ONLY ANGEL | JJ MAYBANK

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

•••

"John B's gonna get nabbed sooner or later. So if we're gonna clear his name, we need to have done it like, yesterday." Kie scoffed and shook her head as they sat by the docks next to her family's restaurant, assembled there together to discuss their next course of action to exonerate John B.

The first thing Collins should've been doing, is getting ahead of the long list of assignments she had stacked ahead of her for the classes that she'd spent all day listening to syllabi for. But obviously, priorities had been rearranged and now, freeing John B from his title as fugitive was at the top of the pile. As it should. Collins knew that until they were able to bring him home, she wouldn't be able to focus on anything else. Thus, the quicker they sorted this out, the better for more reasons beyond just one.

"So are we going to the Bahamas or what?" JJ propositioned. He was the most eager about John B's rise from the dead out of all of them. He was impatient and wanted to do whatever it took to speed things up.

"There is no way that is happening." Pope deadpanned, Collins nodding in agreement.

"Pope's right. Aside from the fact that it would be next to near impossible for us, if we're gonna prove John B's innocence, it starts right here. This is the scene of the crime."

"Okay, then I propose my second idea." JJ said. "We kidnap Rafe."

Kie and Pope simultaneously rolled their eyes at the boy while Collins just shook her head in disapproval. "I'm sorry, what?"

"We kidnap Rafe, tie him up, stick a gun in his mouth and just wait til he starts squawking." There was a smug smirk on JJ's face, and though all of them wanted nothing more than to see the Cameron boy get what he deserved, the method of doing so that JJ was proposing didn't suit any of them well.

"You know, torture's a war crime." Kie pointed out bluntly.

"And how exactly do you plan on clearing John B's name from a prison cell? Because that's a felony." Pope remarked sardonically.

JJ huffed and sat down in defeat. "All right, well what do you guys got? I was just trying to keep it simple. You know, one stop, and we're done."

"Guys, all we need is a material witness." Pope told them.

"Someone who would've been there when it all went down." Collins pitched in. This was how she and Pope worked, building off of each other's ideas until they could find the answer to their big question. Two brains became one big giant brain. It had been a pretty solid strategy for them so far. "Like I said, the scene of the crime. The airstrip?"

Pope nodded, and they could practically see the gears turning in his head. "We saw Ward's plane fly over our heads, with the gold inside of it. He didn't fly it. If somebody else flew, they were there on the tarmac. They saw Peterkin get murdered."

"So we just have to find out who that was, and get them to confess on record." Collins stated, though it couldn't be as simple as her words implied. "Preferably without tying them up and sticking a gun in their mouth." It felt like she needed to make that disclaimer for a certain individual in particular.

JJ grabbed her head and kissed the top of it before moving on to do the same to Pope, who didn't accept it as graciously as Collins did. "I fucking love it when you two put your genius heads together."

While Pope wiped any potential remnants of JJ's saliva out of his hair, Kie looked to each of them for further insight. With their luck, nothing tended to come as easy as they would sometimes hope. "So how are we going to do we do that exactly?"

Pope smirked mischievously. "A little light espionage."

They all liked the sound of that. Smiles soon began to spread across their faces at the idea. It almost felt like they were embarking on another adventure. With a new agenda in mind, they were still up to the same antics that they were in the summer. It comforted Collins to know that even though the school year had began, that didn't mean they couldn't continue with their typical escapades. It made the transition into the fall and her fear of everything changing suddenly melt away.

They took to Kie's car to begin their operation, assessing their game plan while also still planning the components of the said game plan at the same time. It should've been a lot harder to find out who the pilot of Ward's plane was, but it was shockingly easy since all it took was a good FBI grade search through Ward's public Facebook profile and finding the only account on his friend list with pilot listed as the occupation; Gavin. That was only the beginning of it all. With a name and a face to finally place their target on, it was also extremely worrying how easy it was to find out where this guy lived, because after a couple Google searches, Pope had finally found an address for Kie to punch into her GPS. So far, it seemed like their luck was actually in their favor this time around.

A good chunk of the car ride there was also spent satiating JJ's curiosity as he bugged Pope into searching all of their names up to see if their information came up as well, but Kie's had been the only successful one in their group. Well- if successful meant having your private information at the fingertips of anyone with access to the internet, then yes. Probably thanks to her Kook family status. Did it actually pay to be a Pogue sometimes? From a more logical perspective, Kie had only been mildly— make that severely terrified.

