The Last Widow. Karin Slaughter

dropped, opening up the space so Will had a clear line on Vince, who was reaching for his ankle holster when Will shot him. Wounded him. The fucker fell out of the car.

      One dead. One wounded. That left Dwight, Hank, Clinton—

      Will caught a blur out of the corner of his eye.

      Clinton tackled him down to the pavement. Will lost the revolver. His head cracked against the sidewalk. Clinton didn’t go for Will’s face. You didn’t kill a man by breaking his skull. You killed him by breaking open his organs.

      Will’s muscles clenched against the fists pile-driving into his belly. The breathless pain threatened to immobilize him. But this wasn’t Will’s first beat-down. He didn’t use his hands to ward off the blows. He reached into his pocket. His fingers found the folding knife. He pressed the release. The blade flicked open.

      Will slashed out blindly, opening a ribbon of flesh in the man’s forehead.

      “Jesus!” Clinton reared back. Blood filled his eyes. His hands went up into combat position.

      Fuck combat. There was no such thing as a fair fight.

      Will jammed the four-inch blade straight into the man’s groin.

      Clinton sucked air. His body seized. He rolled onto the pavement. Coughing. Spitting. Wheezing.

      Will blinked his eyes, trying to clear the stars. Blood rolled down his throat.

      He heard car doors slamming. The sound echoed like a kettledrum.

      Did Sara call his name?

      Will rolled to his side. He tried to stand. Vomit erupted into his mouth. Every part of his gut was on fire. He could only make it to his knees. He fell flat. He breathed into the pain coursing through his body. He tried again to get up to his knees.

      That’s when he saw a pair of work boots in front of him. The steel toes were spattered with blood. Will watched the boot swing back. He waited for the downswing, then bear-hugged the leg.

      Drop and roll.

      They both hit the ground like a sledgehammer.

      But it wasn’t Clinton.

      It was Hank.

      Will managed to pin him down. His fists windmilled into the man’s face. He was going to punch Hank’s fucking eyes to the back of his skull. He was going to kill him for putting a gun to Sara’s head. He was going to murder every fucking one of them.

      “Will!” someone screamed.

      Sara’s voice, but not her voice.

      “Stop it!”

      He looked up.

      Not Sara.

      Her mother.

      Cathy Linton held a double-barreled shotgun in both of her hands. He could feel the heat from the muzzle. One of the triggers had already been pulled. The second was cocked and loaded.

      Cathy stared up the road.

      The BMW squealed around the curve. Will fell to the ground. His brain was still swimming. Vomit still burned his throat. He tried to count the heads in the car.

      Four?

      Five?

      He looked behind him, expecting to find Sara’s body. “Where—”

      “She’s gone.” A sob came from Cathy’s mouth. “Will, they took her.”

       3

      Sunday, August 4, 1:33 p.m.

      Faith Mitchell checked her watch as she pretended to study the diagram of the Russell Federal Building on the giant video monitor at the front of the classroom. The tedious asshole from the Marshals Service was running through the prison transport plan, which the previous asshole from the Marshals Service had run through an hour ago.

      She looked around the room. Faith wasn’t the only person having a hard time concentrating. The thirty people assembled from various branches of law enforcement were all wilting behind their desks. The city, in its wisdom, turned off the air conditioning in all government buildings over the weekends. In August. With windows that didn’t open so that no one could jump out just for the pleasure of the wind in their face as they plummeted to their death.

      Faith looked down at her briefing book. A drop of sweat rolled off the tip of her nose and smeared the words. She had already read through the book in its entirety. Twice. The asshole marshal was the fifth speaker in the last three hours. Faith wanted to pay attention. She really did. But if she heard another person call Martin Elias Novak a high-value prisoner, she was going to start screaming.

      Her eyes rolled to the clock on the wall above the video monitor.

      1:34 p.m.

      Faith could’ve sworn the second hand was ticking backward.

      “So, the chase car will go here.” The marshal pointed to the rectangle at the end of the dotted line that was helpfully labeled chase car. “I want to remind you again that Martin Novak is an extremely high-value prisoner.”

      Faith tried not to snort. Even Amanda’s composure was starting to slip. She was still sitting ramrod straight in her chair, seemingly alert, but Faith knew for a fact that she could sleep with her eyes open. Faith’s mother was the same way. Both of them had come up in the Atlanta Police Department together. Both were extremely adaptable, like dinosaurs who’d evolved into using tools and forwarding memes that had stopped being memes two months ago.

      Faith opened her laptop. Eight tabs were open in her browser, every one of them offering advice on how to make your life more efficient. Faith clicked them all closed. She was a single mother with a two-year-old at home and a twenty-year-old in college. Efficiency was not an attainable goal. Sleep wasn’t an attainable goal. Eating an uninterrupted meal. Using the bathroom with the door closed. Reading a book without having to show the pictures to all the stuffed animals in the room. Breathing deeply. Walking in a straight line.

      Thinking.

      Faith desperately wanted her brain back, the pre-pregnancy brain that knew how to be a fully functioning adult. Had it been like this with her son? Faith was only fifteen years old when she’d given birth to Jeremy. She hadn’t really been paying attention to what was happening to her mind so much as mourning the loss of Jeremy’s father, whose parents had shipped him off to live with relatives up north so that a baby wouldn’t ruin his bright future.

      With her daughter Emma, Faith was aware of the not-so-subtle changes in her mental abilities. That she could multi-task, but she could barely single-task. That the feelings of anxiety and hypervigilance that came with being a cop were amplified to the nth degree. That she never really slept because her ears were always awake. That the sound of Emma crying could make her hands shake and her lips tremble and that sometimes Emma’s nightlight would catch the tender strands of her delicate eyelashes and Faith’s heart would be filled with so much love that she ended up sobbing alone in the hallway.

      Sara had explained the science behind these mood changes. During the stages of pregnancy and breastfeeding and childhood, a woman’s brain was flooded with hormones that altered the gray matter in the regions involved in social processes, heightening the mother’s empathy and bonding them closely to their child.

      Which was a damn good thing, because if another human being treated you the way a toddler did—threw food in your face, questioned your every move, unraveled all of the aluminum foil off the roll, yelled at the silverware, made you clean shit off their ass, peed in your bed, peed in your car, peed on you while you were cleaning up their pee, demanded that you repeat everything at least sixteen times and then screeched at you for talking too much—then you would probably kill them.

      “Let’s discuss the tactical quadrangle