Chapter 10

The Foole may have loved to sneak about but even he agreed that sometimes bold audaciousness works a little bit better! No, not quite charging in guns blazing, but something both direct but yet subtle.

With the Miami-Dade Police Captain at our lead, we marched bold as sin into a restricted side entrance to the police crime-lab building and took the stairs up five levels into an even more restricted area where my seized clothing and guns were being stored for 'analysis'. Yeah, just like I'd suspected, I was being professionally fitted for the role of patsy, completely with doctored and planted fresh evidence at the swamp bungalow crime scene, but now with these weapons back in my hands and 'missing' from the lab (and administrative chain of custody), they would be now worthless as evidence. Especially after these items became properly and permanently 'lost' somewhere out in deep water.

Baker looked slightly happier with his gun back in its shoulder holster, but the Foole assured him that until a gunsmith took the weapon completely apart and repaired it, that it would never fire again. The smug look on my partner's face convinced me that he'd somehow sabotaged it, but his hands had never been anywhere near it ... quicker than the eyes or not, I had no idea how he'd done it. DeeDee apparently had seen that trick before in the past, just like the way he'd made the Blackwell SUV suddenly lose control and crash into the water. Spooky, it was.

"The Foole has skills!" The old burglar said and winked knowingly. Fat lot of help that was to me!

"That's nice ... and the walls have video surveillance cameras everywhere too!" I muttered. Sure, I was now in lair of my enemies, but that wasn't going to help me for shit if my face was about to appear on every 'Most Wanted' poster.

"Those cameras won't see shit," DeeDee quietly whispered. "They never do around the Foole. He's got some sort of hidden EMP jammer in his pocket that disrupts all electronics, everything around him. Serious CIA grade stuff out of some government lab, I think ... always works, too. The Foole is a ghost ... and he likes to stay that way!"

Right about now, I wouldn't mind becoming and staying a ghost myself!

It was almost too pathetically simple. Captain Baker, being the former head of the statewide Monroe Masher Task Force had every physical security and computer password access to any file we wanted, and more importantly knew exactly where all of my confiscated items were. Most of the stuff I wanted to recover was even lying right out in the open, on various CSI work tables or stashed away in his private office. Things were quiet enough on the night shift that no one thought twice about one of the bosses being in the office and he casually and quietly collected up one by one my entire collection of items that had been collected for use as evidence against me. All of them!

Sure, my confiscated boots had already been used to place fresh footprints at the crime scene, along with planted shirt fibers, not to mention extra bullets and shell casings ... but there were all now worthless without the original physical evidence to compare them with in a court of law!

A final quick trip upstairs to the gun lab to collect my Glock 32.357 SIG and backup SIG .45 Compact ran into one slight but significant hitch. A witness that we all would have rather bypassed, one police lieutenant Bender, nicknamed 'Froggy', who had been Baker's #2 man on the task force, and who was very much still on the Watters payroll. As a good loyal toady, pun intended, Froggy (named so apparently for his infamous nasal allergies that caused his voice to 'croak' often when outdoors) didn't bother with all of the usual camaraderie blue-line honor stuff, or even a 'heya boss!' before he immediately drew his gun and started blasting away at Hot Rod.

I guess the idea of an immediate job vacancy by disposing of his former bossman above him plus the nice added bounty of a million dollar cash payoff trumped any sort of prior loyalty.

With a permanently jammed gun, courtesy of the Foole earlier, Baker was at more than a bit of a disadvantage and he dutifully caught two rounds from the first clip Froggy fired before I could get there to equalize the odds a bit. With the Captain down with a brace of lead ventilation holes in his chest and gut, I became a much more appealing target to the crooked cop. He popped off another rather wildly aimed group of shots at me of mostly suppressing fire designed to keep my head down low so that he could finish off his old boss. While keeping under cover wasn't a bad idea, I used the opportunity to stay low and do a long dive and roll around a desk where I could pop Froggy with my one single working shot before my own gun jammed as usual. The 9mm I'd taken from Face jammed after every shot and I kept having to manually work the slide to expel the fired shell casing and chamber a fresh round.

