Cape Disappointment (10 page)

The redhead, whose name was Deborah Driscoll, wore a conservative suit and a pair of plastic-rimmed glasses that looked as though they were just for the office. About once every two minutes somebody trotted in from the main room. Ms. Driscoll fielded their queries, complaints, and concerns in an adroit, businesslike manner. She was tall and moved with a Spartan efficiency one saw in ballerinas and other athletes. She was younger than I was, probably around thirty, and did not once glance in my direction while I hunkered on a sofa against a wall and thumbed through a golfing magazine. I didn't play golf, but the choices were golf or airplane magazines. I didn't fly, either. Maddox did both.

I'd met James Maddox early in my tenure in the police department, and while we'd never worked together, our paths had crossed a few times, always with polite words and deference on both sides. Maddox had ingratiated himself with the administration and was highly regarded in the mayor's office. Nobody wrote a better letter or performed favors for those outranking him more frequently or efficiently than James Maddox. And, as I was to learn later, nobody crapped on those below him with more casual disdain.

At first, people thought challenging Jane Sheffield for her Senate seat was a rash move, but Republicans were on a national tear to replace roadblock Democrats wherever they could, so even though he didn't have the voter support, he was attracting huge amounts of money both in and out of state. In the beginning he'd polled only a few points behind Sheffield, but in their debate he'd been unable to parry Sheffield's extensive utilization of facts and figures; at one point he even lost his temper and called the moderator a jackass. For many it was a snapshot of a personality for which they were not ready to vote.

Over the years I'd followed his politics and found him sincere in his beliefs but austere and judgmental in the way he regarded the man on the street. He went to church and wore the fact on his sleeve. His motto seemed to be “Let no good deed go untouted.” As a representative in Congress, Maddox had been implicated in some shenanigans involving payoffs, and the word around the Hill, according to the blogs, was that he had escaped an indictment by the skin of his teeth. The federal prosecutor who was investigating was grievously injured in a car wreck, and the prosecutor who took over from her dropped the ball. It was odd how chance played out in certain careers.

I couldn't help thinking about my links to Maddox while I thumbed through
Golf Digest
and waited for him to return to the office. I had loved every aspect of being a police officer and would have been one still if it hadn't been for a young man named Charlie Rivers, a fifteen-year-old with a short history of antisocial behavior. Everything about Charlie was short: his height, his temper, his educational credits, even his life span. He'd served time in juvenile facilities for burglary, car theft, and glue sniffing. Me? I'd been top ranked on the department pistol team and practiced shooting for long hours each week. It must have been karma that our paths collided.

When Charlie Rivers spotted a Volvo station wagon idling outside a liquor store, he took it as an invitation to a joyride, a felony he'd committed before and no doubt would have committed again. My partner and I had been passing through downtown when another unit caught sight of the Volvo blowing a red light and gave chase. When the other SPD unit inexplicably lost him in the vicinity of Fourth and Bell, we were nearby and took up the hunt. At the same time our dispatcher called and told us the owner of a furniture store in Belltown was reporting suspicious activity in the alley behind his store, so we broke off our search to handle the call. After walking through the store with the owner, I located the stolen Volvo in the alley behind the building. The suspicious activity behind the store turned out to be our quarry, Charlie Rivers. My partner went back to get our car so he could blockade the alley while I remained at the rear entrance of the store.

When I saw activity inside the Volvo that indicated he might be getting ready to bolt, I stepped into the alley and approached the vehicle. The engine fired up and the Volvo rocketed toward me. Charlie steered directly at me in an attempt, I could only surmise, to crush me against the wall. I was on foot and had few options. As I drew my weapon, I found a niche where the brick walls of two buildings were not joined evenly and pressed up against it, realizing it wasn't going to protect me from a ton and a half of steel.

The vehicle thundered onward. I leveled my pistol and placed a single bullet through the windshield. Any other driver, it probably would have hit his chest, but Charlie was small for his age, so the bullet penetrated the windshield and entered his face, lodging in the back of his skull. Missing me by a mere ten feet, the Volvo nosed into the wall. The whole incident took less than eight seconds to play out, though oddly, it became a cancer that over the course of the next year finished off my law enforcement career.

