fine glass of Schaefer on draft at McLaughlin’s. “I know there’s an intense guy under that dumb lineman look. I know it. You got what makes these guys tick, Max. Come on. Just come out and watch ’em work and see if you don’t catch a bug.”
I was into my third glass of beer. It was summertime. A thirty-year-old version of the Drifters singing “Up on the Roof” was on the jukebox. I was staring at the oak scrollwork on McLaughlin’s famous hundred-year-old bar mirror and for some yet unknown reason said, “Yeah, OK.”
So the next day I was leaning against an empty metal fire extinguisher box watching the team position themselves in the hallway for a drill on “room probes” and watching the woman who would capture and then severely stomp my previously lazy heart.
Megan Turner was dressed in black, armed and dangerous. There was something about her profile, the sharp straight nose, the small rise of her cheekbones, and her delicate but determined chin that made me stare despite myself. Yet even that first day it was her eyes that caught me. From a distance of fifteen feet their ice-blue color seemed to absorb the fractured light, reflect none of it, and perform the uncanny task of sending an emotional thought across a room. It was her eyes and her hair that day.
Meg had become the team sniper soon after her recruitment to the team on the strength of her ability to put five out of five .308-caliber rounds from a sniper rifle into the dimensions of a quarter at two hundred yards. Good sharpshooters say they aim for a spot just in front of the ear, right where a close sideburn might end. A .308 round there will kill a suspect instantly, before his reflexes can pull the trigger of his own gun.
But on this day Meg was playing backup, armed with an MP5 assault rifle and given the task of covering a teammate who was doing a mirror probe of a classroom.
As the six-person team took up their positions, she had settled in against a hallway corner. Although her eyes were already on the doorjamb of the target room, I could feel her peripheral vision taking me in. She was wearing a pair of black gloves with the fingers cut off and before locking herself into position, knowing I was watching, she consciously loosened a strand of her long honey-blond hair from her baseball cap and stroked it behind her ear. I would learn, much later, that it was a calculated move. And I fell instantly in love.
Once the drill started, she fixed her rifle sites on the doorjamb while her partner crawled quietly along the floor, inching like an awkward snake along the baseboard of a scarred and dirty wall. When he got to the open doorway, he pulled out a long-handled mirror similar to a dentist’s tool and slipped it around the corner, squinting and tilting the reflection to search the room.
For thirty-two minutes the heat in the hallway climbed. And for thirty-two minutes I watched Megan Turner’s concentration. The sweat started in tiny beads at line of her cap and I watched them build and then roll in strings down her brow and neck. The air grew thick and nearly impossible to draw in. She sighted her weapon and never flinched. I’d never seen such a display of total focus.
When the officer on the floor yelled “Clear” the sharp sound of his voice made me jump and bang my shoulder against the extinguisher box. Megan simply exhaled, a slight grin tugging at the corner of her mouth.
After the exercise the squad gathered in the parking lot where they stripped out of their dark clothing and bulletproof vests, dumped cups of water over their heads and inhaled Gatorade. I was hanging near Gibbons and one of the team leaders when Megan looked up and caught me watching her again.
“So what do you think, Freeman?” she said, and the voice seemed way too soft, far too feminine.
“Impressive,” I said, surprised that she knew my name.
“Challenging enough for you?”
“Possibly.”
“Love to have you.”
Gibbons looked up with the rest of the team, but I didn’t see them rolling their eyes. I was watching Meg loosen a strand of her now wet hair and stroke it into position behind her ear.
“Yeah,” was all I could manage.
We dated for six months and I tried every day to figure out if I’d fallen for the toughness it took to hold the