hated to see the look on her face if she saw him floundering like this.
He turned back to Maxine, sighing. "There's this bar I know and they've usually got not-so-shitty music and good food and cold beer. Would you like to come with me tomorrow evening?"
"Timothy, is this a date?" Maxine teased, secretly squealing about it. She had thought for the past couple of days he had been flirting with her, but she wasn't quite sure, because she didn't know him all that well. She did, however, figure that even if she did know him well she'd find him hard to read.
Tim smirked. "We'll go Dutch. I don't want you gettin' no ideas in that head o' yours."
She laughed and nodded. "Alright, yeah. Not-so-shitty music and good food and cold beer sounds great."
"Great. See you tomorrow," he said, smiling a little as he walked out of the bullpen.