Still using Janet's creation and not my own.
Jenny (JenRar) thank you once again for all your work as the beta on this story, but especially for the polish required on this particular chapter.
Chapter 11 – Tank – A Taste of His Own Medicine
Could this damn day get any worse? I've never minded being Ranger's second-in-command. God knows I respect the hell out of the boss, and I've known him personally long enough to know he has integrity to back up the persona, but today makes me want to follow him as my commander and whip his ass in equal measure.
From the moment Hal had told me to pick up the phone and connect to the call Woody was taking on the main line, I've felt as though my stomach was trying to relocate itself in my throat.
I don't mind battle, gunfire, men trying to get a jump on me, but standing around feeling useless isn't something I can tolerate. The rat bastard that thinks he can just steal the heart of our family and walk out unharmed has another thing coming.
I'd hated making the call, but because of both my position in the company and my years as his friend, I'd had to be the one to reach out to Ranger after hearing that Stephanie had been taken. His reaction was exactly what I'd expected – a perfect storm of anger and self-loathing that his inability to stay away from Stephanie had caused her to be taken. I'd let his comments like that go, knowing he needed to focus on how to fix the situation and I could help beat some sense into him later about the future with Ms. Plum.
But after Hal and Bones got us proof about who had taken Stephanie, I'd had to pick up the phone once more and hang a few more details on the worst case scenario he had running through his head. The reaction I'd gotten then wasn't at all what I expected. He'd bypassed pissed and gone into a fit of fury unlike anything I'd ever seen from him. I'd been worried that he was so emotional, it would affect his ability to function, so I'd told him that I was calling up the wolves and hopefully by the time he landed, Juarez would be dead and he could just stop by to check on Stephanie.
His response had been that if I allowed anyone to kill Hernando besides himself, he'd take out his revenge on me instead. "Somebody has to pay," he'd finally said in a much calmer voice. "I've got to make somebody pay for this."
I'd gotten it then. It was his worst nightmare come true, and it wouldn't be enough to land and find that the woman he hadn't manned up and claimed was all right; he needed to work off the emotions he'd been forced to feel for every second since I'd first called him. To look himself in the mirror, he had to do so with the knowledge that he, personally, had eliminated the threat to the most important person in his world.
I'd had to watch as Hector came out, as locked down as I'd ever seen him, and then I'd had to try to get information out of him. I could tell he was trying – hell, he was speaking in English, which I didn't even know he could do – to make it easier on us all. But every time I'd spoken to someone, I'd recognized that same look in their eyes. That combination of desperation to do something that was helpful overlaced with fear that despite all we were doing, we still might fail her. Every man in this damn parking lot was fully aware of what time it was and could tell you to the second how much time we had left in this damn four hour window.
I'd had a false sense of security when Cal went in and Manny came out, figuring if all she needed was entertainment, that between Cal and Lester, she should be set up to wait out the rest of the time.
But when Cal had basically pleaded for Bobby, I'd known something had to be wrong. Needing to give her a pint straight from Zero had rammed my gut with fear anew at the thought that we could lose her before our small window of time was over.
When Ranger had called to say he was in Trenton, I'd asked if he was coming to see her, and he'd quickly told me no. I'd tried to hide my surprise at his answer, figuring he'd want to sweep in and make her feel better, but I understood his reasoning when he'd explained, "I have to get a few things to get her out of there safely, and I have to take out Juarez first. I can't look her in the eye and tell her everything is going to be all right as long as he's still drawing air."
I understood it as a soldier and as a man. Once he went in that hell hole, he wasn't coming out without his woman, and he couldn't bring Stephanie out until he'd made it safe for her again.
But when he'd called me ten minutes ago and said, "I have a job for you if you want it, but you're under no obligation," I hadn't known what to think. It wasn't like I would ever say no to something he needed.
"I'm in," I replied, trusting that he wouldn't ask me if he didn't my help.
"It's…personal, and I'll understand if you want to back out," he added, really confusing me.
"Just lay it out there, man," I said, cutting him off, needing to hear the details.
"The Pharmacist," he stated simply. "He has to die, but not before he gives up the key to the vest on Stephanie. I can get her out of the hole, but I can't get her out of that vest in time without the key."
That was a name I never wanted to hear again. The Pharmacist was a street name of a specialty drug dealer off Stark. He didn't mess with the common drugs, allowing the gangs and low life dealers to handle that. He specialized in blending drugs to produce specific cocktails designed to do whatever his client needed. He was a chemist gone crazy, and in my opinion, the world would be better off without him, but I'd been told previously that the DEA wanted him left alive because he was easy to follow for suppliers and they had gotten a lot of big fish out of the sea by using him as unintentional bait.
