The plan they devised was a simple one, but it would take some talking to get it past the ESU lieutenant who was the onsite commander. The worst part would require them to deceive, in fact to out-and-out lie to, a fellow officer. It left neither Camille nor Eric happy. But these were extraordinary circumstances; every single time they debated who they should share information with about what they did vis-à-vis the Gifted, it came out the same. The information was just too dangerous.

It was Cecil who suggested that a bean-bag round, rubber bullet, or deer slug fired from a 12-gauge shotgun into the head of Summerall might incapacitate the villain long enough for them to restrain him.

"It might also kill him," the old man had added, "but you're looking at that as your only other option, anyway. If pulling that off gets him tied up, then you can get him into a cell. After that, you're home free, 'cause I don't think he's strong enough to tear his way out of a jail cell."

When they confronted the ESU officer, Lieutenant Seward, Eric laid down the 300 feet of nylon climbing rope he and Camille had hastily acquired and slowly began to unwind their plan and why they thought they needed to implement it. The story was mostly true.

"Camille and I would like to go in first," Eric said right away.

The typical playground pushing and shoving followed, as the detective expected it would. Then Eric put on his candid face—it was one of his most powerful tools—and explained to the lieutenant about how a friend of a friend from the DoD had given them a heads-up on Summerall. It was almost true.

"Look, LT, I'm not supposed to tell you this ... I'm not even supposed to know myself. But the guy inside is a former military contractor who got hold of some sort of drug cocktail that apparently is like ...," Eric raised his hands helplessly to emphasize his point, "some sort of super steroid. It makes the guy stronger and tougher than anything anyone has ever seen."

The lieutenant at first said not a word, a look of utter incredulity on his face.

"I'm not taking anyone at their word, lieutenant. Camille and I saw this guy last night. We watched him do a header out a third-floor window and then hop up and chuck a passer-by 20 feet. Camille emptied a magazine into the guy. I don't care if he was wearing armor or not, that should have put him on the ground. And there was enough blood at the scene to prove that at least one of those rounds got past the vest."

Eric looked around to ensure only he, Camille, and the lieutenant could see and then pulled out the broken shackles.

"That friend of a friend sent these. They're the shackles this guy was wearing before he broke out of federal custody." He placed the broken manacles on a field table in front of the lieutenant. "We want this guy alive. The government wants him back for a debrief. Camille and I want to question him on a human-trafficking beef."

"Shit," the lieutenant said, fingering the now useless pieces of metal. "Okay, what's your plan."

"Not that much different than yours," Eric recited rapidly and professionally, "except Camille and I go in first. We know the guy by sight. I have my issue shotgun with three beanbags and the rest deer slugs. Camille has the Springfield. Your guys take the other two suspects, and I'll put Summerall down with a beanbag or two to the head. If he goes down, we truss him up with the rope ... he won't be able to break that ... then we take him to the nearest holding cell. If the beanbags don't work, I use the deer slugs, and Camille uses the rifle."

"It's a simple plan," admitted the lieutenant.

"We'd like to take him alive, but if not ... well, he's a dangerous guy."

After another 20 minutes, the lieutenant signed off on the plan with a few slight modifications. Less than an hour later, all their plans and legal niceties in order, they were ready to rock.

Eric felt his gorge rising when they stacked on the door leading to Summerall's hiding spot. As they'd suspected, security was otherwise nonexistent in the building. Summerall was either an amateur, which they all doubted, or he relied on keeping a minimal security profile to ensure secrecy.

Eric could feel Camille's comforting form pressed up behind him. She was good in a fight. He'd seldom worked with female officers before being paired with the young woman, so he hadn't been sure what to expect—beyond the stereotypes and banter he'd often heard uttered about female officers, that is. But he'd decided to enter the partnership with an open mind and hadn't been disappointed. She is really good in a fight, he reminded himself. If things went badly, it wouldn't be because Camille let him down.

There were two stacks of six entering the room. It had been one of the lieutenant's modifications. The door would be breached by the last man in the second stack. Eric would lead the first stack, followed by Camille. They would concentrate on Summerall. The other four men in the first stack would clear the rest of the room.

The second stack would provide support on the off-chance their adversaries had more firepower than the officers anticipated. Otherwise, the second stack would bring the rope, and their only task would be to help restrain and tie Summerall.

He felt light-headed and his gorge went up further when he felt the squeeze from Camille, signaling the stack was ready. His heart raced. They were to the right of the door, and Eric gave the breach man on the left the nod. The man took one step, pivoted, and hit the door just below the knob with his heavy ram.