Once Pope had finally been able to redirect their focus back onto the task at hand, he began to delve into the method of action that they were going to use to get the intel they needed from this guy.

"If this guy flew planes for Ward, he's gotta be pretty tight lipped." Pope said, studying the man's Facebook profile and swiping through pictures of him and his family looking like your typical middle class household. Obviously this guy had losing his family at a risk just by working for Ward with the kind of job that he'd been hired to do. There was no way he could've moved all that gold without raising questions which Ward

"So then the direct approach gets my vote." JJ stated. As he snapped pieces of the gun back into place, all heads turned to look at him and he was bombarded with protests in appall to his suggestion. "We gotta keep this simple, guys, or else we're never gonna get John B off."

"Or, we just tickle the wire." Pope offered instead, raising his brow. The look in his eyes didn't help his case either. He probably wasn't trying to come off as ominous as he was.

"What?"

"We tickle the wire." Pope repeated, as if him saying it again would make it make more sense the second time.  No one seemed to be catching on.

"I don't think anyone uses that phrase." Collins muttered from behind him, shaking her head. To her it just sounded like he was hinting at something vulgar. It must've been his use of the word 'tickle'. Because of that, she concluded that she did not enjoy that word one bit.

Waving an AirPod case at them, Pope explained, "I plant my phone in his car, and then we listen on your AirPods. Say something." He held the speaker up to Kie to test out the device.

"Something." Kie spoke.

"Okay, we have audio." Pope confirmed, making the first act of their plan a success in terms of spy ware.

Pope was at the forefront of all of their planning and it seemed like everything was moving accordingly. Peering over at him, Collins chuckled. "You weren't joking about the whole ghost recon thing, were you?"

"Not when it comes to freeing John B." Pope responded, looking out the window before pointing ahead of them. "Wait, stop. I think that's his house right there."

Kie brought the car to a slow halt on the shoulder of the street, sitting just across from the house so to not make it look obvious that they were basically staking the place. It looked so normal. Collins didn't know why she figured it'd be nicer for a guy who worked as a private pilot for one of Kildare's biggest real estate developers.

"Don't do anything dangerous." Kie said, looking at Pope with a serious look in her eyes as he was preparing to leave. It was her way of saying 'be safe' without actually saying the words and wanting to roll her own eyes at herself.

"Don't worry, I'm not JJ." Pope sniped with a soft chuckle, earning himself a glare from the blond boy in the backseat.

"Funny, Pope." JJ shot back sarcastically. "Love the little double date thing we have going on. It's so fun."

Pope disappeared out of the car before they could engage in more back and forth banter, slipping through the bushes to sneak over to the driveway. As he moved out of their view, they all took to their jobs as lookout for their friend, scanning the area to ensure that no one would stumble across Pope in the midst of planting his phone in the stranger's car.

"He's been waiting for this moment his whole life." Collins said, peering out the window with her head resting against the glass. "Living out his Mission Impossible dreams."

"How's it been going, by the way? You know, with Pope and all?" JJ inquired, quirking his brow at Kie in her rear view mirror.

"It's good." She answered shortly, giving them absolutely nothing in elaboration. Collins and JJ exchanged sly glances with each other out of the corner of their eyes.

They'd sort of been ruminating on the status of their two friends for a while now. JJ had his intel and so did Collins, but both of them knew that neither one of them could ever go back to their friends and relay what was said by the second party. And so they meddled, but they tried not to play a hand in a game that wasn't theirs to play. Shifting in her seat, Collins continued, "Yeah, but, by good, you mean what exactly?"

Before Kie could reply, JJ interjected, "Is he like, kinda freaky in the bedroom 'cause it's Pope?" Clearly, JJ's curiosity was a bit more specific than Collins's was and his questioned only reflected just how off track they were. Forget being on different pages, JJ was on a whole other book.

"That was in fact, not at all what I was asking."

Finally twisting in her seat, Kie faced him with a scowl formed across her expression. "Collins, can you shock him? Or flick him on the nose? Anything to control your dog."

"I'm just spitballing, here." JJ protested, shrinking back into his seat with false innocence.

"You don't need to spitball. We can just sit in silence." Kie told him, facing forward in her seat once again and checking out the house for any movement.

"Ranking wise, though," Kie rolled her eyes just at the sound of JJ's voice. He just never knew when to quit, did he? "Is John B better?"

"What?" Collins and Kie both spoke simultaneously in appall.

