She knew it was her uncle Terry before she saw him. He never shut the back door. The kitchen was a non-room to him, one of those things women needed that men didn’t want to know about, like sanitary napkins and douches.
Though the sun was barely up, Terry Lawson reeked of alcohol. Maggie could smell it from across the room. He swayed as he stood in the doorway to the dining room. He was wearing his police captain’s uniform, but the shirt was unbuttoned, showing his white undershirt. Tufts of hair stuck up from the collar. He looked like he’d slept in his car with a bottle of Southern Comfort trapped between his knees. Which was probably where he was when he heard about Don Wesley on his radio.
Delia said, “Sit down. You look dead on your feet.”
Terry rubbed his jaw as he looked at his niece and sister-in-law. “Jimmy’s on his way.”
“Is he all right?” Maggie asked.
“Of course he’s all right. Don’t get hysterical.”
The fact that he told her not to get hysterical made Maggie feel like she was going to get hysterical. “You should’ve called me.”
“For what?”
Maggie was stunned. She was a cop, too. You went to the hospital when another cop was there. You gave blood. You waited for news. You comforted the family. It was part of the job. “I should’ve been there.”
“For what?” he repeated. “The nurses fetched us coffee. All you’d do is get in the way.” He nodded at Delia. “I could use some, by the way.”
She walked back into the kitchen to get his coffee.
Maggie sat down. She was still reeling from the news. She hated that Terry was the only way she was going to get answers. “How did it happen?”
“Same way it always happens.” Terry dropped into the chair at the head of the table. “Some nigger shot him.”
“Was it the Shooter?”
“Shooter.” He grunted. “Stop talking out of your ass.”
“Uncle Terry!” Lilly ran into the room. She threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek. She always acted a few years younger around Terry. It drove Maggie crazy because Terry was the last person on earth Lilly should be giving her love to.
Maggie told her, “Jimmy’s fine, but Don Wesley got shot last night. He’s dead.”
Terry gave her a sharp look. He patted Lilly’s arms, which were still looped around his neck. “It’s okay, sweetie. We’ll get the bastard.”
Lilly looked at Maggie for confirmation. Her eyes were red from where she’d scrubbed off the make-up. She was still so young and vulnerable. Maggie felt like a heel for being so blunt about Don.
“Come on.” Terry patted Lilly’s arms again so she’d loosen her hold. “We’ll have him strung up by the end of the day. Don’t you worry.”
“Nobody’s worried.” Delia came back with Terry’s coffee. She put the mug on the table and handed him the newspaper.
Maggie saw the headline under the Atlanta Journal masthead. It was the first time since the election that the paper had led with something other than the newly elected black mayor.
ANOTHER COP MURDERED
Maggie said, “That makes five this year.”
“Maggie.” Delia headed toward the kitchen again. “Don’t bother your uncle.”
She pretended not to hear the warning. “It’s the Shooter.”
Terry shook his head.
“It was the middle of the morning. They were obviously ambushed. It has to be—”
“Eat your breakfast,” he said. “You want a ride to work, you need to be ready to go when I am.”
Lilly still had one arm draped around Terry’s shoulders. Her voice sounded impossibly small when she asked, “Is everybody gonna be all right, Uncle Terry?”
“This is still a cop town, sweetheart. The monkeys ain’t runnin’ the zoo.” He patted her bottom. “Come on. Eat.”
Lilly never argued with Terry. She sat down and started to eat.
He asked her, “You doing good in school?”
“Yes, sir. I got an A in biology and a B in—”
“Good girl,” Terry said, because he wasn’t really listening. He’d already opened the newspaper. Maggie could only see the top of his head, the square crewcut that showcased his receding hairline. He needed glasses. His forehead wrinkled as he squinted at the football scores.
