Dick Winchester in… The Interrogation

Hello! If you're new to the Dick Winchester series, I highly recommend starting with Chapter 1 of Book 1: The Box with No Name

This is Chapter 2 of Book 2. If you haven't already, I recommend starting at Chapter 1 for the sake of continuity:

***

Book 2, Chapter 2

I shoved open the door to the compound, greeted by several beaming faces. They reminded me of a toddler showing their dad the piece of macaroni art and waiting for the ritual pat on the head and pin to the fridge door.

Instead, I poked a hole in that pride and let the air blow out as I fixed them with a withering gaze. The temperature dropped in the room by at least five degrees, and I imagined their crestfallen faces matched what my own must have looked like back then. Back on that infamous July 4th when, after viewing the smoldering timbers of our half-destroyed family home courtesy of my misplaced Bunker Buster from Specter Fireworks, my father turned to me and said, “I’ve seen better.”

Then the bastard had the audacity to up and die on me before I could save the years’ of allowance needed to try for a conflagration worthy of his approval. C4 was expensive, and even arms dealers refuse to sell to a teenager. God knows I had tried to convince them.

Note to self, I thought as I found Katie’s eyes in the middle of the pack, ask about possibility of obtaining Hellfire missiles through her new Pentagon boyfriend. When life gives you DoD connections, procure military tech at friends and family rates.

However, that would have to wait while I sorted out the current mess these morons had created.

“Listen to me, and listen to me good,” I said with fire in my stomach. “From here on out, nobody talks to Vincent. Nobody touches Vincent. Nobody even looks at Vincent.”

Lenny looked up from his desk where he had been polishing a set of brass knuckles and chuckled. “Shoulda mentioned that earlier.”

“How could I have, when I never told any of you to kidnap him in the first place?” I fired back.

“Come on, Dick,” Kiesha said, shrugging. “You may not have said it outright, but you essentially gave us free reign with these kinds of things.”

That was news to me. “How?”

Now it was Barry the intern’s turn. “You tell us to be opportunistic. To think independently. We deliver to an apartment building and see a DoorDash order outside someone else’s door? Swipe it to deny them a return customer. Doorman giving us problems? Slip them $20 and see if they demand Better Business Bureau accreditation the next time Winchester Delivery Services comes knocking.”

I crossed my arms. “Okay, but that’s independence of action in the scope of your delivery jobs. Don’t you think grabbing the second-in-charge of the local Uber Eats chapter is a bit higher level?”

Barry studied the floor and mumbled, “That was the idea.”

I turned to the one conspirator who had yet to speak. “You said you have a Predator drone now?”

Katie nodded.

“And you were testing it out by tailing me?”

Another nod.

“And then you used the nose camera to spot my deflated tire and the Uber Eats sticker.” Of all the questions this lunatic scenario begged, one refused to keep quiet. “What altitude were you flying at?”

“5,000 feet,” Katie said with a slight smirk.

Holy shit, what else can we use this thing for?

I had to let nature take its course now. “There’s no way the Predator wouldn’t come up on radar at that height. We’re right across the river from D.C. The Pentagon is a few miles away. Isn’t this, like, some of the most controlled air space on the planet?”

“Sure,” Katie said, cocking her head to communicate the half left unsaid: what’s your point?

“How did you not get your new toy blown out of the sky?”

“My boyfriend left the Air Force transponder code in place, so to all concerned, it’s just the Pentagon office workers messing around with old hardware. Like usual.”

She looked over at Barry after the last remark, and I followed her eyes to find a knowing smile on his face. Odd… but there are bigger fish to fry here.

“All right,” I said, pausing to rub the bridge of my nose, “there’s a lot to unpack there, but for now, I need to know: whose idea was this?”

Everyone’s mouths opened, and I held up my hand. “And don’t give me the old ‘it was a collaborative decision’ line, I know how this group works. One of you is always the instigator, and the rest always jump on board.”

Mouths still half-open, everyone turned to look at Barry.

