Kim Disclaimer: Kim Possible is property of Disney. I own nothing and don't claim to own anything.

Warning: Includes violence & gore, profanity, references to things like sex & drugs, and what some may consider intense scenes. Viewer discretion is advised.

XX

Chapter 2 – The Girl from Middleton

Middleton, Colorado

Middleton and its vicinity were one of those places that seemed to be its own separate world. Ostensibly it was merely one of many communities hidden away in the state of Colorado. One that you may or not come across when you venture past the sign that said, "Welcome to Colorful Colorado."

But there's the ostensible appearance of a thing, and then there's the actual essence of the thing itself.

And Middleton was unusual in how self-contained it was, how it seemed to operate by its own internal set of rules, and how it neatly served as the center of the universe for the people who lived there.

Everything that happened in Middleton – and the adjacent communities of Upperton and Lowerton (which to their annoyance, were frequently lumped in with Middleton) – seemed utterly important to its inhabitants.

It made sense to them that what happened in Middleton affected the world, just as what happened in the world affected Middleton…Even if the world barely took notice.

It was therefore fitting that it was this unusual community that produced someone like Kim Possible.

There were many beautiful old houses in Middleton, ones that were built between 1870 and 1930. The people who built them were proud families with money and reputation. They were also prouder families with less money who knew how to build houses.

They were peace loving Arcadians in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Ones who had hoped to find Lincoln's "new birth of freedom" in small town Colorado.

They were former military men who traded their army boots for work boots. Individuals who made their bones against the rebel horde of the would-be Confederate States of America. Against the war bands of ancient nations that had named like Sioux and Apache and Nez Pierce and Chawagani. Against the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean, the drug crazed Moro militants in the Southern Philippines, and the Kaiser's forces in Belleau Wood and the Hundred Days Offensive.

Middleton was never short on people who had lived fascinating lives.

The 1930s brought the Depression, and many of these houses were vacated as the population moved around. They went back West or back East, some went to Upperton.

During the post-war era, the derelict old houses were torn down and new neighborhoods sprung up in their place. Middleton became sleek and modern…But a collection of the old houses remained. Some of them were historic landmarks, or had been filled with new tenets, but others just sat and rotted in the woods. Each one of them had a story.

Kim Possible was in one of those houses right now, in a bedroom upstairs…Or at least it probably had been in a bedroom once, it was filled with clutter now, the house's last tenant having been a rather problematic hoarder. She stood between a large bookshelf and a boarded-up window and used a screwdriver to carve five names in the wall…The five names of them men she killed.

She didn't have the name of the fifth and most recent one, she just knew him as "the Freelancer."

She did remember his face though, even though his features had been rather plain: Brown hair, a mustache, a somewhat prominent forehead…But in the brief time she'd seen him, he had made an impression on her.

Kim settled on writing "FLR" for short and placed the screwdriver down on the bookshelf next to her.

"Kim?" she heard a male voice call out.

She went back out into the hallway. "Ron?" she answered.

"Down here!"

Her head turned in the direction of the stairs, she walked over and saw her best and oldest friend Ron Stoppable at the bottom of the stairs.

XX

Ron Stoppable smiled at his best friend as she looked down at him from the top of the stairs.

"Find anything cool?"

"That depends on your definition of cool. The last guy to own this place clearly thought everything was cool."

He looked at the stairs, which were rotted and missing several steps.

"How'd you get up there?"

When he looked back to the top of the stairs, Kim was gone.

"Where'd you-"

Ron heard the house making noises around him, and was momentarily confused, his mind went to ghosts…And then his mind went to Kim, who was undoubtedly scaling the exterior of the old building, unsettling its years of inactivity.

He found the front door, which they had left ajar for fear of getting locked inside. He barely taken two steps outside when Kim dropped down from the roof of the porch, landing in front of him with a winning smile.

"You're…getting really good at that."

"I think I'll try out for cheerleading when we get to High School."

Ron blinked "Really?"

"Surprised much?"

