BY MARITA GOLDEN
Woodmore, MD
(Originally published in 2006)
The bullets discharge from the muzzle of Officer Carson Blake’s sixteen-round Beretta with the tinny, explosive popping sound of a toy gun. He will not remember exactly how many shots he fires so wildly. Fires with pure intent. Fires, he is sure, to save his life. In the first seconds after the shattering sound of the bullets subsides, he would say, if asked right then, that he had fired every bullet in his gun. Never before has his gun been so large. Never before has it weighed so much. He’s dizzy and breathless. His heart beats so fast, he can’t believe he is still standing.
When he shoots the man, everything, all of it, unfolds as if in slow motion. He wants to look away. He dares not turn his gaze. The first bullet boring through the man’s thick neck riddled with razor bumps, the force twisting his head to the side, as though he is looking with those astonished, horribly open, not yet dead eyes to see where the bullet comes from. The second bullet piercing the skin of the black leather jacket, lodging in the flesh of his shoulder. The third bullet, fired at his groin, bringing him to his knees and then onto his face, sprawled flat out on the parking lot forty feet from the entrance to the Chinese restaurant The House of Chang.
Carson stands staring at the man on the pavement, his body a bloody heap illuminated by the fluorescence of the mall parking lot lights, and sees the cell phone a few feet from the man’s hand, and he prays for the ground beneath his feet to shift in a cataclysmic rumble and swallow him whole. A cell phone, he thinks, unbelieving. A cell phone. Not a gun. He hurls a howl, deep and guttural, into the night. Sinking to his knees, he touches the man, turns him over onto his back, sees the bulbous, bloody wound in his neck, smells the sharp odor of his sodden groin, desperate now to find, to feel, a pulse. There is none. There is only the cell phone. Looking up in desperation, Carson sees a sky unfamiliar and frightening, in which he can fathom not a single star, a vastness that makes him wish for wings.
Carson tries to stand but cannot, and he crawls a few feet away and vomits. When there is no more sickness to spill from his gut, he wipes his mouth and shouts at the dead man, through trembling lips stained with a blistering splash of tears, “What the fuck were you doing? Why didn’t you just do what I said?”
* * *
There is nothing on this night that hints at disaster. After twelve years on the force, Carson can tell when a shift will be hell on wheels. On those shifts, the dispatcher begins reciting an address and an “incident” (car crash, domestic disturbance, robbery, brawl, accident, murder) even before Carson is belted behind the wheel. Then there are the calm, quiet shifts when hour after hour he’s numb with boredom, cruising the nine square miles of his police service area, and after a couple of hours he begins looking for a safe place to park and take a nap.
But he can’t get bored. Because bored he won’t see the obvious—the missing tags on a beat-up hoopty driven by a carload of young punks looking for trouble and determined to find it. But this night he is bored by 9:45, when he walks into a 7-Eleven near the litter-filled streets of a housing project known as “The Jungle” to buy coffee and a doughnut: Carson ignores the group of high school–age boys hanging out in front of the store at almost ten o’clock on a school night, rapping, jonin’, joking, lying. Matches waiting to be struck. Don’t they have homes? Carson wonders for the thousandth time, then recalls what he has seen in some of the homes these boys live in—rats, roaches, three kids sleeping on the living room floor, toddlers playing near stacks of cellophane-wrapped crack cocaine, no heat in the winter, stifling ovenlike apartments in the summer, overworked mamas, long-gone daddies. Those homes make the parking lot of 7-Eleven seem a step up in the world.
Still, why the hell were they standing outside to talk? Just hangin’. He’d read somewhere that this was street corner culture, an integral part of the Black experience. Some urban ritual. But this is Prince George’s County. No inner-city street corners here, like in nearby D.C. But niggahs, he thinks sullenly, can turn anyplace into a ghetto.
