Now she slouched against the door, angled her legs across the floor, and closed her eyes, trying to remember the last time she’d been this tense. This morning, on the way to work, she decided. She’d been tense when her car had stalled at the fast-food drive-through and fifteen angry motorists, hungry for their morning coffee and muffins, had piled up behind her. She should have had breakfast at home, but Kevin had eaten all twelve of the pancakes she’d prepared. She made a mental note to stop at the store on the way home from work. She’d also been tense at two in the morning when she woke up in a cold sweat thinking about another evening with Steve Crow, realizing he was coming to visit, and remembering the house was a wreck. The shower-stall door needed the grunge scrubbed away and the living room rug was due for a vacuuming. There were cobwebs on the dining room chandelier, fingerprints on the kitchen cabinets, and if he looked in her oven, she’d die.

So she’d gotten up and cleaned her bathroom, dusted the chandelier, scoured the cabinets, and said the heck with the oven. As far as she was concerned any man who looked in a woman’s oven wasn’t worth snake spit anyway.

Exhausted, she dozed off with her forehead resting on the wheel. She’d slept for only a few minutes when she woke with a start. The car phone was ringing.

“Good morning,” Steve said. “Just calling to see if everything is okay.”

“Yup. Everything is fine.” Not counting the heart arrhythmia she got when she thought about the way he’d kissed her.

“I also wanted to make sure our dinner date was still on for tonight.”

“Of course,” Daisy said. “I’m looking forward to meeting Bob.”

“Uh, right. If you run into any problems on the job, be sure to call me.”

“Thanks, but things are nice and quiet.”

She gave her last report at three-fifty-five while she was en route to the radio station. As she was heading north on the George Washington Parkway back to the station, a D.C. police call for backup came over a scanner. The officer was shouting into his two-way, giving his location. Gunfire rattled in the background. It sounded as if there was a firefight going on in the southwest section of the city in an area well-known for drugs and violence. There was a request for an ambulance. One of the officers on the scene had been shot. More gunfire.

It seemed to Daisy that this was the sort of news a radio station should know about, so she called WZZZ’s editor and told him about the incident, concluding, “I can hear the gunshots coming over the scanner.”

“Where are you?”

“Coming up to the Eighteenth Street Bridge.”

“Take the bridge, babe. Go for it.”