2, Helicopters.
“If your dad would’ve pulled out and made a mess, we wouldn’t be in this one!” A window shattered a few feet from secret agent Alexi Blacktide’s head. She winced as the shrapnel glass pelted her face. She instinctively shook the shards out of her short, black hair as if it trying to be rid of an annoying swarm of bugs.
“Well if your dad had hugged you more as a little girl, maybe you wouldn’t be such a heartless bitch!” Secret agent Emerald Blitz rolled away from her hiding space in the blink of an eye. In one motion she got up to one knee and discharged the entire clip of her 9mm Baretta in the direction of some Russian thugs. Half of them dropped dead as she rolled back into cover.
Both women were completely calm in the shootout, as if they were doing laundry on a peaceful Sunday afternoon. In the fight between them, they were livid.
Blacktide inhaled angrily. “What the fuck, Em! Owens and I said we should all sneak in from the roof, but NOOOOOO, you had to try and pet the fucking guard dogs.” She raised her voice an octave and pretended to be talking to a baby. “Oooo now, who’s a good widdle German shwepperd?” Her eyes doubled in size as she gave her best friend a crazy dog lady smile. “Now now, don’t bite mama’s hand off, widdle doggie…”
“Ok! FINE! You two were right about the roof, and I’m an idiot for trying to pet those dogs! Sue me!” Bullets wizzed above them as Blitz reloaded a fresh clip into her pistol. She checked her nails momentarily in curiosity, but they looked good. She shrugged and in an instant went back to arguing passionately. “It’s never the dogs fault, Lex! It’s their shit bag owners!”
The millisecond the firing stopped Blitz rolled out from her hiding place and repeated her same shooting sequence. She yawned as the gun quickly discharged. The same result ensued and the dead bad guys hadn’t even hit the floor before she’d rolled back behind cover. “I’m taking those dogs with me when all these pricks are dead, Lex, and you can’t stop me!”
Alexi Blacktide’s jaw dropped. “And take them where, exactly? To the safe house? OH YEAH, we don’t have one anymore since you brought that Russian mafioso to our fucking home base!”
“He was good in bed before I had to kill him, at least,” muttered Blitz. She came to her senses but still protested. “Besides, if he hadn’t told us about the connection between these mafia guys and the Russian army, we wouldn’t be here to steal that laptop to begin with!”
Blacktide rolled her eyes. “We should’ve just let Owens do his thing and just waited for him, but then you wouldn’t be you if ya didn’t try to save every damn dog you see!”
Blitz was embarrassed but unapologetic. She struggled to find an answer. “Look, I’ll call someone to come get them.”
“Who in the fuck are you gonna call in Moscow to come get those fucking German Shepherds?!?!?!” Like all friends who’ve been through too much together, Blacktide loved Blitz with her whole heart but was annoyed as hell by her too.
Blitz was angry, but not necessarily at her best friend. “I hate these mafia assholes.”
Blacktide exhaled impatiently. “After we kill these fuckers and get that laptop, I’m more than happy to leave you here so you can start a Russian pet rescue!”
“Bitch,” replied Blitz lovingly.
Blacktide shook her head and took a deep breath. Their fight was over for the moment. She knew that they needed to get through this hanger and get upstairs. Blacktide nodded at the opposite side of the hanger where a smaller helicopter was parked. Blitz understood without words. Blacktide fired one shot at a light fixture above where the bad guys were taking cover. The long florescent tube shattered and made a sound like a bomb went off. As if communicating by telepathy, the women split up and ran to opposite sides of the large helicopter hanger.
Blitz muttered like a crazy homeless person under her breath. “Poor doggies have probably been beaten their whole lives… they wouldn’t harm a soul if they had a good family…” Her anger fueled her hate to kill these bad men. She saw a fire extinguisher on the wall and grabbed it. Blitz removed the scrunchie from her shoulder length blond hair and secured it around the extinguisher trigger. It instantly began to hiss out it’s high pressure contents as she heaved it over a large helicopter in the direction of the bad guys. Blitz was freakishly strong, and the extinguisher landed a few feet from her target, making the bad guys cover their faces and run for cover elsewhere.
“Nice move, Em!” a voice said above her. It scared the shit out of her.
“I fucking HATE IT when you do that, Owens. Fuck you! It’s not smart to sneak up on people in the middle of a gun fight!”
Master thief Owens was on top of a helicopter above her, crouched in such a way that he blended into the helicopter’s outline perfectly. He looked apologetic instantly. “Oh shoot, sorry Em. I thought I was being loud enough that you knew it was me. My bad.”
“You’re quieter than the breeze, you freak, and if you didn’t notice it’s kind of loud in here.” Blitz was annoyed, as if she was scolding a child. “What the hell are you doing?”
Owens climbed down gracefully from the helicopter as if he were a gecko lizard. “I came to tell you that we can go whenever you want. I got the laptop.” He wasn’t bragging, he was simply speaking matter of factly.
“Come again?”
“We can go whenever. Here’s the laptop.” He reached into his shirt and pulled it out so Blitz could see, then put it right back where he had it.
“Wait, what? Huh?” Bullets rang through the hanger and tore up a stack of soviet era cinder blocks several feet away but neither agent winced.
“I came in through the door on the roof. You two could’ve joined me or even just waited for me, but obviously those dogs out there must’ve gotten a wiff of you. I could hear them barking as I was shimmying up that north facing rain gutter. The noise turned out to be a perfect distraction.”
Blitz bit her tongue and did not want to admit that she’d actually approached the dogs intentionally. “Jesus, how in the hell did you get the laptop already, though?”