Nearly all the arrests he’s made, all his stops, involve boys like the ones he barely looks at as he passes by, feeling them grit on him with a steely stare because he’s a police officer. To them he’s a cop and he is, in their eyes, the enemy. He’s fed up with arresting young Black males—aimless, directionless, often involved in nonviolent crimes that set the stage for all the shit that hits the fan in their young lives. Just last week he was called to the scene of a shooting and saw a kid no more than seventeen, dressed in spanking new jeans, two-hundred-dollar Air Jordans, and a Phat Farm sweatshirt, loaded into the Emergency Services vehicle, dead. Shot in the back while standing outside a Popeyes, from the passenger side of a Crown Vic that careened past the spot where he stood munching on a spicy chicken breast and a biscuit while talking to his baby’s mama. The car didn’t even slow down to make the hit. As Carson watched the EMS vehicle drive away, he wondered how many hits the kid had made. Revenge, payback, and a brutal, bloody synchronicity ruled the lives of too many of the young men he arrested. He saw precious few truly innocent victims. Predators, that’s what he calls them, kids like that fourteen-year-old who walked into a convenience store in Oxon Hill and tried to rob it at 5 a.m. and ended up stabbing the Korean owner to death. What the fuck? Carson sometimes wonders. God damn, my people, my people, envisioning the future of the race in every act and every choice these young men make. He’s tried to talk to them, standing in groups like these or in handcuffs in the backseat of his cruiser, but he might as well be speaking Mandarin.
* * *
So yeah, he is tough, and he is hard on their Black asses. There but for the grace of God … He has a son who in his worst nightmares turns into a wannabe thug giving these young bloods a run for their money. None of it makes sense. On more than one shift he’s arrested suburban Black boys from Leave It to Beaver homes, hungering to be criminals, proving their street smarts by being stupid enough to land in jail. He’s arrested boys with a plasma TV in their basement and their father’s BMW SUV and mom’s Lexus and their Honda parked in the garage. He’d been a young punk once too, angry, feasting on his own sense of deserved and superfluous rage at a world he couldn’t control and that he was sure would never give him room. But bored, this night, Carson doesn’t even say a word, just figures his presence, the patrol car, the weapon the boys know is in his holster, will do all the talking for him. He swaggers past the cluster of boys, all of them dressed in baggy jeans and oversize shirts, blue bandanas tied around their cornrowed heads. Carson strides a bit more forcefully than usual, preening to let them know that the convenience store is his turf, not theirs.
Everybody thinks it’s postal workers who are the major victims of workplace crime. It’s really the immigrants and teenagers and retired giving-my-own-business-a-try salesclerks behind the counters of convenience stores who are the most vulnerable workers in America. It’s always open season on them. Every damn day of the week is a “good day to die” for one of them somewhere in the land of the free. By just standing at the magazine rack, thumbing through copies of Hustler or Newsweek, or shooting the breeze for a half hour with whoever is working, Carson can stop a crime.
* * *
Because Carson doesn’t tell the boys to move on, to go home, they continue to stand outside, as loud and boisterous as if they were playing video games and sipping forties in their living room instead of standing in a public place. He could get them for congregating beneath the No Loitering sign, but he doesn’t.
He and Eric used to debate all the time which was worse, more dangerous: the boredom that makes you lazy, careless, stupid, or the nights of pure adrenaline, responding to priority calls back to back. And don’t let it be another officer down. But that’s why Carson is out here. Why he’s a cop. He loves the rush. The risk. Everything on the line. The pressure. The chance to change somebody’s fate, save a life, because he got there in time to catch the burglar, prevent some jerk from giving his wife an ass-whooping and turning her into a corpse. Or maybe he stops a killer on the side of Route 450, pulls him over because the knucklehead is driving a car with broken taillights, expired plates, and when he runs his license through the computer he discovers this is a live one, the kind of scum they build prisons for, and when he searches the car he finds a weapon. And not just any weapon, but one that’s loaded and has been used in a murder.
Still, 95 percent boredom. That’s Carson’s average week. Sometimes his average month. This isn’t nearby Washington, where there are weeks when somebody gets killed every night. This is the ’burbs. But still.
On this March night, a night when it is not quite spring, when it’s a chilly forty degrees, there’s this flat-out wide-faced moon in the sky. A moon so big and awesome it’s like a gigantic neon eye or face. A full moon, bursting the seams of the heavens. Milky and liquid and trembling. It’s not white but some strange kind of orangey yellow, like no moon Carson can ever recall seeing in the sky. The full moon. That’s the only odd thing. The only unexpected thing on this night, when Carson has given a couple of speeding tickets and the radio has been mostly silent.
