3.

The unmarked car sat screened by a row of trees only a hundred yards from the barn. The same barn she’d been looking at for so long—just a big unkempt pile of weather-eaten wood planks, with here and there a broken window. It looked like it ought to be deserted, or even condemned, yet she knew it was full to capacity with the fifteen members of the Godwin family, every single one of whom had a criminal record. As far as she could tell they were all asleep. A gray squirrel ran up the side of a drainpipe and she nearly jumped out of her seat. Getting control of herself, she scribbled some notes on her spiral pad. Sept. 29, 2004, continuing surveillance outside of Godwin residence near Lairdsville, Pennsylvania. This was it, she thought. The day of the raid had finally come. She looked up. The dashboard clock ticked over to 5:47 A.M. and she made a note.

“I count five vehicles out front,” Corporal Painter said. “That’s all of them—the whole family’s in there. We can get everybody in one sweep.” As the junior officer on the investigation, Caxton had been assigned to shadow one of the more experienced troopers. Painter had been doing this for years. He sipped at an iced coffee and squinted through the windshield. “This is your first taste of real police work, right?”

“I guess you could say that,” she replied. Once upon a time she had worked on a kind of investigation. She had fought for her life against vampires far more deadly than any bad guy Painter might have tracked down in his career. The vampire case had gotten her promoted, but it didn’t appear anywhere on her permanent record. It had been nearly a full year since she’d moved up from the Bureau of Patrol to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. In that time she’d taken endless classes at the academy in Hershey, qualified on tests both written and oral, passed polygraph and background checks and full psychological, medical, and physical fitness evaluations, including a urinalysis for drug screening, before she was actually permitted to work a real investigation in the field. Then had come the hard part, the actual work. For the last two months she had been pulling twelve-hour shifts in the car, watching the barn that they believed contained one of the biggest meth labs in the Commonwealth. She hadn’t made a single collar yet, nor confiscated any evidence, nor interviewed a person of interest. This raid would prove whether or not she was cut out for criminal investigations, and she wanted to do everything perfectly.

“Here’s a tip, then. You don’t have to write down the time every five minutes if nothing happens.” He smiled and gestured at her notepad with his coffee cup.

She smiled back and shoved the pad into her pocket. She kept her eyes on the barn. She wanted to say something funny, something to make Painter think she was one of the guys. Before she could think of anything, though, the car radio lit up and the voice of Captain Horace, their superior, came through.

“All cars, all cars. The warrant just came through. Hazmat and firefighters in place. All cars are on scene. Let’s wake ’em up!”

Caxton’s body surged with adrenaline. It was time.

Painter twisted the key in the ignition and threw the car into gear. They lurched forward onto the road, then swung into the broad unpaved driveway in front of the barn, their tires squealing. All around them other cars—hidden until that exact moment—came tearing out of the woods, and armored cops spilled out onto the gravel. Beside her a pair of troopers brought up a breeching device—a length of PVC pipe filled with concrete that could knock down even a steel-core door. Another trooper ran toward the door to knock and announce—to give the legally required warning he had to shout out before they could bust in and serve the warrant. Everyone was armored, and everyone was masked up. She grabbed her own gas mask off her belt and strapped it over her face. Meth labs churned out some pretty nasty chemicals, including phosphine gas that could kill you in seconds. She couldn’t see very well through the faceplate, but she ran forward anyway, drawing her weapon and keeping it down near her hip. Her heart pounded in her chest. Everything was happening so fast.

“Team one to the left, team two with me. Go, go, go!” Captain Horace shouted, coming up from behind her. “Team three”—that was her team—“get some distance. Team three,” he called, “get back, get—heads down!”

A window had opened up in the second story of the barn. A man with a shaved head and sores on his face leaned out and started firing at them with a hunting rifle. Damn it, she thought, they were supposed to have been asleep! She ran forward, seeking shelter on the porch of the barn, a narrow roofed porch that would give her cover.

“You! Get back, get back!” Horace shouted. Gunshots smashed into the gravel and struck the hood of her car as if it had been hit with a hammer. “Caxton, get back!”

In her twenty-seven years of life no one had ever shot at her before. Her brain stopped working and her kidneys hurt as her adrenal glands poured fire into her veins. She tried to think. She had to follow the order. She tried to spin on her heel and run back. The cars were so far away, though. She was out in the open and the porch was so close—

Without warning a high-velocity bullet smashed into her sternum, knocking her backward.

Her vision went red, then black, but only for a moment. Her feet couldn’t seem to grip the loose gravel, and her head collided jarringly with the ground. She could hear nothing at all. Her entire body felt like a bell that had been struck.

Gloved hands grabbed her ankles and pulled her backward, away from the barn, her legs bouncing wildly. She couldn’t feel her left arm. Faces stared down into hers, faces in helmets and gas masks. She could hear a buzzing noise that slowly resolved into a human voice demanding to know if she was still alive.

“Vest,” she said. “The vest took it.” Hands grabbed at her chest and pulled and tugged. Someone got the bullet free, a shiny lump of distorted metal. Someone else pulled at her helmet, but she batted the hands away. “I’m okay,” she shouted, again and again.

She could hear a little better by that point. She could hear the unrhythmic barking of hunting rifles and the more stately reply of automatic weapons fire.

“Get her out of here,” the captain shouted.

“No, I’m good!” she shouted back. Her body begged to differ. You’re not as fragile as you think, she told it, repeating words an old colleague had once said to her. They wouldn’t let her get up—they were still dragging her, even as she fought them.

“What the fuck happened?” a trooper asked, pressing his shoulder against the side of a car. He leaned out a little, into the open, then jumped back as rifle fire chewed up the gravel ahead of him. “They were supposed to all be asleep!”

Captain Horace tore off his gas mask and scowled at the barn. “I guess they use their own shit. Meth freaks get up earlier than normal people.”

Hands reached down and helped her sit up against the side of a car. She couldn’t see anything through her mask. She couldn’t breathe. “Let me up,” she shouted. “I can still shoot!”

“Stay down,” Horace shouted, pushing down hard on her shoulder. “I don’t have time for this. I’m giving you an order. You disobeyed the last one. You don’t get to do that twice. You stay here, stay down, and stay out of the goddamned way.”

Caxton wanted to protest, but she knew he wasn’t interested in her opinion. “Yes, sir,” she said. He nodded and jumped up to run to the back of another car. She struggled to take off her gas mask and drop it on the gravel beside her, then settled in to get comfortable.

It was hours before the shooting was done and they’d carted off the last suspect. After that she could only watch as the other troopers came parading out of the house carrying pieces of the meth lab wrapped in plastic and plastered with biohazard stickers. Ambulances carried away the wounded and almost as an afterthought a paramedic was sent to take a look at her bruised chest. He took off her vest, opened up her shirt, and took one look at her before handing her an ice pack and telling her she was fine. While she was being discharged Corporal Painter came by to check up on her. “You missed all the fun,” he said, grinning. He leaned down and gave her a hand to help get her back on her feet. Her rib cage creaked a little as she rose, but she knew she was fine. “Not quite what you signed on for, was it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m going home,” she told him. She dug her notepad out of her pants pocket and threw it to him. “Here, you can write up the report.”