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| Scene Title | Blindsided |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | When Brandon Timm returns to his home under surveillance, the Company catches wind and moves in to apprehend him, but makes an unnerving discovery in the process. |
| Date | April 7, 2010 |
"He went into the house about fifteen minutes ago, hasn't come out since…"
Blistering cold wind blows down the narrow one-way street cutting through downtown Flatbrush Brooklyn. The development where the NYPD have been watching the Timm residence is a quiet middle-class one, and the duplex that Brandon Timm calls home is as lightless and silent as the rest of the neighborhood is. There's no electricity in Brooklyn, might not be until the end of the week, provided the weather stays as favorable as it is— if sub-zero temperatures in the middle of April are favorable.
"…he had his sonw ith him, we think. There was a little boy, blonde, brought him up the back way into the house. The blinds are drawn inside, our snipers up on the building across the way don't see anything. We called you as soon as he was spotted." Standing out in that frigid cold, Agent Benjamin Ryans leans into the driver's side window of an NYPD cruiser parked just down the street from the brown painted Timm residence, blocking the south side of the one-way street with another cruiser, lights strobing cobalt.
"You need anyone to go in with you? Backup?" Officer Mars lifts his brows up, looking from the senior agent looming in the window of his car to the petite blonde woman bundled up in the freezing cold standing just behind him, only to have those dark eyes settle on Ryans again.
Blocking the north end of the street on the other side of the one-way past the Timm residence, a black Company sedan holds two other passengers who drove here with Agent Ryans and Agent Richards. Though at this distance, Agent Ayers and Agent Sawyer can't be seen save for dark silhouettes in the Mercedes front window.
The cold wind picks up again, stinging at one side of Ryans' face, howling down the otherwise empty street. There's not much sunlight left, such as it is, and the thick clouds overhead are darkening. There's a storm coming, they'd best get moving.
Oh yes, Allison is most definitely bundled up. Going from California to New York in the middle of a blizzard? She's done smarter things before in her life, and she clearly doesn't look too pleased at the current conditions of the weather. But the job is the job. She signed up for this, and so she'll see this particular assignment through. Even if her nose turns red and she freezes her ass off.
At the question of backup Allison looks to Ryans, arching a brow at him, letting him make the decision. She's got a pistol, and knows how to use it, but she's a people person, not a strategist.
Leaning like that, Ryans still squints his eyes at the house thoughtfully, his dark brown canvas duster flutters around his legs, the wind blowing up the collar. He left the fedora at home today, so his hair shifts on his head, blowing across his forehead. "No." He rumbles softly. A hand pats the top of the car as he straightens. "You all just stay out here and make sure they don't flee."
He straightens and glances over at the shrink, not exactly happy that she's in on this. This is her test it seems. "Time to see how well you do, Richards." He not only has a pair of pistols, but Company issue tranq gun.
"Let's go." He bites out, moving towards the house, fingers loosen the ties of his coat so he can reach behind him for the tranq. "Remember, you see this man and you do what you can to get him. Watch out for the kid." Ryans will always have a soft spot for kids.
Allison fights not to roll her eyes. "I'm not going to shoot a kid, Ryans. I'm not a monster," she reminds him as she moves towards the house with him. "Besides, if I can get in earshot of the guy, I can work better than any weapon you might have on you at the moment." Provided that he's not insanely strong willed. That would be a problem.
"Believe me when I say, it can happen. In the heat the moment, then you go after a target, accidents do happen." Ryans sounds like a man that knows, as he approaches the duplex, he heads for the door. Resting his shoulder next to the door, Ryans checks his tranq gun before glancing at Allison.
There is no way to know what he is thinking, but he says, "Remember, you can't always rely on your ability to carry you through, those of us who don't have anything special we have to go with our brains and…" The gun is given a wiggle.
"That said, if the opportunity is there, take it." With that, he reaches out to gently check to see if the door it unlocked.
Unlocked and slightly ajar. When Ryans' gloved hand touches the doorknob the wind does the rest of the works and sends the door creaking open into the linoleum tiled entrance of the duplex. Leading with his gun and taking point, Ryans quietly slides inside, his loafers leaving a wet print on the smooth floor as he steps within. The house is dark, like the rest of the building in Brooklyn thanks to the massive power outages inflicted on all of the borough.
