D. C. Noir 2

by George Pelecanos

  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.”

  Carson recounts the incident, filling the narrative with all the questions and the doubts that plague him, working through the silences that strangle him and hurtle him back into the moment with the retelling. “I know now that I should’ve waited for Jordan. He radioed he was on the way. It all happened so fast. So goddamned fast. I lost control. I mean, before I knew it he was reaching into his waistband and had turned around and was on his feet. On his feet, facing me. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before I lost control of the stop. That’s not supposed to happen, I know. But once he was on his feet, facing me, he was holding this object—he wouldn’t drop it like I kept telling him to. He kept trying to tell me something, but I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t take the chance. He looked like a good kid. He gave me some lip, but he wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I was afraid for my life. I thought he had a gun.”

  Frey listened, knowing that memory is fractured and heightened, made suspect by the lingering effects of trauma. Every time an officer tells him details of a shooting he’s been involved in, Frey recalls the conclusion of his favorite writer, Gabriel García Márquez, that life is not what one lives but what one remembers. Carson tells him much more than he needs to know. The days and weeks and months looming ahead of Carson will be even more crucial than this moment, as he helps him to remember the incident in ways that would render what happened inevitable rather than criminal. “You don’t have to make a statement when you go back to CID. Get one of the other officers to take you and I’ll meet you there. I’ll help you fill out the Discharge of Firearms report. You’ll be asked what happened. You’re not to say anything. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you ever fired your weapon before?”

  “No.” Then Carson asks, “What’s gonna happen to me?”

  “I don’t want you to worry about that tonight. I’ll protect your rights. Just know that.”

  Carson has been in CID many times but never like this, with the eyes of the few officers in the building offering him so much compassion, never with those same officers stopping in the hall to pat him on the back, tell him he’ll be okay, to ask how he is.

  In an office next to the area where roll call is held, Carson is asked by a Colin Barnes if he wants to make a statement. Barnes at two-thirty in the morning wears a cashmere jacket over a cream-colored shirt with a silk navy-blue tie and large silver cuff links, stylish as always amid the grimy gray funk, the stale, listless air, the battered furniture and indifferent decor that Carson knows too well and that weigh on him with an awful heaviness at this moment.

  Then Barnes reads Carson the Advise of Rights form: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Carson is now a cop who has been Mirandized. He signs the form.

  “Don’t people know when you say ‘Drop what you’re holding,’ we mean drop what you’re holding?” Colin murmurs irritably as he places the form before Carson to sign.

  The Discharge of Firearms report asks everything from the type of weapon used in the incident to how much sleep Carson had in the last twenty-four hours. The single eight-line paragraph that Frey tutors him on will be used for a press release that the Office of Communications will send to the media.

  Carson agonizes over the brief paragraph, which contains the sketchiest rendering of the event even as it answers the primary who, what, when, where. The only question left unanswered is why. Carson hands Barnes the form studded with erasures, damp with sweat, the cursive script small and tortured.

  “You been given a replacement weapon?” Barnes asks.

  “No, not yet.”

  The gun used in the shooting is now evidence. He can’t leave CID without a gun. On administrative leave, he is still a police officer. Still expected to protect and serve if he sees a “situation,” while gassing up his car or shopping for a new pair of shoes. He’s got to have a gun. He could be on some thug’s kill list. Maybe he’s got enemies he doesn’t even know about among all the people he’s arrested and helped send to jail. He’s responsible for his life. The lives of others. And his Beretta gives him all the authority he needs. The one or two times he’s left home without his weapon he’s felt naked, like a moving target. His Beretta is a strap-on body part. He wants a gun but can’t imagine holding it without remembering how he held it moments before the shooting, with focused, unfamiliar horror and dread. If he had to fire his weapon again he is not sure that he could.

  Matthew Frey waits with Carson for Derek Stinson, the armorer who provides officers with new weapons. Stinson, a small, monklike man who like Matthew Frey was awakened from sleep, arrives carrying the metal case that is with him at all times. He’s an ex-cop who keeps a collection of guns in his St. Mary’s County home.

