At six foot four and 240 pounds, Tom was no pygmy, but the bruiser who burst through the door shocked him. Tom could have been Jack of “Jack and the Beanstalk” facing down the giant who’d grind his bones for bread. It was the first time in Tom’s life that he felt small.
As he pushed his radio’s emergency call button and whipped out his GLOCK, the thug clumped across the landing, and the fire escape shook under his weight. Sweet Jesus. Where the hell is Cliff?
“Stop! Police! Drop the gun. Kneel down. Right there!” Tom shouted.
The man stomped down the stairs as if he intended to flick Tom onto the concrete parking lot below. His eyes looked crazed.
“Drop the gun! Do it now. NOW.” Tom’s heart pounded like a tiger was fighting to get out of his chest. “Drop the gun, or I’ll shoot!”
The man kept coming. Tom fixed his eyes on the gun barrel, looming just ten stairs above him. He could taste fear, like sour milk. Sweat poured down his face. Between him and the perp was nothing but metal rails and stair slats, which could ricochet bullets and wound Tom in ways he didn’t want to think about. No way in hell will I let that bastard kill me. Lisa needs a dad. As anger pulsed through Tom, he yelled, “Drop the $#@*! gun NOW!”
“Make me, pig.” The man aimed his gun and fired.
A bullet whizzed by Tom’s ear. He ducked. Okay, you asked for it, bastard. Bombs away. He shot. Twice. The perp doubled over on the bannister and slid to the third-floor landing. Tom cuffed him as Cliff staggered onto the fire escape, blood dripping down his face. Ambulances arrived, and the perp was now in prison.
Tom thought he’d fired two bullets, but the shoot team found seven casings from his gun. The difference testified to how adrenaline blocked unnecessary thought, like counting, so he could focus on survival—and how anger and fear could hype you up.
Tom could understand Andie’s trembling voice when she’d called for help. If Christopher had come at her to kill her, Tom couldn’t blame her for being mad and scared—and he could easily relate to whipping out a gun to protect yourself. But just because they’d both faced terror and chosen to shoot, he couldn’t lose perspective. He could not let empathy for Brady get in the way of finding truth.
CHAPTER 15
ANDREA
“What’s it been since we had a professional chat? Seven years?” When Andie had applied to join the force, Dr. Capoletti, the San Julian Police Department’s part-time psychologist, had given her psychological tests and interviewed her several times. Today he was supposed to help her through what was called critical incident stress.
“Seven years sounds about right,” Andie said.
“You’ve liked the job?”
“I loved it till three nights ago.”
“I’m not surprised to hear you say that,” Dr. Capoletti said. “Killing someone can be tough.”
Andie looked around the conference room where yesterday Tom Wolski had raked her over coals of disdain. She’d agreed to meet Dr. Capoletti here to save herself a ferry trip to his Seattle office. If Justice were at her feet, she’d feel safer. Since he wasn’t, the granite wall she’d built between herself and the outside world would have to protect her. Dr. Capoletti would not be allowed behind it.
He knitted his brows into a bushy, sympathetic line. “You must be upset.”
“A little.” My upset is the size of Texas.
“It would be understandable if you said ‘a lot.’ ” Dr. Capoletti’s warm smile complemented his kind eyes. The rest of him was rumpled. His blue shirt may never have seen an iron, and his curly salt-and-pepper hair needed to be trimmed. His razor also needed to be changed before it met his dimpled cheeks again.
“I’ve read your incident report,” he said. “You’re probably tired of repeating the facts, but would you mind going through them one more time? I’d like to know what you saw and what you did . . . if you’re okay talking about it.”
Andie grimaced, looked down at the table, and met Dr. Capoletti’s reflection just as she had Wolski’s and Jackson’s. For the next hour, she dipped her toe into the dark waters of deadly force and then waded in waist deep—but only with facts. She sifted through “this happened” and “then that happened,” her version of events sanitized of terror and guilt. Dr. Capoletti rested his elbows on the conference table and listened so intently that his whole body might have been covered with ears. When she paused, he nodded to encourage her to continue. Once in a while, he interrupted, “What was your reaction when that happened?” She answered only with what she’d thought.
