After

  “The IAD detective isn’t a priest, he’s an investigator, Carson, and you’re to treat his questions as inquiries that require a brief factual response, not second-guessing or conjecture.” That’s what Frey has told him over and over. But in the minutes of the retelling he heard the events as an unexpected resurrection. He told the story the way he was supposed to. Sitting in this room in which the air crackles with the warmth of any possibility, palpable, alive, Carson wants to know and tell the story of that night, to know himself in a new way. There is no other story in his life. This is the story of his life. As the words poured through his lips, he was severed, rent, and simultaneously reformed. He told Lester Stovall what happened. What he did. And the words spoke back to him, under cover, muffled so only he could hear, and now he knows that he cannot leave this stifling small room unless he is in possession of another version of the story. He’s willing to do anything for that version to take shape. He doesn’t care what the new story costs.

  “Now I have a couple of questions,” Lester Stovall says, his face suddenly animated, no longer passive, as he leans back in his chair, then stands up and removes his jacket and sits down again. “If Corporal Jordan was on his way to provide backup for you, why didn’t you wait for him to arrive before you proceeded with processing the stop? Why didn’t you have Mr. Houston remain in his car until Corporal Jordan arrived?”

  If he had waited. If he had waited. Everything would be different now. He knows that. He has relived the moment when he ordered Paul Houston out of the car so many times he wonders why the incident has not been altered just by his will to make it so.

  “I…I’ve thought about that a lot, in fact,” he says, “and I think”—he feels Frey beside him, shifting anxiously. “I had been following him for a while, and…”

  “Carson, you don’t want to do this,” Frey whispers urgently.

  “I was ready for the stop,” he says anyway, plunging into the answer. “I got out of my cruiser, I guess, without thinking.”

  Although Frey’s hand rests heavily on Carson’s arm as if to hold him back from danger or tether him to earth, Carson feels the words he has just spoken have lifted him, curiously, out of harm’s way.

  “Without thinking?” Stovall looks at him through his thin, frameless designer glasses, his eyes sharp, blinking, and alert.

  “Yes.”

  “You know the proper procedure for a traffic stop like this one?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You thought the driver may have been eluding you?”

  “I did.”

  “Yet you chose not to wait for backup before asking the subject to get out of his car?”

  That decision made no sense. Was it a decision? Adrenaline? Instinct? Was I out of control? I wanted to show him I was in control. He feels himself sinking, liquefying before Stovall’s bureaucratic gaze. “That’s correct.”

  Stovall looks away from Carson and writes on a legal pad on the desk.

  “Carson, what are you doing?” Frey asks in a loud whisper that Carson ignores.

  “How did you approach the driver?”

  “I approached the car with my weapon drawn and I told him to get out of the car.”

  “Why did you approach with your weapon drawn?”

  “Because I thought he was eluding me and I wasn’t sure what I would find.” Since I hadn’t waited for Jordan, I needed my gun.

  “And because you didn’t wait for backup?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I have a few words with him?” Frey asks.

  The building is constructed like a bunker, a low, flat, sprawling series of small offices, all concrete walls and cheap, scarred linoleum and fluorescent lights. Outside the room, in the hallway, Frey says, “You’re hanging yourself in there. Why are you doing this?”

  “Something happened when I told the story. It just feels like the way I have to handle this. I don’t want to hide anything anymore. I didn’t plan what’s happening.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asks in exasperation.

  “Not really. For the first time since this happened, Matthew, I don’t care. I don’t wanna save my ass. I want to get this off my back. Face myself. Face everything about what happened.”

  “This isn’t the place for that.”

  “I’ve made it that place.”

  Back in the interrogation room, Lester Stovall asks Carson, moments after he and Matthew Frey are seated, “What commands did you give the driver?”

  Carson folds his hands on the desk and looks at Lester Stovall full on for the first time. “I told him to drop what he was holding in his hand, but he didn’t drop it, and he kept walking toward me and pointing the object at me.” But you had to be there. You had to be me. It was a blur. And it was the clearest moment of my life. I know there’ll never be another moment that I know so well and remember as a slow-motion catastrophe, my own instant Hiroshima.

  “How many times did you give that command?”

  I don’t know. Did he even hear me? Maybe he was pissing his pants, scared and deaf and stupid and sure there was no way he was gonna die that night.

  “Several.”

  “Why did you fire your weapon?” He hears the tremor of impatience in Stovall’s voice, the judgments, and thinks, I was afraid. I didn’t know what else to do.

  “I was afraid for my life.”

  “How many shots did you fire?” Seven? Eight? It felt like I unloaded my whole magazine. I’d never fired my weapon before. Never. That night was the first time. The first fuckin’ time.

  “Three. I fired three shots.”

  “What did you do after you fired your gun?”

  “I examined the driver for his condition. He was dead. And then I saw a cell phone a few feet away from his body.” And then I wanted to turn my weapon on myself. Then I crawled a few feet away and threw up. And then I lost everything and I still haven’t got it back. “I radioed in to the dispatcher that shots had been fired.”

