A Bitter Pill To Swallow

Anxiously waiting for the minutes to tick by like a kid on Christmas Eve, Dave fidgeted as the eternity crawled by. The soft beep of his phone alarm triggered a grin that split his rugged face. "Might need to warm up your credit card in case I need bail money." he quipped at Augusta. "Just grab loverboy whenever the commotion starts. Should be plenty of mayhem to cover the snatch if you're quick." he told Eva as he walked backward across the street towards the restaurant. Turning, he picked up his pace and actually danced a little jig as he approached the Valencia's entrance.
Barely suppressing a grin, he entered through the swanky eatery's glass french doors by throwing them both open and stomping in. The patrons at the waiting bar turned at the sudden intrusion and the Maître D blanched behind his podium. The slight built older man balled his fist around the edge of the wooden lectern, Excuse me, sir!" he objected sternly. "This is a fine dining establishment...."

"Where is she?!?" Dave stomped closer to the podium. Sensing imminent trouble, some of the waiting bar patrons slid off their seats and looked confusedly for some avenue of escape or looked on in shocked amusement. "Where is that low-down Rat she's with?"
Raised voices and the squeals of numerous chairs on the floor carried into the establishment but perhaps not out into the patio area. They were enough, however, to summon the two security personnel from the office adjacent to the foyer. The older, and larger, of the two men looked at the Maitre D and then to the obvious cause of the commotion while his partner surveyed the waiting crowd. The bigger man threw up a hand, half as a warning anf half to block Dave's advancement, "Look, I don't know what or who you have a problem with but you are going to have to leave. Right. Now." To anyone else, the security guard's deep and gritty tone might've made them reconsider proceeding to cause a disturbance...for Dave, it sounded like an invitation to dance.
Squinting his already beady brown eyes at the man, Dave invaded the man's personal space by getting right up in his face and staring him down. The security guard, Amelio by his name tag, did not flinch, "I don't want anyone to get hurt..." By implication, he meant Dave. It was a nice bit of de-escalation sophistry cooked up by an HR firm somewhere. It probably works on people who aren't Dave. "Oh good. Me too..." Dave disarmingly stepped back from the big security guard and smoothed the lapels on the guard's shiny silk jacket as if to mollify the situation. "So we'll do this the easy way..." In a flash, Dave grabbed the guard's tie in his fist, simultaneously pulling the man off balance and, using his other hand, jammed and cinched the man's picture perfect Pratt's knot against his windpipe letting the fashionable purple silk tie garrotte him.
Releasing the man's tie, Amelio dropped to the ground gagging and clutching desperately at his throat. The particular purple cast of his face clashing terribly with the autumn plum shade of his haute couture neckwear as Dave stepped over Amelio nonchalantly. The phone lept into the the Maitre D's hands, almost as fast the cellphones of the bar patrons appeared to document the brewing situation. Amelio's partner jumped in immediately, letting Dave only take two step forward from Amelio's struggling form before locking an arm bar around Dave's neck and pulling his arm back and around into a particularly painful submission hold. On a normal person, they'd have the option of 30 seconds of consciousness from the arm bar across the throat or the excruciating agony of the arm lock to pressure them to give up. Dave grudgingly admired the training these guys had but still felt that they were really just innocent bystanders and didn't deserve most of the retaliatory options available to him. Settling on something simple and direct, and also unavailable to normal people in this situation, he jumped straight up and landed his considerable weight on the guard. The sudden move, fall and crushing weight of Dave took the wind right of the man's sails and he lay on the tiled floor dazed as his neanderthal assailant rolled off him and moved to kick in the doors to the dining room.
Rampaging in, the diners recoiled at the intrusion as confusing and alarm spread. "Where are they? Those two-timing low-down pieces of shit?" he bellowed before spying them through the glass patio doors. "There they are!" he exaggeratedly pointed towards the couple, Floyd and Melissa, before stomping in the direction of the patio dining area. He passed a waiter, frozen in place by confusion and fear, before stopping and grabbing the tray out of the man's hands. "Oooh. Horse Divorce!" he said excitedly before resuming course towards the patio, shovelling some of the Hors d'oeuvres into his maw along the way.

Waiting at the edge of the flat roof on a nearby building, Eva stretches, rotates her limbs and does some knee-lifts, getting ready for her sprinting leap down into the patio -- which she sees some commotion on.

Dave was making his move.

