Just as she was about to lunge, she saw something shiny and gray in his hand. She couldn’t risk grappling with an armed man. When he ducked into a dark corner, she took cover behind a telephone pole. That’s when she yelled to the responding officers where she was and what was going on.
“Get bomb squad here now!” she yelled. “And stay out of the church! The bomb’s on the altar!”
“Santoro, where’s your partner?” an officer called back.
“Looking for Father Romano! The priest called this in and we can’t find him!”
“What’re you doing over there?”
“I’ve got the perp cornered! But I can’t see him. I need a pair of eyes and some light over here!”
While two pairs of footsteps ran in her direction across the church’s empty parking lot, Gina spotted the man in the dark. All his clothes were dark, and something was wrapped around his head to hide his face. She raised her pistol and aimed it in his direction.
“This is the police. I can see you! Raise your hands so I can see them!”
The man’s hands slowly rose in the air, but he kept the pistol clutched in both hands.
“Drop the gun!” she commanded. “Turn around! Show me your face!”
When he turned, he made the mistake of lowering his hands, a threat if there ever was one.
“Drop your weapon! Drop your weapon or I will shoot!”
There was a flash and a gunshot cracked through the air. In only a split second, she aimed and fired.
***
It took an hour before things were making sense at the church. The bomb squad had already left the scene, as had the responding units that Gina had called for. It had turned out that they were delayed because a city truck out sanding the streets in one direction and a snowplow going in the other direction blocked their progress. While Butch continued to explain to their field supervisor what had happened, Gina did her best to apologize to the priest.
Already at the scene was a truck from the city, using a cherry picker lift to repair a transformer on the telephone pole,
“You have no idea how sorry I am Father Romano, but you must understand you should’ve stopped running when I commanded you to. Why were you running, anyway?”
“Too cold to walk, so I ran back to the rectory.” He smiled sheepishly in the dim light of the parking lot as he held the small package in his hand. “I wanted to get to my phone and call the police, you let you know you didn’t need to come.”
“But I was yelling at you from just a few feet away, Father.”
He tapped a fingertip on an ear. “Can’t hear a thing without my hearing aids. I’d already taken them out for the night. I didn’t hear anything until that transformer blew. I wish they’d fix that proper, because every time there’s a snow storm, it blows like that.”
Gina figured that was the flash and crack of noise that she responded to, what made her fire her weapon. “Okay, why did you call for the police? Tell me about that again.”
“I came out for one last smoke. Bad habit. Don’t start.”
“Too late,” she said. “Tell me about finding the open door.”
“Seeing it open, I called for the police. I was sure I’d locked everything and double-checked like I always do. When I went to take a look, I saw that it had been jimmied. Going inside, I bumped into a man just leaving.”
“You should’ve waited for the police. Who was the man?”
“Just a homeless fellow that comes for a meal occasionally. Perfectly harmless. He’d come into some money and wanted to repay the church’s hospitality by leaving a gift on the altar.” He held up the small package that had caused so much trouble. The duct tape on it made it reflect light, and that’s what Gina had thought was a gun during her foot chase. “This is supposed to be his Christmas gift to our Lord.”
Butch and the field supervisor had joined Gina and the priest.
“We better take a look and see what’s inside,” Butch said.
The priest tore the simple wrapping and opened a small box. Inside was an old-fashioned bottle opener. The three men chuckled, but Gina was still feeling sick over almost shooting Father Romano.
“I heard something about a damaged statue?” Sergeant Williams, their shift supervisor, said.
Father Romano led the way to the small garden courtyard where a crime scene technician was just finding the bullet that Gina had fired. She barely noticed that, but instead looked at the shattered pieces of a statue on the ground. With barely any warning, her subtle sense of nausea turned into a real life event into the flowerbed that surrounded the marble statue of the Virgin Mary.
Chapter One
Gina compared the sizes of her two suitcases with the mound of stuff that needed to be packed into them, and wondered how it was all going to fit. Beginning with the most important items, clothing, she began to pack.
Her sister Ana sat on the edge of the bed to watch. “Did you talk to Joey?”
“Last night.”
“You really broke up with him?”
“Not much choice. I’ll be gone for a year. I couldn’t bring him with me, and I couldn’t pass on the job offer,” Gina said.
“He didn’t want to go to Hawaii with you?”
Gina considered where to put her tennis racket, on the top or bottom of the suitcase. “He doesn’t want to quit his job.”
“Which job?” Ana giggled. “Weekends at the car wash, or his big construction job? Because nobody’s getting their car washed in Cleveland in December, and I haven’t seen many houses being built lately.”
“As soon as his uncle gets a construction contract, Joey will be on the crew.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ana said sarcastically. “Maldonado Construction. There’s a dynamo of Little Italy business.”
“Lay off Joey, okay? He had a hard time with breaking up.”
“Not like Dad would’ve let you marry him.”