Maggie’s gaze went back to the headline on the front page. She couldn’t read the story from here, but she knew what it would say. In the last two months, four patrol officers had been shot in cold blood in the early morning hours. They had all been in pairs. Nobody patrolled downtown alone. The first two were found in an alley—they’d been forced down on their knees and executed from behind. The other two were found behind the service entrance to the Portman Motel. Same modus operandi. Same lack of leads. No witnesses. No bullet casings. No fingerprints. No suspects.
Around the station, they’d started calling their mystery bad guy the Atlanta Shooter.
“I put on a fresh pot.” Delia sat down at the table, something she rarely did for long. She was turned in her chair, facing Terry—another thing she rarely did. “Tell me what really happened, Terrance.”
Terrance. The word hung in the air alongside the smoke and bacon grease.
Terry made a show of his reluctance. He sighed. He took his time folding the newspaper. He put it down on the table and lined it up to the edge. Instead of answering Delia’s question, he made a gun with his hand and put it to the side of his face. Nobody said anything until he pulled the trigger.
Lilly whispered, “Jesus.”
For once, nobody corrected her language.
Terry said, “Nothing Jimmy could do. He ran twenty blocks with Don slung over his shoulder. Got to the hospital, but it was too late.”
Maggie thought about her brother running all that way on his bad knee. “Jimmy wasn’t—”
“Jimmy’s fine.” Terry’s voice sounded like he was humoring them. “What he doesn’t need is a bunch of hens squawking around.”
With that, he opened his newspaper and buried his nose back in the pages.
He hadn’t really answered Delia’s question. He’d just given the highlights, likely the same details you could read in the paper. They all knew that, even Lilly. And they all knew there was no use pointing it out. Terry couldn’t be pushed.
Instead of going back into the kitchen, Delia took a packet of Kools from her apron pocket and shook one out. Her hand trembled as she fumbled with her lighter. She looked calmer once she had it lit. Smoke furled from her nose, her mouth. Every wrinkle on Delia Lawson’s face came from sucking on cigarettes—the crepe-like lines around her lips, the sagging jawline, the deep indentation between her eyebrows. Even her dark hair was streaked with the same smoke gray that came out of her Kools. She was forty-five years old, but on a good day, she looked around one hundred. Right now, she looked twice that, like she was already in her grave.
Like Don Wesley would soon be.
Maggie had attended at least two dozen cop funerals in her career. Atlanta’s ghettos were filled with people who had quick tempers and access to cheap guns. Most of the funerals were for cops like Don Wesley, murdered in the line of duty. Some had died under less honorable circumstances—trying to take money off the wrong bookie, sleeping with the wrong man’s wife. They were still cops and they were still dead, so everybody turned out like they were supposed to.
The first funeral she’d attended was the worst. Maggie had sobbed openly as she watched the procession of motormen and cruisers escorting the hearse down Peachtree. It was a solemn affair. Her heart swelled with emotion, absorbing the weighty responsibility of the badge. By the tenth funeral, which honored a detective who’d been shot by a pimp for refusing to pay for services, all Maggie could think about was how hot it was in her dress uniform, and what a relief it would be to go home and sit in front of the fan.
Delia always said you could get used to anything. Maggie had gotten used to cop funerals. And then the Atlanta Shooter had come along. Fo
ur men, just out doing their jobs. Four men who’d felt the grit of the asphalt under their knees, the cold, hard metal of a gun pressed to the back of their heads.
Those funerals were different. She’d felt it in the crowd—the anger, the confusion, the sting of injustice. Hot tears slid down her cheeks at those funerals, even though she’d never met the dead men. She had cried about the idea of them. They were just doing their jobs. They weren’t stealing or gambling or screwing around. The only reason they’d died was because they were cops.
Like Jimmy. Like Terry. Like Don Wesley.
He was a Marine just back from Vietnam, unable to do any job that didn’t require him to carry a gun. His people were from lower Alabama. He rented an apartment off Piedmont Avenue. He drove a burgundy colored Chevelle. He had a girlfriend—a doe-eyed hippie who talked about “the man” and didn’t complain when Don hit her because he’d seen so much bad shit in the jungle.
