Chapter Seven
By: Winston deLeon
Afternoon had long since stretched into night, the unbroken sheet of clouds gradually growing darker as time wore on. Rain still pounded down, and Tammy still trailed the mouse relentlessly but carefully. They were outside of a large shopping complex, the mouse winding a trail through the massive parking lot. Peering out from behind the front right wheel of a minivan, Tammy watched as the mouse swiftly crossed a traffic lane into the next lot. When she'd gone a certain distance, Tammy moved to follow her before she got too far away. Abandoning her hiding place, she intended to make a quick run across the lane and take up another observation post. Tammy stepped up onto the cement curb, looked briefly for traffic, then started running across the lane.
Out on the street, a pickup truck, it's driver acting on the rapidly fading yellow light at the intersection, hung a fast left turn into the parking lot, coming up the traffic lane Tammy was trying to cross. She saw it, but judged that there was plenty of time, and she kept running.
She didn't expect what happened next. Many parking lots, after years of use, have pavement that's been gradually worn down and smoothened quite well by the action of many thousands of sets of tires driving over them, and this one was no exception. There were two extremely smooth, but only just barely visible, tire ruts polished into the pavement in both the inbound and outbound lanes. Tammy made it over the outbound lane without too much trouble, and continued running as she crossed the painted yellow line and continued into the inbound lane, where the pickup truck was bearing down from a distance. If she kept moving, she'd beat it by a safe margin, however, and she didn't think there was much to worry about.
She was fine, too, until she reached the first tire rut in the inbound lane. At that point a combination of things turned against her. In the dark, she wasn't able to clearly see exactly where she was stepping. As she put her foot down, it went right into the middle of an oilpatch, with a smooth sheet of rainwater frictionlessly resting on top of it, and her right foot slid out from under her rapidly and unexpectedly, sending her falling forward, landing heavily on her stomach and lying sprawled out in the middle of the lane.
She was dazed for a moment before she realized what had happened. A feeling of embarassment came over her, despite the fact that she was alone. She started to push herself up with her arms. As she was just about to stand, however, the sound of an engine grew louder and louder, she felt a sinking feeling of fear and remembered the truck. She looked up, and saw that it was still bearing down rapidly, much closer now. She was too small for the driver to notice in the dark and the rain, and the truck sped onward. She gasped softly and her eyes opened wide with terror, and when she realized that there was no time to regain her feet and run, she did the only thing she could think of: she dropped back down onto her stomach, lying as flat she she could, hoping it was flat enough.
Seconds later, the truck rumbled overhead. It was a close call. The truck's left wheels were just inches away, close enough for her to feel heavy, cold droplets of water splash out of the treads and land on her. She also felt some part of the truck just barely brush the tips of the longs hairs on her tail. After the truck had passed, she sprang up off the ground in a panic and bolted to get out of the traffic lane, ducking behind the raised concrete base of a lightpost. She was breathing fast and her heart was pounding hard, racing with fear and adrenaline.
Panting, she briefly looked herself over. Arms, legs, tail... she felt a dim sense of amazement and relief that they were all still there and perfectly fine. At first, she had trouble believing how lucky she'd been. She suspected that this, like the chloroform, was another one of the tales that she wouldn't be telling her mother.
"So much for not doing anything stupid today." She mumbled quietly to herself. At that point, she felt the urge to simply quit this prolonged chase - she was tired, wet and uncomfortable, this was decidedly dangerous work that didn't seem to be going anywhere fast, and now she'd had a truly unsettling brush with death. She'd been in tight spots once in a while working with the Rangers, of course, but this one was a closer call than most. Mentally, she was starting to feel pretty rattled, and she wondered if perhaps the smartest thing to do might be to stop before her luck ran out.
She asked herself, though, whether or not any of the other Rangers would have quit at a time like this. She didn't think that they would. They would find a way to keep going and make the extra effort, no matter what it took. She was still trembling slightly with fright, and she had to rest there for half a minute or so until her heart slowed down, but once it did, she cautiously came out from behind the lightpost, and resumed the long-running pursuit with determination, pushing aside her fear.
