“You okay?” Sam asks.

“Yeah. Just that this is my first mission out west. I’d been working New York City up until now.”

“Look, take the day if you want. Get yourself acclimated. You’ll need your head right for this one.”

“No.” She stands, hoisting the duffle bag out of the grass and engaging that compartment in her brain that functions solely as a cold, indifferent scientist. “Let’s go to work.”

There is no decent place to stand in a massacre.

Leonard Cohen

THE president had just finished addressing the nation, and the anchors and pundits were back on the airwaves, scrambling, as they had been for the last three days, to sort out the chaos.

Dee Colclough lay watching it all on a flatscreen from a ninth-floor hotel room ten minutes from home, a sheet twisted between her legs, the air-conditioning cool against the film of sweat on her skin.

She looked over at Kiernan, said, “Even the anchors look scared.”

Kiernan stubbed out his cigarette and blew a river of smoke at the television.

“I got called up,” he said.

“Your Guard unit?”

“I have to report tomorrow morning.” He lit another one. “What I hear, we’ll just be patrolling neighborhoods.”

“Keeping the peace until it all blows over?”

He glanced at her, head cocked with that boyish smirk she’d fallen for six months ago when he’d deposed her as an adverse expert witness in a medical malpractice case. “Does anything about this make you feel like it’s going to blow over?”

A new banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen-45 dead in a mass shooting at a Southern Baptist church in Columbia, South Carolina.

“Jesus Christ,” Dee said.

Kiernan dragged heavily on his cigarette. “Something’s happening,” he said.

“Obviously. The whole country-”

“That’s not what I mean, love.”