Chapter 1
I wrote a song for you, I hope you like it. It’s called, I hope you die. Stick a thousand needles in your eye.
-Miller’s secret thoughts
Miller
“Shoot him, goddammit! Motherfuckin’ shoot him!” I yelled desperately into my mic.
We all watched in horror as the man, who was holding the young woman up against the church’s glass doors, started to rape her.
The woman’s face was pressed up against the glass as she sobbed.
The man’s body was completely covered, except for one tiny portion of his head, and I knew, rationally, that the opening wasn’t large enough.
James had a single tiny window from his position at the top of the building across the street, and the glare from the sun off the front glass was enough to cause even the most experienced snipers trouble.
But, if anybody could do it, it was James.
The man was a savant with a rifle.
I just hoped he’d be able to make that shot, because there was no other entrance or exit into the building except for three tiny windows at the back that was lined with metal bars.
They could come off, but not without a lot of noise.
“I need a distraction. Get him to move two more inches and he’ll be done,” James’ cool voice said from the mic in my ear.
I moved, not even thinking.
I was moving forward and running towards the side of the building as fast as my legs would carry me.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
James paused, but it was Downy who answered.
“Movement. Pop your head back around the side and let him see the movement. Maybe he’ll move to get a better look and allow James some more breathing room,” Downy murmured quietly.
I nodded and started to move, letting the top left half of my body pop into view and back out. “Hey!”
I saw his head snap around just as I disappeared back from sight.
Then a loud pop filled the air, followed by some glass shattering.
I moved, darting around the building to find the young woman on her knees, her pants down around her ankles as she sobbed uncontrollably.
I moved, stepping onto glass and debris until I was down on my knees beside her.
I moved forward, moving my arms around her to gather her stretchy pants at the waistband, pulling them up until they were covering her once again.
She whimpered and I said, “It’s okay, honey. I know. He’s dead.”
He was very much dead, too.
Half his head was now gone, and his life blood now filled the floor surrounding his body.
“G-g-gone?” She cried desperately, starting to turn back and look.
“No, honey. Don’t look. He’s not looking too pretty,” I said honestly.
She shoved me away anyway and turned to look at the body on the floor before she reached back and let loose a vicious kick with her pointy toed boots into the dead man’s side.
“You stupid.” Kick. “Fucking.” Kick. “Piece of filthy, cock sucking shit.” Kick.
I pulled her away from the body as men started to fill the room around us.
“Come back here,” I said, moving her out of the way.
She came willingly, my arms wrapped tightly around her waist.
I didn’t bother to ask if she was okay.
There was no way she could be.
Not when she’d just been raped on national television.
Try as we might, there was no way that it wasn’t caught on the multiple reporter’s cameras that witnessed the heinous act.
“Mercy Shepherd!” A distraught woman’s voice wailed from the front of the church.
The woman, Mercy the distraught woman had called her, turned to find an older woman with graying brown hair running up the steps to the church, but she was stopped by police before she could get much further than the third step.
She turned into me, shielding her face with my chest.
“I don’t want to see her right now,” she whispered frantically.
I pulled her with me into what looked to be an office, and shut the door until all that was left open was barely a crack.
She didn’t move away from me. Her lean body actually somewhat collapsed into mine. I caught her in time to prevent her from slamming into the cheap laminate floor at my feet.
“I knew him,” she whispered into my chest.
Her hands were clutching my shirt with a grip that could rival the Hulk’s, but I didn’t complain.
If anything, I was happy to offer my assistance.
The last hour had been a freakin’ nightmare, which was why I allowed her to cry in my arms. If it was a nightmare for me, it was a living hell for her.
We’d arrived on scene, after receiving a call from a distraught church goer, that a man had started beating his girlfriend for smiling at another man.
Once we were dispatched, we got call after call of witnesses saying that the woman was hurt really bad, and that the man now had a gun pointed at the woman’s head.
We arrived on scene less than ten minutes after the call was taken, just in time to see him reveal the woman’s lower half to an entire block of downtown Kilgore.
He’d then proceeded to finger her roughly, pinching her breasts, and pulling her hair, all the while he kept a gun trained at the back of her head.
They’d disappeared for a few moments as what churchgoers had described as a ‘come to Jesus.’
The men and women at the church couldn’t give any indication who the couple were, but it didn’t take John, one of the other members of the SWAT team who did all the computer work, to find out who he was.
Mitch Moose, a thirty year old accountant, brought the young woman back to the front window thirty minutes later where he proceeded to rape the woman in front of God and the entire population of Kilgore, Texas.
All the while we watched on, helpless, because every vital piece of his body was covered by hers.
Which led us to now: me holding a crying, distraught woman in my arms who’d just been raped.
I didn’t know what to say.
What did you say in times like these?