The loving animals part was becoming a problem. She had a beautiful white Siberian husky, a rescue, with just a hint of red-tipped fur in her ears and tail. She was named Snow, and Meadow had fought the authorities to keep her in her small apartment. She was immaculate, and Meadow brushed her and bathed her faithfully. Finally the apartment manager had given in, reluctantly, after Meadow offered a sizeable deposit for the apartment, which was close to her work. She made friends with a lab tech in the next-door apartment, who kept Snow when Meadow had to travel for work. It was a nice arrangement, except that the lab tech really liked Meadow, who didn’t return the admiration. While kind and sweet, the tech did absolutely nothing for Meadow physically or emotionally.
She wondered sometimes if she was really cold. Men were nice. She dated. She’d even indulged in light petting with one of them. But she didn’t feel the sense of need that made women marry and settle and have kids with a man. Most of the ones she’d dated were career oriented and didn’t want marriage in the first place. Meadow’s mother had been devout. Meadow grew up with deep religious beliefs that were in constant conflict with society’s norms.
She kept to herself mostly. She’d loved her job when she started as an investigator for the Bureau. But there had been a minor slipup.
Meadow was clumsy. There was no other way to put it. She had two left feet, and she was always falling down or doing things the wrong way. It was a curse. Her mother had named her Meadow because she was reading a novel at the time and the heroine had that name. The heroine had been gentle and sweet and a credit to the community where she lived, in 1900s Fort Worth, Texas. Meadow, sadly, was nothing like her namesake.
There had been a stakeout. Meadow had been assigned, with another special agent, to keep tabs on a criminal who’d shot a police officer. The officer lived, but the man responsible was facing felony charges, and he ran.
A CI, or Confidential Informant, had told them where the man was likely to be on a Friday night. It was a local club, frequented by people who were out of the mainstream of society.
Meadow had been assigned to watch the back door while the other special agent went through the front of the club and tried to spot him.
Sure enough, the man was there. The other agent was recognized by a patron, who warned the perpetrator. The criminal took off out the back door.
While Meadow was trying to get her gun out of the holster, the fugitive ran into her and they both tumbled onto the ground.
“Clumsy cow!” he exclaimed. He turned her over and pushed her face hard into the asphalt of the parking lot, and then jumped up and ran.
Bruised and bleeding, Meadow managed to get to her feet and pull her service revolver. “FBI! Stop or I’ll shoot!”
“You couldn’t hit a barn from the inside!” came the sarcastic reply from the running man.
“I’ll show . . . you!” As she spoke, she stepped back onto a big rock, her feet went out from under her, and the gun discharged right into the windshield of the SUV she and the special agent arrived in.
The criminal was long gone by the time Meadow was recovering from the fall.
“Did you get him?” the other agent panted as he joined her. He frowned. “What the hell happened to you?”
“He fell over me and pushed my face into the asphalt,” she muttered, feeling the blood on her nose. “I ordered him to halt and tried to fire when I tripped over a rock . . .”
The other agent’s face told a story that he was too kind to voice.
She swallowed, hard. “Sorry about the windshield,” she added.
He glanced at the Bureau SUV and shook his head. “Maybe we could tell them it was a vulture. You know, they sometimes fly into car windshields.”
“No,” she replied grimly. “It’s always better to tell them the truth. Even when it’s painful.”
“Guess you’re right.” He grimaced. “Sorry.”
“Hey. We all have talents. I think mine is to trip over my own feet at any given dangerous moment.”
“The SAC is going to be upset,” he remarked.
“I don’t doubt it,” she replied.
* * *
In fact, the Special Agent in Charge was eloquent about her failure to secure the fugitive. He also wondered aloud, rhetorically, how any firearms instructor ever got drunk enough to pass her in the academy. She kept quiet, figuring that anything she said would only make matters worse.
He didn’t take her badge. He did, however, assign her as an aide to another agent who was redoing files in the basement of the building. It was clerical work, for which she wasn’t even trained. And from that point, her career as an FBI agent started going drastically downhill.
She’d always had problems with balance. She thought that her training would help her compensate for it, but she’d been wrong. She seemed to be a complete failure as an FBI agent. Her superior obviously thought so.
He did give her a second chance, months later. He sent her to interrogate a man who’d confessed to kidnapping an underage girl for immoral purposes. Meadow’s questions, which she’d formulated beforehand, irritated him to the point of physical violence. He’d attacked Meadow, who was totally unprepared for what amounted to a beating. She’d fought, and screamed, to no avail. It had taken a jailer to extricate the man’s hands from her throat. Of course, that added another charge to the bevy he was already facing: assault on a federal officer.
But Meadow reacted very badly to the incident. It had never occurred to her that a perpetrator might attack her physically. She’d learned to shoot a gun, she’d learned self-defense, hand-to-hand, all the ways in the world to protect herself. But when she’d come up against an unarmed but violent criminal, she’d almost been killed. Her training wasn’t enough. She’d felt such fear that she couldn’t function. That had been the beginning of the end. Both she and the Bureau had decided that she was in the wrong profession. They’d been very nice about it, but she’d lost her job.