Inspired by true events.

It was the kind of wrong that can never be righted. That’s why I thumbed off the safety on the .45 in my purse, steeled myself, and gave the ornate door handle a twist.

I didn’t have an appointment. I wasn’t expected. I didn’t arrive during business hours. I didn’t use the front door.

Truth be told, I was trespassing. They could easily charge me with breaking and entering, and no doubt it would stick.

But that wasn’t even close to the end of it. I was just getting started.

I had no delusions, and I wasn’t out to save the world. I’d been around too long to believe any of the fairy tales about justice and the rule of law. I’d spent the first four billion years of my adult life at Homeland catching spies. I’d had no prayer of emerging with my idealism intact.

But I had left Homeland with a full bag of deeply antisocial tricks. I chalk it up as one danger of training good people to do bad things. Somewhere along the way, we can’t help but lose our goodness. Ends and means, blah blah, but it’s hard not to lose your soul trying to serve the higher good using the devil’s tools.

“Hello, Commissioner,” I trilled, a massive smile on my face, girls out and prominent, hips doing that thing that tickles the male lizard-brain into instant submission. I marched into Frederick Posner’s office balanced atop my ludicrously expensive Jimmy Choos, artificial cheer cranked up to eleven, looking for all the world as if someone had hired me to deliver a singing telegram.

“What…?”

Ruddy complexion, barrel chest giving way to a beer keg around the waist, enough medals hanging on his police jacket to make a third-world dictator green with envy, hands moving quickly beneath his desk, undoubtedly reaching for his service revolver or the panic button mounted beneath the desktop.

I shook my head. I had expected to be a little more impressed by the face of pure evil.

“Please don’t,” I said, gesturing toward his hands with my “borrowed” piece, its sturdy heft calming my jangly nerves and dampening the tremor in my hands.

I’d used this kind of tool in anger many times before, but never under circumstances like these.

In the past, I’d been an agent of the state, dispatched to serve justice and comeuppance, or at least to do the bidding of the state. But I’d walked away from the job, even if I was having a hard time walking away from the life.

So this was anything but official duty.

In fact, it was homicide.