“I am a cop.”
He steps back, showing me his palms. “It’s cool, man.” Glancing down, his face goes blank and he starts retreating.
I sit there, sticky with my partner’s blood, watching his wounds glisten in the harsh shine of the indifferent sun. My head tilts back. My eyes close.
I long for the sound of sirens until they come.
CHAPTER 9
They find me in the long antiseptic breezeway, where the nurses left me half an hour earlier, working on my hands with a reddened towelette. I see them in my peripheral vision. Only one of them advances, his footsteps echoing on the glossy floor. The shoes come into view. Black wingtips with a military shine. He settles his weight next to me and sighs.
“Getting yourself cleaned up,” he says. “Good.”
He rests his hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“You don’t have anything to apologize for.”
“Just when you were saying all your goodbyes-”
“Shut up,” he says gently.
“You didn’t get to talk to him.”
“March, shut up.” The hand on my back feels so heavy. “He was a good man. A good detective. We all had our doubts in the beginning, but he worked out all right.”
I can’t answer him. All I can do is nod. The silence between us is full of understanding. After a while he squeezes my shoulder and begins to rise.
“There’s some people who need to talk to you. Some questions that need answering.”
“I have a question,” I say. “What did Lorenz have to engage them for? Did the people on the scene say anything about that?”
An air of hopelessness comes over him. “I don’t think anyone saw what led up to the initial shooting. We just don’t know. .”
More footsteps. I look up to find Bascombe there along with an assistant DA and a couple of plainclothes men I assume are from Internal Affairs. Behind them, several detectives from a different homicide shift. They’ll carry the ball on this, our own people being too close.
As we walk down to the elevators, I’m wrapped in an inviolate bubble, nobody alongside or too close, like they see me as a piece of evidence at a crime scene, something not to touch unless you’re properly gloved. I don’t care.
I don’t want them getting close.
“This is not good,” the ADA says. “Not. Good.”
Bascombe bristles. “Of course it’s not. It never is when we lose a man.”
“I’m not talking about that, Lieutenant. One of your detectives walked up to a suspect and unloaded on him with a full-automatic weapon. They won’t even know how many holes are in him until they can search him during the autopsy. And there are witnesses who saw it all. There might even be footage from the pawnshop surveillance cameras.”
“This isn’t an interrogation. Detective March is answering questions to help with the hunt for the suspect who got away. Anyway, the guy whose ticket he punched was about to shoot Lorenz in the head.” Bascombe looks my way for confirmation. I give him a mute nod. “Under the circumstances, what was he supposed to do?”
For the interview, they’ve commandeered the ground floor all-faith chapel, positioning me on the front bench and taking up a semicircle of positions between me and the door. The other homicide detectives-the ones who actually need this information-stand in back, staring down at their notebooks, fully aware of the awkwardness of the situation.
One of the Internal Affairs investigators breaks in. He’s in his mid-fifties and sports a healthy golf-course tan with light circles under his eyes and light stripes on his temples where his sunglasses rest.
“My understanding,” he says, “is that your partner was actually killed with your side arm, Detective March. Is that correct?”
“It was my backup. They took my weapons. That’s why I went after them.”
“With an automatic weapon.”
“I didn’t know it was full-auto. I’d seen it earlier in the gun safe, so that’s where I went. I had to load it first or I would have been quicker.” I glance at the cuts on my finger from pushing the rounds into the magazine.
“You didn’t call for assistance.”
“It all happened so fast.”
The ADA interrupts. “This is not good. Did you have to shoot him so many times?”
“I pulled the trigger once. I wasn’t expecting to empty the clip. Like I said, it happened real fast. If it’s any consolation, he was on his feet with a gun in his hand. The ballistics will confirm that, too. I didn’t shoot him once he was on the ground.” Which is more than he had in mind for Jerry-
“That’s it,” Bascombe says. “I think we’re done for now, unless you guys need anything more.” He glances back to the homicide detectives, who shake their heads. “Fine. We’ll do this for real once everybody’s had a chance to process.”
But the IAD investigator isn’t finished. “One more thing, Detective. I know a lot of people are going to applaud your actions here. I’m sure you’ll get a few pats on the back for this. Whatever you were feeling at the moment, though, seeing your partner there on the ground, there’s such a thing as overkill. If you’re expecting us to rubber-stamp this, you’ve got another thing coming. That was your weapon used to kill Detective Lorenz. And if what you did to that shooter isn’t excessive force, then I don’t know what is.”
He waits for an answer but nothing comes. I don’t have it in me to fight. All I can give him is a shrug and a shake of the head. It was my weapon. It was excessive force, at least in the sense that seeing your partner shot up in front of you is excessive. Seeing one of the assailants drive away without injury is excessive, too.
Bascombe chases the others out of the chapel, turning at the door to face me. He claps his hands on my arms a couple of times, like he’s trying to impart his own strength to my sagging frame.
“Stay strong,” he says. “We’ll get through this.”
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
“It can wait.”
“I didn’t say anything to the first responders. And I wasn’t going to bring it up in front of those jackals just now.”
His eyes narrow. “All right. What is it?”
“I did get a look at the second suspect, the one who got away. He took his mask off in the car. As he drove past, ours eyes locked.”
“And?”
“I can’t swear to this,” I say. “He was behind a tinted window. But remember the photo we got from Bea Kuykendahl? In that file on Brandon Ford?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, that’s who it looked like to me.”
When you’re put on administrative leave, they tell you it’s for your own good. You’ve been through something traumatic. It takes time to recover.
Don’t worry about the job. Just focus on you.
But none of this is true.
The last thing I need is this. Time to reflect. Time to replay what happened over and over in my head. Time to dream it’s still in progress. Time to wake up in a cold sweat, my hands tensing as if I’m still firing the gun.
It’s not for you. It’s for them. So they don’t have to see you. So they don’t have to think of something comforting to say. In grief you’re like the sun to them. In disgrace they cannot bear to look at you full on. So they tuck you away somewhere out of sight, telling themselves that one problem at least can be solved, if only for now.
At home I lock all the doors and switch off the ringers on all the phones.
I go to the stereo with a stack of CDs and a half-formed intention of choosing something appropriate to the moment, music to feed the rage in me, or alternately to quench it. The discs end up strewn in a half circle, their liners unfolded. Portishead first, quite depressing, but it’s too sterile and electronic. Too artificial. So I play Tom Waits full blast for two minutes until the gates of hell open up under me. Then I switch it off and pull the plug from the wall.
Upstairs, I run the shower on cold until my whole body shivers and convulses. I stick my face under the spigot and imagine the water blasting it away like porous stone.