After (14 page)

“Me. The Job. And when I told him about the robberies I committed, nothing changed with us. He even gave me the courage to think about telling Bunny one day.”

“Did you?”

“Naw.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got to keep some secrets.”

“How did you grieve Eric’s death?”

He’s back now. Carson feels Eric not as a memory but as a presence, filling the room, inhabiting his own body. He hears his hoarse laughter, hears him telling him once again, “Slow down, brother, slow down.” “I…I’m not sure. He had a full police funeral, you know the kind we give to a cop killed in the line of duty. But he had a reputation that everybody respected. We felt like he had died in the line of duty. Just being his friend made me a better man. They wanted me to talk about him at the funeral. Everybody knew how close we were. You know I couldn’t get up there and talk about what he meant to me? It made his death too real. So I let him down. He’d never done that to me. And whenever it rains at night and I’m out, even now, I think how fucked up it was to be changing a stranger’s tire in the dark, in the rain, and for death on four wheels to come barreling at you and snuff you out like a candle.”

“How was your performance on the job after he died?”

“My evaluations started slipping. There were two brutality charges against me, but they were bogus. Nothing ever came of them. I was cleared. Sure, I was a little overzealous.”

“Were you angry?”

“Damned right.”

“Did you take it out on the people you had to interact with in performing your job?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. But I stopped seeing their faces. I was on automatic. Yeah. I stopped seeing their faces. It was rough. A couple of months after Eric died, we had a spate of killings all over the county, seventy-two murders in six months. Do you know what that means? That’s twelve a month. Three people a week. Coming to a scene and finding somebody shot in the head or the neck, slumped over the steering wheel of their car…Shit, we found bodies stuffed in trunks, in dumpsters, on the side of the road, as though they’d been tossed there from speeding cars.” He shakes his head. “I’ll never forget one week, there were three murders in my district and I was called to two of them. And when I looked at those bodies I saw Eric’s face. Then after a while I had to stop seeing any faces in order to do what I had to do. I was on automatic.”

“How’d you handle the pain?”

“I didn’t want to take it home, so I’d hang out at The Blue Diamond with other officers after my shift. They weren’t my friends, but they were my tribe. Being around them I didn’t see the faces of the dead, Eric or some unknown, unidentified Jane or John Doe, or some mother’s known son or daughter.”

“Did it help?”

“Sure. Drinking and talking and talking and drinking, it helped…some.”

“Were you in pain the night of the shooting?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you see Paul Houston? Did you really see his face?”

“Either way I answer that question, I’m fucked.”

Three weeks before
Christmas, Carson is cleared by Internal Affairs, the shooting ruled
Justifiable
. That single word allows him back on the force. But it solves nothing. Lays nothing to rest. Does not make him feel vindicated, as Carson had long thought it would. Because if the shooting was justified, why did he feel so counterfeit when he received the formal letter, with that word one of many on the page, stating the outcome of the internal investi gation? If the shooting was justified, why was he so surprisingly ambivalent about going back on the force when he got the call to report for duty? Why had the nightmares seemed to intensify in the days before he returned to work? Why is he afraid he could kill again?

Back on duty, Carson is assigned to evening desk duty, the assignment everyone hates. He answers phones, fielding calls about everything from barking dogs and busted water mains to shootings. He processes the release of impounded vehicles. The calls are ceaseless, as, it seems, is the flow of confused, haven’t-got-a-clue citizens who appear before the front desk, asking for an answer to a mundane inquiry that the police department often can’t answer.

“You sure
you wanna do this?” Wyatt Jordan asks Carson. They are sitting in Wyatt’s cruiser in the district headquarters parking lot.

“It’s not about being sure—it’s just something I feel I gotta do. I don’t know why. But I feel like I gotta do it.”

“Sure.” Wyatt shrugs. “I’ll run a check on the Houstons. Hell, we could do it right now,” he says, pointing to the mobile data terminal stationed between them in the front seat.

“Maybe you shouldn’t do it. Maybe you should ask one of the secretaries to pull the information. That way nobody can trace the request back to you or me,” Carson tells him.

“That’s a plan.”

