Story: Phoenix, Chapter 2
Kate Bronson-Davies leads a double life as Agent Phoenix, an operative for a secret government bureau of people with superhuman gifts. Few know it exists, and to the outside world, Kate is just a postal inspector in Atlanta. But when a routine trip to the airport to pick up her cousin and her cousin’s fiancé turns into a run for their lives, Kate is forced to push her special skills to the limit and turn to anyone who can help, including her estranged ex-husband.
Title: Phoenix (working title)
Chapter/Part: TWO
Previous: Chapter 1
Chapter summary: "SBII was a lone-wolf business, had always been a lone-wolf business. It would drive any normal person insane." Kate matches her skills against a drug dealer who is more than he seems.
Rating: PG-PG-13 (haven't decided on which side it falls yet)
Genres: thriller, action, science fiction, romance
A/N: Still working away, if updating slowly due to busyness. Although, if you are reading this, note that feedback -- whether criticism or just "I'm reading this" -- would encourage me to post more often. ;)
Chapter 2
Two days hadn't done anything by way of improvement to the Skylife Richards Street Apartments. Kate parked on the street less than a block from the entrance and consciously locked her doors as she got out.
She felt just as unsafe now as she had then, probably more so. Dressed in plainclothes today, her service weapon was concealed beneath her loose-fitting T-shirt. Even having that thin layer of cotton between her hand and her weapon had the ability to make her nervous.
Her mind was already in tactical defense mode as she inconspicuously swept the area with her eyes, cataloguing surroundings and potential threats. A decade later, Kate's mind still worked perfectly according to the tactical processing instilled in her during SBII training.
But she reached the door and entered the office with no motion by any of the potential threats except a few curious glances.
Inside, Mrs. Morales was standing at the desk again, as she had been two days ago.
Kate offered her a smile. "Good day, Mrs. Morales," she said. "I trust you got the check I spoke of yesterday?"
The woman nodded. "Buenos días, Inspector Bronson. Yes, I did. You wish to have the keys, sí?"
"Sí," Kate responded with a small smile. Puerto Rico had become the 51st state some 30 years ago, not long before Kate was born, but the mixed-language speech of native Puerto Ricans still made her smile.
Mrs. Morales produced two sheets of paper for her to sign. One was a waiver, the other a rental agreement. Kate skimmed and signed both. Then Mrs. Morales dropped her a set of keys, and Kate was walking back to her SUV.
She popped open the back doors of her Suburban and retrieved two stacked boxes. They were heavy, but Kate was strong - humanly and superhumanly - and she muscled them out, locked the door, and set off toward the fourth-floor apartment she'd been in two days ago.
She let the door lock behind her and moved toward the window and set the boxes down there. She methodically unpacked them. First came the folding chair, then the one-way observer blinds - opaque from the outside and transparent from the inside - that she set up over the window but left retracted, then the coffee pot and cup. And while the coffee was brewing, she assembled the rifle and set up the heat imaging sensors by the window. Flipped over, the larger of the two boxes became a table/gun rack and the smaller became a footrest.
And just like that, from two boxes, Kate had the perfect surveillance set-up. A few minutes later, she slowly sank into the chair, crossing her ankles on the smaller box and sipping from the day's first cup of coffee. It was 10 a.m. and there would be several more pots of coffee - not just cups - before anything happened. Every two hours, she'd get up, take a walk around the room, eat a protein bar, check the rifle. Every other break, she'd use the restroom.
Until that came, she'd just wait and watch.
Surveillance was a thing rookies had trouble with. Hours of idle time spent using only one sense - sight - railed against everything in human nature's desire to be entertained.
Surveillance with a partner was typical for most, as far as Kate knew, but SBII was a lone-wolf business, had always been a lone-wolf business. There was never a partner around to relieve the tension and silence. It would drive any normal person insane.
Kate, on the other hand, had not only been doing surveillance for 10 years, but she'd also undergone special training for this kind of thing. Her mind was never idle. Not for a minute, not for a second. It was always running through assessments and threat calculations like a built-in computer.
Of course, so much experience also meant her mind could be focusing on several other less methodical things at the same time it was assessing every threat in a six-block radius.