Carson isn’t superstitious. Not like Steve, who keeps a rabbit’s foot in his wallet, or Eric, who recited the Twenty-third Psalm, closed his eyes and said it silently in the squad car before he pulled out of the station lot. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” No, Carson figures all that just attracts catastrophe. Why depend on luck instead of yourself? Why close your eyes to pray when what you fear could be closing in? So that moon, which he will tell Bunny about if she’s awake when he gets home, that’s the only strange thing so far this night. His patrol service area includes everything—the area around Martin Luther King Boulevard, the weathered houses and streets of the working-class neighborhood near the FedEx Field football stadium, and the moneyed community called Heaven’s Gate. It’s mostly the area around King Boulevard that keeps him busy with burglaries, robberies, drug traffic. But this night, one hour before his shift ends at midnight, Carson congratulates himself. It’s been quiet. Maybe too quiet, even for a weeknight. But there is nothing in the quiet that makes him think that the worst will be saved for the last moments of his shift.
Half an hour after leaving the 7-Eleven, he’s making one last swing around Enterprise and Lottsford roads, past million-dollar houses and the estates behind the barriers of gated communities. He isn’t doing that well, but with his salary and the $25-an-hour part-time security work he performs, and Bunny’s recent raise, they are a $150,000 household and he lives fifteen minutes away. He doesn’t live in Heaven’s Gate, the community he’s just passed that has been written up in magazines and even the New York Times as symbolic of Black suburban progress. He lives in Paradise Glen, and Carson is just as happy in paradise as he figures he’d be in heaven. He knows police officers who drive Jaguars and Benzes, have high-six-figure salaries, and are in debt up to their ears, cops addicted to doing nothing but working and making money the way some are in the grip of booze and women.
Carson spots another squad car parked in the lot of Kings-ford Elementary School. When he pulls up beside the cruiser, he immediately sees that it’s Wyatt Jordan. The fluorescence of the parking lot lights glows on his massive shaved head. Carson parks beside Wyatt and gets out. He stretches his arms and shoulders as he walks around to the other side of his cruiser. Jordan’s thick, rumbling laughter is the only sound besides the occasional car cruising past on Enterprise Road. The conversation, which Carson hears through Jordan’s half-open window, has the sound of an easy, illicit dialogue, and he figures Jordan is having phone sex. There are all kinds of rumors about Jordan, that he’s hooked on Internet porn sites, and Carson knows he’s a player, has seen him in action. He’s been busted more than once for stopping by his girlfriend’s house for a quickie while on duty, and his wife waited for him to get off his shift one evening and jumped out of her Volkswagen and charged after him with a baseball bat.
“Drama Queen” is Carson’s nickname for Jordan. He’s got no respect for cops who let their lives become a public mess. He knows Jordan from a distance, and he’s fine with that. But hell, he can shoot the breeze for a minute. Jordan ends the call and snaps the cell phone shut.
“Am I interrupting something?” Carson asks, leaning on the side of the cruiser, letting a wide, wily grin spread over his face.
Jordan extends his beefy arm out the car window, a raucous laugh rumbling up from his chest. The two men slap palms and shake hands. “Come on, Blake, ease up—I know what you heard, and it’s all true.”
“All the hardheads must be working a new shift or stayed home instead of risking running into you,” Carson says.
“That’s what it looks like. Only real action I had tonight was a domestic disturbance call over near Bowie High School. By the time I got there, the dude didn’t wanna press charges.”
“Say what?” Carson laughs at the thought of where this story is headed.
“No joke.” Jordan opens the door of his cruiser and lifts his bulk out, leaning on the side of the car. He’s six-seven, two-seventy-five, and solid as a rock.
“You heard me. Dude was getting a Mike Tyson work-over by his girlfriend. He had a black eye. I did the counseling routine. When I got there and saw what was happening, I figured she kicked his ass over another woman. But she claimed he stole some of her money. In my man’s defense, though, she had about three inches on him. He was drunk and kept telling me he called 911 ’cause he didn’t wanna hit no woman.”
