“Fate is a raving fucking bitch,” she corrected.
He laughed.
“Yeah, she is.”
He put his headgear back on.
“I’ll go in first,” he said, giving her his plan.
“I’m low,” she said. “I should go in first after they boot the door. You’ll be in my way.”
“I don’t let women go in before me. That’s a man’s job.”
“Wow. You’re a dick.”
He laughed.
“Did you say you want my dick?” he asked.
“HAR HAR.”
He patted her leg. “It’s my op. Let me go in first. We’ll take him alive. Something tells me one of us is a little trigger happy.”
“What gave it away?”
“Uh, the holes you put in O’Banion’s men in that restaurant for starters.”
“Okay, you have a point, but he better come in alive. He’s our ONLY way to take down O’Banion.”
Oh, he was aware.
“Destination in thirty seconds.”
They all held hands.
Elizabeth had been on a few S.W.A.T calls, and this was where they prayed.
“Dear God,” he said. “Get us in, get us to the man, and get us out without any injuries. Amen.”
“AMEN,” they all said.
Elizabeth grabbed the tactical sight from her pocket and popped it onto the gun. Since this was an operation to grab the man, she didn’t want firepower. Her Glock was sufficient. She wanted accuracy. If she had to take him down, a shot to the leg, AGAIN, would work best. That wasn’t an easy shot in the dark, but when you had hell going down around you?
It was hard.
As the two trucks came to a stop, the back door opened, and they filed out, heading to the house.
She hoped his intel was right on Tommy ‘The Greek’s’ layout, or this could go bad. It was dark, they were going into a mob killer’s home, and this was the most dangerous thing she did in a while.
That said a lot since she chased serial killers.
They followed the man onto the porch with the steel enforcer ready to bust in the door.
The rest of the team went around back.
Max held up his hand. The S.W.A.T guy with the enforcer nodded.
Three.
Two.
One.
The door was busted in, and he fell back as the cops streamed into the building. Elizabeth made it in the door as the second person when the gunshots began ringing out.
“BOSTON PD!” Max shouted, and then there was a shot and he went down. Elizabeth felt the burn to her arm as she and Max were cut off.
More gunfire ensued from the back of the house.
She watched as a man fell from the balcony inside of the home to the floor with a thud.
Cops stormed the place.
She held her arm.
“Max!”
He didn’t move. When she rolled him over, she saw why. He’d taken a shot to the head. It went in by his ear, and out the back of his head.
He died instantly because he had been the first one in the door.
Oh, fuckity fuck.
She saw a cop standing over Tommy ‘The Greek’.
“He’s dead. I had to kill him,” Patty O’Brien said. “I had to put a bullet in his brain.”
That said it all.
“Max is down,” she stated. “I’m bleeding.”
The cops around her swarmed.
Tommy must have known they were coming.
They’d been set up.
And then hell really broke loose.
* * * E l i z a b e t h L a R u e * * *
Morgue
They were working on stripping Debbie to her bones when one of the techs came running in with a police radio.
“Something bad went down. We’re going to have a pick up at the hospital,” he stated.
He put the radio down and they all gathered around it, especially the feds.
‘We have a cop onboard who is DOA, and we have a Fed with a GSW. Again, we have a deceased cop and the female Fed has been injured.’
Chris looked over at Tony.
Those words made his whole body go cold.
They both dropped what they were doing and raced the hell out of there, leaving Debbie on the table. They had to get to the hospital.
NOW!
All the way there, Chris wanted to cry.
“Breathe,” Tony said. “She’s not dead. She has a gunshot wound. She’s not dead.”
The more he said it, the scarier it was. So much could go wrong, and he expected the worst.
That morning…he knew it.
As he watched her from their shared bed, he had that feeling of foreboding.
Now it was happening.
Chris could feel that panicky feeling overtaking him as Tony drove like a maniac.
As they pulled up, the hospital was filthy with cops. They were everywhere. Chris pushed through, pulling his FBI badge, much to the disdain to all the cops who had to wait for news of their co-worker and friend.
At the desk, he calmly told them he was a doctor and a Fed.
The nurse walked him and Tony back to the bay. When he opened the curtain, she was sitting there. Her arm was bandaged, and she was pale.
“Sweetheart!”
She looked up, and the tears began.
She’d fought them for the last twenty minutes, and now she couldn’t anymore.
Chris pulled her into his arms, and even Tony got in on that action. They both held her between them.
“What happened?” he asked, so very grateful that she was alive and with him. This could have been so much worse, and he knew it.
“We got to the door. They took it down. We were the first two inside, and Tommy ‘The Greek’ began firing at us. Max took a headshot. He barely got out that he was a cop when he was dead.”
“Oh, Jesus. I’m so sorry.”
She kept crying.