The mouse Tammy was following kept right on going, to wherever it was that she
was headed, which was steadily becoming more and more of a mystery to Tammy.
She found herself drifting through everything from upscale neighborhoods to
slums and everywhere in between, zigzagging around all over the place. She was
beginning to have her doubts as to whether there was any point in going on,
but she pushed herself to do it, because she reasoned that eventually her target
would stop somewhere, and once she knew where, she'd go get the other Rangers
and lead them there. Hopefully, it would uncover some worthwhile clues, maybe
they'd even catch her there and make an arrest.
At about 8:30, the rain finally slacked off and stopped. At that point, it was very dark outside, the only light coming from streetlights and building windows, and Tammy was in an industrial area, somewhere in the middle of a large cluster of warehouses that mostly appeared to be run down and abandoned. She was getting nervous. This part of town wasn't very good, and in the dark she didn't want to get pounced on by surprise by an opportunistic stray cat looking for an easy meal. Why the mouse didn't appear that worried was a bit puzzling, but then again, over the course of the day, that mouse had been rather cavalier about everything, from the rain to the traffic at street crossings. She struck Tammy as being one of those rare individuals who fears nothing and no one.
Finally, ten minutes later, the mouse was walking on a sidewalk in front of a warehouse that took up most of the lot it was built on. A thin strip that lay between the front wall of the warehouse and the sidewalk, maybe ten feet wide, was composed of bare dirt overgrown with rampant weeds. The mouse stopped on the sidewalk, under a streetlight glowing with the hazy orangy-yellow glow of sodium vapor. She started turning around, looking behind herself, and Tammy ducked behind an ancient, empty, rusted out fifty-five gallon steel drum that was sitting in the dirt, the closest object at hand to hide behind.
Slowly, hidden from the light under the shadows cast by clumps of weeds twice as tall as she was, Tammy peered out from behind the steel drum. The mouse looked around in all directions to make sure that no one else was around. Apparently satisfied that she was alone, she walked to the nearest wall of the warehouse, pushed aside some stalks of weeds, and stepped in through a small hole in the wall that they had been concealing.
Tammy waited for five minutes, and everything was silent. Slowly, Tammy crept closer, trying not to walk on any of the bare dirt, which was quite muddy after the afternoon's rain. Fortunately, there were plently of ground-hugging plants, allowing Tammy to avoid leaving any footprints. At last she reached the wall and pushed aside the plants, revealing the small hole. She looked around inside, not seeing much. There was a dim light somewhere in the back of the warehouse, casting a pale, ghostly illumination just barely sufficient for her to see the general outlines of objects inside. Tammy's curiousity was strong within her. The mouse was nowhere in sight, and it seemed harmless enough to take a quick look inside, so without a second thought she clambered into the hole as silently as she could.
The warehouse had a concrete floor, heavy steel beams and rafters holding up the walls and the high ceiling, and what looked like several years worth of settled dust. Looking upward, Tammy could just barely make out that a large piece of sheetmetal had been used to patch the roof in one part. Coming off one edge of the sheetmetal was a thin steel cable, dropping down all the way to the floor, where it seemed to be attached to some kind of metal box. Tammy guessed that perhaps it was some sort of specialized equipment meant to be mounted to the ceiling that had probably fallen to the floor and never been restored to it's right location because the building was vacant.
Inner partition walls, mostly made up of soft drywall and only extending upwards to about half the height of the ceiling, divided the warehouse into several sections. They were riddled with holes and various weatherstains, attesting to the lack of maintenance. Pale shadowy areas and scratch marks on the concrete outlined where various pieces of loading machinery had formerly been resting, but all of them appeared to have been moved out long ago. The building had obviously been closed down long ago and sitting vacant ever since. Generally, though, when humans did that, they shut off the electricity, but there was still light towards the back, which led Tammy to believe that the mouse had set up residence in the rear of the building.
