Jason watched with his heart sinking rapidly as Hippolyta turned her back on the crowd of media and confidently strode toward her car. Shit! After all this hassle, getting shot at by those hoods, and he still hadn’t gotten a chance to even talk to her!

Now she was going to walk out of his life—hell, it sounded like out of everybody’s life. There would be no chance of ever finding out who she really was, or getting a chance to talk to the woman who had captured his imagination. The fact that she’d caused him so damn much trouble was only more proof of how he felt about her. He couldn’t let her get away! But what could he do?

“Shane, I’ll be back,” he said, tossing the mike to the cameraman as Hippolyta got into her car. There was only one thing he could do, and it was now or never. “I’m going to try and catch her.”

He ran toward his Trans Am. He’d tried following her once before and it hadn’t worked worth a damn. With better wheels under him there was at least the hope that it would work this time.

It took him a moment to get to his car, parked farther up the street, and by the time he got to it Hippolyta was driving away. He hopped in the car, started it up, and stuck his foot into it, leaving two broad streaks of smoking rubber behind him despite half the cops in Toledo watching. She couldn’t get away from him, not this time of all times!

Though she was still wearing the costume, Sally let the Amazon slip away from her after she turned the first corner in the Shay. Thank Christ that’s over with, she thought. No more Hippolyta. Though there were still several things up in the air with her immediate future, at least the Amazon wasn’t going to hang over her head any longer. Get home, get out of the Amazon costume, have a couple good stiff drinks—maybe more than a couple—and a good shower to get rid of the leather smell, and that was going to be the end of it. Tomorrow, thankfully, was going to be another day.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized that Bill Turner had to have figured out the secret. If not, why would he have let her leave the scene without giving ID, a name, and address? It had to have been because he did know who Hippolyta really was, but also recognized the value of keeping that information a secret. Though the two dead hoods had been WarLords, that was hardly the end of them, and those remaining would want payback. Somehow, she was going to have to find a way to have a quiet word with Bill and thank him. After all, tonight had proved in her mind that this Amazon jazz was getting a little too rough, a little too serious. Once upon a time it had been sort of a practical joke, a leg-pull on everyone, but no more. Three dead bodies had taken it well past that.

Sally was so wrapped up in her thoughts that it was several blocks before she noticed the headlights behind her. Some idiot doesn’t know not to tailgate, she thought. That’s all I need. Still she drove along minding her own business, and the headlights stayed irritatingly close.

Perhaps it was some shred of Hippolyta hanging onto her that raised her suspicions enough. Christ, she thought, could the WarLords have had an over watch? It had been one of Charlie’s concerns the night of the Cordero incident. That’s all she needed! She still had the .357 in her holster, but she knew darn well that there were only two rounds in it, and no spare ammo in the Shay—she hadn’t figured on needing the Model 581 tonight. It had mostly been there for show, just a part of Hippolyta’s costume.

There was one way to find out. Without warning or any hint of a signal, at a random corner she whipped the Shay into a tight left turn in front of an oncoming car onto a side street. There was plenty of room for the Shay, but the headlights followed, barely missed by the car coming the other way, a horn that dopplered down emphasizing the cut-off driver’s complaint.

Shit. That made it clear she was being followed, and followed closely. She whipped around another corner, this one with a street light that actually worked, and this time caught a glimpse of the following car.

Metheny’s Trans Am!

At least it wasn’t a WarLord, she thought in relief, although Metheny wasn’t much better. Since he wasn’t a WarLord she didn’t think she was likely to get shot at, but she could hardly shoot Metheny, either. Now what the hell do I do?

Hippolyta is not getting away this time, Metheny thought. That little white rig of hers is cute, but this car can outrun just about anything on the road that doesn’t have big numbers on the side. Sooner or later she’ll realize she’s not getting away and has to stop and talk. God knows what I’m going to say, but at least I’ll get to talk to her.