“He had a kid, Christopher. He had a son, and now he’s never going to see him again. Max…he’s never coming back. Just like that, he’s done.”
Chris held her as Tony got her some tissues.
“I felt the bullet and went with the protocol. I went down and stayed down. We couldn’t get up. We were pinned.”
Chris wanted to puke as he listened to this.
“I was supposed to go in first, but he told me he didn’t let women go in before him. That bullet was meant for me. I would have been the one heading to the morgue.”
Chris held her.
He wanted to be sick. Loving a strong woman, who was fearless, was hard.
“Five seconds. I was counting.”
“What?” Tony asked, unsure what she meant.
“From the time that door was busted in, to the time I got shot—it was five seconds.”
Tony and Chris didn’t get it.
She was rambling, and they were beginning to believe that it was shock.
“Why is that important?” Chris asked, wiping the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs.
“There’s no way he could have been woken up, got to the tops of those stairs at that landing, and been ready to fire on us in five seconds—UNLESS he was warned.”
Chris stared at her, finally getting it.
“You think someone called him.”
She nodded.
“A good cop died because Boston PD has a rat in their house. O’Banion won this one.”
“What about Tommy ‘The Greek’?” Tony asked.
“Patty O’Brien put a bullet in his head. We don’t even have him alive. This was a mess, and it’s on me.”
And then she sobbed more.
“Tony, find out if we can get her out of here. I’m taking her back to the hotel room.”
“NO!”
She fought him.
“Sweetheart,” he said, holding onto her.
“We transport Max back. We take him back, and I stand there while he’s autopsied. Then we do the job. He went down be
cause he believed in justice. We are NOT going to run.”
Chris got it.
His girl wore her courage like her badge, and he couldn’t tell her no.
He wouldn’t.
“I’ll call Gabe. He’ll notify the commissioner of what you suspect, and I’ll handle the autopsy.”
She went into Tony’s arms as Chris headed out to do this for her. As he made the call, he knew there would be shit over all of this.
Only, he didn’t care.
O’Banion had a rat, but they had the FBI behind them.
Ultimately, the stronger would win.
That was going to be her team.
* * * E l i z a b e t h L a R u e * * *
Sunday Noon
Six Hours after
Max’s Death
To say that cops were not happy would be an understatement. They were three days passed pissed. They were so furious that the FBI was handling the autopsy and shooting, that they didn’t even want to hear it.
They argued.
They fought.
They tried pulling rank, but it didn’t work.
So, when they rushed the morgue, ready to skewer the Feds for this debacle, they had a little surprise waiting for them.
By the time Chris got off the phone, Gabe had made the call, and not only that, but he’d hopped a flight.
Boston was a hot mess, and this needed his personal attention. As deputy director of the FBI, this corruption was his issue to handle, and he would.
IMMEDIATELY.
The mole inside their house was causing mayhem, and Gabriel Rothschild, ‘The Dragon Slayer’, did not like chaos at all.
So, by the time the body was released by the hospital to Christopher Leonard, Gabe was on the ground.
By the time they pulled up at the Office of the Medical Examiner, he was there in all his pissed off glory.
When Gabe showed up at the morgue, the bitching cops stepped down, and they stopped insisting that Elizabeth was the reason one of their own was dead.
They shut up, and they were forced to listen.
He was beyond appalled at how they were treating her. They were definitely looking for the sacrificial lamb.
They’d taken her gun.
They’d checked her rounds.
At first, there was a rumor that she’d shot Max in the head as soon as they went through the door. The rumor perpetuated to the point that she had blown the whole operation, in a Fed cover up, and she was about to be lynched.
Only, the proof had won out in the end.
The bullet wound was from the wrong sized bullet, and the casing told the tale.
Once Chris cleared that up, and signed the papers, they had no choice but to stop harassing the Fed.
As they arrived at the morgue, backup was there, and Chris knew he could pass this one off to the big guy.
Gabe was driving the bus.
“Are you going to be okay?” Gabe asked, as soon as he could get Elizabeth off to the side and alone.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” she said, lying her ass off.
He knew her better than that.
“This was NOT your fault. You didn’t even fire your weapon.”
“I know. I can’t believe they thought I’d shoot a cop in the head.”
He glanced over.
“What saved the investigation was that you had a nine-millimeter, and Chris called me ASAP.”
She was aware.
She owed him everything.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
Elizabeth was unnaturally quiet.
“I’m going to bury O’Banion. Someone tipped his guy off, Gabe. There is no way he could have been up, had a high-powered gun like that, and been ready in five fucking seconds.”
He agreed.
Gabe trusted the instincts of his people, but especially this one. Elizabeth was a damn good agent.
“It’s not over, Elizabeth.”
She was aware.
“Thanks for coming here.”
“It’s Sunday. I was off. Why not get some sun in Boston?” he teased.
She didn’t joke back.
He realized something important.
