“Put your hands behind your back,” he told me.
“What for?”
“We need to bring all of you in and sort this out,” he said.
I caught the rapt attention on the punk’s face. Concussion or not, he knew something was up, and he was trying to figure out what it was. I looked back at the older cop in front of me, the one who wanted to handcuff me. His eyes wavered as I met his stare, and I could see some worry there. I was sure he dealt with more than his share of violent crime, but it was probably domestic stuff or kids acting stupid. I was different; a hit man with twenty-eight kills, and someone who had been all over the news for months. He wasn’t quite sure how to deal with someone like me.
“What’s there to sort out?” I asked him. “What the fuck do you think went on here with these two meth heads wearing ski masks and carrying guns?”
“We took the guns off you, not them,” he said stiffly. “And until we sort this out the only crimes we have evidence of so far are assault and battery committed by you, and possession of unlicensed firearms, also committed by you. Now put your hands behind your back. I’m not telling you again.”
There was still a lot of worry in his eyes. The other cops with him edged closer to me. I put my hands behind my back and felt a throbbing pain in my right shoulder. I must’ve hurt it earlier and didn’t realize it until now because of the adrenaline rush. I told the cop about the pain in my shoulder and asked him if I could be cuffed in front instead. He ignored me and cuffed me behind. The punk who had been on his stomach was pulled up to his feet. He smirked at me. He had no idea what was going on but he knew something was working in his favor.
While I was being put in the back seat of a squad car, an ambulance pulled up to the scene. The guy I had knocked out cold was mostly still out, and they were loading him on to a stretcher. I watched all this until the squad car I was in drove off.
At the precinct, I was brought to an interrogation room, and only then were the handcuffs taken off. They took my cell phone from me, and I was left alone for an hour until a Detective John Fallow came in. He was in his forties, balding, pasty complexion, and in his cheap suit looked more like an accountant than a cop. I told him about my shoulder hurting. He ignored me and told me we needed to clear up what happened at the liquor store, and he had me go over my account of what happened.
“Here’s the problem we have,” he said. “One of the men you accosted, Jason Mueller, has given us a completely different version of the events. The other man, his brother, Thomas Mueller, has only recently regained consciousness and is receiving medical attention, but we’ll get his version soon.”
“Did Jason tell you why he and his brother were wearing ski masks on a day when it was over sixty degrees out?” I asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact he did.” Fallow offered me a grim smile. “He claims you tried forcing them into committing armed robbery. That you made them put the ski masks on, but that when they refused to rob the liquor store you beat them both up.”
He had said that with a straight face. All I could do was stare at him and wonder where this was coming from; whether someone in the District Attorney’s office thought they could use this to send me back to prison, or whether they believed that punk’s story. Or maybe it was a matter of them wanting badly to believe his story.
Fallow and me kept up our staring contest; him offering his grim, polite smile, me trying hard to keep my temper in check.
“This is ridiculous,” I finally said, breaking the silence in the room. “If you check their arrest records, I’ll bet they’re lengthy and with other armed robberies.”
“Possibly,” he admitted, “but I doubt they’re as lengthy as your own.”
“You’ve got a bet,” I told him. “I was only arrested once.”
He smiled at that. I could see the argument forming that all the crimes I admitted to would be a far longer list than their arrest records could possibly be. Instead, he asked why I would’ve wanted to stop them from robbing the liquor store.
“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” I said, genuinely confused.
His smile turned patronizing. “If what you’re telling us is true, that you saw the two men standing outside a liquor store and you knew they were about to rob it, why would you get involved? I’m sorry, Mr March, but from what I’ve read about you, that doesn’t make sense.”
“How am I supposed to answer that?” I asked. “Are you saying that I’m incapable of doing something decent?”
He scratched the back of his head as he thought about that. “Yes, I guess that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s not believable, Mr March, that you’d stick your neck out the way you did, nor is it believable that a man of your age and slight build could disable and overpower two armed men in their twenties, especially, as you claim, two men hopped up on crystal meth.”
“What’s hard to believe is you accepting this meth head’s story. Have you tested these two punks for drugs?”
He didn’t answer me. Just kept smiling his polite, grim smile. I took a deep breath and fought a losing battle with my anger.
“Why would I have two guns with me?” I heard myself asking him. “What the fuck was I doing with them, trying to force those two punks to take them off me to commit an armed robbery? Then what happened, they refused and I beat them up? Christ, use some fucking brains. If any of that were true – if they were such innocents – why wouldn’t they take the guns from me and hold me until the police arrived? Talk about your shitbrained fairy tales. You really think there’s a chance the other brother will tell the same story, at least if he isn’t prepped?”
“You have quite a temper, don’t you, Mr March?”
I closed my mouth. I understood then that he was only trying to get a rise out of me, trying to get me to say something that could be used later against me. It wasn’t worth saying another word to him.
He waited patiently, and only when he realized I wasn’t going to answer him, he continued, “To answer your question, I don’t fully believe Jason Mueller’s story, just as I don’t believe yours. The truth most likely lies somewhere in the middle. If I had to guess, you recruited these two brothers for the liquor store robbery, then had some sort of falling out with them at the last minute and things turned violent between you. But if that’s the case, we’re never going to find that out, and given your extremely violent past, their version of the events has to be considered more credible. While it would be nice to lock all three of you away, I’ll settle for sending you back to prison, Mr March. Or should I call you Leonard?”
I saw the way it was going to be then. If the other brother, the one I knocked out cold, had any smarts, he would claim a temporary loss of memory rather than risk contradicting his brother’s story. As insane as it was, I could very well end up going back to prison for the one decent thing I did in my life – and they’d send me for the maximum sentence they could. I should’ve gotten a good laugh out of the whole thing, but instead I felt sick to my stomach thinking how this was going to be played up in the papers and how justified my kids were going to feel in writing me off for good. I felt even sicker knowing that I would never see Sophie Duval again. Absently, I started massaging my throbbing shoulder while Fallow stared at me as if I were some sort of bug that he had pinned down under a magnifying glass.
There was a knock on the outside door. Fallow looked away from me, annoyed. He got up and had a quick conversation with whoever it was outside the door, then left me alone. While I sat in the room, I slipped into despair. It didn’t make much sense for me to feel that way. It wasn’t as if I had that much going for me on the outside; a few more chance encounters with Sophie before she would bring up her book idea and I would turn her down, the slim hope that my kids would give me a break and meet with me. That was really about all I had, but the thought of losing it still sent me sinking into utter blackness.