“A white cop?”
Hal shook his head. “With you guys.”
“Didn’t see no white guy. But what do I know? I didn’t know they was gonna pull that shit either.”
Hal kept pressing. “How about the guys in the building?”
“Told you I don’t know nothin’ about them.”
“So you didn’t see a white guy with them?”
“Didn’t see no white guy ’cept the cops.”
Watching Carson in silence, Hal tipped his chair back and then forward again, landing with a thwack on the linoleum.
Neill rounded the table to stand beside him. “You’re seventeen—means you’re an adult in the eyes of the law. You ever been to prison?”
Carson didn’t answer. Instead, he stared at the ceiling like it was a screen playing a movie he’d never seen.
Neill put his palms on the table. “Nice-looking guy like you. You’d be some fresh meat.”
Carson didn’t make eye contact. Which meant they were losing him.
“You know what they’re going to do with you? Some big guy’s going to make you his girlfriend, Dwayne. You go that way? You like being some guy’s girlfriend?”
Kid like this, he’d heard these threats before. Most of his friends had probably been to jail. This was Neill’s witness, but Hal felt him slipping away. He waited for Neill to give Hal some room to work.
“Ain’t no faggot.”
“Only thing standing between you and prison is me, Dwayne.”
Hal sat back, glanced at his watch and rubbed the face of it gently with his shirtsleeve. His only link to the murders. Come on, Neill.
“You got sixty seconds to start talking,” Neill said.
Carson patted his pocket and sat up in his chair, something in his expression relaxing as though he realized he’d had the answer the whole time. The spark of fear in his eyes vanished. “I want my lawyer.”
Hal watched him draw something from his pocket.
“What bullshit is this?” Neill asked. “A lawyer?”
Carson handed Hal a worn business card. Martin L. Abbott, Esquire.
A lawyer. Hal turned away and clenched his jaw. It was over. Abbott was high profile and expensive, not someone this kid would have access to. Not on his own, anyway.
Someone was helping him.
Hal handed it to Neill, who tossed it back at Carson.
“You think that lawyer’s going to help you?” Neill barked. “How are you going to pay him, Dwayne? A guy like that costs five hundred bucks an hour.”
“I ain’t talking without my lawyer.”
“You’d be saving yourself a lot of trouble by telling us who hired you to sell those guns,” Neill said.
Carson didn’t respond.
Hal smacked his palm on the table, making it stutter across the floor. “This isn’t a game, Dwayne.”
“I ain’t playing at nothin’, officer.”
Hal heard the knock on the door and knew they were done.
Carson had asked for an attorney. No more questions until he made his call. And to Martin Abbott.
That was bad luck.
*
Down in the lab, Hal found Hailey pacing the speckled linoleum floor. One of the techs, Naomi Muir, was working at a station nearby.
“She driving you crazy?” he asked Naomi.
Hailey stopped and scowled at Hal.
“Not at all,” Naomi said. “I like the noise.”
Across the room, Roger sat hunched over his keyboard. Roger had a condition called alopecia universalis, which left him completely hairless. It had taken Hal some time to get used to the way a person looked without eyebrows or eyelashes. Even after five years, it was still the first thing Hal noticed whenever he saw Roger. Seemed like it shouldn’t be that way, but there it was. As a way of an unspoken apology, he had brought Roger a bumper sticker a few months back. It hung on the wall of his workspace.
With a body like this, who needs hair?
“Can you make her stop?” Roger asked.
“No way,” Hal said. “She’s the boss, man.”
Hal and Hailey had both been up most of the night, and while he moved slowly, dragging his limbs like he was underwater, sleep deprivation made Hailey antsy. And the more exhausted she was, the harder it became for her to sit still.
She still had no answers from Jim, who had been given a sedative at the hospital and was sleeping. CSU had spent most of the night processing the house, though they hadn’t come up with anything particularly useful in the process.
Hailey finally stopped pacing long enough to ask Hal what had happened with Dwayne Carson.
“Kid’s a dead-end with a high-priced attorney.” He filled her in on Martin Abbott.
Hailey sank into a chair.
“Martin Abbott,” she whispered. Her shoulders tightened, and for a moment, she was completely still.
Hal tried to read her reaction. What was she thinking? “Did Jim know Abbott?”
She shrugged, an awkward jerky motion, without looking at him. The way she averted her gaze, hesitating to answer questions related to her family—that was not new. It had started in the months after John died.
In the weeks after his father’s death, he, too, had distanced himself from his friends, creating a safe buffer to see whether they settled on his side or the other. He’d been a kid—only twenty-three. So much about that time was blurry now. He wished he could share it with Hailey, tell her that it had been a mistake not to trust in the people who had always been there for him.
How could he do that without confronting her about how secretive she’d become?
She finally looked up, caught his stare and said, “They’re friends, I guess, but I can’t see what either would want to do with that gunrunner we found dead in the closet.”