And none of that mattered anymore because he was dead.
Terry banged his mug down on the table. Coffee splashed onto the white tablecloth. “Any of this for me?”
Delia stood up. She took his plate and started loading it with food, though Terry was usually too hung over to eat anything in the morning.
She put the plate in front of him. Her tone had a begging quality when she said, “Terry, please. Just tell me what happened, all right? He’s my boy. I need to know.”
Terry looked at Maggie, then looked down at his half-empty mug.
She allowed herself the luxury of an audible sigh before she went to get the percolator from the stove. As soon as she left the room, Terry started talking.
“They were out on a signal forty-four off the spike at Five Points. That’s a possible robbery.” He leaned back in his chair and caught Maggie’s eye, like she hadn’t been behind the wheel of a squad car for five years. “They get there, check the place out. Doors are locked front and back. They give an all-clear on the radio. And then …” He shrugged. “Guy comes around the corner, shoots Don in the head, then hightails it. You know the rest. Jimmy did everything he could. It just wasn’t enough.”
“Poor Jimmy,” Lilly mumbled.
“Poor nobody,” Terry countered. “Jimmy Lawson can take care of himself. Got it?”
And for an extra thrill, read on for the short story
SNATCHED
For Gina
one
Special Agent Will Trent sat in the last stall of the men’s bathroom between gates C-38 and C-40 at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. He stared at the closed stall door as he tried not to listen to a man availing himself of the urinal. Muzak played from the overhead speakers. Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now.” At first, the song had reminded Will of his sort-of-new girlfriend, Sara Linton. And then it had played over and over again, at least sixteen times in the last five hours, and all Will could think about was jamming his fingers into a wall socket and electrocuting himself so he never had to hear it again.
There were many jobs with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that agents considered less than ideal—running background screenings for convenience store owners who wanted to sell lottery tickets, going undercover in bingo parlors to make sure old ladies weren’t being ripped off—but no assignment was considered more odious than having to police the men’s toilets at the busiest passenger airport in the world.
Sites all over the Internet listed the best bathrooms for male travelers seeking anonymous hook-ups. Hartsfield was always a prime location. Posters gave the best times for cruising, the type of guy to expect in which concourse, and the various under-stall contortions that were preferred at each location.
Will didn’t mind what two consenting adults got up to. He just wished they wouldn’t do it in public where kids could walk in. He usually spent the first half hour of every morning checking the cruising sites and anonymously posting that he’d seen a police officer staking out the stalls.
And still these idiots kept showing up.
Eighty-nine million passengers a year. Five runways. Seven concourses. Over a hundred restaurants. Twice as many shops. A people mover. A train station. Close to six million square feet of space that sprawled across two counties, three cities, and five jurisdictions. Seven hundred and twenty-five commodes. Three hundred and thirty-eight urinals.
This last bit of trivia was particularly galling, as Will was probably going to lay eyes on each and every urinal in the airport before he died.
All because he wouldn’t get a haircut.
The GBI manual called for agents to keep their hair at least half an inch off their collar. Amanda Wagner, his boss, had slapped a ruler to his neck a few days ago. Will was right on the line, but Amanda had never been one to let fact get in the way of her firm opinion. When Will hadn’t rushed to the barber, she’d assigned him to toilet duty until further notice. Amanda was going to have to wait a good long while. Sara liked Will’s hair long. She liked to stroke her fingers through it. She liked to drag her nails along his scalp.
Which meant Will was pretty much going to be the Samson of Hartsfield until the day he died.
A man walked into the bathroom. He said, “What I told her was, ‘You don’t like it, you can move out.’ ”
Will leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Over the course of the last few days, he’d learned that a surprising number of people talked on their cell phones while they used the bathroom. One of the janitors had told Will that seven million people a year accidentally dropped their phones in the toilet. Will prayed this jackass would be one of them.