Logically, she knew her mind should have a core focus. She heard SBII instructors telling her to focus.
At the same time, she knew that she had both sides of her mind under equally firm control. Nothing was slipping by her. She was merely multitasking, accomplishing more in less time. And for that, for her firm control, her instructors were applauding her.
Her mind drifted forward to Jess and her fiancé arriving tomorrow morning. Less than 24 hours. She would be done with this by then, she was sure. Tired, perhaps, but done with this.
Not for the first time in her life, she wondered what Jess, oblivious like the rest of the world, would say if she could see her big cousin now. If she knew what it was that existed behind the airtight façade of a postal inspector.
And then she pictured Gerard's reaction and the horrifying, life-altering aftermath, the aftershocks that followed that one fateful day, and her throat tightened.
She'd sworn before that day, ever since the day at age 17 when the abilities began to appear and SBII contacted her, to be meticulous about keeping her abilities under wraps, to never be idle in guarding her secret. She swore after that day to die before revealing that secret to anyone else.
Eyes tearing like she'd just been kicked in the gut, Kate's lips flattened. God, it was almost scary how much things still hurt. Some thoughts were just better left unthought.
Staring down at the alleyway, Kate forcibly blanked her mind of all thoughts, related to Gerard or not. Having no thoughts was better than safe thoughts turning into topics that were less safe.
Keeping her mind painfully flat, she sat, waited and watched.
She'd walked around the room eight times and gone through three pots of coffee when something finally happened.
From her vantage point four floors above, Kate had seen three people come and go since night had fallen seven hours ago, but even from here, she knew they were insignificant, so even though she stood with the rifle cocked and aimed, she let them go.
It was 2 a.m. when a petite male figure with medium-toned skin and unremarkable clothing, carrying a black, well-loaded backpack appeared at the end of the alley. There were two larger men, dressed in similar sleeveless white shirts and pants that looked like they could fall off any second, flanked the small man on either side, each also carrying a bag less weighted than the smaller man's.
This, Kate knew, was it.
She rose noiselessly from her seat and moved to the window.
They moved about a quarter of the way into the alley, where the small door Kate had been particularly watching sat in the warehouse wall. The troupe paused at the door, the small man, obviously the leader despite his size, turning to each of the goons.
Even from the distance, without hearing a word and barely being able to see the shadowy figures, Kate knew he was ordering them to stand on either side of the door just inside.
As expected, the three of them surveyed the alleyway and surrounding buildings once each, never even giving her darkened window a second glance.
She lifted the rifle and sighted the largest of the men as the smallest moved to open the door, but never even clicked off the safety. She was a good shot and could easily take it from here, with no obstructions but the fire escape, but sniping the henchmen from this distance was too easy and too flashy for her taste.
Instead, she silently slipped through the open window and onto the rickety fire escape as the small man was entering the door. She laid the rifle on the fire escape and noiselessly dropped over the edge of the rusted railing without one of the men turning in her direction.
Air rushed silently past her, pushing auburn hair up above her head, as she descended toward the ground, eyes trained on the three men as they cautiously filed in the door. She landed noiselessly on the ground without so much as disturbing a pebble.
Even if she had made a sound, they would have been able to see nothing in the black corner where she'd landed.
The last and largest of the men passed into the warehouse as her feet touched ground, the door beginning to swing closed behind him.
Driving an invisible wedge in the last foot between the door and its jamb, Kate took the distance across the alley in two extra-long bounds. She caught the edge of the door right before it would have struck her mentally erected barrier, wrapping both hands around it. Throwing in the momentum she already had from running, she swung her body fully around the door.
Her foot connected solidly with one unsuspecting guard's temple while one hand released the door to wrap around the other's neck. A well-aimed jab to a pressure point as well as a tight squeeze around his throat and he dropped as quickly as his companion.
With only half a grunt from the man she'd kicked, both slumped to the ground. Releasing the door, Kate twisted and landed on her feet as the door clicked shut. It'd all taken barely a few seconds.
It was almost as dark in this corner of the warehouse as it had been outside, but she saw illumination around a hallway bend ahead, around which the small man had already disappeared. Kate's feet pounded quietly against the floor as she darted around the corner herself. On the other side of the L-shaped bend, she froze solid.
