Free Above the Law by Carsen Taite

you.”
    “Especially not me, huh?”
    She probably shouldn’t have said that last part out loud. “Isn’t one of the perks of being a big shot having other people do stuff for you?”
    “You think I’m a big shot?”
    Dale heard the flirtatious tone and did her best to ignore it. “I’m just repeating what I hear on TV.”
    “Don’t believe everything you hear,” Lindsey said. “I’ll admit, I’ll never win any awards for my photos, but I’m a pretty decent photographer, and seeing firsthand how best to frame a shot gives me valuable perspective when I’m reporting. Besides, there have been times when I didn’t have a crew and I took photos to help me preserve images of things I saw. It helped me when I started to write the story.”
    Okay, so she was intelligent and pretty. Well, pretty wasn’t the best word. Lindsey wasn’t all put-together, package-pretty. She was a dangerous, barely-tamed kind of beautiful. In that way, Lindsey reminded her of Maria.
    Dale shook her head. Would she always compare every woman she met to the one she’d lost? Probably. And why not? Maria had been her everything. They’d shared a lifetime of precious moments compressed into a short span of time together. They’d shared love of country, justice, and a willingness to sacrifice everything for the things they believed in, yet they had found time to nurture their love for each other as well. The hard work that often drove couples apart, brought them together until it demanded the ultimate sacrifice. Why did she ever bother comparing anyone else to Maria when she knew the result in advance?
    “Did I bore you with my talk of photography?”
    Dale snapped back into the present and took a deep breath. Her hands were clenching the steering wheel like it was a lifeline, and a trail of sweat trickled down the back of her neck. Praying Lindsey hadn’t noticed her break with the present, she tried for levity. “Not as much as I’m about to bore you with the details of the Take-Back program.” She pointed to Dallas City Hall. “There’s where it’s all going down. Right there on the front lawn. See, they even have banners up. Bring your old antibiotics and help save the world.”
    Dale turned down the next street and drove into a parking garage. The lot was pretty full and she had to park on the outskirts. “Damn, where’s the cop-kissing valet when you need him?” she said. “Guess we’ll have to walk a bit.” She started to open her door, but noticed Lindsey hadn’t made a move to take off her seat belt and she was staring straight ahead at the building. “You coming?”
    Lindsey turned her head slowly and asked, “Mind if we sit here for a minute?”
    Dale made a show of looking at her watch. “Sure. It’s your time. You can use it however you like.”
    “Good. Let’s talk. Tell me why this program is worthy of a news story.”
    Dale narrowed her eyes. “What are you getting at?”
    “It’s pretty clear you think it’s silly. Why don’t you tell me why you think so?”
    Dale held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hold on now. I never said that. I was just joking around.”
    “Okaaay.”
    Lindsey drew out the word, making it clear she wasn’t buying it, but Dale wasn’t about to confide her thoughts about the PR stunt her boss’s bosses had dreamed up to deflect from the recent scandals that had plagued their department. Operation Discreet had gone down in flames when several congressmen on Ways and Means discovered agents had hired expensive prostitutes to work as confidential informants. DEA agents had provided top tier members of the Sinaloa Cartel with high dollar hookers, relying on the women to infiltrate the inner circle and report back. The plan had devolved when way more money was spent on “entertainment” than intelligence gathered. In addition, several of the women had been killed, their violently defiled bodies found by local police, and responsibility for their deaths disavowed