“I’m sorry. You actually liked him.”
“He was a chauvinistic douchebag, but, yeah, I liked him. He has a kid—not even a teen yet, and he wanted to do right for his son.”
“So we do right for his kid,” he stated. “We solve this, and we do it for him.”
She knew that was the best way.
As they got ready to head into the building, the commissioner was standing there with the captain, and they did NOT look happy.
“Deputy Director,” he said, shaking his hand.
“I’m sorry about flying in like this,” Gabe said, “but your cops were on a fucking witch hunt. They accused my agent of shooting your cop.”
The commissioner sighed.
“I’m sorry about that. It’s proper protocol to assume the worst until you find the answers.”
No, it wasn’t.
That was total bullshit, and someone was covering their ass.
She stared at them.
“You have a rat in your house, and it cost a good cop his life. Which one of you did it?”
They stared at her like she was crazy.
“What?” the commissioner stated.
“In that meeting we had, where I passed off the intel, there were only so many people there. Someone ratted to Tommy ‘The Greek’.”
“Gabe, control your agent. We lost a good man and a friend. You will not speak to us that way!”
Gabe stared at the commissioner.
Oh, the man was in for a surprise. Gabe, while a ball buster, always took the side of his agents.
ALWAYS.
“Well, the only thing is, she’s right. It took five seconds for your cop to die. That man was waiting for them locked and loaded. So, I’m not here just to back her up, but I’m here to tell you now that there’s a corruption investigation starting ASAP.”
“What?” Levi stated.
“You heard me. I’m having some agents come up here to play hardball. I had a few working here on the mob issue, but it seems that your house stinks, and I’m done with it. Now, we’ll clean it up.”
The man looked upset.
“Now, if you don’t mind, we’re going in to stand there while our doctor takes care of your fallen.”
Gabe was finished explaining it to the men. If they couldn’t control their mess, he would. It was his job.
Corruption was one of the things the FBI handled, and he was about to handle it.
He led Elizabeth into the building, and to the autopsy suite. Once inside, Chris and Tony were moving the bag that contained the detective to the table.
Doctor Julliard came in in full autopsy gear as if she’d been invited to do the autopsy.
“Out,” Elizabeth stated.
The woman flipped her off.
“See what I’m dealing with here?” Elizabeth asked. “Do you see the jackassery that’s going on here? It’s like a bunch of fucking children who don’t get it, and they answer to no one.”
Everyone knew she was seconds from blowing. Elizabeth was at her breaking point.
Gabe headed toward the woman causing issues.
“You can take off the gear, Doctor. You won’t be doing this autopsy.”
“He was my colleague. I will be, and who the fuck are you to tell me what to do?”
Elizabeth laughed.
She couldn’t help it.
The day had sucked.
Now this.
Well, it was worth watching the woman get her ass handed to her by Gabe.
“I’m the Deputy Director of the FBI, and this case is now a corruption case. Max Bronson’s death is going to be investigated until we find the mob ties, so you’re heading out.”
He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the door. Then he opened it, shoved her out, and then locked the door behind him.
�
�God! Had I known that was an option…”
He began closing the blinds on all the windows so the people peering in were not staring.
The dead cop deserved some dignity.
“Open the bag,” Chris said, as one of their techs did it.
As the bag was opened, there was Detective Bronson. He was starting to go gray.
Death had won.
Chris and Tony moved him to the table and began removing his gear. Chris took the helmet off.
“Wait,” she said.
Chris did.
Elizabeth grabbed a pair of gloves.
“Honey, what are you…?”
She took the bloody, brain covered helmet from his hands and turned it over. Gently, she removed the picture in the helmet.
“He had his son in there for good luck,” she said, as tears filled her eyes.
She handed Chris the picture, and he took some towels from Tony to begin cleaning it up.
When he was done, Elizabeth took an evidence bag and placed the photo inside.
“I want to make sure this gets to his son. Not now, but when he’s older. When he’s eighteen, I’ll get it to him. He deserves to know that his father was a hero and one of the good guys.”
No one disagreed.
“Elizabeth, why don’t you head back to the hotel?” Gabe suggested.
She didn’t say no.
Instead, she gave him a hug. “Thank you for coming. I needed you.”
He kissed her on the top of the head.
“Go rest your arm.”
She would.
With that, she walked out of the morgue, and Gabe pointed at the other two Feds.
“Follow her. Michael O’Banion is going down. You keep your eyes on her until she’s safe, and I don’t care if you have to sleep outside her room.”
They got it.
They headed out.
“Doctor Leonard, proceed. I’ll stand for the fallen.”
And he did.
Gabe didn’t move for the two hours it took.
When he gave his word, he kept it.
Always.
* * * E l i z a b e t h L a R u e * * *
Three Hours
Later
Dawn of Evil_FBI Flashback Page 37