Sam looked at the camera and smiled before she shot out the doorknob.
“Whelan, what the hell—” he started to ask. When the door blew he raised his gun and let loose. She was smart and stayed outside the door, anticipating this move.
“Don’t shoot her,” I said. I wasn’t sure if my half brain thought killing was wrong or if I was afraid if he killed her, I would die.
Four shots from his revolver decimated the doorframe. Sam reached a hand around the corner and quickly followed it with a microsecond dip of her head to sight her shot. Bang! And the hand holding his gun grew a hole in it.
Clint Eastwood’s gun hit the floor.
Sam slid into the room. I backed up. I spotted the open bathroom door behind his desk and slipped inside, slamming the door and locking it, as if that would do any damn good.
I slid down the wall and shut my eyes tight. Without even trying, and honestly I didn’t want to see, as soon as my eyes closed I saw through her eyes.
She moved quickly over to Cranner who hunched over, clutching at his hand with its fresh stigmata. He didn’t scream. He bit through the pain, Texas-style.
I could tell she knew I was watching. Don’t ask me how, but I knew. She raised the gun to his forehead. He looked her in the eye, and by extension, me.
“Why, Samantha? Why are you…?” he trailed off.
She took the gun down away from his head. I’m not dumb enough to think of this as good news. She took hold of his tie in one hand, wrapping the Republican red around her fist. The images coming through were clearer than ever. I tried opening my eyes to stop the show but it remained, pasted over my view of the plain white bathroom walls and underside of the sink.
She reached down onto his desk, turning her head with every motion so I could get a good look at everything she did. She lifted Cranner’s glass plaque for the 2006 Field Director of the year award. We all went to the award dinner. His wife cried. Oh, Christ, his wife. Why was I powerless to stop my other half from doing this?
She smashed the curved glass award on the desk and the remaining jagged piece in her hand resembled a shark’s tooth. I watched projections on the inside of my own eyeballs as she lifted him by her fist wrapped in his tie and then stabbed him in the throat with the glass. She punched forward until it dug in and then ripped out to the right with a twist, tearing the intricate biology of his neck to shreds.
The way blood arced up past our view I knew some spray landed on her face. I felt phantom heat radiate through my cheek and I knew I felt Cranner’s hot blood.
I locked my eyes shut again, trying like hell to escape the pictures. Nothing worked. I watched as she held him up in her hands. I felt my own muscles strain with his weight. Finally she let him go and he fell, bouncing off the desk and sinking to a heap on the floor.
Where’s the backup, right? The SWAT teams, the helicopters and tactical assault units alerted by a shootout in a government building? They wouldn’t be joining us this morning.
After 9/11, when the whole country got paranoid, every office like ours was retrofitted with the latest in bunker mentality design. Our building was made to withstand a dirty nuke attack, so they said. The walls were extra thick, the windows both bullet proof and sound proof. Did you know with a good parabolic microphone you can aim it at a window and using the sound vibrations moving the glass you can eavesdrop on a conversation?
Normally, that’s true. Not in our building. No crafty Al Qaeda spooks are gonna listen in on us. The downside is you could, “literally fire a gun in here and no one outside would ever hear it,” they said at the big post-install meeting.
Sam’s massacre would go unnoticed.
She kicked in the door to the bathroom. I cowered on the floor, gripping tight to the pedestal sink.
“You can come out now. I’m all done here.”
She knelt down to my level, examining my face like her own reflection in a mirror, but the mirror had warped. You know your own face but something is different. I saw myself through her eyes—pitiful, weak, vulnerable.
“My God, you really are pathetic.” Cranner’s blood streaked over her face like when we were six and we got into Mom’s lipstick for the first time.
She stood. Was she now remembering the same happy childhood thought? I held my embrace of the sink as she ran the water. I felt the cool hit my skin as she rinsed the blood off her face. She patted dry with one of the hand towels embroidered with the UT Longhorns logo.
“We should have done this years ago,” she said and turned to leave the bathroom.
“Don’t kill Lucas,” I squeaked out.
She turned back to me. “What? Speak up.”
“Don’t kill Lucas. I love him. And if I love him, you love him.”
“I don’t love anything.”
“Director Cranner?” came a timid voice.
She spun to the door and fired a round through the forehead of Felton or Feldman or whatever his name was. A field agent who only came to the office one day a month. I watched him through her eyes as he fell hard to his knees and then slumped over backward, laying out over Moskin’s legs.
One day a month and this had to be the day.
Blake! Shit, Blake better be on assignment today. I scrambled my thoughts as best I could to keep his name out of her head. Song lyrics, scenes from movies, a grocery list, a random memory of a guy in very tight bike shorts the last time I was in Starbucks. I spun a radio dial in my brain and let the knob roll along as fast as it could.
She flicked a switch on the side of her gun and the empty clip fell to the carpet. She let the gun fall with it and took the extra pistol out of her waistband.
“I’ll say hi to him for you,” she said. But did she mean Lucas or Blake?
THE OTHER MAN IN MY LIFE
Blake and I came to the DEA at the same time. I was the hot shot, he was the stable, steady up and comer. He rocketed straight to the middle and found his orbit, gently circling in a holding pattern for the rest of his career.
Also, Blake wanted to fuck me. Really he wanted to marry me, that was more Blake’s speed and exactly why he didn’t get laid very often. He carried a torch and no matter how many times I tried to throw water on it, he never got the hint. So we settled into the friend zone the same way he settled in to a boring career.
Blake spent most of his time working undercover. He was exactly the type to put on an assignment lasting three years and consist mostly of him trying to rise through the ranks of illegal drug cartel accounting. Ooooh exciting!
But, he remained my best friend in the office and someone I knew I could trust, and those were in short supply.
First I needed to see if he was in the office, which meant touring the battlefield.
The entire floor stank of gunpowder and burning hair. The place was eerily still, the hum of the air conditioning sounded like a 747 when the usual chatter and people sounds were gone.