Chapter Eleven
By: Winston deLeon
As Tammy and Jade waited for Rat Capone to come around from the chloroform, they sat on the floor, talking.
"So, what do you do when you're not setting traps for scumbags or stealing giant diamonds?" Tammy asked as she loosened and removed the black tie she had been wearing.
"Nothing in particular. Scavange for food, build machines, read books... nothing very interesting, I guess. I spend most of my time at home. Most people would probably think my life is downright boring. All but this past month, that is." Jade said.
"If you don't mind me asking, how'd you end up working for Capone?" Tammy asked.
"Capone found me when I was young." Jade said. "I was alone, and not doing very well. I was surviving by building and selling machines made from junk, just barely scraping a miserable living out of it. I was good at building stuff, but I sure wasn't much good at running a business. It was really more of a hobby than a living, though, and I kept at it because it was the only thing I really enjoyed doing. Something I built must have caught Capone's eye, because one day he walked into my workshop and offered me a job out of the blue. He said I could stand to get rich pretty quickly if I could prove to him that I was skilled at what I did. I had no idea what he meant, and I was pretty desparate for a good opportunity, so I took him up on it. By the time I found out he wanted machines to use in order to commit crimes, it was too late. I tried to tell him I wouldn't work for him, but he wouldn't let me leave. I ended up pretty much forced into being a slave, and it was years before I finally got the courage and the opportunity to escape."
Jade was silent for a few moments, loosening and removing the tie that she wore. When she done, she asked a question of her own. "And how did you end up working with the Rangers?"
"Ummm... actually, it started when they trashed my living room four years ago." Tammy said.
"Huh. Now there's a strange way to start the story... I assume there was a good reason they did that?" Jade asked.
"Well, they were airborne at the time, and they couldn't really help it." Tammy explained. "But anyway, they were trying to recover this artifact, the Maltese Mouse, from Fat Cat... you know who that is, right?"
"I've never seen him, but yes, I know who he is." Jade said.
"Okay. Well, after they practically destroyed the entire contents of my living room, the Rangers got roped into babysitting my little sister, Bink, so that my mom could focus on cleaning up the house. Bink's kind of a handful, so I went with, to help them..."
"You mean your mom made them babysit you, too, right?" Jade teased, reading the correct interpretation into Tammy's story, a bit to her annoyance.
"Yeah, yeah... whatever. It's not an important detail." Tammy said, rolling her eyes as she tried to quickly gloss over that point. "Me and Bink ended up helping the Rangers get the Maltese Mouse back, and after it was all over, Chip said that I might have what it takes to be a Rescue Ranger, so I've been working with them off and on ever since, especially in this last year since I graduated from high school, learning how to do all the detective work."
"Must be exciting." Jade commented.
"Yeah... most of the time." Tammy agreed. "Sometimes there's boring things that have to be done, though. To be honest, I thought that staking out the museum the night you stole the Devil's Eye would be one of those."
"Well, then... glad to make your life that much more interesting." Jade commented.
"Yeah, but I could have done without the chloroform. Don't be surprised if those guys complain about having wicked headaches when they wake up." Tammy advised.
After nearly an hour and a half of waiting, Rat Capone finally began to stir
slowly, though he didn't yet open his eyes. Just as Tammy was about to say something,
Jade noted the activity on her own, and rose from where she had been sitting
and quietly waiting. "Rise and shine!" Jade said loudly as she shook
the door of the cage, producing a metallic rattling sound.
Capone's eyes opened, dull and uncomprehending at first, but after a few seconds they flew open wider in panic as he realized where he was. He tried to stand up, only to fall back to floor of the cage halfway through the effort, tripped up by the steel cable binding his hands and feet. The two thugs in the cage with him began awakening at the disturbance he caused. Slowly, both of them came around, and after briefly struggling, discovered that the steel cable was far more than a match for their strength, and soon gave up, sitting quietly in the cage, though bearing surly looks of dull anger at their predicament.
"Good, now that everyone's back in the land of the living, we enter the final phase of my little operation." Jade said as she walked away in the direction of the light switch.
"What... What are you gonna do to us?" Rat Capone demanded, his voice noticably edged with both anger and fear. Jade made no reponse, but simply kept walking. "You know you can't get away with being a double crossing sneak like this... I got people all over the city, see, and they'll settle you, make no mistakes." Capone threatened idly, calling after her. Still no response as Jade went about whatever she was planning.
