Shots

Smoke and Sparks

Evie felt decidedly uneasy about the exchange.

She was quite certain that the only reason she'd been approved last minute to act as middle man for this gun deal was that the guy who vouched for her owed her one. Or two. The whole act seemed off-kilter, like this end of the crew had been knocked out and was spinning loose. Since Bravo had been made a mark by the cops, everyone was on edge. This was supposed to be the last deal in Chicago before the gang rolled out for fresher ground and greener cops. She fiddled with her phone and kept her face neutral.

Two of the undercover cops that were rolling up to do this deal with her were experienced, the other she didn't immediately recognize.

"You got what we want?" The one she knew as Dawson asked as soon as he didn't have to shout.

"Some. The rest I'll call in when you show me the cash."

He nodded at the others. They set down their bags. "It's all there."

Evie threw the cash a cursory glance before dialing On-three.

"Hey, call 'em in." Evie said as soon as the other end picked up. "My buyers are here."

"They're not coming." On-three sounded like he'd been saying that all morning. He probably had.

"What?" Evie knew it. The deal had been sour since the beginning. She wanted to kick something but that would be unprofessional. "Why not?"

"They smelled a rat - not you, actually - and have run scared. They wanna reschedule for next week."

"Which means never. Are you serious?" Evie didn't even bother hiding her frustration now. There wasn't any point.

"Yep." On-three's tone was carefully neutral.

Evie bit back some darling, colorful language that wouldn't help the situation at all but couldn't hold in her sarcasm as she retorted, "So I've spent my day off with my adrenaline going because I'm ready for this to finally go down but somebody flashed their tail feathers and now I have no guns to sell to the cops I've dragged out here because heaven forbid a gun deal goes down anywhere decent?"

Said cops looked at each other in varying degrees of surprise, though Evie got the feeling that they were restraining themselves tremendously.

"Uh, yes?" On-three had the decency to sound sheepish. "I wanted to call you earlier but it wasn't a sure thing until about five minutes ago."

"At least tell me that Dart has pulled everybody out."

"He's taking care of everything on his end, now you've gotta do the same. It's up to you what you wanna tell them, okay? Look, I gotta go kick those tail feathers. Just stand down. I'm sorry," he added right before ending the call.

Despite not being surprised at this turn of events, Evie was still pretty annoyed. She could have been sleeping. Maybe. She probably would've been all over town to hear what the birds were saying, but still. Too many things had been going wrong lately. She didn't like it. Bravo was out of reach now and while she was definitely going to make sure that someone was following his trail, she herself couldn't do anything further.

One of the cops, the younger one she didn't recognize, was the one to break the silence. "What's this about cops?"

"You sound so surprised," she said absently, still annoyed. "Something stunk in the wind so they pulled back. I bet you anything Bravo is having trouble with his boys from outside and they're not really sniffing in this direction. Which is good, because we can't get anywhere if he smells your metal, but bad because they're due to move on by the end of the week."