As long as I'd known about him, I'd wanted him off the streets. I couldn't see any good that could come out of him breathing the same air as me. But after I met Lula through Stephanie and we started dating, my opinion changed drastically. Jail was no longer good enough for him; I wanted him to die – slowly.
When Ramirez took Lula and attacked her, he did it by shooting her up with a sedative designed by the Pharmacist. It was his cocktail that immobilized her, but kept her awake through most of what that sick fuck did to her before stringing her up outside Stephanie's apartment.
Lula and I might not be together right now, but I was just waiting her out. We'd had something special for a while, and then she'd gotten spooked, like it was too good to be true, and she'd sabotaged it on purpose. I understood the feeling; she had a lot of shit in her past that would make it hard to accept something good and stable in her life. But I knew if I stayed around – maybe in the background, but definitely around – she'd eventually sort though her past and begin to want better things for herself.
I knew Stephanie had helped her move from her days on the street. The friendship between those two might seem strange to an outsider, but I could see it. Lula was a breath of fresh air to Stephanie, somebody that didn't need the approval of her old neighborhood to be happy. And Stephanie was proof to Lula that she deserved to be happy. If a normal white girl from a conservative neighborhood wanted to be her friend and stuck with her through all she'd been through, there must be something in there worth being around.
I'd started dropping by the bonds office again by myself, doing an afternoon check for any files when I knew Lula was more likely to be around. I knew that the whole near death experience was the shock that Lula had needed to change her life around, but I also knew her heart, and it was only a matter of time before she'd have made those changes herself. I had every plan on making her mine once more, and this time, I wasn't going to let her push me away if she got scared again. This time, I was done waiting, I was ready to claim the woman I knew could make me happy.
But much like the boss was feeling now, I needed to do something first. I had to avenge the wrong that had been done to her in order to look her in the eye and promise her that what she'd survived before would never happen to her again. I needed the Pharmacist off the streets to have that sense of honor with my woman.
Ranger had intel that proved the Pharmacist was the one that had doped Stephanie, and apparently, he had the key that kept her life in danger. Ranger could have gotten to him and taken him out himself, but he understood the burn I'd been trying to hold back for three years now, and he was giving me a gift with this chance to exact the revenge I'd wanted all this time. He was thanking me for watching over Stephanie as he traveled back to save her, and he was honoring the blood of our brotherhood, even if our mothers were not the same.
"You got an address?" I'd asked, trying to keep my voice calm enough that no one else picked up an interest in the conversation.
Ranger had told me he'd set up a fake deal and the Pharmacist was currently brewing a specialty date rape drug for a large payment. He'd given me the address of where he'd been told to pick up the package and had told me I could do whatever I wanted, but I had to get that key, and I had to bring it back as quickly as possible, or we'd end up losing Stephanie, regardless of everything else we'd done right this day.
The address was less than a mile away, so I knew it was doable within the constraint of time. I'd geared up, called Manny over to main the control center, and left commanding him to focus on the warehouse and forget about me entirely.
I flew to the address he'd given me and realized for a drug lab, the abandoned store front was a good cover. I scoped it out quickly and only saw one outside guy, who I took care of with my hands and a little twist of the neck. I couldn't have him alerting anyone inside that I was here. After that was done, I lifted his keys and let myself in, moving as silently as possible. Most people looked at me and assumed I was a just a big goof, incapable of traveling with stealth. How little they knew.
I took out the remaining two guards inside, stealing the gun off of one, figuring it would be useful, leaving just me and the Pharmacist to deal with his date with the devil. I walked in and instantly shot both his thighs with his guard's gun. There was no way he was going to walk out of here, so I didn't see the reason to leave him the use of his legs.
He hit the floor, crying like baby. I guess he hid in his lab because he didn't have the guts to fight like a man without cowering behind his concoctions and test tubes.
I got right up on top of him and saw a chain around his neck. I reached down and grabbed it, pulling it off and smiling when I saw there was a key on the end of it. Gotcha, you son of a bitch. I looked up on the table, where he'd been working, and saw four syringes lined up, picking one up randomly and removing the cap with my teeth.
"No," he stammered, obviously knowing what I was going to do.
"What, you don't want a taste of your own medicine?" I smiled at my pun and put it in his upper thigh, not too far from the bullet hole.
I grabbed the next needle and repeated the act, but this time, I stuck it in his hip.
"You don't have to do this!" He was sweating like a pig in July. I didn't know what was in these syringes, but he sure did, and he definitely didn't want it in his body.
"The way I see it," I said, picking up the biggest of them all and watching his eyes grow wider and dilate, "is you realized your life wasn't worth a shit, and you decided to take your own life, brewing a cocktail of drugs that would make it painless and quick. But when it didn't work, you turned on yourself and used your own gun to take your life."
"I would never do this," he said, as though that would matter to me.