Before anyone could say another word, Pope was sprinting back to the car, swiftly sliding back into his seat only slightly out of breath as he looked at them and said, "Phase one is complete." They all tried their best to not look like he'd just returned in the middle of an awkward conversation, but they might've been overdoing it because no one could look each other in the eye.

That brought them to phase two, which meant lots and lots of waiting. Mostly for nightfall, because what kind of scheme would it be if it wasn't, but also because they couldn't go anywhere out of range of Pope's phone that was still sitting in Gavin's car. This led them to having to come up with ways to pass the time. And also time to work themselves up the nerve to call Gavin and put some pressure on him without foiling their own plan by stuttering over their own words. That took longer than anything.

With her legs stretched out across JJ's lap, Collins used her phone as a flashlight to illuminate her notes while she quizzed JJ on simple sentences in Spanish. He didn't like it, but Collins had insisted on doing something and this way, she could kill two birds with one stone. "Donde esta el jabon?" She asked him to translate.

Thinking hard for a moment, JJ shook his head and shrugged. "Where is the bathroom?" To be honest, he'd grown bored with her questions ever since she'd initially pulled the binder out of her backpack. But seeing as there was very little else to do and JJ couldn't ever really say no to Collins, he'd suffered through it. And that he did, suffer, immensely.

Collins cast him a blank look. "JJ, that's like the fourth time you've used that as an answer." Clearly they were going to need to spend more time working on his fluency if he wanted to pursue his dream of fleeing to the Yucatán. She didn't mind the study dates if it meant that they could still spend time together. If they couldn't see each other during school then studying afterwards in between exonerating John B was going to have to do.

"Well I figure that at some point it'll be right so I don't want to start switching it up now."

"I said, 'where is the soap.'" Collins informed him. "Jabon is soap."

"Okay, see," JJ sighed. "I'm never gonna need to know that word in real life. The only word I'll need to know is dinero, because I only speak money, baby."

Collins narrowed her eyes at him while Kie growled, "Where is the off button on that thing?"

"Maybe we should just get this plan started with." Pope cut in before Kie could bite JJ's head off. "Kie, why don't you call him?"

"Wait, why does she get to tickle?" JJ protested. Seeing as he'd been named the best liar in the group, didn't it make more sense for him to be the one to make the call? Plus, why did Kie get to have all the fun? The whole ordeal felt like old times when they'd prank call random contact numbers. Pope had to have been playing favorites.

"Why do we have to use the word 'tickle'? It makes my skin crawl. No more using that word." Collins shuddered after the word had left her own mouth. It had about the same effect on her as the word 'moist' did on other people and she'd just about reached her limit on its usage that day.

Her demand went ignored. "Look, Kie's the best at it." Pope insisted, finalizing their terms.

"Should I do an accent?"

Pope nodded affirmatively. "Definitely, disguise your voice."

In an English accent, Kie asked, "Disguise my voice like how? Would you like me to talk like this?"

"Absolutely not." JJ said bluntly.

"Maybe if you were a poor Victorian-era child peddling on cobblestone streets." Collins remarked distastefully in agreement with JJ.

Quirking her brow, Kie offered next in a low and gravelly voice, "Batman?"

Collins smiled, flashing Kie a thumbs up while the others gave her their nod of approval. As Kie dialed the number to Gavin's work phone number that they'd found in their thorough Google search, they waited nervously for the click.

"Hello?"

"Hello." Kie spoke between a growl and a grunt. Just as the word left her mouth she winced and shook her head. They all silently agreed that the voice was a no-go. "Is this Gavin?" She said with her normal voice.

"This is Gavin, who's this?"

"I know what happened on the tarmac." She said gravely. "It was Rafe Cameron. But you already knew that and you lied about it. We're gonna prove it. You're guilty." Shivers crawled up Collins's spine at her message. If Gavin wasn't shaking in his boots, she certainly was.

"Okay, you're gonna tell me who this is, right now." Gavin threatened, his voice louder and his voice meaner through the speaker.

Somehow, his tone didn't phase Kiara one bit. "You could have saved her Gavin, and you didn't. And you're not getting away with this." Deciding that she should leave the conversation on a foreboding note, Kie hung up the phone. She looked around at them for feedback. "How was that?"

"I was scared." JJ shrugged. "Good job."

"All right, we tickled the wire." Pope breathed a little breath in relief. "Phase two complete. Now we wait and listen."

"Pope, what did I say about that word?"