Melissa knows it's on as soon as she sees Dave's Brian's expression change.

It's on! Stay cool, she tells herself but she wasn't prepared for Dave's response. Nor was she prepared for her own.

"That's right, Dave. That's exactly the plan." She sits there looking smug but still a little nervous as she hopes the team gets to the body guard quickly too.

"I do. Better people than the likes of you, Brian." Melissa keys into Brian's nervousness and that gives her confidence.

Not so tough now, king of cool, she thinks as she grabs a knife from the table when Brian isn't looking in case she might need it and waits for the team to start playing their hands.

Dave rampages around the dining room like a bull in a china shop as he makes his way out to the patio area. At one table he grabs a couple of wine glasses and sloppily downs the contents in one long gulp, at another he stops to unsuccessfully try the old magic trick of pulling the tablecloth from the table yet leaving the table setting in place, at yet another he grabs the steak from a diner's plate and consumed it on the way to the patio.
Melissa had warned them about Floyd's bodyguard but they had yet to make a move. That worried him a bit so he decided to rachet things up a bit to see if he could draw them out. "There you are..." he pointed the remnants of a confiscated pheasant leg at Floyd and Melissa's table. "Harcourt Fenton Mudd, have you been drinking again?" he shouted nonsensically. Diners rapidly began exiting the patio area, rushing inside as soon as Dave had cleared the doorway. "You good for nothing layabout! You've been up to no good, no doubt!" he approached their table wagging a finger at Floyd.

ANNESBURG, 6 NOV 2023
A Nearby Rooftop
"Come on, come on..." Eva says to herself, impatient, pacing. She can see that Dave is causing a commotion, but she also sees that the bodyguard hasn't taken the bait. Still, she's probably only seconds away from needing to make the leap, so she starts warming up, drawing and exhaling a couple of deep breaths, moving lightly on the balls of her feet, and doing a a couple of powerfully high knee-lifts...

...and then she loses patience, worried the moment might slip away. "Fuck it," she growls to herself, and she's running for the edge, leaping off the building!

Melissa, wild-eyed, just watches the scene unfold. How is the bastard so cool in the face of this obvious attempt to grab him? She quickly looks over at the bodyguard then to Dave and then around the room, looking for the reinforcements unsure of what to do, so she waits for Dave's cue.

Eva has made jumps like this many times. She knows after she pinwheels her arms once, twice, to tuck them in, just as she does her legs, drawing her knees up to her prodigious chest. Down she plunges like a cannonball, like a fucking thunderbolt when she unfolds her body and prepares for the heavy landing. Before the operation, she'd switched into her control suit, and donned her huge, shit-stomping combat boots -- the same ones she used to wear on dangerous missions like this one.

These kinds of moves always bring back memories, fragments and glimpses of things she was programmed to do. Plunging down now, feet-first, she remembers the last time she did this, jumping from an Interstate overpass onto a moving car. She blew right through the armored windshield and incapacitated the driver all in one fell swoop, and things just got uglier from there.

The landing isn't as clean as she'd like -- tables and plates, patrons and food and wine go flying -- but a simple forward roll bleeds off most of the energy her powerful legs can't absorb. From that rising crouch she springs for her target, and the man barely has time to draw a breath before she's got him and is bounding off the patio, grunting as she puts him over her shoulder and clears the surrounding hedge in one remarkable leap. She's left Dave and Melissa behind, but that's all part of the plan as she lands on the street and looks around for Augusta and the car.

"I've got him!" she shouts at her friend, making for the vehicle.

If there was one payout for the night's chaos and mayhem, it'd definitely be the look on Floyd's face as the dark blur of blonde supersoldier landed in front of him, tackled the sleazy salesman in an acrobatic roll and launched back into the night. That was a mental image he'd treasure for longer than anyone would remember the name Brian Floyd.
"Nobody knows you're part of this..." Dave whispered to Melissa as he took one last look around. "Just cry a lot and you're home free."
The bodyguard foundered on the ground, stunned from the heavy chair hit and the rough intercept by the ground. He wasn't in any shape to pursue Dave. Locking gaze with the guard's pain-ridden eyes. Not bothering to hide the demonical gleeful grin spread across his face, Dave gestured swivelling his fingers between his own eyes and the guard's, an I'll be watching you gesture, as Dave disappeared by slowly walking backwards into the tall hedge that separated the patio from the street.