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  Right on time, Sidney thought. She picked up the pace just a bit. The timing would be critical. She got to the end of the drive just as Franklin Dugan did. They smiled at each other and Sidney stopped and bent over to retie her shoe.

  “Good morning” Sidney said.

  “It certainly is,” Dugan replied. “You’ll forgive me for saying so, but I’ve noticed you’ve become somewhat of a regular, jogging around here in the morning.”

  “I hope that doesn’t bother you,” Sidney said, looking up from her shoes.

  “No, no, not at all,” Dugan said. “Just making conversation with a beautiful young woman.” He smiled at her. “Kind of a nice way to start the day.”

  Sidney finished her shoe and picked up the paper for Dugan. When she stood up she wobbled slightly on her feet, dropped the paper back on the ground and said, “Whoa.” She stumbled away from Dugan like she was about to fall and when she did he stepped in close and grabbed her by the arms. “Hey, easy there. I think you stood up too fast.”

  Sidney smiled and stayed close. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But I’m okay. I think I just need a drink of water.”

  “I’d be happy to get you a glass if you’d like to come up to the house,” Dugan said.

  “Oh...no, but thanks. I’ve got a bottle right here in my pack.”

  Dugan smiled at her. It was the sort of smile that said, Well, I’m not putting the moves on you or anything like that, even though under the right set of circumstances... Sid Jr. smiled right back with her best, Bullshit, you are too and we both know it, circumstances or not smile. Dugan’s face reddened a bit. He bent down to get his paper and when he did, Sid Jr. took half a step sideways and slid her hand into her fanny pack like she was getting a bottle of water.

  Trooper Burns watched the entire exchange. The whole thing made him sick. Sure, she was just a fantasy, but she was his fantasy. But now the fat cat across the street was ruining everything.

  Messing with his mojo.

  Burns thought the guy was a banker or something like that. The bankers…they bothered him…getting rich while the rest of the country starved to death. Burns was no bleeding heart leftie, but enough was enough already. How much steak could one guy eat anyway?

  He saw the fat cat bend over to collect his newspaper—it had sort of scattered when the redheaded babe dropped it. Burns was secretly hoping she’d bend over and get it. Maybe give him a little ass shot or something. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the babe reached into her fanny pack. But she didn’t unzip it from the top. She pulled a Velcro flap from the side. She had sort of a stance going, too. Feet planted firmly, knees slightly bent, shoulders square. Burns had an impression forming at the back of his brain and the impression told him that it looked sort of like a shooter’s stance. He thought, huh.

  Then he saw the redheaded babe pull out a gun and thought, Holy Shit.

  It was the last thought of his career.

  And his life.

  Sid Sr. had a perfect angle. He was in the back of the van, a small tinted slider window open just enough for the barrel of his scoped and silenced bolt-action rifle. He kept the cross hairs of the scope tight on the spot just behind the left ear of the cop. Junior was talking to the banker across the street. Their plan was to fire as close together as possible. Didn’t want to hit the cop first and have to chase the banker around in a panic, and didn’t want to hit the banker first and deal with a trained cop…and his radio.

  When Junior reached into her fanny pack, Senior tightened up on the cop. When she had the gun almost all the way clear of her pack Senior saw the cop start to wiggle, the door coming open. It was going to be close, but he had to do it. The cop knew what was happening.

  Sid Sr. pulled the trigger.

  Dugan had his paper all bunched back together and started to stand up and when he did he looked across the street. He started to wave at the cop in the squad car, but before he was even half-way straightened up he saw Trooper Jerry Burns’ head come apart. The bullet struck with such force and accuracy that Trooper Burns’ arm, the same fucking-A State Trooper arm he had used to wave at the beautiful young woman only moments ago raised up as if he were waving once again. Then his body slumped sideways and out of sight into the passenger side of his squad, his age and heart rate no longer an issue.

  That was the last thing Franklin Dugan saw before Junior flipped his switch.

