Full Circle Read Online Free PDF Page A

job done. Polish and dress me up, and my target usually took the bait. I took acting lessons in addition to self-defense and marksmanship. I can play the part of a ditzy, dumb bimbo with a killer body or the helpless female, whatever was needed. I was trained long and hard to never break character. It got me into a lot of situations where I was privy to information that could help our cases."
    "It also put you in danger," Jack said frowning.
    "Yes, it did," she agreed. "On my last sting operation, something went sour. In the aftermath, I figured it was probably a tip-off from inside the agency. Someone took a payoff. I got a feeling something was going wrong, and I requested to be pulled out, but it was denied. No one has that power! When an agent asks to be removed—they are to be removed immediately. Someone made a bad decision, and I wasn't extracted. A woman died along with her two-year-old child.
    "The bad guys, serious drug kingpins, beat the hell out of me, but they didn't kill me. They had other plans to use me—horrible, disgusting plans. However, one of them screwed up and underestimated me. Where he's spending the rest of his life, he doesn't need his balls. I escaped, but I left a lot of damage behind me on my way out. The Agency called it excessively violent behavior . I called it survival. The end of that mission was too close to the edge for me not to reevaluate what was important in my life."
    "Shit!"
    "Exactly," Josie agreed, as she looked into her cup. "I was supposed to shake it off since that's what a good operative would do. I'd done it before. But I couldn't, not that time. We're not living in a time where the good guys wear the white hats. Sometimes the guys that are supposed to have your back are as corrupt as the criminals. I don't regret what I did to those three men that were holding me. I didn't then, and I never will. I fight to survive. The only thing that mattered to me was that two innocents died. I kept trying to change the scenario of those events in my head, trying to figure out what I could have done to prevent those casualties."
    "You can't change it. The result will always be the same," Jack said seriously. "Unless you were negligent in doing your job, it will always end the same."
    "I wasn't negligent, and I know you're right, that's standard procedure by the manual," Josie admitted. "It's still hard to accept."
    "So, you had your epiphany and walked."
    Josie smiled, again. "Yeah, it was my or something . A couple of weeks later while still on medical leave, I was taking a walk trying to get my head screwed back on straight. I stopped into a sub shop for a bottle of water. For once, there wasn't a long line to the cashier register and I ended up buying a lottery ticket. I tucked my ticket into a jacket pocket and forgot about it."
    "You won?"
    "This is my story and I get to tell it my way!" Josie chided, but she was smiling. "As I said, I forgot about the ticket. I had things that were more important on my mind. I had to make a decision to go back to work or quit the job I'd worked hard at getting and keeping for years. A month later, I stopped in at the same place to buy another bottle of water, and I remembered the lottery ticket in my pocket. I fished it out and asked the clerk to run the numbers."
    "You're killing me, here."
    Josie gave Jack a serious look, and smiled. "It's not a secret, but it's not something I broadcast, either. It wasn't one of the major jackpots, but I did win. I took the payout—three-and-half million dollars after taxes."
    "Holy shit," Jack laughed.
    "Exactly," Josie agreed. "Chump change compared to the big mega-lottery payoffs they announce on the news, but more than I'll ever spend in my lifetime. This is where the epiphany or my 'ta da' moment came into play. I could do anything, go anywhere and have anything I wanted. Only, I didn't know what I wanted. The only thing that was crystal clear in my head was that I did not want to go back into deep cover,