Danny Reagan made a promise to his partner the day her brother died- that he would never let her down. So when Maria Baez becomes pregnant and later kidnapped by a mystery man with a broken past, he goes in too deep and takes matters into his own ha...
Hearing his partner's frantic voicemail that next morning was almost the last straw. Danny rushed from the house back to the precinct and furiously went through the files over and over, hoping to find something he may have missed.
"Come on, you son of a bitch!" he hissed, scrolling through the system on his computer.
He paused. He found a familiar name- Diego Santino.
Of course; if his cousin's family members were documented as New York citizens, then their paperwork, along with their local history, would still be in the city records.
Danny rushed up to the department of records as quickly as the city traffic would allow him and was granted access the second he pulled out his badge.
Unfortunately there were about a dozen different Santino's on file. He grabbed them all from the shelf in a huff and started flipping through the first few. His eyes scanned through paper upon paper, trying to find Diego's name.
At last he found him, in the fifth or sixth file, listed as the only child of Jose and Florica Santino.
To Danny's dismay, the couple had recently departed the country after the death of their son to return to their country, which explained the red marking on the folder. The staff was probably getting ready to archive the family's records from the system.
He scanned the papers one more time and caught something- the residency & address list, with only one location on it.
Was it possible Villegas was there? Where it had all started? After remembering what Ledezma had told him about him, it seemed plausible that he only place he'd end up would be the apartment he grew up in and kept his inner demons bottled up inside until he lost control?
Danny was just going to have to find out.
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The apartment house was small, but appeared to have been suited with multiple suites for a number of families. Now it appeared the entire complex was condemned and deserted, with the door chained and windows barred and locked.
Danny noticed the small alleyway separating the building from its neighbor to its right. IF there was no way for anyone to get in the conventional way, then Villegas probably snuck in through a side entrance.
He snuck behind the corner of the wall and peered out into the open space of the alley. There was a single door, and it was opened just a crack. Quickly he slipped inside and found himself in a darkened hallway.
Right away he saw an old wooden staircase in the center of the room, and then on each side a faint light hinting the entrance to two other halls leading to all the empty apartments on this floor.
As Danny was taking a moment to try and decide which way to go, he got his answer. A faint but familiar female voice was coming from upstairs.
"Baez!" He quietly hurried up the steps, following his partner's sounds of distress to a slightly opened door. He snuck inside pulling his gun from its holster.
Step by step he inched his way across the empty front room, looking around at the remnants of chipped paint and broken pieces of small furniture. A dilapidated cased opening stood on the right side towards the end of the wall, and within the next room there was a man's silent murmuring. Beneath it, Danny could make out a woman's heavy anguished breathing.
Bracing himself for confrontation, Danny gripped his piece in his hand and burst in.
"Don't come any closer!"
Tyrus Villegas stood there waiting with a gun of his own, the barrel pressed into the side of a terrified Baez's head, as he held her down to him by the shoulders.
"No one's gonna take my family from me," he trembled. "Not anymore."
