A Killer Body

By John Angus

McKenna Lynch has never felt particularly at home in life. She's gone from being an overweight teenager with an antisocial personality, to a sleekly framed, narcissistic slut, to an insouciant tomboy police officer out for adventure. Now, fired from the Boston Police Department, and somewhat estranged from her family and people in general, she plods through an unsatisfying office job as a low level employee of the IRS. The only advantage of her cubicled life is job security and anonymity. McKenna's otherwise dull life is spiced up by taunting her boss, by being the unintentional eye-candy for most of the middle aged men who work around her, by wild late-night dancing sessions at Manhattan's trendier night spots, and by her part-time job as a contract killer.

Leading the FBI astray may be more difficult than coping with the interest of an intriguing new dance partner and lover, a handsome Russian who seems to have violent acquaintances and a mysterious past, and who knows far too much about her for comfort. Between police chases in Los Angeles and shootouts in New York, McKenna's life becomes far more adventurous than she had ever really desired

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Angus
• Release date: Apr 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781310713101

Book preview

A Killer Body

By John Angus

Copyright 2011

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Other books by this author

Georgia Heat

Insurrection

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My Sister's Keeper

The Monster Squad

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Chapter One

The coat was stylish, buttery soft black leather, full length, with hidden inseam pockets, one of which was ideally, if coincidentally placed and sized to hold a nine millimeter automatic. It retailed for seventeen hundred dollars, half that wholesale, and a whole lot less when a longshoreman looking for extra cash sold it out of the back of his Ford Explorer.

There was a threat of snow and the chill of approaching winter in the November air as McKenna made her way through the late evening pedestrian traffic. Long inured to city living, she met no eyes and looked neither right nor left, turning a deaf ear to the occasional rude remark or suggestion, letting her peripheral vision warm her of anything that got too close.

The coat was open, despite the chill, but after an hour and a half workout at the dojo she welcomed the cool air on the bare skin showing between her black tank top and her low-slung, smoky gray jeans.

Her hair was raven black, pulled back into a loose pony tail which bounced behind her as she moved. She wore soft-soled, black leather boots and a black leather choker with a stylized Celtic cross in the center. The gym bag bouncing against her hip as she strode past the slow moving traffic on the darkening sidewalk was also black, as was the martial arts robe inside it – and the belt which went around it.

It had been suggested to her that McKenna had a bleak outlook on life. The person who suggested it hadn’t known the half of it.

The predominant colors of the fifties-era diner she walked into were red and gold, and Elvis was playing on the juke box as she tossed her bag lazily into one of the empty booths and slid in beside it. This late, the place was three quarters empty, mostly filled with overtime office workers grabbing a quick bite on the way home. They were a flabby, pale-skinned bunch, and McKenna thought there probably wasn't a one of them who wouldn't have benefited from a solid workout at the dojo she'd just come from.

The three men who burst through the front doors as she took her first bite of a large, sloppy hamburger looked much more fit. One was carrying a shotgun, the other two automatics. From their voices, and the skin showing from behind blue ski masks, they were black men, and they were clearly after as much green as they could get.

That was a problem for McKenna. She’d be perfectly comfortable watching from the side if they'd just empty the registers and leave. But as they strode up and down like cocks of the walk, brandishing their weapons and loud, menacing voices, it quickly became obvious they were too greedy and arrogant to take what the diner had on hand and run for it.

I want to see everyone’s fucking wallet on the table right fucking now! one of them snarled menacingly. I want your watches and jewelry right fucking now! We gonna search anyone and if we find a watch or ring or wallet on you we gonna cap your ass! You hear me, motherfuckers!?

McKenna didn’t mind losing the Rolex. It had fallen off a truck and was easily replaced. But losing all her plastic would be a pain in the ass. More importantly, she didn’t think she could get through a search without it causing trouble. Her personal space was her personal space after all, and turning the other cheek had never been among her stronger personality traits. Besides, they were male, bullying and arrogant, and she was... what she was.

They were agitated, angry, and moving fast down the rows of tables and booths. Most of the other patrons were either under their tables, awkwardly trying to shove their wallets and jewels on top without coming out – or frozen terrified in their seats. One of the thieves was already moving down the tables on her side of the restaurant as she deftly slipped her ID cards out of her wallet and put the watch and wallet on the table.

Across from her, another whipped his gun down across the head of a man trying to tear his wedding ring off, shouting Move, motherfucker! I cut your fuckin' finger off!

