A little time to myself. Time to think. Time to reflect on my life and the choices I’d made. Not a bad thing, I told myself. Everyone should do it.
That worked for about an hour.
For three days I had no newspaper. No TV. No phone calls. Larry Weiss never managed to get inside to see me. Maybe he was right-maybe I needed a better lawyer. Corrine didn’t get in either. Lucinda must’ve figured out where I was but she never showed. Guards delivered three meals a day, enough to survive on. They shrugged when I asked to see my lawyer. They laughed when I demanded to talk to the district commander. I didn’t bother to ask for Corrine or Lucinda. The stainless steel toilet and sink were clean when I arrived but started to stink on the second day. The world outside the stationhouse could’ve burned and I wouldn’t have known.
In the evenings before Jen Horlarche had hired me to watch the Southshore construction site, I’d been reading about a fishing village just over the Florida border from Georgia. Boats went out at night from the mouth of the St. Johns River and came back at dawn, their nets dripping salt back into the ocean, their holds full of shrimp or redfish or both. Winter, spring, summer, and fall, the waves danced in the sunlight where the river met the Atlantic. At the river mouth the undertow got crazy and every year riptides swept two or three people out to sea, waving good-bye to their family and friends on the beach. But the village looked like a place I wanted to be.
If I sold my house, I could afford to rent a moving truck and buy a place big enough for me and Jason-and Corrine, if she would come. I might have enough left over to buy a little boat and some nets. I’d finally decided the fishing village was more than a dream. Then Jen Horlarche had called and invited me to spend my nights in a wasteland where men stole copper. Instead of breathing deep in the warm salt spray, I’d sat in my car and watched dirty plastic sheets blowing across the dirt in the November wind and thieves and cops, who looked identical, shooting each other and my own hand coming away from my holster with my Glock in it. And pulling the trigger.
Every time I’d seen someone die I’d felt the world go a little quieter like I’d lost part of my hearing, and sooner or later the singing, laughing, and screaming would fade into a hushing wind of white noise. That had happened when my dad died. It had happened when Kevin, a boy I was supposed to be protecting, ended up twisted and broken on his mother’s kitchen floor. It had happened. Shooting the cop felt worse. I’d ripped a little hole in the universe and I wondered what sound would fly out through it.
For three days I stared at the three cinder-block walls, the bars that formed the fourth wall, and the concrete floor. I stared at myself too but I preferred the walls, floor, and metal bars.
On the afternoon of the fourth day a guard unlocked the cell door and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Detective Chroler wants to see you.” We went through the next cell block where the prisoners jeered and cheered me like they knew something about me that I didn’t know. Then we went through two security doors and were back among the living. Cops in uniforms or plainclothes walked the corridor, laughed with each other, or stood outside office doors talking on cell phones. It made me dizzy.
We went around a corner, into a stairwell, and up some stairs. Detective Jane Chroler had an office next to the stairwell. She sat at her desk looking unhappy, though I guessed she had been spending her days and nights in nicer places than I had. A stack of newspapers rested on the corner of her desk with a copy of the morning Sun-Times on top. The headline to the lead story read, NO PROGRESS IN SOUTHSHORE KILLINGS. A headline to a sidebar story next to it read, ROGUE INVESTIGATOR JAILED. The article included a small color photograph of me. It was the photograph from my detective’s license. In the paper it looked like a mug shot.
I knew Chroler had positioned the newspaper for my benefit. “Sit,” she said.
I took the chair across the desk from her, and the guard left us. A steam heater hissed softly, but the tile floor and the walls were bare and the room felt cold.
I said, “Ballistics confirmed what I told you?”
“More or less,” she said.
“More or less?”
“You fired your gun once, like you said. The bullet was in Officer Russo, like you said.”
“He’s the one who was helping the thieves?”
“According to what you’ve said.”
“And who says anything different?”
“No one.”
“So where’s the ‘more or less’?”
“Officer Russo’s gun was unloaded.”
“Huh?”
She nodded. “You say he aimed it at the other officers, but there were no bullets in it. So why would he do that?”
That made no sense. “He was on duty and his gun was unloaded?”
She shrugged. “A lot else remains unknown. We haven’t caught the others. When we do, they might tell us something about you.” She kept her eyes on me like she was expecting me to sweat.
The thieves couldn’t say anything about me. I sweated anyway. “I don’t think they’ll tell you anything very interesting.”
She cracked a small, mean smile. “I spent a little time over the last three days looking at records and getting to know you. And I’ve got to say, I don’t like you. When you were in the department you had a habit of breaking the rules and the habit got worse after you were fired. You’re a drunk. You use drugs. You-”
“I quit all that a long time ago.”
“Number one rule of AA: Once a drunk, always a drunk. You might not be drinking but you’re still a drunk, just waiting for life to get bad enough again to start you up again. Same thing for an addict, from what I’ve seen. Never a cure, just occasional vacations.”
I gave her a hard stare. It didn’t make her sweat.
She frowned. “This isn’t the first time you’ve been present when a cop has gotten shot, is it?”
“You know it isn’t.”
“You know where Detective Gubman is now?”
Two months earlier, my friend Bill Gubman had asked me to go with him to stake out and ID a robbery suspect I’d seen. I couldn’t ID the guy, but he’d shot Bill in the stomach. If I’d moved faster, I could’ve shot the suspect first. It was getting to be an old story.
Bill had spent three weeks in the hospital and another three in rehab. The doctors had taken out half of his upper colon and a couple other spare parts, but he’d lived. Far as I knew, he was at home recovering with his wife Eileen.
I said so to Chroler.
She shook her head. “First day back. He’s sitting at a desk downstairs.”
That made me happy, kind of. “Welcome him back for me.”
She shook her head some more. “He hates that desk. But that’s where he’ll be until he retires.”
I said, “Are you letting me go?”
“Got no reason to keep you.”
“You had no reason to keep me for three days.”
She shrugged. “We forgot about you.”
“I wish.”
“You need a better lawyer.” She reached under her desk, came up with a plastic bag, slid the bag across the desk to me.
I laid the contents on the desktop. My cell phone, the battery dead. My keys. My holster-without my Glock.
“My gun?” I asked.
“Impounded.”
My wallet. I flipped it open. Four twenties, a five, and two ones inside-probably what I was carrying when the police took it from me. Also my Visa card and driver’s license.
Something was missing.
“My detective’s license?”
“Under review,” Chroler said, like it was no big deal.
“What’s that mean?” There was no review process that the police were part of, not that I knew of. “The Department of Professional Regulation handles complaints, you don’t. Only the DPR can revoke a license.”