A thin, wiry man stood a dozen paces further down the hall in the corner of another L-shaped bend, bathed in the light that leaked from around the corner.
Kate was still mostly in shadows, maybe he hadn't-
But bleary, bloodshot eyes were turning toward her, along with a gun gripped in shaking hands.
Her service weapon was already in her right hand, her left stretched, palm outward, toward her attacker. The barrel of his gun was suddenly wrenched upward and a bullet buried itself in the ceiling somewhere over Kate's head.
The man himself was then thrown violently backward to crash into the wall four feet behind him, knocking the gun loose from his hand. The shot had ruined her surprise, though - she could hear shouts and scrambling around the corner.
The man on the ground watched Kate dart past him around the corner with dazed and wasted eyes.
With a huff to herself, Kate admitted she liked druggies as victims. They were easier to deal with. Half hallucinating under normal conditions, no one ever believed addicts who told a story of a postal inspector who threw them against walls, floors and the like from halfway across the building. Hell, half of them didn't believe themselves when they woke up.
Around the corner, the hallway opened into a large room with a rough table and metal folding chairs that had seen better days, all overhung by a series of lights that offered the place's only illumination.
A single bullet greeted Kate, wide to her left, before she pivoted to her right, leveled her weapon and efficiently dropped a fourth and fifth man with a bullet each to the thigh.
She turned back to her left to see the small man darting toward another hallway across the room, not even bothering to look back, just running. Another man was a few steps behind him, but looking over his shoulder back at Kate, shock evident in his eyes. Both men were shouldering heavy bags and carrying but not using guns.
A spray of bullets refocused Kate's attention.
A pair of goons with bad aim but overactive trigger fingers were firing at her from the room's opposite corner, over the top of the table. Kate dropped to one knee to put the table between herself and the two men.
They put a few bullets in the table before Kate sent one crashing into the other, then the pair of them crashed into the wall a good four feet above the ground. Then she released them and let them tumble back to the ground, where they landed with a double thud.
Six, seven.
She didn't even bother to stop and ensure they were down, but darted down the hallway after the fleeing pair. She could hear them pounding along the hallways ahead of her.
She caught up with the slower man between the third and fourth forks in the hallway system. He had just seen her coming and was raising his gun at her, still running furiously down the corridor away from her, when she put a bullet in each of his calves. Legs effectively cut out from under him, he tripped to fall flat on the floor, the heavy pack on his back - no doubt carrying drugs - not helping his ruined balance.
Eight.
Without missing a step, Kate kept running, kicking his gun away from his hand as she went. It skittered across the concrete floor and out into a room half-filled with boxes and crates as the hallway opened into it.
Kate froze before she got to the room, instincts kicking in. She took a moment to catch her breath, leaning against the wall, then shouted out ahead of her, loud enough for him to hear her. After a few prior run-ins, just shy enough of a familiarity where she'd be called his handler, Kate was sure he'd recognize her voice.
"Jim, you know better than this," she said, her voice solid even as she caught her breath. "Nyllem-spiked cocaine? You thought just because you slipped it past the DEA from the spaceport you could slip it past us?" Kate shook her head even though he couldn't see her. "Oh, no, sir. After the DEA books you, under special recommendation from the SBII and the president's office, you'll be moved to a certain facility in the middle of the Nevada desert. If they don't extradite you back to N'kta from there, you'll spend more than a little quality time in a very small, very dark solitary-confinement cell."
The only response she received was heavy breathing that echoed back to her sensitized ears from somewhere further along.
Kate checked her gun one more time - even though it was for show and not for actually taking Jim down in a mass of unexplained blue blood - before she rounded the corner with it raised.
Almost as soon as she hit the open area of the room, bullets flew in her direction. They hit wide left of her, but she stiffened on reflex even as she stood her ground. She spotted Jim across the room, half-shielded by a crate, firing at her over its edge.
Kate riddled the crate with holes.
Jim took to the floor, crawling rapidly away. Kate couldn't see him, but she could hear him scurrying away. In a swift bound, she crossed the room and leapt atop the crate that had moments ago protected her enemy.
