Page 10 of Gabe

The familiar figure of Blake Adder, my fellow agent who had worked with me on many cases, walked past. It was his own apartment, so he easily navigated the room using only the miniscule light that snuck around the edges of the closed curtains.

Just as he reached the far side of the room, I flicked the switch on the wall.

The room filled with light. He jumped, nearly tripping over the coffee table as he reached for his gun.

Upon seeing me standing in a hidden corner by the front door, he pressed a hand against his chest and gasped.

“Jesus, Gabe. Don’t do that. I nearly shot you.”

“I’ve seen you during training. Your trigger control is better than that.”

“Well, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”

I stepped further into the room and took a seat on one of the two chairs facing each other. The white leather furniture looked much better than it felt. Blake had a pretentious taste in decoration that I had never understood.

“Are you saying you weren’t expecting me to show up?”

He claimed the other chair, gun still clutched in his hand though it hung limp and remained pointed at the ground.

“Yeah, I did, but not like this. How’d you even get in here anyway?”

I raised one eyebrow, waiting to see if he actually needed me to answer that question.

He didn’t.

“Right, why am I asking?” He ran an exasperated hand through his hair and stored his gun back in its holster. “Fuck. What kind of skills did they teach you in the army? I can’t that imagine lock picking is a part of the standard training regime.”

“Not standard. No.”

Then again, nothing about the Army Rangers was ever standard. It was about getting the job done however possible, and with whatever skills were needed.

Didn’t have the skills needed?

Then you either learned quick or you died.

The ability to pick a lock had saved my life on more than one occasion.

“Well...” Blake leaned back in his chair. “Now that you’ve made your entrance. What do you want? You know the director is still steaming mad about the stunt you pulled. Seriously. I think there was literal steam coming out of his ears at one point.”

I tugged at the sleeves of my jacket, undoing the cufflinks to give my wrists a little more breathing room. “I’ve made an appointment to talk with him tomorrow. For now, you’re my main concern. You were put in charge of investigating the explosion at the Roth Brothers’ apartment. What have you found?”

Blake hid his face in his hands for a moment as he mumbled to himself, likely wondering how he always ended up in these situations.

To be fair, the man did have an uncanny ability for ending up as the middleman in a lot of investigations. Always in the middle of things, but never actually in charge.

“Fine,” he eventually concluded. “This is priority information, but whatever. You’re still an agent, so you still have clearance. Let them try to fire me. See what happens.”

He stood and retrieved a file from somewhere in another room. When he returned, he set the file down on the table in front of me.

I immediately started going through the information as he sat back in his chair and gave me a basic summary.

“It’s as we expected. A bomb was wired into the door, which was triggered when Sebastian Roth opened it. Nasty piece of work, too. There was an incendiary device added to the bomb specifically designed to spread as much fire as possible, which is why the apartment burned so quickly. They really wanted to make sure your man was dead. If the initial explosion didn’t kill him, the ensuing fire would.”

“But they failed. He survived.”

“Yeah. Those Roth brothers must be made of something special, because honestly, I have no idea how he survived.”

At the back of the file, I found a page with several photos attached, including one that looked like a pile of broken bricks. “Sebastian and Damien Roth have had to fight for their survival since they were little more than teenagers. To have lasted this long, it should be no surprise that they’re good at surviving. But that’s not what I want to know about. The nature of the bomb doesn’t surprise me. Its placement, however, is a concern. How was it planted inside the apartment when we had the building secured? I was guarding the place myself. No outsider should have been able to get in.”

---