Protector - Laurel Dewey [101]
Jane closed her eyes tightly, steeling herself from that memory so long ago. She opened her car door when Mike called out to her.
“I love you, Janie!”
Without uttering a word, Jane got into her car and never looked back.
Jane spent Memorial Day packing her bags. Not knowing where she was going or for how long, she didn’t know exactly what to bring. She filled one bag with clothes and a couple pair of shoes and a smaller bag with her collection of CD’s. A third bag was crammed with piles of notes, yellow legal-size notepads and the sundry newspapers with feature articles on the Stover murder case. One of the newspapers sported both Jane and Chris’ photos on the front page. When she caught sight of Chris’ mug, she turned the paper over and stuffed it deep into the bag.
By noon, she finished packing and collapsed on the living room couch. The call from Weyler could come at any time. However, being a holiday weekend, Jane knew there was a good chance she and Emily would not be departing to their location until at least Tuesday. She couldn’t tolerate just sitting still but she didn’t want to go for a walk. She didn’t want to watch television. She thought about downing a couple beers, but somehow the idea lost its appeal between the couch and the refrigerator. And so, she did the only thing she knew to do on a holiday weekend. She went to the firing range.
It was a way to focus, concentrate and blow off the compressed steam that was quickly building inside of her. Jane always went to the same indoor range. It was located in the city of Englewood, southeast of where she lived. She was the only cop who frequented the place—a fact the owners of the firing range bragged about, but that her colleagues at DH always blasted. She wasn’t going to frequent the cop bars so she sure as hell wasn’t going to patronize the cop firing ranges.
Jane scanned the paper targets that were pinned behind the front desk. One drawing showed a lone male gunman pointing a weapon, another depicted two younger males pointing guns. A third target drawing caught her eye. “That’s new,” Jane said to Oscar, the owner of the range.
Oscar looked up at the drawing. “Yeah, we nicknamed that one ‘The hostage.’ ”
Jane stared at it. The target showed a grizzled older man with one arm tightly around the neck of a frightened female hostage and the other hand pointing a large caliber gun at her head. The goal, of course, was to blow as many holes in the grizzled perp without touching the girl. “Give me a bunch of those.” Jane said.
Once she was positioned in lane eleven—her favorite lane since it was farthest away from the other customers—Jane adjusted the protective ear cups and pinned her target on the screen in front of her. She drew out her pistol, laid it on the shelf and pushed the release button that drove the target six feet away, then twelve feet and finally twenty feet. Jane settled on twelve feet and focused. She stared at the target as she wrapped her fingers around the Glock. With split-second reflexes, Jane lifted the pistol and hammered a clip at the perp’s head. She put down the gun and pushed the button, bringing the target closer. As it drew into view, she saw her handiwork: eight dead-on shots to the perp’s forehead and two dead-on hits to the female hostage. “Shit,” she said under her breath.
For the next hour, Jane replaced clean versions of the same hostage target and practiced at distances of six to twenty feet. As good a shot as she was, Jane kept nicking or nailing the hostage every time. She was just about to put up another target when she felt two prying eyes behind her. Turning, she saw Sergeant Weyler on the other side of the glass, motioning for her to come out and talk to him.
“I figured there were three places to find you,” Weyler said as he met Jane outside the secured area. “Your house, your brother’s house or here.”
“I could use about three more days of practice.