Detective Malyssa Fog always wanted to be a police officer for as long as she could remember. Ever since she was a little girl who wore her hair in pigtails every single day to differentiate herself from her twin sister Dianthea who wore her hair in a ponytail every day.

On graduation day, she threw her motor board in the air with her application to police Academy all filled out, ready to turn in and under her arm. A week later, she had been accepted into the academy with her stellar grades, years of volunteer experience, athletic excellence, and four years at the community police day camp and one as a camp counselor.

Through hard work and dedication, she graduated from the police academy at the top of her class. Departments fought over her. Neighborhoods to patrol she had her pick of and vice and narcotics both wanted her out of the gate. The only department that didn't make her an offer was homicide, but after a year in narcotics, they were ready to poach her at the same time she was promoted to detective, the youngest detective in the history of U.S. law enforcement.

The day she was asked to leave the force disgraced was a day like any other, and had started with a morning like any other. With a pourover coffee made with just ground freshly roasted beans and a hearty breakfast of chia seeds in almond milk with goji berries. The vegan breakfast of champions.

Detective Fog practiced meat and animal bi-product free Mondays and felt that her plant-based proteins led to high energy and a movie star complexion that would make mormon girls jealous.

By noon all hell broke loose and no clean eating diet in the world would have saved her from or prepared her for what was about to ruin her dream career just as it was getting started.

Fantasies of climbing the ranks and catching the eye of the FBI all shattered, crashed, and burned, like glass in an explosion turning back into sand.

Patrolling the Tenderloin was Detective Fog's favorite pastime and made for the perfect Monday morning work. It made her feel like the ideal peacekeeper and humanitarian. She only brought thieves and violent offenders in to the station and was beloved by the smokers of pipes and needle-smuggling unfortunates. Fog kept them safe. Or as safe as a populace of fiends at risk of overdose any second or of choking on their falling out teeth could be kept.

"How's it hanging, Declan?" she said through the rolled-down window of her squad car when she got stuck at a traffic light.

"All well and good, Officer Fog," said Declan from underneath a mountain of quilt and beside a tower of food containers. No one could sniff perfectly good scraps tossed by rich people with full bellies the way Declan could, and he had mouths to feed — a whole gaggle of fellow dope fiends who needed to eat occasionally and did the panhandling for pennies and dollars in exchange for quality dumpster dive saves which Declan, in turn, passed on to his dealer for the best drugs four to seven bucks could buy depending on what he made that day.

"That's Detective Fog to you," she replied with a tip of her hat, which was a fedora to go with her plainclothes three piece suit to go with her rank rather than a peeked duty cap to go with an officer on duty uniform.

"What are you doing still patrolling this beat, little miss Detective Foggy?" asked Declan.

"I can multitask," said Fog, lifting a stack of folders and waving them for Declan to see. "Working a grotesque murder case. I got absolutely no leads. But I can brainstorm and cruise at the same time."

"Not sure about that," said Declan. "I see a lot of car crashes in these streets. People trying to do that. But you do look like the kind of overachiever who can walk and chew gum simultaneously. You gonna get out and walk the sidewalks today Missy Detective?"

Fog shrugged. "If I can find parking anywhere."

The light changed and Declan waved her off with a warning: "This is a bad neighborhood. Park here you'll get broken into!" and watched her wave and move along in her black and white squad car. Like someone was going to break into a police car.

Two blocks on and in broad daylight in clear view of her squad car one junkie was squabbling for a needle from another junkie and got him into a strangling noose with a spare sweater or something. The victim went slack, the needle fell on the pavement, and his face was purple.

Fog wooped her siren once and left the car where it was blocking the only lane going southbound — the attacker took off, but he was slow despite his great strangling strength, and Fog caught him in ten seconds, cuffed him, threw him into the auto-locked cage in the back seat then went back to make sure the victim would live.

"My hero," the junkie coughed.

Fog picked up the needle and said, "I'm confiscating this."

"My compliments," said the junkie. "It's good stuff. You'll like it. You're a true neighborhood hero! Best cop I ever seen."

His kind words and the grateful shouts of some of his junkie friends cheered her as she got back into the driver's seat.

Without a word to her prisoner, she turned the ignition and pressed on the gas — rolled forward half a foot — and then looked at the empty seat next to her and did a double-take.

