AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

our signal arranged. Alex will tell me it’s safe to proceed, and I’ll tell you.”
    Munroe said to her, “Tell him I’m going back down to make sure he’s still in the room and I’ll backtrack to meet you at the stairs one floor down.” She relayed this.
    “Sounds good,” the lieutenant said and turned back to the others.
    “Good luck, Alex,” she said. When she realized he’d already left, she said. “Stupid. It’s me who needs luck.”
    Munroe quickly returned to the storeroom, happy he had remembered the way and found the suspect still crouched behind the boxes. The kid was now shaking. I hope those aren’t the shakes you get after you just shot someone, Munroe thought.
    The gun, however, was still missing a magazine and the hammer was still down.
    He left the kid and returned to the stairs as the SWAT team was just reaching the floor above. He connected with Yamaguchi, who relayed in a whisper, “Munroe says the suspect hasn’t moved and we can move down to the sub-basement.”
    Munroe had already gone back down to the sub-basement and was waiting for them after again checking the suspect’s location. Through Yamaguchi, he directed them through the turns until they reached the corridor that led to the storeroom. From what he could tell, they moved silently and he hoped the kid would be unaware of their presence.
    Once in position, the SWAT leader called out to the suspect several times and told him to throw out his weapon and come out unarmed. After not hearing any response, he ordered everyone to put on their gas masks. Then he detailed one of his men to deliver the tear gas through the door. Munroe kept up a back and forth, checking to make sure the kid was still behind the boxes — and happy to see he had shrunk even farther back into his hiding spot — and then telling Yamaguchi the kid probably couldn’t see the lower half of the doorway. She told the SWAT leader who signaled to the man with the tear gas, who then rolled it into the room and ran back to the others.
    Munroe remained by the door, not eager to squeeze through the opening again. After a few seconds, gas came billowing out the door and down the corridor to the waiting SWAT team.
    Damn! thought Munroe, why’s he doing that? as he saw the SWAT leader push Yamaguchi back behind his men, effectively blocking the corridor and his access to the terminal she wore on her arm.
    Movement from the door caught his attention and he saw the opening widen at the same time he saw the SWAT team stiffen, their weight shifting into their upper bodies.
    The gun poked through the doorway and he saw that the magazine was missing and the hammer down. Munroe ran back to the others just as Yamaguchi shouldered her way through the officers who stood before her, exposing her right arm and the terminal she wore.
    Munroe moved so fast he hit the wall of cops and bounced back but he had acquired the field long enough to say “Safe!” He saw her lips open and say the words, and then the team leader yelled his command. As the suspect came through the door amid the billows of tear gas, the beams from the laser sights of two TASERs and several assault rifles met the suspect in the chest. In a clearly defined moment, Munroe could see the darts and trailing wires of the TASERs leave the muzzles, which is when he realized that the darts would pass through him to the suspect.
    There was no time for him to do anything and he knew the current was already passing through the wires when he felt something faint, like the memory of the limbs he’d once had when they were beginning to fall asleep. But the wires quickly shifted position as the suspect dropped and the cops rushed forward to secure him. Yet again Munroe bounced off a wall of cops and found himself squeezed between the end of the corridor and their bodies. He forced himself over them and came back down the other side and saw her standing, left behind when the others rushed the suspect.
    He came up beside her and caught the field of the terminal.
    “… roe!” she said and he knew she was calling out his name from the shape her lips made.
    “I’m here, Linda.”
    “Alex, you OK? I lost contact …”
    “I bounced off 600 pounds of cop. Then I found out what a TASER feels like to a dead person.”
    “And?”
    “Kind of tingly.”
    After an hour of the endless waiting, debriefing and milling around that always resulted after a SWAT incident, Yamaguchi and Munroe were told to go home.
    “I’ll