Jim had stopped moving. All Kate saw was a mass of junk and debris, no human in sight. But she knew he was there, amongst the boxes and garbage that littered the floor. Hiding. Her eyes narrowed.
If she could just catch a glimpse of him, the battle would be over in less than the space of a heartbeat. That was the one major disadvantage to her telekinetic powers - it was hard to move things you couldn't see.
Leveling her service weapon in her right hand at the center of the debris, she squeezed off one shot.
It did the trick. Jim scrambled in his hiding place toward the door, and Kate caught a glimpse of an arm - a flash of white cotton and tan skin - amongst the dingy debris and yanked.
Displacing boxes and broken wood with bangs and thuds, out came a spritely little man flailing in her invisible grasp. He floated across the room to hover in front of her.
Still flailing uselessly, he looked down at her with half-high, half-frantic eyes.
"Tsk, tsk, Jim," she said. "Did you really think you were going to get away?"
He still struggled in vain. For a second, Kate wondered how best to disable him. She wouldn't shoot him, and although she could, she tried to avoid choking people like Darth Vader.
She settled for stripping his backpack from him and drawing it to her, then setting him back on the ground, albeit still under invisible restraints. She didn't even have to open the backpack to know it contained the illicit drugs she'd mentioned.
Tsking, she lifted an eyebrow at her captive. "Have anything to say for yourself, Jim?"
The little man grimaced and spat something foreign out under his breath.
"Yeah, yeah, same to you, bub," Kate just muttered back to him. She flicked her free wrist at him. "Now, march. Around this corner and back out the way you came in." In the midst of the chase through the warehouse, it hadn't slipped Kate's notice that they'd almost fully circled the building, almost back to the same door through which they'd both entered.
Jim reluctantly did as he was told, balefully muttering, "You'll pay for this, Davies."
Kate didn't bother giving his words any weight - N'ktans were infamous for their big talk, little action - or correcting his use of the wrong surname. He wasn't worth either one.
When they reached the door, he glanced down at his large bodyguards on either side of the doorway and grimaced, glancing back over his shoulder at Kate as he did so.
When they stepped outside, it was at that one particular section of a Southern night when the humidity from the day before had worn off, and in the dead darkness, the next day's humidity hadn't yet begun to form. The night wasn't cool, per se, considering it was still summer, just lighter.
As she took a breath of the fresh air and glanced up at the fourth-story window that was open, she heard sirens wailing in the near distance. Right on time, as usual.
By the time the dark SUVs rolled up and agents in dark jackets with the letters "GBI" printed on them poured out, the backpack had disappeared into that open window.
While agents entered the warehouse from the front entrances, guns drawn, Kate pushed Jim forward, toward the front of the alley where agents were gathered.
A group of five muscular, strapping men in suits were standing near one SUV, eyeing her warily as she approached. "There are eight more men inside, all incapacitated," she said. "This is James 'Jim' Salvatore of the Westside." She forcefully shoved the now-handcuffed man toward the GBI agents. The sandy-haired obvious rookie led Jim away while the older agents just gawked at her.
She flashed them the badge clipped at her hip, right beside her holstered service weapon. "Inspector in Charge Kate Bronson, United States Postal Inspection Service."
Every eyebrow in a five-foot radius shot up. "Postal inspector? Isn't this a little outside your jurisdiction, Inspector Bronson?" one of the agents asked, barely disguising a chuckle.
Kate held up an evidence bag with a rubberbanded wad of white envelopes in it. "The suspect in question was carrying fraudulent U.S. mail," she deadpanned. "Be sure to log that said evidence is leaving the scene with me. A copy of all your reports - as well as those filed by GBI's drug enforcement arm with the DEA - should be sent to my office. You know, ensuring interagency cooperation." She produced a business card that she handed to the agent who had spoken up.
He took it and looked down at her, eyebrow quirked.
"The United States Postal Inspection Service appreciates the assistance of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, agents," she said with her smug diplomatic smile and a nod. "But if you'll excuse me, I have other places to be."
The raised eyebrows and smugly amused smiles vanished and became semi-sullen stares.
