The rain was pouring down in sheets so thick that neither Harlow nor Levey_Posner could see more than five feet in any direction outside of the car as they exited.  Harlow felt a sense of unease as she listened to the car doors slamming, unseen, in front of and behind them.  Levey had brought an army with them to Gary, Indiana.  He was going home either with his firecracker or having avenged her, but Harlow wasn't so sure about herself.  Even if she walked away with him and Tamsyn, she couldn't help but feel that she would never again be in Chicago.

It wasn't just that she had no real experience with a gun, it was everything about the day.  The way Lee held her in his arms, the long kisses before he extracted himself from the sheets, how he looked in the morning light pulling on his clothing with such purpose, the gray gloom that hung over them like a shroud, and the odd silence of the Costa HQ.

The chop shop owner had said he hadn't called, he hadn't warned them.  It should have been quiet, and yet, everything about how quiet it was bothered Harlow and her instincts told her to run.  Looking at Lee, however, she knew she couldn't.  She had to be with him on one might be their last time standing shoulder to shoulder in the thick of something.  If Tamsyn was inside, their love affair would likely end, another redhead stealing away her love like a thief in the night.  She accepted this and would see it through to the end.

Levey gave the order and they began to move towards the front doors of the old two-story brick building that she could only barely make out through the fog and unyielding deluge.  Suddenly she was looking up to the sky.  She couldn't recall wanting to look up, or why she had, just that she was now staring up into the rain pouring down and then her back and head met with the merciless mud-covered earth.  She tried to breathe but she felt as though she were trying to pull air through a solid wall.  Her hands clutched at her throat as her brain began to put together that she was hearing hell on earth - gunfire was all around them.

She tried to call out to Levey, tried to cry, tried to breathe, but nothing was working as she wanted, not in her body or her mind.  The only good news was that Harlow never fully understood what the shotgun, held in the hands of a fully alert and prepared Costa gang member, had done to her once beautiful form which was now a mangled pile of meat growing cold in the Indiana mud.

One second he was walking, another he was in the dirt. Ben had thrown him to the ground, but he didn't have time to react himself. By the time he turned to look, the mud was being stained with a deep crimson, and Levey thanked God for the rain that nobody saw the tears streaming from his face. His eyes stung, he could feel every emotion of the past months rising within him. The pain of loss was the greatest though. Twice now in so many months, only this time, this time it was in front of him. 

"Get the fuck off me! He shouted at Ben, and then realized he was going to have to shove the body of the larger man off. Gunfire was hailing around him, but Ben wasn't moving to do a thing to get Levey out of there, which meant Ben did his job, his final job. Levey sighed and, gathering all of his strength, heaved upward out of the mud. His men wer hiding behind whatever cover they could, but he just turned toward the building and whipped out his .38 special, raining lead down on the doorway.

The brown mud matched the eyes of the man who was reloading his shotgun when he went down, and Levey moved to the door.

"Costa, you are one sick fucking prick, I'll give you that, but you can survive this if you're smart. I'm not a chump, I'm a self-made fucking badass, so you can either kneel, or die."

He took the returning hail of gunfire as his answer, and the righteous fury of all his pent up self smiled within him, ready to break free.

"GIVE 'EM HELL BOYS!"  Costa cackled out loudly over the rain and the gunfire as he jammed a new cannister onto his Thompson and opened up on the shape of the cars out in front of them.  He knew Posner and his men were out there, somewhere, but he could see fuck all through the rain and the fog.  Having no better options, he sprayed wildly and at anything moving.  

Costa could not know that already, around the back, Levey's men led by Hadrain Truegust were closing in on the lone doorway that served as a delivery entrance.  Hadrain put a gun to the back of the guard's skull and pulled the trigger twice, dropping the kid, allowing his boss' best goons to kick in the door.  

The group of them came upon the gunmen unawares, their eyes focused out the front all except one bastard at a window who turned back to grab for some ammo on the table near him.  Hadrain and he met eyes for only a moment before they both raised their guns.  Hadrain had the benefit of his actually being loaded.

The noise inside was deafening.  Hadrain's ears were ringing so loudly he thought they might be bleeding.  Costa's men fell, one after another, one or two of the goons who had entered the back with Hadrain went down as well but they gave far better than they got until Costa himself was pinned down behind a desk, under the window he'd been shooting at.

"BOSS!"  Hadrain called out, still not hearing his own voice right.  "WE GOT 'EM!"

Costa still had his gun and he would likely not want to be taken alive, but if they were going to press him to go down shooting... well, that was Levey's call.  The boss was a talker but the cost of today's excursion was high and with these assholes being the ones who took his girl, well, Hadrain wasn't going to even guess at what the boss would want to do.