Christ, what an evening, he thought. I don’t know how I managed to keep it together when all those bullets started flying overhead. Hell, I don’t know how I managed to keep from shitting my pants. How in the hell did Hippolyta get off of that porch and around behind those two hoods? The broad must be some kind of a witch or something. I’ve always thought superpowers were bullshit, but with her, I’m no longer sure.

It hadn’t been until after the shooting had died down that the shakes started to set in. Since he’d been a witness, he’d had to spend time giving statements to the cops, which for once he didn’t have any problem doing, but that hadn’t helped the nerves much. What had helped was Shane’s little plastic flask afterward. Shane had realized his colleague was having problems and had handed it to him, not even commenting. Hard to say what kind of white lightning it was, but it burned going down and it helped with his nerves. He’d only handed it back after he’d drained it, but in a few minutes Shane had handed it to him again, now refilled. He must have a bottle stashed in the van somewhere.

Whatever the booze was, it was potent stuff and had really done the trick. It had pulled him back together; he felt under control now. He knew he could do what had to be done to catch up with Hippolyta, to stop her and finally get to talk to her.

After several turns and some half-assed attempts at shaking Metheny off her tail, Sally realized that using evasion tactics from mystery novels and comic books wasn’t going to get rid of him. In those kinds of things, the chase car usually tried to be at least a little stealthy and give their target a little breathing room, but Metheny wasn’t getting any farther than ten yards behind and that was about the size and shape of that. There was just no room to maneuver.

Sally briefly considered stopping, pulling out Penthesilea, and reasoning with the idiot, but rejected the idea almost as quickly as it came up. Metheny had been so single-minded in trying to get to Hippolyta that he obviously wasn’t going to take no for an answer. What to do? This jazz could go on half the night! Face it, he had to know that she’d spotted him behind her, otherwise he wouldn’t be so stupidly obvious. He also had to know that there wasn’t going to be any shooting involved—that might have caused him to use a little caution.

Just in the wiggling around they’d done, they were now at the west end of town. While there were still a few subdivisions out there, Sally knew that in only a few more miles they’d be out in open country. In this neck of the woods all the side roads were paved, pretty flat, and in good condition. That 351 Cleveland under the Shay’s hood was a powerful engine, and she’d never taken the car near its limit. It was worth a try—she could get out on one of those long, straight roads, stick her foot in it, and maybe, just maybe, the Shay could walk away from him far enough for her to shake him. There didn’t seem to be many other workable alternatives.

Sally took the Shay out under the I-475 overpass and turned toward the west. This was home country for her, and she knew her way around pretty well. A couple more minutes, a couple more miles, a couple more turns and it was now or never. She made one final turn, dropped the four-speed down a gear, and stuck her foot deep into the dual quads. The Cleveland let go with a huge bellow, the rear end of the Shay skated around and burned some rubber before it got a good bite, and she was off to the races. The speed built up quickly, and soon the speedometer was well over three digits as the white hot rod screamed through the night.

The Shay was really nothing more than a Pinto with a funny body and a huge engine, and to say that the Pinto chassis was not terribly happy at those speeds was an understatement, to say the least. Sally had to put all her attention to her driving just to keep the thing between the white lines, and there wasn’t much time to look at the rear-view mirror. About all she knew was that she’d opened up a few yards on Metheny on the strength of the initial surprise, but then he caught right back up to her—not real quick and not quite as close as before, but at that speed even he knew doing a NASCAR draft probably wasn’t a good idea.

Within a couple miles, it was clear that this wasn’t going to work, either. Sally kept her foot in the Shay, racing westward as fast as she dared, which was pretty close to as fast as the car would go anyway. Lacking any other ideas, she just kept going, trying to think of something else. There was a stop sign up ahead at the SR295 intersection, and that had to be the end of this idea, anyway. All too soon she was there—but a glance to each side with a clear view showed there was no oncoming traffic in either direction, so she just kept the Shay roaring right through the stop sign at a speed well over a hundred miles per hour. It didn’t surprise her in the least that Metheny was right there behind her, obviously having decided to ignore the stop sign, too. This can’t go on, she thought. This has got to cease. There has to be a better idea.