“So this was love and money?”
“Yeah, you know, half the calls are rooted in one or the other.”
“You going to the cabaret at the Chateau Saturday night?” Carson asks.
“I’ma get my ticket at the door,” Jordan says.
“I ain’t gonna tell you what I had to do to get Saturday night off—I owe Benson big-time,” Carson says sheepishly.
“Out with it, tell me …”
The two men stand gossiping, trading an easy banter that makes Carson ponder that this is the first time in a long while that he’s really talked to Wyatt Jordan. Jordan finally looks at his watch and says, “I better start heading back in. And I hope like hell I don’t run into anything on my way.”
Jordan pulls out of the lot and Carson sits in his squad car, savoring the silence, the night, and once again looks at that damned full moon. He has decided to follow Jordan in when a car with no lights speeds past on Enterprise Road. He should just let it go, let it slide. He’d been thinking about his warm bed in the moments before the car sped by. But he isn’t that kind of cop. He doesn’t let much slide. He didn’t become a police officer to let shit slide. There have been several carjackings in the area in the past month, and Carson wonders if the idiot speeding by with no lights is some teenage car thief who could cause a fatal accident or some psycho like the predator who waited outside the home of a doctor a mile away and shot him outside his house, stole his wallet, and used his credit cards an hour later, or maybe some kid from D.C., out joyriding in the county.
Carson pulls out of the parking lot and puts his lights on, radioing in to the dispatcher, “I’m behind this guy who’s speeding, no lights, and he’s not stopping.”
“Do you have backup?”
“No.”
Carson hears Jordan’s voice break into the call: “I’ll head back over there.”
Carson’s all up in the ass of the car, glued to the vehicle, but the driver won’t stop. The black Nissan crosses the intersection and finally the driver abruptly pulls into the near-empty parking lot of a strip mall. By the time the car has stopped and he’s parked behind him, Carson’s skin is tingling and he’s tense, buoyed by the involuntary adrenaline rush that’s an invisible body armor, priming him for action.
“Get out of the car, sir!” Carson yells, approaching the vehicle, his Beretta pointed at the man behind the steering wheel with his hands in the air.
“Open the door slowly.”
The door opens and the driver steps out as Carson moves back. He’s twenty-five or twenty-six, Carson guesses, clean-cut, sober-looking, with a serious, proud, unflinching face. He’s wearing expensive jeans, a bulky sweater, a leather jacket, and Timberland boots. His hair is braided and he’s got a chiseled, tough/soft handsomeness that reminds Carson of the Black male models he’s seen on the pages of GQ, advertising Hugo Boss suits, or the actors on Bunny’s favorite soap opera, The Young and the Restless. He’s that smooth. And for all his disarming good looks, the man standing before him could be a robber, a murderer, or just an unlucky SOB caught speeding when he thought no cops were around.
“Turn around, face the trunk of the car,” Carson orders. “On your knees. Put your hands behind your head.” The man drops to the ground and faces the trunk of the car.
“What did I do? Why was I stopped?” he asks, his voice injured, surprised.
“What’d you do? You crazy, man? Fleeing an officer. Driving with no lights.”
“What? I wasn’t eluding you. I didn’t realize my lights weren’t on. I mean, I had an argument with my girlfriend and I’ve been f’d up all evening,” he says, turning to look at Carson to make his point.
“Where’s your license? Your registration?”
“In my wallet in my back pocket.”
Carson begins to approach the kneeling man when he sees him drop his left hand and reach inside his waistband.
The quick, small movement chills the night and freezes Carson’s blood.
“Put your hands up!” he shouts, a surging infusion of fear flooding his insides, as liquid and warm as blood.
He’s no longer a pretty boy but a looming threat. The man is holding an object in his left hand, smooth, hard, shiny as the moon in the sky.
“Put your hands up!” Uncertainty balloons inside Carson. The words bruise his throat as he issues them with a force he hopes the man will immediately respect.
“I’m not … It’s not …” the man pleads, again turning his head to face Carson and in one swift move rising from the ground.