Now the one smiling smugly to herself, Kate turned her back on them, also priding herself on the fact that for this one, as for most SBII captures that were turned over to other agencies under guise, the paperwork would be someone else's problem.
To be continued in Chapter 3.
Title: Phoenix (working title)
Chapter/Part: TWO
Previous: Chapter 1
Chapter summary: "SBII was a lone-wolf business, had always been a lone-wolf business. It would drive any normal person insane." Kate matches her skills against a drug dealer who is more than he seems.
Rating: PG-PG-13 (haven't decided on which side it falls yet)
Genres: thriller, action, science fiction, romance
A/N: Still working away, if updating slowly due to busyness. Although, if you are reading this, note that feedback -- whether criticism or just "I'm reading this" -- would encourage me to post more often. ;)
Chapter 2
Two days hadn't done anything by way of improvement to the Skylife Richards Street Apartments. Kate parked on the street less than a block from the entrance and consciously locked her doors as she got out.
She felt just as unsafe now as she had then, probably more so. Dressed in plainclothes today, her service weapon was concealed beneath her loose-fitting T-shirt. Even having that thin layer of cotton between her hand and her weapon had the ability to make her nervous.
Her mind was already in tactical defense mode as she inconspicuously swept the area with her eyes, cataloguing surroundings and potential threats. A decade later, Kate's mind still worked perfectly according to the tactical processing instilled in her during SBII training.
But she reached the door and entered the office with no motion by any of the potential threats except a few curious glances.
Inside, Mrs. Morales was standing at the desk again, as she had been two days ago.
Kate offered her a smile. "Good day, Mrs. Morales," she said. "I trust you got the check I spoke of yesterday?"
The woman nodded. "Buenos días, Inspector Bronson. Yes, I did. You wish to have the keys, sí?"
"Sí," Kate responded with a small smile. Puerto Rico had become the 51st state some 30 years ago, not long before Kate was born, but the mixed-language speech of native Puerto Ricans still made her smile.
Mrs. Morales produced two sheets of paper for her to sign. One was a waiver, the other a rental agreement. Kate skimmed and signed both. Then Mrs. Morales dropped her a set of keys, and Kate was walking back to her SUV.
She popped open the back doors of her Suburban and retrieved two stacked boxes. They were heavy, but Kate was strong - humanly and superhumanly - and she muscled them out, locked the door, and set off toward the fourth-floor apartment she'd been in two days ago.
She let the door lock behind her and moved toward the window and set the boxes down there. She methodically unpacked them. First came the folding chair, then the one-way observer blinds - opaque from the outside and transparent from the inside - that she set up over the window but left retracted, then the coffee pot and cup. And while the coffee was brewing, she assembled the rifle and set up the heat imaging sensors by the window. Flipped over, the larger of the two boxes became a table/gun rack and the smaller became a footrest.
And just like that, from two boxes, Kate had the perfect surveillance set-up. A few minutes later, she slowly sank into the chair, crossing her ankles on the smaller box and sipping from the day's first cup of coffee. It was 10 a.m. and there would be several more pots of coffee - not just cups - before anything happened. Every two hours, she'd get up, take a walk around the room, eat a protein bar, check the rifle. Every other break, she'd use the restroom.
Until that came, she'd just wait and watch.
Surveillance was a thing rookies had trouble with. Hours of idle time spent using only one sense - sight - railed against everything in human nature's desire to be entertained.
Surveillance with a partner was typical for most, as far as Kate knew, but SBII was a lone-wolf business, had always been a lone-wolf business. There was never a partner around to relieve the tension and silence. It would drive any normal person insane.
Kate, on the other hand, had not only been doing surveillance for 10 years, but she'd also undergone special training for this kind of thing. Her mind was never idle. Not for a minute, not for a second. It was always running through assessments and threat calculations like a built-in computer.
Of course, so much experience also meant her mind could be focusing on several other less methodical things at the same time it was assessing every threat in a six-block radius.
Logically, she knew her mind should have a core focus. She heard SBII instructors telling her to focus.
At the same time, she knew that she had both sides of her mind under equally firm control. Nothing was slipping by her. She was merely multitasking, accomplishing more in less time. And for that, for her firm control, her instructors were applauding her.