Fortunately, I usually didn't ever need more than one shot anyway, and poor Froggy croaked! Ribbit!

Even in or near the gun testing lab, even in the middle of the night, the sounds of multiple gunshots aren't all that common, especially with Froggy wildly unloading two full magazines shattering glass everywhere around us, and even as we were picking ourselves up, friendly helpful folks with drawn guns were running over to us to access the situation. Believe it or not, 'Rod Rod' bleeding profusely from two rather biologically necessary regions, somehow made it his feet assisted by the Foole and DeeDee at either side and he made sure that the crime lab reinforcements recognized his familiar face and voice and he calmly barked a few fast orders before he collapsed.

"Get the evidence lab secured up tight downstairs on Five ... I caught Froggy down there a few minutes ago deleting files from the system and a bunch of my physical files are missing and probably shredded. I think all of the Masher evidence has gone missing ... find out who paid Froggy ... grrrrum." With that he collapsed, play acting I think, but the bleeding bullet holes really did make the scene utterly and convincingly believable.

In the hour of privacy we'd had downstairs earlier we'd been very, very busy and we'd all worn thin, nearly invisible surgical gloves to leave no physical trace behind us. We hadn't planned on Froggy instigating trouble ... and becoming a perfect bad boy to pin all of our mischief upon, but the timing couldn't have been better! Our brand new patsy, Froggy, would have surely have done exactly what Baker had claimed, to purge the evidence files of behalf of the Watters, to ensure that corruption of the top members of the Masher Task Force would never be discovered.

The Captain had known where every file of any importance was kept (mostly in his nearby staff room or in his own private files) and we quickly performed a professional and comprehensive job of triage. Really important files of interest went into the hands of DeeDee and into a series of legal file boxes on a wheeled dolly ready for him to transport out with us.

I'd performed the task of shredding the more numerous mundane files, and the nearby copy room had a nice big and fast industrial model that could munch up into criss-cross miniature diamonds, forever unrestorable, devouring entire file folders up to an inch thick at a time, complete with metal studs, brads or accidentally enclosed wire file hangers. Hardcore ... and very hungry for more even as particles of shredded documents began to overflow the trash bag and spill onto the floor and finally even into the hallway.

Finally the Foole, along with his hidden personal EMP generator was doing a rather nasty number to the police computer files. The physical sort of shredding that I had done would be considered a kindness I suppose compared to the nastier electronic sort of mischief that my diabolical secretive ghost was gleefully now indulging in. I'm not that much of a geek and didn't understand all of the details ... and I think I don't want to.

Needless to say, after his brief final visit to the IT department downstairs in the basement, the Foole assured me that it much more likely that priests would give up their love of buggering young altar boys before a single computer bit or byte of Masher related evidence could ever be successfully reloaded or restored from any of the older backups into the police record database. Not to mention, of course, that not a single security camera in the entire building had yet, or would ever, catch even a peep of us either coming or going, despite all of the emergency security alarms now going off in the building due to Froggy's ill-advised firefight.

Poor trigger-happy Froggy was now perfectly set to take the fall ... and there wasn't the slightest bit of evidence left to implicate any of us. We hoped.

Actually, Captain Baker hadn't needed to exaggerate the seriousness of his wounds much and was pretty much genuinely passed-out from the moment we took the elevator going down to leave. The gut wound was bad enough but not immediately critical, but it was the lung wound just a bit above and to the right of his heart that was trying to both drown him and bleed him out at the same time.

While the Foole made our unobtrusive getaway in his rental sedan, DeeDee and I tried to plug up the blood flows but despite our efforts and a lot of creatively applied direct pressure, our bent police captain was making quite a bloody mess of himself here in the back seat.

"I don't think you're going to get your security deposit back when you return this rental car!" I joked to the Foole, semi-seriously.