The lot is bordered by mounds of snow, icy, dirt-encrusted remnants of last week’s storm.

“I ran a check on Monique before we got married. You see how much good that did,” Wyatt says with a chuckle. “How you holding up on desk duty?”

“It sucks.”

“They’ll ease you back on patrol soon.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“When you get back out there, just remember not to second-guess yourself. It’s too late for that, Carson. It won’t do you or anybody any good. You did the only thing you could that night.”

“That’s what everybody tells me,” Carson says wearily.

“They’re not just telling you that. Whatever you got to go through to put this behind you, you better do it before you go back on patrol.”

“How do you get over shooting somebody the way I did?”

“Look, I’m just saying…”

“I know. I know.”

“What’re you gonna do with the information, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t know. It’s like the man I shot is a phantom, or a ghost. I want to know who he was, who his parents are.”

“That’s spooky shit, Blake.”

“I don’t just have the dream, Wyatt—I live with a picture of him in my mind that’s half developed. Freeze framed, stopped at the moment I killed him. You talk about moving on, but I’m stuck, and I can’t go on until the rest of that picture gets filled in. It’s like there was a bond that was formed between us that night and it doesn’t matter that he’s dead. He’s not dead for me. Fact is, he never will be.”

Three days later Carson sits in a snug Jamaican café a block away from headquarters on his lunch break, reading through the printout from the National Crime Information Center. He pushes his half-finished jerk chicken aside and thumbs through the sheaf of papers a second time. The printout tells him that Temple Houston has gotten a couple of speeding tickets, where Temple and Natalie Houston live and work, the company that insures their home, their car, and more information than he knows what to do with.

It’s all data. All facts. And yet the outline of the life that he can compose from these bits of information comforts Carson. He can guess their politics, what their house looks like and what’s inside, what they talk about. He can speculate on how they raised their son, even what kinds of clothes he wore as a child.

Carson has read about the Stockholm syndrome, in which kidnap victims begin to identify with and form bonds with their captors, and as he folds the printout and stuffs it in his jacket pocket he realizes that he is held hostage to not just the memory but the lived and unlived life of the man he killed. He has even dared to think that one day he would meet the young man’s family. To explain. To apologize. Just the other day he read a story in the newspaper that profiled a group of women in D.C., mothers who had forged bonds with the mothers of the incarcerated men and women who had killed their children. He’d begun collecting similar
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
–type articles about what he viewed as incredible acts of forgiveness—like the young White college student in Corpus Christi, Texas, a born-again Christian, who testified in court, asking leniency for the Black woman who, while driving one night, high on a nearly lethal cocktail of hallucinogens, struck and killed his father, a homeless man crossing the street pushing a shopping cart stuffed with newspapers and clothes. Carson has collected dozens of stories like that, and he keeps them in a scrapbook only he’s seen. These stories amaze him, and he is drawn to them for what they inform him about what men and women as ordinary as he are capable of. He doesn’t even know how he’d initiate such a miracle in his own life. But he has to believe such a thing is possible. That belief, he knows, is the first step. Alone at home, he thumbs through the scrapbook, pores over the stories, has read them so many times he knows them word for word, by heart. These people found miracles, made them happen. He hasn’t told anyone, not Bunny, not Carrie Petersen, but he’s had other dreams too. Dreams in which he made a miracle out of all that now remains.

Carson reluctantly agrees
to go out for a drink one night with Vince Proctor. When he walks through the door of the Blue Diamond and feels the dim, low-ceilinged bar bearing down on him, Carson trembles as memories flash through his mind like a wrenching prophetic vision. Memories of himself sitting at 1 a.m. in the corner where he had a clear view of the television elevated over the bar, nursing a beer or two, huddled at the table that had one too-short leg, with Davis, Quarles, and Jeeter, swapping complaints and
you won’t believe what happened on my shift
stories that on some nights sounded like tall tales or outright lies. The man arrested for walking nude down 193 at 5:00 a.m., armed with a machete and quoting from the book of Revelation. The woman who called to report a robbery and came to the door in a sheer nightgown and tried to seduce Jeeter. The fifteen-year-old who blew her brains out on her front lawn before Davis could stop her. He sat there with the others, all of them bound by a desire to protect and serve, bravado, courage, and an addiction to risk as insatiable as any junkie’s jones.

