Bo checked the little device she jammed between the windshield and a dashboard. A bright red dot still blinked merrily in front of the one indicating her own vehicle. She didn't tend to use a lot of gadgets in her work, but this one came in handy more than once. With a radius of almost a mile, she was able to track her target vehicle discretely, without the other driver noticing the rather conspicuous tail a bright yellow Camaro convertible. It was maybe the worst possible car to use in surveillance, but she was really partial to the old beast that had served her so well over the years.
Reassured that the white, nondescript van with darkened windows and fake license plate she was following was still just a few hundred yards ahead, she shifted lower in her seat to try to relieve some pressure from her backside. Her left butt cheek had fallen asleep during the long ride, and she cursed the driver of the other car when she felt the tingles running up and down her leg. They've been playing cat and mouse for nearly seven hours now, the other vehicle stopping only once in all that time to fill up on gas. God only knew how much longer they had to go and where they'd end up. Bo tried not to dwell on the unknown and unattainable. She had a job to do, after all – inside that white van was something she'd been hired to retrieve, and retrieve it she will.
Bo was rather good at her job, though most would not have guessed so from a casual glance at her appearance. She drove an old car, lived in rundown houses and dressed as if she shopped at consignment Halloween stores. But unlike the pencil-pushers stuck in ever-shrinking cubicles for the rest of their lives, Bo was doing something she loved, something she was good at, and something that helped people. If it meant she took in four pro-bono cases for every paying one, she didn't let it slow her down.
Though she would often introduce herself as a Private Investigator, the job title was too narrow to describe what Bo did for a living. Sure, PI work accounted for a large part of her assignments, but she did so much more than that – she was an investigator, a fixer, an enforcer, and finder of all manner of lost things. Some of her clients were regulars, but most where desperate souls who walked through her doors looking for a miracle – hoping to find redemption, or peace, a way out, revenge... and once, a staffed black cat that was said to bring luck to its owner – a job that had Bo swear off taxidermy for good.
Bo herself have long ago stopped believing in miracles, redemption or peace. She's been through too much to believe in 'happily ever afters'. Abandoned as an infant into the care of her grandfather, she traded a home and the one stable relationship she had for a chance to get to know her mother. Well, that illusion didn't last long. About a month, to be exact. Two weeks of thinking her mother was a misunderstood genius who was kept away from Bo; followed by two weeks or hard reality reasserting the truth – her mother didn't care about anyone but herself. Once the veil was lifted from Bo's eyes, she considered going back home to her grandfather, who she knew would take her back with open arms, despite the way she left. But her pride got in the way of good judgment and she kept away. The longer she stayed away, the harder it became to go back, and now, 16 years after she drove off without really saying goodbye, the prospect of returning to her hometown seemed more distant than ever.
The quiet stretch of the road they were traversing was giving Bo too much time to think about roads taken – and not. She put a quick stop to the melancholy thoughts by jabbing the Play button on the tape player. The comforting noise of long-familiar songs helped her refocus on the task before her. She drove on, accompanied by a raspy "I'm a red-hot fox, I can take the knocks… I'm a hammer from hell, honey, can't you tell?.. The wild one, yes, she's the wild one..."
x
The van pulled up to the roadside Bar and Grill and parked. Bo drove to the other side of the parking lot and parked behind a pickup that mostly obscured her from view. This was the first promising stop and Bo needed to cease the opportunity now.
Breaking into the van would be relatively easy, but large uncovered windows of the bar would expose her when she tried to move the case her sources were telling her was nestled in a cargo section of the van, along with several other containers. The loot came from a series of robberies that probably fell in the industrial espionage category. Bo didn't know exactly what she would be retrieving, just that it was a refrigeration unit with a built in power supply about three feet long. She was given a device that would read the bar code on the container to identify the one she needed to recover and explicit instruction on what to do if the power indicator on the unit were to turn yellow while in her custody.
Looking around, Bo considered her options for a distraction. The entrance to the bar was on the other side, and the only door facing Bo was propped open with a boot. The door had no markings, so Bo surmised it was a service door. Taking a chance, she poked her head in, spotting a cook and a busboy.
The cook was immersed in his work, but the busboy was leaning against a counter, unhurriedly whipping some glasses with a grimy towel, a bootless right foot tucked behind the left leg.
A quick wave of her fingers was enough to get the young man's attention. When he looked up at her, Bo pressed an index finger to her lips then beckoned the boy before taking a few steps away from the door. As expected, moments later the door swung open, the busboy trying to reclaim his boot and step through the threshold at the same time, no doubt hoping to impress the beautiful woman with his nimble footwork. Smiling coyly, Bo gave the boy her most flirtatious look. A few words and a few flutters of her eyelashes were enough to secure his promise to create two noisy commotions about 5 minutes apart.
