The Next President Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Secret Service wouldn’t consider it too hard, and then make the shot.
    Of course, if the goddamn target wasn’t going to cooperate, if the fucker was going to duck while your round was in the air, there wasn’t
    a damn thing you could do about that. Maybe tell him, “Hold still now,” right before you squeezed the trigger.
    That was just what Dixie had done two weeks ago. Told convenience store robber and hostage taker D’antron Nickels not to move a muscle when he gave himself up and came out of that Grab ‘n’ Go store. Dixie had actually just whispered the thought to himself, but D’antron seemed to listen like he’d heard the word of the Lord.
    During the seventeen hours D’antron had held his hostages a twenty two-year-old male clerk, a nineteen-year-old single mother with her three year-old twin sons in tow, and a forty-seven-year-old minister he’d made a point of having each and every one of his captives scream in pain and/or terror over the telephone to the hostage negotiators.
    Once the negotiators had coaxed D’antron’s name out of him, they’d discovered this was the third time he’d taken hostages while robbing convenience stores. The first time he’d been only thirteen and had done a year in a youth camp. The second time he’d been eighteen but had been so high on PCP that his lawyer had persuaded a brain-dead jury that he’d lacked the capacity to form criminal intent. The jury acquitted D’antron, but the judge remanded him to a locked drug therapy facility for all of six months. Now, at age twenty, here he came again. Terrorizing three adults and two tiny kids into lifetimes of nightmares before he figured out he better give himself up.
    The reason D’antron stopped just outside the store wasn’t due to Dixie’s importuning or divine intervention; he stopped to pose and flash a smile for the TV cameras. Dixie Wynne shot him through his two front teeth.
    Now Dixie was in trouble, suspended from his job and being investigated by internal affairs and the state attorney, because D’antron had happened to be a black sonofabitch. A bunch of troublemakers was accusing Dixie of being a racist. Which was a goddamn lie. By his own count, of the fifty people he’d killed in his various lines of duty, only four had been black, including D’antron. He shot people regardless of color.
    He’d shot D’antron Nickels because he knew the little prick was going to keep right on robbing stores and taking hostages, and sooner or later he’d kill some innocent person.
    Dixie’s lawyer had suggested to him that maybe after such a long, intense standoff he been tired and thought he saw something nobody else saw. Or maybe a muscle had twitched involuntarily. There were all sorts of reasons his rifle might have gone off accidentally.
    Dixie wasn’t about to cop to some excuse that would force his retirement.
    He told his lawyer to start thinking in terms of justifiable homicide.
    When he saw the shyster had trouble getting behind that line of legal reasoning, he took off.
    His plan was to hide out, live off the land, and listen to the radio every night to see if anyone was coming after him. But the only news tonight was about the assassination attempt in Chicago. He turned off the radio, policed the area, and put out the fire.
    As he slipped into his sleeping bag, he thought again about that sonofabitch lawyer wanting him to say he’d shot D’antron by mistake. Hell. If he had taken that shot in Chicago, Senator Franklin Delano Rawley would be dead right now.
    Jenny Crenshaw looked at herself in the bathroom mirror before going to bed. Her blonde hair was short enough that she could make it look neat simply by running her fingers through it. But her amber eyes were bloodshot and they didn’t have bags under them, they had cargo containers. She looked slim and fashionable in her clothes, but after stepping out of the shower tonight she’d seen that her ribs were beginning to show. She slipped on