Where is Jordan? Carson wonders, another surge of fear sliding down his spine. Pointing the object at Carson, the man steps forward.
“What’s in your hand?”
“Look, I said it’s …” the man insists, taking another step toward Carson, pointing at him with the hand holding the object. The night, the sky, the stars overhead: they all swirl around him, a dreamy encroachment. Carson is alone. In a darkened parking lot. And terribly afraid.
“Drop what you’re holding and put your hands behind your head,” Carson orders as his finger trembles, a whisper away from the trigger.
“Officer, I said …”
It’s his fingers and his hands, both of them clutching the Beretta, it’s even his body, that pulls the trigger. All he sees is the man’s hand and the object pointed at him in the moment he fires his weapon for the first time ever.
* * *
Wyatt Jordan pulls into the strip mall parking lot and parks a few feet away from Carson and the body on the ground. Two minutes ago he heard Carson radio in to the dispatcher that there had been a shooting: “Shots fired.” Through the radio system that connected Carson to the dispatcher and Wyatt to them both, Wyatt heard Carson’s voice, shell-shocked and unraveling. Damn, Jordan thought, accelerating toward his destination as he heard Carson’s call, wondering who was down and what he would find.
Walking from his squad car to Carson’s cruiser, Wyatt Jordan realizes that Carson Blake is no longer a fellow officer he just barely knows. As the first to arrive at the scene, he will be bound to Carson from now on by the kind of knowledge both men can only submit to but never fully understand.
Jordan examines the man on the ground, scans the area around the body for a weapon, sees the cell phone, and then walks over to Carson, slumped in the front seat of his cruiser. The driver-side door of the car is open. Jordan crouches down beside Carson and pries the gun from his moist, steely grip. “What happened, Blake? Are you okay?”
“I thought it was a gun, I swear, I thought it was a gun.” The words are breathy and heavy, whispered like a confession. Jordan sees before him a mere remnant of the man he had joked with half an hour ago.
Wyatt Jordan looks away, seeking relief from the face, from the husky sound of Carson’s sobs as he weeps into his hands. Jordan lets his eyes scan the circumference of the parking lot and the darkened houses across the street where people are sleeping. Then he turns back to Carson, his large beefy arm enfolding Carson’s shoulders, cradling him in a stiff embrace. He doesn’t know what else on earth to do.
Emergency Medical Services is the first to rumble into the parking lot of the strip mall and begin examining the body. Soon the lot is ablaze with high-beam-intensity lights from fire trucks, a fluorescent halo hovering over the length and breadth of the search for shell casings and other evidence around the body cordoned off with yellow tape. More than two dozen men and women are swarming around the scene, from Internal Affairs, Homicide, Evidence, the Criminal Investigation Unit; the president of the Fraternal Order of Police and the district commander are there as well. Other officers, hearing what happened on their radios, mill about, curious and concerned, all of them thanking their private gods that on this night they are not Carson Blake.
Carson’s sergeant, Melvin Griffin, arrives, and after talking to the crime scene investigators he sees Carson and Wyatt Jordan sitting in the backseat of Jordan’s cruiser. He approaches them. At the sight of Griffin, Carson rises slowly from the backseat, and Griffin, a trim, gentle-eyed man of medium brown complexion, whose handlebar mustache and large, mournful eyes make him appear more solemn than he is, reaches for Carson, puts his arm around his shoulder, and says, “Come on, walk with me.”
“You okay?” Griffin asks as they walk slowly away from Jordan’s cruiser. Because this question seems the most puzzling inquiry he has ever heard in his life, Carson says nothing, although his gratitude for the question is immeasurable. Carson and Melvin Griffin walk away from the hive of activity immediately surrounding the crime scene, to a secluded space in front of the post office, Griffin’s arms fatherly, sheltering, on Carson’s shoulders.
“Obviously you were in fear for your life?” Griffin asks, standing at Carson’s side, not looking at him, but waiting, Carson knows, for the only answer he can give. The answer he will have to give.
“Yes,” he mumbles.
“You thought he had a gun.” Carson hears not a question but a statement.
“Yes.”
