Regina Balfour

The motel off Route 9 had been empty for twenty minutes, and the agents stood on the second-floor walkway with a plan that had no holes in it. Cameron’s agent would put a flash grenade through the window, Brian’s would take the door, and Agent Dennis, who could shoot a grape off a man’s head from across a parking lot, would lean around the frame and end it with one round. The kidnapper was an extremist, armed, and willing to kill. The little girl was all that mattered. Then the grenade hit the mattress she’d jammed against the glass and bounced back, going off in the agents’ faces. Half blind, ears ringing, Brian drove his boot into the door and tore it off the hinges in a single kick. It was the best moment of the night.

Inside, the woman stood frozen with a pistol in one hand and the girl in the other, still reeling from the noise. The gun swung toward the doorway. Dennis leaned around the corner, found her through the blur, and squeezed the trigger with the steadiest hands in the Bureau. The dice disagreed. Critical failure.

The round landed smack in the girl’s face and her head came apart, a wet red burst that painted the wallpaper, the lamp, and the kidnapper’s shocked, dripping features. Bone chips ticked off the window glass. Pink matter slid down the headboard in slow ropes. The small body stayed standing for a second in the woman’s grip, the neck pumping, before it folded and hit the carpet. The room went silent except for the ringing in everyone’s ears. The others stared, then collected themselves and took the kidnapper down while she was still wiping her eyes. The evidence techs would later log the spatter across the walls and ceiling, and the brain matter drying in the shag, as the record of Agent Dennis’s fumble. A master marksman had done it on the one shot that mattered, and the table sat quiet for a long time afterward.