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"The A-Team"

If you have a problem,

If no one else can help,

And if you can find them …

- The A-Team

They left Larry at his house, trying to repair the damage Hopper had done to his face. Hopper considered making Larry promise not to tell anyone what he had told them, but that seemed unnecessary. The only person who wanted anyone to know what Hopper knew less than Hopper did was Larry himself—he had a lot more to lose than anyone else if these folks from Starcourt got pissed off at him for having talked to the wrong people.

On the way to check out the properties in east Hawkins, Hopper and Joyce drove through McDonald's for quick sustenance.

"Hey," Hopper told her, swallowing a mouthful of Big Mac. "I meant it, you know."

"What?"

"You should come work for me. You're too smart for sales; the way you put things together, the way you don't give up until it makes sense, even if the answer is … impossible—you'd be a great detective. Hell, you are a great detective."

Joyce blushed, staring down at the remains of her cheeseburger. "Look out, Nancy Drew, huh?"

"Are you kidding? You're like Cagney and Lacey … and maybe Charlie's Angels, too."

"So now you want me to work for the police but spend half my time tossing my ... hair around?"

"I'd be in favor of that," he told her, his voice going husky at the image of this confident, sparkling, sure-of-herself Joyce tossing her hair while she explained all the weird things that happened in Hawkins to him.

She didn't look away, which surprised and pleased him. "Hop." Then she cleared her throat, wadding up the hamburger wrapper. "Let's go check these properties out, okay?"

Hopper nodded, accepting the response. "Okay." He put the car in gear and peeled out of the parking lot.

It was dark by the time they got to Hess Farm. There was a car and a truck parked outside the house, which there shouldn't have been since the Hess family had moved out months ago.

"Looks like somebody's home," he muttered, his eyes on the house, watching for anything that might tell him what was going on.

The door was unlocked, and Hopper moved inside the house cautiously, shining his flashlight ahead of him. The place was mostly empty, except for a few pieces of furniture. A single coffee cup sat on a table. A full ashtray rested on the arm of a chair. Someone had been here since the Hess family moved out, that was for sure.

From farther inside the house, there was a noise, a rhythmic rumbling. "Did you hear that?" Joyce asked in a barely-there whisper.

Hopper moved toward the sound, seeing a light fixture left on in the hallway, a single bulb brightening and dimming over and over again as if the power was surging somewhere else in the house.

The noise kept going, getting louder as they made their way silently through the house, but there was no one there, nothing moving that could be making that sound. "Where's that coming from?" Hopper whispered, frustrated.

Behind him, Joyce lowered herself to the floor, listening intently. "It's below us." She pointed at the bed she was kneeling next to, and an air vent built into the foot of it—a vent through which they could see lights flickering.

A twist on the Murphy bed concept, then. Together, they lifted the bed, exposing a giant hole in the floor and a set of stairs that went down beneath the house.

Hopper drew his gun and glanced at Joyce, to be sure she was ready for whatever lay ahead of them. But who was he kidding? She was probably more ready than he was.

He went first down the stairs, into a large empty room, very industrial-looking. They could hear voices speaking in a foreign language that Hopper couldn't quite identify.

"Hey, dipshits!" he called out as he came around the corner.

Two men stood up, both seeming very surprised to see him.

"Hawkins PD. Hands in the air!" he demanded. The two men stared at him in confusion, and he gestured with the gun. "Don't make me say it again!"

One of them spoke, again in the foreign language. Eastern European, maybe?

Joyce and Hopper glanced at each other, not having expected this.

"English!" Hopper shouted at the two men. "You speak English?"

The second man spoke in an unmistakably apologetic tone, but still not in English. Was it Russian? Because that's what they needed in Hawkins, was Russians.

"I can't understand you!"

The foreign guy tried again, speaking earnestly, and Hopper shouted over his flood of incomprehensible words. "I can't understand you! No understand!"

Joyce cut into the standoff, calling his name and pointing above them, where footsteps could be heard echoing. Someone was coming. They had to move fast.

Hopper threw himself at the less chatty guy. He looked like a repair person of some kind, more physical than the one who had been doing the talking. That one looked like an office guy, shirt and tie and everything, and Hopper left him to Joyce. He didn't put up much of a fight as she handcuffed him to a pipe, which was good, because it took Hopper more time than he had hoped to subdue the repair guy and tie him up.

Still, by the time the heavy footsteps made it across the house and down the stairs, Hopper was hiding where he could sneak up behind the guy and put his gun against his head. It was the same one from the lab, which he was grimly happy about. Time to get his own back. "Don't move. Drop the gun. Drop it!" He pressed the gun harder against the guy's head, using both hands. "Understand what I'm saying, big guy? Drop the weapon!"

There wasn't really a question. Language barriers aside, a gun to your head spoke in no uncertain tems.

So he was a little surprised when the guy spoke up in clear English. "Or what? You going to shoot?"

"Good. So you do understand what I'm saying, huh? And yeah, you don't put that thing away, I'm gonna blow some daylight into that thick skull of yours!"

"No. You won't do that."

"Why's that?"

"Because you are a policeman. Policemen have rules."

Hopper cocked the gun, the sound echoing in the room. "You want to test that theory? I'm gonna count to three. One. Two." As he shouted "Three!" he pulled the trigger, but the guy moved at the same time, the bullet whistling harmlessly past him. Grabbing Hopper's hands with the gun in them, he yanked him forward and off-balance, and then slammed him into a piece of machinery in the wall.

The gun fell from Hopper's hands and slid across the floor. The submachine gun the Russian guy was carrying went off, spraying bullets across the room as the two of them struggled with it, and Hopper could only hope Joyce was out of the way.

He finally managed to land a decent punch, giving him a chance to get the gun away from the guy before he got punched in return and thrown to the concrete floor. As he tried to push himself back up, the guy kicked him in the ribs, sending him flying into the wall. That worked out, though, because there was a wrench lying there, in reach of Hopper's frantically grasping hands, and he slammed it into the guy's knee.

"Hopper!" He turned to look and Joyce tossed his gun—overthrowing it, so it slid across the floor past the Russian.

"Shit."

Both of them managed to get around the corner before the Russian picked up Hopper's gun and emptied it at them. Uncuffing the guy in the tie, Hopper attached the empty cuff to his own wrist. "Come on, Smirnoff. You're comin' with us." The three of them ran for the stairs. Smirnoff ran as fast as they did, as his comrade had retrieved his submachine gun and was spraying bullets at them without regard for Smirnoff's health and safety.

They slammed the bed down, even as bullets cut through the floor and sprayed feathers from the mattress all over. Hopper knocked a heavy bookcase over on the bed to slow down the guy with the gun, and they ran for the car.