"Uh…You know it's just that…Cheerleading seems a little too girly."

"That'd be fitting since I'm a girl."

Ron's face fell as he realized he said something he shouldn't've "I didn't mean it like that."

Kim cocked her head playfully at him "I'm messing with you Ron, I know what you mean."

He sighed in relief "I always took you for the Amber Grudzinski type and not the Bonnie Rockwaller type."

Amber Grudzinski was a year above them and played soccer at Middleton Middle School. She was quite attractive and had a fierce personality. Some of the more haughty girls at school, Bonnie Rockwaller chief among them, were all too eager to make disparaging remarks about her femininity and speculate on her heterosexuality (But never to her face.)

Ron knew that Kim was friendly with Amber, that the two of them played soccer in the park and both shared a disdain for the Bonnie Rockwallers of the world.

"Amber likes girly stuff, too," Kim said.

"She does?"

"When she's not talking about soccer, video games, and Polish military history. She talks about girl stuff."

"Like what?"

"You're not a girl, classified."

They laughed.

A few hours later, the two of them were leaving a pizza place when Kim's cellphone rang. It was her special cellphone, that meant it only could've been one person calling.

"Agent Barnes?" she said immediately upon answering.

"Greetings," said Barnes unmistakable voice. "Agent Tetradze has requested your assistance again,"

The mention of Ben captured Kim's full attention "He did? What's he doing? Is he in trouble?"

"I don't believe he's in trouble, although I'm not privy to the full details of this operation. I'm actually calling you from my house in Indiana. What I do know is that the first order of business is to get you on a plane to Sacramento, California."

"Someone will come by your house in three hours. I trust that's enough time for you to get things squared away?"

"I'll race home," Kim said excitedly.

"Great, I'll call you again once you're airborne."

As she hung up the phone, her mind shifted to Ron, who had standing quietly behind her. She turned to face him, an apologetic expression on her face. He, to his credit, appeared quite accepting and melancholy. Kim thought of how rare it was for him to look so mature.

"The Batman signal?" he asked.

"I promise I'll take you with me one day, Ron."

"I don't know if I'd be much of a Robin."

Kim caught onto the self-deprecation and wouldn't have it. "I don't do sidekicks, just partners."

He smiled, the simple things she said always made him feel better. The two best friends embraced, each of them dreaming of the day when he could go with her.

But for now, the world awaited her once again.

XX

Sacramento Valley

The man who picked her up at Sacramento International was named Tippet. He was a balding, officious looking man with glasses that gave Kim school principal vibes.

He didn't say much and seemed disinterested with the task of chauffeuring her.

Their destination was a large complex surrounded by a concrete wall with barbed wire on top. Kim saw a sign on the wall that read "Whitlow's Scrap and Salvage." At the front entrance was a gate that only opened once Tippet typed a code into a keypad.

Tippet drove her inside the compound, showing her that it was filled with rows of junk cars and mountains of condensed scrap. There was a small dirt road that led from the entrance to the far edge of the compound.

They pulled up to large garage building big enough to service semi-trucks. Inside the garage, Kim saw what looked like a bus or recreational vehicle.

She also noticed that there were other people around. There were men in mechanic uniforms who looked to be in the process of tearing apart a beat-up old car.

There were two others, wearing plainclothes, one was leaning against the wall of the garage and looked like he was keeping watch, the other sat in a chair under an umbrella and read a newspaper.

None of them even looked over at Kim Tippet as they drove into the garage.

Overlooking the interior of the garage was a second story office, one accessible by stairs.

Once Tippet was parked inside the garage, he exited and walked around as if to open the car door for Kim. When she instead exited the car herself, he stopped in his tracks and peered at her through his glasses.

"Well…You can wait here for Agent Tetradze," he said. "Please don't go anywhere until then."

"Where would I go?" Kim asked, puzzled by the idea that she would thoughtlessly wander off.

Tippet stared at her for a few seconds. "Nowhere of course…I should be going. Goodbye Miss Possible."