  “Where did you go after you left Matthew Frey?” Bunny asks as they sit together on the bed. It’s nine-thirty and she’s been frantic, wondering where Carson went when he left IAD headquarters at three-thirty that afternoon.

  “I drove around. Then I needed a drink. In fact, I needed a lot of drinks. So I could stand to look at myself in the mirror.”

  “I’m not gonna let you go back into that dark place, Carson. I don’t care what you saw in yourself or think you saw today. I won’t let you take us all back there again.”

  “When I heard the story this time, I was hearing a verdict. A judgment that I rendered on myself. And I asked myself the question I haven’t wanted to ask all these months: Am I a bad cop? Have I become the kind of cop I swore I’d never be? If I’m not, how else could this have happened? I’d chalked it all up to a tragedy that couldn’t be helped. I thought what I saw was a gun. It was a mistake. I wanted to believe it happened to me. That I didn’t make it happen. I don’t know what it was. What got into me. Everything Matthew and I had practiced, everything we’d rehearsed, the attitude, the correct type of answers…I lost it. Maybe I didn’t lose it. It didn’t feel like I lost it. It was more like it was lifted or stripped from me. Every question felt like a trial. I walked into that room with cataracts, or blinders. I came out and I’d caught sight of everything I did wrong that night. I caught sight, but it’s a picture I still don’t want to see. And I could tell Stovall was thinking what a fuckup I am. I’d never seen it clear like that in a fellow officer’s eyes, on his face, with no bullshit offers of sympathy or support—how are you? Anything I can do for you? It was all there, staring back at me.

  “Leave me alone, okay?” he orders, shrugging out of the grasp of Bunny’s hands on his shoulders. “Leave me alone. That’s the best thing you can do for me now.”

  When Carson sees Carrie Petersen again he tells her, “I don’t know if I can go back. Not with what I know now. It doesn’t matter if they sanction me or send me for retraining or what. I
don’t care about that now. There’s nothing the department can do that’ll come close to what I’m going through.”

  “Do you want to go back?” Carrie Petersen asks him. She’s been on vacation, two weeks in Aruba, and she’s returned with a bronze glow and highlights in her hair, now shortened to a pixie cut that has made her nearly unrecognizable, Carson thinks. She looks different, and she greeted Carson with a pronounced enthusiasm as she ushered him into her office that he knows is the afterglow of vacation, intense and sure to fade. But she’s the same Carrie, he discovers, once he tells her about the IAD interview, quietly relentless and thoughtful in her performance of what he has come to consider a sixty-minute mental autopsy.

  “Sure. I wanna go back.”

  “Why?” Her favorite question. No one has ever asked him why so many times. He never realized or imagined the depth of his motivations, how they lay camouflaged, ignored, denied, in the shadow of all his actions. Why? The one-word question sends him scurrying in his mind, looking for the hiding places where everything that makes him tick is buried.

  “For vindication. To prove in some way that it matters to me that I managed to overcome what happened. That I didn’t really lose everything. I don’t want twelve years to be a waste.”

  “Twelve years is a long time, Carson, but not that long. You could start over in a new career.”

  “You sound like my wife.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” She laughs.

  “No comment.”

  “What is it that you know now about yourself that you didn’t before?”

  “That if I’d done things differently that night, that young man would be alive.”

  “You didn’t know that before?”

  “I never let myself think about it.”

  “And this knowledge makes you feel what?” she asks, her eyes narrowed, lips pursed, forehead wrinkled in quizzical mockery of his pronouncement.

  “Like a danger. To myself. To others. Maybe to everybody. There’s something wrong with me. Otherwise it couldn’t have happened. Not the way it did, anyhow.”

  “Does that conclusion give you any satisfaction? Does it make you feel in control?”

  “At least now I know.”

  “Carson, you’ve decided to know; you’ve decided to conclude this about yourself.”

  “Maybe I have. And yeah, maybe I do feel like this is where I belong, this is who I am. Who I always was. And I’m a thief in a whole new way. I stole a son from another family. I don’t dream about the shooting as much anymore, but now it’s about that family and the son they no longer have. A thief. A killer, that’s what I am.”

  “Do you think you can live in a meaningful way with such a conclusion?”

  “I’m taking one day at a time.”

  “Tell me about the last couple of years. How’ve you felt about your job? You told me about Eric. When he was killed, what happened in your life?”

  “I changed. The job changed. He was more than a friend.”

  “In what ways?”

  Saying that he was a thief, that he is a killer, that was easier than what she wants him to say now. If he talks about Eric, which he realizes he’s never done with anyone else like this, maybe the talking will bring him back. If for only a moment. “He was a lifeline. I didn’t need the things some of the others on the force need—drugs, booze, other women. I had Eric. I always thought of him as my first real friend. My best friend. I mean, I love my wife and kids. But Eric was out there in the same situations I saw. He understood.”

  “What did he understand?”

  “Me. The Job. And when I told him about the robberies I committed, nothing changed with us. He even gave me the courage to think about telling Bunny one day.”

  “Did you?”

  “Naw.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve got to keep some secrets.”

  “How did you grieve Eric’s death?”

