'Turn around and put your hands behind you.'
'I don't think so,' he said again. She didn't even see his leg, but she did hear the rip of his pants. The Colt went flying onto the sidewalk.
She was caught off guard. Surely an escaping crook would turn tail and run, not stand there looking at her. He wasn't behaving the way he should. 'How'd you do that?'
Where were her partners?
Where was Mrs. Shaw, the postmistress? She'd once caught the designated bank robber by threatening him with a frying pan.
Then he was on her. This time, she moved as quickly as he did. She knew he wouldn't hurt her, just disable her, jerk her onto her face and humiliate her in front of everyone, which would be infinitely worse than being actually hurt. She rolled to the side, came up, saw Porter Forge from the corner of her eye, caught the SIG from him, turned and fired. She got him in midleap.
The red paint spread all over the front of his white shirt, his conservative tie, and his dark blue suit.
He flailed about, managing to keep his balance. He straightened, stared down at her, stared down at his shirt, grunted, and fell onto his back into the flower bed, his arms flung out.
'Sherlock, you idiot, you just shot the new coach of Hogan's Alley High School's football team!' It was the mayor of Hogan's Alley and he wasn't happy. He stood over her, yelling. 'Didn't you read the paper? Didn't you see his picture? You live here and you don't know what's going on? Coach Savich was hired just last week. You just killed an innocent man.'
'She also made me rip my pants,' Savich said, coming up in a graceful motion. He shook himself, wiping dirt off his hands onto his filthy pants.
'He tried to kill me,' she said, rising slowly, still pointing the SIG at him. 'Also, he shouldn't be talking. He should be acting dead.'
'She's right.' Savich sprawled onto his back again, his arms flung out, his eyes closed.
'He was only defending himself,' said the woman who'd yelled her head off. 'He's the new coach and you killed him.'
She knew she wasn't wrong.
'I don't know about that,' Porter Forge said, that drawl of his so slow she could have said the same thing at least three times before he'd gotten it out. 'Suh,' he continued to the mayor who was standing at his elbow, 'I believe I saw a wanted poster on this big fella. He's gone and robbed banks all over the South. Yep, that's where I saw his picture, on one of the Atlanta PD posters, suh. Sherlock here did well. She brought down a really bad guy.'
It was an excellent lie, one to give her time to do something, anything, to save her hide.
Then she realized what had bothered her about him. His clothes didn't fit him right. She leaned over, reached her hands into Savich's pockets, and pulled out wads of fake one-hundred-dollar bills.
'I believe ya'll find the bank's serial numbers on the bills, suh. Don't you think so, Sherlock?'
'Oh yes, I surely do, Agent Forge.'
'Take me away, Ms. Sherlock,' Dillon Savich said, came to his feet, and stuck out his hands.
She handed Porter back his SIG. She faced Savich with her hands on her hips, a grin on her face. 'Why would I handcuff you now, sir? You're dead. I'll get a body bag.'
Savich was laughing when she walked away to the waiting paramedic ambulance.
He said to the mayor of Hogan's Alley, 'That was well done. She has a nose for crooks. She sniffed me out and came after me. She didn't try to second-guess herself. I wondered if she'd have guts. She does. Sorry I turned the exercise into a comedy at the end, but the look on her face, I just couldn't help it.'
'I don't blame you, but I doubt we can use you again. I have a feeling this story will pass through training classes for a good long while. No future trainees will believe you're both a new coach and a crook.'
'It worked once and we saw an excellent result. I'll come up with another totally different exercise.' Savich walked away, unaware that his royal blue boxer shorts were on display to a crowd of a good fifty people.
The mayor began to laugh, then the people around him joined in. Soon there was rolling laughter, people pointing. Even a crook who was holding a hostage around the throat, a gun to his ear, at the other end of town looked over at the sudden noise to see what was going on. It was his downfall. Agent Wallace thunked him over the head and laid him flat.
It was a good day for taking a bite out of crime in Hogan's Alley.
3
SHE MET WITH COLIN PETTY, a supervisor in the Personnel Division, known in the Bureau as the Bald Eagle. He was thin, sported a thick black mustache, and had a very shiny head. He told her up front that she'd impressed some important people, but that was at Quan-tico. No one working here in Headquarters was impressed yet. She was going to have to work her butt off. She nodded, knowing where she'd been assigned. It was tough, but she managed to pull out a bit of enthusiasm.
'I'm pleased to be going to the Los Angeles field office,' she said, and thought, I don't want anything to do with any bank robberies. She knew they dealt with more bank robberies than any field office in the Bureau. She guessed it was better than Montana, but at least there she could go skiing. How long was a usual tour of duty? She had to get back here, somehow.
'L.A. is considered a plum assignment for a new agent right out of the Academy,' Mr. Petty said as he flipped through her personnel file. 'You originally requested Headquarters, I see here, the Criminal Investigative Division, but they decided to send you to Los Angeles.' He looked up at her over his bifocals. 'You have a B.S. in Forensic Science and a Master's degree in Criminal Psychology from Berkeley,' he continued. 'Seems you've got a real interest here. Why didn't you request the Investigative Services Unit? With your background, you would probably have been escorted through the door. I take it you changed your mind?'
She knew there were notes about that in her file. Why was he acting as if he didn't know anything? Of course. He wanted
her to talk, get her slant on things, get her innermost thoughts. Good luck to him on that, she thought. It was true that it was her own fault that she was being assigned to Los Angeles and there was no secret as to why.
She forced a smile and shrugged. 'The fact is that I just don't have the guts to do what those people do every day of their lives and probably in their dreams as well. You're right that I prepared myself for this career, that I believed it was what I wanted to do with my life, but-' She shrugged again. And swallowed. She'd spent all these years preparing herself, and she'd failed. 'It all boils down to no guts.'
'You always wanted to be a Profiler?'
'Yes. I read John Douglas's book Mindhunter and thought that's what I wanted to do. Actually I've been interested in law enforcement for a very long time, thus my major in college and graduate school.' It was a lie, but that didn't matter. She told it easily, with no hesitation. She had practically come to believe it herself over the past several years. 'I wanted to help get those monsters out of society. But after the lectures by people from ISU, after seeing what they see on a day-today basis for just a week, I knew I wouldn't be able to deal with the horror of it. The Profilers see unspeakable butchery. They live with the results of it. Every one of those monsters leaves a deep mark on them. And the victims, the victims ...' She drew a deep breath. 'I knew I couldn't do it.' So now she'd go after bank robbers and he would remain free and she wanted to cry. All this time and commitment and incredibly hard work, and she was going to go after bank robbers. She should have just quit, but the truth of the matter was that she just didn't have the energy to redefine herself again, and that's what it would mean.
Mr. Petty said only, 'I couldn't either. Most folks couldn't. The burnout rate is incredible in the unit. Marriages don't do well either. Now, you did excellently at the Academy. You handle firearms well, particularly in mid- distances, you excel at self-defense, you ran the two miles in under sixteen minutes, and your situation judgment was well above average. There's a little footnote here that says you managed to take down Dillon Savich in a Hogan's Alley exercise, something neverbefore done by a trainee.' He looked up, his eyebrows raised. 'Is that true?'
She remembered her rage when he'd disarmed her twice. Then, just as suddenly, she remembered her laughter when he'd walked away, his boxer shorts showing through the big rip in his pants. 'Yes,' she said, 'but it was my partner, Porter Forge, who threw me his SIG so I could shoot him. Otherwise I would have died in the line of duty.'
'But it was Dillon who bought the big one,' Petty said. 'I wish I could have seen it.' He gave her the most