Then, all of a sudden, she got one. It might work, if luck and Hippolyta’s Gods and Goddesses were all with her. It was a better idea than any others she’d had in the last few minutes. Got to do this right, she thought.

Again, the local knowledge was on her side. At the last possible instant she came down hard on the Shay’s brakes, and with tires squealing made a turn to the south, barely managing to stay on the road. A glance in the rear-view mirror told her that she hadn’t shaken the Trans Am with the sudden turn. He’d fallen back a little, but soon caught back up to her. There was no point in trying to set a land speed record, but still she headed south with the speedometer again well into three digits. She flashed under the Ohio Turnpike overpass, and on the far side could see the lights of a small town up ahead.

As she got to the edge of town she slowed down, still well over the speed limit but at least not idiotically so. As it turned out, the light at the intersection was green, and she threw another left onto what she knew as Main Street and Route US Alt-20. There was one more light up ahead—now if she could just time it right …

She did. It was red as she and Metheny approached it, but just as she was thinking she might have to slow and maybe stop, it changed to green, and she stuck her foot into the Cleveland again. The big V-8 howled, and the Shay fishtailed once again as the car tires fought for traction. This was now essentially a drag race, and Metheny’s Trans Am was almost up with her when she did something she’d never dared to before—she gritted her teeth as she reached out with one hand and flipped a switch on the Shay’s dashboard—the one that was labeled “TURBO”.

At least she was going straight when the waste gate on the Cleveland’s turbocharger closed. In an instant, the engine was putting out half again the horsepower it had provided her before, and she pulled away from Metheny—well, not like a shot from a gun, but steadily. Now, she needed one more piece of luck …

She got it. With Metheny having his foot all the way into the Trans Am’s engine, struggling to keep up with the Shay and not succeeding, the two of them flashed past a feed mill on the east end of town. Sally crossed her fingers, looked in the rear-view mirror, and saw the sight she’d been praying for—flashing red and blue lights pulling out of the feed mill parking lot and taking out after them. She knew, of course, that the feed mill was the place where Charlie usually hung out when he worked Swanton, mostly because there was a ridiculously long stretch of thirty-five mph zone on the east end of town beyond the city limits. It was no trick for any cop to hand out numerous tickets for fifty-five in a thirty-five mph zone over the course of an otherwise quiet shift.

She had to stay out in front enough to make sure that Metheny would be the one picked off, though she knew there was no way Charlie wouldn’t recognize the Shay anyway. Mentally crossing her fingers, she shifted into high and put her foot back into it, taking the Shay into a speed range it had never been before. In a few minutes more, she could see that the cop, Charlie or whoever, was pulling Metheny over to the side.

She flipped off the turbocharger and made a quick exit onto the first side road to her left that she saw. Charlie had to know who was leading the race and would obviously raise hell with her for what she’d done, but she also figured his anger would turn to outright glee when he saw who he’d pulled over.

What a night! What else could happen?

A few relatively uneventful minutes later—though she was physically shaking enough that they seemed like hours—Sally pulled the Shay into its customary parking spot in the back barn. “Holy shit,” she said out loud as she finally pulled off the Hippolyta hood with its red wig. “Holy shit,” she repeated breathlessly, her heart still pounding. “I’m glad that’s over with.” She just sat there for a few minutes, breathing heavily, pulling herself together.

It took her several minutes to settle her nerves before she could muster the energy to step out of the Shay. She’d left her Mustang parked in the space next to it for the sake of easily shifting the Hippolyta gear from one car to another. Now she had to get it out of the Shay so she could throw the tarp over the little white hot rod that had saved her bacon just minutes before. She certainly wouldn’t worry about the Hippolyta gear since it wasn’t going to be used again—well, the .357 had to go back into the glove compartment of the Mustang, and Penthesilea would go back to hanging on the wall of her room. The rest of the costume would be boxed up somewhere, later, and hopefully forgotten. She might wear the leather shirt or pants again sometime—not in Toledo, though—and she might not. It might remind her too much of Hippolyta and those exhilarating days best left behind her.