Finally, she described the moment when she saw that her attacker was Christopher. Dr. Capoletti held up his hand for her to pause and brought up the bearded, iridescent polka-dotted elephant in the room: “What about your emotions? How did you feel when you realized it was Christopher?”
Andie paused to consider what to say. “I was surprised.” Totally shocked, if you want to know the truth. “I felt a little guilt.” Enough to fill a moving van. “Even though Christopher lived on my street, I’d never gone out of my way to know him. I feel bad that I didn’t help him before he went out of control.”
“You can’t rescue everybody, Andrea.”
“I wish I could rescue his parents. I want to apologize to them for killing their son.”
“It’s hard not to do what you feel is right, but legally you can’t talk with them now. Ron Hausmann would tell you that.” When Dr. Capoletti took a swallow from his Coke can, his Adam’s apple bobbed. “You know if you take a life, even justifiably, guilt is perfectly normal. I’d be surprised if someone as sensitive as you didn’t feel it. But we don’t want it to debilitate you.”
“Don’t worry. It won’t.” A shameless lie. Guilt had already sucked so much of Andie’s blood that she was emotionally anemic. “A friend showed me Christopher’s obituary this morning. He sounded like a saint. He was supposedly brilliant, generous, beloved. There wasn’t a word about him stabbing Justice and intending to stab me. It’s not fair. I thought my dog and I were going to die.”
“Andrea, I’m sensing some resentment underneath your guilt.”
“Maybe.” Andie had revealed too much. She huddled behind her wall.
“When people go through trauma, they can’t help being mad. It’s perfectly okay for anger to flare up sometimes. You can also expect sadness, depression, anxiety, irritability, emotional numbing. You could get paranoid.”
Andie could check each box in that list. No problem.
“Officers in your situation inevitably go through a notable disruption, and some have long-term problems. We want to head those off.” Dr. Capoletti took a pipe from his coat pocket, and in this no-smoking room he held the unlit bowl. “Any headaches or stomach issues?”
“No.”
“Trembling, sweating?”
Too many times to count. “Not really.”
“Are you going over and over what happened?”
Constantly. “Once in a while.”
“What about flashbacks? When you relive what you went through. Same sounds. Same smells.”
“No.”
“Nightmares? Panic attacks? They can be common after trauma.”
“I’m really fine.” Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Dr. Capoletti clamped his teeth down on the pipe’s lip; perhaps he wished Andie would provide responses he could sink his professional teeth into. “Andrea, I’m getting the sense that you’ve closed down.”
“How do you mean?”
“Shutting off your feelings. Being numb.”
“Maybe a little,” Andie admitted.
“You don’t have to be ashamed of being vulnerable.”
“I’m not vulnerable.” If Andie were Pinocchio, her nose would have grown through the window and across the parking lot.
Dr. Capoletti raised his eyebrows. As he paid inordinate attention to his pipe, silence filled the room. At first it pressured Andie to blurt out something, anything to fill the void, but then she thought she had a right not to
spill her guts. For long, awkward minutes, she watched her hands, folded on the tabletop, until they ended up a sweaty pretzel in her lap. She heard two men in the roll-call room arguing about a Seahawks game. Finally, she asked, “What do you want me to say?”
“What do you want to say?”
That I’m going through a classic case of what you called a “notable disruption.” That I feel horrible, and I’m not sure I’m going to get out of this mess in one mental piece. “I don’t want to say anything.”
“Why is that?”
Andie shrugged. “Because there’s nothing to say.”
Dr. Capoletti’s frown may have had as many wrinkles as his shirt. She bit her lip and waited for him to start on denial, yet another common symptom after trauma. Silent again, he looked like he was trying to determine how hard to push but only said, “Okay. Do you have any questions?”
“One. Well, two, actually.”