"Wouldn't do to suffocate ourselves, now would it?" Jade asked, though mumbling to herself more than speaking anyone in particular. For the second time, she ascended the rope ladder affixed to the electrical box on the wall, this time flipping the switch next to the one controlling the lights. A soft whirring sound drifted down as several ventillation fans in the ceiling came to life and began spinning up, pulling air out of the warehouse and venting it out the top of the building. A current of fresh air from the outside began to flow in, so subtle that it was almost unnoticable.
"Help me with this, would you?" Jade requested, grabbing a wooden plank from the smashed packing crate, dragging it across the floor, and tossing it into the pit. Tammy started to get an idea of what she was planning and gave her a hand, throwing in one piece of wood after another, and soon the whole of the lumber that used to constitute the packing crate was lying in a haphazard jumble in the bottom of the pit.
"Now for the special ingredient." Jade said. After vanishing behind the cluster of barrels that she seemed to stash everything behind, she emerged dragging a small unlabeled metal container. She tipped it and a clear liquid sloshed out of it and into the hole, soaking the wood.
The smell the stuff put off was vaguely familiar, but Tammy wasn't quite sure exactly what it was. "Gasoline?" She guessed.
"Not quite. Kerosene. A bit less explosive and slower burning. I just wanna catch the stuff on fire, no sense in risking a real explosion." Jade explained.
"You musta gone completely crazy since I last saw youse," Capone interrupted her, starting to sound desparate, "because you can't really be about to do what it looks like."
Jade didn't reply immediately, but she brought out a box of wooden matches and pulled one out, twirling it around idly as she walked slowly past the cage Capone and his thugs were imprisoned within. "Try and hold your tongue for a while and observe, Capone." Jade instructed him at last. "All things of the material world arise from dust and ashes, and to them they all eventually return. I'm simply speeding the process up for the benefit of illustrating your own foolishness to you."
"Whaddya you talkin' about?" Capone growled angrily. "What are you gonna do?"
"This." Jade said simply. She struck the match she was holding, and watched for a moment as the gob of chemicals forming the matchhead flared into dancing yellowish fire, then settled into the steady orange flame of burning wood. Once it was burning well, she casually tossed the match into the pit.
For an eerily silent fraction of a second, there was nothing, then, with a sudden loud thump of igniting vapors, a fireball briefly flared out, mushrooming upwards and dissipating. Heavy, dirty black smoke poured out, followed by tongues of dancing orange flames that grew steadily higher. The charactoristic crackling sound of fire started echoing up out of the pit.
The thick, dark smoke rose lazily up into the ceiling, where it was sucked out by the air vents and blown out into the dark night sky. A fire inside a building usually drew humans, which might have been trouble, but Tammy supposed that in the inky blackness of the night, no one would ever even notice the smoke, so they were safe enough from the possibility of the fire department interrupting the proceedings.
"No!!" Capone shouted, his voice carrying a note of anguish as his powdery white fortune started going up in smoke. His jaw hung in stunned silence for a few seconds. "That shipment cost me everything I had in the world..." His voice began to sink low with seething anger.
"Relax, Rat." Jade said calmly. "Enjoy the fire. The flames are beautiful, aren't they?"
Rat Capone simply slumped to the floor of the cage, staring silently at the sheetmetal with an angry scowl. He was clearly not enjoying the fire one bit. "Fine. Your loss." Jade said with a shrug. With that, she lay down on the concrete floor, propped herself up on her elbows, and smiled as she stared at the flames.
Soon, the kerosene burned off. The smoke became more sparse and turned from dirty grey-black to wispy white, indicating that the wood was doing all the burning now. Flames still leapt up from the pit, crackling eagerly as they devoured lumber and destroyed narcotics. The heat and exhaust from the fire in the air above the flames made everything being viewed through it shimmer and waver as it rose to the ceiling vents, a sickening updraft bearing the vapors of corrupt wealth being expelled from the building and replaced with fresh air at ground level.
For the next half hour, Tammy and everyone else in the room watched in silence as the fire burned, until at last the blaze ran low on fuel and the flames sank down, leaving a smoldering carpet of glowing charcoal embers that would soon be nothing but ashes.
"You might as well kill me now." Capone finally moaned pitifully.
"Yes, well... You've been exeedingly cruel to me, and maybe you even deserve it after the kinds of things you've done to some people... but I'm just not that vindictive." Jade said calmly.
