Sunny held the phone in front of him, paralyzed with indecision.
"Suuuuuuuunny," Naira nee Bains called slowly, as if she were looking for him in a haunted house. "I see you're thinking about it."
"We can just sit in here and make you come out," Naira suddenly said into the phone, pulling her gun out of her purse. "Your drones are still strafing us. It's not very welcoming."
Naira nee Bains sighed loudly, as if she were fed up with her namesake. "If we come out, we're killing all of you, and then we're mopping up and making like you all never existed. Do you want to be responsible for killing two more men along with you, bitch?"
"That's not very friendly," Joe said, to Sunny's surprise. "I thought you were police officers, isn't that illegal?"
"Oh! We hear from the stowaway at last!" Naira said, far too cheerily for the situation. Sunny had to wonder if she was a little mentally ill. "You're a big one! What's your name?"
"Joe DiTomaso," he said. "I know Sergeant Joanie Mara, the hero of the Battle of Barnet, if that makes a difference to your colleagues."
She paused for a second, as if she were actually discussing it with her colleagues. Then she said, "Your friend might be a hero, but my colleagues don't feel they owe her the courtesy of giving in to the three of you. They're only giving you a second chance to walk away. Right now."
"I'm not walking away. Your colleagues nearly killed my wife and son with that little car chase, and they need to answer for it."
"That was never intentional, you know. All they wanted to do was stop them and ask them what they knew about the device and why they took it. You guys weren't even on our radar until you took the device, and it wasn't even meant for you. If you never stuck your noses into this, you all would have been fine!"
"That's what I told them," Naira said, "and yet they continued to insist, so here we are."
"Where you are is in a vice. We have the upper hand. We outnumber you, we have more weapons, and more importantly, we have the hostage."
"How do we know you have him?" Naira said. "We haven't been given proof of life the entire time we've talked to you."
"Oh, would you like to hear from him? Why didn't you say so?" Naira nee Bains' voice was manic, and suddenly Sunny knew she was about to do something terrible.
A scream rang out over the line. It sounded male, but at that animal level it was hard to tell. Naira squeezed her eyes shut, and tears ran down her cheeks. Joe's hands curled into fists, but his face was white.
Eventually the screaming stopped, and Naira nee Bains said, "How was that? Believe me now?"
"What did you do to him?" Sunny shouted.
"Oh, we just hooked him up to the generator we have in here, gave him a little taste," she said, sounding bored. "He's physically fine, but we can leave him hooked up for longer, and then he won't be as fine."
"You're sick," Naira said. "You're all sick. Is it really worth dehumanizing yourselves for this?"
Naira nee Bains laughed in what sounded like genuine delight. "That was nothing. That was just me getting a little of my own back for Birinder cheating on me with you. We haven't even begun to hurt him yet. So, the longer you take to make up your mind and get in here, the more often we'll hook him up, and for longer each time. How does that sound?"
Sunny felt panic settle in his gut like a stone, but Naira continued as if she hadn't heard the other woman's threat. "Isn't it a little ironic that you have police officers with you there, who haven't said a word, by the way, which I think is on purpose because they don't want to have themselves identified in a phone call; these police officers are acting like criminals now, just so they can continue using a technology that can help them catch criminals. Don't you guys have any shame at all? You killed the man I loved, for the crime of caring about my well-being, and you kidnapped the man I was married to for the crime of not wanting to go to prison for killing the man you killed! How does this make you any different from the criminals you want to catch?"
"What are you trying to do, Naira?" Naira nee Bains asked. "Appeal to our better natures? Did you really think your profession was more ethical than any other? In the end, the only thing that matters to anyone is gaining an advantage over someone else."
"Is that what you learned in your formative years, before you were arrested and became a police informant?"
Naira nee Bains chuckled. "Are you trying to shock me with what you know? I don't care, Naira! Can you get that through your head? Maybe you need another push to make up your mind and get in here, because I'm done arguing with you."
Another scream rang out over the phone line, longer this time.
"Okay! Okay!" Naira shouted. "You win, all right? I'm coming." She pressed end call and looked at Sunny and Joe. "You two stay here."
Sunny looked at Joe. "We can't do that," he said.
"You both have families. Look, call the police again. Tell them where we are. They have to get it on the record that I entered this building and didn't come out again."
"How about I call them while we're all walking together to the building."
Naira sighed in frustration. "You're really making it hard for me to turn you away, and it doesn't help that I don't really want you to go." Her face crumpled, and she furiously wiped her eyes. "They're not going to go any easier on you than they are on me."
"We can fight back, you know," Joe said. "We don't have to die on our knees."
"That's easy for you to say, but we have one gun between the three of us. What do you think we'll be able to do? We can't even sneak up on them, not with these drones circling us."
Suddenly gunshots rang out, and Sunny feared that the people inside had gotten tired of waiting after all and just stormed out with guns blazing. Then, one by one, the spotlights went out as the drones exploded in a shower of metal, plastic and sparks. Some of the pieces hit the body of Joe's truck, and Sunny was afraid he'd have an insurance claim to make for paint and body work.
