The Drafter

“I said no drugs!” Allen’s voice came over one of the agents’ radios, and they warily circled him as if he were a lion, waiting for more backup. “No drugs! I can’t interrogate an unconscious man. Good God! Isn’t there anyone out there higher than a brown belt?”

 

 

Allen, Silas thought, changing his plans. He’d let himself get caught. He wanted to talk to him. His smile grew as the three agents looked uneasily among themselves. Alive and undrugged? He didn’t have any such constraint, and he threw the dart away, flexing his hands in anticipation. “You heard the man,” he said, scuffing the pavement for purchase. “Who’s first?”

 

But no one volunteered, and finally Silas bellowed, rushing the smallest.

 

Silas hit his middle like a linebacker, stealing his air and sending him flying. He spun for the next, and they were on him, forcing him to the ground. He twisted, but someone had his arm, yanking it up and back in a submission hold. Two more landed on his legs.

 

“Cuff him!” someone shouted, and Silas grimaced at the feel of steel ratcheting about one wrist. Twisting, Silas flung the man away.

 

“Keep him down!” someone else demanded, and Silas’s air huffed out as two more men fell on him. One got a face full of elbow, but then they got his other arm, twisting it back with the first and fastening them together.

 

“Get off me!” he demanded, and in a breath, they seemed to vanish.

 

Shocked, he twisted, managing to get himself seated upright. Six men all in black suits ringed him. One had a bloody nose, another a red face as he still struggled to breathe. All of them were angry, their nice black suits mussed with dirt and oil.

 

His own nose was bleeding, and he wiped it on his shoulder, staying put when one of them shoved him to stay down. Silas followed their attention to Allen, who was hobbling forward between the parked cars, awkward and slow with his right hand bandaged and a crutch to ease the weight on his damaged left knee. Bound in cuffs, Silas’s hands clenched, and his skull began to throb.

 

“He’s got one dart in him,” the tallest man said, almost panting as Allen limped to a halt and looked Silas up and down. “Sorry, sir.”

 

Allen’s brow lifted in amusement as he took in the men trying to put themselves back together. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, while Silas seethed. “It hardly slowed him down.” Allen scanned the parking lot, other agents keeping the curious onlookers moving. “Can you stand?” he asked Silas.

 

“Fuck you,” Silas said softly, his chin hurting where it had hit the pavement.

 

Allen chuckled. “Get him up,” he said confidently, and two men yanked him, stumbling, to his feet. “I want his phone. Wallet. Everything. Where’s the van?”

 

Silas stood stoically while they searched him. If they were focusing on him, they were not looking for Peri, and a curious feeling of anxious satisfaction coursed through him as Allen step-scuffed on his crutch to a nearby agent to find out what was taking the pickup van so long.

 

“Booted?” Allen echoed, clearly peeved as a shopper tried to get it all on YouTube, complaining when an agent took the phone and snapped it. “We cleared it with the local cops!”

 

“Yes, sir,” someone said. “It’s got a VigilantVigilante sticker on it. I have a car coming.”

 

“Seriously?” Frowning, Allen shifted his gaze from the mall to the nearby construction trailer. “I don’t want this plastered on the Net. Someone open that up. Denier, move, or we’ll move you.”

 

Silas slowly started for the construction office, his hands bound behind him. The chain-link fence door rattled open, and Silas eyed the gun on Allen’s hip. He’d take that when he left, and he waited patiently as an agent darted up the metal steps and into the dirty single-wide.

 

“In,” Allen prompted when the agent stuck his head out and proclaimed it clear.

 

Silas went, his pace stiff, and he gave the agent at the steps a look to back off as he managed them himself. His mood darkened when he found the ceiling predictably low and the furnishings covered in the expected filth and grime—but his clothes were ruined already.

 

“Put him there,” Allen said, and two agents shoved Silas into the rolling chair before the messy desk, going farther to tether his cuffs to an immovable, fireproof file cabinet with a long, plastic-coated wire. Silas leaned back as much as he could, his hands fisted behind him.

 

“We’re tracking the woman,” one man said, and Allen sighed as he rested his rump against the top of the desk. “She’s heading east,” he added, showing him on the tablet. “Mobile, and moving fast.”

 

Allen glanced at it. “Don’t bother,” he said as he got his phone from a back pocket and started flicking through the apps. “It’s not Reed.”

 

Shit.

 

“Sir?” the agent asked, his tablet drooping until Silas could see it was a map of the city.

 

“It’s not her,” Allen repeated, smug as he met Silas’s eyes. “Is it.”