by Matt Lincoln
“You go around that way,” I whispered to Holm as I nodded toward his side of the couch. “I’ll go the other way. That way, he’ll only be able to focus on one of us. As long as he keeps his gun pointed at us and not at the girl, it’ll be fine.”
Maduro was still ranting, but a moment later, a loud bang cut him off, the sound of the back door being busted down. I snuck a glance around the edge of the couch, and for the first time, I actually got a look at Maduro.
He had an average height and build, with short, dark hair and a stocky frame. He had one hand wrapped around a petite woman’s arm, his grip so tight that her skin was red. The two of them were standing on the other side of the dingy living room, directly behind an armchair. More importantly, he was also facing away from us, his gun pointed toward the back door.
“Now!” I hissed to Holm. The two of us both shot up at once, sprinting out from around the couch toward Maduro.
He turned at the sound of our footsteps, and for a moment, he just stared at us, struck dumb with indecision. Then he made a split-second decision and pointed his gun at me. I crouched low to the ground just as he fired, the shot sailing above my head at the last moment.
Holm was almost upon him, having gained ground in the few seconds that Maduro focused on me. As Maduro swung the gun around to point it at Holm, I jumped back up, running full force not at Maduro but at the hostage. This was probably going to hurt her, but it was infinitely better than getting a bullet in her head.
I tackled her at full force, hard enough that Maduro was unable to keep his grip on her arm. I did my best to cushion the woman’s fall by twisting around so that I wouldn’t land completely on top of her. Doing so caused me to land directly on my injured arm. Up until that moment, I’d been so hyper-focused on all the chaos going on with the mission that I’d almost forgotten that I’d been injured. The pain lancing up my arm sharply reminded me, though, so intensely that, for a brief second, I couldn’t move.
I gritted my teeth and pushed through the pain. My first priority was to check on the woman. She was crying and seemed a bit shell-shocked, but other than that, she seemed uninjured. Next, I turned to Holm’s struggle with Maduro. He was grappling with the gang leader, who was still holding the gun. At least Holm had his hand on Maduro’s wrist, doing everything in his power to keep the gun pointed up and away from either him or us. I jumped back up and raced toward them.
“Hey!” I shouted as I lifted my fist. Maduro snapped his head around in response, just in time to see my closed fist heading toward his face. He groaned with pain as he dropped the gun. Holm shot down to grab it while I punched Maduro once more, just as Linden and one of the other officers rushed into the room.
“Freeze!” Linden yelled as he pointed the gun at Maduro while the other cop ran to check on the woman. “Don’t move!”
Of course, Maduro didn’t listen and spun around to lunge at Linden. However, I grabbed his arm before he could go more than two steps and yanked him back around to face me before punching him a third time. He swung back at me, but I dodged his blow before driving a knee up into his gut.
He coughed as the strike knocked the wind out of him. My hand still wrapped firmly around his arm, so I spun him around, slamming him down against the back of the armchair before pulling his hands behind his back.
“Stop resisting,” Linden warned as he rushed in with a set of handcuffs to help me secure him. As he did that, I turned to check on Holm, who was leaning against the wall.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Just got one helluva scare just now. I barely managed to push the gun out of the way in time. A second later, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Well, you did good,” I commended him as I clapped him on the shoulder before turning to glare at Maduro. “The girl’s okay, and we got our guy.”
“Thank goodness for that,” Holm muttered as he dragged a hand over his face. “Maybe now we can finally get some sleep.”
“Almost,” I assured him. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but the sun had long since gone down. Considering we’d started the day at four this morning, we were rapidly approaching twenty-four hours that we’d been out in the field. Fatigue was going to hit me like a truck as soon as the adrenaline wore off.
“Hey, you’re bleeding,” Holm noted with concern as he nodded toward my arm.
“Oh, yeah,” I replied as I looked down at my bicep. “I think it’s just a graze. I can still move it fine, so it’s probably not bad.” That being said, the sting rapidly grew more painful, and I was certain that, too, was going to feel a lot worse once the adrenaline was gone.
“Just a graze,” Holm scoffed. “It’s crazy that we’ve gotten to the point where we can just casually brush off bullet wounds.”
“All part of the job, right?” I chuckled as red and blue lights lit up the front windows of the house.
“Oh, good,” Linden remarked as he looked through the window. “Backup’s here.”
Maduro growled and struggled against Linden’s hold with renewed energy as he sneered at the police cars that had just come to a stop right outside the house.
“Settle down already,” I barked at him. “It’s over.”
Maduro stopped squirming and instead lifted his head to glare up at me, his face contorted with anger. It was a frightening look and one that might have had a less experienced agent trembling. I, on the other hand, had been doing this for long enough that a dirty look from a pathetic man like him wasn’t about to faze me.
I felt nothing but contempt and disgust as I shook my head down at him before stepping away so the arriving cops could drag him away. Finally, we had one of the two big players in this case.
Now, all that was left to do was to convince him to lead us to the other one… and I already had a pretty good idea of how I was going to do that.
30
Ethan
After apprehending Maduro and the rest of the men, we decided to call it a night. At that point, we’d been working hard for almost twenty-four hours, and as I needed to go back to the hospital anyway, we decided to resume the interrogations the following day.