Her mind drifted forward to Jess and her fiancé arriving tomorrow morning. Less than 24 hours. She would be done with this by then, she was sure. Tired, perhaps, but done with this.
Not for the first time in her life, she wondered what Jess, oblivious like the rest of the world, would say if she could see her big cousin now. If she knew what it was that existed behind the airtight façade of a postal inspector.
And then she pictured Gerard's reaction and the horrifying, life-altering aftermath, the aftershocks that followed that one fateful day, and her throat tightened.
She'd sworn before that day, ever since the day at age 17 when the abilities began to appear and SBII contacted her, to be meticulous about keeping her abilities under wraps, to never be idle in guarding her secret. She swore after that day to die before revealing that secret to anyone else.
Eyes tearing like she'd just been kicked in the gut, Kate's lips flattened. God, it was almost scary how much things still hurt. Some thoughts were just better left unthought.
Staring down at the alleyway, Kate forcibly blanked her mind of all thoughts, related to Gerard or not. Having no thoughts was better than safe thoughts turning into topics that were less safe.
Keeping her mind painfully flat, she sat, waited and watched.
She'd walked around the room eight times and gone through three pots of coffee when something finally happened.
From her vantage point four floors above, Kate had seen three people come and go since night had fallen seven hours ago, but even from here, she knew they were insignificant, so even though she stood with the rifle cocked and aimed, she let them go.
It was 2 a.m. when a petite male figure with medium-toned skin and unremarkable clothing, carrying a black, well-loaded backpack appeared at the end of the alley. There were two larger men, dressed in similar sleeveless white shirts and pants that looked like they could fall off any second, flanked the small man on either side, each also carrying a bag less weighted than the smaller man's.
This, Kate knew, was it.
She rose noiselessly from her seat and moved to the window.
They moved about a quarter of the way into the alley, where the small door Kate had been particularly watching sat in the warehouse wall. The troupe paused at the door, the small man, obviously the leader despite his size, turning to each of the goons.
Even from the distance, without hearing a word and barely being able to see the shadowy figures, Kate knew he was ordering them to stand on either side of the door just inside.
As expected, the three of them surveyed the alleyway and surrounding buildings once each, never even giving her darkened window a second glance.
She lifted the rifle and sighted the largest of the men as the smallest moved to open the door, but never even clicked off the safety. She was a good shot and could easily take it from here, with no obstructions but the fire escape, but sniping the henchmen from this distance was too easy and too flashy for her taste.
Instead, she silently slipped through the open window and onto the rickety fire escape as the small man was entering the door. She laid the rifle on the fire escape and noiselessly dropped over the edge of the rusted railing without one of the men turning in her direction.
Air rushed silently past her, pushing auburn hair up above her head, as she descended toward the ground, eyes trained on the three men as they cautiously filed in the door. She landed noiselessly on the ground without so much as disturbing a pebble.
Even if she had made a sound, they would have been able to see nothing in the black corner where she'd landed.
The last and largest of the men passed into the warehouse as her feet touched ground, the door beginning to swing closed behind him.
Driving an invisible wedge in the last foot between the door and its jamb, Kate took the distance across the alley in two extra-long bounds. She caught the edge of the door right before it would have struck her mentally erected barrier, wrapping both hands around it. Throwing in the momentum she already had from running, she swung her body fully around the door.
Her foot connected solidly with one unsuspecting guard's temple while one hand released the door to wrap around the other's neck. A well-aimed jab to a pressure point as well as a tight squeeze around his throat and he dropped as quickly as his companion.
With only half a grunt from the man she'd kicked, both slumped to the ground. Releasing the door, Kate twisted and landed on her feet as the door clicked shut. It'd all taken barely a few seconds.
It was almost as dark in this corner of the warehouse as it had been outside, but she saw illumination around a hallway bend ahead, around which the small man had already disappeared. Kate's feet pounded quietly against the floor as she darted around the corner herself. On the other side of the L-shaped bend, she froze solid.
A thin, wiry man stood a dozen paces further down the hall in the corner of another L-shaped bend, bathed in the light that leaked from around the corner.
