Chapter 127: Blood and Tears-No Sweat

"Now Chief since you came to your senses and decided to talk, I'm going to give you a warning, as I always do. I'm going to be asking you Questions about the Atwood brothers. You are going to answer them truthfully. The reason you are is because if you don't, first we kill your family then we chop you into little pieces until you talk.

You will talk in the end, if you don't talk, we have to kill what is left of you. The only question for you right now is, are the Atwoods more important than your family? You might also want to ask yourself this, are the good old farm boys, as bad as my friend, the Irishman, and me."

"I already said I would talk," he said bitterly.

"Good, but you should know that we already know a lot about the Atwoods. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. Now I will ask you questions to which I know the answers. They will be mixed in with the questions I don't. Obviously you could lie to me, but you don't know to which questions I know the true answer. If you lie to me and I catch you, The Irishman is going to leave and kill your whole family. There will be no reprieve. Do we understand each other?"

"Yes I understand," he said.

He had a little too much confidence to make me feel comfortable. "That's yes Ma'am from now on. You are working for me now, or you are dead. Do you understand?"

"Yes Ma'am." he replied.

The GBI had given us just enough information to ask questions that were probing and also convinced the Chief that I did indeed have information. He had no idea how much information I had.

So for the next hour I questioned and browbeat him. Mike recorded it all as we went. When I thought that I had everything I could get from him, I said, "Chief you are going to do one last thing for me. Then if you are half smart, you are going to take your family and get the hell out of Georgia. Do you understand?"

"Yes Ma'am I understand."

"Mike get those files off to our friends in Atlanta," I said before I turned to the Chief. "Now you go tell Blain Atwood that I will meet him at the outfield fence of the softball field in city park. I will be there at 4pm this afternoon. If he is there we can work a deal, if not, one of us is going to die. He should know that I have the better gunslinger." I opened the cuffs on the chief, pushed him out the door, and watched him stumble to his car.

"Did you scare him enough," Martin asked.

"We won't know that until about five this afternoon." I replied.

"The time is good. It will put the sun in their eyes not mine," Martin said with obvious approval in his voice.

"Got to get lucky now and then," I replied.

"Right," he said smiling.

"So here is the deal. If you can cook up some kind of repeater, so that you can monitor the audio and video from here, then you will be a lot safer," I said to Mike and Gwen.

"I have one. If you can get it within a hundred yards of the Mic. I can monitor it here."

"If you give us a video camera that we can just sit on the roof and point it in the general direction. You can have some images of what goes down," I suggested.

"They will be lousy images, but better than nothing," he suggested.

"We got two hours Max, you wanna screw?" Mike asked.

"No thanks, but listen you keep a sharp eye out. I have a feeling this is going to be like my C.O. used to say about spies. "The bad thing about turning a man, is that he can be turned back again just as easily."

"Right," Mike said almost ignoring me. "I knew he didn't think anything could happen to him. Too young and stupid I suspected.

For the next two hours, Martin and I drank coffee and worried. Well for the first hour anyway, after that Martin went out to zero his scope. I tested the microphone to be sure that Mike could really hear it from inside my body.

"It's not really a microphone. It's more a receiver and transmitting unit. Your whole body is the Mic and the antenna," he explained.

"I don't care just so long as it works, I don't want to have done this for nothing." I suggested.

"You get them to admit to sending the men to kill us, and we will put his ass in prison. I guarantee you nothing will go wrong with my equipment."

After the equipment check I drank coffee and worried. I worried because there was too much that could go wrong. I knew that a plan, as loose as the one we were using, could easily get us all killed. I just couldn't come up with a better one.

"Unless they were complete idiots, they were going to guess that the chief had gone over, but that didn't matter to my plan. If they killed him, that was fine with me, if they chose to turn him back, that was okay as well. We already had what we wanted, intelligence. We had sent the GBI enough information to start a wide ranging investigation. It was mostly what questions to ask, and of whom to ask them, but it was a starting place. It was probably more than they had before we rode into town.

Time was running out. Martin and I loaded his equipment and Mikes camera complete with repeater into the SUV. Before we could drive away, Gwen came out and kissed Martin with a lot of tongue. I wasn't at all surprised, nor was he. I was surprised, when she kissed me exactly the same way.

Then she whispered, "Just for luck."

"Of course," I mumbled as I got into the SUV.

"Be careful, you know they are going to be extra careful," I said to Martin when he stopped the SUV behind the concession stand.

"You to lady, you piss me off sometimes, but I don't want to lose my first client." He said it smiling, as he used a ladder like I had never seen to climb the back wall of the concession stand. The ladder had a single center pole and folding steps on each side. He flipped it once and it became a ladder.

He was about half way up when I walked onto the field. I felt naked since I left my 10mm Glock under the seat of the SUV. I have to admit that I was so scared I had to pee bad. I have no idea why, but before the shit starts I always have to pee, but the urge is gone with the first sign of action. I knew that once I saw Blain, I wouldnt be able to pee, if my life depended on it.

I tried to be calm as I walked through the chain link fence. As I walked over home plate, I could feel eyes on me. I could only hope that they were Martin's and his alone. I walked to the pitcher's mound and over it, I walked over what would have been second base, it the bases had been out. Like most places, they were put out only for games and removed immediately after. The walk to the center field fence made me very nervous. I was in fact terrified.