"What's this guy's name?" Hank asked as he, Kevin and Kalinda approached the house.
"Michael Barry. Goes by Mikey," Kevin said. Reaching the front door, he knocked loudly on it. "Mikey! It's Officer Atwater! Get down here!"
"Doubt he's going to want you to keep shouting that in this neighbourhood," Kalinda said with a flicker of amusement. If people got the idea Mikey was helping the police rather than being investigated by them, he would be in a world of trouble.
"That's what I'm going for," Kevin said. He banged on the door again. "Mikey! Chicago PD!"
"Get down here before we kick the door in!" Hank shouted. They actually couldn't do that as they didn't have a warrant. But threatening it wasn't against the rules. He found that his voice often had an intimidatory effect on people.
Maybe that was why the door opened within ten seconds. A fat, pasty-faced man with scruffy brown hair and what looked like yesterday's clothes on stood there.
"Jesus, Officer Atwater. Keep your damn voice down," he protested.
"Shut up and get inside," Kevin said, pushing Mikey inside and going in with him. Kalinda followed, then Hank, who closed the door behind them.
"What do you want?" Mikey asked grumpily.
"We're looking for someone who's pushing dodgy Molly to hookers," Kalinda said. "We've heard the name Vulcan, and that he's possibly Russian."
Mikey looked at Kevin with a smirk on his face. "What's this, bring your sister to work day?" It was a very lame attempt at casual racism.
"He's black, I'm Asian, you twat," Kalinda snapped. "Now, talk, before I lose my patience."
Mikey, like most pimps, didn't like a woman getting above her station, as he obviously saw it. "And what if I don't?" he fired back.
Hank didn't intervene, and neither did Kevin. They were both getting their first sense of how the team's new recruit could handle herself in an adversarial situation. Hank didn't have any doubts.
"Then I'll spend the rest of my day spreading the news that you've been a CI, dropping names to Intelligence Unit. I wonder how long you'll have that set of teeth in your head? I'd bet they're gone by the end of the day, along with your kneecaps."
Mikey reacted angrily, but directed it at Kevin. "What the hell? You told me you'd never tell anybody I was feeding stuff to you."
"I won't," Kevin said calmly. He motioned towards Kalinda with his head. "It's her you've pissed off. If I were you, I'd do something about that pretty fast."
With an angry scowl on his face, Mikey came to the realisation that he was backed into a corner.
"Just tell us who this guy is and where he is, and we'll be out of here," Kalinda said, softening her tone a bit.
"Alright," Mikey snarled. "His name's not Vulcan, it's Volcan. And I think he's Ukrainian, not Russian."
"Good," Kalinda said. "Now where does he live?"
"In an apartment block over on Ridge Street."
"Which apartment?" she demanded.
"I don't know!"
"Sounds like BS to me. Not a good idea," Kevin said, making like he was helping Mikey out.
"Apartment 22," Mikey grumbled. "You didn't hear any of this from me. I mean it."
"We were never here," Kevin assured him.
"Let's move," Hank said. He was impressed but not surprised by Kalinda's work, having put on an excellent good cop/bad cop routine with Kevin. He knew she was skilled of course, that was why she had made the team. However it was still nice to see his selection verified.
After Hank led them out of the house, he saw Kevin and Kalinda exchange what he thought was called a fist bump.
"Nice job, KR," Kevin said.
"You too. Worked him to perfection."
"So call it in," Hank ordered, all business as ever. "I want the whole team at Ridge Street, now."
Kevin got on the phone to organise that as they returned to their cars. Kalinda joined Hank, as before.
"With luck, we can sweep in and scoop this guy up before he knows what's hitting him," she said as Hank got the SUV moving.
"In an ideal world," he agreed. "The world is rarely ideal."
"That should be a quote on a monument somewhere," she said with humour. "The world is rarely ideal."
He managed a smile. It was hard to remember the last time he had done that. "Well, it's true."
"It sure is," she replied with a smile of her own.
With typical Intelligence efficiency, the entire team were soon assembled at the apartment block where Volcan Baranov lived. That was his name, Dante had been able to discover once they had a first name and an address to work with. He was indeed Ukrainian by birth, as Mikey had said. Now the objective was to breach his apartment and arrest him. Given the potential for the suspect to be armed, and for possibly more than one person to be in there, the team would be going in wearing body armour and with assault rifles. That was apart from Hank, who would bring up the rear with his sidearm, directing proceedings if necessary. It usually wasn't necessary with a team so skilled and experienced in this kind of raid.
"I was able to find plans of the apartments in this building," Kim said, standing her tablet on the hood of Hank's SUV so that the whole team could see what she was talking about while they put their bullet proof vests on. "They're all the same design. Each apartment has two floors. Lower floor has a living room and a kitchen. Upstairs has two bedrooms and a bathroom."
Hank took charge. "Kim, Adam, Hailey, you'll clear the lower floor. Kevin, Kalinda, Dante, you'll take the upper floor. Let's go."