“I’m listening.” He leaned back in his chair.
“Of all the people on the planet, why was I the one who got caught in a terrible thing like this?”
“What do you think?”
“I have no idea. I did nothing to bring it on. I barely knew Christopher.”
“What’s your other question?” Dr. Capoletti asked.
“When I shot him, did I do the right thing?”
“What’s your answer to that?”
Andie’s cheeks flushed, her involuntary signal of chagrin. “I don’t have an answer. That’s why I asked.”
“I can see you’re annoyed,” Dr. Capoletti said. “I asked for your answer because I believe what matters most is what you think about whether you did the right thing. Once you know in your heart that you did, what anyone says or thinks won’t matter, because you can face whatever comes.”
Andie glanced at the ceiling’s white acoustical tiles, which were riddled with holes. “I still don’t know if I did right.”
“I’d like to help you find an answer. How about if we meet regularly for a while? I’d say you have a lot to work through.”
“There’s nothing I can’t take care of on my own.”
When Dr. Capoletti leaned forward, she could see broken capillaries in his nose. “All right. If you want to do this on your own, then at least take time right now to be good to yourself. Get stable. You need to sleep and eat well while you process what happened. If your feelings become too intense or you start having flashbacks or panic attacks, get yourself over to see me. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You know, between fifty to seventy-five percent of officers who kill someone leave law enforcement within five years. Second-guessing their actions and feeling moral pain get to them. I don’t want that to happen to you.”
“It won’t. I’m really okay,” Andie assured him one more time. Her replay button was stuck. She hunched down behind her wall, but the granite felt cold and lonely.
CHAPTER 16
ANDREA
As soon as Justice realized he was about to taste freedom, he charged through Dr. Vargas’s waiting room as if he intended to yank off Andie’s arm. He was so happy to escape that he seemed to forget the white plastic cone secured around his head to keep him from biting his incisions. At the front door he yipped like a puppy. Outside in the rain he tugged Andie to the parking lot.
But then he stopped and peered across the gravel at Wendy in her green scrub suit and Meghan in a yellow slicker. They were standing on each side of a suspicious rubber-surfaced plank that led into the back of a strange car. Justice twisted the cone around and looked up at Andie. What was that board? Where was her Honda? What was Rosemary’s person doing there?
“Meghan is driving you home in her Jeep Cherokee so you’ll have lots of room,” Andie said. “We’ve borrowed a ramp because you can’t jump in.”
Justice eyed it with scorn. Once he figured out that the women intended for him to walk up it, he stiffened his legs and dug intransigent paws into the gravel.
“Come on, Justice.” To urge him closer, Meghan patted her thighs and kissed the air.
Andie pulled him, like it or not, to the ramp, and six determined hands guided him up to a blanket nest. Justice’s disparaging glances at his oppressors let them know, I do not appreciate coercion. He plopped down with a groan.
As Meghan was about to close the door, he bonked his plastic cone against a window. His dark expression made irrefutably clear, This is the Cone of Doom.
“You’ll only have to wear it for a week or so,” Andie said.
Huff.
* * *
At home, Justice limped down the ramp and burst inside the house like a Cavalry Scout. He padded stiffly through each room and checked that it was still in order and in his absence nothing untoward had taken place—no furniture moved, nothing carried off by thieves, no bucket accidentally left on the kitchen floor. He may have sniffed vestiges of Tom Wolski and his team, but their invasion seemed no cause for alarm. Determining an all clear, he joined Andie and Meghan in the kitchen just as Rosemary landed with her usual thump outside on the windowsill.
Andie let her in and removed Justice’s cone—for now she could keep an eye on him and stop him from chewing his stitches. From his gold corduroy bed, which Andie called his throne, he grabbed his rubber carrot and paraded, squeaking, around the room—until Rosemary leapt out from behind the kitchen table’s pedestal and ambushed him.