Eric followed the door as it swung inward, his shotgun at the high ready, and nearly ran smack into Summerall, the barrel of the shotgun inches away from the huge mercenary's sternum. The weapon exploded, knocking the suspect's body back several feet onto the floor, and the detective, his body animated by a will other than his own, took one stride, chambered another shell, and leapt on Summerall's fallen form, taking careful aim as he moved.

As he leveled and discharged his weapon a second time, something powerful and hard scooped the detective up and smacked him front and back like a child tossing a toy across the room. Somehow the wicked taste of blood and a vile something else combined in his mouth, and Eric saw that he was facedown on the building's putrid floor. He couldn't breathe, and after a short moment or two was struck by an intense wave of pain. He had no idea how he knew but realized the giant's arm had struck him and driven him against the plaster ceiling ten feet above.

The detective tried to rise and groped for his shotgun. It was underneath him, and though his actions seemed like slow motion, he managed to lever himself up and, upon securing the weapon, to raise it in the general direction of Summerall, who was on both knees and one hand and who, with his one free hand, had just felled two officers. There was no sign of Camille.

Nor was there time to waste. Despite the agony in his abdomen and his complete inability to draw breath, Eric managed to get his shotgun up and to level it with a feeble hand at the mercenary. But the man's powerful hand suddenly shot out and grabbed the shotgun barrel in an attempt to wrest it from the detective's grip.

God loved Eric Mueller at that moment, because Summerall's grip momentarily steadied Eric's shaking weapon, and the policeman squeezed off a third round. The beanbag miraculously struck his opponent on the sweet-spot where the jaw bone hinged just below the ear. The mercenary's head snapped at an angle, and he dropped onto his face, his body still flailing weakly.

In a flash, four yelling and cursing officers dived onto Summerall and began binding him with the sturdy nylon rope. Eric, still fighting for breath, rose on unsteady feet. Camille was three or four feet to his left, crawling to her hands and knees and attempting to get control of her rifle.

Eric finally drew a ragged and painful breath but was unable to exhale. His body's only reaction was to take another painful gulp of air, and then a third. The agony was nearly unbearable, and just when he thought it would never end, his body blessed him with a painful and brutal exhale. He felt nauseous and dizzy, but steadier. His next three breaths were excruciating. The sound of them, rasping and desperate, was like the huffing and puffing of some great dying animal.

But his wits were still about him, he had his weapon fully under control, and Camille was armed and back on her feet.

Suddenly, Summerall surged upward, knocking aside three of the four officers who were binding him, and attempted to shrug off the 20 or so loops of rope they'd draped around him. Eric stepped forward, chambered a new round and shouted a raspy "CLEAR!" Several officers were still in the potential line of fire. He screamed the word again.

The suspect was back to one knee when Eric fired the first deer slug into the back of the man's head, point blank, about two inches below the crown of his skull. This time the giant went down with a smack against the floor. The slug hadn't even penetrated the scalp, but Summerall lay there unmoving. The men resumed binding him. None seemed aware that Eric had just used a live round on the suspect.

Medics soon arrived and pronounced Summerall unconscious but alive. It took ten more minutes to finish securing him, and another few minutes for Eric's breathing and speech to return to a semblance of normal, with Camille and the lieutenant occasionally checking on him. He pulled off his body armor and stood, thankful. The vest likely had saved his life.

Five years in the marines and more than a dozen on the force had done little to prepare him for what had just transpired. But everyone was happy with the score. All three bad guys were in custody, and no officers had been seriously injured. It was a good raid. Now they just needed to figure out what to do with Summerall.

***

It's a funny thing about a fight. Two people can be in the same brawl and remember everything differently. Maybe it's the excitement, the adrenalin, the underlying fear, or the emotional trauma. Who knows? But as Eric and Camille waited to be examined at the hospital, they discussed the encounter they'd had with Summerall.

Much to Eric's surprise, Camille informed him that at one point in the fight—she couldn't say exactly when—she had stood on Summerall's back and butt-stroked the man a half dozen times to the head with the stock of her rifle, before he threw her across the room. What's more, neither could provide a real sense of how long the encounter had lasted. The fight, they'd both afterward learned, had lasted scarcely a minute. It had seemed much, much longer.

Eric's injuries weren't that bad. There was some bruising to his sternum and solar plexus, and he probably had some cracked ribs. But his worries that he'd broken or chipped some teeth after landing face-first on the ground were exaggerated. He merely had bitten his lip and tongue, and the bleeding had stopped by the time they'd reached the hospital. It was nothing that wouldn't soon heal on its own.

Beyond being bruised and scraped-up a little, Camille had a wrenched shoulder that would be fine after a few days of heat and ice. Both detectives felt ill-used but were otherwise grateful for having weathered the encounter so well.

