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Crime Story: A Rainy Night in Blackwood County – Behind the Broken Badge

Chapter 3

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"Boss! You can't do this! Someone on radio channel two warned me that an impostor with fake credentials would try to breach the scene!" Miller shouted, his panicked eyes darting around for support as two of his colleagues stepped forward, gripped his arms, and unholstered his sidearm. "I was just following a radio alert! You have to believe me, Boss!"Just as he was turning to sprint toward the ambulance, Marcus Vance froze. The seasoned agent's sharp instincts immediately caught the glaring anomaly in the young officer's desperate outburst.He spun back around, stepped right up to Miller—who was now pinned by the shoulders by his own squadmates—and pressed him in a voice as cold as ice:"What did you just say? Radio channel two? Who broadcasted the warning that someone would show up here tonight with fake federal credentials?"Miller gasped for air, cold sweat mingling with rainwater as it streamed down his temples. The terror of facing federal prison made him spill everything without a second thought: "I... I don't know his name! About ten minutes before you arrived, an encrypted signal from the department's auxiliary relay station patched straight into my personal radio. The voice said the syndicate was sending a Black guy in a dark jacket posing as a federal agent to finish off the witness in the ambulance. He told me to snap the ID and stall you at all costs until... until the ambulance cleared the scene!"A jolt of ice-cold electricity shot down Marcus Vance's spine.He whipped his head toward the ambulance flashing its bright red lights at the corner of the parking lot. The rear doors had just slammed shut. Its engine roared loudly, tires biting hard into the slick pavement and kicking up a spray of water as it prepared to bolt past the perimeter without a single police escort!"A diversion!" Marcus roared. "The mole didn't use Miller to kill the witness—he used this kid's stupidity to keep me pinned out here! The witness in that ambulance is in mortal danger!"Act IV: Pursuit Through the NightNot waiting another millisecond, Marcus bolted past the police barricade, his gold-lettered windbreaker whipping in the wind and rain. Chief Callahan instantly grasped the gravity of the plot; he snatched his radio and barked an order for every patrol car on the scene to lock down the East Port parking lot exits.But the driver of the ambulance had calculated every move in advance. Instead of charging toward the main gate where four police cruisers were forming a blockade, the ambulance yanked its wheel into a sharp ninety-degree turn, smashed straight through a rusted chain-link fence behind the old warehouse, and barreled out onto the fog-choked harbor road.Marcus leaped into the driver's seat of his service sedan and twisted the key in the ignition. The eight-cylinder engine roared to life. The exact moment he floored the gas pedal, the front passenger door flew open as Chief Callahan jumped in—while a handcuffed Ryan Miller was shoved hastily into the backseat on the Chief's urgent orders."Why the hell are you putting this kid in my car, Callahan?" Marcus demanded, wrenching the wheel hard through a slick corner as the tires screeched across the wet asphalt."He's the only one who heard the mole's voice and broadcast frequency over the radio!" Callahan replied curtly, gripping the overhead grab handle as the sedan went airborne over a set of abandoned train tracks, hot on the tail of the ambulance's flashing red lights ahead. "Besides, his idiocy just put your witness on death's doorstep—he's going to watch this firsthand and help clean up the catastrophic mess he just made!"In the backseat, Ryan Miller sat hunched over, his face still pale with shock from the explosive confrontation moments earlier. Through the rearview mirror, he caught sight of Special Agent Marcus Vance's calm, razor-sharp eyes. Now that his hot-headed arrogance had evaporated, Miller realized just how cheaply he had been played. Whoever orchestrated this knew his arrogant, territorial, power-tripping personality inside and out; it had taken nothing more than a single provocative whisper over the radio to turn him into a rabid guard dog, snapping a real federal agent's credentials with his own hands and clearing the way for assassins to abduct a key witness right under the noses of dozens of cops."Agent Vance..." Miller croaked from the backseat, his eyes wide as he stared ahead. "That ambulance... it doesn't belong to Blackwood County General Hospital! I got a good look at the plates when it turned the intersection. That's a decommissioned rig sold off at auction last year—it usually sits parked near the abandoned boat repair yard at Pier Seven! And the guy who called my radio earlier... in the background of his transmission, I heard the foghorn of a tugboat down by Pier Seven!"Marcus glanced into the rearview mirror. Despite his lingering anger over the young officer's unlawful stunt, he couldn't deny the immense value of that intel."If you're right, Officer, that'll be the only mitigating factor I include in your federal indictment," Marcus replied coldly, killing the sedan's headlights to switch to a stealth approach.The road leading out to Pier Seven was pitch black, lit only by a few sickly yellow high-pressure sodium lamps casting dim pools of light over the rainwater puddles. The fake ambulance slowed down and slipped through the massive iron gates of a decrepit shipyard that had been shut down a decade ago. Out on the freezing river beyond, a high-powered speedboat sat idling, ready to whisk the assassin and the classified hard drive across the maritime border into international waters the moment the job was done.Act V: A Battle of Wits in the Abandoned ShipyardMarcus brought the car to a halt a hundred meters from the shipyard gates, tucking it behind a row of old shipping containers. He turned to Chief Callahan and unlocked Ryan Miller's handcuffs, though he kept the officer's sidearm tucked securely in his belt.
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Crime Story: A Rainy Night in Blackwood County – Behind the Broken Badge

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