The deputy sat inside the car, watching them move the bodies into the morgue. He’d figured it would’ve taken longer to find them.
As he watched, he thought about how funny it was how a life changed. You start out with the best intentions, wanting to help people just get along, live peaceful lives, free of fear, free of violence. Then life gets complicated. You buy a house, get a mortgage, have to make payments each month. You meet a girl, and you marry her, and you have kids.
But she trips and falls in the kitchen, and injures her back, and needs physical therapy and pain meds, and soon she doesn’t like to get up too much, but now she needs pain meds just to lie in bed and watch TV. And your kids go to school, and it’s a public school in a good district, but they need clothes, and they grow so quick. And the fifty grand you’re making as a county cop suddenly doesn’t go as far as it should.
But you go on busting bad guys, laying down the law, carting lowlifes off to jail. You are not one of them, you are better than they are. One day you bust some scumbag coke dealer, and he has a brown paper bag with twenty-five thousand in hundreds in it, old, new, worn, intact, just thousands and thousands of dollars in hundreds. And he says take it, just take it and let him go. And you need a new roof, and a new water heater, and the boy’s birthday is in a week, and that money would let you breathe for a second, just a second, help you get your head above water.
But you say no. And you arrest him, because he’s a scumbag and you’re the Law.
But now it’s different. You know it’s out there, that little brown paper bag or one just like it, that one-inch-thick wad of untraceable hundred-dollar bills. Or one just like it. And you coulda had it, but you said no.
But it’s still out there.
And things don’t get better. The real estate market tanks, and you can’t sell the house, and you can’t afford to fix the roof. Your wife is drinking, but not as much as your fifteen-year-old. He’s dropping out of high school, but you’re not there, because you’re working overtime to save up for the roofing, doing details or working security at the parties of the rich. And you stand there watching them go past, blond high school girls driving German sports cars that cost as much as your house, laughing and tanned and carefree.
And your wife is now a sucking hole of need, a festering ulcer in your bed, and as you lie next to her, you want to gnaw off your arm, hack it off, anything to escape, you want to be parked off the sand at Gran Turtle Beach, slipping the bra off that sixteen-year-old blonde in the back of her Mercedes convertible, breathing in the smell of million-dollar perfume on her neck as you slide aside those silk panties and start fingerfucking that rich little pussy.
And you discover busting bad guys is like watching the tide—they just keep coming, sliding in, going down, always more mopes to take down. And the funny thing is you get to know them—you see they have families, people who care about them. And one day you realize they’re just like you—screwing up their lives trying to make a fucking buck, trying to make enough to keep their own heads above water.
And it occurs to you that the problem is the scumbag customers: dealers just give the customer what he asks for, a product that in some countries isn’t even illegal anymore. You’ve learned that users will always find drugs, that if they can’t buy from one scumbag, they’ll buy from another. And you finally understand your life is just some picayune shit, measuring out the ocean with an eyedropper.
And then one day someone offers you a thousand dollars; you don’t have to do anything, you just have to not be somewhere. All you do is make sure your patrol route doesn’t take you past a particular intersection during a particular hour.
And this time you say yes.
And after that, it’s all over.
He checked the cell phone; another eighteen minutes credit before he had to chuck it. He answered on the second ring.
“They found the car in the canal, and identified the body.”
He listened.
“Yeah, I know it was fast. The new medical examiner recognized the wife’s jewelry.”
He shook his head.
“No, they did. But she had a small necklace, and I guess they missed it.”
The parking lot was mostly empty now. As the cars began to trickle out of the lot, the radar gun mounted on the dash sporadically flashed the speeds—7, 12, 8—the digits splashing pale green light on his face.
The deputy shook his head firmly. “He’s sharp—we need to be careful with this one. We’ll keep a close eye on him.”
He hung up. Sixteen more minutes, and this phone would be history. Fuck it, he should just trash it now, pick up the next one.
What he was doing wasn’t so bad—it was just information.
The rain picked up again, and the last of the mourners scurried in to shelter. He liked the sound of the rain on the car, liked being quiet and dry while it poured around him. Tonight, he’d lie in bed awake a long while, listening to the sound of the rain drumming against the terra cotta tiles that covered his beautiful new roof.