The stop to see the medics, which had been an order, took more than 90 minutes out of their day, and since it was already after dark, they were eager to get to the holding cells to start to work on Summerall. Traffic sucked another 40 minutes of their time, and when they arrived back at their precinct, to which Summerall had been transported, Camille dashed upstairs to check in with Lieutenant Silva, and Eric went down to the cells to find where they were keeping the prisoner.

He bumped into Lieutenant Seward coming out of the stairwell.

"Detective, you going to the cells?"

"Yeah, LT, what's up?"

"You missed them," the officer said.

"Missed? ... who?"

"The feds. They left with that guy of yours about 20 minutes ago."

Eric generally did an excellent job of hoarding his emotions, but this time couldn't rein in a bitter, "Well, shit."

"Fucking feds," joined the lieutenant sympathetically. "I'm with you. But they had all the right paperwork, so the skipper had us turn him over .... Still, that was a helluva thing you and Tommy did today. I didn't half believe that shit you were selling me, but that guy was a fucking Frankenstein."

"Any idea where they took the fucker?" Eric had regained his composure. "We really wanted to talk to him."

"Nah," said the lieutenant, "and I couldn't tell you anyway. They're slapping a lid on this. There'll be a memo going around later instructing ALCON to keep this under their hats."

"Shit," he said again, but less bitterly. "Was Agent Caldecott-Nevarez there? He might be able to get us clearance." Eric had a desperate urge to dick-punch the incompetent FBI pretty-boy.

"No, I didn't see him. These guys were with Homeland ... but don't tell anyone that. Look, Eric, sorry the feds screwed you over, but again," the lieutenant said sincerely while extending his hand, "that was one helluva job today. Ted Silva is going to get a call from me."

The two shook and said their goodbyes. Eric took a seat outside a breakroom near the stairwell and wondered whether he'd have to break this to his partner. A few minutes later, a dejected Camille came plodding down the stairs.

"Could it have gone any better?" he called out to her.

"Of course, you've heard," she said. "Thank God. I wasn't looking forward to telling you."

The two laughed as only law enforcement officers or soldiers could at the macabre and ridiculous.

"Any guess on where they took him?" she asked finally.

"No. Seward told me it was Homeland, though I don't think he was supposed to. I was thinking of strangling Ash, just for the hell of it."

"Nah, don't do that," she smirked. "The irony of losing a partner after surviving what we went through today would be too great .... God, I'm so tired."

"Yeah, I was thinking of getting up and getting some of that shitty coffee over there. I just can't muster the energy."

"If it makes you feel any better," she piped in after a while, "I've never seen Silva throw things before."

"He pissed?" Eric enquired lazily.

"Ohhh ... yeah."

"At us?"

"Nah," she giggled. "We're golden this time. He's pissed about the feds."

The two sat quietly for some minutes before being roused by a familiar voice.

"Where is he?" whispered a running Caldecott-Nevarez. The man skidded to a stop in front of them.

"Ash, who are you looking for?" asked Camille.

The FBI agent ignored the obvious slight. "The superhuman you brought in," he whispered even more quietly.

Camille shrugged. Eric's face registered nothing, but it amused and perplexed him that the FBI agent didn't, after all, play a role in the disappearance of their prisoner.

"I don't know anything about that," she said.

The agent looked back and forth between the detectives. Camille took mercy.

"We bought that guy Summerall in earlier, but he was just a big football-player type on some kind of steroid cocktail. He was strong as fuck, but I don't know he was any kind of superhuman."

The agent, disconsolate, sat in a chair across the hall from them. At least ostensibly the lead on the human trafficking taskforce, the FBI man had expressed scant interest in Summerall when the detectives informed him of the mercenary's possible role in that conspiracy. He appeared singularly obsessed with "superhumans." Eric looked over at him with annoyance but also, for the first time, with just a pinch of sympathy.

"Agent," asked a patient Camille, "have you ever seen any of these people before? Even one?"

Something played over Ash's face. Was it doubt? Credulity? Embarrassment? Eric couldn't make it out, and he usually had a knack for such things.

"No, I never have," the agent said finally.

"Then how do you know they exist?" Camille sounded sympathetic.

"Because I have it on good authority from people I trust," the man said.

"I'm not sure I could take that step," she replied. "I mean, if I actually saw some guy whose skin could stop bullets, or whose sense of smell was so acute he could track like a bloodhound," she glanced over at Eric, "or especially someone who could break chains like pretzels or fly through the air like a rocket ... then I would believe it ..."

Eric felt his composure begin the break. He wanted to laugh so hard his left eye had begun to twitch.

"... but I don't think I could take such a thing of faith," she finished.

"That's the difference between you and me," the man said in a condescending tone. After a few moments, he got up and left without another word.

"And the student has become the master," Eric said aloud.

The two exchanged fist bumps, with Camille's ending in a tiny "poof."