  She popped him right in the side of his head from about a foot and a half with a silenced .22 semi-auto. Dugan dropped on the spot, dead before he hit the ground, the bullet bouncing around inside his head like a ball bearing in a blender. She put two into his chest just to be sure, then bent over to grab her brass. They were hot, but not overly so. Still, when she picked up the third casing—the last one fired—it burned her finger and thumb and she lost her grasp. It hit the pavement just right, did a little flip and a half moon roll then tinkled down the storm drain between the curb and the street.

  The van was rolling up close. She swore silently, took a quick peek into the drain, didn’t see anything, swore again, and then jumped into the van. She pulled the door shut and Senior drove them away going no faster than the posted limit, like maybe they were going to church or something. He zigzagged through a few side streets just to be sure and a few minutes later they were on the loop, lost to the world.

  Gone, just like that.

  2

  Outside of the two years he served in Iraq One, Virgil Jones had worked in law enforcement his entire adult life. His father, Mason Jones, had been the Marion County sheriff until he retired a few years ago, but Virgil took the state route and became a trooper. He put in the time, got the job done and when the governor of Indiana appointed a black female cop by the name of Cora LaRue as administrator of the newly sanctioned Major Crimes Unit, she hired Virgil as her lead detective. And as a political appointee, Virgil technically outranked even the superintendent of the state police. In theory, he could go anywhere in the state anytime he needed to investigate and arrest criminals who fell under the state’s loosely defined rules of Cora’s Major Crimes Unit. With scant little oversight, for a guy like Virgil, that was just about perfect. As long as he produced and made a reasonable effort to stay between the lines—blurry that they sometimes were—no one got in his way.

  Usually.

  The morning was clear and warm, the temperature perfect and Virgil was just about to turn into his parking spot at the state police building behind the courthouse when his cell phone buzzed at him. The caller ID showed the cell phone number of Sandy Small, one of his team members. He grabbed the phone, fumbled it, and then caught it in the tips of his fingers, upside down, almost clipping a parked car in the process. He stopped in the middle of the street, threw the truck in park, turned the phone over—which by now was on its last ring before it kicked over to voice mail—hit the little green talk button and said “This is Jonesy.”

  For a moment Virgil thought he’d missed it. It didn’t sound like Sandy was there. Just the empty background noise you get over a bad connection. But then, just like that, she was there. He could hear her in the background, and then there was a noise so sharp Virgil winced and pulled the phone away from his ear. It sounded like Sandy was panting, breathing hard, and swearing all at the same time. She kept counting, one through five, over and over.

  As a new team member, Sandy had been assigned to the governor’s protection detail for the past week as a way to get to know the governor on a more personal level. A better understanding of who she was really working for and all that. Today was her last day with the governor before she started catching cases.

  Virgil—who knew how to listen to his gut—had a feeling something was very wrong. He dropped the truck into gear, hit the lights and burped the siren through the intersection. It was just past seven in the morning. Sandy would still be at the governor’s mansion. He put the phone on speaker so he could have both hands on the wheel to drive. “Sandy? Sandy, can you hear me?” Virgil shouted into th
e phone but he didn’t get a response. He heard her though…a grunt of effort, then more swearing. He couldn’t quite make it out, but it sounded like she was saying ‘shit’ over and over.

  A few seconds later as Virgil slid through a corner and turned north on Meridian Avenue he heard her loud and clear, her voice coming through on the Motorola police radio mounted under the dash of his truck. “Officer down. Shots fired. Officer needs assistance. Governor’s Mansion. Repeat…Officer…Down. Officer…needs…” Then nothing.

  Virgil dropped the hammer on the truck and blew the intersection. He didn’t think about it, he just went, and went hard. A little quick math put him eight minutes out if he didn’t kill himself on the way there.

  Sandy Small had a Bachelor’s degree in education and a Master’s degree in psychology. She also ranked as an expert in marksmanship on the shooting range. Translation: She could out think and out shoot just about every cop in the state and could also teach anyone how to do it if they wanted to put their ego on the back burner. Most didn’t, but that wasn’t on her.

