Darlene and Walter Gallagher were killed in a car crash when Chris was fourteen and Steven was seven. The Gallaghers had never made out a will, but that was basically of no consequence, since they had no money and little of value.
The boys went to live with an aunt, an alcoholic who reacted to the added responsibility by significantly increasing her alcohol intake. Chris became the responsible adult in the house, and took it upon himself to watch out for his little brother.
For a while it went well, until real life got in the way. When Chris was twenty-three he enlisted in the Marines, and the plan was for Steven to follow suit two years later. But Chris was shipped overseas, and Steven quickly befriended the wrong people.
Chris tried repeatedly to intervene from a distance, and when he was able to get home on leave he sometimes took more forceful action. Once he arranged to be there instead of Steven when his dealer, known only to Steven as Nick, came by to drop off cocaine and collect his money.
Chris attempted to reason with Nick, proposing in a respectful manner that the man stop peddling drugs to his brother and in return Chris would continue to let Nick live. Nick was six foot four and two hundred twenty pounds, meaning he was three inches and thirty pounds larger than Chris. It was that difference in size, as well as a serious misjudgment of his potential opponent, that made Nick laugh in response to the threat.
Once he heard the dismissive laugh, there were a number of ways that Chris could have handled the matter. He could have put a bullet in Nick’s brain, or slashed him across the throat with a knife, or broken his neck with his bare hands.
He chose option three.
He didn’t do it in anger; Chris had lost the capacity to experience anything approaching rage in the mountains of Afghanistan. Instead he did it with dispassionate resolve, and a sense of justice that he realized was unique to himself. It was as if he watched himself do it, with a measure of approval, but felt neither triumph nor guilt afterwards.
Once Chris decided that something was right, or necessary, or both, then he did it and never, ever looked back. Nick deserved to die, so he had died, and his body was never found.
But Chris knew that there would be other dealers, each willing to take full advantage of his brother’s human failings. There was a limit to how many necks Chris could break, especially since he was stationed so far away. So he tried to focus his efforts on helping Steven, rather than dispatching his suppliers and enablers.
He got him into therapy, once even a six-month program as an inpatient in a rehab facility. There were signs of hope, but months of positive progress would inevitably be undone by a single moment of weakness. And for Steven, weakness was always just around the corner.
The criminal justice system’s built-in insensitivity made matters worse. It was not set up to recognize that Steven suffered from a disease, and a noncontagious one at that. It treated him as a criminal, though he was clearly the sole victim of his own “crime.”
So it became a cycle of jail and rehab and progress and falling back, until the latest arrest and conviction. Judge Daniel Brennan had expressed a frustration and lack of patience with Steven, and had made it clear that he was going to sentence him to a prison term that would remove him as a problem for a very long period of time.
So now Chris was heading back home, not to pick up the pieces of Steven’s life, and certainly not to put them back together. He was coming back to witness his own greatest failure.
The loss of his little brother.
Who never hurt anyone but himself.
Steven Gallagher lived in a basement apartment in Paterson, New Jersey.
It was on Vernon Avenue, in one of a dreary collection of box-like houses. They were relatively well kept; these houses likely assumed their dreary persona within an hour of the time they were built.
Emmit and I were going to be the point men; we drove through the neighborhood a few times to get the lay of the land. We’d be the ones to go in and do the actual questioning. We didn’t have a search warrant with us, but one could be gotten quickly were Gallagher to prove uncooperative.
Such was the importance the department placed on this case that we had four officers with us as backup, positioned in the front and back of the house. We had no reason to believe yet that Gallagher might try to run, but if he did, he wouldn’t make it fifty feet.
Emmit and I went to the front door of the house to speak to the owner, who the records showed lived on the first floor. The basement apartment had an entrance and windows only at the back, so there was no way Gallagher could have known we were there, if he was at home. But in any event, we had the back well covered.
The owner was not on the premises, and there was no reason for us to wait for him. “Let’s go talk to our boy,” I said, and Emmit radioed our plans to the backup officers. Emmit walked around the right side of the house to the back, and I approached from the left.
There was a door with a broken screen, beyond which there were three concrete steps down to another door. We drew our weapons and I opened the first door. I walked down the steps, while Emmit stayed at the top, which gave him a better view of the whole picture.
I knocked on the door. “Gallagher?” I called out, but got no response. “Gallagher?”
“Leave me alone!” finally came the answer from inside. “You said you wouldn’t come back here!”
It was a voice filled with about as much stress as a voice could be filled with. “We’re the police, Gallagher. We want to talk to you.”
“NO! LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!”
The voice had become firmer, more decisive; this was not a guy who wanted to talk. Which, of course, made him a more interesting candidate for us to talk to.
I edged to the side of the door, in case he was planning to fire a bullet through it. “Open the door, Gallagher.”
“No! I’m not going with you.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere. We just want to talk.”
“LIAR!”
“This is not voluntary, Gallagher. We’re going to talk; no reason to make this difficult. Nothing for you to worry about.”
There was no reaction at all. In these cases talking is good, no matter what is said. Silence is not so good.
“Open the door, Gallagher.”
Still no response. Emmit and I made eye contact, and he spoke softly into the radio, alerting the backup officers that “we’re going in. Suspect is present but uncooperative.”
