“Hands up!” Sullivan demanded. Pacheco was…surprised, yes, surprised at Sullivan’s poise and precision. She was almost impressed, but that was a little further than she was willing to go. One too many exits down the Sullivan respectability freeway. Surprised was plenty far enough.

“What’s going on?” Sam shouted, his hands very much up, as ordered. His hands could not have been further up. He exited the backseat from the passenger side one step before Hillary did. All told, they both moved a little gingerly. She was having trouble managing her footing, but her hands? She was in full control of those and they were most assuredly up. They didn’t know where they were or what had happened, but they knew how to put up their hands.

Dat Vinh’s hands, on the other hand, were not quite up. He hadn’t emerged from the car, either. At best, his hands were a lackadaisical 40% up. They were getting there, certainly, but they were not quite up. If Sullivan had yelled, ‘Hands a little up!’, Dat Vinh would have been in full compliance.

“He said hands up!” Pacheco yelled, a little giddy to be getting involved with whatever Sullivan had in the works. What did it matter to her? She was counting down the seconds until she was done with ASP.

“Our hands are up,” Hillary replied, unaware that that still wasn’t universally true,” now would you please tell us what the hell is going on?”

“Get out of the car,” Sullivan ignored Hillary and leveled his eyes on Dat Vinh. “Or I’ll shoot.”

It wasn’t an empty threat, either. For the first time in his lengthy ASP tenure, he had cause to draw his weapon. Dat Vinh hadn’t moved. He was still lodged in the driver’s seat. His hands hadn’t done much moving either.

“Christ, Dat Vinh, get out of the car and put your hands up,” Sam implored. He could tell his own safety hung delicately in the balance with Dat Vinh’s recalcitrance weighing heavily against his favor.

“I’m going to give you to the count of three,” Sullivan announced. Pacheco looked at him with fire in her eyes. These were words she hadn’t heard since training. So much of their job was paperwork and procedure, process and protocol. Only a very small fraction was spent doing what they had been trained to do. They were the rejects, the maniacs, the malcontents that the armed forces and other police couldn’t handle. Yet, they frequently had their hands tied by namby-pamby regulations.

This new side of Sullivan, though, was something different entirely. If Sullivan had acted like this more often, maybe she wouldn’t be dropping her pension in favor of an apprenticeship at a Vermont dairy farm.

“And he’s not a slow counter,” Pacheco added.

Sullivan was running on adrenaline. And amphetamines. All above board, of course. In fact, they came standard issue, just like his sleeping pills, just like his handgun, and just like the quasi-tank he’d used to push the Milieu scum off the road. His heart had a heavy metal gait to it. His hand was steady. He didn’t know what would come next, but he was damned sure somebody was about to get hurt.

Sam and Hillary were yelling, plaintively, but no one could hear them. Their words weren’t falling on deaf ears as much as indifferent ones. These were ears that had moved past de-escalation. These were ears that were set to ‘kill’, assuming that was a setting ears came programmed with. All the noise in the world wasn’t going to change a thing.

“One…,” Sullivan started.

Dat Vinh, finally, began his retreat from the car. His hands, however, had dropped entirely. Zero percent up.

“My name…,” he began, his voice sounding a little unsure of itself. “My name is Dat Vinh Halliburton.”

“Hands up! Put your hands up!”

Sullivan and Pacheco had managed to say it in sync. They very nearly harmonized. Years and years together and they were finally acting like real partners.

Dat Vinh’s head was out. One shoulder, too. His hands were still out of sight, though.

“My name is Dat Vinh Haliburton,” he repeated.

“..Two..”

“Consider that your last warning,” Pacheco hollered. This, of course, ignored the fact that Sullivan technically hadn’t gotten to ‘three’ yet. Perhaps Pacheco was overeager. Perhaps Dat Vinh not listening to their orders set her off. Or she just wanted to see blood.

At last, Dat Vinh emerged from the car. Against all protocol, both Pacheco and Sullivan slightly lowered their guns, though Dat Vinh only had one hand above his head.

Sam breathed a sigh of relief. Hillary noticed, and wondered if it were premature.

“My name is Dat Vinh Halliburton and I am a member of the Milieu,” Dat Vinh defiantly declared, though everyone there can be forgiven if they missed the last bit, Dat Vinh’s coup d'etat. It wasn’t because he’d lowered his voice in his last few syllables: each was delivered with the intent that all the world would hear and know why he was about to do what he was about to do.

No, his final words were obscured by the sound of his own gun firing and then V’s agonized retort.

“He got me. He fucking shot me,” she said. Her arms flung helplessly into the air even as she cascaded to the ground. The pain was everywhere. She didn’t know where to clinch.

It all hurt.

Sullivan snuck a peek at Pacheco but it lasted only the briefest of moments as another bullet came from Dat Vinh’s direction. Whatever feelings he had briefly allowed himself vanished. A moment, that’s the most he could manage. Anything more than that and a sub-human ability to suppress the anguish he felt kicked in. He didn’t have time to feel.

Mechanically, Sullivan raised his sidearm and fired in one deadly, fluid motion. He didn’t need to aim. He didn’t need to consider his shot. In the fury of the moment, he could see that Dat Vinh would die too. He already knew the man’s fate. Sullivan’s bullet would tear through Dat Vinh’s esophagus and he would die, contorted in pain, in that lonely highway ditch.

He knew the same was true of V. He didn’t need to look at her again. Her death pose might be different from Dat Vinh. The bullet might have struck a different vein or bone. The result, though, was the same. He could see that with his eyes closed.

He wasn’t a soothsayer or a prophet. Shots like these, at relatively close distance, in the barrens of the most barren parts of the lower forty-eight? Neither Dat Vinh nor Pacheco stood a chance. Buzzards would make it to their bodies before any ambulance ever did. Pacheco cried out, begging for help, but Sullivan offered none. He didn’t allow himself to meet her eyes again.

The part of him that cared about Pacheco quickly scabbed over. As far as he was concerned, she was already dead.

That explains why Sullivan offered no succor. Whatever emotions were roiling his insides subsided and he got back to doing his job. Lowering his gun again, he ambled over to the still very distraught, weeping pair that had started this whole mess.

“You two are lucky you’re alive,” he grunted. “And you’re under arrest, too.”