  She was on the last day of her protection rotation, covering the overnights at the governor’s mansion. Her new boss, Virgil, had told her that they’d all had to do it, part of some getting to know the big guy routine, or something. As far as Sandy was concerned, protection was protection, simple as that. Getting to know someone in the process was neither a pro nor a con. It was more of an inconvenience than anything. But no matter…this was the last day and she was almost done.

  At seven in the morning she stepped out the back door of the governor’s mansion, walked across the deck, down the steps and headed outside. Monday morning, last time of the last day to walk the wall. The governor’s mansion was situated on a full acre of property at the northern edge of the city of Indianapolis. An entire acre, Sandy had discovered, covered 43,650 square feet, and in this case, said acre was surrounded by a nine-foot high brick wall on all four sides. At about three feet per walking step around the perimeter, it was safe to say that doing one circuit per hour every eight hours over the last week had been a lot of walking. Good for the heart and lungs.

  Not to mention the ass.

  She varied her routine—sometimes clockwise, sometimes counter-clockwise. She always paused at the gate at the front of the drive though, and waved to the uniformed duty cop who had the overnight street-side patrol before continuing back to the house. This last trip was no different. Jerry Burns, the old coot, whistled at her every time she went by.

  Sandy was about fifteen steps from the front entrance—in the middle of pulling her long blond hair into a ponytail—when she heard the sounds, three in all. Or was it four? A pop, like a car backfiring. She stopped and listened. Heard another noise, then a short pause, then two more pops. The sound was distinct, especially if you knew what you were listening for—a ratcheting sound almost like the cycling action of a semi-auto. Then she thought, no, exactly like the cycling action of a semi-auto. Muffled pops after the ratcheting sound. It took her a few seconds to process, but when she did, Sandy took off full tilt toward the gate.

  By the time she got there it was over. She tried to push the gate open, then remembered she had to input a code into the box, a wait that made her blood boil. She ran to the street and tried to process what she saw: A white panel van as it turned the corner a half block away. Couldn’t get the plate. No more than a glimpse of the vehicle itself. A man across the street on his back, his limbs jutted outward at difficult angles, his paisley robe askew, a leather slipper missing from his foot, a pool of blood that seemed to grow darker the closer she got, glassy eyes staring at nothing. Gone.

  A banker, she thought? Where did that come from? She let it go.

  A look to her left. The squad car. Windows down. Engine off. Seat empty. Reddish tint on the front windshield.

  She ran to the car. Pulled her cell out along the way, and hit Virgil’s number from the speed dial. At the first ring she was almost there. At the second ring she looked inside the squad. At the third ring she had the phone pinched between her shoulder and her ear. At the fourth ring she had the door open and pulled the trooper out of his vehicle, her hands wrapped under his armpits. She lost the phone as it clattered to the ground, but she thought she heard Virgil answer.

  Sandy pulled hard until she got Burns clear of the vehicle and flat on his back. No pulse. Not breathing. She began CPR, counting with each chest compression, and then pausing to breathe into his lungs. Her hair hung in a ponytail over the front of her shoulder and every time she bent forward to give Burns mouth-to-mouth the ends of her hair landed in the pool of blood next to Jerry’s head, like a paintbrush. Eventually she gave up on the counting and began to swear as she compressed his chest….“shit shit shit.” Five shits then a breath. Every time she compressed his chest a few drops of blood seeped out of the hole in the side of his head.

  When that didn’t work, she crawled to the cruiser and grabbed the microphone and started transmitting. “Officer down. Shots fired. Officer needs assistance. Governor’s mansion. Repeat…officer…down. Officer…needs…” Out of breath. She dropped the microphone and started back in on Burns. She tried to remember something personal about him. Wife? Kids? She didn’t know. Couldn’t think. The microphone she’d just used dangled from the squad car, hung out over the bottom of the doorjamb, smeared with blood. Sandy watched it sway back and forth as she worked on Burns. Somewhere in the back of her mind it registered as one of the saddest things she’d ever seen—the microphone hanging upside down from the door of the squad car.