That was a new one. “This was your idea?”

He glanced at Katie. “Well, we were texting back and forth about how her flight test was going—”

I spun back to Katie. “New question: since when are you two friends? Don’t you think that some things we talk about I might not necessarily want to make it back to my employees?”

She shook her head. “I’d never betray your confidence.”

The slight smirk returned to Barry’s face. “Besides, I’d call us a bit more than friends.”

Lenny and Keisha’s eyes widened to match my own. It was going to take me a week to sort through all the secrets coming out this evening.

Now I fixed my scowl on Keisha. “So you didn’t know about this, either?”

“No.” She shook her head, then cocked it. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because you’re the head of HR, damn it!”

“And this involves HR because… why?”

“We have strict guidelines around interoffice relationships for just this reason.”

Keisha snorted. “Katie doesn’t work for us, Dick.”

“But she’s the CEO’s friend! Doesn’t that put her in a protected class or something?”

“Considering I wrote the manual, I’m fairly certain that nowhere is it stipulated employees of Winchester Delivery Services cannot be in romantic relationships with ‘close acquaintances’ of management or other employees.” She smirked, unable—or perhaps unwilling—to keep the patronizing tone out of the next sentence. “But I can always crosscheck.”

I turned back to Katie. “Anyways, what the hell?”

She crossed her arms. “My love life is mine to live, Dick.”

“Sure, but what about our life updates? We both promised to hold nothing back. This sure feels like a pretty big omission, wouldn’t you say?”

“Hey,” Lenny spoke up for the first time in a few minutes, “can I get in on this life update circle?”

A scene flashed before my eyes of the three of us all clustered around a table at the back of a bar, me and Katie gawking as Lenny told all about the innocent civilians his unit had gunned down in cold blood during his three tours in Iraq and how their command had swept the whole thing under the rug. Not that he’d ever said anything like that before, but a guy who uses a 7.62 NATO round as a toothpick has to have at least one skeleton in the closet.

“I’m not your lawyer, but I still think I’m obligated to discourage you from self-incrimination.”

Lenny appeared to accept this with a simple nod. Not exactly deterring my previous assumption about the darkness lurking in his past.

“Anyhow,” I pivoted back to where Katie stood with arms still crossed, “when were you planning to tell me this?”

Confusion wrinkled her brow. “But I already mentioned it when I called you. In fact, it was you that cut me off from saying more.”

“You said you were seeing some guy from the Pentagon…”

I looked over to Barry as my voice trailed off. He nodded.

“But you already have a job.”

“I have an unpaid internship. It’s a tough market out there. I have to keep my options open.” He smirked at Katie. “Your friend has expensive tastes, after all.”

I felt my skin crawl at the thought of the two of them together and filed that reaction under the Revisit Later list right below “Hellfire missiles,” which apparently now shared the common thread of Barry.

It was my turn to cross my arms. “I suppose next you’ll tell me they pay you over in the DoD, too.”

His shoulders slumped. “No,” he said, halfway between a sigh and a groan.

“Oh,” I replied, feeling a bit lighter that I at least wasn’t operating at a lower ethical standard than the organization responsible for My Lai. “Well, I respect your hustle, then.”

“Speaking of my other employer, I’ve actually been meaning to tell you: my boss wants to meet with you soon.”

Before I could process that one enough to respond, a voice boomed from the next room. “If you jackasses are going to keep me here all night, at least tell me the score.” The fire in the words vanished, replaced by something just north of pleading. “Please…”

Oh, right.

I looked around the assembled circus as they parted to either side of the break room door. “This conversation isn’t over. It’s going to the top of my—”

“Revisit Later list,” they chorused in unison, even Katie. “We know.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, feeling a bit disappointed as I turned to the door. “Nobody come in unless I call for you.”