To the right of the entrance, nook holds a coat rack with nothing hanging from it and a window with Venitian blinds drawn. There's not a single sound inside the apartment, eerile so. Creeping past the coat rack, Allison is given enough space ot follow in behind Ryans into the apartment. The tiny kitchen to her left catches her attention, with its yellow formica top and aluminum band around the rim. Chairs are pushed in and a bowl of browning and sunken fruit looks like it's been sitting there for too long.
The refrigerator, an old avacado-colored appliance, is closed and silent from the lack of electricity. Ahead of her, Ryans makes his way thorugh a narrow hall lined with photographs, depicting the lanky and long-faced figure of Brandon Timm, all toothy smiles with an arm around a man roughly his age, same buggy eyes and long face, they're probably related. A little blonde boy stands between them— Billy. It's a camping trip photo of Brandon and his brother and his nephew-come-son.
Past the photographs Ryans moves, and Allison is right at his back, noticing pictures on the other side of that narrow hall of an elderly couple and Brandom Timm outside of a brownstone residence just a block away from Times' Square— Brandon's mother and father. To think now, that building is probably a pile of smoking irradiated rubble.
Through the hall agent Ryans emerges into a cluttered living room. The curtains are drawn shut, pale gray light spilling thorugh the thin cloth to afford a muted sense of illumination to the room. The floor is thickly carpeted and a lamp is knocked over, broken glass scattered in the shag. A crumpled newspaper lays draped over the coffee table, its headline is from over a month ago.
The smell of something rotting catches Ryans' attention, stings the back of his nose and waters his eyes, the same stink that soon assails Allison's senses when she comes into the living room. Ryans is the first to spot what's dead, a bird-cage hanging near the window has a dead parakeet laying inside, its body twisted like a wet towel and blood dried and brown in the bottom of the cage, the bars of the birdcage are bent and crooked, as is the stand it hangs from.
A staircase here likely goes up to the third floor where the bedrooms are, and a partly ajar door in the living room leads to a darkened staircase that goes down, probably to the garage. Allison, however, notices the corner of the wall-to-wall carpet has been bunched up and looks like a portion of it was cut away so it could be pulled back, but was hastily laid back down.
"Yes, I know," Allison murmurs in response to his comment about relying on abilities. Her pistol is pulled out, even with her boasting about her ability, though it's kept pointed towards the ground for now, until she has a target. While he's checking the door, she's looking over the windows, watching for anyone who might be peeking out. Or worse, sticking a gun out to start shooting.
When Ryans moves inside, so does Allison, keeping a few feet between them, but staying close enough to back him up if it comes to that. The smell of the parakeet has her nose wrinkling, and her left hand lifting to press to her nose, but she makes no sound. Then she's nudging Ryans to get his attention, and points to the carpet. Hey, secret passages/rooms happen, right? Look at how Molly was found by Matt!
As he steps in, the traq gun sweeps along with his gaze, one gloved hand around the grip, holding it out, the other cupping the bottom of the grip. Unlike Allison, Ryan's doesn't react to the smell, but he eyes the crunched up metal, eyes narrowing some. As that poor little bird, gives him some unease. How it's twisted like that, just seems… odd.
Brows dip down, but he continues on footsteps taken with care, until he's nudged. He twists back to look at the doctor, eyes flickering over to where she points. He gives a short nod of his head. A hand comes off the gun, to stall her as he moves towards that corner.
Once there, he reaches down to pull it up gently, weapon trained at the floor in front of him.
Allison's instinct was right, partly. Looking under the slice up carpet, some of the floorboards have been sawed out to give access to the space beneath them. But it's not hiding people or even bodies that agent Ryans finds, but rather an overstuffed pair of black canvas duffelbags. Each one is roughly four feet long and two feet wide, matching the descriptions of the bags that were carried away in the night from the car wreck that was eventually dredged out of the East River. One hand tugging down the zipper, agent Ryans reveals stacks of money suffed inside of the bag, this is the money Timm stole from the bank.
The creak that comes next is from the edge of the living room, where a startled looking man stands in the doorway, one sliver of his eye revealed in the dark. Brandon Timm lets out a hissed breath the moment he sees agent Ryans and agent Richards, slamming the basement door and thundering down the stairs; his voice carries through the floor. "Get in the goddamned car! Get in the goddamned car and open the goddamned fucking door right now!"