"Bye."

Kim waited around the inside of the garage for nearly ten minutes, looking at all the things there were to see. Until eventually she heard an approaching vehicle. A familiar black jaguar was coming down the dirt road that led from the gate to the garage, kicking up dust behind it.

The Jaguar pulled into the garage and parked right where Tippet had parked; but done so in a manner that effortlessly eradiated style and coolness.

Kim ran up to the driver's side of the car. The driver's window began to roll down, the music escaping from the inside.

Got a black uniform and a silver badge

We're playin' cops for real, we're playin' cops for pay

Let's ride, lowride

The window rolled all the way down to reveal Ben's smiling face, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

"You don't look like a North California girl to me."

"Nope, just a girl from the Rocky Mountain Empire."

"Wolverines," Ben declared as he turned his car off.

"So what's with this place?" Kim said as she indicated their location with her hands.

Ben left his car and pondered his environment "It looks to me like auto-wrecking yard, doesn't it? It belongs to the U.S. Marshals, before them it belonged to the Sacramento Mafia."

"Sacramento has a Mafia?"

"They did…It's something of a long story. The Marshals and other agencies have been using this location as an unofficial safehouse and operations center for nearly three years. All the corpses that were dug up has done much to keep this place off the market."

"Did you say 'corpses?'"

"You'll also recall that I said it was a long story."

Ben's wittiness and the unique way he carried conversations quicky came back to Kim, she beamed "It's really good to see you again, Ben."

Ben looked off the side awkwardly. This stuck out to Kim, did he have a thing about being complimented? She hadn't recalled that from their first adventure together.

"You and I have much to go over," Ben said gesturing towards an office that overlooked the interior of the garage.

They up the stairs to the office. It was spacious and contained two desks, a table with some chairs, a file cabinet, a couch, a water cooler, espresso machine, and a minifridge. The office was littered with empty pizza boxes and Chinese take-out containers, banana peels, paper coffee cups and water bottles, and a bottle of a ranch dressing that sat atop the minifridge.

There was also a wall that was covered in photos, documents, maps, and bits of string connecting them together in various. Kim only recognized a few photos; on one edge of the board was photo of the individual known as "Jimmy the Kid" Cortlandt, there were also photos of Richie Liu and the Freelancer. Three men that she had killed last month in Los Angeles.

Ben noticed Kim's curiosity as she took everything in.

"I've been living out of this office the past three days: I've made arrangements, slept on the couch while my car was being tuned up, I've had three separate meetings with people who ask me inane questions and seemed rather discombobulated when I had flawless answers for them.

He pointed towards the wall of string.

"Yesterday, two colleagues of mine came by and helped me set up this."

"Uh…so what is this?" Kim asked as she stared the wall.

"How much do you know already?"

"Just what I read on the plane ride. You're gonna be in a street racing tournament?"

"Against one Calvin Shepherd and his top racers. They're in a tight spot after what you and I did in LA."

Kim vividly remembered the events of the last month. "The cocaine?"

"Yes, it appears that the Ghost White was just one part of a sprawling set of affairs. We don't know all we need to just yet. But we do know what our current priority is, which is to ensure Shepherd doesn't win the Redwood Cup?"

"The Redwood Cup?"

"That's the name of the tournament."

"Underground street racing tournaments have names?" Kim asked dubiously.

"This one does. Would you like to know all about it?"

Kim still didn't know what role she would play if Ben was going to be racing car, but she may as well know everything. "Okay."

"It started in the Spring of 1994, a group of racing enthusiasts who knew the names of all the top street racers on the west coast; but couldn't agree on who was the best. They decided to resolve it the only way they could. The first tournament had eight racers and was witnessed by less than fifty people. Each racer wagered five hundred dollars, the winner walked away with four-grand. They of course couldn't let it be the final say on the matter, so they agreed this wouldn't be the only tournament."