Fortunately for me, the wound on my arm did turn out to be just a mild graze. Of course, any injury involving a bullet was serious, and the skin around the site was charred, bloody, and swollen. I’d been right about the pain getting worse, too, and it was only thanks to the painkillers that the doctor prescribed that I could fall asleep that night with relative comfort.
Actually, it was the pain in my arm that woke me the next morning, a lot earlier than I would have liked, given how exhausted I was. I groaned as I sat up in bed, flicking on the lamp at my bedside table before looking down to inspect the wound. I frowned when I saw that it was bleeding heavily through the bandages.
I heaved a heavy sigh as I swung my legs over the side of the bed before getting up, grabbing the small bag of supplies the doctor had given me as I headed into the bathroom.
In movies and TV, a graze from a bullet was just a little scratch that the hero of the story could just ignore, continuing their adventure as if nothing was wrong. In reality, getting grazed by a bullet usually meant that some of your skin got sloughed off as the bullet dragged its way across your skin, burning and tearing through the flesh as it went. Sure, sometimes, you’d get really lucky, and all you’d end up with is a small burn, but most of the time, you’d wind up with a chunk of your own arm or leg missing. In some ways, a graze could actually be worse than a straight shot since they were a lot more prone to infection due to the way the skin was affected.
I carefully peeled off the bandages under the bright bathroom lights. Fortunately, the stitches were still intact, and the blood was only seeping through the small crevices between them. I reached into the paper bag and pulled out the bottle of antibiotic cream that the doctor had prescribed to me. The label and instructions were all in Dutch, but I remembered his instructions well enough to go without, and in any case,
it wasn’t like I could really mess up applying cream. Once that was done, I grabbed the little roll of gauze that was in the bag and wrapped it back up before swallowing a couple of the pills he’d given me as well.
The sun hadn’t even come back up yet, and I had every intention of sleeping for as long as I could. I flipped the light back off in the bathroom before shuffling back to bed, collapsing into it, and barely managing to pull the covers back up before I felt myself drifting back under.
The next time I woke up, sunlight was already streaming through the windows, and my phone was buzzing on the bedside table next to me. I blinked blearily as I reached for it, rubbing my eyes with my other hand as I read Holm’s name on the screen.
“Hello?” I answered groggily as I held the phone up to my ear.
“Hey,” he replied. “Are you still asleep? No wonder I’ve been calling you for ten minutes.”
“What?” I replied, immediately more alert as I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the time. It was ten minutes after eight, which was when we’d agreed to head out this morning. I swore as I held the phone back to my ear. “Sorry, I guess I slept through my alarm. The pills must have knocked me out.”
“No worries,” Holm snickered. “Just hurry up and get dressed, or I’m leaving without you.”
“I’ll be down in ten,” I replied as I hung up the phone before dropping it back onto the table. It was unlike me to sleep in like that, especially when we were on a mission. The combination of the lack of sleep and the pain medication must have caused me to sleep for longer than I’d meant to. It was worth it, though, because I felt a lot better now than I had yesterday. My arm didn’t hurt nearly as much, and I felt significantly more awake and alert after a good night’s rest.
I walked into the bathroom for a quick shower, just long enough to let the water rinse me off and wake me up even further since I didn’t have time right now for anything longer. Once that was done, I changed into a clean set of clothes and double-checked to make sure I had all of my usual tools. It was only then that I realized I’d never recovered my pocket knife, the one that Gek and his group had taken off of me and used to stab Linden. I supposed that it was technically considered evidence in a crime now.
I’ll have to get it back before I leave, I thought to myself as I finished getting ready and headed out the door. I checked the phone as I locked the door behind me and smiled when I realized that exactly ten minutes had passed since I’d gotten off the phone with Holm.
The lobby was a lot more packed than it had been the previous morning when we’d slunk out during the wee hours. Standing just outside the elevators, a young couple was trying to reason with a little girl who was sitting on the ground, crying. A little further into the main lobby, an older couple was sitting on one of the couches. They were talking quietly and giggling, looking like lovestruck teenagers despite their age, and I could help but smile at them.
I finally spotted Holm sitting on one of the other couches. There was a kid standing in front of him, saying something. I approached them quietly, curious about what they were talking about.
“So, are you, like, a ninja or something?” the kid asked, staring up at Holm with bright, wide eyes and a toothy grin. He couldn’t have been older than five or six.
“Yeah, something like that,” Holm replied with a confident shrug. I almost snorted with laughter.
“Wow!” The kid gasped. “So you catch bad guys like in Super Ninja Squad?”
“Uh… sure,” Holm replied with uncertainty. He clearly had no idea what the kid was talking about, though to be fair, neither did I. Probably some kid’s show or maybe a move, based on the way the kid was talking about it.
“The guys in Ninja Squad use swords to fight,” the kid gushed. “Do you use a sword? Or just your gun?”
“Well--” Holm started to reply.
“Oh my goodness, Phil!” a woman wearing a pink top suddenly exclaimed as she came rushing over to the kid. “I told you to stay right next to me! You can’t just wander off like that!” She turned to Holm. “Sorry, I hope he wasn’t bothering you.”