“Come on, I see a table.” Proctor nudges Carson. It’s 9:00 p.m. The place is half full. Raleigh Stevenson, the 350-pound owner, waves at Carson from behind the bar as he and Proctor walk past.

“It’s about time, man, how you doing?” he calls out to Carson, who stops at the bar and extends his hand. Raleigh is a heart attack just waiting to happen, so large that he wobbles unsteadily, lumbering toward Carson.

Carson looks around, trying to delay sitting down with Proctor, who has found a booth, but he sees no one he recognizes.

“What’re you having?” he calls over to Proctor.

“Gimme a Heineken.”

Raleigh hands Carson two bottles and he walks slowly, reluctantly, over to Proctor. He sets the beers on the table and slides into the booth.

“You look like you held up okay,” Proctor says.

“Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving.”

“You know, I been on my share of administrative leaves. They call it leave but it’s really punishment, the way they isolate you. It’s really about breaking you,” Proctor says moodily.

Proctor has shot five suspects in the last four years. Been disciplined for excessive force in three of those cases. Most cops never fire their weapons. Ever. Proctor can’t stop unloading his. His pale skin is chalky white, a plaster cast shattering at the seams. Crow’s-feet pinch the space around his eyes, pucker the skin above his lips. A crazy quilt of crinkled veins scars his craggy, aged face. Carson has seen the faces of cops who should have quit the force, who simply couldn’t handle the streets, the stress, but the ruin that stares back at him is a decay that has spread from within.

The thought that one day he could look like that forces him to turn away from Proctor, to look at the nearby wall with the dartboard, the television set airing the news, at Raleigh pouring a shot of scotch for a U.S. marshal whose face Carson vaguely remembers. He turns away from Proctor just so he can breathe.

“So what’d you do all that time?” Proctor asks.

“Why you askin’ now? You coulda called if you’d really wanted to know.”

“Ouch.” Proctor laughs. “C’mon, you know how it is. Life goes on.”

“So they say.”

“Know what I did when they’d put me on leave? Spent the day at a shooting range out in Prince William County. Worked out a couple of hours at the gym. You know, so I’d be mentally and physically sharp when I came back. You can’t let them break you, Carson. Not the brass on the force or the punks we arrest.”

“Can’t remember what I did. How the hours, the days passed. I just remember feeling like shit. I still do.”

“You gotta move on, man. I know being on desk duty is the last thing you want, but they’ll ease you back on the streets.”

“That’s kinda what I’m afraid of.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“They say if you shoot one person, you’re likely to shoot somebody again. You feel more paranoid, you’ve got a different perception of danger.”

“Hell, it’s the same streets as far as I’m concerned.”

“You ever dream about the guy you shot?”

“The one I paralyzed in that drug bust?”

“Yeah, the one you shot in the back.”

“Come on, man, you make it sound so cold, make me sound like a hit man.”

Proctor stares at Carson through hazel eyes turned wary and cold.

“No. I never dreamed about him. What the fuck would I wanna do that for? I don’t have trouble sleeping. Never have.”

It’s a lie that he offers up without a hint of defensiveness or shame. The stilted tenor of his voice, the word
never
, inform Carson that Proctor’s torture has indeed been immense.

“Well, I dreamed about the man I shot. I still do.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“You know that sumbitch Griffin tried to get me transferred,” Proctor says, steering the conversation onto rocky but less threatening shoals. “I been on the force eighteen years—shit, I can retire, get the hell outta Dodge in two. What you wanna bet I outlast him? I went straight to the union reps. Told them he was harassing me.”

Before he realizes it, Carson has been sitting in the booth an hour and a half listening to Proctor, his complaints about the new recruits, the pay raise the legislature voted against, the civilian review board. The three beers Proctor drinks turn him loud and nasty, and when two detectives at a nearby table ask him to keep it down, Carson has to push him back in the booth to keep him from bolting across the small room to nail them.