"Any man would do something like that with the right motivation. I've seen men greater than you take the easy way out when it came to themselves," I said, remembering the last moment I'd spent with Abruzzi. I'd meant it to be a welcome to RangeMan gift for Stephanie, but I'd realized she probably couldn't handle the idea of us killing somebody for her, so I'd restaged it to look like a suicide and to keep the cops off our trail. I knew she'd always thought it was Ranger looking out for her, but in reality, that one was all me. I knew he would have done it himself if he'd had the chance. I just felt like reminding him why we considered ourselves family, even if we didn't use that word specifically.
"You have what you came for. Take the key and go," he pleaded as his breathing cranked up a notch. Whatever I'd given him was definitely having an effect.
"No...the key was my secondary target. I was sent here to take you out, and I'm not leaving until I get what I came for," I told him with a full fledged smile. It was always nice when your work could be so rewarding.
I plunged the needle in his chest and depressed the plunger. His eyes got even bigger, and he tried to argue with me, but he seemed to be struggling to keep his thoughts together. Despite his panic, he was beginning to struggle with consciousness. I knew I didn't have unlimited time, so wrapped his limp hand around the gun and raised it to his head, pulling the trigger and ending his life. I dropped the needles on his torso, trying to give the appearance that he'd done this to himself, and then dragged the guard I'd taken the gun from into the lab. There wasn't a logical explanation for all the injuries on the Pharmacist, but an extra body could account for the two shots in his legs. It wasn't a great set up, but since there was no denying his place in the community, I figured enough people would be glad to see him gone that the police wouldn't waste much time looking for the real killer.
The whole trip over here and my work inside had taken eleven minutes. I ran back out to my Explorer and floored it to get back to the warehouse. I gripped the key tightly, knowing this was the missing piece that Ranger had to have in order to save Stephanie. There was no way I was going to fail her after coming so close.
Ranger was beside my door before I even got it open. "You get it?" I knew he was nervous, despite how steady his exterior might appear. The fact that he was using words instead of just holding out his hand to take what he knew good and well I had if I was here spoke volumes.
I put it in his hand and said, "The Pharmacist has apparently seen the error of his ways and realized all the drugs he's put on the street was a crime against humanity and the only way to make it right was to take his own life…violently."
"Like Abruzzi?" Ranger said, verbally tipping his hat in my direction.
What can I say, I love a good western.
"Go get the girl," I told him, still refusing to answer his question, but knowing the slight smile on my face gave him all he needed to know to shut the book on that piece of history once and for all.
Ranger took off at a full run toward the warehouse, and I yelled after him, "Remember to approach on your belly."
He stopped running and turned around long enough to smirk at me. Yeah, yeah, he's Batman and can get where he needs to without setting off silent alarms and rigged traps. Still, the look on his face told me he was ready to go get her free, so it was all over but the waiting.
I hate waiting.
I've seen Ranger evade even the most impossible circumstances and come out on top. This one might seem horrible, but in the big scale, with all the back up and support out here, he's definitely beaten worse odds. That still didn't help to move my stomach back to its rightful place when I realized I could do no more to help, and that if Ranger rushed and did one thing out of sequence, we might lose them both. Fuck that... Brown, Santos, and Zero were all in there, too.
With every mission he left on, I knew there was a possibility he might not return and that RangeMan would be mine to run in his absence. But I also knew that with Brown and Santos with me, we could do it. It wouldn't be the same as it was with Ranger, but for him, we would band together and do it. If I lost them all, I wasn't so sure. It's not that I wouldn't know what to do, but I wasn't sure if I'd even want to bother. In that building was my family. I hadn't grown up in the back country with them, but I'd become a man with them by my side, and that was growing up enough to count for what birth didn't give me.
I glanced at my watch and saw we were down to the final ten minutes. I didn't doubt Ranger's skill, but I hated this last minute shit.
I couldn't take it anymore. There was nothing for me to do in the warehouse, and I knew my big frame in a limited space operation wasn't exactly an asset, but I couldn't stand still any long.
Giving up the fight, I reached down to my hip and pulled my cell phone up, pressing the contact I'd been holding myself back from for far too long.
It rang twice, before her sassy voice said, "Hello."
"Lula?" I began, kicking myself for not sounding more confident. Who the hell else did I think had answered her cell phone?
"Tank?" She sounded completely confused.
"Yeah, it's me." Smooth, man. Real smooth. I ran my hand over my shaved head, and then mentally swore that I was acting like some kind of freaking school girl at her first dance.
"What's wrong?" Lula asked, giving me a stepping off point that I didn't realize I needed.
"Something's happened today – something bad. I think it's all going to work out, but it made me realize some things." It sounded like I was talking in some kind of code.