The man was thrown against the chair behind him and half lay there dazedly, bleeding, as his wife tried desperately to yank the ring off him.

Then the gunman on McKenna's side came up behind her and snatched her wallet and watch.

You got any more, bitch!? he snarled, jaw shoved out angrily.

She shook her head warily as the world began to narrow in focus. There was him, there was her, there was the guy across from her, shouting and snarling at the couple below him, and it all began to slow...

No? Maybe I’ll just see for myself, he said with a sudden leer, yellowy teeth gleaming.

There was a downside in having a pretty face and a good body, McKenna thought fleetingly, as he thrust his hand under her coat. He smirked at her, his tongue sliding obscenely across his lower lip as his fingers moved tauntingly over her left breast, digging into her harshly.

Suddenly, the world sped up as she sensed his shock and the beginning of a reaction at discovering the hand grip of the Glock Sig Pro – black, of course – protruding so perfectly from its tight sleeve she'd often wondered if it had been designed for just that purpose.

She grabbed his wrist with her right hand, clamping it to her chest as she rammed her elbow into his groin. His gurgle of pain was comparatively mild as he began to collapse, but she had already reached up and grabbed the back of his head, yanking with all her considerable strength even as he instinctively jerked forward. The sound of his face smashing into the table, pulping his nose and probably breaking his jaw, was considerably louder.

She hadn’t planned for his gun to drop into her lap, but caught it deftly as he fell to the floor, and her movements from then were simple professional instinct. She extended her arm, rock steady, and fired four times into the chest of the second guy who was just turning at the noise. His gun went flying and he stumbled back into a pillar then dropped heavily.

She threw herself out of the booth and rolled. The third guy was behind the counter, and already raising his shotgun. She continued her roll along the front of the counter, and when he lunged over the top, shotgun extended, she was eight feet further to his left than he’d allowed – and he had no time to adjust. She fired from her back, five shots, four of which hit him in the upper body and head, throwing him sideways into the cash in a spray of blood before he dropped bonelessly to the floor behind the counter.

There was a long moment of shocked silence in the diner, of her speeding mind and eyes darting from one to the other to the next. Then she leapt up and hurried back to her table. She snatched up her bag, watch, cards and wallet, and hurriedly wiped the table with her sleeve before turning and striding quickly for the back room – and the exit sign she’d seen through the open server counter. The other patrons and staff were just starting to rise in shock, staring at her with open mouths when she shoved through into the kitchen.

She passed a bubbling cauldron of stew and dropped the gun in without pausing, went out the emergency exit and hurried down the alley to the street behind. The subway was only a block away, which was why she was here. But there was no way she going anywhere which had cameras the cops would soon be reviewing. She hurried through the streets, thin black leather gloves on now, trying car doors as she moved.

She found one unlocked and slipped inside. It was an old Dodge with a cracked windshield and rust along the door, but she wasn't looking for beauty. She stripped off the gloves and pulled the knife out of her boot, forced open the locking mechanism, and had it working in sixty seconds.

The sirens were starting to wail as she headed – sedately – south, downtown, where the crowds gathered. She dumped the Dodge twenty blocks away, then walked for another ten before hopping the subway home. It started to snow as she reached her street, and she quickened her pace, glancing at her watch.

The circuitous route she'd taken home had made it a longer night than she’d anticipated. She’d missed her favorite show, and she'd missed dinner. She spent a moment feeling irritated at being off her planned schedule, then pulled a TV dinner out of the freezer and shoved it into the microwave. She examined the jacket, brushed it with a moist cloth, then, content, hung it up in her tiny closet. She climbed the ladder to her bed, stripped, and pulled on a pair of loose sleep pants and an oversized T before sliding back down to the ding of the microwave.

She carried the dinner to the coffee table and sat down on her leather sofa as she clicked on the TV hanging on the wall across from her. As usual, she found very little worthy of her attention. She surfed through channels as she munched on chicken, sipped some milk, then flossed and brushed her teeth before climbed back up to her bed loft to sleep.

That she had killed two men that night merited very little consideration as she closed her eyes, and certainly nothing which could remotely be defined as regret.

* * * * *

You’re shitting me?

The uniformed cop shook his head. "Nope. Like supercop or something, then disappeared out the back. The waiter says she comes in every Tuesday, though, always dressed pretty much the same, always carrying a gym bag.

Bryant shook his head, bemused. He’d seen a lot of strange shit in his sixteen years on the job, but this beat most of them flat.