I couldn't help thinking about Charlie Rivers as I sat on the sofa in Jim Maddox's office. Maddox's phone call the day before had resurrected the past in a way I hadn't thought possible. What destroyed my equanimity more than anything was the fact that I'd probably spent fifteen hundred hours on the pistol range practicing so that when the time came to do what I eventually did, I did it flawlessly. It was an impeccable shooting borne of endless impeccable rehearsal. For years
afterward they told my story in the academy. Your gun may be the only tool between you and hell. Practice, practice, practice. I had and it was. I'd drawn, flicked off the safety, aimed, and hit him just under the right eye, all so quickly that neither of us had time to register what was happening.

When I stepped over to the wrecked car, I found Charlie slumped across the gearshift, gasping for breath as if he'd been hit in the lungs instead of the head. I could smell the hot steam from the Volvo's broken radiator. I reached past him and shut off the motor. Quarters were tight because Charlie had short legs and had moved the seat forward. Except for the heavy breathing, he was motionless, conscious, and reasonably alert, even though his eyes weren't working. The eye on the side where the bullet entered was gone, and the other, still open, appeared to be sightless. While the two of us waited for the fire department medics to arrive, Charlie told me he was fifteen.

“I'm sorry, Officer,” Charlie gasped. “Honest. I was just trying to scare you.” During a thousand nights when I replayed it in my head, I never did decide whether he was telling the truth.

“Am I hurt?”

“Pretty bad.”

“How bad?”

I tried not to respond, thinking the medics would arrive in time to bail me out, but I waited and nobody arrived except a few lookiloos from a nearby apartment building, a pair of gay men who, having witnessed the incident from their bedroom window, later testified on my behalf.

“Am I going to live?”

“Of course you're going to live. Just hang in there. We're going to do everything we can for you.”

“I think I'm going to die.”

“Don't say that.”

“It's true, though. Shit. I'm going to die.”

He was fifteen, and fifteen-year-olds are prone to a certain type of fatalism. They are also prone to stupid stunts. True, he'd stretched the limits further than most. If I hadn't found him in a blind alley and cornered him, if the alley hadn't been so tight, if I hadn't been so damn
calm and steady when I fired, he probably would have driven away and ditched the car the way he'd ditched all the other cars he'd stolen. He might have grown up and at some point found a nice girl, or become religious, or trained in a profession; he might have turned his life around. At the time I was not a whole lot older than he was— he could have been my younger brother— and while this wasn't the first time I'd been around somebody dying from violence, it was the first time I'd been around somebody dying from
my
violence. From my perspective on Maddox's office sofa, it seemed as if it had happened in a different world, a different epoch, to a different me. The only part of it that hadn't changed was the victim, Charlie Rivers, who was still fifteen and would always remain fifteen.
That
was never going to change. I was officially exonerated, but my guilt was never going to be assuaged. I'd been doing my job, protecting my own life, but that didn't take the sting out of the fact that I'd airmailed a bullet into a fifteen-year-old boy's brain.

Before he died, he'd made me pledge to tell his mother he loved her and to explain how his death was his own fault, not mine, but I knew that no matter how I parsed it, I was going to sound self-serving and his mother was going to think I was lying. I didn't tell her that night and I didn't tell her the next day or the next week. I never stopped thinking about telling her, but I never did it, either.

It was one of those failures that, every time it crossed my mind, I wished I had the cojones to revisit and revise. From time to time over the years I would look her up in the phone directory, but to date I hadn't cooked up the nerve to follow up on my oath to a dying boy. Knowing they blamed me for his death and knowing how badly his mother had taken the tragedy at the hospital— they'd had to sedate her— I simply could not scrounge up the strength to do what I promised. I went through a complex set of mental gymnastics trying to justify my lack of action, but in the end it was nothing more or less than abject cowardice.