"No, you don't understand. It's the Columbians. I only gave them down payments. If I don't finish paying off what I bought from them, they'll knock me off for sure... and now that I've lost the whole shipment, I can't get no loot to pay them off with, see?" Capone yelled angrily. "They're gonna skin me alive, you stupid - "
"Aww, you worry too much." Jade said with a dismissing wave. "After all... how are they going to get to you? A dangerous repeat offender like you will end up getting life in a maximum security facility, almost guaranteed. Probably Alcatraz, that's the closest one. And good riddance."
With one final wordless, strangled growl of frustration and dismay, Capone cast his eyes downward in defeat and fell silent. It was obvious that he didn't look upon prison as being a much better alternative. Tammy would almost have felt sorry for him, so pitiful was he in his utter defeat at this point, but she knew he wasn't getting anything he didn't deserve.
"Well, it's 1:30 in the morning, and I'm exhausted." Jade said, stretching and yawning as she got up off the ground. "It's been a very long day. I think we'll have to get some sleep and wait until morning to finish up."
"That might be a good idea." Tammy had to agree, who had been feeling decidedly sleepy herself for a while now. "But what about the three stooges over there? Is it a good idea to just leave them alone?" She worried.
"The cage they're in is engineered to tolerate three or four times the force that even Mousenegger could exert, even if he weren't tied up, and the vehicle itself has a parking brake, so they can't move the whole thing by shifting their weight back and forth inside. They'll be fine for a few hours." Jade appraised the situation. "Besides, I can't help but think that it would be better to show up at at Ranger HQ at an hour when everyone's likely to be awake."
"I suppose that's a good point." Tammy agreed.
After parking the vehicle imprisoning Capone behind the cluster of barrels and
pulling a heavy canvas dropcloth over it, then turning off the lights and airvents
in the warehouse, Jade and Tammy walked the short distance back to the building
that Jade's home was in, and took the elevator back up into the skylight.
"You can sleep on the couch." Jade said as they entered her living room. "It's pretty comfortable. I usually end up sleeping there anyway. Just use the blanket that's already on it." Indeed, there was a blanket laid out across the couch that Tammy hadn't noticed before, thinking it merely a covering for the cushions.
"Okay. Where are you going to be?" Tammy asked, not seeing a bed or any other rooms in which there might be one.
"I'll take the floor." Jade said.
"You don't have your own bed?" Tammy asked incredulously.
"Nope. Not enough space, with everything else I've crammed into this skylight. Besides, after the places Capone kept me locked up in, I've gotten rather used to sleeping on just about anywhere and on any surface, so it didn't ever really seem necessary to get one." She said, as she pulled a spare blanket and a small pillow out of her storage room and laid them out on the carpetted floor.
Jade turned off the lights, and in spite of being in a strange place and still somewhat apprehensive of everything that was going on, Tammy was too exhausted to lay awake worrying and fell easily into a dreamless sleep.
The next morning (which came all too soon, in her opinion, after a tiring day like yesterday), Tammy was awakened by Jade, shaking her softly by the shoulder. Tammy slowly opened her eyes and yawned, and noticed that Jade had changed out of the black button-down shirt she'd worn to meet Rat Capone in, and was now back in her plain grey long sleeved shirt once more.
"Time to get moving." Jade told her. Tammy sat up and looked at the clock in the corner. It indicated that the time was 7:30, and sunlight was coming in through several eastward-facing windows cut in the plywood that had been opened to admit the daylight. "I'd offer you breakfast, but I sorta don't have anything left around here to eat. We finished it all off last night." Jade said apologetically.
"That's okay," Tammy said, as she pushed off her blanket and got up, "I'll get something at Ranger HQ. Monty's probably making cheese omlettes or something anyway."
They returned to the warehouse and Jade pulled the dropcloth off her vehicle. Capone and his lackeys squinted briefly as the light of day fell upon them. Capone shifted a bit and cringed slightly with pain as he did. Evidently the night on the hard metal floor had not been kind to him.
"Sore?" Jade asked.
"Whaddya you care?" Capone said, sneering and staring back at her with eyes that were shot with red and darkened underneath with fatigue.
"I care because I want you to understand how it feels when you do these kinds of things to other people, and I want you to understand the chain of misery you start every time you do." Jade said.
"What kinda nonsense are you babbling about now?" Capone asked haughtily.
