by Dylan Keefer
“Palila, you sound crazy. What’s going on? You’ve been blowing up my phone all day?”
“I told you that I’ve been working on a project to help with PTSD,” she said rapidly. “We failed spectacularly at that, but I think we found something better, and I think it can help your mom!”
Palila told Bryce that no one, but the group she worked with knew about the serum—yet. It was experimental and not something they could legally say was a cure for anything, but—it had worked. For a couple of weeks, Bryce had been filled in about more experiments and tests, and he had relayed everything to them. Palila planned to sneak some of the serum out before they actually turned in their findings. A plane ticket had been purchased for her. They had made plans to get her into the hospital. There was hope. Palila never got on the plane.
Macy jumped when a masked-covered face appeared from over the desk. “What the hell are you doing? Put your mask back on!”
Macy squeezed the balled-up mask in her hands. “No one can see me. I couldn’t breathe in that thing.”
“I don’t care!”
“We killed someone though,” she said softly, shuddering at the thought of the security guard. “No, I killed someone.
“Adam squatted beside her. “Listen, little sister, Dad and Bryce weren’t going to let you come on this thing. They wanted you to stay home. I’m the one that said you should come because you are a part of this family, and this is all for our family.”
“I know.” Macy’s gaze dropped to the floor.
“You know? Do you remember how mom looked when we last saw her? She’s barely alive. We have to do whatever it takes to get that damn prick’s attention, and we need to get that serum.”
“I know,” Macy growled. Adam sighed.
“Then snap out of this. Put your mask on.”
Macy did what she was told and followed her brother out of the office. The hostages looked exhausted from the stress of the situation. There were a few bank workers, a mother and her daughter who was probably only a couple years younger than Macy, and several randoms. Two men sat against the back wall. They whispered to each other periodically, but other than that, were quiet.
“You haven’t said anything lately,” Micah muttered. Eli had stretched out his legs and leaned his head back against the wall with a relaxed look on his face.
"What do you want me to say? It sounds like we're waiting for your friends out there to break up this party, and they're too scared to do anything. Kind of like you are too scared to do something."
“There are people in…”
“Just like you are scared to admit that I’m right about Raine.”
“Don’t talk about her,” Micah growled. Eli shrugged.
“No worries. If you don’t want to face the truth, then don’t.”
“You don’t know anything about truth. Your truth is warped.”
“Raine doesn’t deserve your love just like her fiancé didn’t either. What is with you idiots falling in love with these women who cheat on you, treat you like dirt, and make you weak.”
Micah clenched his mouth shut and waited for a few seconds before addressing the last comment. "Is that what happened to you? You were so hurt by Raine that you had to see her destroyed. How does it feel to know that it isn't working?" This time Eli was silent. His jaw flexed as he crossed his arms across his waist. Movement from across the group caught Micah's attention. The same banker that had tried to reason with the gunmen before stood up. Gunman number four looked up with some interest and tilted his gun up towards the man.
“I suggest you sit back down, sir. I won’t ask you a second time.”
“Please,” the banker held up his hands. “I know that you aren’t killers. The guard was an accident. We can tell them that.”
Number three was very quiet. Number two had pulled her out of one of the offices earlier where she was obviously hiding. If she was getting overwhelmed, then maybe there was a way to get the others to unravel, too.
Number four stood up from his seat and pointed the gun to a woman who sat only a few away from him. The barrel aimed at her head.
"You've got ten seconds. Either you take a seat now, or she takes a seat permanently, and then we will see who isn't a killer."
It was plain to see that the banker wanted to challenge this proposition, but the fear in the woman’s eyes dissuaded him. Micah sighed. Something was going to go down soon, and he had the feeling that he was going to have to decide on how it all played out.
Chapter Four
Time was not on their side, and that made Raine a little nervous. Out of the three names that Healani had given them, they were only able to find information on one of them. Rafael Puluka had an address in Mililani. Normally, it took twenty minutes to get there from where they were, but Tai made it in half the time. Raine had spent her time on the phone trying to get someone to track where Rafael would be at that time as well as trying to keep Ailani in the loop.
The apartment complexed barely looked livable. For a military medical student, the kid was not living the high life. According to the papers that were in the folder, Rafael along with two others, Palila and Philip, were top students as well as soldiers, all of them were specializing in Neurology. They were members of a few clinical trials. There was nothing that mentioned R33PM.
“How you wanna do dis?” Tia asked as they pulled up. “Good cop, bad cop? Two bad cops?”
“Whatever you want, Tai,” Raine said. “As long as we get the information.”
Something stirred in the apartment when Tia’s meaty fist banged on the door. The footsteps were light. Obviously, someone was trying to sneak up to the door as to not make it seems like they were there. Raine pushed Tai out of the way and stood in front of the peephole. She heard light scuffling on the door and smiled.
“Who is it?”
“I’m looking for Rafael Puluka. Is he here?”
“Doesn’t live here anymore. Goodbye.”
“Please,” Raine said. “It’s an emergency.”