Right after she said that, they all became distracted by the car from Gavin's driveway backing out into the street. Quickly, the teens ducked down in their seats and tried to hide themselves from the window view as the headlights of Gavin's station-wagon flashed over them before speeding down the street. Intentionally waiting for a couple seconds to pass before starting her car, Kie shifted gears and made a U-turn to follow behind Gavin to wherever it was that he was heading at a respectable distance.

It was then that Pope sealed the connection between the AirPods in his ears and his phone that was hidden in Gavin's car, focusing intently on listening to every word that came through.

"He's talking to Ward." Pope informed them. As he tried to decipher the rest of the conversation, he furrowed his brows but couldn't make anything out with the audio breaking up the words into one big salad. "Get closer, I can't hear."

Kie slower moved forward, tailing closer to Gavin's car than what Collins was comfortable with. All it would take was one glance. If he so much as looked in his rear view mirror and realized they were following him, it was over. "Careful, Kie." Collins murmured, more out of her own worry than her thinking Kie wasn't being cautious. Collins's back wasn't even touching her seat from how far up she was sitting, the only thing holding her down was her seatbelt while she clutched the back of Kie's seat tightly. She was far too anxious to sit back and relax.

"He's talking about negotiating something— renegotiating." Pope corrected himself. He listened for a few more beats before his eyes widened. "Gavin's got the gun Rafe used to kill Peterkin."

"Holy shit." Kie whispered.

This was huge. The murder weapon was exactly what they needed. With it, they could finally get their hands on something that could actually exonerate John B. The police couldn't ignore physical evidence. There had to be ballistics connecting the gun to the murder, not to mention Gavin's role as a key witness to the whole thing. Or perhaps a more damning title would be accomplice.

"I think he's trying to use it as extortion, as leverage." Pope explained. "Wait, he's pulling over. He's panicking." Sure enough, Gavin's car was pulling off to the side of the road.

"Do I pull behind him? What do I do?" Kie asked them, beginning to panic herself.

Waving for her to keeping going, JJ hissed, "Just go, go around the block." Kie did as told, rounding a corner to circle around until they could get back behind Gavin.

As they moved further out of the line of sight on Gavin's vehicle, Pope fiddled with the AirPods, struggling listen. "I can't hear anything. I'm losing it, I'm losing the signal. I can't hear him."

"What the hell is this?" The road they'd turned on to appeared to be under construction, obviously unbeknownst to them. They weren't going to be able to get through the reflective traffic cones and barriers in place that were blocking their path.

"Just stop and turn around." Right as Kie was about to do so, a loud beeping came up from behind the car and they realized that an excavator had reversed into the street, leaving them trapped on both sides. "Seriously?"

Not wasting another second sitting in the car, Pope scrambled out of his seat after flinging the door open, and fled in the direction where Gavin was. "We have to know where they're meeting!"

"Let's go." Collins said, unbuckling her seatbelt with no hesitation before she took off after Pope. Not far behind her was JJ and Kie, leaving her car abandoned in the middle of the construction site, much to the workers' chagrin.

They snaked through fences and hopped over hedges, trying to get through the backyards separating them from locking signals with Pope's phone and Kie's AirPods.

Pope was just ahead of her, sprinting past someone's pool where laughter and splashes in the water paused for a moment to question the boy's appearance. It looked like some kids from school, but Collins was too busy trying to catch up with Pope to distinguish exactly whose yard she was standing in. Once she'd finally reached him at a stop near the bushes that sat across the street from Gavins' car, she read the focused expression on his face and gathered that he was finally able to hear the conversation through his earpieces again.

JJ and Kie caught up with them, too, equally out of breath and waiting expectantly for Pope to relay the information back to them. "He's meeting Ward right now. We gotta go."

It was back to the car they went. Pope had gotten the location of the meet up just in the nick of time, giving them their next solid lead to follow in continuation of their plan to prove John B's innocence. Apparently, Ward and Gavin had agreed upon meeting up at one of the construction sites for Cameron Developments. The building where it was located was in the middle of town, though with how late it was, no one was around to see the exchange go down expect for the four teens hiding in the alleyway. If anyone was going to witness criminal activity in place, it was going to be the Pogues.

Peeping over a fence in the alleyway across the street from the construction site, Collins blinked hard to clear her vision through the raindrops falling onto her face. A storm had decided to drop in on them, making their stake out so much more miserable than they needed it to be. Her clothes were drenched and her body was beginning to shiver, but they couldn't leave until Ward actually got there so they could catch him in the act. If only he could just get there sooner so they could finally get out of the downpour and under a roof where it was dry.

