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“Bull shit!” Garcia swore. “You attend school here. You speak English, all right. Ma! Where is he?”
“Bubbles, got one running out the back! Move to intercept!” Jimmy Wilson yelled.
Laura Lee saw Michael dart around the side of the house. Seconds later, the garage door rolled open. The car inside was running, with thick, black smoke pouring from the tailpipe. “Garage door is opening,” she reported.
“Stop whoever it is, Lah-lee,” Garcia ordered.
She shifted to drive and stomped on the accelerator. Speeding into the driveway, she pulled up sideways to block the car as it began to back up. She screeched to a halt, stopping the car’s movements, and pinning it in the garage. She held her .9mm tightly in her grasp, pointed at her passenger window, ready to fire if the driver of the car trying to get away got out of it with a weapon in his hand. Through her comms, she heard as each of the team called out their status. It sounded like several men had been caught inside the house.
The car didn’t stop, though. It backed into her car, violently hitting it repeatedly. Bang, bang, bang! “Oh no, you don’t!” she said aloud. She slammed the car into park and got out of the vehicle, her pistol leading the way as she rounded the front of her car. She could see the round face of the young Chinese man behind the wheel. He had both hands on the steering wheel. No weapon was in plain sight. “Out of the car! Now!”
He looked towards her but didn’t comply. He continued reversing and hitting her car.
“I said out of the car!” she yelled, taking a step closer. “I won’t miss at this range! Do you want to die today?” The door flew open, and the young man raced from the car, rounding the front of it within the garage. Laura Lee wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man. “Damn,” she cursed aloud. “He’s running!” she reported. She retreated back around her car as the man cleared the garage and ran towards the front yard of the house next door.
The one thing Laura Lee knew she was great at was running. She had speed and stamina. And the man she chased was slightly overweight and not very fast. She overtook him quickly and pushed him to the ground. He rolled over, huffing and puffing in labored breaths. She was barely breathing hard, but her abdomen, where the incisions from her surgery were, smarted. She’d forgotten about that. She stood a foot away from him, out of striking distance, her weapon aimed at him. “Freeze!”
He said nothing, but raised his hands up in front of him.
“Keep your hands in sight and roll onto your stomach, placing your hands behind your back,” she ordered. She was surprised when he complied. The problem was, she had nothing on her to secure his hands with and she wasn’t confident in her ability to restrain him manually.
Thankfully, within a few minutes, Jimmy Wilson exited the house, running out the front door. “I’ll be damned. Good work, Lah-lee!” he said, jogging up to her. “We’ve got six detained in the house, including the one Bubbles went after. No Ma, though, and none of those motherfuckers are talking. Regular FBI are on their way.”
She’d heard most of that through her comms. She watched him secure the man’s hands in zip ties. Then Wilson pulled him to his feet. She followed him as he led the man back to the house.
“Ma?” Garcia snarled in one man’s face as they entered the living room where the six men were being detained, face down on the floor. “He lives here. Where is he?”
The man shook his head and spoke in Chinese. It looked to Laura Lee as though Garcia wanted to punch the guy. She understood. Her adrenaline was spiking, and she was keyed up, ready to make headway, too. And she hadn’t taken one in the vest as Garcia had.
“I’ve been given permission by my superiors to use any force needed to get you to talk,” Garcia said. He planted a knee on the guy’s shoulder. “All I want is Jin Ma. You’re not in trouble, but I can make big trouble for you if you don’t talk. ICE will be called, and you’ll all be deported if someone doesn’t talk.”
“Jin left for the gym on campus hours ago,” one of the young men spoke up. “He no return.”
“Does he have a gun?” Garcia asked.
“No!” the man replied, as though the question was ludicrous.
“Team, search the premises for weapons while you wait for the regular FBI,” Shepherd ordered. “Confiscate all computers and phones. We’ll take custody of the electronics and let the FBI have the suspects.”
“Taco, you take one bedroom, BT and Lah-lee the other. I’ve got the kitchen,” Garcia said. “Moe, the bathroom is yours, and Powder, you take the garage. Bubbles and Roth, cover these guys. If anyone moves, hurt them.”
Laura Lee followed Wilson and BT into the short hallway the bedrooms were off of. There were three twin beds in the room with a chest of drawers at the foot of each bed. There was no clutter anywhere. “This place is way too clean for a place college guys live in,” Laura Lee said. “These beds are made to military perfection.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” BT said.
They searched the entire room, the closet, the drawers, between the mattresses and box springs.
“And we haven’t even come across any porn. We’re in a room that three guys share. Someone has to have some porn someplace.”
“Unless it’s all on their phones and computers,” Laura Lee said. “It’s a different era than when I was in college, but still, this place shouldn’t be this tidy.”
“No, it shouldn’t,” BT agreed.
“You should see how clean this bathroom is,” Tessman called from the bathroom. “You could eat off the floor.”
“Gross,” Laura Lee remarked.
Twenty-five minutes later, when the regular FBI arrived, they’d found no weapons. They did find six laptop computers and seven cell phones. On the kitchen table they lined up all seven men’s wallets and IDs. Garcia took pictures of each one as well as of each of the seven men’s faces. Four of the men had driver’s licenses with the house’s address. The three other men only had Student IDs from the university. They all had credit cards issued by the same Chinese bank.
