Other links:
Sapphire Angel, Superheroine (Book 1)
Power Play (Book 2)
Deconstruction (Book 3)
Savage Dawn (this book - Book 4)
VIOLENCE WARNING: The two stories in the Savage Gang saga, and especially the second story, involve a gang practicing extreme violence toward everyone — women, the elderly, the protagonist, etc. The stories contain mature sexual content and violence as well. I am placing this warning on all chapters, including those without such violence, so you can choose whether to continue.
CHAPTER 13
The reek of cigarette smoke permeated the worn carpet and faded curtains in the second floor conference room of the Harrisburg Police Department. Vials of air freshener fought a losing battle against the long-entrenched aroma.
A rectangular conference table, the edges of its laminate surface cracked and peeling, filled the center of the room. Olivia Lockheed sat in a wooden chair at the table, with the agent assisting her, Dave Michaels, slouched in a seat to her left. Michaels was a stocky man of Irish decent, with red, closely cropped hair and a freckled complexion.
Lockheed’s flight had arrived earlier in the day, and she had gone straight to her hotel. She could have stayed with her family, but her childhood friends needed to know she was a big deal now. They didn’t need to learn she had paid for the pricey suit at the Hilton herself, upgrading from a government-rate room. Appearances were everything, and her friends couldn’t view her as a struggling government worker.
From the hotel, she and Michaels had walked the two blocks to the police station, so she could interview the Savage Gang members in lockup. First, though, she and Michaels were reviewing the department’s file.
Across from Lockheed and Michaels sat a young police officer, wearing wire-rimmed glasses. The chief should have shown her more respect by assigning a senior officer to assist her, but this newbie would have to do. She would address the chief's discourtesy later.
Lockheed had gone through the paper file, which had revealed little, and had moved on to the evidence list. She tapped her lips with a finger as she flipped through the sheets of paper and glanced at the plastic evidence bags on the table. Something was off. Michaels, her assistant, rose in his chair.
“What’s wrong, Olivia?” he asked.
Lockheed ignored the question and leveled her gaze at the young officer sitting across from her. He squirmed under her gaze.
“Are you aware this is incomplete?” she asked, leaning forward and waving a sheet of paper in front of the man’s face.
He swallowed, looked toward the door, and turned back to her. He nodded.
“I am,” he said in a calm voice. Lockheed raised an eyebrow. He and Lockheed stared at one another before Michaels interjected.
“Mind if I ask what the piece of paper is, and how it is incomplete?” the junior agent asked. Lockheed preferred to think of him as a junior agent, even though she’d been on the job only a few weeks longer than he had.
Lockheed looked sideways at him and back to the police officer. “Care to answer that?” she asked.
“That is a manifest of the weapons recovered from the scene, including inside the van,” the officer explained, his voice flat. “The left column contains a description of each weapon, by manufacturer, model, and any other notable characteristics. There is another column where we normally list serial numbers. For the first several weapons, we entered ‘illegible’ because someone had buffed those numbers out and we couldn’t read them.”
The young officer paused and looked toward the door again, as if considering his next statement. He took a deep breath and turned back to Lockheed and Michaels.
“For several of the weapons, though, the serial number entry is blank.” He pursed his lips for a moment and continued. “The officers who examined the weapons decided that if so many had been sanitized, they all must have been sanitized. They never finished the review, and just went with that assumption.”
Lockheed shook her head and muttered, “Imbeciles.” She rose from her chair. “Are the prisoners still here?”
“Yes, they are, as you requested,” the young officer answered. “Normally we would have transferred them to the county prison by now, or to a federal lockup, since they didn’t post bail. But we still have them in our holding cells here, per instructions from your office.”
“Your chief will keep them here, until I say otherwise,” Lockheed barked. “I don’t want to run out to the county prison, or, heaven forbid, drive an hour to the federal lockup, every time I need to see them.”
The young officer frowned.
“Come with me,” Lockheed ordered, disdain in her voice obvious. “You’re going to take me to see them.” She turned to Michaels. “You,” she said, pointing to the agent and then toward the bagged weapons lined up on the table, “review the guns — even the ones already examined — and see what you can find.”
Lockheed spun and headed for the door. The young officer trotted to keep up with her. Once out of the room, he moved into the lead, walking toward the elevator at the end of the hall. After a brief wait, the two stood on the elevator together and descended toward the basement.