Owens crinkled his brow in confusion. He spoke sheepishly, almost as if he were reciting a recipe to bake bread. “The door on the roof wasn’t locked so I walked in. I had to sneak by a few people but it was easy to find the office. The laptop was right where that Russian mafia thug said it would be.” Owens dropped his eyes and looked at the floor as he finished, “You know, the guy you banged and then had to kill after he texted his buddies the location of our safe house?”
Sounds of automatic gunfire made her instinctively drop and turn around in a crouch to see who was doing the shooting. She had no guilt about her love life or killing bad guys, but she felt sort of bad that the three of them were now in this shootout situation. A second later she turned back around to address Owens but he was gone like a ghost. It caught her by surprise. “What the fuck?”
Master thief Owens had dropped to the floor and belly crawled flat as a pancake all the way across the hanger in only a few quick seconds as if he were a light speed spider. He slithered up to where special agent Alexi Blacktide was hunkered down and in one fluid motion was crouched next to her. “Hey Lex.”
Blacktide had the same startled reaction as Blitz, but gathered herself just as quickly. “What the fuck! Dammit, Owens.”
“It’s all good, just letting you know that I’ve already got the laptop, Em is mad at me for scaring her too, and we can go whenever you want to.” He paused, “unless you simply wanna kill more bad guys or whatever. I know that’s kind of your thing.”
“How’d you get the fucking lap top already?” Bullets ripped into the aluminum wall a few feet from her. Blacktide waited ’til the bad guys stopped shooting, then she continued. “We split up outside like five friggin minutes ago!”
Owens was sheepish again as he answered, “I went through the door on the roof. I got the laptop. Now I’m here. We don’t have to go if you wanna keep killing these thugs. I’m cool either way.” He wasn’t annoyed or mad, but just casually chatting with an old friend who happened to be a secret agent in the middle of a shootout. “I wanna go fishing in the morning and we still need to get a couple hotel rooms since the safe house is compromised.”
“Fishing?!? In Russia?” Blacktide knew Owens well enough and simply sighed, “of course you do.” They heard a roar of frustration from Blitz from the other side of the hanger. Blacktide turned around to see the action but more gunfire made her duck. She turned to talk with Owens, but again he’d disappeared.
Owens unnaturally slithered with insane speed back to the side of special agent Emerald Blitz. Her attention was focused on some bad guys and again, she didn’t hear or see him. “Hey Em.” Emerald Blitz again about jumped out of her skin but he didn’t wait for her to be pissed off. “I told Lex that I have the laptop and she seems pretty intent on killing all these bad guys too.”
Blitz looked at him with anger and confusion. “Huh? Lex is all the way over there and in her own shootout.”
“Yup, so I’ll just climb up to the rafters to watch you finish shooting these bad guys. You’re a really good shot, you know.” With that, he ducked behind the rear rotor blade of a helicopter and disappeared with no shadows or sound.
“Unfucking real,” Blitz muttered. She turned her attention back to the shootout at hand. She could hear Blacktide on the other side of the hanger shooting. The sound of dead bodies hitting the floor let her know that the only two bad guys left were hers to kill now.
“Good luck!” She looked up and saw Owens stretched out comfortably on a thin metal rafter fifty feet above her. He looked like a jungle cat, smiling widely while giving her a thumbs up.
“How in the fuck does he do that shit?” Blitz instinctively dropped as bullets missed her by inches, and in one swift move she rolled out into the open. She had a perfect angle to finish the two bad guys and she didn’t miss. Her silhouette from the front looked like a scene from a James Bond movie as smoke left the barrel of her pistol.
“Damn girl, you’re good!” said Owens as he slow clapped only a few feet away from her. “Well done!” Somehow, he had silently dropped the fifty feet in a matter of a second and not gotten injured.
“Dammit Owens,” said Blitz with indignation, but it was pointless to bitch. She wanted to say so much but couldn’t find the words. Blitz simply reloaded her pistol in the now silent hanger and said, “Let’s get out of here. I wanna let those guard dogs off their chains before we split, though.”
“Give them some of this,” said Owens. He handed her a few pieces of jerky from his pocket.
“Um…” Blitz had even more questions but thought better of it. “You know what, never mind.”
“No, no!” argued Owens. “It’s deer jerky, and it’s not too salty or sweet. Those dogs will love you for it. It’s really good and I usually keep extra for friends.”
Blitz clearly knew that Owens was strange, but wow. “Just in case your friends want… JERKY???”
Owens smiled patiently at Blitz and tried to speak in a comforting tone. “A human friend OR a dog friend, Em. You’re a dog nut but you don’t carry dried meat with you? You’re weird, you know.”
Blitz was incredulous hearing Owens accuse HER of being weird, but Blacktide walked up to them at that exact moment. She turned and almost pleaded with her best friend. “Lex, Owens here just said that I’m weird.”
Without blinking or smiling, Alexi Blacktide replied matter of factly. “You are weird, Em. Very weird, actually. Let’s get out of here.” She looked pleasantly at Owens and asked, “Got any jerky? I’m kinda hungry.”
Owens gave her a big smile as he reached into his pocket and handed her some dried meat. They turned and leisurely walked towards the hanger exit. Blitz shook her head in disbelief and mumbled each word separately to herself, “What, the, fuck.”
In the distance, a phone rang in a plain downtown Moscow apartment and woke up a crooked Russian army general to inform him that his laptop had been stolen at a mafia controlled helicopter hanger. The world would soon know the depth of his mafia connections. He felt deep fear as he hung up.
