Adrenaline

“How naughty of you,” The tiny redhead traced the lines of Dominic’s rough-hewn abs as he rolled her stockings back up her legs to secure them to her light-colored garters.

“What?” A pair of chocolate brown eyes met a mismatched set of green and blue, Blair’s usual glare was soft and relaxed as she lit a cigarette.

“We’re supposed to be down at the garage, bulletproofing cars. I do have to work sometimes, you know, it’s not a permanent vacation here,” She chuckled as his fingers tickled the tops of her thighs.

“Oh, I’m sorry Ms. Hundley, for interrupting your rigorous work schedule,” Toretto’s deep, raspy voice was thick with sarcasm, and interrupted by their brief kisses. Blair reached for her ringing cell phone on the bedside table as Dominic went back to his feeble attempts at fastening a garter strap to a thigh high - he could take apart and re-assemble an entire car engine, but a tiny little clasp like the one on the end of her underwear was beyond him.

“Blair Hundley.” She answered the phone, waving his hands away from her midsection as she sat up, a hand pushing her loose curls back from her face as she listened to the rapid Russian on the other line. She replied in the same language, glancing at Dominic as she stood and crossed the room to where a pad of paper and a pen lay on the otherwise empty dresser top. She scribbled as she spoke, taking a brief moment to take a hearty swig from the tumbler of vodka Toretto had brought for her. Dominic became bored watching the tiny redhead write and talk and began to dress himself again; silently he slid one of her necklaces - a delicate silver thing with a blue glass heart dangling from it - from her bedside table and fastened it around his neck before he pulled his shirt over his buzzed head.

Blair set her cell phone down then, and reached for the cream-colored blouse she had been attempting to retrieve before she had been distracted.

“What is it?” Toretto asked, offering her the high-waisted skirt she had been wearing.

“Well,” She pulled her hair from the neckline of her shirt before she buttoned it from bottom to top, holding out her hand impatiently for the skirt. “I have another offer for a shipment. They have more money on it too.” Blair sighed, taking another deep draught of the vodka, emptying it. “The problem is... I don’t think I have enough cars.”

“Oh. Business.” Blair nodded as she shimmied her way up into her skirt - how she always managed to look so put together on such short notice the muscle man would never know. She brushed a touch of mascara across each set of eyelashes before she reached her hand out to his, her cigarettes, a lighter, the paper she had written on and her cell phone in the other.

“Business you’re going to help me with. Let’s go,” She motioned to her keys as she took his hand, they left the room quickly to sweep down staircases. The clicking of Blair’s heels drew Kolya and Mikhail from their rooms as the pair blew past on their way down to the garage.

“Blair?” Kolya called from behind the pair. Blair motioned him to her side.

“We have another shipment.” She murmured to him as the burly man fell in step beside her. Mikhail flanked Toretto’s left side; both men had noted their clasped hands, Toretto was certain. He couldn’t help but wonder if the other two cared - if she had treated them as she treated him at one point. Blair was strange like that… Dominic sighed as he made a slight alteration to the thought; Blair was somewhat slut-like; he simply wouldn’t concede to the fact that she might be a female player or something in that genre.

That thought occurred before he glanced over at Blair just in time to catch one of the adoring looks she shot him when she thought he wasn’t paying attention. Dominic smiled and squeezed her hand tightly, zeroing back in on the conversation at hand.

“- enough cars.” Mikhail was muttering from Toretto’s left.

“I know we don’t have enough cars. Get me Brian, Antony and…” She paused for a moment, as if considering something. “Get me Andre as well. And I guess get Gil if Andre is coming along.” Blair tucked the piece of paper into her waistband as she came to a stop at the top of a staircase, stopping Toretto with her.

“What are you going to pull?” Kolya’s tone was hushed, and he glanced around surreptitiously as if there could be a concealed cop around any corner.

“You know what I’m going to pull. It’s not going to be easy, but we’ve done this before.”

“Not without Vladimir!” He was less quiet now. Blair’s grip on Toretto’s hand became tense for a moment as she breathed gently through her nose to calm her temper.

“But we have Toretto now. Enough for four teams.” She sighed and turned, tugging Toretto along with her as she called back to the bewildered pair on the stairs. “Meet me at the garage. Hurry up, Dominic, there‘s a bit we need to discuss.”

“Like what?” He watched as Blair swept into the driver’s seat of the black Range Rover - the car she used for the sole purpose of getting to and from the Compound from the Garage and vice versa. Quickly, he clambered into the passenger’s seat, feeling like the bitch as she removed her right shoe to drive.

“How we’re going to pull this off. Grand Theft Auto doesn’t make you squeamish, am I right?” Dominic nodded, bewildered at how fast Blair went from being couple-like to captain-in-command. “Well, we’ll have to locate and lift the cars, then bulletproof, tint and enhance them all before Monday - because I fucking left the other shipment off until the last minute like an idiot,” She sighed, taking the hairpin turn towards the garage.

“And how exactly do you do this?”

“Well, I guess it’s not all thievery and falsehoods,” The garage’s door lifted slowly before them, and Toretto waited patiently for the answer he knew was coming. “I call a few people I know who check around at the races, if the car is there and it’s someone who I know, I’ll offer to buy it from them for a nominal fee. Mercedes. They always want fucking Mercedes.” Blair shrugged as she guided the Range Rover into the lift.

“Sounds like you’re trying to make up for the thievery and falsehoods,” Toretto commented, and glanced at Blair’s hand, at the cluster of three bluish dots which hovered by her hand. She knew the game, he could assume. Anyone who had done any sort of hard time did.

