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“Y’all ready to go in or do we need a group hug first?” She looked at me with her brows raised high as if I
was the pansy keeping everyone from their work.
“Age before beauty,” I said, letting her in the door first. She shot me the bird behind her back.
The bank was a mess. Ceiling tiles were scattered all over the floor. They had shot into the ceilings and into
the walls trying to disable any electronic surveillance. It still smelled like a bank with Eau d’ Gun mixed in.
I went behind the teller counter and came upon the first victim. I pulled on a rubber glove and felt her neck
for a pulse. She didn’t look older than eighteen or twenty. She was gone. Single shot to the head, it looked like,
but in the end, the Coroner’s Investigator makes that call.
“I’ve got one here,” I called out to no one in particular.
“I’ve got the other one over here.” Amelia was crouched next to our second victim. Her thin, angular face
was set with emotion, but her soft eyes, slanted slightly so that you could mistake her for Asian for just a
moment, betrayed nothing.
The victim looked like the bank manager according to the picture on the wall behind his desk. He was on
the floor next to his desk where a picture of his wife and kids stared down at his now lifeless body. Then a voice
only a mother could love pulled me up out of the hole.
“John?”
“Yeah, Don.” Don Esterhaus, one of the detectives in the robbery division, wandered over.
“We have the two dead suspects outside, one got away.”
“Yeah? How?”
“One of the witnesses says that he was the last one in but when all the shooting started he took off out the
back and drove off.”
“Did anyone see him? See what he looked like? See the car? Any-fucking-thing?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Okay, Donnie.” Don Esterhaus sounded like he gargled with gravel and he only needed to say about four
sentences to me before I would start getting pissy with him. Tall and lanky with graying hair that stood on end
most of the time, he was both comical to look at and scary to listen to. He’s a good cop so I try to tolerate it,
but listening to him is like fingernails on a chalkboard. This was his case now.
We stepped outside. “Who went down?”
“Patterson,” Gonz answered.
“No shit.”
“Bullet got around the Kevlar, hit him in the side. He also took one in the neck.”
“Where’s Mike?” Mike Shin was Gregg Patterson’s partner in patrol. Mike was part of our little group.
“At County, where they took Patty.”
A cop goes down, day turns to shit for everyone.
Fin
Chapter Four – Michael Scott Miller – Ladies and Gentlemen – The Redeemers
Michael Scott Miller is a first-time novelist who works with numbers by day in the business world
and with words by night. He began writing shortly after graduating from the University of
Pennsylvania and has had his work published in the Welcomat (now Philadelphia Weekly) and wrote
music reviews for the Wharton Journal while his wife was getting her degree there. Miller currently
lives in Lafayette Hill, PA with his wife and three children.
Author website: http://www.ladiesandgentlementheredeemers.com/
Amazon.com book page: http://tinyurl.com/2g523qy
Copyright © 2010 Michael Scott Miller