options, she just did what she thought anyone would do, something that she was very familiar and very comfortable with after all these years. She raised her gun and fired. Sidney Wells, Sr., took one in the forehead. Then two in the heart.
When Cauliffer saw that the make and model of the van matched the BOLO he picked up the microphone to call for backup, but then just as quickly set it back in it’s holder. Check the plate first, he thought. Lots of white vans in the city. He opened his door, got out, and brushed the crumbs from his uniform shirt. He was about half way across the lot when the side door of the van flew open and a woman jumped out.
With a gun.
He pulled his service revolver and yelled. “Police! Drop the weapon!”
The woman spun and fired a single shot at Cauliffer. The bullet hit the handheld radio clipped to his belt and when it did a shard from the plastic casing fragmented upward and sliced into Cauliffer’s forehead, just above his left eye. He ducked, winced at the pain, and momentarily lost sight of the woman. He thought about running back to his squad car to call for help, but then he remembered that the Governor was only a few hundred yards away.
And the woman with the gun was running that way.
Cauliffer started after her, one eye pinched shut and full of blood.
Sidney Wells, Jr. heard the cop yell for her to stop, or freeze or some such shit that the cops are always yelling. She spun around, fired once to slow the cop, and then ran toward the Governor. She was still on auto-pilot, the thoughts of what her father had just told her spinning through her brain.
Her father.
She’d been lied to, abandoned, neglected, abused, and rejected her entire life. It was all about to stop.
It was all about to end.
Cauliffer was gaining on the woman. She was fast, but still, he was gaining ground. But it wasn’t going to be enough. He wanted to stop and take a shot, but with one eye full of blood he knew the chances of hitting his target were slim at best. And if he missed she would be on top of the Governor before he could do anything about it. His radio was useless, so Cauliffer did the only thing he could think to do, something that at the Academy they told you never to do because of the danger to yourself or others. Cauliffer fired three warning shots into the air.
When Junior heard the shots behind her she turned to look back, and when she did she tripped in the grass and fell to the ground. The cop was about thirty yards back and coming hard. Junior knew then that the Governor would live and she would not. There would be no comfortable and peaceful villa in the Keys with her lover, Amanda. There would be nothing except a jail cell and ultimately a needle in her vein. She scrambled to her feet and turned toward the cop.
When the Governor’s three-man protection detail heard the shots, two of them took the Governor to the ground and held him there while the third ran toward the sounds of the gunfire. Most of the media people were on the ground as well, but one of the cameramen, a veteran from the war and no stranger to the sound of gunfire put his camera on his shoulder and followed the cop. He got the entire thing on tape.
Cauliffer saw her fall and he kept running until he saw her get up. He stopped, leveled his gun and yelled one more time for her to drop the weapon. He saw her start to bring the gun up, saw the crazy light in her eyes and pulled the trigger. The nine millimeter caught her center mass and Sidney Wells, Jr. dropped in a heap in the grass. Cauliffer ran over and secured her weapon, then sat down in the grass and tried to wipe the blood from his eye.
When it was over the Governor and his protection detail pushed their way through the circle of cops and chaos. The Governor walked up to Cauliffer and shook his hand. “Officer Cauliflower, you’ve saved my life.”
Cauliffer shook the Governor’s hand. “It’s, uh, Cauliffer, sir.”
The Governor reddened at his repeated gaff. “Yes, yes, of course. I keep getting that wrong, don’t I?”
The cameraman got the entire exchange. It made the evening news and went viral on the internet within hours.
Indiana Governor…Saved By Cauliflower.
“That’s all right, sir,” Cauliffer said, as he wiped more blood from his eyes.
“What the hell happened?”
“It was a woman. She was headed your way with a gun. She fired at me. I chased her here and when she tried to fire again I took the shot.”
“A woman? Where is she?”
Cauliffer pointed to the other grouping of cops. “Right over there,” he said.
The Governor walked over and looked at the body of the woman that lay in the grass. When he saw her face he turned away, then vomited all over his shoes.
That went viral as well.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I swam in and out of consciousness, or imagined I did over a period of time that may have been a few minutes or a few days. People shimmered in and out of focus, fuzzy around the edges, like images on a big screen television with poor reception. When I was able to finally hold my eyes open and keep them focused, I found myself on my back in an uncomfortable bed in a darkened room. A tube was taped to my right arm and ran down to my wrist where a needle poked into a vein on the back of my hand, held in place with more tape. My left leg was in a cast that extended from the tips of my toes to just under my knee. As soon as I saw the cast the pain brought me fully awake and I let out a moan.
“He’s awake,” I heard someone say. “Better get the doc.”
A door opened and a shaft of light from the hall snuck into the room then faded away as the door hissed closed and clicked against the latch. I saw Sandy’s face, her eyes tired, a frown line across her brow. My father stood just behind her. She leaned in close and brushed my hair off of my forehead. “Hey, tough guy,” she said. “About time you woke up.”
It was all coming back to me now, the attack, being tied to the steel girder, the beating, all of it. I wanted to ask, how long I had been here, but when I opened my mouth to speak, all I said was, “Hurts.”
My dad had stepped forward, just behind Sandy. He had his hands on her shoulders “Cora was here, Son. She stepped out to get the doctor. There’s a button for the pain. Do you want me to press it?”
I nodded and he reached out and pushed the button. After a few seconds, the morphine made its way through the IV and I felt it beat the pain back, though not completely. I tried to sit up a little, then wished I hadn’t.
“Where am I? What happened?”
The door opened again and I watched Cora come into the room, a doctor in tow. “You’re at Methodist Hospital, Detective,” the Doctor said. He took a pen light from his pocket and shone it in both of my eyes. “If you had to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, what would you say the number is?”
I tried to blink the light away and the after images hung on the back of my eyelids. “Uh, I don’t know. Eight now, I guess. My dad just pushed a button.”
I watched the doctor inspect the IV line that ran into my vein, and then he made some sort of adjustment to the pump next to my bed. “I upped the dose a little. You can push this button every seven minutes if you have to, and you’ll probably have to for the next twenty-four hours or so. Did anyone tell you what we did?”
“He just woke up,” Sandy said. “We haven’t had a chance.”
The doctor wrote something on a chart while he spoke. “You apparently took quite a, uh, thrashing. You’ve got a broken rib on your left side that punctured a lung. You lost quite a bit of blood and I don’t mind telling you that