"In all the years I was stuck with you, Rat, I discovered so many things that you were too blind to ever see. For example, Let's say you rip off a mouse, make him turn over gold for a measly slice of cheese. That ruins his day. He heads home in a lousy mood and takes it out on someone. Maybe his wife or his kid. He yells at them, and it makes them feel rotten. That person takes it out on someone else, and the someone they take it out on carries that lousy mood around, too. The things we do spread out, like ripples in a puddle when someone drops a rock in it. That's the kind of chain I'm talking about." Jade explained.
"What do I care?" Capone snarled. "I'm in the middle of the puddle, the one making the ripples, so it's not hitting me, see?" He noted smugly.
"Are you so foolish?" Jade asked rhetorically, giving the bars of his cage an illustratory tap. Capone's face fell a bit as he seemed to realize the point she was getting at and that maybe she was right, but Jade continued and explained it anyway.
"The ripples don't stop when they hit the edge of the water, they bounce back. It might take awhile - maybe years - but what you send out eventually comes back to you. And what have you sent out? You've sent out misery and suffering, for what? So that you could accumulate your stupid little treasures? So that you could have things that just crumble away into dust and ashes in the end? Well, that's the choice you made, and now you can reap what you've sewn with your backbreaking hard work. So gather up your wealth of ashes and dust, if you want it so badly..." Jade reached into her pocket, withdrew a handful of something, and threw it in Rat Capone's face. It was dull, greyish powder, intermingled with some other brighter, sparkling powder, and Tammy knew what it was: A handful of ashes from last night's fire, mixed with a handful of glittering dust from the crushed Devil's Eye diamond. "... and feel the pain you've inflicted as it bounces back to you, starting with how sore I know you must be right now. The rest will probably come to you in it's own good time. Enjoy prison."
There had been nothing vengeful or malicious in Jade's voice as she had spoken, much to Tammy's surprise. It was as if she was acting impersonally, rather than speaking to someone who had tormented her for years. She must have been exerting tremendous willpower not to let her emotions bleed through, Tammy realized, in order to keep Capone from getting the satisfaction of knowing that he still got to her. It seemed to work. Capone sneezed and shook the pale grey powder off his face, but otherwise remained silent.
After throwing open the small door cut into the wall of the warehouse, Jade put a heavy sheet of canvas over the cage on her vehicle, and tied it down with strong thread, completely blocking Rat Capone and his two cohorts from getting any view of where they were going. "It'll stop them from knowing where the Ranger's headquarters is really located." Jade explained as she climbed into the driver's seat and motioned for Tammy to take the passenger side. "Wouldn't want to take an unnecessary risk like that, even if he is caged up."
Once Tammy had sat down and seatbelted herself in, Jade drove the vehicle slowly out onto the sidewalk, then picked up speed and headed for Ranger HQ. The trip was uneventful, and neither Jade nor Tammy spoke for some time.
Midway through their trip, as they drove along in silence, Tammy wondered what would become of Jade as soon as this whole business with Rat Capone was over. Would she just go back to being a reclusive machinist, hiding from the world in a skylight with her shelves full of books? It seemed like a shame to let the kind of talent that could pull off such an amazing heist and plot out such a great strategy for nabbing a dangerous criminal end up in so dull a fate. The Rangers were always on the lookout for people who had a willingness to help, and Tammy was getting the idea that Jade would most certainly be a valuable ally for the Rangers, if their differences could be settled. And how hard could that be? They were both working to help people, after all - why shouldn't they be combining resources? She set her mind determinedly on trying to bring them together.
"So... what are your plans once Rat Capone is off your hands?" Tammy asked, breaking the silence at last.
"I'm probably just going to drop him and his goons off and get going right away." Jade said with a small shrug. "Why?"
"You should stick around at headquarters for a while. I'll introduce you to the Rangers." Tammy offered. "And you can get some breakfast... erm, if you like cheese, that is..."
"I, uh... don't really have much time. I'm gonna have to be on my way again soon." Jade said evasively.
"I think they'd be very interested in meeting you." Tammy said, brushing past the flimsy excuse.
"Yeah... I'm sure they'd be thrilled to come face to face with the person who they think taunted them, humiliated them, and then rubbed it in their face afterwards. They'd be so happy to see me, I can already feel the cuffs tightening down on my wrists." Jade said.