She was tempted to get closer and see what else she could see, but at that point, disgression won over curiousity and she decided that it was time to go. She had only just barely started turning around to leave, however, when a voice spoke from close behind her - the voice of the mouse she'd been following.
"Tamara Lauren Chessnutt. Well, you've got amazing persistance, I'll give you that..." As the mouse spoke her full name, a cold, fast shiver ran down Tammy's spine. As her heart jumped into her throat, she spun swiftly around on her heel to face the mouse, who was standing directly in front of the hole in the wall. Tammy's heart thumped hard with fear and adrenaline, and her bushy tail started involuntarily flicking sporatically as she nervously took a few steps back, distancing herself from the mouse.
"However, you need to learn to temper your eagerness with some caution." The mouse continued calmly, casually leaning back against the wall. "If I'd been interested in hurting you, I couldn't have asked for a better chance than the situation you've just put yourself in. Alone, in an unfamiliar dark building... and you let me lure you right in. Now I know you're smarter than that." The mouse smiled, confusing Tammy - she'd been tensing herself, getting ready to fight, but the mouse made no aggressive moves. In fact, she actually stepped aside from the hole in the wall.
"I won't stop you if you want to leave. In your position, I wouldn't trust someone like me, either." The mouse motioned to the unblocked exit. "But, if you do, you'll miss something that I think you and the other Rangers would find most interesting."
A strong urge to run, and fast, swept over Tammy, but she resisted it for a moment. "Huh? What are you talking about?" She asked, puzzled by what the mouse had just said.
"Well, for one, you haven't seen the tape." The mouse said, and Tammy realized that that was a good point. She found herself wondering just what was on that tape that the Rangers had been given. "I've got a copy, I can show you here if you'd like..." The mouse offered.
The tone of her voice and her whole demeaner struck Tammy as being completely honest, not like any of the criminals she'd ever dealt with before - and yet, it didn't change the fact that she was probably a thief, and she'd never yet known any of the thieves that the Rangers had encountered to be trustworthy. She stood silently, carefully thinking over her next move in this odd situation.
"How long have you known I was following you?" Tammy finally asked.
"Most of the time, since just after the lake." The mouse replied, which was a somewhat startling revelation for Tammy. She was a bit dismayed at her apparent failure to be stealthy enough. "Why did you think I took ten hours to get here? This place isn't more than maybe an hour and a half's walk, at the most, from Ranger headquarters. I was trying to lose you, hoping you'd get discouraged and give up. But I've run out of time for fooling around, so congratulations, you've found my... oh, I guess you could say it's my 'hideout'." She shrugged.
"Run out of time? What do you mean?" Tammy asked.
"I've got plans that demand a certain timeframe, and I can't afford to completely exhaust all my energy when I've still got a busy night ahead. Stick around and find out if you want. Dry off and warm up, then watch the tape. It'll answer some questions. I'll explain more afterwards, once we're inside."
"Huh? We are inside." Tammy pointed out.
"No, I mean inside my home. Up in the skylight." The mouse pointed upwards, towards the patch of sheetmetal fixed to the ceiling. "The elevator's over here, I'll show you." The mouse started walking to the middle of the concrete floor, motioning to the metal box that Tammy had noticed earlier. It was big enough to accomodate maybe four or five rodents. The makeshift elevator was open on one side, and enclosed on all five other sides. The mouse stepped in. Tammy hung back, not quite trusting her yet.
"Coming?" The mouse asked.
Tammy was growing more and more curious at what she'd stumbled across. Still, though, she hung back, trying to buy a a bit more time to think and get a better judgement of exactly who she was dealing with. "Like you pointed out, I don't know if I can trust you." Tammy replied.
"I suppose not. But if I was going to attack you, I'd have already done it, and if you leave, there are questions you won't be able to get answers to. Ultimately, though, I'll have to leave the decision about whether or not the risk is worth it up to you. If you're going to leave, that's fine, but if not, then hurry up, the blowdryer's upstairs and I really would like to dry off. I'm sure you would, too."