No answer. Raine looked at Tai and nodded to the door. Tai smiled. He was bad cop. He only needed a few steps momentum to ram into the door and snapped the frame by the lock. The door swung open, and Raine stared at the wide-eyed, boy standing in his boxers and t-shirt with a glass in his hand. For a second, they stared at him, and he at them. Then, Raine saw something on the table in between them and him. It was a gun.
"Rafael?" Raine started. That seemed to jump start him again, and he dropped the glass. He moved with lightning speed towards the gun, and Raine dove for it at the exact same time. Her fingers grasped at it but missed as he snatched it and rolled to the side pulling it up and pointing it at her as she sat on her knees.
“Hold on, brudda,” Tai’s voice boomed. Out of her peripheral, she noticed that Tai had his gun trained on the boy.
“Put your gun down, or I blow her brains out. Don’t think that I won’t.” Panic was written all over Rafael’s face. This kid was terrified.
“Rafael,” she said softly, holding up her hands. “I don’t want you to be afraid. My name is Raine, and the big guy over there is Tai.”
“Don’t give a damn,” Rafael’s voice trembled. “You won’t kill me. You’re not getting me, too.”
“We don’t want to kill you,” Raine said. “I’m with HPD, and he’s is military police. We’ve come here for your help.”
“Shit!” He adjusted his fingers on the gun and glanced at Tai. “Neither of you look like cops.”
“We’re here because there is an emergency, and we don’t have a lot of time.” She lowered her hands. “Now, my partner here is going to lower his gun, and we hope that you will lower yours, too. I’ll show you my credentials.”
Tai sighed but lowered his gun. Rafael stood up from his position and backed away from both of them. Raine turned around on her knees and made sure he could see that she was pulling her identification out of her back pocket. She held it out, and he quickly grabbed it.
“Fine, so it says that you’re a cop.” He tossed it back. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
“We ain’t got time fo you to feel safe,” Tai said. “We got people who need you? You know der is a bank hold up.”
“Saw something on the news? What’s that got to do with me?”
“The robbers don’t want money. They want R33PM.” The gun in his hand that started to lower was raised up again.
“Who sent you? Was it Painter? Was it!”
“No, Rafael. We are trying to find this serum? We know that you and your friends created it, and somehow they took it from you.”
"Took it?" Rafael laughed spitefully. "Is that what you heard? They didn't take it; they ordered us to give it to them. When we questioned them, they-they destroyed us."
“Talk to me,” Raine said. “We can help you, but we need to know what’s going on here.”
Rafael lowered the gun, but keep it in his hand. He leaned against the wall and shook his head.
"I don't know if you can help. We knew that we couldn't sit on R33PM and not reveal our findings. Our clinical trials are monitored by our department heads. So, we had to bring our information to him."
“I’m guessing that Colonel Edison is your department head?” Rafael nodded.
“Before we brought it to him, Palila said that she wanted to take some to her friend in the States to help with his mom’s tumor. Philip and I freaked out on her. We hadn’t tested the serum on a real medical situation, and legally, it was against every protocol we were supposed to do. If the serum turned out to be lethal to the woman or caused something else, then we were liable. We didn’t want that to happen.”
“So, you told Edison,” Tai said. “Then what? C’mon, time is tickin’.”
“Edison wanted to see it for himself. He wanted to experiment with it. Then he started bringing Commander Painter down to our lab. Soon, he was excluding us from any conversations about the project. Finally, we were given orders that our project had been canceled per order Colonel Edison. We were all furious, but Palila was more. She went to Edison’s office, and I’m not sure what she said, but the next day when we tried to get to the lab to at least get our work, we couldn’t. There were soldiers blocking us from going any further.”
“They took it over.”
Rafael nodded. “Yeah, at least the thought they did. Palila figured that Edison would pull something, and she grabbed all of the plans and as much of the serum as she could before they closed us all out.”
“So, she has the serum, too!” Tai said. “Great. How we get in touch wit her?”
Rafael snorted. “You think that I pulled this gun on you just for kicks? Palila is dead. They killed her, and they’re trying to kill me, too.”
Raine shook her head. “You’re telling me that Colonel Edison killed Palila and is trying to kill you and Philip?”
“It goes beyond Edison. It’s got to be Painter. And I haven’t heard from Philip in days, so I’m assuming that either he is hiding or—dead. See, they never found the plans or serum that Palila kept. She hid them somewhere. We had nowhere to go because Edison put it out that we had stolen stuff from Tripler, and we were being searched for. When I heard what happened to Palila, I knew something was going down. I got this place, and I pulled as much money as I could out of the bank. I’m trying to lay low, and then go back to the States, and live with my cousin for a bit.”
Raine looked at Tai. An hour was almost up. She needed to stall for time with the gunmen and with Ailani. This case had just escalated even more.
“You think I’m a fool, don’t you! I don’t like being played for a fool. If you don’t think this is serious, I will prove that to you.”
Macy didn't like how her dad sounded on the phone. He was a gentleman normally and rarely acted out in anger. Well, he had been angry a lot, and that had become the new normal. His face was red now, and his body shook so much that he clinched the phone tight in his grip just so that he could focus his anger on something.
