Ella kissed her husband Thomas on the cheek leaving a big red smudge from her lips stick.

“Now don’t forget it’s our date night tonight. So please try and leave work on time,” she told him as she brought her thumb to his face and started to rub the scarlet wax off.

“I will Honey,” he told her. Tom’s dark black police officer’s uniform was freshly pressed and he looked every bit the handsome young poster-boy for law enforcement.

“And could you pick up some condoms on the way home too,” Ella asked.

“Sure thing,” Thomas said with a twinkly in his eye.

Wump. Wump. Crash!!

The suspects' door smashed inwards from the impact of the battering ram’s third strike. Splinters of wood fibres were held suspended in the air for just long enough for the team of eight heavily armed tactical police officers to gust them sideways as they entered the house. Thomas was third in the breach team and set about clearing the house.

Intel had indicated there were possibly children in the house so they hadn’t received operational permission to use flashbangs. Thermal scopes coming back inconclusive for the number of occupants currently occupying the residence. Thomas would have much preferred to come in after the initial disorientation of a stun grenade detonation. In Kabul, they would have used the grenades before going in anyway. Children or not. But there was a lot of stuff Thomas had done in Afghanistan that he shouldn’t. No time to think of that now as he began clearing rooms with his partner.

Voices were raised on the no-knock warrant.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“Police! Get on the ground!”

“Don’t move! Don’t move!”

Tom cleared one side of the room he was entering and turned to the other with his Mossberg Shotgun raised. A skinhead with a swastika on his forehead and many more Aryan Brotherhood tattoos on his body was just standing up from the couch he’d been sitting on when the police had broken down his front door. He’d been reaching for an Uzi that sat on the coffee table in front of him. Another inch of movement towards it and Thomas would have to repaint the wall behind the guy.

The skinhead’s eyes flicked between the machine pistol and Thomas and back to the gun. Thomas hadn’t even had time to draw breath to shout in all this time before the Nazi-loving redneck made his decision and sprinted straight at the window.

Another crash, of glass this time, and the man was straight through the window pane and running towards the rear of the house.

“We’ve got a runner!” Thomas yelled before setting off after him.

His shotgun tucked behind his back; Tom sprang through the window as well. More glass falling as Thomas added to the hole in the window. Wispy lace privacy curtains tangling around the butt of his weapon and getting pulled out after him. Glass crunched under Thomas’s boots as he set off after the felling suspect who was just clearing a brick fence at the rear of the property. Squad cars at the front of the house coming to life with lights and sirens as word went out over the radio of a runner.

They caught up with Thomas and the suspect almost a mile down the road. The fugitive lying face down in the middle of a back alley. Thomas’s knee in his back and his pistol pressed against the rear of his brain stem. That was if a white supremacist even had a brain.

Ella had spent much of the day at the beauty spa. She’d had a full body mud treatment that left her skin feeling smoother than a newborn baby. She’d been waxed of every single follicle of hair on her body beside the ones on her head. Those she’d had cut, treated and blown out as well as a dozen streaks of chestnut put through her otherwise long dark black hair.

She’d had her finger and toenails painted a deep red that matched the same lipstick she’d smeared onto her husband’s cheek that morning. Marla, her make-up artist, reapplying her entire face until she looked ready for the cover of Vogue. Or maybe something younger women read.

The one other thing she’d had done was have her asshole bleached. She and Thomas never did anal in the normal course of their marriage, but on their date nights, anything could happen.

As she was ready to leave for the restaurant, Ella received a text message from Tom telling her that he was running late but would go directly to the restaurant and meet her there. Checking her reflection one last time, Ella left their house.