He's on the move.
There's a second where Allison just looks at Timm. Then she's moving in that direction, flinging the door open as soon as she reaches it so she can yell down to Timm. As she starts yelling at him her eyes fade from hazel to a silver so light it's nearly white. It's time to put her ability to the test in a real life situation! "Stop where you are! Brandon Timm, stop!" is called down the stairs, even as she's glancing to Ryans, just briefly, to make sure he saw what she saw. Then it's off she goes, holding her gun at the ready, just in case her words don't work, and she's moving as fast as she can without running into the barrel of a gun.
The creak, has Ryan's head snapping up, the money forgotten for the moment. The carpet is dropped over the duffel bags, they will be back for those, for now, he's on his feet and moving. There is a soft curse as she takes off like that, the agent moves to follow, hand grabbing the corner as he swings around so that he can hurry down after her, growling. "Damn fool woman is gonna get herself killed."
His leather shoes are loud as they slap down the basement stairs, at this point it's catch up with the shrink. He's not happy about that.
Allison's shout goes down into the dark of the basement loudly as she's barreling thorugh that door and down the stairs, shoes clunking on the wooden steps. The stink of car exhaust fills the air once she's partway down the steps, like a car that had been running for a while in the closed-up garage. There's a pop pop pop of gunfire from the dark garage and bullets impact the sheetrock in front of Allison and tear up the stairs. Timm's firing from down below, it's hard to tell if the harried shout Allison gave was enough focus and concentration to keep Timm out of the car, or maybe that's what halted him long enough to consider shooting.
However long it is, it's not long enough because the next thing she hears after the gunfire is the car door popping shut, and then a low haromnic rumble filling the basement as the garage doors explode open, splitting down the middle and shearing in half before flying outwards onto the street. The tires peel out and she can barely make out a tiny black Honda Civia backing out of the garage and onto the street now that there's light flooding the basement from the missing doors.
The shots have Allison stopping and dropping into a low crouch. "Black Honda Civic!" she calls back to Ryans. "He's in the damn car!" And she doesn't sound happy about it. And she's smart enough to know that she can't run down a car on foot, as much as she may want to. Then she's glancing back at Ryans. "Did he hit you?"
"No." Comes the harsh, clipped word as he slips past Allison on the stairs, as the car barrels out of the garage. His attention turns to the garage door, frowning some. "He's Sawyer and Ayers problem now." He strides to the front of the garage, lips pressed together, eyes moving in the direction the car went.
He take a deep breath only to cough against the thick amount of exhaust in the garage, though the fresh air is starting to seep in. "What were they doing?" He glances around the garage. "It's suicide to keep as car going in an enclosed garage."
With a sharp turn he moves to go back up the stairs, there is a bunch of bags waiting there and… there may be a clue up there. "Come on."
Ryans is right on the money when he makes the claim about Ayers and Sawyer, because as soon as the Honda Civic is peeling out of the garage and headed down the one-way street, there's a roar of the powerful Mercedes engine as Veronica is hot on their tail, tires screeching and rear-end fishtailing across the slippery street. In the passenger seat, Corbin admittedly looks a little frazzled as he fumbles with his gun before the Mercedes slips out of view.
By the time Ryans is upstairs, both he and Allison can hear a horrible shearing smash down the street, and when the senior agent goes to the window to get a better look at what happened, he can see a police cruiser up in the air twisting around like a towel being wrung out, glass shattering, metal shearing and then finally dropping back down on the ground as Agents Sawyer and Ayers' Mercedes whips past in hot pursuit.
"We should search the house for the kid. I have no idea if he was in the car or not," Allison points out, lowering her gun but not putting it away just yet. "Don't get me wrong, the money is damning evidence, but the kid…"
"I — have a feeling the kid is in the car, if not there is a third man." The senior agent's words bland as he pushes away from the window a look of disgust on his face thinking about the cops being twisted up in that car. Poor bastards. "Tell me, Richards. Look out at the Police car and tell me if you think a man, being pursued like that can concentrate on driving and twist a car like a dish towel?"
But, he still holds his weapon at ready, just in case there is a surprise, as he moves through the house. Never can be too careful. "Besides, he took the kid on the job, as well." Though he really hopes he's wrong. This is one time he doesn't want to be right.