"What the fuck?" Naira glanced around. It was dark again, and none of them could see who or what had made the drones stop circling them. At the moment they had the advantage of not being seen if they wanted to approach the warehouse, but before they could capitalize on this advantage they had to know if whoever shot down the drones wasn't intending to shoot them too.
They sat there, panting in the darkness, afraid to leave the truck and also afraid of what would happen if they didn't leave the truck.
Then, "Naira?"
"Hello?!" Naira called, to whoever happened to be on the outside of the truck.
"It's Maria."
"Jesus!" Naira opened the back door. "Come in, come in!"
She'd been crouching below the mirrors, that was why they couldn't see her. And she wasn't alone. Tracey slid in next to her, and it was a tight fit in the back, especially as they were both wearing kevlar vests.
"You're here too?" Sunny asked Tracey, deliriously happy to see them both. "I thought it was your night off."
"Maria called and told me what you guys were up to," he replied. "I couldn't let her make this collar without me."
"Your superiors weren't convinced this was a collar that needed to be made," Naira said. "They were persuaded to believe the nine-one-one caller was a crank."
"That's very discouraging," Tracey said. "Even if it was a crank, you still do a check."
"No back up, then," Goncalves said. "Fuck."
"So they're in there?" Tracey asked. "The hostage, Birinder Sandhu... your ex-husband, I presume?" he asked Naira.
"Yes."
"Nice to finally meet you, by the way."
"You too. Sunny here speaks highly of you."
"Thank you. You gave us some confusion in the beginning, when you were a missing persons case, before Maria cleared things up for us."
Sunny decided now was probably not a good time to mention the low opinion Naira had of Maria's discretion. The fact that the two of them had come, with or without backup, made him feel like he could karate chop a tank right now. "What's our plan, then?"
"We called headquarters as soon as we pulled up and saw the drones circling your truck, and asked where the fuck backup was," Goncalves said. "At the very least, they know we're here and away from our vehicle. If they don't send backup now, they're going to risk losing two detectives."
Sunny's phone rang again. It was Naira nee Bains. He put his finger to his lips and answered on speakerphone. "Naira?"
"What's going on, Sunny?" she asked. "We've lost our video, and you haven't come in yet."
"It seems we have backup after all. You didn't manage to warn off everybody."
Silence for a moment. Then she said, "I don't know if I believe you, Sunny. You might have somebody out there, but it's not a whole squadron, or else we'd be hearing sirens by now."
"They were good enough to shoot your drones out of the air."
"It's not that hard if you have good aim. Even a glancing blow could throw off the whole equilibrium of its flight and cause a crash."
"You seem to have a great knowledge of the things. Are your colleagues feeding you this information?"
She was silent for a while. Sunny held his breath, wondering if he would hear another scream from Birinder.
Finally, she said, "It looks like we're playing a game of chicken, now. You don't know how many we have inside, and we don't know how many you have outside. Who's going to blink first?"
The fact that she said they didn't know how many were outside meant that they had no way of knowing without coming out and checking, which meant they had no more drones to send out, which also meant they weren't confident enough to come out, because there couldn't have been that many after all, or at least not so many that they were willing to risk a shootout; if there were a lot of them, they could have simply counted on the advantage of numbers for bodies and ammunition. Maybe there were only five or six plus Naira, their mouthpiece. Certainly enough to sit on Naira's house and manhandle Birinder when he showed up to beg her to talk to the police. Enough to risk a firefight with an unknown number of people outside? That was the question.
To Sunny's surprise, Naira said, "You are," and pressed end call.
"What did you do that for?" Maria asked. "You've forced our hand, we have to go in now."
"Come on, Maria, you knew that was a possibility when you came here. I think they're bluffing. I don't think there are that many in there. A couple to fly the drones, plus a few to control Birinder. Plus Naira. I think they would have come out and surrounded the truck if there were more."
"You read my mind," Sunny said.
"God, I hope you're right," Maria said, ejecting the cartridge in her gun and counting the bullets. "We're not going to have much time to find out."
"Joe," Tracey said, "you still have to go before a judge for that assault, am I right?"
"Uh... yeah," Joe said, surprised. "I almost forgot about that, so much has happened since."
"I think it would be best if you refrained from any further violence tonight, just so you don't get into any further trouble with the judge," Tracey said, so reasonably that it was incongruous with the situation, where violence was sure to be necessary; it was like he was a character out of a different TV show, plopped by accident into the police thriller this was about to be.
"Uh..." was all Joe could say in response.
"There's something else you can do, however, if you'd like to contribute to this operation," Tracey said. "That is, unless you have an issue with damaging your truck any further tonight."
"Will the New West Police pay the repair bill?"
Tracey chuckled. "I'll see what we can do, given that our backup hasn't arrived yet; maybe I can expense it as collateral damage to civilian property."
Joe only took a second to respond. "Fuck it. I'm in."
"Good. Here's what I want you to do. If we do this right, you shouldn't get injured, but make sure your seat belt is latched real tight."
Thanks for reading this far! Buckle up, as Tracey just said, because we're heading to the final confrontation! If you liked what you read so far, hit "Vote" and send this title up the ranks. If you think it isn't that easy to shoot a drone out of the air, leave a comment and let me know.
To find out what happens next, click on "Continue reading."