"Nice camera." JJ complimented sarcastically at Pope. "Where'd you dig up that relic? Why don't you just use your phone?"

"Well, first of all, I like my antique electronics." Pope protested, holding the device in his hands defensively. That was probably the nerdiest thing Collins had ever heard him say to be honest. "Second of all, this is a telephoto. It allows me to get a close image from far away. For definitive proof of witness payoff, we're gonna need quality glass."

Just when they thought neither of them were going to show, a figure was spotted sprinting down the sidewalk. By the brief glance at him that they got, they could tell that it was Ward, and only a couple seconds after, Gavin came running after him. They sought shelter by disappearing into the building and out of sight, leaving the Pogues helpless in seeing any part of their encounter.

"Shit. Where's he going? I can't see anything from here."

Looking around JJ searched for a solution around them, disappearing momentarily from Collins's side to follow an idea. He quickly came back, whistling at them to get their attention and wave them over to where he stood. "Hey, I found something. We gotta go up top." He pointed to a ladder leading up to the roof of the building they'd been standing next to.

"Always the problem solver." Collins praised, climbing up after Pope.

"Hurry. We don't want to miss anything."

Once all four of them had made it, they crouched down behind the ledge and spied across the street with a much better view of what was going on. The room in which Ward and Gavin were conversing in was illuminated by one of the fluorescent lamps the construction workers had left behind for the night, allowing them to perfectly see all that was going on without the darkness prohibiting them.

"You getting anything, Pope?" JJ asked the boy, watching as Pope fiddled with his camera while he held it up to his eye and focused in on the suspicious figures.

"Ward just handed Gavin something." Pope reported.

"Guys. I think this is a payoff." JJ deduced, and by the looks of things, he might've hit the nail right on the head with that statement. The murder weapon that could put Rafe and Ward away for enough money that Gavin could live comfortably off of for however long he could live with himself.

"Gavin doesn't look happy about something. It looks like he's yelling at Ward." Pope described to them. He could see the expressions better through the camera lens than they could with their naked eyes. "I don't know why, but he sure looks mad."

"What's going on?" Collins questioned, squinting to try and make out the scene ahead of her but finding it difficult to in the heavy rain.

Pope jerked up, watching intently as something happened. "They're fighting over something. They're really going at it. Ward's kicking the shit out of Gavin. Holy shit. Ward's got a gun now."

"I bet that's the murder weapon."

The next instance didn't take a camera for them to see what happened next. There was a quick flash that was gone in less than a blink of an eye, followed by a second, and then only one figure was left standing in the dimly lit room at the construction site across from them.

Collins fell flat against the cement ledge, ducked behind it as the shock of what had just happened took over her whole entire body. She gasped for a breath that she couldn't seem to catch, and her heart beat harder and faster to try and compensate for the lack of oxygen the rest of her body was no longer getting. She didn't realize it at first, but everyone else had fallen into the same position as her, stuck in a state of panic as a result of what they'd just witnessed.

"No, that did not just happen." Kie cried, naively hoping that if she said it out loud, she could somehow manifest it into a reality.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Collins simultaneously tried to keep the water out of her eyes while also trying to pull herself together. No way did they just watch a man die. As if things weren't already serious enough. "For all we know it didn't kill him. It could've been a graze, or it could've missed something important." She could try to convince herself that that was true, but no one shoots someone twice unless the first shot didn't give. The second fire is meant for security, to ensure that the purpose behind the firing is served. To guarantee that the person they are shooting actually dies. A double tap.

"Tell me you just got that." JJ said to Pope, his breathing was erratic, but he was still holding this sort of stoic look on his face. He didn't feel all that sorry about the whole thing to be honest. Gavin was still a dirtbag for sitting back and letting John B get the heat for Peterkin's murder when he knew the truth and had the evidence to prove it. He didn't have to die, but if they had the whole shooting caught on film, they could pin Ward for two crimes. Justice for Gavin, Peterkin, and most importantly, John B.

"Enough to put this asshole away for life." Pope stated. He was the only one daring enough to pop his head back over the ledge to keep the camera pointed right at Ward. Meanwhile, Collins, JJ and Kie were still slumped up against the wall.