No one else here knows her?

The cop shook his head. A lot of them noticed her before the shooting. She’s some kinda fox according to a couple of guys, but all they can really give me is tall for a woman, black hair and tight body.

Great. I’ll put that out. We’ll have her in no time.

The cop put his notebook away and shrugged

No camera in this place?

Nope.

Great.

Bryant sighed and made his way over to the first corpse, laying on his back in the middle of the floor. Eduardo was already squatting over him, going through the pockets.

Anyone we know? he asked.

Eduardo shrugged. Small-time punk, probably.

He pulled aside the man’s jacket and plucked aside the shirt he’d earlier pulled open.

Look at the spacing here, he said, pointing a gloved finger at four neat bullet holes less than a hand span apart. Nice pattern. According to the witnesses she fired from a sitting position without any pause in movement. Bang, bang, bang, bang, cept most of them think she only fired three times. You know why?

Because she fired so fast.

Ayup. This chickee is well-practiced with a piece, man. It wasn’t even her piece, neither. She took it off mister beautiful there.

He waved negligently at the sole surviving gunman, his face a swollen mass of purple red and black as he was wheeled out on a gurney.

Bryant stroked his short, roughly trimmed beard absently, then stood up and moved around the counter to where the other body lay in a crumpled heap. The pattern here was harder to measure. She’d hit him from the side and below while both were moving. But he’d taken one just above the ear, one in the cheek, and one through the side of the throat.

Eduardo came up beside him. One other thing. One of the witnesses says that when she dove onto the floor and rolled, her jacket came open, and she definitely had a piece in some kind of inner holster. He thought she must be a cop because of that.

We’re know she wasn’t?

Nope. I can think of a few reasons why a cop would run from a scene like this.

Mostly if she had something in her blood she didn’t want to come out, Bryant said, rising.

Wouldn’t take much. The blood test shows a little coke, or grass, even ecstasy, and she’d be in trouble with the job. She’d know that.

Well, we don’t have that many tall young black haired Caucasian foxes on the force. Nor does anyone else. We’ll get some pictures and show them around. In the meantime, let’s start checking gyms in the area. If she was dropping by every Tuesday maybe she had a regular appointment.

Once a week? Eduardo said. That don't seem enough for a cop in good shape.

Have patience with the young, Bryant thought, fighting down irritation.

Once a week that she came in here. This ain’t no health food emporium Eduardo. No woman who worked out regularly would eat here every night after gym. Kind of defeats the whole purpose, right?

Yeah, I guess.

Find out if there are any gun clubs in the area, too.

We don’t actually got her on anything, you know. From what the witnesses said there ain’t a jury on the planet, less maybe it was in Saudi Arabia, that would do anything but give her a fuckin’ medal.

Yeah, I know, but we can’t just let it lie. The press is gonna be all over this, and the plaza will want answers. You know that.

Eduardo nodded and shrugged.

Bryant looked around. He wasn’t displeased at the fate of the three scumbags. Surprise, surprise, assholes, he thought silently. He was reasonably sure this was the same trio Major Case had been chasing for twenty other restaurant hits over the past six months, and while they hadn’t yet killed anyone that had only been a matter of time.

He stroked his beard again. He hated it. It always itched, but it kept him from having to answer questions about the ugly scar across his chin he'd gotten from a punk just like these three he hadn't been careful enough with.

He hoped the girl hadn’t been a cop, or at least, not a local one. If she was he would find her, and whatever her reasons had been for fleeing, she was going to be in trouble when she had to explain why. Cops did not flee the scene of crimes, especially ones where they’d been involved in a shooting.

But if she hadn’t been a cop – then who and what was she? She sure wasn’t a timid civilian running away to avoid the bad guys. She’d been cold as ice in there. So if it was the police she was avoiding – then why?

Chapter Two

Pink Floyd was playing on the radio, the sound getting gradually louder and drawing McKenna from her well-deserved slumber.

She combed her fingers through her hair and rubbed her face, then stretched languorously amid the sheets, rolling her head back into the down pillow as she clung greedily to the sheer physical pleasure of being in a soft, warm bed. The radio played in the background, then the news came on. She listened with one ear, postponing the inevitable. Two men had been killed in a restaurant robbery. The announcer sounded quite content – echoing her own feelings about it.

When the news, sports and weather were over, she knew she was pushing her luck, and finally sat up, yawned again, stretched, and threw back the covers.