Fully kitted out, the team were soon marching into the building and up to the second floor like a well-oiled machine. They passed a couple of civilians, who made sure to stay well out of their way. Within a couple of minutes, they were at the door of apartment 22. There would be no knocking. The door would be busted straight in with a battering ram. Hank used hand gestures to tell Adam to perform that task.
Standing beside the door in a covering position, Kim quietly counted down from three. At the mark, Adam smashed the door as hard as he could near its lock. The lock gave way at the first time of asking, and the team flooded in.
Bringing up the rear, Hank saw his people split up as per his orders, calling out 'Chicago PD' and covering each other as they began to clear the apartment. For the time being, he remained near the front door, which also left him near the stairs. From there he would be able to respond swiftly no matter where he was needed.
"Sarge!" It was Kalinda's voice, coming from upstairs, seconds after he had heard a door crash open. Her call was urgent. He ran up the stairs.
"Drop the gun, Volcan!" Kalinda was saying as Hank got up there. He found her standing in a bedroom doorway, pointing her assault rifle at a naked blonde man with tattoos covering his chest, arms and neck. His eyes looked like he was high on something. He had a short Hispanic woman pulled tightly against his body and a pistol to the side of her head. The woman only had panties on.
"I'll kill this slut, I swear!" Volcan shouted in strongly accented English.
The woman was a hooker, Hank realised. They had probably been asleep together when the front door had been busted in. Now she was a hostage, clearly scared to death, so much so that she wasn't making a sound. She had long dark hair, a pretty face and tattoos, one on the side of her neck, and a sleeve on her left arm. To Hank, she looked a lot like Anna Avalos.
Kevin and Dante appeared, having cleared the other upstairs rooms. Hank motioned for them to stay back. Kalinda was the only one who could handle the situation now. She was locked in a standoff with Baranov.
"I've never shot a man with his dick out before, Volcan. I don't want to start now," Kalinda said, trying to talk him down. "Drop the gun, let the girl go, and everyone can walk out of here."
"Walk out of here? You're going to arrest me. I've got enough shit in this place that I'll be in jail the rest of my life."
He meant drugs, Hank realised. Apparently there was a big stash somewhere. The team downstairs may already have found it, or it might be in the bedroom where the hostage situation was taking place. Drugs were not the immediate concern though.
"We'll talk about that, Volcan," Kalinda said, her gun still aimed right between his eyes. "But what I need you to do first is let the girl go and drop your gun. You know if you shoot her, I shoot you. You don't want it to go like that any more than I do."
"Fuck you!" Volcan shouted maniacally, and pulled the trigger, blowing the hooker's brains out.
For Hank everything started to go into slow motion. He didn't see the hooker falling to the floor, dead. He saw Anna Avalos. He saw Anna die in front of him, again.
Kalinda immediately shot Volcan in the face as soon as he pulled the trigger, then again in the chest as he went down. It was a clean and definitive kill, but the hostage had also been killed.
"Check her!" Kalinda shouted to Hank as she rushed over to clear Volcan's gun away from his body. But Hank couldn't move. Her voice sounded slow and distant in his mind, and his feet felt like they were set in concrete as he stared at Anna on the floor, looking exactly the way she had when Hailey had shot her. It made no sense as Anna hadn't even been shot in the head, but nonetheless, Hank saw her lying there on the bedroom floor.
"Sarge! Check her and call it in!" Kalinda shouted at him.
Kevin rushed into the room to do what Kalinda had asked Hank to do. He checked the hooker, confirmed she was already dead, and called in a sit-rep to dispatch.
"Sarge? You okay?" Dante asked, putting a hand on Hank's shoulder.
The physical contact snapped Hank out of staring at Anna, and the dead woman on the floor became the hooker again. "I'm okay," he said, although it wasn't true. "Kalinda? You good?"
She came over to him, looking mortified by what had happened, understandably so. "Sorry, Sarge. I thought I would be able to talk him down. Looked like he was high. I…"
"You did what you could," Hank assured her. "Search this place from top to bottom. I'll call in the shooting." Although Kalinda had done nothing wrong, the incident still needed to be reported, and she would be questioned about it before it would be officially declared a good shoot. That was procedure for any officer-involved shooting.
Hank went down the stairs and out of the house, feeling glad to get out into the fresh air. He needed it. He needed to be away from that bedroom. He needed to be away from the body that had somehow appeared to him as Anna. Stepping outside, he felt like he was going to throw up. Crime scenes never got him like that. But it wasn't the crime scene that had done it. It was seeing Anna dying in front of him for a second time. He didn't understand how or why his mind had done that to him, and he didn't know how to react to it. In that moment, he only felt empty. Heartbroken. If only he had been able to help Anna. To save her. He would have given his own life for that if he'd had to. But she was dead. Dead and gone. Gone like everyone else in his life.
A/N: A very rough incident for Hank, who was already struggling to process Anna's loss. It made him freeze on the crime scene, which several members of the team witnessed.
What will happen next?