"You have enough right? Can we please get the hell out of here?" Collins begged. They needed to get help. Gavin was probably wasting away by the second. Not only that, but Collins couldn't stomach sitting there any longer. She felt like if she did, she might curl into a ball and never leave that roof to avoid returning to the nightmares in the world awaiting her. Now that they had incriminating evidence against Ward, what would stop him from giving them the same fate that he gave Gavin?

Before Pope could grant her request, he leaned in like he was trying to get a better look and said, "Wait, he's coming out." Collins moved just enough to poke her head up to see Ward fleeing the building, but not running straight away like they wouldn't anticipated. "I think he's looking for the gun, it must've fallen down. Hold on, I think it just went down the drain. He's looking for it."

Ward had his arm deep between the grates of the sewer cover, a few inches deep in the water pooled around it from the unrelenting rain. Before any of them realized what she was doing, Kie stood up straight on top of the building, cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, "What is wrong with you? Murderer!"

They all scrambled to pull her down in panic. She'd definitely grabbed Ward's attention by the way he was frantically looking around to find the source of the yell. She might've just blown their cover. "Kiara!" JJ hissed. "What are you doing, are you crazy?"

"I don't care if he hears me, he's a murderer!" She protested.

"Yeah, and he's gonna murder us, Kie!"

"Guys, he sees us. We gotta go, he's coming!" Pope clambered up onto his feet, the rest of them following in suit as they made their urgent escape before Ward could get to them first.

Collins was the first to get to the ladder. She eased herself onto the rungs, one foot at a time, trying not to slip from how wet everything was. But they needed to be quick and so there really wasn't much time to take things slow, therefore Collins couldn't help the knot of anxiety in her chest that pulsated like her racing heart at being rushed to move with haste.

She'd only managed to get about halfway down when she heard someone cry out, right before she felt something heavy drop on top of her, causing her to lose grip of the ladder and fall straight towards the ground. She fell onto the concrete with a hard thud, a sudden ripping sensation overcoming the muscle on her shoulder blade that radiated to her arm. For a good moment, all Collins could do was lay there, holding where it hurt with a tense grimace in pain. She tried to catch her breath but the wind had been knocked out of her. Nothing felt broken, but based on what she was feeling, there must've been some pulled muscles that were sure to bruise in shades of blue and purple that the human body should never have.

"Shit, are you okay, Collins?" It was unclear who had said it as Collins felt like there was a muffling over her ears that was making it difficult to hear things properly. It could've been the rain or maybe she'd hit her head on the way down for all she knew. Either way, she didn't even know if she'd responded because she couldn't even tell if any words had left her mouth.

JJ should've been the one to have gotten the worst of it, seeing as he'd only just started climbing down before Kie had crushed his hand under her shoe and he'd taken the fall from the near top of the ladder. Except he'd been lucky enough to have Pope under him as a cushion when they'd collided with the ground, but then Collins had gotten the most unfortunate end of the ordeal by having both of them fall on top of her. As far as domino effects goes, this was the worst.

"It's fine. I'm fine." Collins grumbled, rolling over her unaffected side and carefully pushing herself up with one hand to stand with JJ's help. She didn't even have to look behind her to know it was him purely based off of how low his grip on her was. "Tell me the camera's okay."

Pope held pieces of the camera in devastation. "Are you kidding me?" JJ exclaimed. "You fumbled it?"

"You kicked me in the face!" Pope protested.

"She stepped on my hand!" JJ shot back, pointing accusatorially at Kie.

"I was trying to hurry." Kie defended herself.

Clearly, all this back and forth wasn't helping them. It wasn't going to fix the camera and so their priority was getting the hell out of there. "Guys, he's coming. We need to go now." Collins pushed them to get moving, corralling them away from the building.

Finally in agreement, the four of them sprinted over to the fence standing behind them and hopped over it one by one. Collins muscled through the pain of the throwing herself over and ignored the sharp, stabbing pain that screamed whenever she put pressure on it. All that mattered was that they were gone before Ward could catch them, and by the time they'd all gotten over the fence and started sprinting back to Kie's car, it was only once she was inside did Collins feel like she could finally take a breath. Only it was hard to catch one through pants after how far they'd run to get back to the car with all the adrenaline pumping through them. 

Collins felt a little sorry that they were getting Kie's seats all wet, but the sentiment was completely overtaken by the sheer shock that they were all still in. No one had the stamina to think of anything in a coherent way.

JJ was the first to break the silence, blurting out loudly, "Can someone fill me in on what the fuck just happened? Did he find it? Did Ward find the gun?"

