Weekly Writing Challenge: 1,000 Words, Take Two

Our challenge this week is to write a post based on this picture:

When I saw her staggering towards me, I knew she was in trouble.  I was on my way to hand over crucial documents to in a highly sensitive case involving a crime syndicate, but I couldn’t help myself from going into action mode when I saw this girl in trouble.

Instinctively I moved in closer to catch her as I could see she was on the verge of collapse.  As I let her lean against me, I held her as though in an embrace, both to protect her and to scan the surrounding area.  The warmth of her blood was seeping through on to my shirt, her wound was bleeding badly.  My years as a private detective taught me to survey the area in-depth.  Someone here had a knife, dripping with blood on their person, trying to cover their movements with an air of casualness.

The elderly man in the striped shirt seemed harmless enough, it seemed as though he had his wife with him or perhaps she was a companion.  Ahead of them, another elderly man in a blue shirt and what may be a camera bag slung around his shoulder.  They formed the picture of harmlessness, a perfect disguise for a crime in public, but then I caught a glimpse of the quick scurry and stressed movements by a tall man in the green T-shirt.   Was he trying to force the door open?   The woman just behind him was trying to act casual but her folded arms were dead a giveaway.   They had spotted me grab the girl, they knew it was not an embrace because they knew what I must have seen…

I called over to the older man in the blue shirt to call for help as I gently rested the girl against the wall, the man came rushing over stating that he was a doctor.  I reached for my gun from my shoulder holster and started the chase.  The couple had managed to open the door.

The inside of the building was dark and damp.  I had to stand still for a minute using my senses to hear any sounds, all the time wishing that my eyes would adjust to the dark quicker.   Quietly I followed the voices I could hear in the distance.  The voices were getting  a little louder as I etched in closer.  I realised that the couple thought they got away with their crime, but little did they know that I was on to them.  The minute I stepped into the room, they both stared at me without blinking an eye lid.  It was then that I knew that I fell into a cleverly laid trap and that I was in just as much trouble as the girl.

Staring at them in amazement and cursing myself for my own stupidity, I slowly levelled my hand gun in their direction.  The dark haired woman even smiled at me, sort of sardonically as though she was going to crack up laughing any minute.  Just then, I felt the very cold barrel of a gun pushing into the back of my neck and a voice ordering me to drop the gun.

As I dropped the gun I turned and was face to face with the man in the blue shirt, the girl from the street, standing next to him, right as rain, smiling at me with a smile as cold as the person she must be.  She ripped the small plastic bag filled with red liquid from her body and flung it on the ground.

I had made the biggest mistake of my life, I fell into a trap, set up especially for me, by people who had studied me an knew how I would react.  My life was now in these people’s hands.  Grimly, I handed the documents over cursing myself for not following my first instincts about this group of people forming an innocent picture and yet they were playing out a perfect crime.

I knew I would get out of this jam, I just didn’t know how…