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Chapter 7

After storming out on Joe, I ducked into the small room by the elevator. As far as I knew, it was only used for interviews, but it was perfect for stealing a few moments of quiet. I needed to get myself collected before going into the meeting.

I started the deep breathing exercises Ranger always encouraged after one of my incidents and was surprised when I felt my heartrate start to slow. As my body calmed, I focused on forcing my muscles to relax from their clenched state. A few moments later I no longer felt like I was humming with adrenaline, so I stepped across the hall into the conference room we were using for our meeting.

A quick look around showed that Joe had beat me back. And it was clear he hadn't taken a moment to calm himself. Judging by the glare he was leveling at Ranger he was even less cool and collected than during our chat. Ranger on the other hand seemed to be in a state of forced calm. I knew that meant he was like a coiled spring and could erupt at any moment.

Fuck.

Tank shot me a look that all but screamed 'fix this'. I was momentarily impressed that I had done the ESP thing before realizing he actually expected me to do something about this.

I knew from experience there was nothing I could do about Joe. Well, balls to the wall gorilla sex would probably diffuse him, but that was so far off the table that the table wasn't even in the building. I decided to ignore him for now and turn my focus on Ranger.

His eyes were black - and not in the good 'about to ruin you for all other men' sort of way. He had more of an imminent destruction vibe going on. His focus was on Joe until I walked into the room. Then I felt it zero in on me. Counting on that, I made a point of taking the long route around the conference table to the empty seat on his left.

I wasn't sure who the seat was meant for. I was assuming it was for Tank, but he was still standing about midway between Joe and Ranger. He looked like he was ready to physically stop any violence that broke out. But if he wanted me to calm Ranger down, he could deal with giving up his seat.

Reaching out, I ran my hand gently up Ranger's leg. When I got to his hand that was clenched in a fist under the table where no one could see, I wormed my hand into his larger one. He allowed me to force his fist open and lace our fingers.

Once I felt the tension in his hand begin to lessen, I turned to face him and gave a small smile before turning back to the group at large. Distraction was one of my specialties and I was going to use that to my advantage now.

Pasting a bright smile on my face, I slowly looked at everyone gathered in the room projecting a calm I certainly wasn't feeling.

"I apologize for the delay," I said, turning the full force of my smile on Agent Carson of the DEA. I had gathered during the initial introductions before Joe and Detective Garcia arrived that he was the senior agent in charge. "I believe we're all ready whenever you'd like to start."

I'd kept hold of Ranger's hand throughout, surreptitiously massaging it with my thumb under the table. Judging by the mischievous grin Lester was sending my way, I was pretty sure the Rangermen weren't fooled in the least. I didn't really care since I could feel Ranger relaxing bit by bit.

By the time Agent Carson started speaking, he had pulled his glare from Joe and his focus was mostly on the presentation with just a bit tuned in to me.

Unlike Ranger, I didn't have the ability to split my focus. So by the time I felt like the risk of an alpha male explosion was mitigated, Agent Carson was well into his presentation. I still wasn't clear on what my roll would be, but I was sure that Ranger and the guys would get me caught up on anything pertinent that I'd missed.

"The data is summarized in this graph," Agent Carson was saying. "You can see that there has been an uptick of seizures of the raw materials used to synthesize Dragon Bite. It doesn't correlate with the increase in overdose deaths, leading us to believe that there are additional streams we aren't aware of. You can also see that the incidents related to explosive agents sourced from at least three species of dragons not native to North America have increased as well. So far, we aren't sure if this is correlation or if they have the same source. We're hoping to get answers to that during this investigation."

After that, Agent Johnson from the ATF started in on an analysis of the explosives that had been linked to recent incidents and seized during inspections. I managed to gather that there were two significant makeups - one that was professional and another that seemed home cooked - but they were losing me on all of the chemistry.

Some time later, control of the presentation had been handed back to Agent Carson and he was scrolling through persons of interest to the investigation. This part was more interesting to me, and I perked up when we got to Benny Wright.

There was a lot of info on him and some of the surveillance was what had led to the charges he was FTA for. I momentarily saw red when I realized that a good bit of the information on him had been gathered by Joe, well before he went FTA. Fortunately, Ranger seemed to pick up on my irritation and took his turn massaging my hand.

He started rubbing small circles on my palm with his thumb and all coherent thought flew out of my mind.

It came snapping back two slides later when I recognized the face blown up on the screen.

"That's one of the guys from the warehouse," I blurted before I could stop myself.

"That shot at you," Ranger asked.

