Page 50 of Logan

He raised his gun with intent, and for a moment, I feared he was about to commit suicide-by-cop and force us to shoot him.However, his gun never pointed at any of us, and instead he kept raising it until the barrel pressed against his own temple.

“No,” our team leader shouted, but it was too late.

The man pulled the trigger, and the wall beside him was painted red.

I stared at the freshly dead body that dropped to the floor and tried to summon an ounce of sympathy. Death should be sad, and a loss of life should never be taken lightly.

Yet, I felt nothing but a vague sense of relief, like finding out that the dirty dishes in the sink had already been washed and I could cross that chore off my list.

Maybe I needed to go back to therapy for a bit. This case seemed to be affecting me more than I realized if that was my only reaction to watching someone commit suicide in front of me.

With one target dead and one unconscious, arresting them didn’t take very long. The one conscious target complied silently with every instruction we gave him and didn’t utter a word as we shoved him into the back of a cop car in handcuffs beside his unconscious accomplice.

The dead body would be taken to the morgue and dealt with accordingly. Even criminals had a family, and they had a right to bury their loved one. If a member of my family turned out to be involved in something like the Bell ringers, I’d have them cremated and dump their ashes in a distant landfill, but I kept that suggestion to myself.

We had just set the two living targets off in a cop car, when new information came through the radios. An unlicensed van had been caught trying to flee the area. It had been stopped, but theagents were now in a standoff as the driver refused to exit the vehicle.

With a quick order, Agent Stayner directed us to the site of the standoff.

Just like the man I’d taken down, the van was also completely unremarkable. It looked more like the kind of oversized minivan a mother would use to take a horde of kids to soccer practice, rather than a tool for kidnapping. The only thing suspicious about it was how fast it had been driving away from the scene of the crime, and the fact that its license plate had a quick release catch that would allow it to be swapped out at a moment’s notice.

It was only through sheer luck that I arrived just in time to hear the request for permission to shoot the target in the van.

“Wait,” I jumped forward to interject. “Don’t do that.”

Our team leader was the highest-ranking officer present and had taken over command of the situation as soon as she arrived. She looked at me with a question in her eyes as she held the radio up ready to reply to the request.

“We’ve already apprehended two suspects alive. Keeping this one alive isn’t vital to the mission and extracting him from the car alive will put our agents in a lot more risk.”

“I know, but…” I gestured toward the van. “Look at the size of the vehicle. The targeted family only had one prospective victim, and a single child doesn’t take up much space. There’s no reason for them to have a van this large. even if it was meant to transport all four members of their team, it’s still bigger than they would need.”

Agent Stayner’s eyes narrowed under the glare of the streetlight as she studied the van. “You think there might be others?”

“Other kids. Other perpetrators. I don’t know, but something about it doesn’t sit right with me. We can’t open fire when we don’t know for certain what we’re firing at.”

Thankfully, the team leader listened to me and denied the order to open fire.

“All right, Hollingsworth. Got any more bright ideas about how to get the target out of the van without gunfire.”

I glanced toward the van again, making sure it was designed the way I thought it was. Although it resembled a minivan, it still had large double doors at the back like a cargo van.

“We pretend like we’re going to use deadly force to keep the target occupied. Meanwhile, someone sneaks around back and opens the back door. We can sneak up on the target, hopefully, or at least get a better look at what’s waiting for us inside.”

“All right.” The team leader relayed these instructions through the radio, before giving me a smirk. “You know how to pick a lock, Hollingsworth?”

I nodded hesitantly, already suspecting where this was going.

“Then, since this is your idea, you get the honor of doing the sneaking.”

I sighed, but I wasn’t unhappy about the outcome. I probably would have volunteered anyway, but there was something annoying about being ordered to do it when the plan had been mine from the start.

There wasn’t any time to waste. Within a minute, I managed to sneak around through a few back yards to put myself behind the van without the target seeing me. As soon as I was in place, several heavily armed agents approached the van from the front, making a big scene and shouting threats at the target to keep his attention pointed forward.

My lock picking skills were rustier than I’d like, and took me more than one attempt, but I managed to get the back of the van unlocked and cracked the door open just enough to peek inside.

Some of the seats had been pulled out of the van to create empty space at the back. A rough brown blanket covered something that at first seemed like supplies, until I noticed the blanket moving. There were people under the blanket, and based on the size, they weren’t adults.

The only adult in the van that I could see was the driver. From this angle, I would have a perfect shot at the back of his head. He’d never even know I was here before he died.

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