"What the actual fuck?" she said, stepping on the brake, diving to look at the floor at the foot of the passenger seat, and then under the seat, then coming back up and swinging around to the man she had arrested.

"Did someone take my files?" she demanded. "Who took my files?" Blank eyes looked back at her, partially silent in defiance and partially thoroughly stoned.

"Shit, shit, shit." She swung in all directions to scan the sidewalks for anyone running away, but there was only the usual amount of squalor and the usual number of slow-moving hungry huddled masses and the occasional purposeful but terrified local passing through who had taken a wrong turn and ended up in the worst neighborhood in San Francisco.

Then her radio staticked to life and asked for backup in a shootout nearby. "Shots fired, officer down. I repeat, officer down."

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," said Detective Fog, and now was the real time for multitasking. Siren on, foot on the gas pedal, eyes everywhere in a last-ditch effort to catch brown manila folder paper, she flew forward toward the address from the dispatcher. "Unbelievable," she said, giving up all hope of finding the folders. The address was only three minutes away, and she was there too soon, unprepared to shift gears to deal with what was coming next.

It was a flower shop at Turk and Jones. One empty black and white squad car was abandoned outside, the noise from the sirens turned off but lights on top still blinking feebly. A small crowd had formed outside, but even without a police line to not cross, they were keeping back. Shots had been heard, and people were scared, but people were also always stupid and wanted to see anything interesting that happened, just hoping for the best, hoping they wouldn't be shot themselves. But maybe they'd catch something good on video.

Detective Fog wooped at the crowd several times before she left her car a second time, badge held up high in the sky like a lighter at a rock concert and still had to push through the crush of morons. "Police, coming through. This is an active crime scene, get back to a safe distance." The morons all ignored her.

She felt safe approaching the glass door to The Watering Can florist since the crowd hadn't been fired at and she lowered her badge now so she wouldn't be a great big human target. Her eyes scanned the brightly lit rows of colorful flowers inside and didn't find any movement. No sign of the shooter from this vantage. Beginning to consider the proper tactical maneuvers to enter the building and clear a safe place to next scan for the shooter, she was distracted by a short mop of straw-blond hair and a forehead and eyebrows just visible on the floor at the end of a row of ready to pot oleanders. The visible part of the face was identical to Malyssa's own.

A peeked police cap lay nearby.

All thought of proper and safe procedure, or in other words, the smart next move, was driven from her mind, and she made her second mistake in six minutes. The glass door flew as if weightless into the glass behind it with a crash that caused a few cracks, and she slammed it with the superstrength of her left arm and had her gun out in her right hand before she thought about what she was doing. At the same time, she was sprinting across the flower shop to her sister, not properly looking for potential assailants at all.

A head poked out from behind the counter the same second she made it to Dianthea's side in a crouch, hands and eyes searching for blood, wounds, a pulse. Dianthea's eyes were closed, and she looked bloodless white. She looked dead.

The head poking from the counter poked a little bit higher. Like the sharpshooter she wasn't Detective Fog reacted to the movement with a startlingly perfect headshot that shocked her — the man behind the counter who was standing up had been a good head below where she was aiming, but he continued to stand just in time to meet the bullet square in the forehead. With his body now mostly above the counter, she could now see unarmed hands that had been in the process of raising and a florists apron caked in soil and manure, making sense of the picture in the last second when the man's body was forced back against the wall behind the cash register by the force of the shot, before he fell back to the floor.

"Fuck," she said. It was only a minor problem, though. She could bring him back in a second. But first she needed to do the same for Dianthea. It was something she had never done before but always known she could, should the occasion arrived that made it worth it. There were two shots to the head — not the mafia's doing. Dianthea's flesh, brain, skull, skin reformed before Malyssa's eyes and pushed out the black gunpowder covered pellets, spitting them out onto the floor. Dianthea's gray eyes fluttered open, and she breathed in a deep breath to fill her lungs back up.

A miracle. Only it was a miracle Detective Fog had always known she could perform at the drop of a hat. It was only illegal if you got caught. The sound of a gun cocking stopped her from step two in her plan of action: resurrecting the florist. Detective Fog took a chance and looked up.

"I didn't mean it," stammered a tear-stained, red-faced gunman. Detective Fog wondered for one insane moment whether the man had tried to hold up a flower shop for cash. Every inch of his face was wet as if he had just come in from a jungle downpour.

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