I pushed open the door, finding the projector and couches had been pushed to the side from their usual staging for Adult Movie Night. In their place, a square table dominated the center of the space with a single halogen bulb still lit in the ceiling. It wasn’t quite the classic smoke-choked interrogation room with the suspect caught in one ring of light with their back strapped to a metal chair, but I suppose it was a commendable attempt.

After all, kidnapping wasn’t exactly in our portfolio.

Though we might be competing with Amazon’s mailbomb service offering soon, so worth keeping an open mind when it comes to additional revenue streams.

In the center of it all, Vincent looked up, his brown-almost black eyes locking onto me.

“So, how about it, Winchester,” he spoke. “What’s the score?”

I checked my phone. “4-3, Capitals victory in overtime.”

He rolled his head back and heaved a sigh. “Can’t believe I missed it.” Then he returned his gaze to me with renewed intensity. “You’re lucky it’s early in the season or I might take this more personally.”

I held my hands up. “Believe me, I didn’t want this any more than you. My employees decided to exercise some autonomy and failed to read through the obvious red herring.”

For a moment, he was silent. Then he surprised me with a chuckle. “Of course. You were never fooled by that, were you? Couldn’t imagine you charging into Three Courts to take on a bar full of dozens of Uber Eats drivers with a six-shot revolver.”

Despite the circumstances, I found myself chuckling, too. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

Rolling his neck, Vincent kept the smirk. “No worries, Winchester. I can tell this wasn’t your op. Pretty rushed production, if you ask me.”

“Oh, why’s that?” I asked, expecting him to nod to the bean bag chair beneath him.

Instead, he kept his mouth shut. One leg rose, and I caught the glint of metal near his sock. Then Vincent lunged over the table and cleared the space between us in a fraction of my stuttering heartbeat.

Before my hand had moved two inches toward my oldest friend Smith & Wesson, the knife was pressed to my throat.

“Always handcuff prisoners behind the back,” Vincent finally answered.

I blinked, unable to come up with a good response to such a clear misstep, so I said the only thing that came to mind, conscious of how the steel scraped my neck as I spoke. “Any other pointers for next time?”

Nice one, genius.

I had been wrong before. Vincent’s eyes weren’t brown-almost black. They were black. A darkness that seemed to swallow any white remaining the longer he spoke.

“You think you’re some badass because you mistakenly answered what you thought was a job ad and ended up fighting in Ukraine, what, as an ammo runner? Two months as a glorified courier during a losing battle makes you fucking Rambo, does it?”

I opened my mouth, but he responded with the slightest increase in pressure, and I decided silence was golden. Another iota and I’d probably start bleeding all over his somehow still perfectly polished Oxfords. Couldn’t have that.

“I’ve put up with a lot of your shit, Winchester, but that’s one bit of arrogance I can’t let pass. I signed up for war because I wanted to. I fought the Jihadis because I wanted to.” His voice dropped to a hiss. “I killed people because I wanted to. You think you’ve seen suffering? The worst this world has to offer? You know nothing.”

He blinked, as if breaking out of the trance. Or pulling himself back from the brink. “Someday soon,” he continued in his normal voice, “it’ll be open season on you and your band of lunatics here. And when that day comes, I’ll give you a war you won’t believe.”

The phrase triggered a memory, and I felt the side of my mouth curling up.

“See, I might take that seriously if it also wasn’t a Rambo quote, Vincent,” I replied, quoting Officer Teresa’s comeback when I had issued a remarkably similar statement of ominous intent.

Vincent appeared to lean back an inch, searching the depths of memory. Then the circuit completed, and he snorted. That snort evolved to a laugh. The knife lowered a centimeter.

“Fair enough, Winchester. Sometimes we soldiers get a bit too wrapped up in our mystique, eh?”

Then the knife pressed into my skin again. “But your little band here denied me a Capitals goal. I’ll never get that moment back. So why shouldn’t I gut you right now?”

It was a long shot. Certainly a hockey fanatic like this guy already had his own setup, but it was the best I could offer. “ESPN+ lets you rewatch games?

“Nice try, but I’m not made of money over here.”

