Haynes snapped. He looked back at Sloan. Fine. Show me the fake badge. Do it slow.
You flinch, I drop you. Sloan kept her eyes locked on Haynes' twitching trigger finger. Moving with agonizing slowness, she lifted her right hand from the steering wheel. She reached over to the passenger seat, her fingertips finding the cool, heavy leather of her FBI credentials case. She pulled it back into her lap, then slowly lifted it towards the window, flipping it open.
The gold shield caught the brutal midday sun, glinting brightly. Beneath it, her official Bureau Identification Card, Sloan Jenkins, Special Agent Federal Bureau of Investigation. Complete with the Department of Justice seal, the watermarks, and Arthur Campbell's, stamped signature. Haynes snatched the leather case out of her hand. He didn't even drop his gun.
He held his weapon on her with his right hand, while he brought the badge up to his face with his left. He stared at it for three agonizing seconds. Then he burst into laughter. It was a cold, cruel, barking laugh that echoed off the empty desert landscape. Woah.
Haynes chuckled, tossing the credentials casually onto the hood of Sloane's Taurus, the heavy badge scratching the paint as it slid down toward the windshield wipers. I got to admit that's high quality. What did that cost you on Amazon? 50 bucks? A hundred?
Sloane's eyes narrowed. The stillness in her evaporated, replaced by a cold, sharpened fury. That is federal property, officer. And you have just assaulted a federal agent, detained me without probable cause, and are currently brandishing a deadly weapon at a sworn officer of the Department of Justice. I'm pointing a gun at a suspect resisting arrest who just presented forged law enforcement credentials, Haynes countered smoothly, completely lost in his own fantasy.
That's a felony, sweetheart. Now, for the last time, get out of the car. Sloane knew she couldn't reason with him. Haynes was too far gone, too deeply entrenched in his bigotry and his ego to back down. If she stepped out of the car, he would throw her to the dirt, cuff her, and likely manufacture a charge of resisting arrest.
Or worse, he'd accidentally discharge his weapon in the scuffle. She needed to tip the scales. All right, Sloane said slowly. I'm stepping out. With her left hand, she reached for the door handle, but beneath the steering wheel, out of Haynes's line of sight, her right hand dropped to the center console.
She didn't reach for her own weapon, a custom-fitted SIG Sauer P320 tucked away in a lockbox under the seat. A shootout was exactly what Haynes wanted. Instead, her fingers found the heavy encrypted satellite radio bolted to the center console, the one she used to communicate directly with the Phoenix field office and surrounding federal task forces. By feel alone, she flipped the protective plastic toggle on the side of the radio. Then she pressed and held the bright red panic button for 3 solid seconds.