Max knows Mouse likes (muchness) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-04-12 00:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | daenerys targaryen, daniel cross |
Who: Max and Kellan
What: Max fails at killing an arsonist
Where: Outskirts of Vegas
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Gunshots
A long stretch of silence over weeks and months was probably a good idea. Keeping his head down and staying out of sight - working in other cities, in other states - meant nobody’s radar was going to pick him up. Cerise’s half-warnings were vague enough to make him decide that random acts of arson in Vegas proper were not a great idea. So it was back to the usual work, and traveling as far as he needed to go to find it.
At the moment, that location was ‘not far’. Kellan skulked outside the abandoned lot - old storage garage, probably plenty occupied by the lost and criminal - for almost the full time he’d allotted his mystery contact. Nothing had really happened, as far as he could tell. No subtle buildup of cars, no shadows moving under flickering lamplight. Nothing suspicious. Nevertheless, he was on edge.
She’d checked out. Contact was clean, for a certain definition of clean. Living on Fremont, which started to explain the high insurance rate. A drug addict with an arrest record wasn’t the first person he’d want to get paid by, but thirty grand was thirty grand and anyway, who was he to be choosy these days? And it wasn’t out of the ordinary for someone like that to suddenly need a lot of money, fast.
He put down the paranoia to old age and too long spent waiting for someone from the crazy shithole hotel to put a knife in his back and watched the entrances (half were boarded up) for any sign of someone heading in with whatever they thought counted as collateral.
Mobility was still a no-go for Max these days. She was better, but she wasn't good. Her truck hadn't moved since she'd had it towed to the townhouse, and the most she could do was drag herself around with the use of her upper arms. Oh, she could move her feet, and she could move her legs. She could kick the sheets off the bed at night, and she could swing her legs over the edge of the mattress. It hurt like a bitch, and it required a Vicodin beforehand, but she could do it. It was bearing weight that was the problem, and it was bearing weight that (according to her physical therapist) was going to keep her dependant on a chair or walker for her entire life. So, mobility was going to be a challenge.
Max had known that when she contacted Kellan.
Oh, she hadn't forgotten about the arsonist. She had agreed not to kill Cerise, for Corvus' sake. But she hadn't forgotten. It had taken months, but she could be patient when she needed to be. But she hadn't forgotten.
When she got Kellan's contact information, she'd considered telling McKendrick. For five full minutes, she'd considered pursuing his form of justice. It said something, really, that she'd even considered it. But, in the end, she just didn't believe in that kind of justice. As much as she got on Corvus and the kid about not employing their own lethal methods, she was different. She was trained as an assassin. She'd been conditioned by the federal government all her life; she could do it without it eating at her. It was the flawed mentality of a spook, of someone trained to kill. She didn't even see the hypocrisy.
So, before even texting Kellan, she'd practiced getting in an out of the truck. That was all. If she could manage that, if she could drive, then she could bring a good sniper rifle, and she could take him. Simple.
It was good that he gave her a three-hour window, because it took Max a full hour to even get into the truck. It took two Vicodin, and her hands were shaking by the time she was settled behind the steering wheel. Her hips ached, and it was the kind of pain that ate through the painkillers and made the backs of her teeth hurt. But she managed it. Luckily, working through pain was something she'd learned on the job, and it was something she'd learned early.
The world blurred as she drove, but she arrived at the spot with enough time to load the sniper rifle, to crack the window, to place the barrel so far down on the window's edge that it wasn't immediately visible. She wore a baseball cap, hair tucked out of sight, and waited.
She saw him skulking around, and she wished she could go up to him. She wished she could look him in the eyes as he died. It was cold and heartless, but she didn't care. He'd almost killed her daughter. She didn't care.
She willed her fingers to stop shaking.
In a world without the Vicodin haze, she would have realized her hand wasn't steady enough for a kill shot, even with the high-end rifle. But she was drug glazed.
She pulled the trigger.
Kellan had been burned by these sorts of situations in the past, which was why he took more precautions these days. Double checking with his connections. Making sure he could find a background on people. Back ten years ago, when he’d done work for the rich and powerful, there were fewer precautions to take because the clients did that themselves ... but there were less of them these days. Or at least, less of them willing to hire him.
But all that had been in case it was a sting operation and ten squad cars descended on him with all the subtlety of a bag of bricks. He’d expected that sort of thing - not for someone to hide in the dark and take him out from a distance. Snipers had never figured into his life.
The bullet hit him in the upper arm, a snap and a sting that almost dropped him. Kellan grabbed at the wound and crouched, so surprised all he could really do was focus on the bloom of pain and the what the fuck. He didn’t think about where the bullet might have come from or if another one was on its way already.
Cross was, though. Cross had sniped and been sniped at and had spent the last three hours quietly deriding the whole affair. Being proven right meant he was going to take every opportunity to gloat ... but only once the danger of instant death was outside the realm of possibility. So as Kellan reeled Cross figured a vague angle off the wound and snapped almost gleefully derisive instructions: back left. Stay down. He’s probably waiting to see you fall. I said down you incompetent son of a bitch!
Kellan glanced up from his half-crouch, glaring around at the flickering darkness with his arm pressed tight across his chest, looking for any sign of someone trying to run - or fire again.
