Free Mean Woman Blues by Julie Smith

before it got out of hand. And it wasn’t because he was so all-fired hunky, she suspected; it was because she’d made him. Whooo! Way too big a turn-on. She got herself a nice, young, seriously buffed ex-football player first chance she got, and after that she kept her distance and her fingers crossed. She had to think of a way out of this.
    Especially knowing what she did now. One night, in the throes of passion, he told her what was really going on: “Oh, Baby, I can go all the way on this! I know it! You know what I have done? I have finally, at long last, come to an understanding of God’s plan for me. Everything else in my life has just been flailing around. God has finally put me where I belong, and God will take me to the highest office in the land, where I will do the work of the Lord on the grand scale I was meant to.”
    Someone else might have asked them to run that by her again. But she knew Earl Jackson. There was no question in her mind just how crazy he was, what he intended to do. A piece of her actually thought he could pull it off and was just dying to see him try.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Turner Shellmire was waiting for Skip in the parking lot of the Third District. It gave her a turn, seeing a male form looming so publicly. If Jacomine had found a kamikaze shooter to kill her, all he had to do was wait for her just like this. He’d have time to turn her into a sieve before anyone could return the favor.
    In the old days— four or five years ago— New Orleans had had a homicide department, and Skip had been a hard-working member of it. But “decentralization” had come to the city on the river, along with community policing, “accountability,” “comstat,” and certain other fin-de-siècle crime-fighting ideas first tried in New York and increasingly considered the hip and groovy nineties way. New Orleans had hired the same consultants who’d successfully worked the plan in New York City and had adopted all their ideas except one: The city that invented boob-baring for beads had zero tolerance for zero tolerance. (Or so the experts were told. Plenty of natives thought this was a sop to the tourists.)
    The effect, however, was that decentralization became the most dramatic manifestation of the new order. Basically, it meant the detective bureau was dissolved and its members dispersed to the district stations, where they became what some of them called “gen dicks”: general detectives rather than specialists. The only ones who were still exclusively homicide investigators were those on the Cold Case Squad, which handled murder cases for the Eighth District as well as the cold ones its name implied. They still worked out of headquarters, where you parked your car in an underground garage and no one could wait for you in an open parking lot. Seeing Shellmire, Skip was once again a bit resentful about being sent to the boonies.
    “Hey, Turner,” she called. “You my police escort?”
    “For today,” he said. “For today.” He shook his head unhappily, the corners of his mouth turning toward the floor. “I don’t know about tomorrow.”
    “Well, I do. Tomorrow, Jimmy Dee’ll go to work, and the kids’ll go to school, and the FBI won’t be able to do a damn thing, and the sniper’ll have a clear shot.” She spoke with such hopelessness she hated the sound of it.
    Shellmire looked at her in surprise. “You don’t sound like yourself.”
    “I’m just worried, that’s all.”
    “Have a drink with me?”
    Skip liked the sound of that. Shellmire wasn’t the sort who’d waste his time trying to cheer her up: if he wanted to buy her a drink, he must have something to say.
    She suggested a place near the lake, since they were in the neighborhood anyway and Shellmire lived on its north shore. But the agent said he wasn’t going home, had miles to go before he slept, had to work out a plan to keep her alive. She wished, as she let him follow her back to the French Quarter, that she had any