Cop Town by Karin Slaughter

your life.”
    Maggie didn’t know what to say. She’d known Chip forever, but it wasn’t like they sat around talking about their feelings.
    Chip seemed to realize this, too. He told Bud, “Let’s go.”
    Maggie watched the car roll into the parking lot. She quickened her pace again. She didn’t want to think about the plans Terry and his friends were making. As a cop, she had a duty to make sure the law was upheld. But she was a cop, and she wasn’t going to rat out other cops. Besides, the men were detectives. Maggie was patrol. She was also a woman. No one would listen to her, and even if they did, they wouldn’t care unless The Atlanta Constitution ran a story on it. All Maggie could do for now was handle what was in front of her, and right now what was in front of her was getting ready for work.
    She dug around in her purse as she crossed the street. The brick that was the transmitter for her radio took up half the space in her bag. She clipped it onto the back of her belt, then jacked in the springy cord to her shoulder mic. Maggie checked the dials on top of the transmitter. There were two—one for volume, one for tuning. She could adjust both in her sleep.
    Cash from her wallet went into her front pocket. Two pens and a small notepad went into her left breast pocket, her citation book went into the right one. Chemical mace went into her back pocket along with a tube of nude lipstick. Neither one was regulation, but a girl had to protect herself.
    She catalogued the remaining items in her bag: a paperback, loose change, a darker lipstick, powder, mascara, blusher, eyeliner. The latter items were not necessary for the job, but necessary if she wanted to keep them from Lilly.
    A breeze rustled Maggie’s hair as she stepped onto the sidewalk. The sharp pain in her knee was gone. The sensation was more like she was aware that she had a knee rather than that she was about to collapse with every step. She didn’t know how Jimmy dealt with the constant discomfort every day. Of course, she didn’t know how her brother dealt with a lot of things.
    Either Jimmy was lying about what had happened during the shooting or he’d taken the time to clean his gun before leaving the hospital. Considering the half-ass job he’d done of cleaning his own face, she doubted the latter explanation. What was more likely was that he hadn’t fired the revolver at all.
    In which case, what else was he lying about? Had the Shooter’s gun really jammed? Because Maggie had been on the firing range enough times to know what happened when a gun jammed. She’d had it happen herself. She’d seen it happen to others. The sequence was always the same. You pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. You pulled the triggeragain, maybe even a third or fourth time, before you accepted that the gun was jammed. The process was like sniffing bad milk or tasting something that was too spicy. You always had to do it more than once. You never believed something was off the first time.
    Maggie stopped walking. She looked down at her watch. When the second hand hit the twelve, she mentally walked herself through the Shooter’s movements.
    Turn the corner. Aim. Shoot Don Wesley. Recoil. Aim. Pull the trigger. Nothing. Pull the trigger again. Run.
    Five, maybe six seconds. That was assuming there was no hesitation. And that the Shooter was able to re-aim quickly even though Jimmy had to be moving the moment Don went down.
    Maggie started walking again. A second lasted longer than most people thought. The blink of an eye takes around three hundred milliseconds. The act of breathing in and out eats up around five seconds. An average marksman can pull his weapon in under two seconds.
    Jimmy Lawson was one of the best marksmen in their division. In five or six seconds, he could easily kill a man.
    Maggie turned the corner and almost ran into another cop. He had coffee-colored skin and was wearing a too-tight uniform that made him look like a first-day recruit.