"I rarely do," he replied, keeping his eyes forward on the road and staying just below the speed limit. "Fortunately, since I work for an insurance company, I've made a friendly understanding with this national rental car corporation that sometimes, often, or actually rather frequently, their vehicles might not get returned at all and should be considered a complete insurance loss, which my company is quite happy to pay. Heck, they usually offer me the slightly older models anyway or a scratch and dent vehicle that they want to be able to legitimately write-off the books. Everyone wins!"

"Perhaps, but Hot Rod is still leaking badly from his pipes and we need to get him to a particularly kind and understanding doctor used to treating bullet holes late at night and with no curiosity about his patients received them. Any ideas, DeeDee?"

"One maybe, if the notations to his qualifications also include 'exorbitantly paid'. The guy I'm thinking of was a Navy medic and learned his business at the sharp end of things back in the first Gulf War. Problem is his uncle, also an ex-Navy Vietnam era vet, might have some friends involved with various Watters businesses. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I'd say he has certain Watter associations, mostly dealing guns. He's got those alright, if you still need them, and before you had that huge price on your head I'd have sent you to him, but now I probably wouldn't."

"Ok then, what's your second choice?" I enquired.

"Don't have one," he muttered, "unless Miami-Dade County Hospital will do?"

It wouldn't. The Masher's last victim had been taken there and didn't make it through the night before being silenced. I wasn't going to make that mistake again!

I didn't quite 'owe' Baker, but he'd stuck to the script and done exactly what we'd asked him to do ... and gone even beyond, taking two bullets and afterwards thinking fast enough to give us all a perfect cover-story. Sure he'd diddled me around making sure I got fed nothing but bullshit for a couple of years, but that debt had now been cashed in with blood. I still wanted to see a lot of people dead for what they'd done to protect the Monroe Masher, allowing him to kill young women for three years indiscriminately ... but Captain Baker had earned his reprieve, at least from me. We were never going to be friends, but he wasn't going to die from my hand, or from any indifference on my part. Sure, he'd later probably try and do something to screw us over, if he thought he could make enough of an escape to grab his ex and daughter and skedaddle off somewhere to safety, but for now he wasn't going anywhere with two holes in his pipes. A proper gun like a .45 or my old .357 SIG would have cashed his chips out probably, so for once I glad to see the bad guys like Froggy playing with their silly 9mm toys.

Maybe a trip to the medic and his gun dealing uncle might kill two birds with one stone! I had a perfectly good sniper rifle and a M4 assault rifle, but I needed something portable, concealable and fully functional. I hated the M4 enough that I didn't want to trust my life to it and would rather tote almost anything else but that. The way the Beretta that the Blackwell Face had been carrying kept jamming after every round was beginning to really piss me off! It was a damned unusually quiet gun, but it constantly jammed after every shot!

"Screw it, DeeDee ... we're out of options. Let's go pay your medic a visit and hope that his uncle is either not at home or bribable enough to forget about us for a few hours."

He agreed, but I could tell that he wasn't too terribly happy about it. He had a bad feeling about the whole thing and the closer we got to there the less good I felt about the situation too. My 'woman's intuition' is as good as anyone's – and I was starting to smell disaster. My problem in life has been that I never listen to mine!

As usual, it was dead on.

Our morally flexible ex-military combat medic, 'Chesapeake' Pete, lived in a rather nice beach house just north of Fort Lauderdale, near Pompano Beach and with enough beach-front land that the nearest neighbor was probably out of gunshot hearing range, barring a full-scale war. Actually, the property was owned by his older uncle, Martin DelRey, a cold-blooded shooter if I had ever seen one. His arm tats advertised that he was an ex-SEAL like my father and from the crazy dead eyes in his skull I'd say that it was absolutely truth that he was a stone cold killer.

