Catching people wasn't the hard part. Charlie was no longer the small-town sheriff of Forks. Back then, he hadn't had a single officer under him—not even a dog—and had to do everything himself. Now he commanded over nine thousand LAPD officers. The department had been the first to resume normal operations after the earthquake, and Charlie had direct authority to mobilize SWAT.
Find the target, breach the door, grab the guy. That part was straightforward. The challenge was locating a drug lord who'd buried himself this deep in a city of millions.
Bella flipped through the frustratingly thin dossier and agreed: this was a tough one.
The key constraint was keeping herself out of the picture. Ideally, Charlie shouldn't stand out either.
At his rank, any case his officers cracked earned him a share of the credit as their commanding officer. Better to let the rank-and-file handle it.
With two layers of separation between herself and the action, even Bella's considerable talents sometimes left her scratching her head.
This drug lord named Braga was a dead end—until one detail in the file caught her eye. Braga was currently recruiting street racers, apparently planning to use them to move cash out of Los Angeles before resupplying through Mexico.
A day later, Bella found Shaw. She wanted Shaw to go undercover as a delivery driver, infiltrate the racing circuit, get close to Braga, and confirm his real identity.
Shaw had been idle lately. After completing her own round of the artificial insemination procedures, she'd settled into the same lazy drift as Bella, killing time with nothing to do.
Root, on the other hand, was swamped. The moment her pregnancy was confirmed, she'd rushed off and married her rebound pick, Reed Strucker.
The timeline was brutally tight. Being a decent man didn't make Reed an idiot. If they'd never so much as held hands and she showed up ten months later with a baby claiming it was his, who'd buy that? The man needed at least a taste of the goods.
Tight schedule, heavy workload.
Root multithreaded the operation: embryo cultivation on one track, courtship-to-marriage on the other, both running in parallel. The entire process—dating through wedding—took less than a month. A true lightning marriage. She'd even mailed wedding invitations from Atlanta, though neither Bella nor Shaw bothered attending.
Root's logic was sound. She didn't have Arendelle as a fallback. A child born on Earth needed two legal parents. Shaw—emotionally flatlined as she was—wasn't exactly father material. Finding a stand-in husband would benefit the child's future.
Shaw herself hadn't given much thought to what her face would look like around a child. Her understanding of the dynamics between the living and the dead, between men and women, between women and children, was still a tangled mess. When Bella called, the thoroughly idle Shaw showed up without hesitation.
"What's the intel? Give me the broad strokes. I only take the easy jobs," Shaw said, her voice characteristically slow. She often preferred to communicate through gestures rather than words.
Her old pickup truck had been totaled when her soul was extracted, so she now drove an orange Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII. The car drifted to a stop in front of Bella. Through the window, Shaw's leather jacket and ponytail looked effortlessly cool.
"Simple job. Find a drug lord named Braga. The name's fake—I've already divined that much. He's recruiting drivers in LA to move product. You enter the race, take first place, get close to him, and then..."
"Then beat him to death?"
Bella waved her hands frantically. "No, no, no. We have to follow the law! Do you even remember what the law is? I need this guy brought back in one piece. Missing a couple of fingers or toes is fine, but no missing limbs. Ideally, the LAPD makes the arrest. Oh, and you'll need to collect evidence proving that Braga is Braga."
Shaw's brow furrowed into the universal expression for "you're making this way too hard." She said, "This mission is impossible! Can't we simplify it?"
"Uh... Fine, you can just deliver him directly to a police station. Say you're a concerned citizen."
"Can we simplify it even more?"
"Even simpler? How about I just tell you where this Braga guy is and you go put a bullet in his head?"
Shaw stared at her with absolute sincerity. "Really? That's great! I love that kind of mission!"
Bella covered her face. "What are you thinking? Look, to reduce your workload, I'm giving you a partner."
She pulled out a phone. The device chittered and clicked, a series of mechanical transmissions rippling through it, and transformed into Frenzy—a member of the Decepticon Soundwave's squad.
The unlucky little bot had been captured by Sadako. With Soundwave's fate on Cybertron unknown, Frenzy had effectively defected from the Decepticons, at least temporarily.
And because Sadako's avatar had written a substantial amount of code into Soundwave's database, from the perspective of Frenzy, Laserbeak, and the rest of Soundwave's subordinates, Sadako had more or less taken Soundwave's place.
Mechanical life-forms didn't care about appearances or bloodlines. Once the code checked out, that was the right boss.
So Frenzy had stumbled his way into becoming one of Sadako's minions. Bella had borrowed him from Sadako to gather intelligence against a Los Angeles drug lord—overkill, perhaps, but she didn't mind, and Frenzy had no authority to object.
"Can this little thing really pull its weight?" Shaw was familiar with Bumblebee and Shatter. Seeing a Transformer didn't faze her. She just thought Frenzy was too small; even transformed, his body was paper-thin.
Frenzy bared his teeth and snarled, spitting a stream of Cybertronian profanity, and made to teach Shaw a lesson. A spinning shuriken materialized in his palm, but before he could fling it, Bella caught his arm. In the same instant, Shaw drew a pistol and pressed the muzzle against his forehead.
Shaw nodded, satisfied. "Looks capable enough. He's with me."
Bella felt reasonably confident. Frenzy was small, yes, and his combat power was laughable compared to Bumblebee or Shatter. His specialty was intelligence gathering, not fighting. But weak as he was, he was still stronger than any street gang.
Caught off guard, Frenzy could wipe out an entire gang without breaking a sweat.
Underground street racing had always thrived in Los Angeles. After the earthquake and tsunami, mass unemployment and school closures had driven countless men and women into the scene.
They craved the thrill, the chance to lose themselves in the roar of engines and the thunder of cheers.
City Hall and the LAPD turned a blind eye. With that many people needing an outlet, what else were they supposed to do? After weighing the alternatives, street racing was the safest, most harmless option available. A few dead racers at three in the morning was a price the city could live with.
Bella had maintained a refined persona for the past two years.
Natasha had secretly raced before joining S.H.I.E.L.D., but Bella herself had never had much exposure to the underground racing scene. After Shaw and Frenzy departed, she threw on a baseball cap, changed into an unremarkable sleeveless knit top and jeans, and drove out to see the action for herself.