(Bee must have flown back a few feet, not from the blast but from the shock! There went all his day’s lack of work in one flash of light with nothing left of it but a hole straight through to the water below. He stuck his hand into it just to be sure. The heat from the plasma singed his paint even from a distance, and it sent a shudder up his struts.)
(The mech was gone by the time he’d got his bearings, and through a stunned fuzz in his head, Bee pocketed his money, transformed, and rolled back to his little hidey-hole in the alley. His CPU spun the whole way back. Who was that mech? Why was he so well dressed AND well armed, and what did he have against Blindside’s paper? Where did he make the kind of money to throw around like that?)
(Deciding he wouldn’t let Blindside know what happened was an easy decision, but it cost him in the morning when he went in with no papers to sell back.)
“Where did they all go? You dumped them in the river, didn’t you?! Damn mini! I’ve got a menace to society to uncover and you can’t even get the public reading the truth!”
(It got him a cane to the head and his latest stack thrown at his back as Blindside slammed the door behind him. Bee popped out one issue and skimmed the headlines as he, for the first time in weeks, ate a quick energon breakfast.)
“Town darling dead in disaster! Officer loses life in a harrowing high-speed chase ending in a crash on-”
(Bee knew that neighborhood. He starts walking there, papers on his back and selling a few while he’s not really paying attention, making his steady way to the scene of the accident. Paper said the officer had spun out on a slick road from the acid rain.)
(It hadn’t rained in days.)
Megatron glared at the paper Soundwave had tossed on his desk. It would seem that Blindside hadn’t noticed his warning. Fair enough, it was rather subtle compared to last night’s chase. At least Longarm had been able to keep a few important details under-wraps. “You know where the mech gets his ink?” Soundwave gave a short nod from where he leaned against the wall. Of course he knew. “Maybe it’d be better fer him if there was a shortage.” The slender mech removed himself from the wall, straightened his tie, and walked out without a word.
~~~~~~~
The road had indeed been slick hours ago, but not with acid. The scent of ethanol had yet to disappear, wafting from the pavement, under the skidding tiremarks of the unfortunate officer. The wreckage had been cleared away, but not fast enough to keep the energon from staining the ground. A section of the backroad was still cordoned off, though not a soul seemed to linger by the scene. They knew better in his town.
Another, narrower set of marks peeled off down a wide alley, but no police tape had been put up around them, footprints even suggested there had been foot traffic over them since then. The only other bit of blockage was a set of traffic cones around an oblong hole in the pavement, a little ways farther than the crash site.
Megatron's back up 