There was not much room in her bedroom for more than the bed. In fact, there wasn’t even room for a bed.

She lived in what some real estate snob would euphemistically call a bed loft. In reality, it was a small, single room with a tiny adjoining bathroom and kitchenette. It was in an old building, however with high ceilings. Someone had taken advantage of the high ceiling at some point by putting in a half floor over the kitchen, bathroom and entrance hall, and called it a loft bedroom.

There was a hollowed out square where her queen sized mattress sat, and a polished, foot-wide oak rim around that on all sides. There were two lamps attached to the wall behind her head, and a small shelf which ran along the wall between them. The wall at the foot of the mattress was filled with built-in drawers – and a pair of narrow cupboards, and that served as her dresser and closet.

She leaned forward now, dropping onto her hands and knees as she pulled open a lower drawer. Black bra and matching thong came out into her hand, and she shoved the drawer closed again. She opened another drawer and took out a blood red cotton and cashmere sweater dress, then duck-walked to the edge of the rail and tossed them over. She grabbed the ladder, turned and slid down it, bending to scoop up her clothes as she headed for the kitchen.

She tossed them onto the sofa, looked out the window for a moment, checking the weather, then padded across the floor to the kitchenette to check on the coffee maker before going back and flipping on the stereo.

She pushed the coffee table back and stood straight, raised her arms high and then began to slowly rotate them. The exercise routine she followed in the mornings was slow and relaxed, and mainly involved stretching. She hated exercising and always had, so she'd adapted some of the Tai Chi forms with some of her modified kata forms into a slow, fluid series of movement which could almost have resembled a ballet. She loved dancing, after all, as much as she hated exercise.

Ballet, however, was normally very far from her style. She had far too much energy – other than first thing in the morning – for a slow, graceful flowing movement. Headbanger metal was more her thing.

The coffee was done before her routine, and she inhaled the delicious scent of it as she turned and slowly twisted, bowed and arched, rolled her head and shoulders, and turned her long legs up and around. Ten minutes after starting she was in the tiny shower. And that went much faster. Being a cop taught you how to shower quickly, so she was done, wrapped in a towel, and sipping coffee in just under three minutes.

Being a cop hadn't taught her how to shoot a gun or dance, of course. Her brothers had taught her long before she ever thought about joining the Boston Police, and they'd rued the day. She'd become infamous for her wild dancing in high school, and even more infamous when she'd followed them onto the BPD. Abandoning Boston for New York had been a kindness to them. They didn't have to be embarrassed about her antics any more.

Half an hour later, she was riding the elevator down, clad in coat, dress and black boots, clutching her purse, and checking her watch. The federal building, on Broadway, was a very short subway ride away, and in the opposite direction from most of the crowd. That meant she almost always got a seat and didn’t have to stand up amidst the press of a sweating humanity, swaying back and forth as the train moved.

Which was just as well. McKenna had never really been a people person.

She blinked back sleep as she sat, cross-legged and gazed out onto the dark tracks beyond the car, oblivious to the appreciative but furtive gaze of the men across from her. Being considered attractive was something she’d gotten used to, took for granted, and mostly ignored now, though it was useful, of course in getting men to do what she wanted. And, for the most part, it was a nice boost to her ego.

Her pass whisked her through the electronic gates as bored looking guards looked on, and if they paid any extra attention to McKenna it had nothing to do with suspicions they were letting a killer through their front door.

The federal building was enormous – and more to the point – anonymous. It was stuffed with alphabetized agencies filled with people who knew nothing whatsoever about anyone else there, nor cared to. McKenna rode one of the elevators up to the twenty-ninth floor, ignoring the nearly floor to ceiling crest of the Internal Revenue Service on the wall. She waved her pass at another electronic door, and swept through into the cubicled world beyond.

Less than a minute later she was in her cubicle, down a side aisle, invisible, anonymous, turning on her computer as she adjusted her high-backed ergonomic chair. She turned on the computer, then slipped a few paper clips out of a holder and tossed them over her shoulder – over the cubicle wall – and into the cubicle behind hers. There was no complaint so she knew Saffron wasn't in yet.

She shrugged and waited for the computer to boot up, pondering the small bit of window she could see out the open door of her cubicle.

It had proved surprisingly easy to get work with the federal government, especially since all the time she’d spent with her family’s Lebanese housekeeper when younger had left her essentially fluent in Arabic and French. With the French, Spanish had been a breeze to pick up in school because they were so similar in structure and grammar. The government loved hiring people with multiple languages, whether it had an immediate use for them or not.