"I don't think anyone had the faintest idea how huge it would get…"

"By the time of the fourth tournament in 1997, it was a multi-million dollar event with sixteen racers and a seven-figure cash prize. No one was sure where the money came from, there was so much money being moved through the tournament and such a need to attract the best racers, that it became a given that there would be a treasure chest for the winner at the end of their quest."

Kim asked a few more questions, and Ben had the answers for it. All of which had been covered before and didn't warrant restating.

"It's all rather fascinating Kim," Ben said, a nerdy smile on his face. "I know more about American street racing than anyone else currently in the employ of the federal government, and as far as I'm aware of, there's no other street racing event in this country that comes close to the Redwood Cup."

"And your job…" Kim said slowly, a thoughtful look on her face, "…Is to make sure Calvin Shepherd doesn't get access to this year's prize money."

"Indeed…And to accomplish this goal, I shall not be racing as myself, but as Ruslan Lomovtsev, a Russian Mafia street-racer."

"You'll be racing as who?" Kim asked, not catching the name.

"Ruslan Lomovtsev."

"Is that a Russian name?"

"It is."

"So you're pretending to be Russian and not Georgian?"

Ben shrugged good-naturedly "It worked for Stalin."

"Why do you need me for this Ben? I can't help you win races."

"I'll feel better and race better if I know you're around Kim."

She was not quite ready for this "Oh…Um…Really?"

"It wasn't my intention to make you feel awkward Kim," Ben said calmly. "But I do mean it…You proved yourself to me in Los Angeles. You're a survivor."

Ben glanced at the wall of string, and at the photographed faces of Calvin Shepherd and his organization. "And if you're going to help me, I think it's time you learn more about who it is we're dealing with."

"Calvin Shepherd," Kim said, the name not rolling pleasantly off her tongue.

"And his gang."

"Con-Quest Motor Club," she added.

"Why don't you have a seat?"

Kim took a seat at the table while Ben planted himself next to the wall of string.

"Shepherd has three key men under him. Three men that kill, steal, and race for him. The four of them make up the California chapter of the Con-Quest Motor Club."

Ben placed his finger on one of them.

"This is Nicholas Nowicki, known as Night Devil."

Nicholas Nowicki had long eyebrows and short black hair that was rather shiny, either due to hair gel or because he was unhygienic to the point of having greasy hair (Kim was dismayed by the thought.) Nowicki's eyes unnerved her, they were stoic and pitiless, sort of like the eyes of a spider. But there also seemed to be something lurking behind the eyes. He had what could be described as "dormant psycho energy," a three-word phrase that Kim only knew because she had heard someone else say it.

"He was born in 1973 in suburban New Mexico, near Santa Fe. His father Alan Nowicki was a prodigious mind that worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I was able to track down a Popular Mechanics issue from 1971 where he's mentioned by name. But with that mind also came a volatile emotional state, Alan Nowicki committed suicide in 1979 when Nicholas was around six."

Ben let that sink it for Kim, and sure enough she found herself feeling pity for the man with the pitiless eyes.

"Nicholas carried the trauma with him, and he also inherited his father's brilliant but tortured spirit. All throughout his childhood, he would fly into unexplained episodes of rage and have to be physically restrained."

"Many people have a bad go at life when they're children; but still turn out relatively well adjusted…Nicholas Nowicki had the potential to be one of those people, but it was almost as if it was predestined that things would get worse for him."

"His mother had priorities they didn't seem to include her son. She remarried soon after her husband's death, wanting to bury that old life under a new one, with little thought for how it would affect Nicholas. If anything, she disliked Nicholas because she saw so much of her late husband in him."

"He acted out and accumulated a local reputation as a hellraiser, maybe hoping to get his mother's attention, but this just made her withdraw from parenting completely. His stepfather was one of the few that made an effort, and in return he was one of the few people Nicholas showed any deference towards. He hooked Nicholas up with a job working in a junkyard, he seemed to enjoy it there and was able to calm down."

Ben and Kim shared a look.

"As you can possibly guess…" Ben queried cryptically.