Pope was too busy to answer as he was more preoccupied with what Kie was doing. "Kie, who are you calling?"

"Who do you think? Who else am I supposed to call?" Kie responded pointedly, her hands shaking as she punched the number into her phone.

"Why would you call the police? That's Ward!" JJ said with a raised voice.

"Someone just got shot, guys! We have to call someone, we have to do something." Collins stated firmly. They couldn't forget that vital fact. How were they supposed to go home and do nothing when they knew what they did?

Silencing them all with her finger, there was a click and a greeting from the Sheriff's office that barely finished their words before Kie was rambling off into the speaker. "Hello? Somebody's been shot at the Grand Street construction site! You guys need to hurry because he's dying. I don't know if he's already dead or not. You guys just need to hurry!"

She ended the call and sighed in exasperation, just as JJ began to usher them to move. "We gotta go. We're sitting ducks here."

"But we have to make sure they help him." Collins protested. "I dont know about you guys, but that call sounded pretty sketch. I wouldn't blame them for thinking it was just some prank call and not even bother sending someone out to check."

"Did you guys forget that this is Ward we're dealing with? All the cops you're asking to save this guy are basically working for the man who offed him in the first place!" JJ shook his head in discord with them. "Without the camera, we've got nothing on him."

"We have a body and we have a motive. That's plenty enough to get the ball rolling against Ward." Collins argued. "There's no way Ward's paying off every officer in the county."

"She might be right." Pope admitted, though all of them could agree that they did not want to go back there. "It's a risk, but we should at least make sure that they find him. If it really was the same gun used to kill Peterkin that Ward just used to shoot Gavin, that could be evidence enough to link the two together and help them realize that Ward and Rafe are their criminals."

"So Gavin being shot with that gun tonight could be all the proof we need to prove John B innocent. He couldn't have used a gun from a prior murder to shoot a man in a town he's not even in." That would at least mean that this night wasn't a total bust. They could've still actually done something to save John B, though of course, it had been at the expense of someone's life. Was Gavin's death a burden that they should've been carrying?

Collins's rationale seemed to be fairly convincing enough to get them all to agree with her to go back to the scene of the crime. Granted, they'd spent a long time just sitting in the car to try and build up the courage to go there, but they'd eventually returned nonetheless. They all felt sick to their stomachs, but it needed to be done. If Collins's hand wasn't intertwined with JJ's, it probably would've been shaking uncontrollably.

As they pulled up to the building, there were cop cars already parked in front with all their flashing lights just waiting. Once all of the Pogues had climbed out of the car, they were almost instantaneously greeted by Schoupe himself, though his face told them that this wasn't by any means an instance where warm welcomes were granted. As the newly appointed sheriff, he must've taken it upon himself to check out the scene for the reported murder. It also wasn't like they had very many homicides in Kildare County to begin with before Peterkin.

"I should've known you bunch were the ones behind all of this." Schoupe shook his head at them and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Just listen to us, okay? We'll show you exactly where it happened." The teens rushed to lead Schoupe to where they'd witnessed Ward shoot Gavin, bursting through the unoccupied building and running up the flight of stairs to prove to Schoupe that they were telling the truth.

But once they finally reached the top level, confusion replaced the urgency in each of their faces. The place was empty. There was no crime scene, no body, no blood, no sign of any altercation ever taking place. It was just a construction site.

Pointing to the far end of the room, Kie said, "Look, his body was right here. This is where the maniac shot him, where he claimed his next victim."

It even sounded insane to the rest of the Pogues as they heard it, but they knew what they saw. They just couldn't explain why it was no longer there. Clearly, that wasn't enough to convince Schoupe, leaving him skeptical and even more pissed off at them than he usually was.

"Next victim?" The new sheriff scoffed in disbelief. "Uh-huh, and how long ago did you say this happened?"

"45 minutes ago."

"Okay, so Ward Cameron just popped one off and shot him? Execution style? And then he cleaned it all up in 45 minutes?" Questions followed up by more questions was never a good sign. Clearly Schoupe wasn't buying what they were selling.

Of course, that seemed to be the only logical explanation for the mystery of the disappearing body. No way could Gavin have picked himself off the floor and left without contacting the police himself and leaving a trail of blood behind him. Ward had to have covered up his act to protect himself.

"That's exactly what we're saying. We filmed the entire thing." Schoupe raised his brow, intrigued by Kie's statement. "But we can't show it to you because I stepped on JJ's hand, and then he kicked Pope, so Pope fell on Collins and dropped the camera, which was a piece of shit, so it broke."

