Marcus fought the urge to roll his eyes when Emily Morgan, the SO’s resident counselor, asked for a few minutes alone with him. The others were preparing to leave, and so Marcus and Emily pulled out a couple of chairs from the conference room table and sat down facing one another.
“So what’s up, Doc? How do you feel my brother is assimilating, or whatever you want to call it?”
“I believe Mr. Ackerman is learning and growing by leaps and bounds. But I wanted a moment to talk about you.”
“I’m an open book. Ask away.”
“What if you don’t like the question?”
“That sounds like a loaded response. Did the Director order you to talk to me about Eddie Caruso?”
“He strongly suggested I discuss your old friend with you before you board the jet. But, as always, my primary concern is your health and well-being as a member of this team and someone whom I consider a friend. You helped me through my husband’s death more than anyone else, Marcus. You are my number one concern. And from the way the Director described it, this Eddie Caruso is not someone of whom you think highly.”
“I’m sure that’s not quite the way the Director tactfully phrased it.”
“He’s a colorful man. But we’re not here to talk about him either. How do you feel about going back to see your old friend Mr. Caruso?”
“I appreciate the concern, Doc, but it’s nothing to worry about. Eddie and I were best friends when we were practically babies. We had a falling out, and we ceased being friends, spent some time as adversaries, and ended up just trying to pretend the other person didn’t exist.”
“Does that situation sound healthy to you?”
“You always tell me not to live in the past. Not to overanalyze all my decisions and question whether I could’ve made different choices. It is what it is. I haven’t thought about Eddie Caruso in years. It’s not anything that still bothers me.”
“I think that may have been the most you’ve ever spoken during one of our counseling sessions. So I would say that it obviously is bothering you.”
“Bullshit! I’ve talked a lot more than that at least a few different times. You realize that when we go out there in the field I’m your boss, right?”
“Yes, but there’s one area of management where I’m the boss. And that is when it comes to the well-being of this team.”
“No worries. I’m all good.”
Emily raised her eyebrows.
“Okay, we were close. We had a falling out. After that he teased me a lot, really made life hard on me. And I can’t fault him for that. We were kids. That kind of thing happens. But the deal with Eddie is that after my parents were murdered he didn’t lighten up on me. In fact, he started in harder. Made my life a living hell. It was so bad that I took a year off from school. Which everybody thought was completely understandable, considering that my parents had just died. No one really questioned it. But the real reason I needed to get away was because of Eddie Caruso.”
“But you eventually came back to the same school?”
“Yeah, after taking some time away and looking at the situation objectively, I remembered that I could beat the living hell out of Eddie Caruso. So, first day back, I cornered him, and under threat of violence and humiliation, I offered him a truce. Kind of a North and South Korea type of deal. The kind of agreement where we don’t want to work out our differences and so we’re just going to pretend that the other party doesn’t exist.”
“Again, very healthy. But I totally understand, and you’re right about one thing: we should learn from the past, but we should never worry over it. However, your unresolved history with this man could quite easily become a problem when you go to see him.”
“It’s not a big deal, Doc. Water under the bridge.”
“After your parents died, what was the worst thing that Eddie did to you?”
“He said that my mother was a whore. He called my dad a dirty cop. The same dad who had just fought and died for me. He told me that they were probably relieved when death came, because at least they didn’t have to put up with me anymore.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that, but as you said, it was a long time ago. I’m sure both you and Mr. Caruso are very different people now.”
“I can’t help thinking that anybody who would say that kind of thing to another kid whose parents had just died … I don’t know, that just seems like an issue with a person’s heart and soul. A darkness that’s never going to change.”
“Perhaps, but one of the limitations of this mortal existence is that we can never truly see into another person’s heart and soul. We spend so much time trying to chart a roadmap of what’s in everyone else’s heart, but we forget that the most important thing is what’s in our own. We can’t worry about what’s in the hearts of others because our own soul is the only one over which we have any control.”
“And how does that help me with Eddie?”
“You need to examine your own heart. We should forgive others in the same way we hope others forgive us. If you go in with a humble spirit and a forgiving heart, then you’ll be fine. But here’s a question: What if, as you suspect, Eddie still possesses a spiteful personality? What if he responds negatively? Will you give in to your anger?”
“Just because people make me angry, doesn’t mean I have an anger problem. It seems more that I have a people problem.”
“Last week, I was told you had an incident with a local sheriff.”
Marcus gritted his teeth and growled deep in his throat. “We needed this Podunk sheriff to serve a warrant on one of the security guards who was supposed to be protecting the truck that Demon’s cronies altered. The guard turned out to be dirty. He had taken a bribe to look the other way and erase the security footage.”
“I don’t believe the guard’s culpability was the issue. This sheriff claimed that you defecated in his breakfast. He threatened to file a formal complaint with the Department of Justice.”
Marcus laughed at the memory and Emily’s description of it. “That’s only partially correct.”
“How do you partially defecate in someone’s breakfast?”
“This local sheriff, I find out, is running for re-election, and he’s in there at some greasy-spoon diner jibber-jabbering and won’t go with us to serve the warrant until he’s finished his breakfast. We tell his office that this is a time-sensitive investigation. They respond that we’ll just have to wait. So we wait. For forty-five minutes. Finally, I go in and find this sheriff laughing it up with a bunch of old banker types. They’re just sitting there, cackling like a bunch of old hens and sipping their coffee.”
“How does that connect your excrement to his breakfast?”
“I’m getting there. So I walk up and introduce myself. I ask if he’s the sheriff. Anyway, long story short, he gave me attitude, and I pissed in his coffee cup.”
“You urinated in a fellow officer’s coffee cup in the middle of a crowded restaurant?”
“No, I took the cup into the bathroom. Then I urinated in it and brought it back out to him.”
“Do you feel that was an appropriate and proportionate reaction to his behavior?”
“To be honest, Doc, considering some of the other things I thought about doing to him, I think pissing in his coffee was a pretty measured response on my part. I actually think it displays some real personal growth.”