"You know they wouldn't do that." Tammy said. "Not once you explain everything to them. Besides, they might need some information from you on exactly how you trapped Capone and pulled off this whole crazy scheme."
"I dunno, maybe they can get in touch with me sometime in the future if they really need to know anything... You know, at their convenience. I wouldn't want to impose on them..." Jade trailed off.
"I could have sworn that you were a mouse, not a weasel." Tammy mumbled, a little taken aback at Jade's attempts to dodge out a meeting.
"Excuse me?" Jade said, puzzled.
"You're trying to squirm your way out of meeting them for some reason." Tammy replied, making it clear that Jade's thin excuses were being recognized as such.
"Well, okay, so what if I am?" Jade asked, starting to show annoyance. "First, I don't feel like going to jail, and second, you'd be embarassed and uncomfortable too if you set up a group of people for a surefire humiliation they didn't deserve at your hands, and then you went to meet with them like nothing had happened. To tell the truth, I'm scared that they would feel like I was being insufferably arrogant. And besides, the thought of talking to them face to face is kind of intimidating, somehow." She admitted.
These comments caught Tammy by surprise, because they seemed so contrary to Jade's tough exterior. How could someone so confident and capable about pulling off a difficult theft and nailing a notorious criminal be that shy and insecure when it came to the Rescue Rangers? That was rather contradictory to some of the things she'd done, like a certain video tape, for instance. "If you're worried about that, why did you give that video to them?" Tammy asked, puzzled.
"Well, I thought it would be kinder to let them know the reality of the situation than let them be filled with false hope that they might be able to get the diamond back." Jade explained. "I didn't want to distract them from taking on new cases that mattered by leaving them hanging on an old one. I don't want anyone who needs help to suffer because the Rangers are tied up on account of my actions. At least that was the idea, anyway. In retrospect, I might have missed the mark a bit. Like, say, by a mile or so... I always seem to do that. When I'm nervous or apprehensive about something, I tend to put on an arrogant front to overcompensate and hide it, and I'm afraid that's probably how I've come off every time I've tried to communicate with the Rangers. You might have noticed that I get like that. I don't mean to, but I can't help it sometimes."
That demystified some of her behavior and explained the odd transition from overly confident to locking with panic, Tammy realized. Suddenly it also cast some of her other actions in a new light: The video wasn't a boast, it was an attempt at damage reduction and an apology, but the unconscious arrogant mask had obscured that. "You're sorry for what you've done?" Tammy asked.
"Yes, of course I am." Jade answered. "If I could have done everything without breaking the law or hurting anyone, I would have."
"Then why did you do things the way you did?" Tammy asked.
"Because I was doing what I thought had to be done. It was sort of a once-in-a-lifetime irresistable opportunity to accomplish many goals at once, I couldn't just let a chance like that slip away. I felt like it would have done more harm in the long run to everyone for me to sit by and do nothing." Jade said.
"Well, just explain it to them like that, and I'm sure they won't hold it against you. I know they won't. They care more about your heart being in the right place than anything else." Tammy tried to reassure her. "They'll understand once they get to know who you really are and what you were really doing."
"How can I be sure of that?" Jade asked apprehensively. "I've done something that I know they consider really bad, and they've probably taken it rather personally because of how I went about it. Why should they forgive me? How do I know this won't blow up in my face?"
"You'll just have to trust me this time. I trusted you just a little while ago, and I had less reason to trust you then than you have to trust me now." Tammy pointed out. "Besides, you'll never know what they really think if you don't talk to them eventually. Do you really want to just slink away and never tell them your side of things?"
"In a lot of ways, it would be easier to just 'slink away' and not have to face them..." Jade said. She was silent in thought for a long moment, but finally reluctantly conceded. "Alright. I'll trust you. It seems you're not going to let me get out of this, anyway." She sighed in resignation.
"Not a chance." Tammy smiled.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer:
The charactors of Chip, Dale, Gadget, Monterey Jack, Zipper, Tammy, Foxglove
and any other charactor originally appearing the animated series "Chip
and Dale's Rescue Rangers" are all © Disney and are used here without
permission. Any other charactors appearing herein that are not © Disney
are my own creations. This story may be freely copied, transmitted, printed,
distributed, used as bird cage liner, or whatever, I only ask that it is not
modified from it's original form and it is not used for profit in any way. I
believe that that concludes the legal mumbo-jumbo for now... On to the story!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------