Back through the living room, Ryans' eyes go over the furnishing again, the dead bird and twisted cage, the newspaper, the ratty sofa, the torn up carpet. Quiet contemplation comes thorugh the agent, followed by a furrow of his brows as he considers the newspaper again, noticing how it's raised up as if draped over something. A hasty look through the apartment might have let that elude the agents, but Ryans' decision to stay behind and keep looking has things taking a different shape.
Moving over to the table, Ryans lifts up the newspaper, pulling it back to reveal a map of New York City spread out over the coffee table. The map has colored post-it notes tagged around it. One up in Flushing, Queens that lists the operating hours of the bank that was robbed, then another post-it note down in Red Hook, listing a time and a split of the money to be given out, then another post-it note at JFK airport with April 4; 10:55pm, Gate 3 written across it.
Flight information, plans to escape the city. The gears behind Ryans' eyes begin spinning, and given the date on that Post-It note, there's no way Timm's flight would have been scheduled with the violent winter weather hammering down on the city. Which means his timetable got thrown off, and now he's probably desperate.
Something else catches Ryans' attention though, a post it note on the south end of Red Hook listing an address:
Shipper's Salvage Yard
End it
There's a chirp on Allison's cell phone at that, followed by the blip of a text message that comes up on the screen:
Ellechu: What's up Doc? Sawyer and Corbie have Timm cornered at a salvage yard in Red Hook. We're almost outside, come on down and meet us and we'll take you with us.
Right on cue, the sounds of a car pulling up out front and the honk honk is sure sign that agents Buckley and Bishop responded to a call for backup.
Allison moves to the window and peers outside, grimacing faintly. "Point. Though I really hope that you're wrong about this. A guy using a kid like that is just…beyond wrong."
Her phone is pulled out with a frown, then she glances up to Ryans. "They've got him corned at a salvage yard in Red Hook. They want us there. Or, well, Elle does," she says, putting her phone away. "We can leave someone behind to thoroughly search the house if you want." But she's heading for the door to join in the chase!
"Shipper's Salvage Yard." Ryans supplies, a finger stabbing at the map, specifically the one that says 'End It.' "Whatever they plan to do there. It won't be good." He rumbles, straightening from the map, his tranq gun is shoved back into it's holster.
The honking as the senior agent turning. "Let's go." He growls. "I don't how much time we have and believe my, Richards, I want to be wrong on this one."
The door is thrown open and he is out the door, pausing long enough for the doctor to catch up. A quick stop to give orders to the cops still on scene and he angles his way to the car. The person in the drivers side, gets a thumb jerked at. Ryans is driving and the look on his face says there is to be no arguing this.
The driver's side door of the car opens to reveal the tall and broad-shouldered figure of agent Buckley. Tilting his chin up, the agent scratches at the underside of his jaw, slanting a look at Ryans before motioning inside of the car where Elle sits in the passenger's seat with a cell phone held up to one ear. Buckley opens up the back seat of the black sedan and slips inside, unlocking the opposite door for Allison to get in.
"Oh I'm way ahead of you Corbie…" Elle chirps into the phone with a quirks of her lips into a smile and a little finger-wiggling wave at Allison through the passenger's side window, "I've got the old man and Doc with us and we're on our way to meet you. Don't let 'em get away!" Leaning back in her seat to watch Bryan get in the car, Elle's blue eyes flick towards Ryans as she impatiently waves at the driver's seat, patting the center console as if she were beckoning in a puppy.
"If you let the bad guys get away, Corbie, you'll be getting extra zaps when we get back to base." Elle adds with a broad, toothy smile as she bobs up and down in her seat impatiently, crackling sparks of electricity dancing up and down her unoccupied hand as she checks her nails while on the phone, completely unphased by the police car twisted like a wrung out towel and on its side ahead of them, officers in the street looking stunned and confused.
Sliding into the car, Ryans is already sliding the gear into drive as soon as his door slams shuts. "Elle. What have a told you about that?" The calm words full of a rather fatherly like disappointment, even as he jerks the wheel and accelerating, the old man has complete control of the car. How many car chases has he had to go through? How many classes? They are countless. The old man can drive.
Once they are driving straight, one hand comes off the wheel to jerk the seat belt into place. Allison will get a first hand experience of Ryans' driving. Better hold on woman, it's a bumpy ride.