She rounded the building and waited for the first of the two disturbances. When it came, starting with a started man's voice shouting "You pinched me?!" and followed by sounds of fists connecting with flesh, she quickly approached the van and set to picking the unexpectedly complicated lock. It took a minute longer than she anticipated, but eventually the locking mechanism clicked open and she stepped into the van, closing the door behind her in case someone should walk by. The sunset glow streaming through the darkened windows was enough to navigate by, and she counted about a dozen cases in the cargo hold. It would only take a minute to find the right case, and she took out the scanner to check the nearest one.
Going methodically from one case to another, Bo was about half way through when a sound of a van's driver-side door opening sent chills down her spine. A moment later the seat cracked when a body dropped into it and the door was shut. Bo checked her watch in disbelief – only eight minutes have passed since the van parked in front of the Bar and Grill – what kind of schedule was this guy on that he couldn't take an hour to eat like a normal person? Protected from the view of the driver by a solid wall, Bo couldn't see a takeout container that now rested on the passenger seat, and but she could smell it. Bloody Hell. If she bailed now, he may hear her, or feel the shift in weight distribution. Even if she managed to get off without alerting the driver, she may not get another opportunity to remove the container. If she stayed… she may be risking her skin for whatever was in it. And this damn container was apparently so important, Mr. Jones was paying her double her typical fee to get it back. This client – her oldest and most frequent one - was a total mystery, which bothered Bo a good deal. He only reached out to her through a different intermediary. These middlemen conducted all negotiations and payoffs, but made sure to always point out that they were hiring her on behalf of Mr. Jones. If pressed, they all could list every assignment that Mr. Jones has ever sent her way, but none of them would tell her anything about the man, and all her considerable efforts to learn his identity thus far were for naught. She knew enough, though, not to want to disappoint him.
Her musings caused her precious seconds in which the driver had shifted gears and pulled out of the lot. In mere moments the van was once again cruising down the highway, destination unknown, containers and stowaway enclosed in its cargo hold.
Bo took a deep sigh and settled in for a ride after finding the container she was sent for. The sucker weighed at least 20 kilos, and if she wanted to come away with it, she would need to negotiate her way out of this mess. If things turned ugly, she had a long knife in her right boot. It would have to do.
They drove on for more than four hours, and when the door to the cargo section was thrown open, Bo was faced with not one, but three thugs. Two drew their guns on her immediately, while the third grabbed and roughly pulled her out of the van. Bo didn't have time to take in much of her surroundings, but she could see that the van pulled up in front of the industrial looking building, probably no longer in use based on the number of broken windows she could see. The building was the length of the street block, and she could see a pole with a street sign at the corner, but was far away to make out what it said.
She was frog-marched inside where they tied her to an office chair with zip ties, after divesting her of the boot knife, scanner and a case with lock-picking tools. She pulled on the zip ties to check how well they held and felt the plastic dig into the flesh of her wrists. She smiled sweetly at her captives, who've yet to say anything. Perhaps it was time for introductions, she decided.
"Guys, this – " she rocked her chair to indicate she was well and fully incapacitated, "isn't necessary."
"Sure it ain't," one of her captives answered, smirking. He picked up a knife they removed from her boot and made a show of testing how sharp it is with a thumb. "'Cause you're such a sweet angel, won't hurt a fly, right?"
"Sweet – yes. Angel – no." Bo winked at the men. She continued to smile amiably, knowing from experience that 'charm and disarm' was a best tactic against armed opponents. And she could tell it was working now – the guns they had trained on her earlier where put away into the holsters.
One of the man tapped another on the shoulder. "Let's go get the cases in." His companion nodded, and together they headed out.
Bo took a moment to look around. The space was wide open, with only a few support beams positioned at equal intervals. The interior looked as gutted and abandoned as the exterior did, and Bo thought it probably housed industrial machinery of some kind at one time, because she could see ventilation tubes and florescent lights strung up under the ceiling. Aside from the chair she was tied to, there was a desk with some papers on it, but no other furniture or boxes. So this was a burner house. A place to do business in once and not come back to again. Her mind was flooding with implications and she made an effort to refocus. The man who had spoken to her earlier walked over to the desk and was leafing through some papers.