"What happened?" Kim asked.

"During the second semester of his junior year in High School, a handgun was found in his locker. Whether he brought it to school with him, or whether somebody at the school planted it there, I cannot say with any certainty."

"You think another student could've planted the gun?"

"Or a teacher."

Kim looked ponderously at Ben.

"Based on everything I know about him; I can attest to the probability of him bring a gun to school. I can also attest to the probability of someone planting a gun in his locker during the day lockers are being searched because they were that determined to be rid of him."

Kim had mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it was an injustice against him. Although she could sympathize with anyone who understood the school would be safer without him.

"…I would say he had quite the hellish year after the gun was found. Nowicki was expelled, arrested and went through the juvenile system. His mother relinquished custody of him as soon as she was able. His fingerprints weren't found on the gun, there wasn't even ammunition in it. This saved him from the worst possible consequences and reinforces the theory that it was planted there solely so there would be cause to kick him out of the school."

"He ended up in a group home in Albuquerque, and enrolled in something called an 'alternative high school,' but he had no intention of saying at either of them. He disappeared from the group home and managed to make it all the way to El Paso. From there he slipped across the US-Mexico border into the adjacent city of Ciudad Juarez and laid low for seven months."

"Juarez is an intense place, Kim. If Nowicki made moves there and came out alive and with all his body parts attached, then he assuredly became a tougher and more tenacious specimen for it."

"From 1992 to 1994, he was active in the western edge of the Southwest. Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas. He never stayed in one place for long, he always brought down heat on him. He found work boosting cars or doing odd jobs for extra cash. We can speculate that during his time as a car thief, he discovered a passion for burning asphalt and high-speed thrills."

"You of course remember Jimmy the Kid?"

"I killed him last month, so…hard not to?" Kim said, trying with great effort to not sound like a sociopath.

"Nowicki knew him during his time in Arizona. They pulled a few jobs together, fed off each other's psycho energy. Years later, it would be Nowicki that put Jimmy in touch with Shepherd.

"He kept on with this until he had a self-imposed incident in Summerlin, Nevada. He was in a drug store and tried to use a stolen credit card to buy a can of chili and Dr. Pepper, the cashier wasn't fooled and threatened to call the police…"

The expression Kim was giving him meant she knew this story was about to take a despicable turn, and Ben's resolute seriousness could be seen as a confirmation of this.

"He thought it an appropriate response to pull out his gun and shoot her. He left with his chili and Dr. Pepper, but not before emptying out the cash register…The cashier died of blood loss.

Kim was angry now, and she communicated it with a subtlety that was uncommon for a twelve-year-old. Ben himself thought it would be more useful if she was angry.

"That was Nowicki's first murder that we know of. In order to say out of jail, he stepped his game up yet again. He made his way to California, and it was there that Nowicki would meet Ryan Quint…"

Ben gestured towards a photo of Quint that was near Nowicki. Ryan Quint had dark brown hair and the medium complexion of someone who was likely multiracial. Kim thought he could be considered rather handsome, but she also understood that attractive features sometimes covered up the most unattractive things imaginable.

"Quint was born in 1974 in Delaware. He comes from a wealthy family. His father Roger Taylor Quint was the richest man in Delaware for a few years during the 1980s. The 1987 recession cost Quint Senior a fair bit of money, as did his Japanese investments. He remained with much more money than most though."

"Ryan Quint was your quintessential rich schmuck as a teenager, Nelms was able to obtain the files his middle school and high school had on him. He was frequently in trouble for disrespecting school staff, disrupting classes, and antagonizing other students. His mother was the school board's top fundraiser, so expelling him was forgone in favor of containment.

"Outside of school, he had love for vandalism, shoplifting, and causing mischief. He once got into a violent altercation with mall security. Another time, Ryan and his friends was thrown out of a McDonalds for smoking marijuana, a few hours later a homeless drug addict walked into the restaurant and shouted a series of horrific threats to the staff. He admitted to police that Ryan had provided him two-hundred dollars to do so."

