After (2 page)

“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 car, 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.”