“But Jim, Colby Wesson, the Dennigs, the gunrunner—they all got buttons. Then, we’ve got a kid who lawyers up with Martin Abbott, of all people… It’s a tight circle. There’s got to be some link. The only thing that makes sense is the guns.”
Hailey said nothing, so Hal turned to Roger, who was still typing at the computer. “What’ve you got, baldy?”
Roger smiled, one bald man to another. “Just getting a read on the button now. Letter’s still running.”
Hal had seen the letter the night before. After the interview with Carson, he had stopped by the lab to talk to Roger. The letter had been inside the FedEx envelope lying beside Jim.
Now, he followed Hailey across the room and looked again at the single page, printed on an HP LaserJet in Times New Roman font.
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people,” Hal read out loud. “I know your darkness, Senator. Yours is a very old special.”
“It’s Jung,” Roger said.
Hal and Hailey said nothing.
“Carl Jung,” Roger added. “The famous—”
“Okay, Doctor Wikipedia,” Hailey said.
Roger laughed.
“It sound like anything else you’ve seen?” Hal asked Hailey.
She shook her head. “I’m sure Jim gets all sorts of weird stuff.”
“But usually not with a bullet,” he pressed.
“Right,” Hailey agreed. She met his gaze and held it, her normal confidence gone, as if she’d just accepted a dare she wasn’t sure she could stomach.
Finally, she rubbed her arms, and said, “I don’t honestly know,” and resumed her pacing.
Hal felt slighted by the response. Though she’d been keeping her distance for more than a year, he still felt the fresh sting when he butted up against the wall Hailey had built between them. What stung more were the lies and omissions. Maybe they weren’t important things. Maybe they were none of his business, but he used to think they shared more than other partners did.
He’d thought they were closer than other partners.
Now he wasn’t sure.
They’d been together seven years now, since she’d r
eturned from maternity leave after Camilla was born. They’d had only a few periods of separation since—when she gave birth to Ali, the five weeks he spent recovering from a shoulder surgery, and her leave of absence after John’s death.
In all that time, he had never felt more distant from her than he did now.
From across the room, Roger asked, “You get philosophy on any of the others?”
“Only to wage peace and not war,” Hailey answered, still moving.
“I guess that’s philosophy.”
“We’re not much into philosophy, Roger,” Hal said.
“Right, we’re more into names,” Hailey added and turned to pace the silent lab, her heels clacking on the floor.
As Hailey walked by, Hal took her gently by the shoulders.
“I’m pacing?”
Hal nodded.
Hailey exhaled and sank into a chair.
“Thank you, Hal,” Roger said. “Now I can think.”
Hailey rolled her eyes at them and turned to her phone. “Got a text from ballistics.” She scrolled, reading the message. “They dug a .38 slug out of the wall of Jim’s house,” she said.
“Like in the note.”
“Maybe,” she said.
Hal found it hard to believe that Hailey hadn’t made the same connection, but he didn’t push. You’re going to have to push. He tried to follow the logic. “So Jim gets this letter yesterday and a button, along with a bullet. A dead gunrunner is found with an identical button. We haven’t seen any of these buttons in a year and now we’ve got two inside two hours.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Roger said.
“Why now? Why these guys?”
Hailey didn’t look over at him. “Jim isn’t pro-gun. He’s more moderate than most Republicans. He actually believes in restrictions.”
“He doesn’t vote for restrictions, does he?” Hal asked, feeling his own outrage building.
Hailey glanced away. “The party politics make it tough.”
“A republican voting for gun control would be outrageous,” Roger added.
“Seems like he’s in pretty heavy with the gun guys,” Hal said. “Can’t imagine they would like a vote for restrictions.”
Hailey didn’t respond.
Hal tried to appreciate that Jim was her family now. She wanted to protect him. But above the truth?
“How long before we get lab results on these?” she asked Roger.
“We’re running the button from the senator’s house and letter concurrently,” Roger explained. “It’s faster to run both at once, but we’ve probably got another five or ten minutes.”
Hailey went to sit on the far side of the room, and Hal leaned back, watching her through partially closed eyes, wondering what she was thinking, if she’d considered that Jim might, somehow, be involved in something that would warrant someone wanting to shoot him. He wondered if she’d ever tell him, one way or the other. Wondered if he’d have the guts to ask the question.
He hadn’t pushed his mother for the truth either. To this day, she’d never told him whether or not she thought the allegations about his dad were true. Somehow, the real story became like a neighbor she could avoid by not answering the doorbell. Hal was out of the house by then, attending the police academy in Alameda.
The day Hal read the newspaper headline, he ran for four miles before he reached the fancy part of Oakland, where the houses were as large as city blocks, where the lawns were manicured, and flowerbeds were as big as his whole front yard. He ran through the oak-lined streets while white people in fancy cars stared at him. Ran back up under the freeway and into the desolate streets of Oakland, the place where black kids didn’t have a fighting chance, where instead of struggling their way toward the top, they simply made themselves at home on the bottom.
He ran through the place where his father had worked, the “war zone.”
Ten miles later, soaked and beaten, Hal had arrived at the police station where his father had brought him from the time he was barely old enough to speak, long before he was old enough to understand his father’s job.