"He frequently threw parties in the woods and in vacant houses. Parties where underaged drinking, drug use, and sexual misconduct was rampant. More than once his father had to get him out of legal trouble, which sometimes meant using his political connections to get things tossed and other times meant writing checks to people."

"Unsurprisingly he never grew up, and when he went to his father's alma matter of Wharton Business School, he was stunned to find that an elite university won't put up with you the same way your high school will. He was thrown out in his second semester there, after one incident too many."

"This was a red line for his father. He sent him to Stanford in Palo Alto, California, where he was forced to live in a residence hall and subsist only on an allowance given to him by his father. Rather than use this as a wake-up call to become some kind of worthwhile individual, he drifted further into the dark side, and this time he had a friend to guide him."

"As I said earlier… While at Stanford, Ryan Quint met Nicholas Nowicki. The circumstances of their first meeting is known only to them, but they were often spotted together during the Fall Semester of 1994. Shortly after midterms, Ryan dropped out of school and left a polaroid photo in his dorm room. A photo that he knew would make it's way back to his father. It was a photo of his middle-finger."

Kim giggled softly.

"Several weeks later during New Years Eve, Nicholas Nowicki and Ryan Quint were both sighted in a strip club in San Francisco. They were both drunk and in possession of large amounts of money that I will say they almost absolutely obtained under shady circumstances."

"Officially, Ryan's family insist that they're estranged from him, but there who suspect that Rodney Quint has maintained contact with his son and provided funds and resources to the Con-Quest Motor Club."

Kim's opinion of Ryan Quint's father took a nosedive "He's financing the gang his son is apart of?"

"Roger Quint has a reputation for unscrupulousness. He's also been the subject of a least one IRS investigation."

"If his son charted his own course as a professional criminal. It's foreseeable that he would contact his father in some warped effort at reconciliation and say 'Hey dad, I hooked up with some serious guys and we're doing nicely for ourselves. You want in?'"

"Roger is just the type of father who would say 'That's my boy!'"

"The last one is Russell Barleycorn, or Albie. He was born 1970 in Mobile, Alabama."

Ben pointed at Barleycorn's photo. He had a squarish head and chestnut brown hair. In his photo, he was gazing downwards towards the ground, giving him a brooding appearance.

"He doesn't have much of a story for me to tell. Unlike his three compatriots, Barleycorn doesn't appear to have been a juvenile delinquent. He barely had a criminal record before 1995."

"He was unable to finish High School, his grades were such that he would've had to repeat his senior year. Instead, he began working a series of low-skilled jobs. Eventually he began drifting in search of higher paying jobs. Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona."

"His last real job was working security at a roadhouse bar in the Navajo Nation. Shepherd picked him up soon after that."

"And then…There's Shepherd himself…"

Kim looked at the photo of Calvin Shepherd. Like Ben he was thin, blonde, and had a look of seriousness about him. Unlike Ben's platinum blonde hair, Shepherd's hair was brownish blonde. He also had a cold look in his eyes that him look far less friendly than the sage and approachable Georgian ATF agent that Kim had come to know.

She also noticed a black-and-white mugshot of a younger Shepherd, he had a shaved head and a cavalier bad-tempered smile. The contrast between the two photos of Shepherd somehow told her everything she needed to know about him.

"Shepherd is originally from Philadelphia. He was born in 1967 and grew up in the River Wards section of the city. His parents…Well they did him no favors. They had him out of wedlock, his father had a criminal record, his mother had much that ailed her and left them both when Calvin was still in Elementary School."

"By the time he was your age, it was becoming gradually clearer that he wasn't alright. He fought with anyone that gave him a reason, he held grudges for the slightest of grievances. A girl in ninth grade said something cruel to him, so he started a fire in her locker. He stole things, he slashed tires and smashed windows, he went to go live with relatives when his father needed a break from him."

"The only thing that seemed to center him was working on cars. A social worker offered to get him into a vocational technical high school in Camden County, New Jersey, but Calvin had already set his sights to a life on the fringe."

