Rrinkers

Chapter 4

"Does anyone know why this meeting was called?"

Crickets...Crickets were the only thing that could be heard when no one said a thing. All the FBI agents were sitting in the black chairs of the largest conference room in the building. There must have been thirty chairs, well, twenty-nine, because Valencia was still outside, talking to the Carlow chief of police.

"How long does Valencia plan to be out there? We've already been here for fifteen minutes!" One of the hot headed FBI agents said as she rolled her eyes at Valencia's careless actions. The truth is, Valencia was careless. He would call an urgent meeting and himself be late by half an hour. He would say one thing but do another. He would promise to do one thing and then either forget about it or change his mind last minute. Not to say that he was not a great FBI agent. Nonsense. He was the greatest agent/assistant director that the FBI had ever seen; he had over twenty-five years of law enforcement experience with five of them serving in the air force and the last five, serving as the chief of police. Despite all that, he could still work on his people skills.

"If he doesn't come in the next two minutes, I'm leaving this room and not coming back," said another agent. "I need to program my new device to catch this bastard that's terrorizing our city, and I can't very much do that sitting with my legs crossed in a conference room." He seemed to get the other agents motivated as well as they all nodded their heads and showed approval with their body language.

Lucas had sat quiet this entire time. He sat with San on one side of him and Tyler on the other which made it a great opportunity for him to look at them both before not hesitating to stand up from his chair and say, "Mark, sit the fuck down. You too, Jenna! You guys don't know shit about what Valencia is doing out here, and I know that he's annoying at times, but he is still the damn assistant director so like him or not, if he said it's urgent that we meet in this conference room, that means it's urgent."

Right when he was saying that last sentence, Valencia walked in the room. "Well Red, I didn't know you felt that way about me. I'm kind of concerned that you might love me too much for your own good."

Some of the agents laughed, including Tyler. Valencia was a lot of things but not funny wasn't one of them. He sure could make a crowd laugh. Well, except the two agents, Mark and Jenna, who kept their pissed off faces on because they had to wait too long for Valencia to come into the conference room.

"All right!" Valencia started. "Thank you all for waiting for me, I had some very important business to take care of with the Chief. He wanted this investigation on us because he didn't have the "resources" and the "budget" to tackle it." He put air quotes around the two words to emphasize his point. "What I told him was that we are on the same boat as he is; we also don't have the budget to tackle this big of a problem. But...that doesn't mean that we shouldn't go offensive on this. So...I made a deal with him. If he provides me with men for some operations, I will gladly take on the investigation process and apprehension."

"And women," Jenna said from her chair, still having her straight face on.

"What?"

"You said 'if he provides me men,' but I think what you meant was men and women."

Valencia was a little taken aback by her comment, especially in front of a lot of agents. "Watch your tone with me, Cook. You know I respect women in this workplace. If I didn't, I wouldn't have hired and promoted you."

Lucas and Tyler sat in their chairs, happy that she got what she deserved while everyone had an "o" look on their face similar to the one in the high school cafeteria when there was a roast battle and someone just made a fire comeback. It felt weird to Lucas that he was on Valencia's side. If this was any other situation, he would find himself the one roasting Valencia and actually doing it in a way that made sense, not in a stupid way like Jenna was doing right now. Lucas was glad that Valencia said that because it made her sit quietly back in her seat.