No such luck.
The urinal flushed. The man left without washing his hands. This was no longer shocking, either. In fact, Will had witnessed worse lapses in personal hygiene over the last two weeks than he had during his entire adult life.
Will pulled out his cell phone to check the time. The numbers glimmered, then the screen went blank. A marathon session of Minesweeper had drained the battery into the red zone. He would have to charge it during lunch, which was blissfully close enough to justify abandoning his post. The business travel rush had come and gone. Another morning without an arrest. Will hoped his good luck would flow into the afternoon. He was probably the only cop on the planet right now who was happy to post a zero in the win column.
Will stood up. His knees popped. He stretched his arms up to the ceiling in order to coax his spine into a position more conducive to walking. A spasm nearly doubled him over. He wasn’t built for sitting all day. He’d rather chase a chicken back and forth across a courtyard than do this. At the very least, it would give him some exercise.
Around ten every morning, Will usually had his second breakfast of a fried chicken biscuit. By noon, he was at Nathan’s ordering a slawdog meal. At two, he visited the pretzel stand, and at four-thirty, he grabbed an ice cream sandwich or a Cinnabon on his way to the parking garage.
If he didn’t die of boredom, he always had a heart attack to look forward to.
The stall door next to him opened. Reluctantly, Will sat back down on the toilet and waited. Lady Antebellum revved up over the speakers. Will suppressed a scream. He’d thought he had another thirteen minutes before the track cycled on again. The song pierced his eardrums like an ice pick.
And then a child whispered, “Please, I wanna go home.”
Will turned his head, though he could only see the wall next to him. There was something plaintive in the little girl’s voice that cut straight through. Will leaned down. He saw a pair of white Hello Kitty ballet shoes with pink trim. Impossibly tiny ankles in white tights. The man behind her wore gray Brooks running shoes. The hem of his tan cargo pants was high, showing white socks.
“Just go,” the man ordered. “Quickly.”
Slowly, the little feet turned. The bigger feet did not.
Will sat up. He stared at the stall door in front of him. Phone numbers of escorts, tips on the best strip clubs. He knew them all by heart.
The man
said, “Hurry up.” He said something else, but his voice was too low for Will to make out the words.
Regardless, the little girl sniffed, which made Will wonder if she was crying. He also wondered why every hair on the back of his neck was standing at attention. Will had been with the GBI for fifteen years and learned early on that there was such a thing as a cop’s intuition.
Something wasn’t right here. He felt it in his gut.
Will stood from the toilet. He’d taped a Band-Aid over the automatic sensor to keep the toilet from flushing. He peeled back the strip and let the sound of a flush announce his presence.
There was a subtle change in the air, as if the man was suddenly on alert.
Will unlocked the stall door. His badge was looped on his belt. He slipped it into his pocket, not wanting to spook the guy. His Glock and holster had been checked with security, but his handcuffs were neatly stacked into the leather pouch at the small of his back.
Which hardly mattered. You couldn’t arrest a man for snapping at his daughter. Half the population would be in jail right now.
But still—Will sensed that something was wrong.
He went to the sink and held his hands under the faucet so the water would flow. Will waited, staring at the reflection of the closed stall. He could still see the man’s heels under the door. The running shoes looked new. The hem was torn at the back of the trousers. The man had used a stapler to tack them up.
Seconds passed. A full minute. Finally, the little feet went back to the floor.
The toilet flushed. Will waited. And waited. Eventually, the lock slid back. The stall door opened. Will glanced at the man, taking in the short brown hair, the thick black glasses, before returning his gaze to his hands under the faucet. The guy was wearing a green jacket that looked a few sizes too big. He was tall, almost matching Will’s height of six-three, but probably weighing in at twenty pounds heavier, mostly in the gut. He looked to be around fifty. There was no telling how young the girl was; maybe six or seven. She was in a flowered dress. The pink collar matched her shoes.
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