Both of the deputies thought this was a stupid policy, but what could they do? Still, it left them both perpetually on edge, frustrated about what lessons were being taught. Some of these so-called “good kids,” they knew, were capable of some bad stuff. Nothing tonight, true, but every time they approached a parked and dark car down an abandoned levee road, there was a chance of something unexpected happening. And, in fact, these were not always “kids,” good or otherwise. Some were a couple of years out of high school, unable to cut it in college or even in the minimum wage job market, and they were now unemployed and angry.
Every car a possible threat. And tonight they’d pulled up behind seven of them.
Wound up tight as a spring? You could say that.
In any event, when they got the call from dispatch about some kind of disturbance from one of the Troon Estates Neighborhood Watch people, they were ready to switch gears and roll. Even though it was probably as mundane as some girls TPing some guy’s house — with school just starting, it was high season! — nevertheless, some other of the lower-rent parts of town had recently come under the apparent influence of wannabe gang members from the capitol just down the freeway. There had been an alarming rise in residential burglaries in the last year or two, especially in some of these seedier areas, although “seedy,” like DUI, was a term best left unspoken.
Except for their black and white police car, the county road back was completely deserted. To recalibrate his and his partner’s own respective equilibriums, Paul Walker was having some fun on the drive into town, pushing eighty miles an hour without his red and blue lights flashing and keeping his siren mute.
They just hit the city limit, maybe half a mile more before they’d get to their turn into the Estates proper, when dispatch came on again. “Car sixteen, do you copy?”
Greg picked up the dashboard microphone. “Car sixteen, copy.”
The dispatcher, Davon White, was normally the soul of calm, but now there was a palpable sense of urgency in her pinched and no-nonsense voice. “We’ve got a ten seventy-one on the call to Country Club Court. Repeat, ten seventy-one. Other units will be responding.”
“Ten seventy-one,” Greg said. “Shots fired.”
Paul threw a quick glance over to his partner. “I know what it means.”
“You want to pull over? Wait for backup?”
“When something real is finally happening? In your dreams, Greg.” He reached out and punched up his emergency lights and siren. Then, with his tires screeching, he took the right hand turn onto Country Club Drive.
Not even a minute after Carrie heard the shot, the siren’s wail froze her where she stood in the middle of the lawn. Relatively close to the house, she was caught in the lights over the front porch. Dropping the last couple of rolls of toilet paper, her hands went to her mouth and, unable to control her reaction, she let out a scream.
From behind her, Emily yelled, “What is it? What is it?”
“Where’s Dawn?”
“Inside. Still inside.”
“Oh my God! We’ve got to get out of here.”
“We can’t just leave her. Anyway, she’s got the keys. Jesus Christ. What are we going to do? We can’t just...”
Emily turned away from Carrie as the police car skidded around the corner into the Court, catching her in its brights as it lurched to a stop, deputies coming out of both sides, their weapons out. Emily put her hands up over her head.
“Down,” the driver said. “On the ground. Hands where I can see them. Down, I said!”
Carrie followed the movements of the other cop, who’d come out the passenger door, his gun also drawn. She didn’t know how it happened, but her reactions did not seem to be under control and suddenly she had her own hands spread apart in the air over her head. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” she wailed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Then she was on her knees, sobbing.
Both of their guns extended out before them, the deputies kept advancing toward the open front door, toward the light.
Then Carrie became suddenly aware of another movement around to her side, toward the house. She turned her head and saw Dawn come out through the doorway.
A couple of steps behind her, Jason followed, shading his eyes from the light above him, the gun in his other hand.
The deputy down by Emily called out. “Gun! Gun!”
And both cops opened fire.
The standard investigation into the officer-involved shootings came to an end in the week before Christmas vacation, with both deputies completely cleared of any misconduct. After all, they’d come in the middle of the night to the scene of what looked to be a burglary in progress. The apparent perpetrator, armed with a handgun, was a couple of steps behind a young woman who appeared to be involved in some kind of a possible hostage situation.
The deputies really had no other option. The investigation concluded that they had acted reasonably under the circumstances and undoubtedly had prevented further injury to the other young women who had been involved in what had started out as a TP hazing event and then somehow gotten out of control under many still-unexplained circumstances.
In the intervening months since the incident, Greg and Paul took a lot of grief among their law enforcement colleagues for their poor marksmanship, but the fact that they hadn’t killed anyone had probably played some role in their exoneration.
Which is not to say that they hadn’t done some damage. Jason Trent took four bullets, one in each extremity, and the injuries had made him miss the entire football season, although the prognosis was that he would probably be able to play in college if he so chose.
Dawn Halley was hit in the face by ricocheting marble from one of the columns by the Trent’s front door and was looking at a further array of plastic surgery procedures to restore as much as possible to what had once been her angelic face.
The mystery of the person who had originally broken into the Trents’ bedroom through the back door and dead bolted the door to the hallway remained just that. Whoever it had been — the prevailing theory favored one of the wannabe gangsters — he or she, probably scared off by the gunshots, took nothing and left no trace of evidence. (There were fingerprints from some of Jason’s football teammates, but since the Trents’ bedroom was a well-trod shortcut on the way to the swimming pool, these were discounted as easily explained and irrelevant.)
For a couple of weeks after the incident, Chris was consumed with guilt and fear: the former at what he’d actually done, the latter that someone would find out and charge him with something. Gradually, though, he settled on feeling most responsible for the injuries to Jason. After all, if Chris hadn’t broken in, little or none of the events would have happened. And it wasn’t the girls TPing the house that had made Jason break out his father’s gun.
In any event, Chris came to the conclusion that, even if he wasn’t going to do something stupid like confessing, he should at least try to do something to somehow make things better. Even if it was only symbolic, it seemed that it might be worth a try. After all, because of Chris’s break-in at the Trents, the football team was also short one very important guy. If Chris could somehow make it back to the team and contribute...
So against all reason — and he’d already learned from geometry that logic was not his forte — he signed up for the tutorial workshop again. If he could get a C or better in geometry before the first quarter was over, he could still get some playing time and even make some small difference. Anyway, he thought, it was worth a try, maybe undo a little of the harm he’d done.