  Stinson places the metal case on the same desk that Carson used to sign the Miranda forms and to write the report of the shooting. The four guns lie in the case embedded in foam, with magazines for each gun. Stinson gently lifts the Beretta and a magazine from the hold of the foam and offers them to Carson. Carson holds them in his dry, ashen palms with a reverence that stills the moment. Derek Stinson tells him, “In situations like the one you were in tonight, this is your only friend.”

  After Carson has put the new Beretta in his holster he tells Stinson, “I’d never fired my weapon at a suspect before. I never wanted to have to do it, but still I wondered what it would be like. Now I’d give anything not to know.”

  At 5:30 a.m., Carson unlocks the door to his house, weak with the desire to see the faces of his children. It is a desire that fills him like hunger. Like thirst. He walks quietly in the dark to his twin daughters’ room, which he painted pink for their birthday. The night-light plugged into the wall socket casts an eerie frosting of muted half-light over the room’s darkness. Barbie posters claim nearly all the space on the walls. Stuffed teddy bears, dolls, and Beanie Babies are scattered all over the carpeted floor. Standing in the doorway, Carson is stunned by the cheeriness of the room and it nearly buckles his knees, nearly sends him crashing onto the floor, but he steadies himself and walks to the bed of Roseanne, lying on her side, sucking her thumb reflexively in her sleep, her body curled, snail-like, beneath the sheet. Carson wipes the tiny beads of sweat from her forehead with his fingertips. Leaning closer, he listens to the heavy grunt of her breathing. He closes his eyes and allows that sound, the slightly asthmatic, ragged breathing of his daughter, to drench him like rain.

  After a few moments Carson pads softly over to Roslyn’s bed. She is sprawled on her back, arms and legs akimbo. A gentle fluttering of her eyes behind her closed lids makes it seem as though she’s merely feigning sleep. Roslyn’s left leg twitches several times and she turns on her side.

  In Juwan’s room, the boy sleeps too, a copy of Treasure Island tucked beneath his pillow. Carson stares at the face slack with sleep. He looks deeply into the face of a son that he is sure, even before this night, he has already lost.

  Carson stands outside Juwan’s door and considers the steps he will have to take to enter the room where his wife, Bunny, sleeps. The thought of those steps fills his mind like a forced march. Bunny wakes up at 7:00 a.m. Maybe, just maybe, he will have a reprieve until then. He knows he won’t be that lucky but walks back downstairs anyway, sl
umping into a chair at the breakfast nook in the kitchen. He is more than tired, feels an ache that is primordial and awful in his bones and in his skin. He’d like to make a cup of coffee but doesn’t want to make any movements that would signal that he is home. There have been other times in his twelve years on the force when he was hours late because of a fatal accident. Sometimes he had a chance to call. Sometimes he didn’t. Bunny knew this was part of The Job. Shit happened. So she would have guessed, Carson convinces himself, that shit happened last night. To someone else.

  If he can just be alone for a while. So that he doesn’t have to face Bunny, to tell her what he did. Even if alone means having nothing and no one to distract him from the images and the memories of the shooting playing over and over in his head. A videotape that on the ride home he promised that he would only allow to play for fifteen minutes of every hour, a promise he has absolutely no power to keep.

  The clock on the kitchen wall ticks in all this silence, too loudly, and when he finally switches on the kitchen light to see that he has been sitting in the breakfast nook for half an hour, Carson hears Bunny coming down the stairs. She stands in the kitchen doorway, bundled in a terry-cloth robe, her hair in rollers.

  “I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep all night,” she complains, yawning and walking over to the table. “What’s wrong? Why are you so late?” she asks sleepily. “Why are you sitting down here? Why didn’t you come to bed?”

  “I know I should’ve called,” he begins.

  “I was worried … I started to call the station,” Bunny whines.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Carson, sorry just doesn’t cut it. You don’t seem like yourself. You look strange, Carson, what’s wrong?” she asks, sitting down heavily beside him.

  He thinks he will tell her calmly, slowly. Instead, the words speak themselves, stumble out. “I’d given him the ticket. The stop was over. I was on my way home.”

  “Carson?” Bunny asks, saying his name like a question, and to Carson his name sounds as odd as the inquiry he has heard, it seems, a thousand times this night, Are you okay?