She was right. Tammy was completely soaked with rain and feeling pretty cold. But things still weren't adding up here. "Why would you just give up and tell me what I want to know?" Tammy asked suspiciously.
"Because I admire your effort. Determination like that merits a few answers, and besides, it would be a more personal touch to allow one of the Rangers to observe what's going to happen next firsthand instead of leaving everything a mystery. It's to my advantage to have you around as an ambassador of sorts, and it's to your advantage to hear my explanations of things. Mutual benefit, I guess you could say. I didn't plan for this to happen, but it might just work out quite well for both of us. And, last but not least, since I don't have the diamond anymore, there's nothing for me to lose, so why not?" The mouse replied.
As crazy as it felt, Tammy was, although reluctantly, finding this mouse rather convincing. If she wanted to get to the bottom of things, she'd have to take the calculated risk of extending her some credit. That risk, however, didn't really seem so bad. The mouse did have a good point, after all, if she was interested in harming Tammy, the opportunity had already been there. Tammy decided to take the mouse up on her offer. She wasn't going to let herself get careless, however, and she kept her eyes on the mouse as she approached the elevator and stepped slowly inside.
"Okay... I'm interested." Tammy told the mouse. Part of her mind still had it's doubts about doing this, but she was, nonetheless.
"Alright. Let's go get dried off, then. By the way..." the mouse offered her hand, and Tammy shook it, "my name's Jade."
"Going up!" Jade said with a slight smile, then reached over and pressed a button attached to the inside wall of the elevator. The low hum of a large, powerful electric motor echoed down from somewhere in the ceiling, and the elevator began to rise slowly.
Standing in front of a table in her workshop, Gadget lifted the bucket of dust
that had come with the video they'd just finished watching and began tipping
out the tiny granules into a beaker half-filled with water. Volume measurement
marks had been carefully inked onto the outside of the glass, and Gadget continued
adding the powder, which didn't seem to dissolve (then again, it wouldn't if
it really was diamond, Gadget thought to herself), until the water's volume
rose to exactly one milliliter higher than it had started.
Carefully, she lifted the large beaker and transferred it to a small scale to weigh it. After waiting a few seconds for the scale to settle, she jotted down the weight of the beaker and it's contents, and subtracted from that the weight that she'd written down before adding the dust from the bucket. The difference worked out to exactly the number she had suspected it would: 3.51 grams. The optics test she'd done earlier had made her suspicious, but that clinched it for sure. There was only one substance she knew of that was crystalline, colorless, and had a density of 3.51 grams per cubic centimeter.
She could hear Chip putting forth his best effort to wear a hole in the floor in the empty room adjacent to the workshop by pacing back and forth. It annoyed her mildly, but it was better than when he'd been inside her workshop. If she hadn't finally shooed him out and closed the door some time ago, he'd probably still be peering over her shoulder with impatience, watching like a hawk without even knowing the signifigance of the tests she was running. She couldn't help but feel some sympathy, because he was obviously pretty frazzled.
Now, though, she was done testing, and she was going to have to disappoint him.
Slowly, she opened the door and emerged into the room where everyone else was waiting. Chip had the anxious look of someone in a hospital waiting room watching for a family member to come out of risky surgery. Gadget was starting to get the feeling that Chip was getting too wrapped up in this case, maybe a bit more than was healthy. She could understand it for the first day or so after the theft, that was the most straining time for everyone. But it hadn't stopped. For a long time now, he'd been edgy and prone to swift irritation, much more than usual, and he'd insisted that the Rangers continue to scour the city for the next two days. Then he'd carried on alone for most of today when it had become clear that everyone else thought it was a lost cause.
She didn't know whether her report was going to help relieve or aggrievate the situation. As the door swung open, Chip stopped pacing in midstride and turned to Gadget, waiting for the news. Dale, Monty, and Zipper were also waiting, but unlike Chip, they were sitting in chairs and appeared more calm. There was really no "soft" way to put it, so Gadget decided to just say it outright.