“I guess so.” Blair finally said, as she crawled out of the car, leaving Toretto alone with his thoughts. Jacking cars and selling them to the Mafia? She had mentioned it before, but the muscle-bound driver had never thought he’d get to see the Russian form of Grand Theft Auto in action. What did she want him for anyway, to be her wing man? Dominic had thought Blair would be the first to know that he was no good at following people’s lead when it came to any sort of heist - he was always large and in-charge. He looked forlornly out the window as Blair punched the button for the lift, watching the creases in the cinderblock walls pass them by quietly as the lift rattled its way down the oversized shaft.

“Well? Are you ready and willing, or would you like to head back to the Compound?” Blair asked as she clambered back into the tall Range Rover, vacating the lift for the use of the others who she was certain would follow. She didn’t understand the look of concern on Toretto’s face - hadn’t she read him right, hadn’t he been involved in that gas-truck-jacking ring in the Dominican Republic? He had been in charge of that shit, if she recalled correctly. Why would lifting a few Mercedes in Estonia make him squeamish?

“I’d like to know more about your system. Why would you need me?” Toretto followed Blair to the nearest car - a Lexus LS 460 Sedan. It was black, as all of Blair’s cars were, with tint on the windows which was nearly the same color as the chassis. The car’s doors lay on the nearby workbench, several thick, curved plates of steel lay on the bench beside the doors.

“Normally, my racing team is involved with this in order to support the exorbitant fees which sometimes accumulate with our dirty habit.” Blair shrugged as she picked up a screwdriver in her slender hand and began to attack the driver’s side door, separating the lining of the door and its mechanical workings from the chassis with practiced ease.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Toretto watched, and leaned against the bench Blair worked on.

“I need your help.” Blair set her screwdriver down on the workbench and carefully lifted the insides of the door wholly away from the chassis, and set it down beside the thing before she carefully proffered the black outer shell and placed it gently against one of the pieces of steel. “Since Vladimir is gone, we are one short of a full team. And I thought that with your background, you’d be a perfect candidate to help.” She turned to face Toretto. “It’s just a few cars, Toretto; I didn’t think you’d be so worked up about it.”

“I’m not worked up!” He leaned and seized the steel slab the chassis of the door was leaning against, and pulled it away from the rest so Blair could better attach the pieces together. She shot him a look before she crouched, balancing on her toes to finish the final few screws on the bottom - she was nearly underneath the workbench.

“You are,” Blair wrapped the car door with a cloth and directed Toretto to a foam cut out sort of thing where he should set it. The sound of the lift clattering down the shaft filled the garage as Dominic set the heavy steel down on the floor. Toretto watched as Blair clicked her way across the concrete to an adjacent room - strange, because Dominic had thought that the main, expansive room of the garage was the only part of the garage. Pretty self-explanatory, he thought. But he also thought that she would have him jacking cars by this point and not re-assembling parts of high-end cars for the mafia.

Toretto turned the final screw of the bulletproofed door before the lift finally rattled to a stop - he began work on a second door, seeing that there was probably no other use for him. Kolya, Mikhail, and a few other men Dominic recognized from the Compound - the first two vanished into the same room Blair had disappeared to, and the four men Toretto didn’t recognize set to work on a set of cars as he was - a Jaguar XJ, a Bentley Continental Flying Spur, and a Cadillac CTS-V.

He had almost finished the last door for the car, and was wondering how he was supposed to attach them to the car (because regular door hinges couldn’t possibly support the weight of the steel-reinforced doors) when Blair stuck her head out the door of the adjacent room. Toretto had never heard such a grating call.

“Toretto!” He turned the last screw, and stood to follow the wisp of Blair’s long red hair as she disappeared around the door frame.

Blair stood in the center of the room on an advanced-looking computer, Kolya was at her shoulder and she dictated to Mikhail, who recorded into a black composition book.

“What’s all this?” Toretto settled into an ancient-looking armchair, one leg flung over an arm.

“This,” Blair paused her dictation to Mikhail on car specs and turned, a cigarette in hand. “Is Kolya’s masterpiece. He managed to hack in to the dealership databases of every car dealership in Russia and the Bloc that has sold a high-end car to anyone in the recent months, and their records of those sales.” Blair grinned wryly and took a drag of her cigarette. “This way, we can track the owner of each one of those cars, see if they still have them, lift if we must, charge a nominal fee if we can. And we can track specific models and such.”

“That’s genius!” Toretto was on his feet, looking over Blair’s shoulder.

“Would you like to dictate?” She took Mikhail’s spot, he left to go assemble doors, hoods, or a roof, Toretto figured.

“I. Guess.”

“Good. We’re looking for Rolls-Royce Phantoms, Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG, Cadillac CTS-V’s and a few more Lexus LS 640’s.” Blair sat with the pen in her hand, blowing smoke as she spoke. Toretto nodded, and as Kolya typed and scrolled, Toretto scanned each page, calling out Make, Model, Owner and Location. If Blair wanted more, she would ask for a phone number and an address, which she copied shorthand.

“How are we supposed to acquire all of these cars?” Kolya laughed as he left the room, clapping Toretto on the back.

“Hard work.”

“We only need twelve cars, Kolya, don’t frighten him!” Blair threw back her hair to laugh, and crushed her cigarette out as she looked at the list in her hands. Half of it was written in Mikhail’s Cyrillic-looking characters, the other half in Blair’s beautiful cursive. She picked up a hi-liter and began to narrow down the list from nearly two-hundred cars to just fifty, and from there, she circled the twelve cars she believed to be their best picks.

“Are you in?” She asked; a hand brushed through Dominic’s generous growth of black hair, her eyes piercing.

How could he say no?