Page 3 of Flash and Bang
“Take that harness off and throw it to me.”
The man sent him a murderous glare. “Fuck you, man.”
Jarrett grinned and pointed his Glock at the man’s face. “Now, asshole!”
Abject fear crossed the man’s features. “Jesus! You’re certifiable. You know that?” The man wrestled with his harness, his knees bleeding like crazy, and threw it to Jarrett.
Jarrett stood up and stepped into it, slinging it over his shoulders and cinching it up as he watched the other suspect peeking out from behind the building. Jarrett grabbed the rope and threaded it through the harness, looking around for an anchor ashe did so. His glance finally landed on the second suspect, still whimpering from the pain of his bleeding knees. Jarrett began to smirk.
“Hey, dickhead, how much do you weigh?”
****
Thayne got to the top of the stairs and peeked out of the crack between the door to the stairwell and the roof just in time to see his insane partner jump off the roof backward into thin air. Thayne almost crapped his pants in the ten seconds or so that it took for him to realize that a black nylon rappelling rope was threaded through a harness Evans was wearing around his body. He was holding a MAC-10 in one hand and his Glock in the other, screaming something over the din of the blood roaring through Thayne’s veins. It sounded distinctly likeYee Haw!One of their armed suspects was charging across the roof toward the spot from where Jarrett had just jumped.
“Oh my God, do you see that?” Sarah Connor’s voice sounded shocked in Thayne’s earwig. He knew Sarah must have been watching from the ground ten stories below. “Is that? Is that… fucking… Evans? Did Evans just jump off the roof?” she screamed.
Thayne’s heart hammered in his chest and he forced the door open the rest of the way.What the hell is he doing?Thayne shot out onto the roof, jumping over a bleeding suspect who was clearly already dead, and charged toward the still-armed second suspect who had his back to him, peering over the side of the roof. The suspect watched for a few seconds and then pivoted around to his friend, running back toward him, completely oblivious to Thayne’s presence. He dropped his auto-loader on the roof while he grabbed something tied around his friend’s waist.
“ATF!” Thayne screamed, “Put your hands behind your head! I don’t want to shoot you!”
The crouched suspect turned toward him and complied, instantly putting both hands behind his head as he moved to kneel. His friend, laid out flat on the roof, was bleeding from both knees and screaming his fool head off.Thayne’s heart thundered in his chest, still uncertain what the hell was happening to Jarrett. He was rappelling down the building and it was only then that he figured out that Jarrett was using the suspect’s body as a counterweight. The suspect with bloody knees had the end of Jarrett’s rope tied around his waist, two MAC-10 magazines providing a splint on either side of his torso so that he wouldn’t be cut in two from Jarrett’s weight.HolyChrist, Jarrett.
Thayne quickly cuffed both suspects and then ran to the side of the building to look over. Jarrett was rappelling down, using the long black nylon rope and pushing off from the building over and over as he lowered himself to the sidewalk. The street below was filled with LAPD patrol cars, ATF and FBI vans, and several black SUVs.
“One suspect down and two in custody up here,” Thayne said so that he could be heard in the earwig. When Jarrett didn’t respond, he realized he must have taken out the earwig. The door to the roof opened up again and ATF, FBI, and LAPD began filing out onto the roof like ants. Thayne turned and looked back down at his partner.I’m gonna fucking kill you.
Chapter One
Judging by the expression on SAC Lloyd Stanger’s face as he sat across the desk from Thayne and his new partner, he was getting ready to tear them both new ones. Thayne glanced over at Jarrett, who sat with his hands clasped in his lap, studiously staring down at them and avoiding Stanger’s blazing red cheeks as they heated. Thayne had been working for the LA field office for nearly nine years and he’d never seen Stanger as red-faced and angry as he was now. He supposed Jarrett had it coming. It wasn’t every day that an ATF special agent did a Bruce Willis off a ten-story building in full view of a hundred spectators, law enforcement personnel, and several news crews. Jarrett’s stunt had not only made the TV news but it was trending on YouTube and Twitter and several videos of it had been uploaded and viewed over fifteen thousand times in just the last three hours.