"Well, it's real diamond, all right." She said. "The optical and density tests both confirm it."
Chip cringed a bit. "There's no possible way for it to be faked at all? It can't be anything else?" He asked.
"Golly, Chip, how much more evidence do you need?" Gadget asked, getting a touch impatient with his obsessing. "I've done the testing. I know for a fact that the dust in this bucket is real diamond, a whole lot of it, and we all saw that video. I think at this point we're going to have to put two and two together."
The room was silent for a few seconds. Chip sighed and hung his head. His shoulders slumped a bit, as if he was finally resigning himself to defeat. "Yeah, I guess you're right. If you say it's the real thing, then it must be." He said softly. "I just... just didn't want to have to tell the RAS and the museum security team that it's definately gone for good."
Gadget found herself feeling sorry for Chip, especially after all the hard work he'd put into this case. "Well..." She strained momentarily for something to say, "at least we got some of it back..." She offered, trying to sound cheerful. "And besides, now I won't have to work on that submarine building project."
"Whaddya so worried about the RAS and those museum folks for, anyway?" Monty asked Chip.
"Well... I dunno, it just feels like I'm letting them all down bigtime." Chip said, flopping into a chair and pulling off his fedora. "What if they never have confidence in us again? What if our reputation in this city - "
"Aww, c'mon Chip, we've proven ourselves lotsa times in the past, and we'll do it plenty more in the future, too." Monty said, interrupting Chip. "One disaster ain't the end of the world, mate."
"Yeah, screwing up now and then isn't so bad." Dale said, "and if anyone here knows something about screwing up, it's me."
"Besides, it's not like anyone who was at the museum that night got hurt or killed." Gadget noted. "And even if we did lose a great big diamond, well, I think the fact that everyone ended up safe is still the most important thing. It could have been a lot worse."
Monty had looked like he was about to say something else, but after Gadget had finished, he fell silent and a troubled look came over his face, as if he were thinking carefully about something. Gadget noticed that he glanced briefly at Dale, and she started wondering again what it was that had gotten between them. As much as she wanted to know, however, she was still reluctant to bring it up, mostly for the fact that she wasn't sure what to say. Being a peacekeeper, she had discovered over time, was easy between Chip and Dale. Just get them focused on something more important, and they forgot their own quarrels easily enough. But with Monty, who was himself usually a stabilizing element, she didn't know quite what to do.
Chip spoke, however, breaking her train of thought on that matter. "Yeah, I guess you guys are right." Chip said, starting to look a bit more calmed down. "I suppose I have been kinda shortsighted these last few days... When you look at the big picture, we haven't done so bad. I just really wanted to solve this one so badly and get that diamond back that I completely lost sight of everything else. Guys, I'm sorry if I've been pushing everyone around and snapping at people."
"Awww, it's okay, it wouldn't really be the same if you weren't doing that once in a while." Dale joked. Everyone laughed. Chip looked a bit embarassed at the decidedly accurate observation, but eventually even he couldn't help cracking a sheepish smile.
"So does this mean we'll be getting back to normal and moving on with other cases?" Gadget asked, after a short pause.
"Well... unless something new in this case comes up, I suppose so." Chip said. "I don't think we'll ever really get any further, so maybe it's best if we just move on. I hate not catching the thief, but at this point all I think we can do is wait and hope that they don't strike again."
"I think Tammy'll be glad to hear that we're dropping this one, mate." Monty commented.
"Huh? Why her, especially?" Chip asked.
"She wasn't here at all today. I think she musta felt like she needed a day off after the way this case has been going, with those two miserable days of running around the city lookin' for leads what ain't there." Monty replied.
"Hmm... I can't say I blame her, not after the way this has all turned out. Maybe she'll be back tomorrow. I guess we'll just have to show her the video then." Chip shrugged.
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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!
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