“Put your hands up!” he shouts, a surging infusion of fear flooding his insides, as liquid and warm as blood.
He’s no longer a pretty boy but a looming threat. The man is holding an object in his left hand, smooth, hard, shiny as the moon in the sky.
“Put your hands up!” Uncertainty balloons inside Carson. The words bruise his throat as he issues them with a force he hopes the man will immediately respect.
“I’m not … It’s not …” the man pleads, again turning his head to face Carson and in one swift move rising from the ground.
Where is Jordan? Carson wonders, another surge of fear sliding down his spine. Pointing the object at Carson, the man steps forward.
“What’s in your hand?”
“Look, I said it’s …” the man insists, taking another step toward Carson, pointing at him with the hand holding the object. The night, the sky, the stars overhead: they all swirl around him, a dreamy encroachment. Carson is alone. In a darkened parking lot. And terribly afraid.
“Drop what you’re holding and put your hands behind your head,” Carson orders as his finger trembles, a whisper away from the trigger.
“Officer, I said …”
It’s his fingers and his hands, both of them clutching the Beretta, it’s even his body, that pulls the trigger. All he sees is the man’s hand and the object pointed at him in the moment he fires his weapon for the first time ever.
Wyatt Jordan pulls into the strip mall parking lot and parks a few feet away from Carson and the body on the ground. Two minutes ago he heard Carson radio in to the dispatcher that there had been a shooting: “Shots fired.” Through the radio system that connected Carson to the dispatcher and Wyatt to them both, Wyatt heard Carson’s voice, shell-shocked and unraveling. Damn, Jordan thought, accelerating toward his destination as he heard Carson’s call, wondering who was down and what he would find.
Walking from his squad car to Carson’s cruiser, Wyatt Jordan realizes that Carson Blake is no longer a fellow officer he just barely knows. As the first to arrive at the scene, he will be bound to Carson from now on by the kind of knowledge both men can only submit to but never fully understand.
Jordan examines the man on the ground, scans the area around the body for a weapon, sees the cell phone, and then walks over to Carson, slumped in the front seat of his cruiser. The driver-side door of the car is open. Jordan crouches down beside Carson and pries the gun from his moist, steely grip. “What happened, Blake? Are you okay?”
“I thought it was a gun, I swear, I thought it was a gun.” The words are breathy and heavy, whispered like a confession. Jordan sees before him a mere remnant of the man he had joked with half an hour ago.
Wyatt Jordan looks away, seeking relief from the face, from the husky sound of Carson’s sobs as he weeps into his hands. Jordan lets his eyes scan the circumference of the parking lot and the darkened houses across the street where people are sleeping. Then he turns back to Carson, his large beefy arm enfolding Carson’s shoulders, cradling him in a stiff embrace. He doesn’t know what else on earth to do.
Emergency Medical Services is the first to rumble into the parking lot of the strip mall and begin examining the body. Soon the lot is ablaze with high-beam-intensity lights from fire trucks, a fluorescent halo hovering over the length and breadth of the search for shell casings and other evidence around the body cordoned off with yellow tape. More than two dozen men and women are swarming around the scene, from Internal Affairs, Homicide, Evidence, the Criminal Investigation Unit; the president of the Fraternal Order of Police and the district commander are there as well. Other officers, hearing what happened on their radios, mill about, curious and concerned, all of them thanking their private gods that on this night they are not Carson Blake.
Carson’s sergeant, Melvin Griffin, arrives, and after talking to the crime scene investigators he sees Carson and Wyatt Jordan sitting in the backseat of Jordan’s cruiser. He approaches them. At the sight of Griffin, Carson rises slowly from the backseat, and Griffin, a trim, gentle-eyed man of medium brown complexion, whose handlebar mustache and large, mournful eyes make him appear more solemn than he is, reaches for Carson, puts his arm around his shoulder, and says, “Come on, walk with me.”
“You okay?” Griffin asks as they walk slowly away from Jordan’s cruiser. Because this question seems the most puzzling inquiry he has ever heard in his life, Carson says nothing, although his gratitude for the question is immeasurable. Carson and Melvin Griffin walk away from the hive of activity immediately surrounding the crime scene, to a secluded space in front of the post office, Griffin’s arms fatherly, sheltering, on Carson’s shoulders.
“Obviously you were in fear for your life?” Griffin asks, standing at Carson’s side, not looking at him, but waiting, Carson knows, for the only answer he can give. The answer he will have to give.
“Yes,” he mumbles.
“You thought he had a gun.” Carson hears not a question but a statement.
“Yes.”
“Well, then this looks like a clean shooting to me,” Griffin concludes, casting his gaze back to the site they have just walked away from. “Take care of yourself and make sure you take your ten days. You call your wife?”
“Not yet.”
“Call her, son — it’s gonna be a long night.”
Griffin begins walking back toward the fire trucks and squad cars, the investigators, the officers from Internal Affairs who Carson knows want to talk to him, gently leading Carson back toward that assembly with him.
“No, no, can I just have a few minutes?” Carson asks.
“Take all the time you need,” Griffin tells him, and walks away, leaving Carson in the shadowy darkness outside the post office.
He feared for his life. He thought the man had a gun. If he had done the right thing, if he had done the only thing he could do, why did he now wish that he’d been rendered mute so that he could not speak, or blind so that he could not see what that fear and those thoughts had wrought?
No, he had not called Bunny. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He’d have to tell her this face-to-face.
“Be sure to take your ten days,” his sergeant had told him. Ten days before he had to make an official statement to anybody about what had happened, about what he had done. Ten days that would turn into weeks. Ten days to get his story straight? Ten days to keep silent, when all he really wants, even now, forty-five minutes after he has killed a young man holding a cell phone and not a gun, is to talk, to explain. But this is Maryland, and the state has legislated ten days of silence for a police officer after a shooting. Ten days to live alone in his own head, the last place he wants to be.
He can’t stay in the shadows forever, he knows, so Carson heads back to the others, still feeling the shadows engulfing him no matter how fast he tries to walk. He is still a police officer, and he has to bear witness to what has happened. To what he has done. He tells the story of the stop and the shooting to Margery Pierce, an investigator from the Criminal Investigation Division. She’s a red-haired, blue-eyed, frumpy matron Carson has seen at other major crime scenes like this one, and her hand rests on Carson’s shoulder as he leans against her van and talks to her, hearing his own voice as though from a great distance, as though it belongs to someone else. When Margery walks away, Lester Stovall from Internal Affairs steps toward Carson, asking first, like Margery, like everyone, if he is okay, and then before Carson can answer says, “Can you tell me what happened?”
Just as Carson is going to answer the question, Matthew Frey, the Fraternal Order of Police lawyer, walks out of the crowd surrounding the scene and puts his hand on Carson’s chest like a barrier between Lester and Carson and says to Lester, whom he knows and respects, “You know I get to talk to him first.”