He never made it inside the heavy glass doors.
They met him on the steps—his father’s captain and partner. Before he could get inside for a breath of air-conditioned air, they told him to walk back out, to leave it alone. He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. He wanted to fight. He started a brawl, but before he could throw a punch, he’d been handcuffed.
As a favor to his mother, his father’s partner had put Hal in the back of a squad car, still cuffed, and delivered him home. Sitting in the back of that black and white, the grill separating him and the good guys, Hal had felt a penetrating suffocation, the terrifying sense that he’d never fill his lungs fully again.
By the time he got home, he was wheezing and choking so badly his mother had wanted to take him to the hospital. After the officers had uncuffed him, he’d huddled on the front lawn, fighting to catch his breath. He got down on hands and knees and pressed his face to the grass his father had tended with such pride—the same grass his father had studded with American flags every Fourth of July.
His father’s captain had agreed not to record the incident as long as Hal stayed away, to give him a final chance to make it through the academy, if that was what he wanted.
His lungs had settled just fine once those cuffs were off and he was outside the car.
Seeing he was all right, his mother had gone inside, and when he walked into the house, still drenched and hot, she was sitting at the table, the paper he’d stuffed into the garbage can spread in front of her, the torn bits of print smoothed out, her pink fingertips blackened with ink. Without a word, she motioned for him to sit across from her where a tall glass of water waited. He chugged the water, and as soon as it hit his stomach, he stumbled outside to retch. He sat on the front step then, and cried, his tired, tight stomach heaving until his mother finally emerged from the house to join him.
“You’re going to upset your sisters, Hal. They’ve been through enough. We all have.”
“It isn’t true. It can’t be.”
She sank onto the stair beside him, using the railing to lower herself down. “It don’t matter one way or another now, baby.”
“They set him up.”
She stared at her stained fingers and ran her palms over them. “Maybe.”
“What about his name? What about our name?” He nodded toward the house. “You’re going to stay here and just let them print that shit.”
“No, son. I ain’t. I’m going to go down and stay with David and Becca for a while. They got no kids and plenty of space.”
Los Angeles. She was moving across the state, away from their friends and family. “You just going to give up?”
“I don’t see it that way, Hal. I see it the opposite. I’m moving on.”
“What about his pension?”
She shook her head. “Don’t think we’ll be getting that, but we’ll make do without it.”
“What about—”
She stood then, wiped her hands across her sweatpants where they made little black hash marks like she’d been keeping score. “Your sisters will be back soon. They went to get some boxes. Don’t be talking this nonsense to them, you hear?”
He had wanted to ask her what he was supposed to do, where he fit in now with his whole family down south and him up here, him in the academy, setting out to follow in his father’s footsteps. He’d always considered it an honor, a legacy to be a cop, but that was all different now.
How could he go back there without knowing the whole truth about his father’s death?
What choice did he have but to go back?
Leaving the academy was as good as admitting to his father’s guilt. He owed it to the family to go back, hold his head high, and reclaim their family’s name. If they would let him.
On the day he returned, his captain had summoned him. In full dress uniform, he’d gone into the office, prepared to leave the academy behind with d
ignity.
His captain sat behind the desk, hands folded on a leather blotter while his lieutenant leaned against the far wall. “We hope you’ll finish the academy, Officer Harris,” his lieutenant said.
Hal had never felt such intense relief. He would stay. They wanted him to stay. There, he could prove himself. “Yes, sir,” he’d answered.
“Some of the men are going to have heard the news,” the captain said. His skin was as dark as Hal’s, peppered with tiny moles that you could only make out standing face to face. But his eyes were oddly light for such a dark man. It gave the impression that he held special powers—like he could see past words simply spoken to the truth behind them. “You understand, Officer Harris?”
Hal’s stomach went taut, his breathing skittish. “Yes, sir.”
“There are plenty of men with stories like this one. You have to decide how to handle it. Whether you’re going to fight his battle or yours,” the captain continued.
“Yes, sir.”
“I need to know whose battle you’re fighting.”
It would not be about his father, but about him. “Mine, sir.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“I know, sir.”
The captain and lieutenant shared a glance as Hal stared at his lap. He held his chin high, eyes open, and focused on the flag in the corner of the room.
His father had loved that flag.
Every year, in the last days of June, his father would line up flags all along the border of the yard. More than a hundred of them, one right beside the next, with just enough distance between them so that when the wind blew they had the space to stretch out.
If it rained, he’d take them down and put them back up as soon as it dried out again. If he was on patrol when the rain started up, he’d call from the car and tell Hal to do it.
At the end of July, when Mama finally convinced him that the holiday was over, he took them down again. He sat in the living room and rolled them one at a time, fastening each with a rubber band, laying them in a box labeled “Patriot Day” in his narrow print. The box then went up into the attic until the next year.
Hal wondered what would become of his father’s flags.
“Dismissed, Harris,” his captain said and rose from his chair.
The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set Page 34