“Well, then this looks like a clean shooting to me,” Griffin concludes, casting his gaze back to the site they have just walked away from. “Take care of yourself and make sure you take your ten days. You call your wife?”
“Not yet.”
“Call her, son—it’s gonna be a long night.”
Griffin begins walking back toward the fire trucks and squad cars, the investigators, the officers from Internal Affairs who Carson knows want to talk to him, gently leading Carson back toward that assembly with him.
“No, no, can I just have a few minutes?” Carson asks.
“Take all the time you need,” Griffin tells him, and walks away, leaving Carson in the shadowy darkness outside the post office.
He feared for his life. He thought the man had a gun. If he had done the right thing, if he had done the only thing he could do, why did he now wish that he’d been rendered mute so that he could not speak, or blind so that he could not see what that fear and those thoughts had wrought?
No, he had not called Bunny. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He’d have to tell her this face-to-face.
“Be sure to take your ten days,” his sergeant had told him. Ten days before he had to make an official statement to anybody about what had happened, about what he had done. Ten days that would turn into weeks. Ten days to get his story straight? Ten days to keep silent, when all he really wants, even now, forty-five minutes after he has killed a young man holding a cell phone and not a gun, is to talk, to explain. But this is Maryland, and the state has legislated ten days of silence for a police officer after a shooting. Ten days to live alone in his own head, the last place he wants to be.
He can’t stay in the shadows forever, he knows, so Carson heads back to the others, still feeling the shadows engulfing him no matter how fast he tries to walk. He is still a police officer, and he has to bear witness to what has happened. To what he has done. He tells the story of the stop and the shooting to Margery Pierce, an investigator from the Criminal Investigation Division. She’s a red-haired, blue-eyed, frumpy matron Carson has seen at other major crime scenes like this one, and her hand rests on Carson’s shoulder as he leans against her van and talks to her, hearing his own voice as though from a great distance, as though it belongs to someone else. When Margery walks away, Lester Stovall from Internal Affairs steps toward Carson, asking first, like Margery, like everyone, if he is okay, and then before Carson can answer says, “Can you tell me what happened?”
Just as Carson is going to answer the question, Matthew Frey, the Fraternal Order of Police lawyer, walks out of the crowd surrounding the scene and puts his hand on Carson’s chest like a barrier between Lester and Carson and says to Lester, whom he knows and respects, “You know I get to talk to him first.”
Matthew Frey wears a wrinkled trench coat over a white shirt and khakis. He had hurriedly dressed in the bathroom of his Clinton, Maryland rambler after hanging up from the call from the president of the Fraternal Order of Police. Gently shaking his wife awake, he told her where he was going. He has defended police officers for eighteen years. In his office desk in Largo, he keeps a twenty-inch billy club that his grandfather used when he was on the force in Baltimore. Matthew Frey stands before Carson, trying to gather quickly how much he can handle, if he is an officer who will fall apart because of this night or one who will turn to stone. No matter how long he looks at Carson, he cannot tell for sure.
Carson sees Matthew Frey’s longish gray-white hair and his pencil-thin lips and reads in the man’s blue eyes that he is perhaps the only person present whose job is to protect him.
Frey walks with Carson to his Volvo, and they sit in the front seats.
“You smoke?” he asks Carson, offering him a cigarette.
“Naw.”
“Then I won’t. You called your family?”
“I can’t bring myself to do that just yet.”
“I understand. You okay?”
“Not really.” This is the first time Carson has answered the question. The first time he has spoken what he knows unalterably to be the truth.
“When you’re ready, I want you to tell me what happened. Take your time. Tell me everything just as it happened, as much as you can recall.”
Carson recounts the incident, filling the narrative with all the questions and the doubts that plague him, working through the silences that strangle him and hurtle him back into the moment with the retelling. “I know now that I should’ve waited for Jordan. He radioed he was on the way. It all happened so fast. So goddamned fast. I lost control. I mean, before I knew it he was reaching into his waistband and had turned around and was on his feet. On his feet, facing me. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before I lost control of the stop. That’s not supposed to happen, I know. But once he was on his feet, facing me, he was holding this object—he wouldn’t drop it like I kept telling him to. He kept trying to tell me something, but I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t take the chance. He looked like a good kid. He gave me some lip, but he wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I was afraid for my life. I thought he had a gun.”