Holding up the broken pieces of what was left of his camera, Pope showed it to Schoupe. "This is a telephoto, we needed it for long distance imaging. But I fell, and it broke so the video is basically unusable."

"But we were there. We witnessed the whole thing." JJ insisted. Plenty of people have witnessed things and only had what they'd seen with their own eyes to back them up. Here were four different individuals who would attest to seeing Ward Cameron murder the pilot of his plane.

However, their hi온라인카지노게임 with law enforcement made them less than credible sources to be following leads on. "So the dog ate your homework? Look, I don't know what you kids expect me to do with this. You drag me out here in the middle of the night for a whole lot of nothing except some crazy stories about how Ward Cameron's out on a random killing spree!"

"We're not making this up! It wasn't random, Gavin was his pilot. He was paying him hush money because he was on the tarmac that day." Collins tried to explain it in the most logical way that she could to get even just the tiniest part of Schoupe to believe in them. All they needed was to plant the seed if that was the last thing they could do.

"Gavin was blackmailing Ward because he had the gun that Rafe used to kill Peterkin?" Schoupe quirked his brow while trying to clarify the 온라인카지노게임 that Collins had just spun for him.

"Then he called him here and tried to pay him off, but it wasn't enough so he shot him! With the murder weapon."

Collins's mouth fell open and she sighed to herself in frustration as she realized that they had her another major hole in their 온라인카지노게임: no actual murder weapon to back them up. It had been flushed away into the sewers, otherwise out of their possession. Now all they had was full fledged desperation. "You have to believe us. How could we make this up?"

"How did you guys know all this in the first place?" Schoupe asked them.

"Pope did this thing with his phone and he put it in his car, he heard the whole conversation." As soon as Collins heard Kie try to explain it, she knew that it sounded really bad. Schoupe was not going to be any happier with them than he already was.

She hated to be right. Schoupe's eyes widened. "You wiretapped him? You know what? I've had enough." He shook his head, waved them off, and started to leave.

JJ scowled at him while they followed after him out of the building. "What are you talking about, Schoupe, you're just gonna walk away?"

"You ever heard about the boy who cried wolf? Waste of my goddamn time." Unfortunately, yes, and they were a prime example of the 온라인카지노게임. The only difference was that both times, they were actually telling the truth, they just didn't have any proof to back them up. Schoupe was fuming. Once they'd emerged out of the building he addressed all of the other deputies outside and announced, "There's nothing there. False alarm. Let's all go home."

Watching in despair as everyone started getting back into their cars and driving away, Kie turned to Schoupe and continued to plead with him. "Look, I know this sounds crazy, I know! But why can't you believe us just this once?"

Facing them with a serious expression on his face, Schoupe appeared almost empathetic despite his continuous efforts to dismiss every single word of theirs. "Hey, I know you're upset, and I know you think that your friend is innocent. But you weren't there. The only actual witnesses who are above ground say the exact opposite, alright? And both of them have a hell of a lot more credibility than any of you right now. I saw your little art project on Ward's wall, do not do that again. It's gonna make things a lot harder for both of us."

Collins furrowed her brows, and caught the shame that crossed both Kie and Pope's faces. Apparently they'd adopted some hobbies of their own during the last few days of summer. With those as his final words, Schoupe eventually left them, leaving them to become nothing more than shrinking figures in his rear view mirror.

Kicking his feet as he walked, JJ shook his head in dismay. "I told you this would happen. You just had to drop the camera, huh, Pope?"

Scrunching her face in disagreement, Kie snapped, "It was your fault."

"Guys, can we please not play the blame game?" Collins felt like she was lifeguarding again and trying to settle a dispute between children. Nothing that they were doing was going to solve anything.

Ignoring her completely, JJ shot back, "My fault? Why do you always take his side? Why do you never take mine?"

"No, I don't! Shut up!"

"Hey!" The sharp edge in Pope's voice broke up their fight and finally got JJ and Kie to go quiet. With their bickering at an end, Pope spoke and said, "We're not out of this yet. We can still go get the gun."

They followed his gaze downward to where the sound of running water resonated through the metal grate covering the sewer drain. Printed on the curb in worn out white paint, were the words 'drains to ocean' written above it, and already did Collins feel a sickening lump at the bottom of her stomach that they were going to be in for even more chaos than Pope's idea of 'light espionage' entailed.