  He was gone—she knew it—but she kept at it anyway. Didn’t know what else to do. Heard the sirens. They sounded far away. The blood on her hair painted her shirt as she worked on Jerry.

  Five shits, then a breath.

  3

  Virgil was not a believer in God, at least not in the traditional sense. If pressed, he’d admit that he believed in something bigger than life…something bigger than himself, but he’d also be the first to admit it was something he couldn’t quite define. He’d been raised Catholic but it hadn’t stuck and by the time he’d turned eighteen—more than twenty years ago—he’d never gone back to church at all except for weddings and funerals. And, he was hitting the age where he’d begun to notice there were less of the former and more of the latter.

  It seemed to Virgil that almost everyone believed all they had to do was talk to God, ask for their prayers to be answered—which really, he thought, amounted to nothing more than asking for stuff—and then God, in His wisdom, would either grant the request or not. The whole concept seemed kind of selfish. A little too…feel good. Like comfort food. The idea that groups of people would get together once or twice a week and listen while someone stood on stage and waved a book at them and told them how to live their lives seemed very…republican. Like it didn’t matter if you waved the book or waved the flag, in the end it was all pretty much the same. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

  So. Virgil was a believer of something. What that something might be was just a little hard to pin down. But believer or not, over the last eight minutes since he’d heard Sandy on the radio, he had to admit he’d been talking to someone, asking…praying, that she wasn’t hurt.

  When he finally rolled up to the scene and saw her working on Jerry Burns, saw her physically okay, he felt like his prayers had been answered.

  And wasn’t that, Virgil thought, a kick in the nut-sack of belief.

  He slid his truck to a stop at the south intersection, almost a half-block away. It was as close as he could get. It looked like every cop car in the city had converged on the scene. He flashed his ID to the city cop and ran through. Sandy had moved over and was sitting down on the curb across the street from the trooper, her head down, her hands in her hair. Virgil didn’t know who had the overnight duty so he didn’t know who the trooper was, but even as he ran he could tell it wasn’t good. He looked up and saw two news helicopters circling overhead, and when he crossed the street h
e saw the fallen trooper was Jerry Burns and that fact made something click in his chest. Jerry had been Virgil’s training officer when he joined the state police.

  After a few seconds of reflection Virgil walked over to Sandy and squatted in front of her and noticed the blood on her shirt and in her hair. “Jesus, Sandy, are you hurt? Are you hit?”

  Sandy shook her head, then leaned into him, her arms around Virgil’s neck. He felt her shake and sob into his chest. “I’m…I’m all right. Not hit.” She pulled back and rubbed her eyes, then tried to wipe the blood out of her hair. “It’s Jerry’s blood. It’s in my hair. I was trying…I was trying to do CPR.”

  Virgil looked at her and for just a moment he wanted to scoop her up and take her home. Get her cleaned up. Wanted to take care of her. The blood was everywhere…in her hair, on her shirt, her hands, her face. He tried to wipe some of it from her cheek, but it was useless. He turned toward the EMTs and motioned them over, then turned back to Sandy. “Where’s the governor, Sandy?”

  She didn’t answer right away and he had to ask her again. She pulled her hair away from her face streaking it with more blood in the process. “He’s, uh, still inside, I guess. Hasn’t left yet.”

  “Stay here. Do not move. Understand?”

  She nodded and Virgil went over and grabbed one of the city cops, a guy named Cauliffer, according to his name-tag. “Officer Cauliffer, my name is Detective Virgil Jones, with the state police.”

  “Yeah,” Cauliffer said. “I know who you are. You’re the guy—”

  Virgil cut him off. “Listen, Cauliffer, go secure the governor. He’s inside his house. Keep him there.”

  Cauliffer let his face form a question. “Sir?”