Frey listened, knowing that memory is fractured and heightened, made suspect by the lingering effects of trauma. Every time an officer tells him details of a shooting he’s been involved in, Frey recalls the conclusion of his favorite writer, Gabriel García Márquez, that life is not what one lives but what one remembers. Carson tells him much more than he needs to know. The days and weeks and months looming ahead of Carson will be even more crucial than this moment, as he helps him to remember the incident in ways that would render what happened inevitable rather than criminal. “You don’t have to make a statement when you go back to CID. Get one of the other officers to take you and I’ll meet you there. I’ll help you fill out the Discharge of Firearms report. You’ll be asked what happened. You’re not to say anything. Do you understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever fired your weapon before?”
“No.” Then Carson asks, “What’s gonna happen to me?”
“I don’t want you to worry about that tonight. I’ll protect your rights. Just know that.”
Carson has been in CID many times but never like this, with the eyes of the few officers in the building offering him so much compassion, never with those same officers stopping in the hall to pat him on the back, tell him he’ll be okay, to ask how he is.
In an office next to the area where roll call is held, Carson is asked by a Colin Barnes if he wants to make a statement. Barnes at two-thirty in the morning wears a cashmere jacket over a cream-colored shirt with a silk navy-blue tie and large silver cuff links, stylish as always amid the grimy gray funk, the stale, listless air, the battered furniture and indifferent decor that Carson knows too well and that weigh on him with an awful heaviness at this moment.
Then Barnes reads Carson the Advise of Rights form: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Carson is now a cop who has been Mirandized. He signs the form.
“Don’t people know when you say ‘Drop what you’re holding,’ we mean drop what you’re holding?” Colin murmurs irritably as he places the form before Carson to sign.
The Discharge of Firearms report asks everything from the type of weapon used in the incident to how much sleep Carson had in the last twenty-four hours. The single eight-line paragraph that Frey tutors him on will be used for a press release that the Office of Communications will send to the media.
Carson agonizes over the brief paragraph, which contains the sketchiest rendering of the event even as it answers the primary who, what, when, where. The only question left unanswered is why. Carson hands Barnes the form studded with erasures, damp with sweat, the cursive script small and tortured.
“You been given a replacement weapon?” Barnes asks.
“No, not yet.”
The gun used in the shooting is now evidence. He can’t leave CID without a gun. On administrative leave, he is still a police officer. Still expected to protect and serve if he sees a “situation,” while gassing up his car or shopping for a new pair of shoes. He’s got to have a gun. He could be on some thug’s kill list. Maybe he’s got enemies he doesn’t even know about among all the people he’s arrested and helped send to jail. He’s responsible for his life. The lives of others. And his Beretta gives him all the authority he needs. The one or two times he’s left home without his weapon he’s felt naked, like a moving target. His Beretta is a strap-on body part. He wants a gun but can’t imagine holding it without remembering how he held it moments before the shooting, with focused, unfamiliar horror and dread. If he had to fire his weapon again he is not sure that he could.
Matthew Frey waits with Carson for Derek Stinson, the armorer who provides officers with new weapons. Stinson, a small, monklike man who like Matthew Frey was awakened from sleep, arrives carrying the metal case that is with him at all times. He’s an ex-cop who keeps a collection of guns in his St. Mary’s County home.
Stinson places the metal case on the same desk that Carson used to sign the Miranda forms and to write the report of the shooting. The four guns lie in the case embedded in foam, with magazines for each gun. Stinson gently lifts the Beretta and a magazine from the hold of the foam and offers them to Carson. Carson holds them in his dry, ashen palms with a reverence that stills the moment. Derek Stinson tells him, “In situations like the one you were in tonight, this is your only friend.”
After Carson has put the new Beretta in his holster he tells Stinson, “I’d never fired my weapon at a suspect before. I never wanted to have to do it, but still I wondered what it would be like. Now I’d give anything not to know.”
