White Shadows

Chapter 8 - Holiday

***ALEX***

Park doesn't tell Jensen about his wife's surprise reappearance right away - not over the phone, anyway. He waits until the man himself arrives to tell him, and when he does so, Jensen nearly falls over from sheer surprise.

"Is he telling the truth?" he asks, turning to look at me with wild eyes.

Mutely, I nod.

"Oh my God," Jensen says. He repeats that phrase a few more times before finally getting down to business. After hanging up on his call, Park went over and handcuffed the gunman with a plastic zip-tie conveniently placed in his back pocket. He also searched the guy's parka and found two more guns concealed in inside pockets, as well as something tiny that causes all the blood to rush out of his face on sight.

"What is it?" I ask Park, unsure why we should be scared of the little device.

"It's an ultralight bomb," he whispers, his voice a little ragged. "Basically, a mini-nuke. If you press the button on that thing, you have ten minutes before it releases a cloud of aerosolized pure hydrogen. Then the nuclei fuse and everything within about sixty feet gets incinerated."

"And irradiated?"

"Actually, there's no radiation."

"Whew," I say. "So that doesn't sound so bad."

Unable to tell if I'm joking or not (hint: I'm not), Park just heaves a sigh and lends a hand as Jensen pulls the gunman to his feet, then takes him to his van. As we pile into the van as well, Jensen backs the immense vehicle out of the narrow parking space into which he's managed to wedge it and thanks us for helping to take the guy down. (I feel like I didn't do much more than screw up, but I don't tell him that.) Jensen also says that, for the time being, Annie and Harlan are not to know that we saw their mom. "We can't distract them," he says. "They've got enough to be occupied with at the moment."

"Understood," Park says.

I mumble something in agreement.

Park then leans forward and says, "You know, I'm kinda surprised at you, Alex. I mean, when this guy started shooting, everyone else hit the deck. But not you. You barely flinched."

"I lost the water," I say, staring out the side window.

"But you stood your ground," Park points out.

"And I wouldn't back down?"

Leaning forward and clapping me on the shoulder, Park says, "You got balls, kid."

"That's a new one on me," I say, turning away from the window. Park grins at me, but then when I see Jensen, his face looks more like a pained rictus than an impressed smile.

"Yeah," he says, his knuckles turning white for a second as he steers the van around a sharp turn and onto the main road. "What he said."

A few minutes later, we're back at the condos. "You wanna come in with us?" Jensen asks as he takes the keys out of the ignition. "There's nobody home next door, so unless you wanna be all by yourself-"

"Yeah," Park interrupts, "and if you come in with us, you can watch us interrogate him." He jerks his thumb at the prisoner, who's been sitting silently with a filthy look on his face the whole ride.

"No, I'll pass," I say. "Not really interested in seeing scrivs get waterboarded, thanks."

Somehow, this is funny enough for Jensen and Park to burst out laughing. "Hahaha...no," the former says eventually. "No torture. The only way he'll get hurt or killed on our watch is..." He glances shiftily in the prisoner's direction before whispering, "If he kills himself."