The second-hand man of the Arlington Uber Eats chapter can’t afford $10.99 a month?

At least it left me an obvious opening: “I’ll share my password. But if you kill me, it goes to the grave with me.”

Vincent mulled the one over for several seconds, then nodded. As quick as the knife had appeared, it disappeared into its ankle sheath.

“Shrewd, Winchester. Very shrewd.” Vincent clapped me on the shoulder, a maneuver that required he shift his other arm. “Now can we do something about these restraints? I need to watch the overtime footage before the hockey group chat spoils everything for me.”

That naturally led to the question of who they belonged to, since handcuffs were not standard issue gear for Winchester Delivery Service drivers. I gave it my best guess and turned my head to the door: “Katie!”

Her muffled voice came through a moment later. “Yeah?”

“You have the key to these cuffs?”

A pause, and then, “I think I left it at Barry’s place.”

I winced, and Vincent made a similar expression in my peripheral vision.

“Uh, well, you should probably get it so we can let our ‘guest’ out of them.”

Even with a door separating us, I could hear the sly smile in her voice. “Okay… but if I’m going over, it might take me a while to get back here. If you know what I mean.”

That, complemented by the image of her flipping her hair behind her neck in anticipation, sent the bile climbing up the back of my throat.

Vincent, a man who claimed to have seen unspeakable atrocities by his own claims, looked down at the cuffs wrapped around both wrists with a face pale at the thought of what these shackles had born witness to.

“Is it too late to get that knife in my throat?” I asked.

“No way, man. If I take you out, then I’d have no one to return the favor. Big Man frowns at suicide,” he said, crossing himself with his hand.

The door opened, and Lenny entered, his shoulders almost scraping both sides of the frame. “No worries, boss. I can speed this process up.”

Vincent and I both watched unblinking as the man proceeded to pull each manacle apart with his bare hands, the air filled with the sound of groaning metal while Lenny didn’t show the slightest hint of sweat.

The Uber Eats second-hand man stared as the broken cuffs clattered on the concrete, then gazed up at Lenny in awe. “Where you been hiding this WWE superstar, Winchester?”

“Nah,” Lenny said, chuckling. “I’m a vet like you.”

Vincent squinted. “Really? Who’d you deploy with?”

Lenny grinned, but there was something about the way that he did it that made me look again to make sure there weren’t fangs among his teeth. “Outlaw Platoon. Hunted us some ISIS during the Battle for Mosul.”

It seemed impossible, but Vincent’s face went even paler. His voice was weak. “I heard rumors, but I thought it was all a myth…”

The tension broke as a new voice cut in. “Hey, what the hell,” Katie shouted. “I wanted those back!”

We all followed her finger to the shattered handcuffs. Lenny gave her a sheepish green, I grimaced, and Vincent shook his head vigorously before starting toward the door.

“Do me a favor: next time you kidnap me, don’t do it with your bondage kit.”

Katie ran her hands through her hair and blew a kiss after him. “No promises, handsome.”

Vincent pretended not to hear that as he paused beside me. “Friendly advice, you might want to ditch that phone of yours. I’m assuming ‘they’ have reached out to you by now.”

I only knew too well what he meant, but he resumed his headlong flight before I could respond.

“Get the fuck out of my way, you degenerate,” he shouted on his way out.

A moment later Barry appeared in the doorway. “Man, what’s his deal?”

“Some men just can’t accept a sexually liberated woman, sweetheart.”

“Hey, their loss.”

My head swiveled between their adoring expressions for several moments before I pulled myself back from the abyss. “Keisha, we’re going over the bylaws tomorrow!”

“Again?” she replied from the front hall, not bothering to hide her consternation. “For the last time, Dick, I’m not adding a mandate that every employee must buy your poetry book.”

“Not. That.” I felt my jaw clenching. “Something else this time.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

Clearly this organization was suffering from a dual lack of discipline and respect for authority. But before I could even start to guess at the solution, I had to deal with the many threads of tonight. I opened the mental to-do list and focused on the first item.