They had never asked her if she’d appeared in any notorious Internet videos, and she hadn’t enlightened them on that score, nor on the reasons she’d parted ways with the Boston Police Department two years ago in a voluntary separation.

She was a GS-10 earning just over sixty thousand a year; quite a successful job for most women her age with her education. But it was just about as far from a life of excitement as it was possible to get in New York. She worked in the Public Consultancy Department, and her job was Letter Forwarding. Essentially, companies which had lost track of beneficiaries to trusts and pensions, or estates which needed to locate heirs, contacted the IRS, and for a fee, the IRS would use its taxpayer database to locate people and forward a letter to them on behalf of someone – if that letter was deemed to be of some financial or personal benefit to the taxpayer.

It was somewhat repetitive work, but it did make her feel good to locate someone and send them a letter letting them know they were entitled to some kind of unexpected financial benefit. She imagined that most people were delighted to read the letters she sent them – in contrast to most of the other letters the IRS sent out. If she had someone’s social security number, and if that person dealt with the IRS, then she could quickly and easily get their address, wherever they were.

It didn’t really require a lot of brain power. Her job involved searching for people without their social security numbers sometimes, and that did need a little more creativity. Still, in some ways the job was beneath her; no challenge at all. And McKenna was a woman who thrived on challenge.

She had always been smart, had always thought of herself as an extremely capable, intelligent person. Even in those dark days of early teenagehood when her body had been compared to a potato, when her anxiety-driven overeating had led to bulimia, even then she’d always had confidence that no matter what her appearance showed to the world, she was a smart, savvy young woman.

Who was, she was forced to admit, often driven to doing really, really dumb things.

She was smart enough to diagnose the origin of her emotional flaws and what ought to be done about the behavior they inspired, but all-too-often she managed to talk herself into idiocy regardless.

Taking modeling classes had been stupid – she had already been far too self-conscious of her looks and her appearance and how others saw her. More to the point, the fluttery, vapid people she met had given her an even more cynical and jaundiced view of humanity in general, and women in particular. It had taught her to do her nails, really well, but also to mock and sneer at those who cared about nails.

They had put up with her snotty attitude for just about as long as she could stand to put up with their shallow, hypercritical idiocy about every aspect of her looks and comportment, and they had parted ways amid mutual insults and contempt. Her parents had then demanded, as she had no other educational impulses, that she get a job.

She had lost all the potato look two years earlier. Her father had been inspired to enroll her in marshal arts class – Jiu Jitsu, to be specific, and promoted it as a way for her to get fit, healthy and toned. She’d thrived there – physically. But they had found her philosophy somewhat discomforting. The more she’d learned how to defend herself – by – and there was really no getting around that – hurting others, – the more people she’d decided deserved to be hurt.

She hadn’t actually put her feelings into action but the school found her inability to adapt to their more pacifistic philosophy in the use of self defense to be more than a little disturbing. Ever the pragmatist, she’d faked coming over to their way of thinking long enough to get her black belt – which had taken surprisingly little time. With that under her belt – so to speak – she’d gradually loosened hold of her tongue and they’d pointedly suggested she’d be more comfortable in a more militant discipline.

McKenna had indeed felt militant. With her new athleticism and black belt she felt tough and cocky. She felt like a rebel. She wanted to run guns across the Spanish border and get involved in revolutions and that sort of thing. She was young and eager, but not altogether that earnest or naive. Most of the excitement seemed to take place where there was neither air conditioning nor flush toilets. And McKenna had been raised to enjoy her comfort.

More to the point, her father’s objective had been achieved. McKenna’s body had become fit and toned, and the discipline she’d learned in martial arts had helped her with her poor self-restraint so she’d kept the weight off with relative ease. But she had gone from being self-conscious about her flabby unattractive body to being narcissistic, vain, and self-conscious about being attractive.

She’d become a clotheshorse. The stint with the modeling school had followed, but while it had robbed her of many of her illusions about attractive people it hadn’t done a lot to combat her vanity in her own looks and abilities. McKenna liked being attractive, she loved being hot, and she came to love dressing in ways that accentuated her body and looks. She became, in other words, pretty much of a cock-tease.

McKenna, however, hated to disappoint people. Intellectually, she knew this came from her basic insecurity. If she disappointed people, they wouldn’t love her any more – even if they didn’t love her now. Emotionally, she thought of herself as simply having a soft heart with a lot of empathy for the needs of others.

