Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

Dirk shook his head. “Man, you got me, you really did.”

“It happens,” he said, feeling good at seeing the shocked expression on that usually confident face. Dirk had on the usual SWAT gear, but he noticed something else, as well: a yellow smiley-face button, right in the center of the vest. Like some sort of mocking talisman or good-luck charm.

The training officer came over, his face set. “Time for a debrief. Excuse us, will you?”

“Sure,” Craig said, and he was outside again, joined shortly by the police dispatcher. Sarah frowned and said, “They were better this time. I don’t think I got anybody but they really nailed me good. What about you?”

“Held up a glove and got shot.”

She laughed. “That’s something.”

Craig found a spot and sat down on the cracked asphalt, leaned back against the concrete wall of the bunker. Sarah joined him and he caught a whiff of her perfume. Something young, something sporty. He suddenly found that he was envious of her youth, her wide-open future.

“Sure, that’s something,” he said. “But it can also mean a lot of trouble for Dirk and for the department, down the road.”

“How’s that?”

He rubbed his chest where it still stung from the shot by the paintball, even under the protective pad. This time tomorrow he’d have a nice purple and green bruise there to remind him of this day, as if he would need any additional reminding.

“Thing is, let’s say in a year or two Dirk’s involved in a shooting of a suspect. Could be clear, could be a righteous shooting. Still, the guy’s defense attorney might want to find out the background of the nice cop who shot his client. So he’d subpoena the department’s training records for Dirk, to see if he found anything questionable. Bingo, there’s a record that during this particular training session, he fired at a person holding nothing more threatening than a glove. See the trouble?”

“God, I guess so,” she said, the revolver large and still in her lap. “Tell me, how do you know so much about cops?”

“Experience,” he said. “Simply experience.”

Sure, things had been looking up for him and Stacy and the store, until something happened. That was the way of the world now. You made plans and thought things through and thought everything would work out, and then Something Happened. This time, the something was a bit of Congressional backstabbing and backslapping that meant funds allocated for Porter went to Portland, Maine, or Portland, Oregon, or some other place. Which meant the eager real-estate agents who had been sniffing around the store went away and never came back. Which meant that a week after he had turned down an offer for the store from one of the agents — confident that a counteroffer would come back later that was larger and better — Stacy just looked over at him from behind the store counter, lining up lottery tickets, and said with quiet bitterness, “Some life, huh? Some life.”

And what could he have said? That there would always be sacrifices?

So he had gone along, done the best he could to run the store and work and live with Stacy, and then, well, something clicked. It had just seemed to him that the only times she was happy, smiling, and engaged were when there were cops around the store. Pretty funny, eh? Cops who were supposed to serve and protect were now making his wife happy. And one night... well, he had gone back to the store by accident. Or had it been accidentally-on-purpose? He still wasn’t sure. All he remembered was that he had left some receipts at the store and when he got back there, had gone through the door, the little bell jangling, there had been Stacy, and there had been Officer Dirk Conrad. Stacy had been leaning over the counter, buttons on her tight black sweater undone just so, and Dirk had been grinning the grin of somebody who had seen this sight before and had enjoyed it very much.

And the look from the both of them, as he unexpectedly came up the main aisle, told him everything he needed to know.

The third scenario was delayed until after lunch. For a while the SWAT team members trained by themselves in the two bunkers, learning how to better enter and sweep the rooms. Craig and Sarah were left alone for a while, and while Sarah got on her cell phone and talked for long and dreary moments to her boyfriend Toby, Craig went over to a sunny side of the bunker and stretched out his legs. Before him was grassland and then a tall chain-link fence topped off by razor wire, and on the other side of the fence, the ground was cleared out for about fifty feet to the treeline. Up on the slight rise leading to the access road was a locked gate, so that the cops wouldn’t be disturbed. All of this land where once nuclear weapons had been stored, and where armed Air Force security police were authorized to use deadly force, was now a nature preserve. The officers out here at night, armed and ready, had probably thought this place would last forever.

But things change, he thought. Boy, do they ever change.