"At fifteen, he stopped attending school and became part of a youth gang that was connected to the Irish Mob in Northeastern Philadelphia. That began his career with them, he started out as a hood and stick-up man. He eventually graduated to murder and narcotics.

"He also took up street racing, which of course, began him down the road he's currently on. Shepherd's time in the driver's seat…Well, it changed him. He became a sovereign being. One who knew what it was to be fast and powerful, the kind of speed and power that allows you to achieve a higher form."

"And once you've experienced that higher form, it takes an extraordinary amount of fortitude to return to a world of lower forms and the contented, cretinous people that live in it."

Ben allowed an ever-so slightly passionate caress to seep into his normally quick-paced, low-tone voice.

He noticed Kim watching him with fascination.

"As someone who races myself, I rather know something about it," he explained in a milder voice.

Ben only took moment to regain his train of thought.

"As I alluded to, racing was a new horizon for Shepherd. He excelled at it so much that he eventually he decided that he no longer needed to endure an existence as an Irish Mob

henchmen. Ten years ago, in 1990, Shepherd cut nearly all his ties in Philadelphia and set out for the territories. He spent five years between coasts, his misadventures and crimes against humanity during the time being something of a mystery to me. I speculate that it was a wilderness period for him."

"In 1995, he shows up North California, possessing the mindset to build something that was all his own. He met Quint and Nowicki, and they became a trio. They found Barleycorn working at the roadhouse, and the Con-Quest Motor Club soon emerged. Add five more years and we're where we are now."

"Between the four of them? We have them committing twelve murders. This isn't counting murders they've outsourced to degenerates like Jimmy the Kid or that Freelancer. Or murders that the other four chapters of their Motor Club have committed."

"If Shepherd is killed or arrested, it'll cause irreversible damage to the luster and organizational cohesiveness of the Con-Quest Motor Club. It may even cause them to fall part."

"There are considerably worse people and institutions in the world than Shepherd and his gang. They amount to little more than an impertinent nuisance, but a nuisance needs to be dealt with less it becomes more than that."

"We have to sharpen our claws on somebody, don't we?" Kim pondered, a look

Ben broke out into a grin "I may be inclined to observe that twelve-year-olds don't typically say such things."

"I'm a twelve-year-old who hangs out with some pretty heavy-hitters" Kim bragged, "including Ben Tetradze and his Jaguar."

"Did you see the motor coach outside?"

Kim recalled the large recreational vehicle "Oh yeah, what's the deal with it?"

"That's where you're going to be staying, I requisitioned it for you."

She blinked "I'm going to stay in there? Why's that?"

"The tournament is spread across the state of California, and I'd rather not move you between safe houses and hotels."

Kim had been camping before, but never in a motorcoach. "Where are you going to be staying?"

"I'll always be nearby, or even parked right outside if necessary, I've slept in my car before. Even when I'm not around, there will be two U.S. Marshals posted to the motorcoach, and it will be under constant twenty-four-hour surveillance. It's also bulletproof and has a tracker in it."

Kim felt awkward about all this just being for her "I…Thank you?"

Ben smiled endearingly at her "No one who knows you thinks you're delicate, Kim. You're still a child though, and you're relatively new to this. You'll forgive us then, for having a great regard for your wellbeing."

"Sure, I get it."

Ben looked at his watch "We have a drive ahead of us, I suggest we start on"

"Where are we going?"

"We're going to a party."

Kim wasn't expecting this answer "A party!?"

"I'll explain on the way."

XX

Patriot44's Notes

I decided to spend some time in Middleton before beginning Kim's new adventure with Ben.

And we get some backstories for Shepherd and his not-so-merry men of Gen X turbo-douches (LOL…I like that, I'm gonna have Kim say that.)

Also, I wonder what the deal is with my fascination with abandoned buildings.

Tetradze's Playlist

"Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty

"Police Truck" by Dead Kennedys