Kate was still mostly in shadows, maybe he hadn't-
But bleary, bloodshot eyes were turning toward her, along with a gun gripped in shaking hands.
Her service weapon was already in her right hand, her left stretched, palm outward, toward her attacker. The barrel of his gun was suddenly wrenched upward and a bullet buried itself in the ceiling somewhere over Kate's head.
The man himself was then thrown violently backward to crash into the wall four feet behind him, knocking the gun loose from his hand. The shot had ruined her surprise, though - she could hear shouts and scrambling around the corner.
The man on the ground watched Kate dart past him around the corner with dazed and wasted eyes.
With a huff to herself, Kate admitted she liked druggies as victims. They were easier to deal with. Half hallucinating under normal conditions, no one ever believed addicts who told a story of a postal inspector who threw them against walls, floors and the like from halfway across the building. Hell, half of them didn't believe themselves when they woke up.
Around the corner, the hallway opened into a large room with a rough table and metal folding chairs that had seen better days, all overhung by a series of lights that offered the place's only illumination.
A single bullet greeted Kate, wide to her left, before she pivoted to her right, leveled her weapon and efficiently dropped a fourth and fifth man with a bullet each to the thigh.
She turned back to her left to see the small man darting toward another hallway across the room, not even bothering to look back, just running. Another man was a few steps behind him, but looking over his shoulder back at Kate, shock evident in his eyes. Both men were shouldering heavy bags and carrying but not using guns.
A spray of bullets refocused Kate's attention.
A pair of goons with bad aim but overactive trigger fingers were firing at her from the room's opposite corner, over the top of the table. Kate dropped to one knee to put the table between herself and the two men.
They put a few bullets in the table before Kate sent one crashing into the other, then the pair of them crashed into the wall a good four feet above the ground. Then she released them and let them tumble back to the ground, where they landed with a double thud.
Six, seven.
She didn't even bother to stop and ensure they were down, but darted down the hallway after the fleeing pair. She could hear them pounding along the hallways ahead of her.
She caught up with the slower man between the third and fourth forks in the hallway system. He had just seen her coming and was raising his gun at her, still running furiously down the corridor away from her, when she put a bullet in each of his calves. Legs effectively cut out from under him, he tripped to fall flat on the floor, the heavy pack on his back - no doubt carrying drugs - not helping his ruined balance.
Eight.
Without missing a step, Kate kept running, kicking his gun away from his hand as she went. It skittered across the concrete floor and out into a room half-filled with boxes and crates as the hallway opened into it.
Kate froze before she got to the room, instincts kicking in. She took a moment to catch her breath, leaning against the wall, then shouted out ahead of her, loud enough for him to hear her. After a few prior run-ins, just shy enough of a familiarity where she'd be called his handler, Kate was sure he'd recognize her voice.
"Jim, you know better than this," she said, her voice solid even as she caught her breath. "Nyllem-spiked cocaine? You thought just because you slipped it past the DEA from the spaceport you could slip it past us?" Kate shook her head even though he couldn't see her. "Oh, no, sir. After the DEA books you, under special recommendation from the SBII and the president's office, you'll be moved to a certain facility in the middle of the Nevada desert. If they don't extradite you back to N'kta from there, you'll spend more than a little quality time in a very small, very dark solitary-confinement cell."
The only response she received was heavy breathing that echoed back to her sensitized ears from somewhere further along.
Kate checked her gun one more time - even though it was for show and not for actually taking Jim down in a mass of unexplained blue blood - before she rounded the corner with it raised.
Almost as soon as she hit the open area of the room, bullets flew in her direction. They hit wide left of her, but she stiffened on reflex even as she stood her ground. She spotted Jim across the room, half-shielded by a crate, firing at her over its edge.
Kate riddled the crate with holes.
Jim took to the floor, crawling rapidly away. Kate couldn't see him, but she could hear him scurrying away. In a swift bound, she crossed the room and leapt atop the crate that had moments ago protected her enemy.
Jim had stopped moving. All Kate saw was a mass of junk and debris, no human in sight. But she knew he was there, amongst the boxes and garbage that littered the floor. Hiding. Her eyes narrowed.