"You got shot at?" Joe asked at the same time, but I decided to ignore him and focus on Ranger.

"I'm not sure if he's the one that did the shooting, but he was there talking to Wright."

"Cormac Miller was talking to Benny Wright?" Agent Carson interjected. "You're sure?"

"Yeah. Wright is one of my current skips. Some of my research said he'd been working at Varanus Solutions pretty regularly. So, I decided to try to apprehend him there. I was surveilling the building and saw him talking with two other guys out back."

"Do you think you would recognize the other guy?" Carson asked.

"Sure." I was good with faces, and I'd gotten a good look at them. I was fairly confident I would be able to ID the other guy.

Sure enough, Carson advanced the presentation to the next slide, and I saw the third guy from my field trip to the Varanus warehouse.

"That's the other guy," I said before he could advance the presentation again.

"That's Johnny Menduza. Him being with Miller isn't surprising, but the two of them meeting with Wright is new. As far as we knew, they were all players but didn't have a known association."

"Babe," Ranger said, softly so only I could hear it. I was pretty sure that 'Babe' meant only you stumble onto this sort of thing." And I agreed with him. I did have the damndest luck.

"You said they shot at you," Agent Carson said. "Can you tell us anything else?"

I briefly recounted the little bit of their meeting that I was able to hear. That Wright was supplying them with some service and was raising the price. Also, that he seemed to know the feds were onto him.

Agent Ramsey, the second agent from the ATF cursed softly before interjecting. "I was afraid of that. Wright's arrest was done by a rookie who didn't understand the assignment. He was supposed to be gathering intel. We knew Wright was involved and we were pretty sure arresting him tipped him off. It was confirmed when he went FTA."

"It is what it is," Carson said, jumping in before anyone could go down that coulda, shoulda rabbit hole. "For now, we need to focus on next steps. The current teams will stay on their assignments. Manoso, we were hoping to bring Rangeman on as a contractor to help cover surveillance. We just don't have the manpower for the scope this investigation is growing to. We'd also like help with research. We know you have good programs and people here."

"And at this point, we need to bump bringing in Wright up the priority list," said Ramsey. "He gets around local organized crime and from what Ms. Plum observed he has connections we weren't aware of."

"Rangeman will assist Steph with getting him brought in," Ranger said.

"Ranger, he's my skip," I said, biting my lip to keep from saying more. I'd left the room, not wanting to have this argument with Joe in front of an audience. While I wasn't worried about yelling and arm waving from Ranger, I still didn't want to argue with him in front of the feds. Joe would probably also get too much enjoyment out of it.

"I know. That's why you'll be taking point since you've already done some leg work on this guy. Extra bodies will expedite getting him brought in so we can focus on the other parts of this case without worrying about him compromising more players."

"Okay," I said. I couldn't think of anything else to add. Ranger's explanation made sense and logically I knew I would need help to bring in Wright in a timely manner.

"Okay?" I heard from Joe, interrupting my stray thoughts. "Your boyfriend asks you to hand Wright off to Rangeman and you freak out. Ranger pretty much jumps in and all you have to say is 'okay'?"

"Apparently," I said through clenched teeth. I was working on this new maturity thing, but damn Morelli was making it hard. Our long history of explosive arguments didn't help, but I was trying to act like an adult in front of the federal agents while I was dressed in a Rangeman uniform.

"Well, I think we're done with what we wanted to accomplish today," Agent Carson said, cutting through the tension with a professionalism that I admired. "Manoso, since you've agreed to help, I should have final copies of contracts for the job to the Rangeman lawyer by midday tomorrow."

With that, there was hand shaking and manly nods all around. Then I was suddenly alone in the conference room with Ranger. The Merry Men who had been in attendance had escorted our guests out.

"Sorry about that with Joe," I said, looking more at Ranger's left ear than his eyes.

"Babe," he said and was quiet until I forced myself to make eye contact. "I didn't realize he would be part of the meeting until he was on his way up, but I could tell from the briefing info I reviewed yesterday that he was probably holding out on you. I'm sorry I didn't let you know in time, and it took you by surprise. I know that's an issue for you two."

"Well, not anymore. We were off as of a few days ago. And after this little stunt, I told Joe it's permanent. I'm over having information withheld that would let me be safer all while he complains about how dangerous my job is."

"Proud of you Babe."

"Thanks, Ranger," I said with a smile. I felt emotions welling up that I would rather he not pick up on with his ESP, so I did a bit more distraction for the day. "So, it sounds like we have a bad guy to catch. Want to assemble the Justice League?"