Bo cleared her throat to get his attention. "You know, it's obvious you have something I want." He looked up at her, curious where she was going with that. "Perhaps I have something you want…" The man leered at her and "Not that!" she hastened to clarify. The man smirked in response, making it clear he wasn't taking her offer seriously.
At that moment his two companions walked in with two containers each and deposited them in a corner. "All good?" one of them, the one who drove the van, asked the man Bo was speaking to. Getting a nod in response, they left to retrieve the rest of the containers.
Bo tried to reestablish the conversation. "Look, I'm sure you are getting paid handsomely for this job. And if money is what moves you, I can make it worth your while to part with just one of the cases – one specific case, to be exact. If it's not money – tell me what it is. I can make it happen, regardless."
She didn't put much stock in them accepting her offer. For guys like them, non-delivery could mean a bullet to the head, and their fear of people who hired them outweighed their greed more times than not. But she kept talking because her voice was helping to drown out the tiny squeaking of the screw (which she pulled out of the back the chair using her thumbnails as a screwdriver) as it seesawed across the plastic of the zip ties binding her wrists. A few more minutes, and she hoped to be one step closer to freedom. Tough how she was going to manage that remained a mystery, Bo was a big fan of Napoleon's two-part battle plan: First we show up, then we see what happens.
Before the man who was guarding her could formulate a response, his two follows walked in with another arm load of cases.
"That's the last of it." One of the men said, whipping at his forehead.
The boxes were neatly stacked against one wall, and Bo strained to see if she can pinpoint the one she marked earlier with a smudge of lipstick, after finding it with a scanner her employer supplied her with. But either the container was turned in such a way that the side she marked faced the wall, or the men found and removed her mark, because the bright red of her lipstick would have been easily visible on the eggshell colored plastic of the container.
The disappointment of not seeing the mark was tempered by a flood of relief when the zip ties broke, leaving her hands free. The tiny pop of the plastic breaking had thankfully gone unnoticed, and Bo was very careful not to betray the change to her captives.
"Should we call the boss to see how he wants to handle this situation?" One of the man asked his companions, motioning at Bo. Bo couldn't suppress a reflexive swallow, knowing the 'situation' they were referring to was her. "There are vents here in the walls that are big enough to hold the body." He continued calmly, and Bo automatically looked at several ventilation cover grates in the wall she was facing. They did look big enough to hold her body.
"Guys, let's not be hasty." Bo attempted to slow down her impending doom. "I'm sure we can come to an understanding if…" A loud crashing sound interrupted her, and it took everyone a moment to realize it was coming from the doorway. It was obvious that no one was expecting company, but when five men with guns drawn came through the door, everyone started to shout all at once.
"Put the guns down!"
"What the fuck?!"
"Get down!"
"You put your fucking gun down!"
"I'm not taking orders from you!"
"I don't believe this!"
"Shut up! Everybody shut up!"
Bo wasn't sure what triggered it, but a single shot rang out first, followed a moment later by a salvo of flying led. She dove for the only cover she could think of, but before she could reached a stack of containers, she felt a sharp bite in her left thigh that dropped her in mid-lunge. She looked down to see a steady flow of blood pulsing out of the wound in her leg and felt almost dizzy from the sight alone. A man was lying in a floor next to her, obviously wounded, but still shooting back. Another had noticed him and fired several rounds into his chest. Some were using the beams for cover, and all have obviously plenty of ammunition, firing with abandon.
Bo thought it most prudent to get as far away from crossfire as she could. She crawled the rest of the way towards the containers and wedged herself in the space between them and the wall. It wouldn't work for long, since the newcomers were obviously there for the same reason she was, and not as any kind of rescue attempt.
Well, she would just rescue herself, she decided, noticing that one of the ventilation shafts was positioned just above her in the wall, hidden from the rest by the stack of containers. It had a grate cover, like the rest of the vents, and studied the bots that had kept it in place. The bolts were far too large to unscrew with her nails, but now that her hands were free, she had other implements at her disposal. Quickly ripping out a button from her jeans, she set to work on the rusty bolts. Adrenaline and natural strength aided in her task, and she had 3 of the 4 bolts holding the cover in place removed. The cover swung down on the last bolt with a squeak, but other either didn't hear or didn't care. Pulling herself into a round tube about a foot off the ground with one leg virtually paralyzed was easier than re-securing one of bolts to fix the cover back in place once she was in, but Bo had managed.
She stilled when the shooting had stopped abruptly, hopping that she had wiggled deep enough down the tube not to be noticed.
"Get the containers!" Someone yelled, and almost immediately someone had grabbed several of them off the stack.
"What about the girl?" Asked the same man.
