with her eyes open. Faith’s mother was the same way. Both of them had come up in the Atlanta Police Department together. Both were extremely adaptable, like dinosaurs who’d evolved into using tools and forwarding memes that had stopped being memes two months ago.
Faith opened her laptop. Eight tabs were open in her browser, every one of them offering advice on how to make your life more efficient. Faith clicked them all closed. She was a single mother with a two-year-old at home and a twenty-year-old in college. Efficiency was not an attainable goal. Sleep wasn’t an attainable goal. Eating an uninterrupted meal. Using the bathroom with the door closed. Reading a book without having to show the pictures to all the stuffed animals in the room. Breathing deeply. Walking in a straight line.
Thinking.
Faith desperately wanted her brain back, the pre-pregnancy brain that knew how to be a fully functioning adult. Had it been like this with her son? Faith was only fifteen years old when she’d given birth to Jeremy. She hadn’t really been paying attention to what was happening to her mind so much as mourning the loss of Jeremy’s father, whose parents had shipped him off to live with relatives up north so that a baby wouldn’t ruin his bright future.
With her daughter Emma, Faith was aware of the not-so-subtle changes in her mental abilities. That she could multi-task, but she could barely single-task. That the feelings of anxiety and hypervigilance that came with being a cop were amplified to the nth degree. That she never really slept because her ears were always awake. That the sound of Emma crying could make her hands shake and her lips tremble and that sometimes Emma’s nightlight would catch the tender strands of her delicate eyelashes and Faith’s heart would be filled with so much love that she ended up sobbing alone in the hallway.
Sara had explained the science behind these mood changes. During the stages of pregnancy and breastfeeding and childhood, a woman’s brain was flooded with hormones that altered the gray matter in the regions involved in social processes, heightening the mother’s empathy and bonding them closely to their child.
Which was a damn good thing, because if another human being treated you the way a toddler did—threw food in your face, questioned your every move, unraveled all of the aluminum foil off the roll, yelled at the silverware, made you clean shit off their ass, peed in your bed, peed in your car, peed on you while you were cleaning up their pee, demanded that you repeat everything at least sixteen times and then screeched at you for talking too much—then you would probably kill them.
“Let’s discuss the tactical quadrangle we’ve created on the west-bound streets,” the marshal said.
Faith let her eyes take a really slow blink. She needed something outside of work and Emma. Her mother euphemistically called it a work/life balance, but it was really just Evelyn’s polite way of saying that Faith needed to get laid.
Which Faith was not opposed to.
The problem was finding a man. Faith wasn’t going to date a cop, because all you had to do was date one cop and every cop would think he could screw you. Tinder was a no-go. The guys who didn’t look married looked like they should be chained to a bench outside of a courtroom. She’d tried Match.com but not one of the losers that she was even remotely attracted to could pass a background check. Which said more about the type of men Faith was attracted to than internet dating sites.
At this rate, the only way she was going to get laid was to crawl up a chicken’s ass and wait.
“So,” the marshal clapped his hands together once, loudly. Too loudly. “Let’s review Martin Elias Novak’s résumé. Sixty-one-year-old widower with one daughter, Gwendolyn. Wife died in childbirth. Novak served in the Army as an explosives expert. Not too expert—in ’96, he blew off two fingers on his left hand. He was discharged, then took some odd jobs working security. In 2002, he was in Iraq with a private mercenary force. By 2004, we clocked him joining up with some fellow vets on a citizens border patrol in Arizona.”
The marshal steepled together his fingers and slowly bowed his head. “Arizona was the last time we saw him. That was 2004. Novak went off the grid. No credit card activity. Closed his accounts. Canceled his utilities. Walked out on his lease. His pension and disability checks were returned as undeliverable. Novak was a ghost until 2016, when he popped up on our radar at a new job: robbing banks.”
Faith noticed that he’d skipped over a big piece of the puzzle, the same way every single speaker had skipped over the glaring detail in all of the previous meetings.
Novak was an anti-government nut. Not just a guy who didn’t want to pay taxes or be told what to do. Hell, no red-blooded American wanted those things. His time with the so-called citizens border patrol put him at a whole other level of dissent. For six months, Novak had kept company with a group of men who thought they understood the Constitution better than anybody else. Worse, they were willing to take up arms and do something about it.
Which meant that thanks to all of those bank robberies, someone, somewhere, had half a million bucks to aid the cause.
And no one in this room seemed to give a shit about it.
“All right.” The marshal clapped his hands together again. Someone in the front row jumped at the sound. “Let’s bring up Special Agent Aiden Van Zandt from the FBI to talk about the reason Novak is such a high-value prisoner.”
Faith felt her eyes roll back in her head again.
“Thank you, Marshal.” Agent Van Zandt looked more like a Humperdinck than a Westley. Faith didn’t trust men who wore glasses. At least he didn’t clap or offer a long preamble. Instead, Van Zandt turned toward the monitor, offering, “Let’s go to the video. Novak is the first man through the door. You can see the two fingers of his left hand are missing.”
The video started to play. Faith leaned forward in her seat. Finally, something new. She had read all of the police reports but hadn’t seen any footage.
The screen showed the inside of a bank, full color.
Friday, March 24, 2017. 4:03 p.m.
Four tellers at the windows. At least a dozen customers standing in line. There would’ve been a steady stream all day. People cashing their checks before the weekend. No security glass or bars at the teller counter. A suburban branch. This was the Wells Fargo outside of Macon, where Novak’s team had taken their last stand.
On the screen, things moved quickly. Faith almost missed Novak coming through the doors, though he was dressed in full tactical gear, all black, a ski mask covering his face. He held his AR-15 at his right side. A backpack was slung over his left shoulder. The pinky and ring finger were missing from his left hand.
The security guard entered the frame from Novak’s right. Pete Guthrie, divorced father of two. The man was reaching toward his holster, but the AR swung up and Pete Guthrie was dead.
Someone in the classroom groaned, like they’d just watched a movie, not the end of a man’s life.
The rest of Novak’s team swarmed into the bank, quickly taking up position. Six guys, all dressed in the same black gear. All waving around AR-15s, which were as ubiquitous in Georgia as peaches. There was no sound with the video, but Faith could see open mouths as the customers screamed. Another person was shot, a seventy-two-year-old grandmother of six named Edatha Quintrell who, going by the witness statements, had not moved fast enough getting down on the ground.
“Military,” someone needlessly said.
Needlessly, because these guys
