“I’m dispatching as we speak.” The woman’s voice was calm. Like she dealt with bombs every day. “I want you to vacate the premises and find cover a safe distance away until officers arrive.”

“Got it.” She pulled open the back door and clattered down the deck steps while she answered the woman’s questions, trying to wrap her mind around this surreal turn of events.

Hate mail was one thing. An occupational hazard you learned to live with in her type of job.

But a bomb?

Way out of bounds.

She skipped the last step and leapt to the ground.

Maybe her sisters were right.

Maybe hosting a controversial talk radio show was a dangerous job.

And maybe, in the future, she wouldn’t cavalierly dismiss the venom that was sometimes spewed at her by listeners who didn’t agree with her opinions.

For now, though, she had to focus on keeping her neighbors safe. Willing as she was to put herself in the line of fire as part of her job, it wasn’t fair to endanger the innocent residents of this bucolic St. Louis suburb she called home.

The 911 operator finished her questions as Eve sprinted next door.

“I’ll stay on the line until officers arrive. Are you moving to a safe location?”

“Uh-huh.” Or she would be soon. After detouring to Olivia Macie’s. The eighty-one-year-old widow would either be watching TV with the volume sky-high or napping without her hearing aid. She wouldn’t hear her phone—and she might not even notice the noise from the emergency vehicles that would soon descend on the quiet cul-de-sac.

After bounding up the steps to the woman’s back porch, she skidded to a stop, set the phone beside the pot of geraniums on the patio table, and pounded on the door.

“Come on, Olivia. Open up. Please!” As she squeezed her other neighbor’s key, the first faint wail of a siren keened through the muggy August air.

She continued to pummel the door until the spry, white-haired woman at last pulled it open.

“Gracious, Eve.” Olivia adjusted her glasses and blinked. “I thought I was being raided.”

“Sorry. You need to go down into the basement ASAP.” She gave the woman a choppy three-sentence explanation. “Until the police get here and tell us what to do, that’s the most secure place.”

She hoped.

After all, if subterranean walls of concrete offered protection from tornados, they ought to shield a person from a bomb that was a hundred feet away . . . right?

And it had to be safer than fleeing in the open air. What if the package exploded while Olivia was outside?

Her skin grew clammy as a stream of stomach-turning images strobed through her mind.

“There’s a bomb on your front porch?” Her neighbor stared at her as if she’d just said aliens had landed in the yard.