"Probably ran off. Don't matter, we got what we came for." Another answered, grabbing the next two containers. Bo didn't recognize any of the voices, so she assumed that her original captives have been taken out by the newcomers. This was unlucky for her, her chances of ever recovering the container she was hired to bring back dropping every time it changed hands. But if she can make out of this place alive, she'll keep looking. Bo wasn't a quitting sort.
But she was, apparently, a fainting sort. Her wound continued to bleed, unabated, and Bo realized she must have passed out for some time, because when she came to, many voices echoed around the empty space of the interior and they sounded like cops talking. She concentrated and heard someone nearby comment on the scanner she had used to find the right container.
"Check it out, Serg. This little device scans and transmits its location. I think we just figured out how the second group of perps was able to find the first group and whatever they stored in here."
"Still doesn't explain why these local guys would get into a firefight with a bunch of out-of-towners less than half an hour after they get here." Another, gruffer voice answered. "Keep looking, guys, we are missing something here."
The voice sounded vaguely familiar to Bo, something dancing in the recesses of her memory just out of reach. She gave up trying to place it after a moment, more interested in picking up any information she could on the men that had left with her container. Most voices were further away from her, and she could only pick occasional words, but the two man closest to her were pretty legible.
"There is a blood splatter here that doesn't seem to belong to any of the dead. And it doesn't continue towards the exit. You think they carried this guy out?" the gruff voice asked, and Bo had no trouble hearing him at all, since he was standing just outside of her vent.
"No way he could have walked away after losing this much blood. I'll check with EMTs" his partner said and moved away. Bo tried to suppress a shiver. This was likely her blood that they were looking at, and knowing there was a puddle of it in the tube that was probably larger than the one on the floor was making her lightheaded. Or the blood loss was making her lightheaded. Either way, she needed to find a way to deal with this wound soon.
The man with the gruff voice remained by the vent, presumably still looking at the blood splatter. From across the large space someone shouted "Hey Dyson, the techs are here to pick up the van."
A bolt of recognition hit Bo squarely between the eyes. Dyson – of course! That's why the voice was familiar. What were the odds she'd ever run into him?
"Yeah, let them take it." Dyson answered distractedly, still nearly an arm's reach away from Bo.
Quickly getting over her shock, Bo's mind whirled with a new set of choices. Take her chances with Dyson or wait until the cops leave? Processing a scene with multiple fatalities could take hours; did she have that kind of time with an open wound? How would Dyson react to her? Will he even recognize her after 16 years of no contact?
The numbness in her leg made the choice easier. She twisted her head to see if Dyson was alone near the hatch, but could only see a part of the space. Hear heart beating franticly in her chest, she made her move.
"Pss. Dyson." She hissed, and waited, but there was no response. So she tried again, a little louder. "Pss. Dyson. Dyson!" That seemed to have worked, because suddenly the light from the hatch was cut off, and Bo saw a shape of head as the owner peered into the tube. She couldn't tell if it was Dyson, since he was blocking the only source of light, but she had to take a chance. "Dyson, it's Bo – Bo McCorrigan, from Sacred High?"
"Bo?" Dyson repeated, confusion and uncertainty clear in his voice.
This was the most dangerous moment. She needed to communicate to Dyson that she couldn't be exposed to the cops, and that she needed his help, before anyone else saw him talking into the ventilation hatch.
"Dyson, please, can you get me out of here without alerting your friends?" she whispered, straining to keep her head turned towards the opening, hoping that even if she couldn't see him, he could see enough to read the pleading in her eyes.
Someone from another part of the room must have noticed Dyson's odd behavior, and called to him. "Hey, Serg, do you see something in there? Need an evidence bag?"
Dyson turned away quickly, allowing the light to return to a portion of the space in front of Bo.
"No, nothing there but dust and mice droppings." He answered, lying smoothly. "I think maybe we should wrap it up for tonight. The CSI unit got samples of everything, and we're not going to solve this tonight." He offered casually, knowing that he didn't have the authority to ask various techs gathering and photographing evidence to leave, even though he was a senior detective on the scene. None of the others reported to him.
"You have a hot date tonight, Serg?" The man teased. Then he added more seriously "You know, all these vents could be a perfect hiding place for god only knows what. We should strip this place, just to be sure."
"Yeah, we should." Dyson agreed with the man. "I'll post the security detail here tonight, and tomorrow we'll come back and open all the walls and all the vents." He spoke a bit louder than usual, making sure everyone heard him. He reached for a radio on his belt and clicked it on. "Dispatch, I need two uniforms," he rattled off the address of the building and got an affirmative. Clapping his hands together, he made sure to get everyone's attention. "Security is in the way, let's wrap it up for tonight folks." He injected as much authority into his voice as he dared, knowing that most people didn't mind following orders if they thought the person giving them had authority to do so.
