Grind City

by Gary Hardwick

  Epilogue

  Walking

  The Shaw family was going to get a big settlement from the city. Marshall was orchestrating it. The kids all agreed that their parents should get the money. They’d do the right thing with it. It didn’t feel right somehow, but this was all they had.

  The Black Lives Matter people moved on to the next city. Hard to believe police shootings are now an industry.

  DeAngela Gomez was now a full-fledged celebrity. She had been on four national news shows and had even landed in a New York paper in a best dressed column.

  She and James Cole had broken it off and she was back on the prowl but had plenty of suitors. Knowing her, she was looking for a wealthy man to back her ever-expanding ambitions.

  DeAngela and the IAD brass had even offered me a job. I imagined me and her as the poster kids for law and order and then I imagined Vinny shooting us both.

  I turned them down of course, but I have to say, I was a little flattered.

  I took some well-deserved time off. I stayed at home, played with the baby and acted like a normal human being. Children, I thought, to some a blessing, to others, a curse.

  I discovered that I have an online presence now because some kids have started websites and Twitter accounts with my name on them.

  There’s one guy who goes by the name Danny Cavanaugh357 and he tweets tough guy talk in a reprehensible black slang. I would really like to find him and have a little talk about respect.

  There are memes of me firing two guns and one of me half-naked. It’s my face but I have no idea whose body that is.

  Vinny tells me I can have them all pulled down if I wanted but that would only give them more attention. I figure after a while, they’ll all disappear.

  After a week, I had to sit down with a reporter and give him that interview. The story came out a week later and generally, I hated it. The word “hero” was used liberally. But I did get to say something important to me. I said, no matter what, we, the police, are still the good guys.

  There is another part of the article I like and it sums up how I felt about everything. What it says about me, I’ll let others decide.

  Detroit Free Press:

  dark, bizarre turns in

  precinct murder case

  … Ivory Shaw and Raymond Ranier’s

  killer knew that our current problems

  in law enforcement would hide his

  devious crimes. He knew that all of us

  would go straight to past atrocities

  and find comfortable enemies and

  convenient racial positions which

  would have us so angry and preoccupied

  with our own self-righteousness that

  we’d never suspect anything more evil

  than our own hearts. Which brings me

  back to Detective Cavanaugh, a man

  who stands taller than his occupation

  but tries to shrug off this shine because

  he is embarrassed by it. His heart is not

  evil and so he suspected everyone.

  Thank God he did.

  I’m going to save that for my son and one day when he thinks his old man is corny and out of touch, I’ll give it to him. Then again, I had to have my own son to see how cool my dad was, didn’t I?

  Vinny and me never talked about the fact that I got shot and had I not been wearing a vest, I might have bought it. No one wants to think about death around our house these days.

  RMC got up and walked a few days ago. He was wobbly and he fell but he got right back up and came to his mother.

  I was happy of course but I had a flash of Bill Wiznewski, whose kids had bound him in desperation and Dr. Ross, whose desire for a child bound her to the corruption of her very soul. My son was life and I was thankful for it.

  The thought passed quickly as I envisioned RMC walking and running in the sun, a whole new world for him under his own power.

  And so I turned to thoughts beyond the thick winter outside, to the renewal of spring, which would bring back life and hope.