“So, Barry,” I said, taking a step closer. “Any chance you can score us some Hellfires for that Predator? It would really enhance the security of our operation.”

“I might,” he said, glancing at Katie. “But that was a gift to my girl. It wasn’t meant for you.”

Must they shove this relationship in all our faces? I breathed deeply before any of that emotion could force its way to the surface. “Fair point. I would be happy to purchase an entirely new Predator as well.”

“What the hell, babe?” Katie shoved her way in between us. “You’re giving Dick Hellfire missiles but not me?”

“What do you need that kind of ordnance for?” I shot back before Barry could respond.

“What do you?”

“The dozens of enemies I’ve made building this company. Including the one you probably made for me tonight!”

“If Barry and I are going to go serious, then your company’s enemies might soon be mine.”

Now it was Barry’s turn to go white as a sheet. “Serious? But I thought you said you weren’t ready for that.”

“For a full missile load and a launch tutorial, I’m willing,” she said, pressing herself against him.

I blinked, suddenly aware of how we were both trying to exploit this man for his connections. Maybe I can at least help him in return.

I cleared my throat. “You said your bosses wanted to meet with me?”

Barry’s face brightened a bit. “Yeah, that’s right. Tomorrow evening if possible.”

I winced. “I’ve got a date tomorrow.”

“She said whenever you can swing it. The upper ranks tend to work late.”

“Upper ranks?” I cocked my head. “Who exactly is your boss?”

“The secretary.”

“A secretary of what?”

“No, no.” He grinned. “The secretary.”

Then it all clicked. “The Secretary. The Secretary of Defense?”

Barry nodded.

“The person who runs the entire Department of Defense? That’s your boss?”

Another nod.

“The woman responsible for billions of dollars of weapons and gear? The woman who oversees all our armed forces?”

Barry shrugged. “Don’t worry, boss. She’s really easy to talk to. Real salt of the Earth type.”

The room started to spin. “The Secretary of Defense wants to meet with me? The head of an underground delivery service?”

“Yup. Asked me if I could figure out how to get in touch with you. You wouldn’t believe how happy she was to learn I talked to you on the regular.”

“And she knows that the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the military from participating in civilian law enforcement?”

“You’re not under arrest, boss. She said there’s a shared interest she wants to discuss.”

“Great, I’ll be there. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to do some major decompressing after tonight.” I spun around and walked out the door, desperate to scour the images of Barry, Katie, and the handcuffs from my mind.

Unfortunately that task would be even tougher as I had not walked far enough to avoid overhearing Katie yell at Barry again. “What the hell, babe. You’re taking Dick to meet your boss before me?”

“My other boss,” Barry corrected her.

Let’s just hope our interests remain mutual, or who knows which boss Barry would side with. Though if I make our side more vital to him in this tough market…

I added “Pay Barry” to the Revisit Later list, but, after considering the priority of the first page items, shifted it to the second page under “Subscribe to MoviePass,” confident that I would soon return to it given such an efficient and up-to-date filing system.

Yep, I thought as I climbed behind the wheel of my RAV4 with four fully inflated tires, this city might fall apart if not for the vigilance of a few good men like Dick Winchester.

***

What national secrets will be revealed, intentionally or otherwise, during Dick’s upcoming meeting with the Secretary of Defense? Will Dick ever learn of the horrific fate that befell MoviePass? And will Katie and Barry’s relationship survive—if it doesn’t make everyone else jump off a cliff first? Find out in the next thrilling installment of Dick Winchester in… The Pentagon

More Dick Winchester in...

The Opening Salvo (Book 1)

• Opening chapter: The Box with No Name

The Counterattack (Book 2)

1. The Deflation
2. The Interrogation — you are here
3. The First Date
4. The Pentagon Part 1
5. The Pentagon Part 2
6. The Movie Night
7. [The rest of the book] — drafting in progress