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“I’m not sure what you mean,” Buck says, and Chimney groans.
“Like, the rate at which weird shit happens to us, verses the average person.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Buck visibly considers this: he tilts his head from side to side a bit, brow creased in thought. “Well, we do have a job that means we, you know, get out there, interact with people more, when they’re not really at their best.”
Okay. Sure. But. “Do you think that San Diego firefighters get kidnapped this often?”
“You’re not kidnapped,” says their kidnapper. “You’re being held hostage.”
“Totally different,” Chimney agrees. Holding his hands above his head started making his arms tired a while back, and he’s been lowering them at incremental rates for the last hour. Now he’s finally able to rest them a bit against his head, and his deltoids sigh in relief. Or would, if they had mouths, and isn't that a disturbing mental image.
But things could definitely be worse. At least this guy isn’t actively trying to stop his heart. He definitely keeps threatening to kill them, but hasn’t yet, and he doesn't strike Chimney as a man overly burdened with follow-through. He hasn’t said what he wanted, but Chim assumes from their location (a jewelry store) and the evidence (the jewelry he keeps trying to shove into his pockets without looking, while keeping his gun pointed at Chim and Buck) that what he wants is to leave this store unmolested and sell his loot for pennies on the dollar somewhere.
And frankly, Chimney would let him, since he values not being shot a lot higher than he values a bunch of diamonds that aren’t even his, but unfortunately, situated as he is on his ass in front of the counter, Chimney doesn’t have the power to call off the cops.
“Is it that different?” Buck asks. “This is my second time being held hostage—well, third, if you count the naked lady that pointed a gun at me on the highway that one time—but I’ve never been kidnapped.”
“No, he’s right, it’s pretty different,” Chim admits. “Jonah at least had a plan.”
“Shut up,” says their hostage taker. “Or I’ll shoot.”
He’s wearing a camo sunhat, a bright green t-shirt that says save the frogs: realexjones.com and crocs with Pickle Rick croc charms. It’s not a very threatening combination. The guy probably can’t get a job that pays enough to move out of his parents’ basement, so he’s robbing jewelry stores about it. What a moron.
Due to the nature of the job, and the number of times there's been metal sticking out of him that shouldn't be there, Chim’s got a pretty hefty life insurance policy. But he flatters himself enough to think that Maddie, Jee, and the baby’s lives would be worse if he got killed by the Infowars idiot waving a gun. If he dies here, he's going to have to stick around on earth a little longer to haunt the fuck out of this guy.
Kevin will understand.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” He tries to sound as bored-yet-menacing as possible. What Would Liam Neeson Do? “My wife would be upset, and she’s a cold-blooded killer.”
Buck turns, a look of outrage on his stupid face. “What are you talking about, she was crying so hard after—” Chim tries to widen his eyes emphatically, and the penny drops. “But, uh.” The wheels spinning in Buck’s brain are almost audible. “You know who didn’t cry when they killed someone?”
Duh. “Athena,” Chimney says, at the same time Buck says “Eddie.”
They both pause. A brief whoop of a police siren can be heard outside.
“Wait. Who did Eddie kill?”
“Uh, ISIS?” Buck makes a duh face. Like Chimney is the guy Eddie shares traumatic war stories with. “Who did Athena—oh, right, Ethan.”
“And Amber.”
Buck lowers his hands a bit, then hastily raises them again when the gun gets turned on him. “I thought Maddie killed Amber.”
“Nah. Maddie took her down but Athena finished it.” They’re both still having a bit of trouble with that one, but Chimney’s not going to tell that to the idiot currently loading his pockets with gaudy engagement rings. “Though Maddie did think she’d talked a guy into killing himself.”
“I think Maddie deserves partial credit for Amber,” Buck says. “But Athena also killed that werewolf guy.”
Chimney frowns. “What werewolf guy?” He feels like he’d remember a werewolf guy.
“Don’t worry about it. You were rebar’d at the time.”
They’re definitely missing someone. Chimney thinks back through several years worth of disasters, traumas, petty treason and high-level drama. “Oh, and she killed Jeffrey!”
“Okay,” the guy says. “What the fuck is wrong with you people? Aren’t you supposed to save lives?”
Buck ignores him. “Chim, are we the only people on the team who haven’t killed anyone?”