For now, though, she didn’t feel like hauling all the stuff into the house, so she just put Penthesilea into the trunk of the Mustang. She opened the door to put the .357 into the glove compartment, making a mental note to clean and reload it the first chance she got. She was too wiped out to do it right now. Tomorrow, at the latest, she thought, as the cell phone laying on the Mustang’s seat started to ring. “Now what?” she said aloud, irritated at the interruption.

Resisting the urge to just ignore it, she picked it up and said, “Hello?”

“Sally?” she heard, and knew it was Liz from the station. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I forgot and left the phone in the car,” she lied easily. “What’s up?”

“Look, I hate like hell to call you on your time off, but that idiot Metheny has disappeared someplace, and we’ve got to do a remote over at the scene of the shooting tonight. Did you hear about that?”

“Not a word,” Sally said. Actually, she was telling the truth. She hadn’t heard about it. She’d been there.

“A couple of WarLords tried to take out Hippolyta,” Liz reported. “She dropped both of them instead. Shag your butt over there as we’ll need you to do a stand up at eleven o’clock if Metheny doesn’t show up.”

“Okay,” Sally sighed in exhaustion. Only at the last instant did she think to ask Liz for the address, but at least she remembered to ask. As soon as the phone was off she remembered she was still wearing the remnants of the Hippolyta costume, so she raced into the house, pulled on some clean clothes, and used a little makeup to cover the marks of the mask.

What with everything, it took a while to get back over to the scene. Several times Sally had to remind herself that she hadn’t been there, she didn’t know anything about what had happened, and she had to play catch up.

The stand-upper went off easily; all Sally really had to do was to remember that she was Sally, not the Amazon. It was the lead story, of course, and much of the tape was rolled from the station—Hippolyta’s first meeting with Shelby, if only a few seconds of it, then some of the action from the porch. Despite the immense pressure of being shot at, Shane had terrific film of the last seconds of the shootout, including Rick’s shots hitting the second gunman. It was ballsy camera work from the word go, the kind of thing they all expected from Shane. Hippolyta’s statement followed, and the segment was wrapped up showing a brief interview with Lieutenant Turner, which Sally and Shane taped just a few minutes before air time.

And then all that was left was to pick up and go home. Sally offered to help Shane and Keri with packing all the gear, but they told her they had it under control since they knew where everything went. She acted surprised to hear that Hank McMahon had been there and then learned he was called back to the station to help coordinate things there, no one knowing Metheny would disappear from the scene.

Thank God that’s over with, Sally thought. She headed toward the Mustang, tired in a way that she’d never been tired from one of these fracases before. She remembered her plans earlier—a couple drinks, a hot shower, bed. On sober reflection, she decided that the shower could wait till morning and that a couple drinks might not be enough. Over at the Mustang, she took a last look around the area before she moved to climb in—it was a place that would stay in her mind, always. She hadn’t yet had the time or the energy to consider what killing those two bozos might do to her, but she realized that coming to grips with it wouldn’t be an easy task.

“Sally,” she heard Rick say, breaking her out of her reverie. “Could you take me home?”

“Sure,” she replied, turning to look at him. “Rick, you look awful!”

“That’s how I feel,” he said soberly. “God, I hated doing that. Maybe I’m not cut out to be a cop after all.”

Oh brother, she thought. He’s got the shakes from remorse, just like I will as soon as I get a few minutes alone to think about it. “Didn’t you come with someone?”

“Yeah, Janice,” he said. “She had to go downtown for something, and I figure that’ll include Charlie as soon as he gets off.”

“At least she’s got him,” she said as she slid into the car, while he opened the door and got in the other side.

