“Open the door, Gallagher.”
Still no response. Emmit and I made eye contact, and he spoke softly into the radio, alerting the backup officers that “we’re going in. Suspect is present but uncooperative.”
I edged up along the side of the door, reaching for the knob, but expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t; it turned easily. This was the dangerous moment; there was no way to enter without being exposed, no matter how quickly we did so. If Gallagher had a gun, we had a problem.
I nodded to Emmit, and signaled that I would go first and he would follow. When one enters situations like this, the plan is not to saunter in saying, “Honey, I’m home.” Even though there is effectively no chance for surprise, as much shock and chaos must be created as possible, to rattle the suspect.
So I slowly turned the knob, took a deep breath, threw the door open, and burst through, screaming. I felt Emmit barreling in behind me, screaming as well. When it comes to barreling and screaming, he makes me look like an amateur.
The room was sparsely furnished and dirty. A small kitchen table had partially eaten food on it, and the bed, which was more like a cot, had only a blanket, no sheets or pillow. There was a small television sitting on the floor, with a “rabbit ears” antenna, and there was a laptop computer next to it.
I didn’t notice all these things until later, because my attention at that moment was on Steven Gallagher, sitting on the floor against the wall. More specifically, my attention was on his right hand, which was holding a gun, finger on the trigger.
It wasn’t pointed at me, which at the moment did not provide me with that much comfort. I pointed my own gun at him and screamed, “Drop the weapon!”
He looked at me strangely, almost as if he was trying to understand what I was saying. I saw a look of pain on his face, misery like I don’t think I have ever seen before, and I’ve seen a lot of it. Of course, everything I’m describing happened in a split second, so I could be wrong about all or part of it. But I don’t think I am.
He didn’t say anything, but he raised the gun. His finger was still on the trigger.
I didn’t wait to see what he would do with it; I put three bullets into his chest, pinning him back to the wall. Which means I never got to find out what he was going to do with the gun.
The moment my weapon discharged, I was no longer involved in the investigation.
Instead I became a witness and had to relate in excruciating detail exactly what transpired. I also, in the minds of at least some members of the public, was about to become a suspect. I had killed a man, and the burden would be on me to show that it was a justifiable act.
Emmit called in the report, and the scene immediately became chaotic. Captain Barone arrived pretty much at the same time as the homicide detectives, which meant that he was monitoring the situation very closely. It was far more involvement than was typical for him, but then again, calls from the Governor about a case were rather rare.
After I had given the first of what would be a number of official statements, Barone came over to me. “You OK?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah.” This was the first person I had ever killed; I had shot a previous suspect, but he was not badly wounded. I had even managed to serve in Iraq during Desert Storm without firing a weapon in anger.
I was feeling a little shaken by the experience, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from having killed Gallagher or from the realization that I could have been killed myself.
“You did what you had to do,” Barone said.
I nodded. “How come I don’t see any FBI agents here?”
He snapped his fingers. “Damn. I knew I forgot something.”
“You realize you’re going to have to bring them in, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Once we have forensics that connect this to Brennan.”
“Any indication of that so far?”
He nodded again. “Some bloody clothes in a plastic bag.” Then he smiled about as wide as I’ve ever seen him smile. “Oh, I forgot. There was also a bloody knife in the bag.”
I knew he had plenty of information to justify calling in the FBI, and so did he. He didn’t even need the forensics; just the fact that we were acting on a tip that Gallagher killed Brennan was enough. “They’re going to be pissed.”
“Ask me if I give a shit,” he said. “I don’t answer to them. The President didn’t call me; the Governor did.”
“You da boss.”
“Besides, they’ll know by tomorrow morning either way.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because they’ll see us on the Todayshow.”
He wasn’t kidding. The next morning a limousine was at my house at five thirty to take me into the city. Barone was already in the backseat waiting for me, wearing his Sunday best.
The publicity shit had hit the fan sometime during the night. Barone had alerted the Governor, the media, and the FBI, in that order. I was already being called a hero, which didn’t thrill me and led me to believe that our hero standards are being lowered somewhat. I had shot a drug-addled kid sitting on the floor; that didn’t exactly make me Davy Crockett defending the Alamo.
Lester Holt conducted the interview, which was fairly uncomfortable. He kept trying to talk to me, since I was the one who did the shooting, but Barone kept cutting in. It’s not that he was imparting crucial information; he basically repeated the mantra that the investigation was ongoing, so there was very little we could say. If I were Holt, I would have asked that if there was nothing we could say, what the hell were we doing there? But he didn’t.
Nor did anyone else, and there were plenty of opportunities. Barone had set up almost an entire day of news interviews, and we traveled from media location to media location, not answering the same questions, over and over again. It seems like half the people in this city are newscasters, while the other half somehow manages to have no idea what’s going on in the world.
If I’ve ever spent a less productive or more annoying day, I can’t remember when. Not only was no news being made, but the trappings were insufferable. For instance, each place insisted on applying makeup to our faces, even though it had already been applied repeatedly throughout the day. By the time we got to the fourth studio, I refused to allow it. Had I not, archaeologists would eventually have had to lead an expedition to dig down to my actual skin.
Barone handled it all with something between good cheer and outright jubilation. I wasn’t quite feeling so happy, and it wasn’t because of the pointless interviews. I had killed a young man, and it just didn’t strike me as something to celebrate. It’s not that I felt guilty about it; he had a gun and most likely would have killed me had I not shot first. My reaction was textbook police work, and would stand up to any scrutiny from anybody.
Gallagher also was likely the man who murdered Judge Brennan, so his removal from the planet was certainly not going to usher in a round of hand-wringing from me or anyone else. I expected I’d feel a little better when evidence tied him conclusively to the Brennan murder, but I was quite sure that it would. But for the moment, I was uncomfortable receiving plaudits for ending a young life.
I called my answering machine at home, and discovered it was filled. There were eighteen messages, mostly from people I worked with, calling to congratulate me, and inviting me to come down to the Crows Nest that night. It’s the bar we always go to whenever there is something to celebrate, or whenever there isn’t.
The only nonwork person who called was Linda Farmer, a girlfriend I had broken up with two weeks before. She hadn’t seemed that devastated by the breakup at the time, perhaps because we dated less than a month. But apparently my new hero status was motivation for her to try and resurrect the relationship.