At 5:30 a.m., Carson unlocks the door to his house, weak with the desire to see the faces of his children. It is a desire that fills him like hunger. Like thirst. He walks quietly in the dark to his twin daughters’ room, which he painted pink for their birthday. The night-light plugged into the wall socket casts an eerie frosting of muted half-light over the room’s darkness. Barbie posters claim nearly all the space on the walls. Stuffed teddy bears, dolls, and Beanie Babies are scattered all over the carpeted floor. Standing in the doorway, Carson is stunned by the cheeriness of the room and it nearly buckles his knees, nearly sends him crashing onto the floor, but he steadies himself and walks to the bed of Roseanne, lying on her side, sucking her thumb reflexively in her sleep, her body curled, snail-like, beneath the sheet. Carson wipes the tiny beads of sweat from her forehead with his fingertips. Leaning closer, he listens to the heavy grunt of her breathing. He closes his eyes and allows that sound, the slightly asthmatic, ragged breathing of his daughter, to drench him like rain.
After a few moments Carson pads softly over to Roslyn’s bed. She is sprawled on her back, arms and legs akimbo. A gentle fluttering of her eyes behind her closed lids makes it seem as though she’s merely feigning sleep. Roslyn’s left leg twitches several times and she turns on her side.
In Juwan’s room, the boy sleeps too, a copy of Treasure Island tucked beneath his pillow. Carson stares at the face slack with sleep. He looks deeply into the face of a son that he is sure, even before this night, he has already lost.
Carson stands outside Juwan’s door and considers the steps he will have to take to enter the room where his wife, Bunny, sleeps. The thought of those steps fills his mind like a forced march. Bunny wakes up at 7:00 a.m. Maybe, just maybe, he will have a reprieve until then. He knows he won’t be that lucky but walks back downstairs anyway, slumping into a chair at the breakfast nook in the kitchen. He is more than tired, feels an ache that is primordial and awful in his bones and in his skin. He’d like to make a cup of coffee but doesn’t want to make any movements that would signal that he is home. There have been other times in his twelve years on the force when he was hours late because of a fatal accident. Sometimes he had a chance to call. Sometimes he didn’t. Bunny knew this was part of The Job. Shit happened. So she would have guessed, Carson convinces himself, that shit happened last night. To someone else.
If he can just be alone for a while. So that he doesn’t have to face Bunny, to tell her what he did. Even if alone means having nothing and no one to distract him from the images and the memories of the shooting playing over and over in his head. A videotape that on the ride home he promised that he would only allow to play for fifteen minutes of every hour, a promise he has absolutely no power to keep.
The clock on the kitchen wall ticks in all this silence, too loudly, and when he finally switches on the kitchen light to see that he has been sitting in the breakfast nook for half an hour, Carson hears Bunny coming down the stairs. She stands in the kitchen doorway, bundled in a terry-cloth robe, her hair in rollers.
“I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep all night,” she complains, yawning and walking over to the table. “What’s wrong? Why are you so late?” she asks sleepily. “Why are you sitting down here? Why didn’t you come to bed?”
“I know I should’ve called,” he begins.
“I was worried … I started to call the station,” Bunny whines.
“I’m sorry.”
“Carson, sorry just doesn’t cut it. You don’t seem like yourself. You look strange, Carson, what’s wrong?” she asks, sitting down heavily beside him.
He thinks he will tell her calmly, slowly. Instead, the words speak themselves, stumble out. “I’d given him the ticket. The stop was over. I was on my way home.”
“Carson?” Bunny asks, saying his name like a question, and to Carson his name sounds as odd as the inquiry he has heard, it seems, a thousand times this night, Are you okay?
“It was dark. Hell, I didn’t know. How could I? All he had to do was drop what he was holding. Like I told him. Then I would’ve known.”
“Carson, you’re scaring me.”
“It happened so fast.” And that is the truest thing Carson has thought or said this night. “It happened so fast. I killed a man. I stopped him because he was speeding and driving with no headlights.”
“And you killed him?” Bunny whispers, rising so quickly she nearly falls, clutching the collar of her robe tight at her throat and covering her mouth with her hand. Carson stands and walks to Bunny as if he could protect her, save her, from the wrath of what he has done. They cling to each other. Never before have they held each other with love so total and so blind.