As far as Thayne was concerned, Jarrett deserved every bit of Stanger’s ire. He was damned upset about it himself. He’d only gotten Jarrett back from his Criminal Investigators Training Program and Special Agent Basic Training in Georgia last month. Jarrett had begun his career with the ATF by crashing two vehicles and now this stunt. As he covertly watched Jarrett pretend to look down ashamedly, Thayne knew Stanger was not going toaccept one more screwup.
“Six months! Six months you were in training and this is how you come back to me, Evans? You know you could have pulled that suspect off the building resulting in your death as well as his! It’s bad enough that the news crews had a field day with that stupid stunt you pulled at the Staples Center. I just got off the horn with the director. He wants your ass and mine too. After the way you looked out for Wolfe before his trial, we were happy to offer you a badge. If it wasn’t for the fact that you have friends in Washington, I’d be asking you to hand it back to me right now. And you, Wolfe… where were you when your partner was taking a leap off a ten-story roof?”
“I was coming up…” Thayne began.
“Shut up! If I wanted your excuses, I’d ask for them!”
“But you did, SAC…”
Thayne stopped midsentence, slapping his mouth closed as SAC Stanger shot daggers at him. Jarrett should be the one in trouble here but in the boss’s typical fashion, he was going to rail at them both until he felt better. Somehow Thayne seemed to get blamed for Jarrett’s actions a lot. As an agent who’d been on the job nearly nine years, he was expected to make sure his rookie partner didn’t doshit like this, but loosing Jarrett on the world with a badge and a gun hadn’t been Thayne’s idea. How Stanger thought Thayne was supposed to put the genie back in the bottle was anyone’s guess.
“I-I probably shouldn’t have done that, SAC, but there was no way I could have known that Wolfe was about to come through that rooftop door, sir. If I’d have stayed up there with nowhere to take cover from that MAC-10 the suspect had, I wouldn’t be sittin’ here. Down was the only direction open to me and I just figured…”
“You just figured? You just figured you’d disobey a direct order. Don’t sit there and tell me that the only reason you rappelled off that roof was because you couldn’t communicate with your team…” Stanger held up a hand to stop Jarrett as he opened his mouth to argue. “And if you tell me there was something wrong with that com unit, I’ll kick your ass, Evans. We use military grade earwigs and communications systems. They don’t have static!”
Thayne lifted a hand and put it over his mouth to hide the smile that threatened. At the time, he’d wanted to kick Jarrett’s ass when he lost touch with him. He knew, as did everyone on their team including Stanger, that Jarrett had taken the earwig out and disappeared it somewhere up on that roof. Hecould have put the entire team in jeopardy, not just himself, and the breach in protocol was one that would have gotten him suspended under any other circumstances. Stanger went on.
“If you ever lose contact with your team again, you’d better be unconscious.” He glared at him as Jarrett opened his mouth to protest. “Shut up. Just shut up, Evans. I’ll suspend your ass so fast your head will spin,” he railed, “Secondly, if you had listened to me in the first place and let the LAPD aerial unit handle it like I told you to, all those suspects might have been taken alive or at least be able to walk!”
Jarrett peered up at him under dark lashes, looking guilty. “Yes, sir.”
“Now, because you were a hot dog, I am pulling you and your partner to work a case down in San Diego,” Stanger said. “If I don’t see you for a few days, maybe my blood pressure will return to normal.” He turned to look at Thayne. “As for you, Wolfe, I have no choice but to send you down there with him. Try not to let him kill anyone else. It seems Evans needs babysitting and the last thing I need is to have him going off the rails… or roofs as it were.”
“Yes, SAC,” Thayne said, ignoring Jarrett’s pointed glare. “What kind of a case are we talkingabout?” Thayne hadn’t been down to San Diego for nearly three years, since before going undercover with Mills Lang’s crew.
“There was a pyrotechnics show down there and several people were hurt. The local law enforcement believes that some sabotage took place and we want you to find out why anyone would do that.”