One by one they packed up and left, and only 10 minutes later Dyson was the only one left on the floor. He sent his partner away, promising to watch the place until the security detail showed up. Quickly moving back to the vent, the removed the two bolts holding the cover in place and reached in.
"Give me your hand, I'll pull you out."
Bo did as instructed, and in one pull she was half out. Before Dyson could pull again, she stopped him.
"Wait, my leg is bleeding, I don't want to add to the blood on the floor."
Dyson swore quietly. Bo was right – if the blood spatter looked different tomorrow, there will be questions. "OK, hang on." He left her clinging to the wall while he sprinted to his car, returning moments later with a plastic bag, a blanket and duct tape. "Where is the wound?" he asked, and with her help he wrapped first the bag then the blanket around it, securing both with duct tape until he was reasonably sure she would not bleed on the floor. Bo herself was surprised to note that her leg no longer bled as much as it did initially, but the pain and numbness were enough to keep her more that concerned, regardless.
Dyson picked her up effortlessly and headed out of the room. She protested mildly, not liking to depend on anyone for anything, but Dyson shushed her. "The security team will be here any minute, and if they catch me taking you out of the crime scene, my career will be over. Not sure what will happen to you – I'm sure you had a good reason not to be seen there with all those dead thugs for hire."
Bo grumbled, but let herself be carried to the car, where Dyson put her in the back seat, elevating her wounded leg. "Stay here until I'm back. Don't make a sound." He cautioned, before pulling another blanket over her, hiding most of her from view. He grabbed a small canister with hydrochloric acid from the trunk where he kept it to help remove rust from tools and a few rugs. It wasn't the best way to clean up the blood in the vent where Bo had been hiding, but it was the best he had available. Holding a flashlight between his teeth he crawled into the vent, finding it very cramped for his larger body. He poured the acid on the pool of blood and used the rugs to soak up as much as of it as he could. When he heard a patrol car pulling up to the entrance, he hastily wiggled out of the vent, stuffing the rags in a plastic bag, putting it against his stomach and zipping his jacket over it. Dyson was a fit man, but now he looked like someone with a considerable beer belly. He hoped that the patrolmen sent to guard the building until the morning were not someone he knew, or he wouldn't get away with it.
But luck was on his side that night, and two officers didn't know him. They gave him all the respect his detective badge afforded him, though, and Dyson only needed a few moments to issue orders before he was free to return to his car, where Bo waited.
When he slid into the driver's seat, he pulled the bag from under the jacket and threw it on the floor. It smelled of acid and blood, and he wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible. He put the car and gear and pulled out, waving at the two officers keeping watch, but not acknowledging Bo until he was a few blocks away.
When he felt safe, he reached back, pulling the blanked that was covering Bo. "Hang in there, we'll be at the Hospital in less than 10 minutes," he assured her.
"No, no hospitals. Please, Dyson." Bo pleaded, even though she knew the wound was serious. "You know they have to report the gun wounds."
"Well, what else is there?" Dyson asked, exasperated. What kind of trouble was Bo in that she would forgo a medical care with bullet wound to the leg? "It's not going to heal on its own, you know."
"I'll take care of it. Just get me to some place… A motel, anything, and I'll take care of it." Bo tried to assure him.
Dyson looked back and saw how pale she was, saw the sheen of sweat that on her face and estimated she wasn't in any shape to deal with a bullet wound. "I'll take you somewhere safe, with medical equipment and someone to fix you up."
"Dyson," Bo tried to reason with the man, but had very little leverage at the moment.
"Trust me, I like this option a lot less than dropping you off at the hospital, but…" He stopped, unable or unwilling to finish. "Just trust me," he repeated, knowing she's going to hate this a lot less than he will.
They pulled up in front of a large building just a few minutes later, and Bo could see it was a Medical Examiner's office. She wondered why Dyson had brought her to a city morgue while he left to find a wheelchair for her. Still, this place would have medical equipment, at least, she mused.
Dyson returned with a wheel chair, and after almost passing out while he moved her out of the car, she was glad to be seated and not having to move anymore. The pain was unbearable now, and she fought it the best she could, not paying any attention to where Dyson was taking her.
When they reached a well-lit room, he stopped and greeted the other room's occupant who was already there when they arrived.
"Hello Lauren, you wouldn't believe who I ran into to today."