Their evening wrestling match began. Round one: Rosemary lay on her back and flailed her legs, her claws politely sheathed. Justice whimpered and prodded her with his nose. Round two: He took her head into his mouth, and she resisted with halfhearted bats at his muzzle. Round three: He picked her up and carried her around the ring until she squirmed loose; in an amazing comeback, she pounced on him again. The contenders repeated the rounds, dog versus cat, no champion declared, until they got tired.
Usually, they cuddled up and napped together on Justice’s throne. But tonight Andie was browning hamburger to celebrate his homecoming, and, lured by the sizzle of beef, Justice and Rosemary stationed themselves at her feet. The desperation on their faces was as if they were only a whisker away from starvation and if she didn’t provide a heaping serving they would collapse, unrevivable, and slip away.
Meghan watched, her elbows on the breakfast table, her graceful hands folded under her chin. To keep her auburn hair from frizzing in the rain she’d pulled it back into a ballerina’s knot. Her features were delicate and even. “Imagine we thought Justice might never come home. Look at him now,” she said. “What do you think he’s thinking about getting s-t-a-b-b-e-d?”
“I’m not sure, but I doubt he’ll be happy to see another k-n-i-f-e.”
“Has he been upset?”
“At first he was depressed, but he seems better now.” With a spatula, Andie rearranged the hamburger for an even brown.
Justice’s and Rosemary’s nostrils quivered. Justice moaned as if to underscore that certain death from malnutrition awaited him.
“You should see the photo my client from hell brought in today,” Meghan said. “It shows some deranged Scotsman’s den, and everything was Royal Stewart tartan plaid. I mean everything—the walls, lampshades, rug, tablecloth, upholstery. It looked like some bagpiper had gone mad in there. She wanted me to decorate her family room like that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I tried to reason with her. I gave her a quick lecture on excess.”
“Did she understand?” Andie asked.
“I don’t know. Put me in a room like that and I’d start screaming in two seconds. I’m counting the days till this project’s done and she’s out of my hair.”
Justice and Rosemary were counting the seconds till Andie stopped cooking and they could sink their teeth into beef. Before they keeled over from anticipation, Andie turned off the burner and dropped three ice cubes into the meat to cool it quickly. She could relate to Justice’s, Rosemary’s, and Meghan’s impatience. Sometimes you got so anx
ious waiting for something to end, like Andie was waiting for Tom Wolski to finish his investigation—yet it had barely started. Hours of her days would go to combing through alternative outcomes for her future and wondering how she’d cope. And she had no control over any of it. She was trapped in a car without a steering wheel, and it was careening downhill, picking up speed as it went.
* * *
After Meghan and Rosemary had left and Justice had inhaled two more of Andie’s Welcome Home Pupcakes, she made her nightly gratitude list: 1) Justice is home! 2) He’s getting stronger! 3) Meghan is my dear, kind friend.
Andie dropped the list into her basket and hauled Justice’s throne upstairs to her bedroom. Usually he slept plastered against her legs, but now his wounds prevented him from jumping onto the bed. Accepting exile from his regular spot, he curled up on the gold corduroy the best he could while wearing the Cone of Doom. Andie tucked his white fleece teddy, Bandit, next to his chest for the night.
She climbed between her sheets with dread because she knew what was guaranteed to happen. As soon as she was alone with her thoughts, they’d zero in on Christopher as surely as a compass needle pointed north. And so they did. She lay there wondering, what had Christopher been thinking when he ran at her with his knife? She’d told him if he didn’t drop it she’d shoot. She’d given him fair warning twice.
Had he not heard? Or had he not believed she’d shoot? Or had he been determined to run at her, the devil be damned? What had he thought when she fired her gun? Did he have regrets? Was he angry that Andie followed through on her threat? Was he scared? The more she thought about it, she became sure that fear had ruled his mind as he faded away.
Andie remembered a night patrolling with a high-school tennis player who’d signed up for a Career Day program that allowed him to shadow a cop. As she drove along San Julian roads, her headlights fuzzy in the fog, he’d asked, “What’s the hardest part of your job?”
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