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shooter. Officer down, need assistance…”
    The man with the pleasant smile, his hand moving below her line of sight…
    “Officer down…”
    And suddenly she was spinning, her gun up and aiming. Firing before she could think.
    All in a split second as some part of her was silently shouting: I can’t do this! Stop!
    But she felt something more powerful than instinct: a primal certainty and a conviction, from way down inside, that if she didn’t do this then she and Xavier and others would all be dead, before another word could be spoken.
    And so she shot the man with the puzzled smile right through the forehead.
    Have I shot the wrong man? Mary, Holy Mother of God, have mercy on me. …
    The other people around him screamed and ran to the right and left - like a curtain of people parting to reveal the man sinking to his knees… with a silenced 9mm pistol in his hand.
    He flopped forward, facedown, not even twitching. Quite dead.
    Lowering the gun, she glanced down at Xavier, who was staring up at her, grimacing. “You scare me,” he said.
    Didn’t sound like he was kidding.
    She looked at the gun in her hand. She closed her eyes…
    It had happened again.
    --
    “You know, Angela, this is starting to make a few people nervous,” Captain Foreman said, scratching in the short bristles that passed for his hair. He was an ex- Marine and he’d kept the haircut. He looked at her with his small, blue eyes, and the lines on his tanned face deepened with his frown. “Shooting four people in six months - doesn’t happen too often, Dirty Harry movies aside.”
    “Yes sir, but uh - it’s not as if any of it’s my idea,” Angela said.
    “You know, you can sit down in that chair there.”
    She was standing almost at attention in front of his desk, in his downtown office. Pictures of his kids on the wall, framed certificates of commendation, a smell of pipe tobacco. “No thank you, sir.”
    She knew she was being petulant, acting the martyr by refusing to sit, but she felt like she was being hauled on the carpet for just doing her duty.
    “You’re thinking you should get a medal and not a hassle,” Foreman said, leaning back, his chair creaking.
    She felt her face redden. “Not a medal, sir - but, maybe, not a hassle.”
    “Tell you what I think. I think it bothers you, too, all these shootings in a short time.”
    She let out a long breath. He had her there. All four shootings had been instinctive. All four had been one-shot-one-kill affairs, instantly lethal. All four had been people no one mourned, no one complained of losing. Murderers, every one. A child killer, a vicious enforcer for a drug gang, a bank robber who’d already killed a hostage, and now a lunatic, a random shooter.
    And in every case she’d just found herself in the vicinity. Just following a feeling. And every time she’d been right.
    She tried not to think about her sister. How what had happened to Isabel could be happening to her. She tried not to think about the voices she’d heard, the ghosts she’d seemed to see as a child. She couldn’t let herself believe all that was coming back. Because that had been madness.
    But how could this be madness? She’d been…
    “… right every time,” the captain was admitting.
    “That’s the damnable thing. They all checked out to the bone. You probably will get a commendation, when things quiet down. But we still have to suspend you pending investigation. It’s just routine. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
    “I know, Captain.”
    “Dodson - there’s nothing you want to tell me about this?”
    “Like… what?”
    “I don’t know. Just… next time you have one of these, you know, these hunches, call somebody before you… follow up. I mean - not if there’s a shooter right there, but…”
    “I know what you mean, sir.”
    “Okay. We’ll see you in the morning at the inquest.”
    She nodded, and walked out, thinking, He’s right.
    I’m scared by this thing, too.
    --
    Chaz had just