“He wasn’t.” Holm smiled at her. “He’s got a pretty big imagination.”
“That he does,” she replied as he took the boy’s hand. “Come on. I got us checked in, let’s go see the room!”
“Okay,” the kid, Phil, replied cheerfully. “Mom, that guy’s a ninja!”
“Wow,” I heard her coo with exaggerated enthusiasm as they walked away.
“What was that all about?” I laughed once they were gone.
“Oh, you’re here,” Holm replied as he turned around to look at me across the back of the couch he was sitting on. “The kid saw my gun. I guess he was surprised and started asking me questions about it. I wasn’t about to go into the gory details, so I just told him that I was an agent who stopped bad guys. That got him really excited.”
“I bet,” I replied. “Kids that age are all into heroes and stuff, right? And it’s rare to see guns around here. Gun control laws in Aruba are pretty strict. Diane had to submit all the usual paperwork she has to when we wind up in European countries.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Holm muttered as he stood up off the couch. “I forget that Aruba’s technically part of Europe, even though it’s here in the middle of the Caribbean. Anyway, you ready to go?”
“Ready,” I replied as I led the way out of the hotel.
“How’s your arm?” Holm asked as we walked toward the car. “You said over the phone that you took more meds last night. Was the pain that bad?”
“Not the worst I’ve ever had,” I replied as I climbed into the driver’s seat. “But after the day we had, I definitely wanted to get enough sleep.”
“I hear you,” Holm replied as he got into the car and pulled his seatbelt on. “I think I was asleep a second after I laid down last night. I think we needed the rest for our plan to get that paranoid scumbag Maduro talking.”
“Actually, it might not be that hard,” I noted as I drove to the station.
“Hm?” Holm turned to look at me. “What do you mean? What are you thinking?”
“Just as you said,” I explained. “Maduro’s paranoid. Everyone we’ve spoken to has said that he’s been acting crazy, going on about how everyone is out to get him, and we saw for ourselves last night how distrustful he was of us. I think we can use that to our advantage.”
“You mean like tricking him?” Holm asked.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “It seems to me that the thing he’s most concerned about is the idea that Sandoval might betray him. He went as far as to sail all the way to Venezuela to collect the drugs on his own because he got it in his head that his partner was dishonest. I think if we push that angle and convince him that Sandoval was responsible for us catching him, we might get him to tell us where he is.”
“That’s a good idea,” Holm replied. “The way Maduro acts, I bet he’d be willing to sell out Sandoval in order to get back at him.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too,” I replied. “We just need to play up his own fears, and he’ll confess on his own without realizing it.”
Holm and I continued to discuss possible ways the interrogation could go and the best ways to navigate it until we arrived at the police station. By this point, we’d been here so many times that the building no longer looked threatening and foreboding the way that it had when we’d first arrived. I parked the car next to one of the police cruisers in the lot before hopping out. Holm and I walked toward the entrance, and my heart began to race with anticipation the moment we stepped through the doors.
“Hey,” the officer sitting behind the window called to us as we stepped into the reception area. There were only two other people in here. One was a middle-aged woman who was sitting in one of the plastic chairs sat against the wall and reading a book. The other was a teenage boy, sitting a few chairs away from the woman and, by the looks of it, fast asleep. I wondered vaguely what their story was, but I quickly pushed th
e thought away. This wasn’t the time for people-watching.
“You’re here to see the captain, right?” He asked even before I’d pulled my badge from my pocket. As I looked up at him, I realized that I recognized him. He was the same officer that had been here the first day we’d come. He pressed something on the desk, and the door next to the window creaked open. “Come on through.”
“Thanks,” I replied as Holm and I headed through the door. The layout of the station was familiar enough to us now that I knew exactly how to get to Captain Lopez’s office. I led the way up the stairs to the second floor and through the busy bullpen. Holm and I were nearly to Lopez’s office when someone said my name.
“Agent Marston!” Linden called as he walked briskly up to us. “Agent Holm, I’m glad you two are here. How’s the arm?” He looked sympathetically at me.
“Great, actually,” I replied as I rotated it experimentally. It stung a little, but not enough that it would impede my ability to work.
“That’s good,” Linen replied. “I saw that guy shoot you yesterday. I was surprised when you got back up and kept fighting. Most men would have just lain there moaning, me included.”
“It’s not all that bad,” I replied. “How’s the hostage? Did Maduro hurt her at all?”
“A couple of bumps and bruises.” Linden frowned. “She had a particularly bad one on her arm where he grabbed her. Thankfully, that seems to be the worst of it. She was pretty scared, but I heard that she was allowed to leave the hospital last night, so she’s alright. She was traveling alone, which is probably why she was targeted.”
“Bunch of cowards,” I spat, my voice dripping with contempt. “They only go after defenseless women that they know can’t fight back.”
“I’ll be glad once we can stick them all behind bars,” Linden grumbled. “Just as soon as we interrogate Maduro and figure out where to find Sandoval.”
“Right,” I replied. “I actually have a plan for how we might go about doing that.”