The officer remained silent, staring at the elevator doors. Lockheed projected an air of anger, clenching her fists, setting her jaw, and shaking her head, but inside she was anything but angry. She hoped the local cops had screwed up, and she found a piece of evidence to break this case open. Her standing in the Bureau would improve if she made headway with the Savage Gang, which nobody except Sapphire Angel had done.
When they reached the basement, a bell dinged, and the elevator doors opened. A dank hallway with flickering lights stretched before them, with a stairwell to the left. The basement looked like someone had hewn it from the stone beneath the city, with rough walls of grey rock rising on both sides. Dirt and dampness filled the walls’ cracks.
Lockheed wrinkled her nose as she followed the officer down the hall to a thick metal door with a desk in front of it. An older officer sat behind the desk, looking bored. Without saying a word, he slid a clipboard across the desk toward the younger officer. The officer took a pen attached to the clipboard, scribbled on a paper fastened to the clipboard, and handed it to Lockheed.
“Sign here, please.”
Lockheed grabbed the pen, gave a huff, and signed her name on a line below where the officer had signed. She handed the clipboard back to the man at the desk, bypassing the young officer.
The older officer rose from his chair and fumbled with a set of keys hanging from his neck. He moved to the large metal door behind him and unlocked it with one key. She and the young officer stepped through the doorway, and the older man pulled it shut behind them. She heard the key turn in the lock, as if they were being sealed off from the rest of the world.
The young officer started forward, but Lockheed put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ve got this,” she said. “I'm going to pick one of them for you folks to take to an interrogation room. Which cells are they in?”
“End of the hall. The last two cells on each side.”
Lockheed proceeded down the hall, her heels clicking on the stone floor. There were seven cells on each side, and movement stirred in a few of them as she passed. In some, the occupants stood, grasping the steel bars and watching the strange woman in their midst. A few of the occupants let out whistles and vulgar comments.
“Hey, hot thing!” one voice called. “Come over here and let me show you what a real man can do!”
“Whew-eee! Give me some of that ass!” another voice called out. The other cries were similar. Lockheed ignored them and stalked toward the four cells at the end.
When she reached them, she stood in the middle of the passageway, equidistant from each of the four cell doors. In three of the cells, the occupants lay on their bunks, staring at the ceiling and not moving. Only the occasional blink of an eye, or the rise and fall of a chest, suggested they were alive.
In the last cell on the left, a man stood in the middle, his arms crossed, and his eyes fixed on Lockheed. His orange prison jumpsuit was too small for him, leaving little of his build to the imagination. He emanated power, from his thick neck to his muscled arms extending from his rolled-up sleeves.
She met his gaze, and they stared at each other for several moments.
“I’m Special Agent Lockheed, with the FBI,” she said, not bothering to flash a badge. If she was back in the cells alone, he had to know she was an authority figure. “One of you will earn the right to talk to me in another room, and maybe get out of here before your friends. I’ve been told they read you your rights. I am advising you that those still apply.”
The man didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. Lockheed allowed herself a slight frown. She had been told none of the prisoners had so much as opened their mouths to speak to the local police, but she figured the local cops were unskilled interrogators. Her interrogation experience wasn’t extensive, but her training was among the best in the world.
“Let’s start with your name,” she said, taking a step toward him, but keeping a careful watch on how close she got to the cell door.
The man didn’t move and didn’t speak.
“So you want to play that game,” she said with a smirk. “Or maybe it’s not a game. Maybe you’re too dumb to know how to talk?”
The man didn’t react to her insult, holding his position and continuing his stare. As annoying as he was, she wouldn’t let him bother her.
“You and your friends here are in loads of trouble,” she said, trying a different approach. “I’m the one person who can help whoever speaks first. But you need to talk to me.”
As she spoke, she glanced around at her surroundings. Video cameras hung in strategic places, covering each cell. They might be there for safety, or to capture confessions, or even to defeat claims by sleazy lawyers about violations of their clients’ rights.
The man remained silent.
“You and your boys here killed people,” she continued. “That means the death penalty is on the table. None of us want that.”
She was trying to be careful with her words. She wanted him to be afraid of what might happen to him, but not so afraid he would ask for a lawyer. Right now, though, he didn’t appear to be afraid at all. In fact, he wasn’t showing any emotion. He hadn’t moved, or even twitched, since her arrival.