"What's going on with my girl?" Lula guessed right on the money. People might look at her past and judge her, but from where I was standing, that experience on the street made her a damn fine reader of people.
"I can't tell you just now, but it's been a hell of a day," I admitted, hoping she wouldn't get locked on my refusal to answer her question.
"A hell of a day," she jumped in, "It's only two o'clock. The day ain't near over yet."
"It's not two yet," I corrected her, refusing to allow anyone to take away the precious minutes Ranger had to get Stephanie out of that building and back to where we were all waiting. "We've still got nine minutes before that."
"Okay, Tankie..." She softened her voice, using the name I used to love hearing on her lips. "You said this bad day helped you realize something. That why you called me?"
"Yeah, baby." I smiled when I used the pet name for her. "That's why I called you."
"Well, then, let me sit down this here work so I can listen better." I smiled when I heard her talking away from the phone, saying, "Here, Connie, take this shit. I got my Tankie on the phone, and he needs to talk to me, so you gonna have to hold on for a little bit. This here is important."
I was important. Hearing her say that tightened my chest. I was described as a lot of things: big, overbearing, silent, a goon – none of them all that complimentary. But to Lula, I was important, and that made me want to cut to the shit and tell her why I called.
"All right." She came back to the phone, slightly breathless. "Lay it on me."
Tempting as that was, I knew I needed to stick to words here and not take her command in its most literal sense. "I miss you. I want you in my life in a big way."
"That was worth sitting down for," she said, and I could practically hear the smile on her face through the phone. "You want something serious?"
"With you, I do," I confirmed.
"You gonna talk this time?" she pushed.
"As much as I can, but you may need to help push me a little if I start clamming up," I warned, trying to be honest.
"What about the cats?" She laid down what had been the final straw she'd used when we split the last time.
"I'm not getting rid of them, but I can contain them in part of the house and try to do a better job of cleaning around them to make it easier on you," I offered.
"I'm just shitting you. I got me some allergy medicine at the clinic, and the doctor said it should get rid of most of the sneezing and stuff I was doing, and if that didn't work, I could get some shots that might help," she conceded, making me smile again. If she'd done that then she had been thinking about me, too. This wasn't all on me any more.
"That's real good," I replied, knowing it didn't do justice to how I was feeling.
"So…" She picked up exactly where I needed her to. "My apartment is clean, and it sounds like you've had a hell of day. How about you come over to my place, and we can talk about how this might work. I mean, I'm a career woman, and I need to be sure you can support me in all my goals. I don't want to be held back by no man, all right?"
I couldn't stop the smile from coming over my face if my life depended on it. "That sounds exactly like what I need," I told her, before thinking about it and adding, "And just so you know, baby, I'm not holding you back from a thing. I want to be there beside you for all your dreams to come true."
"Tankie, I'm glad you called me," she said, stating the same thing I was thinking. "And you just keep in mind that you can pick up that phone anytime you need to hear a friendly voice. I want to be beside you, too."
There was a brief minute of silence, before I realized I needed to get off the phone before I said something stupid. "I'll see you tonight at your place, baby."
"I'll have dinner ready," she promised, and then hung up.
It was the best news I'd had all day.
I saw Ram take off at a dead run from the corner or my eye, and my mind snapped back to the present, reminding me that while I was fighting for a chance at love with the woman I knew was meant for me, my best friend was in there fighting for a chance at life with his. I needed to get my head in the game.
I glanced at my watch and saw our window was down to just two minutes. I knew from experience that a hundred and twenty seconds could be an eternity. I certainly couldn't hold my breath that long, and I knew that it was a lot longer than it took me to draw my gun, check the load, and empty ten rounds into a man ten yards away.
But suddenly, a hundred and twenty seconds felt as though it could pass with the blink of an eye, and I found myself afraid of blinking, for fear that it would speed the hands on my watch and I'd miss something that could change my life forever.
I couldn't stand still any longer. My size fifteen boots started moving, one in front of the other, and I found myself going toward the building that had the potential to rip our lives from us all.
Just as I turned the corner, I heard voices yelling that I recognized. Ram screamed out, "Move, move, move!"
I stayed planted firmly where I had been, not running away, but halting my forward progress at the same time.
There was a single gun shot and a horrendous crashing sound that I couldn't identify, before billows of smoke began to come out from the door.
I stepped back, knowing I wouldn't be able to help anyone if I was coughing from inhaling the haze in the air. I could hear feet moving faster than a standard walk, but still moving slower than it sounded like Ram had told them to go. What in the hell was taking so long? Did I need to call the men to fall back, or should we rush the building to get our guys out of there?
I was frozen to the ground, unable to offer my assistance and unwilling to desert the people that might need me. I had no choice but to hear the seconds tick by in my ears and wait.
I hate waiting.