Hm. “Well, Bobby—”
“Killed, what, 150 people?”
Right. “And Hen did for Evelyn.”
“Wow.” Buck leans back as far as he can without making the gun twitch. “Guess we are. It’s a real shame you left all the experienced killers free and clear.”
“Yeah, you better watch your back.”
“What the fuck,” the guy whispers.
“How long have we been in here, anyway?” Buck asks. “Chimney, can you see my watch?”
Chim cranes his neck so that he can get a look at it. Buck remains stupidly tall. “About four hours now.”
“Man, this dude’s gonna have to hurry up if he doesn’t want Eddie to get here before he’s done. Eddie’s got no patience for this shit, you should have seen him in the ambulance that one time—”
Uh. “Eddie’s in El Paso.” He wouldn’t have thought Buck would forget this, since he’s been carrying on about it like some kind of war bride for days now. On Chimney's couch.
“Well, yeah, but he’ll come back when he hears I got taken hostage without him.”
Hm. “Bit of a dirty trick, don’t you think?”
“Well, I didn’t ask to get taken hostage. It would be different if I'd gotten taken hostage on purpose.”
“Can you two,” the guy says, “please shut the fuck up.”
“Sorry, guy,” Chim says. “Can I call you Guy? You haven’t told us your name.”
“Sure,” Guy says. “Like Guy Fawkes.”
“No, like Ryan Reynolds in that one movie.” And speaking of people with that haircut–“Hey Buck, do you know if Tommy ever killed anyone? He was army.”
“Funnily enough, that isn’t like my go-to for pillow talk.”
Oh. That’s fair. “But it is with Eddie.”
Buck turns a funny color. “Shut up.”
“Thank you," says Guy. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”
They all go quiet for a minute. The police are probably gearing up for something; he can only hope they don’t come in guns blazing, because Chimney considers himself pretty spry, but not dodge-a-bullet spry. So far, Guy’s only negotiation offer was for the LAPD to let him go to the train station with everything in the store, and the police had shockingly not taken him up on it.
Currently, he’s fiddling with the glass case holding a collection of very expensive-looking watches. He tries hitting it with the cash register, and then kicking it in, and then, since apparently those were his only two options, raises his gun.
Chim and Buck both drop their hands.
“Oh shit–”
Guy fires.
Fuck, that’s loud. They cringe with their hands over their ears.
“Dude, none of us were wearing range-safe ear protection!” Buck hollers. “God!”
Chim’s ears are ringing too much to hear any activity outside, but they’re probably on higher alert now. It's probably too much to hope that Guy only has one bullet.
“I didn’t kill Jonah but I could have,” he realizes. “I took him down with the defib.”
“Who the fuck are you people?” Guy barely glances up from the watch case to scowl at them. He's got both his hands inside it, and if Chimney were Liam Neeson, this would be the moment to football tackle him. Unfortunately Chimney is not Liam Neeson.
Buck grins. “We're the 118! Hey it’s like that song kids sing at peewee soccer, you know, everywhere we goooo—” he looks between the other two, clearly waiting for a response. “And then Chim, you say it back.”
“Everywhere we go?” Chim asks.
“People wanna knowwwww.” Buck makes a conductor gesture, that he then tries to cover as putting his hands back up when Guy reaches for the gun. “You have to say that one too.”
It’s unlocking something in Chimney's brain. Some faint memory of high school basketball. He’d had a terrible haircut that year. “Oh, wait, I do know this one. Who we aaaare! So we tell them.”
“We’re the 118, the mighty mighty—”
That’s when the ladder truck bursts through the wall.
Chimney and Buck pull their feet as close to their bodies as they can as the truck barrels forward. It passes about three feet in front of them before squishing Guy against a sign advertising honeymoons in Guam.
Eddie sticks his head out the door. Hen and Bobby follow, like that scene from The Breakfast Club. “You guys okay?”
“Fine!” Buck says brightly. “You made good time.”
“Ravi called me.”
Buck and Chim look at each other. “We forgot Ravi,” they say, simultaneously.
The man in question climbs down out of the driver’s seat. “What about me? Oh, ew.”
They all look at the remains of Guy, splattered along the wall.
“Nevermind,” Chim says. “It’s still just us.”