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This moment would.
“Ambulances will be here soon, partner. Hold on tight,” Ella said.
“I’m fine,” Ripley coughed. “Thanks for saving my life.”
“I guess we’re even,” said Ella. She turned over to look at Tobias Campbell, dead and gone. It was a bittersweet ending in that they’d never learn what he told his victims, but it didn’t matter. They had more important things to worry about.
In the distance, ambulance sirens pierced the sounds of the night.
“You said I was right. What was I right about?” Ella asked.
Ripley rested her head against the wall then looked Tobias’s dead body up and down. She turned to her partner and smiled.
“Maybe legends don’t die after all.”
EPILOGUE
The next day, Ella went back to the D.C. offices to pick up a few things. She lived in a new world now. A much brighter, more optimistic world. No longer did she have to hide in the shadows or look over her shoulder every two minutes. There were new possibilities, more freedom, less dread. Months of mental and physical toll had finally come to an end and so Ella could finally seek out joy once more.
The director had given her two weeks’ paid vacation to heal up and offered her a fifty-thousand dollar reward for bringing Tobias to justice. Ella turned the money down and asked the director to put it towards Mia’s retirement party. Mia, staying true to her word, had gone out to visit her son in Pennsylvania. She wasn’t cleared to fly because of her injuries so the Bureau took her by car. In Mia’s words, she might as well use the perks of the job while she still could.
Ella sat at her old desk in the Intelligence Unit and turned on her computer. She needed to activate her out-of-office status in case anyone wanted her over the next few weeks. No doubt she’d be getting a lot of questions about the two cases and she wanted them put to bed.
As she waited for the old machine to boot up, her phone began to ring. A number she’d never seen before.
“Hello?”
A robot voice spoke to her. “Miss Dark. You are cordially invited for a special get-together tonight. Please accept or reject after the tone. Beep.”
“Terrible, terrible voice,” Ella said. “But the answer is yes.”
“Voices are not my forté,” Ben said.
“I got a better idea. How about breakfast in about one hour? I’m gonna be off work for two weeks so I’m free from today.”
“Two weeks? It’s alright for some. But yes, that’s even better because you invited me so you have to pay.”
“That is the rule,” Ella said. “Are you back from Virginia already?”
“Yup. Got back this morning. Cops called me in the night to say everything was clear. Apparently some lunatic cleared house. Took out about twenty of them at once.”
“She sure did. It was like that scene from Rambo.”
“Actually my favorite movie,” Ben said. “My place in an hour or something?”
“Consider it done. Just need this computer to hurry up. See you soon.”
Ella hung up the phone and input her login details on the PC, then sat back and waited for the whirring and the buzzing to finish. Apparently the FBI couldn’t use regular software because it was more vulnerable to hackers, so they had to rely on some specially built operating system that took an age to do the basics.
Now that Tobias was out of the way, Ella could finally turn her focus to more personal matters: the unsolved death of her father. She’d made some headway a couple of months back but shelved the operation when Tobias began invading every facet of her life. Before she left it, she found that her father had a debt of thirty-thousand dollars to a local group called the Red Diamonds – a debt he took out only days before his death in 1995. She’d then traced the text on the invoice receipt to a man named Owen Angels. He’d been the one to sign off on her dad’s loan.
That was as far as she’d gotten, and once she’d recovered from the trauma of the past few weeks, that’s when she’d dig further and track down this mysterious loan shark.
Ella opened up the FBI database to familiarize herself with this Angels gentleman. Maybe it would jolt an old memory or something, she thought. She began typing, half thinking about this mysterious lender, half thinking about seeing Ben again. She tapped the enter button then realized she’d written Ben Carter in the search box, not Owen Angels.
“Buffoon,” she told herself then went to click off. She glanced at the results and found 105 Ben Carters in the USA with criminal records, and so, just to put her mind at ease, she searched for her Ben.
“Hmmm,” she said to herself. There was indeed a Ben Carter from Virginia in the database.
