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The passenger rolled out onto the asphalt and managed to draw his Beretta even as the noise of the firing threatened to overwhelm him. He got to his feet just as the trunk of the drifting Ford passed by him, leaving him exposed in the street.

He fired a shot into the van – it hit one of the women in the stomach and she collapsed, groaning. The other three shooters still had about a half dozen rounds in their mags and they proceeded to dump them into the staggering detective. He shuddered and fell back into the gutter. The unharmed woman aimed carefully and shot off the top of his head as he lay there. Then she dropped her magazine and pulled out a fresh one.

“What are you waiting for?” she shouted to the van driver. “Go!”

One of the men pulled the sliding door shut as the van took off west on 9th.

One of the PSF officers grabbed the elderly woman at the front of the Starbucks order line and pushed her away.

“What the hell!” the woman shouted. There were a half dozen civilians inside the store, and they all looked over – all except for one man in the corner with his face buried in the New York Times.

“You best shut the fuck up,” screamed the officer. Kessler ignored the unpleasantness and stepped up to the barista.

“My usual,” she said. The barista turned to his buddy.

“The usual,” he said. The buddy nodded. Extra loogie it is.

At 7:15, Kelly Turnbull opened the door of the bathroom and stepped out with his black Remington 870 pump action. One of the PSF men was about ten feet away. Turnbull lifted it by its pistol grip, planted the stock in his shoulder and fired a shell full of double aught buckshot straight at the blue’s face.

His face was erased, with most of it splattering one of his buddies, some of it catching the old woman, who shrieked and ran. Turnbull jacked out the empty shell and pumped a fresh one into the chamber.

The other security man raised his AK, but Turnbull was quicker, firing straight into his chest. The Kevlar plate in his body armor took the brunt of it, but he still flew backwards and crashed into the pastry case, scattering shards of glass among the indifferent scones and rock-hard muffins that Starbucks now sold.

The splattered officer was raising his rifle next to Kessler when there was a roar and his face blew out forward, and he went down what-was-left-of-his-face first. Behind him, Larry Langer stood unsmiling with smoke curling from the barrel of his .357 magnum Colt Python. Around him, the civilians were diving for cover under the tables.

Turnbull stepped forward and pumped the shotgun, then fired again into the PSF officer entangled in the pastry case. The officer stopped moving. Turnbull pumped the 870 again.

“Nope,” said Langer, putting the .357 to Kessler’s temple as she struggled to take out her Beretta. She froze, quivering.

“You’re Kessler, right?” he said.

“Uh no,” Kessler said.

“Then why you wearing her uniform?” Langer asked. Kessler looked down and realized her name was on the breast of her black uniform.

“Don’t hurt me,” she said.

“You killed my family,” Langer said, the anger underlying his words becoming more obvious.

“No, not me,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

Langer pulled back the hammer.

“We need to move,” Turnbull said, covering the door with his weapon. The civilians had recovered their senses and were scrambling to escape. The baristas were gone.

“You can’t just shoot a woman in cold blood,” Kessler said, desperate.

“Yeah,” said Langer. “But I can if I – what do they call that? – misgender you.”

“I—” Kessler began, but Langer pulled the trigger.

The cruisers’ windshields in the parking lot of the PSF station were shattering one after another. Bullets ripped into the sheet metal, singly or stitching across panels. The shotgun pellets would punch out gaping, jagged holes in the steel, especially as the insurgents moved in closer.

The noise from over four dozen weapons all firing was overpowering.

There were maybe a half-dozen officers lying around their vehicles, with only one or two still stirring. Another five or six were pinned down behind their cars, intermittently returning fire – less aim and squeeze than spray and pray.

The PSF station was a squat, one story brick structure with only a few windows, and those were high on the front face of the building near the roof line. What glass there was the insurgents rapidly blew out.

Every few moments, a PSF officer would appear in the front doorway to fire a random AK burst out toward the attackers. The insurgents caught onto the pattern pretty quickly, and two with scoped hunting rifles patiently awaited his next appearance like they were waiting for an eight-point buck. The next time the shooter swung out to blaze away, he caught one .270 and one .308 round and was dead before he hit the floor behind him. The PSF officers inside stopped trying to shoot at the guerrillas out the front door.

The insurgents had been waiting for the quick reaction force to come rushing outside. The 911 calls reporting the assassinations were supposed to begin coming in at about 7:15 or so that morning. But they didn’t. The guerrillas had moved into position in, on, and around the nearby buildings, waiting for the PSF officers to spill out to their vehicles and hurry to the various shooting sites, but five minutes later there was still nothing.

Banks was in overall command at the station. He was positioned with his team next to a hardware store with a good view of the front of the PSF station, and his folks were deployed around the perimeter of the building.

There had been no sentries outside when they first arrived, which boggled his military mind. That made it simple for dozens of the insurgents to slowly move into position, surrounding the station, and to stand waiting for the exodus of the quick reaction force. But the force simply did not appear when expected

“Why aren’t they coming out? Do you think they see us?” Banks said to a brown-haired woman with an AR15. Her name was Mary. She had moved into his house a few days before; they had known each other since high school but really connected lying on the ground waiting to pump bullets into passing blues.

“Maybe no one called 911,” Mary suggested, not taking her aim from the front door.

“I heard the shots from the Starbucks,” Banks said. The coffee shop was a few blocks west. He held his M14, barrel down, waiting. Nothing.

“I don’t think anyone called it in,” Mary replied firmly.

“I suppose that’s good. The people won’t help them. Means we have their hearts and minds, I guess,” Banks said. On the hardware store’s wall next to them were three Carl Hyatt posters that had evaded being torn down the way many of the others had been.

“Well, what do we do?” Mary asked. “They need to come outside or the plan won’t work.”

“Hold on.” Bank leaned his rifle against the wall and pulled out a cheap Motorola cell phone he had taken off one of the dead PVs just in case he needed a burner. The battery was out of it, of course – no sense in walking around with something that would broadcast his location – so he had to reinsert the white power cell into the back of the device to turn it on.

“Still nothing,” Mary marveled as they watched. The other insurgents were getting restless. Banks punched 9-1-1 into the phone and put it to his ear.

He waited. And waited. His troops looked at him, puzzled.

“You’re kidding,” Mary said.

“Hold on,” Banks said, gesturing and letting it ring.

Several moments later, he spoke.

“Yeah, hi, hey, some PSF guys just got shot at the Jasper Starbucks on Main,” he said, then paused, listening.