Max knew the shot had landed, but she knew it hadn't landed where she wanted it to. Fuck. Her fingers shaking, she prepared to take another shot. He had dropped to where she couldn't see him well with the truck's height, but he hadn't gone toward the road. He'd have to move eventually, and she'd take another shot when he did. She willed her fingers to still, and she counted in order to curb her drug addled nerves. She was having trouble keeping an eye on all possible approach points, and she realized (finally, then) that maybe she wasn't in any shape for this. But she'd come this far, and she'd take her shot, even if it meant letting him come close enough to get a wider margin of error.
To that end, Max opened the window a little more, just a slight creak and movement, and she waited for something to shift or move, to come closer. It was a risk, because if she had a better shot, so did he. And if he ran? She'd just go for the center of his back. That was a big target. She cursed her hips for not letting her angle higher, to get a good shot at ground level.
She couldn't afford to open the truck door, as much as she wanted to. She waited.
The best idea, Kellan thought through the fine haze of pain radiating from his arm, would be to drop down and crawl toward the nearest corner and wait to see if the shooter ever surfaced to try and hunt him down. It would give him a way better chance to survive - and figure out who was going after him instead of guessing - but where his pride was flexible, Cross’ wasn’t, and as such he wound up just hunching over more and sidling as quietly as possible (not very) in the direction the shot had (probably) come from.
The movement he didn’t see, but the creak he heard. It could have been anything and still he paused. There was a truck parked some distance away, still and silent, and he wondered: how long had it been there? He didn’t see it show up. It might have been there the whole time.
Better blow it up just to make sure.
With teeth grit against the pain and still hunched as best he could, Kellan stalked toward the truck, still not able to see any details too clearly but with a second sight looking a lot more carefully than he was. He let go of the wound on his arm with a wince and reached back, under his jacket, to wrap his fingers around the handle of the gun he always had with him on occasions like these.
She managed to stay back, against the truck's seat, unmoving as he neared. She wanted, more than anything, to be able to move. She wanted to get out of the truck, and she wanted to slam the butt of her gun into his face. She wanted to tell him about the little girl he'd almost killed with his sloppiness, and she wanted to tell him about the college student that would never graduate, and she wanted to do it while the bones in his nose shattered. She forgave Cerise. She could understand Cerise's motivation. But money? Money she didn't understand, not as a motivator.
And the fact that he approached the truck? It was the same kind of sloppy move that had blown the entire house up. She watched him, and she imagined all the things she wanted to do to him, and it kept her still until he came close. She watched as he reached back, and she knew that was a hunt for a weapon. She took a second to enjoy that wince of pain as he reached, and then she fired again.
The shot still wasn't clean and pure, but it was better than the last; he wouldn't be forgetting that one anytime soon. It wasn't a kill shot, but it was good, and she knew he'd be firing back. The sniper rifle was unwieldy, and her injuries made putting her foot to the pedal an act of supreme effort. She shot once more, and she turned the key in the ignition and prepared to head right toward him with the truck, to head off any excess bullet work on his part.
The gun almost fell from his hand as the second bullet went through his abdomen, just under the ribs and spurring a second agonizing pain. Kellan staggered back, knowing the shooter could see him now, knowing they were probably lining up another shot for his head, already raising his weapon in response - and then the truck’s engine roared to life and it was more instinct than rational thought that made him dive out of the way in time. He hit the ground (on the bad side, of course) and locked his eyes on the blurring license plate for a few seconds.
Then he shot at the truck, two bullets in the back, two in the side. Poorly aimed out of pain and fury and disbelief, all they’d do was leave a couple holes in the metal. Stupid goddamned --
Are we going to act like actual adults here for once, and not stupid teenage wannabes looking for a drug fix? The condescension came in waves, and it was all Kellan could do to stop from lashing out at nothing to cut it off. His arm lowered and he aimed for one of the truck’s wheels with a wavering hand. One shot, heard a sharp noise that might have been a bullet ricocheting off the rim or vanishing into the car’s underside and then - Great. Now do that running away thing you’re so fucking good at.
Kellan scrambled to his feet, swearing as the pain increased with every movement. He clamped a hand over the bleeding wound on his stomach and made for the darkest shadows, the higher walls, buildings that would prevent him from being seen. A hospital was a no-go with his record. The only other option was Passages - and a door through which any wounds were treated and only got raised eyebrows and eventual paperwork in response.
Until then, he just hoped like hell that truck didn’t suddenly go into reverse.
The first four shots were nothing. She could tell from the angle that they wouldn't get anywhere. The metal above one rim clanged, and the truck bed screamed as holes tore through it, but there wasn't any serious damage. As for the blurry plate, that was legitimate and a serious lapse in judgement. It wasn't registered to her, but it was registered to a very powerful man in New York, since she'd had the truck since they'd moved there five years earlier. But it was a good plate, New York, not Nevada at all, and memorable for that very fact.
She was trying to work up the residual energy to kick the truck into reverse, when the next shot came. She was blurred vision by then, and so much pain that she had tears streaming down her cheeks, but she was determined. She'd managed to just kick the manual truck out of drive, and then the bullet slammed into a tire, and the truck went into a spin.
In the abandoned intersection, there wasn't anything much to hit, and it tumbled off the road like a toy thing, landing harmlessly in the brush beyond the blacktop. She watched him through the cracked side mirror, watched him limp away, but she couldn't kick the car into reverse or muster another shot. She ached even more from the off-road trip. No, he'd manage to limp off. She reached for the gun in the glove, a scream of pain tearing through her as she bent at the waist. But she readied it, just in case, as she watched him flee.