It turned out that Rick lived in an apartment building not too far from the University of Toledo campus. Sally had never been there before, but it was a fairly quick drive down I-475 to it. Other than very minimal directions, it was a quiet ride with neither of them talking much. She pulled into a parking spot in front of the apartment and asked, “Rick, are you going to be all right?”

“I hope so,” he said. “I don’t know yet how much I’ll feel like being alone, but, Sally, I’ll tell you this. The last thing I want to do tonight is to sit around some bar with a bunch of cops. I’m just not up for it.”

“I can understand,” she said sympathetically. She didn’t have that option, but she couldn’t tell him that. “You got a piece of one of those guys, didn’t you?”

“I’d say more than a piece,” he said. “I don’t know if Hippolyta got him first or if it was me, but he wouldn’t have lived if it had only been my shots that hit him. Fuck. I’m going to be replaying that forever.”

“I can understand,” she replied, not knowing what more she could say. Finally, she spoke, “If I was a cop, I don’t think I’d like sitting around some bar with a bunch of cops tonight much myself.”

“You’re all right, Sally, you really are.”

“Let’s get you upstairs. This has been a long day.”

“No shit. At least I get a couple weeks off while the Firearms Review Board goes over it.”

“Is that going to be any trouble?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Although right now I sort of wish it was. Like I said, I don’t know how much I like being a cop right now.”

“Rick, you know I’m a cop’s daughter. That’s part of the territory; you know it. You had to have known it going into the job.”

“Yeah … I suppose,” he said hesitantly. “It’s one thing to think about it, but it’s another thing to be there, to do it. Sally, you can’t understand what it’s like. You weren’t there. You didn’t just kill a guy.”

Sally was silent for a moment. She knew damn well that she should be going through what was happening to Rick, and she would be sooner or later, without even fellow cops to support her.

“Rick, I know more about what it’s like than you think. A lot more.”

“Sally, you can’t know what it’s like. Like I said, you weren’t there. Hippolyta was there, and I’ll bet that iron-assed babe is sleeping with a satisfied grin on her face.”

Sally was silent for a moment. This was a tough decision, but she knew she was going to do it. She would need the support just as much as Rick. He was a good guy and didn’t deserve to eat his guts like this. When you got right down to it, the decision wasn’t tough. It was easy.

“Rick, look in the glove compartment.”

“What?” he frowned. “Why?”

“Look in the glove compartment.”

Rick shook his head, but popped open the glove compartment. The .357 slid out onto the door. “Your Model 581. So what?”

“Smell it, Rick.”

He held the gun up. He didn’t need to get it very close to his nose to discover what she was talking about. “It’s been fired,” he said quizzically.

“Yes, Rick,” Sally said softly. “Four shots. I haven’t had a minute to clean it, or even reload.”

“Sally,” he frowned in disbelief. “Hippolyta fired four shots tonight, too.” His eyes started getting bigger as dawning started in his mind.

“Penthesilea is in the trunk. I could show her to you. The leather gear is up in my room at home, and her white Shay is under a tarp in the shed behind the barn.”

“Let me get this straight. I don’t believe it,” he said, eyes wide. “You’re Hippolyta?”

“No, I’m Sally. Hippolyta was an act, one that went way out of control. We have to keep it a secret or my career is going to be screwed up big time, and I’ll have WarLords after me in force. I’m pretty sure Bill Turner knows I was Hippolyta, but I don’t think he’ll tell anyone. Charlie knows, but I’m pretty sure Janice doesn’t. Otherwise, it’s just you and me, and I’m not doing Hippolyta ever again.”

“Jesus. Even knowing how good you are at fencing, I never put it together. Shit, I should have.” You and your brother sure did well at the misdirection.

“I’m real glad you didn’t figure it out,” she said. “But that’s in the past. You got anything to drink in your apartment?”

“I can find something.”

“Good. Let’s not eat our guts out alone when we can do it together.”

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