  He’s back now. Carson feels Eric not as a memory but as a presence, filling the room, inhabiting his own body. He hears his hoarse laughter, hears him telling him once again, “Slow down, brother, slow down.” “I…I’m not sure. He had a full police funeral, you know the kind we give to a cop killed in the line of duty. But he had a reputation that everybody respected. We felt like he had died in the line of duty. Just being his friend made me a better man. They wanted me to talk about him at the funeral. Everybody knew how close we were. You know I couldn’t get up there and talk about what he meant to me? It made his death too real. So I let him down. He’d never done that to me. And whenever it rains at night and I’m out, even now, I think how fucked up it was to be changing a stranger’s tire in the dark, in the rain, and for death on four wheels to come barreling at you and snuff you out like a candle.”

  “How was your performance on the job after he died?”

  “My evaluations started slipping. There were two brutality charges against me, but they were bogus. Nothing ever came of them. I was cleared. Sure, I was a little overzealous.”

  “Were you angry?”

  “Damned right.”

  “Did you take it out on the people you had to interact with in performing your job?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I stopped seeing their faces. I was on automatic. Yeah. I stopped seeing their faces. It was rough. A couple of months after Eric died, we had a spate of killings all over the county, seventy-two murders in six months. Do you know what that means? That’s twelve a month. Three people a week. Coming to a scene and finding somebody shot in the head or the neck, slumped over the steering wheel of their car…Shit, we found bodies stuffed in trunks, in dumpsters, on the side of the road, as though they’d been tossed there from speeding cars.” He shakes his head. “I’ll never forget one week, there were three murders in my district and I was called to two of them. And when I looked at those bodies I saw Eric’s face. Then after a while I had to stop seeing any faces in order to do what I had to do. I was on automatic.”

  “How’d you handle the pain?”

  “I didn’t want to take it home, so I’d hang out at The Blue Diamond with other officers after my shift. They weren’t my friends, but they were my tribe. Being around them I didn’t see the faces of the dead, Eric or some unknown, unidentified Jane or John Doe, or some mother’s known son or daughter.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Sure. Drinking and talking and talking and drinking, it helped…some.”

  “Were you in pain the night of the shooting?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you see Paul Houston? Did you really see his face?”

  “Either way I answer that question, I’m fucked.”

  Three weeks before Christmas, Carson is cleared by Internal Affairs, the shooting ruled Justifiable. That single word allows him back on the force. But it solves nothing. Lays nothing to rest. Does not make him feel vindicated, as Carson had long thought it would. Because if the shooting was justified, why did he feel so counterfeit when he received the formal letter, with that word one of many on the page, stating the outcome of the internal investi gation? If the shooting was justified, why was he so surprisingly ambivalent about going back on the force when he got the call to report for duty? Why had the nightmares seemed to intensify in the days before he returned to work? Why is he afraid he could kill again?

  Back on duty, Carson is assigned to evening desk duty, the assignment everyone hates. He answers phones, fielding calls about everything from barking dogs and busted water mains to shootings. He processes the release of impounded vehicles. The calls are ceaseless, as, it seems, is the flow of confused, haven’t-got-a-clue citizens who appear before the front desk, asking for an answer to a mundane inquiry that the police department often can’t answer.

  “You sure you wanna do this?” Wyatt Jordan asks Carson. They are sitting in Wyatt’s cruiser in the district headquarters parking lot.

  “It’s not about being sure—it’s just something I feel I gotta do. I don’t
know why. But I feel like I gotta do it.”

  “Sure.” Wyatt shrugs. “I’ll run a check on the Houstons. Hell, we could do it right now,” he says, pointing to the mobile data terminal stationed between them in the front seat.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t do it. Maybe you should ask one of the secretaries to pull the information. That way nobody can trace the request back to you or me,” Carson tells him.

  “That’s a plan.”

  The lot is bordered by mounds of snow, icy, dirt-encrusted remnants of last week’s storm.

  “I ran a check on Monique before we got married. You see how much good that did,” Wyatt says with a chuckle. “How you holding up on desk duty?”

  “It sucks.”

  “They’ll ease you back on patrol soon.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “When you get back out there, just remember not to second-guess yourself. It’s too late for that, Carson. It won’t do you or anybody any good. You did the only thing you could that night.”

  “That’s what everybody tells me,” Carson says wearily.

  “They’re not just telling you that. Whatever you got to go through to put this behind you, you better do it before you go back on patrol.”

  “How do you get over shooting somebody the way I did?”

  “Look, I’m just saying…”

  “I know. I know.”

  “What’re you gonna do with the information, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like the man I shot is a phantom, or a ghost. I want to know who he was, who his parents are.”

  “That’s spooky shit, Blake.”

  “I don’t just have the dream, Wyatt—I live with a picture of him in my mind that’s half developed. Freeze framed, stopped at the moment I killed him. You talk about moving on, but I’m stuck, and I can’t go on until the rest of that picture gets filled in. It’s like there was a bond that was formed between us that night and it doesn’t matter that he’s dead. He’s not dead for me. Fact is, he never will be.”