“To tell the truth,” she said, “you might get off with minimal time if you cooperate, and help us find the rest of your gang. Just give me a sign that you're willing to talk.”
Her statement was a lie. He was a murderer, and no amount of cooperation was going to get him back on the streets any time soon. He didn’t have to know it, though.
Despite her vow, Olivia Lockheed was getting frustrated. The man still hadn’t spoken, or even moved.
“It can be you, or it can be one of your friends here,” Lockheed said, an icy edge creeping into her voice. “Someone will talk eventually, and it might as well be you.”
Lockheed leaned forward, poking her finger toward him to emphasize her point. She leaned too far, and what happened next shocked her. The man shot forward in the blink of an eye, his arm flying between the bars and his hand wrapping around her throat. He squeezed.
Forward to Chapter 14 (link works after Chapter 14 goes live)
Other links:
Sapphire Angel, Superheroine (Book 1)
Power Play (Book 2)
Deconstruction (Book 3)
Savage Dawn (this book - Book 4)
I think Olivia was pretty careless in the cell with the gang member, but we know she is no pushover. I will be interested to see how she deals with her issue. I do still wonder if she will end up helping Sapphire Angel, or will she be another adversary? I could see her in a a Savage Gang sponsored fight against Olivia, to which of course there would be no winner. In the end I think they will team up, but will wait and see. For now, I want to see what Olivia does next.
First off, happy Pride Month! I’ve been at work creating a few Pride-themed heart keychain ornaments to sell to some of my classmates in college; what do you think would be a good price for them? $1 per ornament? Or maybe just $0.50? I’m not concerned with making too much cash; sharing awareness and solidarity is my chief concern overall.
Moving on, this chapter truly gave more of a scope on what exactly Olivia Lockheed’s relationship with the rest of the Savage Gang is.....and it looks like she doesn’t necessarily hold the officers of the Harrisburg Police Department in too high of a regard, either. I suppose she IS with the FBI, which holds an overall higher position when it comes to law enforcement than the other state-level police departments. You have your standard street-level officers, then the SWAT team, then the FBI, then the Supreme Court. And then you also have other vigilante superheroes like Sapphire Angel who operate on completely different rules. Basically, if one is a criminal in this world, a lot of people are going to be coming after them. Both Sapphire Angel’s universe AND the PCU, actually.
For the time being, I can tell she’s firmly against the Savage Gang, refusing to let their crimes go unpunished and even trying to intimidate one with the possibility of the death penalty. She still technically fights crime, too, despite her beef with Sapphire Angel. But I do wonder.....if the Savage Gang ever found out about her rivalry with Sapphire, might it be possible for them to connect their troubles with hers, and thus try to compromise with her? Perhaps one of them could visit her and say something along the lines of “We both want that annoying superhero gone, don’t we? If you and your department promise to cover up our activities and remain silent, we can give you revenge against Sapphire Angel.” That’d certainly thicken the plot. I have a feeling the FBI itself wouldn’t give in so easily, though.
They may have made the case a bit harder, but I got to hand it to the Gang for sincerely trying their best to cover their tracks. The weapons’ serial numbers either being indiscernible or otherwise unavailable will make it tough to trace the firearms back to their origins, but at the same time, the laziness and complacency of some of the officers themselves is also to blame for that. They made so many bad assumptions that could’ve been avoided if they’d had just taken some extra time to look at each and every recovered weapon. ‘Every weapon was sanitized.’ Ridiculous. Perhaps they were secretly in league with the Gang?
I was on the edge of my seat during that entire sequence with Olivia Lockheed and that random Savage Gang member standing inside the jail cell. I was like, “Something’s going to go wrong. Something’s going to go wrong. Something’s going to go wrong.”
And then something went wrong.
I don’t recall if she specifically had any self-defense weapons on her, but if I were her, I wouldn’t have gotten within arm’s reach of the cell. Instead, I would’ve kept my distance and had something---I don’t know, maybe a pistol or handgun, or even some pepper spray---just within reach for me to draw if things got out of hand. But.....ugh. I suppose that the more anxious or tense someone gets at the ending of a chapter, the better it was written, but I really didn’t want it to end right there. It was getting SO good.....and not just because of Olivia suffering.
Oh, well. Back to making those ornaments! Catch you on.....Monday, I believe?