“Why should I trust you!” Bryce sat watching the hostages, and Adam now watched what was going on outside. Macy was scared to death to look. In here, they had the guns. Out there, a lot of cops were ready to shoot them on sight, and they still didn’t know that someone was dead. It was hard to think about, and she really didn’t want to imagine the consequences. They needed the serum to save their mother’s life. That was all.
Her father slammed the phone down. The boys walked over to him while keeping their eyes on the hostages.
“What happened?” Bryce asked. Macy watched as her father closed his eyes, the face mask covering the full expression on his face.
“They want more time,” he said. Bryce and Adam both started to protest, but he cut them off. “The woman from earlier says that she is going to find that serum, but she needs to find out where it’s hidden. At least, that’s what the cop from outside said. He assures me that they won’t move on us as long as we promise not to hurt anyone.”
“And what makes you think that they’re going to honor that promise?” Adam asked. His father sighed and then looked back at Bryce.
“They mentioned Palila.”
Bryce clenched his teeth and shook his head. “How much time?”
“Another hour. She will call us personally.”
Micah leaned back with his head on the wall. He was trying to think of a plan. The bank wasn't that big. There was only one front door, and he assumed a backdoor or exit. Maybe someone had to go to the bathroom. They had been in this place for over an hour, and no one had to go? Eli mimicked his position.
“Whatever the police are getting for them seems to be a big deal,” he whispered. “Kind surprised they haven’t taken these four right now.”
“I know you don’t really care about others, but the police do.”
"You automatically assume that I don't care about others, Lieutenant. I feel like that is an unfair judgment."
Micah snorted. “Unfair, huh? You have done everything that you’ve done because you are upset that Raine made mistakes, that she isn’t perfect. That someone could see past that and love her despite her failures. That’s what this whole vendetta is based on, and you’ve ruined lives because of it.”
Eli shrugged. “That’s what everything is based on, Lieutenant. Don’t you see that?”
“You’re delusional.”
“Right, let me ask you a question then?” Micah groaned inside. “You have the choice of choosing whether to shoot that girl over there who picked up our phones or the girl that’s with the gunmen. Who do you choose?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“No, it isn’t. Both girls are so young and impressionable, but if you had the choice between saving one or the other, you would choose the girl who is the hostage even though you have no idea of the story behind the girl who is the criminal.”
“She is a criminal. She has consequences for her actions no matter what she did. I can’t ignore that fact.”
"See, now you sound like me. Whatever has this girl in the situation that she is in, you have already decided that she deserves judgment. It doesn't matter. She's failed."
Micah noticed some movement to the far side of him and watched as the banker who had constantly been challenging the gunmen was moving in front of the group quickly towards him. Micah scooted into Eli who grunted a cuss word in his direction. The banker slid in beside Micah, who saw him looked down to the side of the person next to him.
“So, the little girl was right? You’re a cop?” Micah’s eyes grew wide, and he glared at Eli as if to say This is your fault. “Why haven’t you done anything yet?”
“Because the time isn’t right, and we need to let the cops do what they’re supposed to do.”
The banker nodded slowly. Micah suddenly felt very uneasy. He didn’t like the fact that more people knew about him being a cop, and if the banker and girl knew, more did also.
“I’m Ted, by the way.” Micah didn’t feel like introducing himself
at all, but Eli stuck his arm right in front of him and shook the banker’s hand.
“The name is Eli. Good to meet you.”
What do they think this is? A committee meeting?
“Hey!” Ted called out. “Can I get my inhaler? It’s in the desk in the office up front.”
Number four stared at the banker for a while before answering. “You don’t look like you need it.”
“You should probably think about getting it. You don’t want a situation where this guy has a panic attack and dies,” Eli chipped in. “Then you’ve got two dead ones on your hands.”
Number four snarled, and then nodded towards number three, who disappeared for a moment before returning with a small inhaler. She stepped in front of the banker.
Micah wasn't sure when it had happened, but the gun that he had been trying to hide found its way into the Ted's hands. The inhaler dropped to the ground as the man bounded to his feet and grabbed number three. He twirled her around and wrapped one arm around her neck with the gun quickly pointed at her temple. The hostages in the building sensed immediately that the escalation was not good. Number four jumped up from his seat and pointed his gun at the banker.
“Put the gun down!” Ted said. “Put it down!”
“You have made a serious mistake, man. Serious!” The commotion caused the other two to come from where they were standing and pause at the scene before them. Ted tightened his grip around the girl. “Put your guns down! Now! Or she dies!”
Micah watched along with Eli as Number two quickly put his gun up and pointed it at the little girl with her mom. Dammit! You fool!” Number two took several steps and picked up the girl by her hair as she screamed. He put her in a similar hold to what the banker had Number three.
“You let her go, sir, and I won’t ask a second time.”
Micah wasn’t sure why the conversation entered his mind at that time other than he saw the process that Eli was thinking. There were two girls. Two innocent girls, and if something didn’t change, then both were going to die. Not one of them, but both. He couldn’t choose, but he didn’t have to choose.