If she could just catch a glimpse of him, the battle would be over in less than the space of a heartbeat. That was the one major disadvantage to her telekinetic powers - it was hard to move things you couldn't see.
Leveling her service weapon in her right hand at the center of the debris, she squeezed off one shot.
It did the trick. Jim scrambled in his hiding place toward the door, and Kate caught a glimpse of an arm - a flash of white cotton and tan skin - amongst the dingy debris and yanked.
Displacing boxes and broken wood with bangs and thuds, out came a spritely little man flailing in her invisible grasp. He floated across the room to hover in front of her.
Still flailing uselessly, he looked down at her with half-high, half-frantic eyes.
"Tsk, tsk, Jim," she said. "Did you really think you were going to get away?"
He still struggled in vain. For a second, Kate wondered how best to disable him. She wouldn't shoot him, and although she could, she tried to avoid choking people like Darth Vader.
She settled for stripping his backpack from him and drawing it to her, then setting him back on the ground, albeit still under invisible restraints. She didn't even have to open the backpack to know it contained the illicit drugs she'd mentioned.
Tsking, she lifted an eyebrow at her captive. "Have anything to say for yourself, Jim?"
The little man grimaced and spat something foreign out under his breath.
"Yeah, yeah, same to you, bub," Kate just muttered back to him. She flicked her free wrist at him. "Now, march. Around this corner and back out the way you came in." In the midst of the chase through the warehouse, it hadn't slipped Kate's notice that they'd almost fully circled the building, almost back to the same door through which they'd both entered.
Jim reluctantly did as he was told, balefully muttering, "You'll pay for this, Davies."
Kate didn't bother giving his words any weight - N'ktans were infamous for their big talk, little action - or correcting his use of the wrong surname. He wasn't worth either one.
When they reached the door, he glanced down at his large bodyguards on either side of the doorway and grimaced, glancing back over his shoulder at Kate as he did so.
When they stepped outside, it was at that one particular section of a Southern night when the humidity from the day before had worn off, and in the dead darkness, the next day's humidity hadn't yet begun to form. The night wasn't cool, per se, considering it was still summer, just lighter.
As she took a breath of the fresh air and glanced up at the fourth-story window that was open, she heard sirens wailing in the near distance. Right on time, as usual.
By the time the dark SUVs rolled up and agents in dark jackets with the letters "GBI" printed on them poured out, the backpack had disappeared into that open window.
While agents entered the warehouse from the front entrances, guns drawn, Kate pushed Jim forward, toward the front of the alley where agents were gathered.
A group of five muscular, strapping men in suits were standing near one SUV, eyeing her warily as she approached. "There are eight more men inside, all incapacitated," she said. "This is James 'Jim' Salvatore of the Westside." She forcefully shoved the now-handcuffed man toward the GBI agents. The sandy-haired obvious rookie led Jim away while the older agents just gawked at her.
She flashed them the badge clipped at her hip, right beside her holstered service weapon. "Inspector in Charge Kate Bronson, United States Postal Inspection Service."
Every eyebrow in a five-foot radius shot up. "Postal inspector? Isn't this a little outside your jurisdiction, Inspector Bronson?" one of the agents asked, barely disguising a chuckle.
Kate held up an evidence bag with a rubberbanded wad of white envelopes in it. "The suspect in question was carrying fraudulent U.S. mail," she deadpanned. "Be sure to log that said evidence is leaving the scene with me. A copy of all your reports - as well as those filed by GBI's drug enforcement arm with the DEA - should be sent to my office. You know, ensuring interagency cooperation." She produced a business card that she handed to the agent who had spoken up.
He took it and looked down at her, eyebrow quirked.
"The United States Postal Inspection Service appreciates the assistance of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, agents," she said with her smug diplomatic smile and a nod. "But if you'll excuse me, I have other places to be."
The raised eyebrows and smugly amused smiles vanished and became semi-sullen stares.
Now the one smiling smugly to herself, Kate turned her back on them, also priding herself on the fact that for this one, as for most SBII captures that were turned over to other agencies under guise, the paperwork would be someone else's problem.
To be continued in Chapter 3.