He was tapping on the vent when out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of a folded paper on the passenger floorboard. He picked it up, and in the dim light he unfolded it. It was Andy’s paycheck stub.
A.J. knew how much money Andy made. Because of the union, starting salaries were common knowledge, and were even posted on the department’s Web site. But still, A.J. wanted to look.
Thirty-two thousand, one hundred and seventy-four dollars and three cents. Awful lot of money for a rookie who didn’t know shit about what he was doing, or why.
His gaze moved to the deductions.
A hundred-buck automatic deposit to the First Bank of Tennessee. Union dues. Federal taxes. Social security. 401k contributions. Payroll-deducted equipment costs. The kid had bought himself a Kevlar vest.
A.J. looked to the dashboard, at the picture Andy had clipped there earlier tonight. The photo was of Andy’s wife and baby. The woman, a wide-eyed beauty, looked a lot younger than Andy did, and the baby was so new it was still wrinkled.
He folded the check stub and set it on the seat. Thirty-two thousand was nowhere near enough.
A.J. made decent money now, decent enough, he guessed, for a single guy long past child support. But in the early years, when Lorraine was young and raising Sheila and trying to make a home for them, it had been a struggle. Later, after he lost track of Sheila, he had started sticking almost a third of his paycheck into a savings account. He had found a nice little cabin on Lake Arkabutla down in Mississippi and he wanted to buy it.
Eight grand into the plan, he met Spider Jackson, a trash-talking street germ with a big attitude and a bigger father who wielded one of the sharpest legal swords in the city and who had other political attachments, like the mayor’s sister.
Spider had been caught red-handed selling stolen guns and, as all dirtbags do when they’re high and scared, he resisted arrest. Bit a chunk of flesh out of one officer’s hand, kneed another in the groin, and sliced open the abdomen of a third before he found himself in the back of the patrol car, alive but hurting.
A.J. never hit Spider. Didn’t get there in time to do anything except drive him to the jail and escort him inside. All the way in, Spider was hollering how his daddy was going to sue everyone, but A.J. had heard it all before, and hadn’t given it another thought until a few weeks later when his name showed up on a subpoena in a brutality lawsuit.
The car was too warm now. A.J. reached down and turned off the heat and used his sleeve to rub the condensation off the glass so he could keep an eye on Andy.
In the old days, people sued the city. Nowadays, they could sue officers, and that’s what Spider’s father did. In the end, the city settled their part of the lawsuit, and the jury divided the balance of the settlement up among the officers.
Later, the lawyer explained that since all the officers denied any culpability, the jury had no reason to believe that A.J. was the only one who was really innocent, and besides, he said, you know better than anyone that to some people you’re all just white faces in blue uniforms.
The court took the eight thousand in one lump sum, and set up a payment plan for the rest. His final payment was due in August of this year.
A.J. reached down to pick up his coffee cup. His fingers had stiffened up again and he couldn’t grab the cup the way most folks grabbed things, so he picked it up with his index finger and his thumb, transferring it to his left hand to drink it.
He looked down at his hand. His pinkie finger was gone, shot off by a punk-ass armed robber firing blindly as he tumbled his way down a fire escape. The bullet had ripped through A.J.’s palm, mangling the tendons and severing the pinkie.
Another cop had been on the fire escape that day. His partner, dead from a shot to the head, lying there on the black iron, his blue eyes open toward the sky, his gun still in his holster.
A.J. had seen it happen. But even now, he couldn’t remember it well. All he could remember feeling at that moment was his pain and his fear and all those other selfish emotions that come when you think you’re going to die.
He could remember the funeral a few days later. The long line of police cars crawling along the freeway and the smell of the white mums and the saddest damn music he ever heard at a grave site.
And he remembered the endless rows of uniforms, and the stiff, solemn faces looking at him from the other side of the casket, silently wondering why two veteran cops hadn’t been able to catch one sixteen-year-old dirtbag. Wondering why A.J. hadn’t managed to fire off one single round from his weapon, because he was, they knew, the first one out the window. Wondering all of that, but never saying a word.
A.J. laid his head back against the seat and took a second to close his eyes.
His dead partner had four ex-wives, but not one came to the funeral, so it had been A.J. who had accepted the folded American flag afterwards. Lorraine had put the flag on the top shelf of the closet. Said she put it there so she wouldn’t have to look at it and be reminded every day of just how suddenly she could be a widow, too.
Right after, the department had stuck A.J. behind a desk in the traffic division, saying that because of the finger, he couldn’t shoot accurately anymore. Maybe afraid, too, he couldn’t pull his gun quickly enough to keep from getting shot himself. That year they had paid out three hundred grand in widow’s pensions, they said, and they couldn’t afford any more.
He had stayed at the desk in the traffic division for over a year, silently slogging through paperwork. Every night, he’d uncap the bottle of Jim Beam and try to tune out Lorraine’s whining and find some peace. Finally, Lorraine told him if he wanted some peace, she’d be happy to give it to him. The next day she was gone.
Days after, when he was looking for his old revolver, he found the folded flag behind some Rolling Stones records. He stood there in his bedroom, holding it in his hands, thinking he needed to find some place of honor for it, somewhere better than in the top of a dusty closet.
He bought a new case for it, a triangular one with polished oak edges that the flag could just sit right in, and he set it on the kitchen counter, next to the ever-present bottle of Jim Beam.
A few weeks later, the flag was still there. The bottle was gone and he had not replaced it.
He practiced at the range for a month, always alone, too embarrassed to let anyone see his fumbling. Finally, he found enough agility in his hand and enough confidence in himself to ask for another shot at requalifying. A week later, he was back behind the wheel of a cruiser.
That’s when he finally understood what Lorraine felt, trapped in a life and feeling second-rate, so invisible that you plan honeymoons you’re never going to take.
A calm female voice came from the radio, calling to him. A.J. keyed his mike and acknowledged her.
“Looks like the detectives are about five minutes out,” she said.
A.J. thanked her and clicked off.
Andy was leaning against the half-wall, staring out at the darkness. A.J. figured he was done throwing up, and was now probably just trying to unscramble things in his head. A wisp of fog curled around Andy’s legs, then disappeared. For a second, everything was clear and silent, as if the darkness was holding its breath.
Andy would be different in the morning, A.J. knew. He wouldn’t know why, because he didn’t understand that this was the kind of moment that you lose a piece of yourself in, a sliver of something taken away by that invisible thing that crawls inside you and leaves just as quickly, without letting you know what it took.
Andy wouldn’t miss it much right away, but over time, one day, if he found himself sleepless and alone, he might wonder where it went and if he could get it back.