And so McKenna had become a slut.

That was fun, kind of, for a while. Having once been under-appreciated and mocked for her unattractiveness, McKenna hugely enjoyed her ability to arouse men of all ages to trembling, stuttering idiocy. She'd had no actual romantic notions about the men she had sex with, no particular interest in being anyone’s girlfriend, much less anything serious. She basked in their approval, in their admiration and lust, and kindly let them sate that lust on her body.

She hadn’t actually thought of herself as a slut, but as an uninhibited girl who was not carrying the societal baggage that repressed women’s sexuality. Men, she would say to anyone who questioned her motives, were expected to tomcat around and fling themselves on every female they could get into a prone position, so why were women held to such a different standard?

Over time, however, she came to realize that her lack of inhibitions, while present to a certain extent, was really nothing more than a sop to her own emotional need to be admired, lusted after – appreciated. Which, she decided, was pathetic, and made her, she was forced to admit, pretty much a typical slut.

Unfortunately, that realization, that moment of epiphany, had not yet occurred when she joined the Boston Police Department. Where else was a tough, cocky, swaggering young woman to go but into the police, after all, especially if she had little interest in university or college? It wasn’t like she didn’t already have a good idea what the job would be like. She had three older brothers, an uncle and two cousins on the BPD. And the fact none of them felt she should join was a mere irritation.

So against the advice – and pleas – of her family, and with help from BPD’s sagging gender equality statistics – she’d been accepted, and, to almost everyone’s surprise, thrived.

While she thought the rules were often stupid, she obeyed them, or at least, paid lip service to them. And her looks had quickly gotten her selected for plainclothes work – which meant, for a female rookie, hooker detail.

It was as if the BPD had specifically designed a job with McKenna in mind. She got to dress up in hot, sexy clothes, and lay herself out as bait to tempt and tease every male who came across her.

Those who nibbled on the bait were then treated to her soft, dusky voice, and sweet, sultry smile promising them the world in exchange for a few paltry dollars. With her cleavage on display, and the rest of her lithe young body tightly wrapped in a form fitting dress, the johns had crawled out of the woodwork in record numbers. Her superiors had been delighted at her arrest statistics.

That had gone embarrassingly south when a defense lawyer had given a tape recording of one of her conversations with a potential john to the media. McKenna had followed the letter of the law to avoid entrapment charges. She had never explicitly offered anything for money. She had, however, mastered the art of the double entendre, and while she’d been well aware of the fact that she looked hot, she’d been startled at the public response to her mere voice.

There had been a – reaction – that in other lights she might have thought was flattering. The tape became a favorite on the Internet. Teenage boys by the horny truckload had gotten erections listening to her whispery offers of pleasure. While technically it hadn’t been entrapment, the general view seemed to have been that ordinary, law-abiding men might well be unfairly convinced to engage in unlawful carnal knowledge with someone who sounded like that – especially when that someone looked like she did.

The conservative men who ran the BPD were not amused. They didn’t want their police officers thought of as sexually provocative, even if they’d put them on the street for that very purpose. Putting McKenna back into uniform was a consideration, but rejected. They wanted to hide her away somewhere, at least for a while. And so they sent her to the Bomb Squad, as a glorified clerk.

Just keep your nose clean for a while, her brother Shane told her. Push papers, and keep your mouth shut. It’ll get you out of people’s memory, and then you can move into one of the detective bureaus.

McKenna, however, was an extremely intelligent, and somewhat hyperactive young woman. Sitting around filing papers was simply not in her nature. It wasn’t challenging. It wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t accomplishing anything worthwhile. And she was still, of course, something of a slut. She’d gone through the Bomb Squad like Sherman through Georgia, conquering one man after another. She had become the unit’s mascot, the unit’s whore, and the unit’s little sister all rolled into one.

She’d also learned an awful lot about how bombs were made, and defused. The men on the bomb squad were quite clever, and inspired to impress a pretty young woman. They’d taught her how to make small bombs, and then deactivate them. And since they also acted as the Arson Squad, they’d taught her the tricks of that trade, as well. McKenna began to display almost as much skill and talent with explosives as she did in her lovemaking, and had had some hope of joining the squad as more than a clerk.

That was when a video had gotten out, taken as a prank by a cop who was not on the bomb squad, which showed her, en flagrante delicto, as it were, with one of the men on the desk in an absent captain’s office.

That had