Free The Liar's Lullaby by Meg Gardiner Page A

rigging in centerfield.
    The gubmint will use Tasia’s murder as an excuse to confiscate our firearms. Expect the second amendment to be suspended within the week. National Guard checkpoints will be erected after that. We’ll be stopped, arrested, and interned. Be ready, people.
    Yeah, that was good. He was getting warmed up now. His blood heated his hands.
    The police investigation into Tasia’s death is puppet theater. The SFPD will never produce the bullet that ended Tasia’s life. Doing so would prove, incontrovertibly, that she was killed by a round fired from a military-issue sniper rifle, not a Colt .45.
    And now the authorities have thrown another curve ball. They can’t silence the outcry over Tasia’s assassination, so they’ve decided to smother us with psychobabble. They’ve hired a psychiatrist to analyze Tasia’s death.
    This is not a joke.
    Tasia’s murder had been bold, incredibly so. She was a fire, and she’d been put out. But much worse was coming, straight at him, unless he took action immediately. Government minions—Legion’s legions—would descend on him like demons. Robert McFarland could cry for the TV cameras, but his people certainly weren’t. They were thinking Finish the job . They would come for Tom Paine.
    Authority always did. He had to strike first.
    We’ll get “insights” into Tasia’s “tortured” mind. This psychiatrist will give us a sad, I’m-so-sorry face, and blame Tasia’s mother and American society for her “tragic suicide.” You know she will—she’s from San Francisco. She’s a gubmint lackey, a useful idiot.
    This is how tyrants plant their boot on our faces. Not always with a midnight knock on the door, but through the comforting lies of a quack.
    A chill curled down his arms. He would put out the call. Keyes, the ex-merc who now drove for Blue Eagle Security, would answer, and that atavistic white power groupie he worked with, Ivory.
    Tasia warned us. She came to the concert armed with the jackal’s gun. She raised it high. She could not have shouted a louder message: True Americans will not go quietly.
    To quote Thomas Paine: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
    Who’s with me?
    Yes, Keyes and Ivory would be dying to ride to the rescue. The question was how many people could they take with them when they rode off the cliff?
     
     
    A FTER JO SAID good-bye to Vienna Hicks, she walked back to her truck along crowded streets. Businessmen’s ties writhed like snakes in the wind. Above skyscrapers, clouds fled across the blue sky. When she turned on her phone it beeped with multiple messages from Tang.
    But the message she wanted, one from Gabe saying he was safe on dry land, wasn’t there. Her breath snagged. Her emotions caught on a bramble, fear glinting in a corner of her mind.
    She shook loose from the feeling. He would call. She wouldn’t. She would wait, because that was the unspoken rule. Instead she called Tang, who sounded like she’d been chewing on sandpaper.
    “Give me joy, Beckett. I need progress.”
    “Tasia’s sister thinks it’s fully possible she committed suicide.”
    “ ‘Fully possible’ doesn’t work. I need concrete results.”
    “You sound like you’re sitting on a sharp rock.”
    “You been watching the news? ‘Still no information on the bizarre death of Tasia McFarland, and with each passing hour speculation grows that the police are incompetent, in on the conspiracy,’ blah blah repeat until nauseated. The sharp rock’s sitting on me.”
    Jo stopped at a corner for a red light. Taxis and delivery trucks jostled for space at two miles an hour, horns quacking.
    “I need Tasia’s medical and psychiatric records. All of them, including files from the years when she was married to Robert McFarland,” she said.
    “Army records, yeah. Getting paperwork from the military is going to be like pulling teeth from a chicken.”
    “You expect them to drag their feet?” The light changed and Jo crossed the street,