He felt wetness on his back. “Mike, roll me and see if it came through the other side.”
Hajek pushed up on the shoulder blade. “Yeah, it did.”
Through and through. A helluva way to find out that the Kevlar vests weren’t worth a shit, but McLarney was at least relieved to know the bullet was out.
Separate ambulances took both men to the same trauma unit, with McLarney telling the medics in his ambo that he felt as if he was falling, as if he was going to fall off the litter. When he felt that way, the pain seemed to let up.
“Don’t go out,” they began screaming at him. “Don’t go out.”
Oh yeah, thought McLarney. Shock.
In the surgery prep area, he could hear the man he shot making all kinds of noise on the litter beside him and could watch as the trauma team poked at his own body with IVs and catheters. Phillips, another man from his sector, went to tell Catherine, who took it the way any reasonable person would, expressing an unequivocal concern for her husband’s wellbeing and an equally unequivocal conviction that even in a city like Baltimore, most lawyers go through life without being hit by gunfire.
This is it, she told him later. What other reason do you need? McLarney had no right to argue with her; he knew that. He was thirty-two years old, with a family, making half of what most other college graduates do and getting shot down like a dog in the street for the privilege. Boiled to its core, the truth is always a simple, solid thing, and yeah, McLarney had to admit, there was no percentage in being a cop. None at all. And yet nothing about that shooting could change his mind; things had somehow gone too far for that.
He didn’t return to active duty for eight months, and for much of that time he was using a colostomy bag until his digestive system healed enough to permit the reversal surgery. After each operation, the abdominal cramps were so bad that he would get down on the floor at night, and after the reversal surgery, a bout of hepatitis prolonged the recovery. Gene Cassidy came by to visit a couple of times and once took his sergeant out to lunch. And when McLarney attempted to cut corners on his rehabilitation by ordering a proscribed beer, Cassidy chewed ass. Good man, Cassidy.
A standing tradition in the Baltimore department dictates that a man shot in the line of duty, upon returning to duty, can take any posting for which he is qualified. That summer, as McLarney was preparing to go back into uniform, Rod Brandner was taking his pension, leaving behind a reputation as one of the best sergeants the homicide unit had ever seen. Brandner had put together a good squad and he worked for D’Addario, which meant that McLarney would also be serving under a lieutenant known to be human.
He returned to the sixth floor expressing little pride at having been shot and little interest in telling and retelling the story. At times, he would express amusement at the status it accorded him. Whenever a shitstorm was breaking, McLarney would simply smile and shake his head. “They have to leave me alone,” he would say. “I’m a sworn member who got shot in the line.”
In time, it became a standard joke in the unit. McLarney would emerge stone-faced from a meeting in the captain’s office and Landsman would play straight man.
“Captain shit on you, Terr?”
“Nah, not really.”
“What’d you do? Show him your wounds?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuckin’-A right. Every time the captain gets wound up, McLarney just unbuttons his shirt.”
But he was not proud of those scars. And over time, he began to talk about getting shot as if it were the most irresponsible thing he had ever done. His son, Brian, had been eight years old and was told only that his father had slipped and fallen on the stairs. But a day or so later the boy heard McLarney’s father talking to a family friend on the phone, then went back into his room and began throwing things around. A kid that age, McLarney would later tell friends, I had no right getting shot.
In the end, he rested his pride on a smaller, lesser point. When the bullets hit him on Arunah Avenue, Terrence McLarney did not fall. He stood there, firing his own weapon until he brought his man down. Raeford Barry Footman, twenty-nine years old, died two days after the incident of complications from a gunshot wound to the chest. When they compared the bullet recovered at autopsy, they found that it had come from McLarney’s service revolver.
Some time after the shooting, a detective brought McLarney a printout of the dead man’s priors, which ran for several pages. McLarney scanned the sheet until he was satisfied, noting in particular that Footman had only recently been paroled from a felony conviction. He did not want to see an ident photo of the dead man, nor did he want to read the case folder. To McLarney, that seemed to go too far.
McLarney sits behind Dunnigan’s desk in the annex office, listening to the steady rhythm of a young girl sobbing disconsolately behind the interrogation room door. The tears are real. McLarney knows that.
He leans across the desk, listening to the girl trying to collect herself as the men inside the room go through her statement one more time. Her voice is breaking, her nose running. The girl feels pain, a sense of loss even, as genuine as any felt for Gene Cassidy. And that, to McLarney, is a little obscene.
D’Addario comes out of his office, walks to the interrogation room door and stares through the mirrored window. “How’s it going?”
“It’s down, lieutenant.”
“Already?”
“She gave up Butchie.”
Butchie. Tears for Butchie Frazier.
The crying jag began a half hour before, when they finally broke through to Yolanda Marks and the truth began slipping from her in fits and starts. In the interrogation room, McLarney listened to the sobbing until the contradictions, the fractured morality, became too much. A little speech forced its way up into his throat, and then he told a young West Baltimore girl that she was doing the right thing. He told her what Butchie Frazier was, what he had done, and why it needed to end this way. He told her about Gene and Patti Cassidy and the child not yet born, about a darkness that would not go away.
“Think about those things,” he told her.
There was silence after that, a minute or two when someone else’s tragedy took shape in the young girl’s mind. But then McLarney left the room and she was sobbing again, and the tears had nothing to do with Gene Cassidy. The simple truth was that Yolanda Marks loved Butchie Frazier, and she had given him up.
“Is she talkin’ in there?” asks Landsman, walking through the annex.
“Yeah,” says McLarney, absentmindedly opening Dunnigan’s top drawer. “We’re getting ready to write up the statement.”
“What’s she saying?”
“It’s down.”
“Hey, way to go, Terr.”
Landsman disappears into his office, and McLarney pulls a handful of paper clips from the drawer, lines them up on the desk and begins torturing the first, twisting it back and forth between stubby fingers.
The last two days had made all the difference, and this time they had it right. This time, the investigation had been temperate and clinical, precise in a way that it never could have been in the hours after the shooting. Rage and frustration had marked those first days, but those emotions had finally been sublimated by time and necessity. For McLarney, the Cassidy detail was still a crusade, but one now fueled more by deliberate reason than raw vengeance.
Yolanda Marks’s journey to the interrogation room actually began more than a week ago, when McLarney and the two detail men brought their two reluctant eyewitnesses-the sixteen-year-old and his younger sister-downtown to the state’s attorney’s office. There, detectives and prosecutors began a series of pretrial interviews to elicit additional details about the shooting, details that might then be corroborated to strengthen the existing testimony or, better still, that might lead to additional witnesses. In particular, McLarney wanted to identify and locate the young girlfriends who were supposedly with the thirteen-year-old witness when the crime occurred.