Without my realizing it, during the next months my career began unraveling like a two-dollar sweater. To put it in a nutshell, I found it hard to live with the fact that I'd killed a boy and might, somewhere in the course of my duties, be forced to kill another. My feelings about
carrying a gun were transitory, I told myself; they would evaporate in time and I could go on and be a competent police officer again. If I let enough time pass, I could put it behind me. But eventually it became apparent that as long as I was still on patrol and carrying a 9 mm, the feelings were only going to worsen. My emotions had become a major encumbrance to the performance of my job. Within a year I was a private citizen again.

Somewhere between the time I shot Charlie Rivers and the day I decided to resign from the department, Jim Maddox showed up at my place unbidden on a Saturday afternoon. I'd been painting the side of my house, the side that faced south, that absorbed the broiling sun every summer. Maddox parked on the street and strode up the driveway, where I was perched on a ladder. He was off duty for the weekend and wore an old dress shirt and jeans. “Need help?” he asked, picking up an extra brush I'd been using on the trim.

I looked down at a man who was by then a chief, a man I barely knew. “Sure. If you want, you can finish the trim around that basement window. Rags are under the ladder.”

He was so intent on painting the window without mistakes I almost forgot he was there. After we'd been working side-by-side for twenty minutes, he said, “Sometimes things don't go the way you think they're supposed to.”

“No.” I'd been feeling sorry for myself all week, but it had gotten particularly bad that day. I'd blown off a dinner date and a bike ride with cycling buddies. I'd dropped out of a course I was taking at the university. I'd resigned from the shooting team. Looking back on it, I now see that this particular day marked the nadir of my downswing. I'd never really gotten over Charlie Rivers, but that Saturday was by far the worst. I didn't want to paint the house, but I didn't want to sit inside it feeling sorry for myself, either. It was almost as if Maddox had sensed my doldrums and flown to my rescue. I didn't need a lot right then, just a few kind words, which he was thoughtful enough to provide.

“I was thinking about you,” he said. “A couple of people said you mentioned resigning.”

“It's been on my mind.”

“I wanted to let you know a lot of us have had things happen on the
job we weren't prepared for. You go into this believing you can handle whatever they throw at you, and then one day you realize you've hit a wall and you can't handle it after all. It's no disgrace. If you choose to resign, you'll make a success of something else. These experiences make you stronger.”

Somehow, just knowing he was supportive, this man I barely knew, knowing he'd had the foresight to visit on that particular day and to say what he'd said felt like a phenomenal gift. “Look,” I said. “It means a lot to me that you've come. I appreciate it more than you know.”

“I had my own problems a few years ago. One of the old-timers came by the house and said a few words. I told him I owed him. He said to pass it on. I'm passing it on.”

We painted for another hour, and then I told him I needed to stop and fix dinner. I invited him to stay, but he said he had to get home to his family. Maddox helped me put the ladder away. “Hey, Jim,” I said, as he headed down the driveway toward his car. He turned around and stumbled but did not fall in my driveway, a perfect example of his infamous clumsiness.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for coming.”

“I should have been by sooner.”

“I owe you. Anytime you need anything at all, call me. I mean that.”

“I just might do that.”

My sense was that either Maddox was an exceedingly considerate man or he'd faced so much scorn and ridicule in the department that he was able to empathize with a castoff. For years Maddox had been more or less ostracized from the mainstream, and he must have seen a kindred spirit in me. Never mind that the reasons for our exclusion were different: Over the years, Maddox's kindness had become inextricably linked in my mind with the shooting.

After he entered politics we lost touch, and then out of the blue Maddox called and asked me to take a job with his campaign. The moment I heard his voice I thought of my unfulfilled pledge to Charlie Rivers. Somehow, it seemed as if in keeping my pledge to Maddox I would be making up for my failure with Charlie. It wasn't completely logical, but emotionally it felt like the right thing to do.

When Maddox finally arrived, he extended his hand and said, “I'll only be a minute. I need to talk to Deborah.”