We made it as far as inside their living room before Martin's eyes showed that the dice inside his head were spinning and it was going to be a rather close decision as to what he was going to do about us, or more particularly to me. Once I'd become displayed for proper inspection with some good lighting it had been pretty instantly plain that he'd seen my face before, probably on a bounty notice emailed from the Watters or their associates. His reaction to his second look at the wounded Captain Roderick Baker also indicated that by a stroke of rather opportune luck another fat bounty had also walked in the door wearing a 'please cash me in' tag. For at least one of the DelReys, opportunity was definitely knocking.

I'd been quick to whip out my handy gym bag full of cash, to start slapping $20k bundles of bills onto the coffee table, but it was becoming quickly apparent that I was going to get seriously outbid. He needed the Watters for business as usual and the only thing he needed from me was my head ... preferably detached from my body. Besides, he could still take my money later after he'd shot me.

The eyes are the windows to the soul, and though Martin didn't have much of one left anymore, I'd had enough combat experience to know when I needed to get my ass into full gear - and I moved it. We were too close to each other for either of us to draw handguns, and probably just as well; I think for his larger size he could move just as fast as me and a gunfight at distance could have very problematic. My knife was out quick as I lunged towards him and I'd have had him cold at anything closer than ten feet away, but unfortunately he was about eleven or twelve ... and the bastard moved faster than anyone twice my size I'd ever seen before!

His nephew was quite oblivious to everything around him and he was already fussing over Baker's wound, but everyone else knew to get out of range fast! The Foole and DeeDee just retreated back behind the large leather sofa where Pete was working away on Hot Rod, out of range ... and safely so, considering that neither of them carried a weapon. The Foole EMP gadget trick wasn't likely to work against bare knifes! The Foole's Taser was tucked inside his jacket, charged and ready ... but he knew he'd only get one chance to make a shot and he waited, and kept the weapon hidden for now.

That left just me to take down a trained killer twice my size and strength and with nearly my own speed! Right from the very start I discovered that I wasn't doing terribly well. I was quicker, slightly, but he had the muscle and he didn't seem to feel any pain. I'd played this sort of game once or twice before and the strategy to winning this kind of fight was to stay out of range and fight fast, in-out, evade and let your opponent tire himself out chasing you or wait for him to get angry or careless and make a mistake. Oh ... and don't let the cocksucker nail you!

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee ... or something like that. That worked for about four and a half minutes, and while I might have been ahead on points one of his spin kicks had popped me hard enough in the chest that I suddenly now couldn't catch my breath. He looked for a moment too like he was a bit out of balance and I decided to try something sneaky, to dive and roll in, and try for a scissor-kick that might take his knees out. We were both weapon-less now and I could see my dropped Ka-Bar a few feet away from him and calculated that with an additional half roll to the left afterwards I could grab it and put it to some good use, maybe even hamstring him. Even in my oxygen deprived state that could be the advantage I'd need to take the tough bastard out.

Now unable to catch my breath, I hadn't realized that the former squid bastard had cracked three of my ribs until I'd faked my kick high so that I could tuck and roll under him. He also wasn't quite as out of position as I'd thought and he did a really neat side-spin and hop that evaded my leg sweep entirely. Now with my ribs suddenly shrieking at me, I couldn't roll back up into position as neatly as I'd intended and failed entirely to make that last planned half roll to reach my dropped knife. Now I was most very definitely out of positional balance and the stress on my ribs hurt and slowed me as I tried to belatedly bounce up into something of a crouching defensive position.

I almost made it ... and did manage to protect my damaged left ribcage from his frontal snap-kick at the cost of leaving myself wide open for the right haymaker. Mike Tyson had never hit his own wife that hard!

Knocked a full ten feet back, I was now lying flat back on my ass with shoulders and head leaning against the plate glass windows of the sliding doors to the beach patio. My bell was pretty well rung and I was seeing everything now in double-vision. Nope, grabbing for my knife again very definitely wasn't an option at the moment, nor was any thought of getting up. I knew certain martial arts techniques for blocking out pain and regaining focus, but I'd been knocked just silly enough that I needed a few seconds just to try and reorient myself and remember what planet I lived on first.