I edged up along the side of the door, reaching for the knob, but expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t; it turned easily. This was the dangerous moment; there was no way to enter without being exposed, no matter how quickly we did so. If Gallagher had a gun, we had a problem.
I nodded to Emmit, and signaled that I would go first and he would follow. When one enters situations like this, the plan is not to saunter in saying, “Honey, I’m home.” Even though there is effectively no chance for surprise, as much shock and chaos must be created as possible, to rattle the suspect.
So I slowly turned the knob, took a deep breath, threw the door open, and burst through, screaming. I felt Emmit barreling in behind me, screaming as well. When it comes to barreling and screaming, he makes me look like an amateur.
The room was sparsely furnished and dirty. A small kitchen table had partially eaten food on it, and the bed, which was more like a cot, had only a blanket, no sheets or pillow. There was a small television sitting on the floor, with a “rabbit ears” antenna, and there was a laptop computer next to it.
I didn’t notice all these things until later, because my attention at that moment was on Steven Gallagher, sitting on the floor against the wall. More specifically, my attention was on his right hand, which was holding a gun, finger on the trigger.
It wasn’t pointed at me, which at the moment did not provide me with that much comfort. I pointed my own gun at him and screamed, “Drop the weapon!”
He looked at me strangely, almost as if he was trying to understand what I was say
ing. I saw a look of pain on his face, misery like I don’t think I have ever seen before, and I’ve seen a lot of it. Of course, everything I’m describing happened in a split second, so I could be wrong about all or part of it. But I don’t think I am.
He didn’t say anything, but he raised the gun. His finger was still on the trigger.
I didn’t wait to see what he would do with it; I put three bullets into his chest, pinning him back to the wall. Which means I never got to find out what he was going to do with the gun.
The moment my weapon discharged, I was no longer involved in the investigation.
Instead I became a witness and had to relate in excruciating detail exactly what transpired. I also, in the minds of at least some members of the public, was about to become a suspect. I had killed a man, and the burden would be on me to show that it was a justifiable act.
Emmit called in the report, and the scene immediately became chaotic. Captain Barone arrived pretty much at the same time as the homicide detectives, which meant that he was monitoring the situation very closely. It was far more involvement than was typical for him, but then again, calls from the Governor about a case were rather rare.
After I had given the first of what would be a number of official statements, Barone came over to me. “You OK?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah.” This was the first person I had ever killed; I had shot a previous suspect, but he was not badly wounded. I had even managed to serve in Iraq during Desert Storm without firing a weapon in anger.
I was feeling a little shaken by the experience, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from having killed Gallagher or from the realization that I could have been killed myself.
“You did what you had to do,” Barone said.
I nodded. “How come I don’t see any FBI agents here?”
He snapped his fingers. “Damn. I knew I forgot something.”
“You realize you’re going to have to bring them in, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Once we have forensics that connect this to Brennan.”
“Any indication of that so far?”
He nodded again. “Some bloody clothes in a plastic bag.” Then he smiled about as wide as I’ve ever seen him smile. “Oh, I forgot. There was also a bloody knife in the bag.”
I knew he had plenty of information to justify calling in the FBI, and so did he. He didn’t even need the forensics; just the fact that we were acting on a tip that Gallagher killed Brennan was enough. “They’re going to be pissed.”
“Ask me if I give a shit,” he said. “I don’t answer to them. The President didn’t call me; the Governor did.”
“You da boss.”
“Besides, they’ll know by tomorrow morning either way.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because they’ll see us on the Today show.”
He wasn’t kidding. The next morning a limousine was at my house at five thirty to take me into the city. Barone was already in the backseat waiting for me, wearing his Sunday best.
The publicity shit had hit the fan sometime during the night. Barone had alerted the Governor, the media, and the FBI, in that order. I was already being called a hero, which didn’t thrill me and led me to believe that our hero standards are being lowered somewhat. I had shot a drug-addled kid sitting on the floor; that didn’t exactly make me Davy Crockett defending the Alamo.
Lester Holt conducted the interview, which was fairly uncomfortable. He kept trying to talk to me, since I was the one who did the shooting, but Barone kept cutting in. It’s not that he was imparting crucial information; he basically repeated the mantra that the investigation was ongoing, so there was very little we could say. If I were Holt, I would have asked that if there was nothing we could say, what the hell were we doing there? But he didn’t.
Nor did anyone else, and there were plenty of opportunities. Barone had set up almost an entire day of news interviews, and we traveled from media location to media location, not answering the same questions, over and over again. It seems like half the people in this city are newscasters, while the other half somehow manages to have no idea what’s going on in the world.
If I’ve ever spent a less productive or more annoying day, I can’t remember when. Not only was no news being made, but the trappings were insufferable. For instance, each place insisted on applying makeup to our faces, even though it had already been applied repeatedly throughout the day. By the time we got to the fourth studio, I refused to allow it. Had I not, archaeologists would eventually have had to lead an expedition to dig down to my actual skin.
Barone handled it all with something between good cheer and outright jubilation. I wasn’t quite feeling so happy, and it wasn’t because of the pointless interviews. I had killed a young man, and it just didn’t strike me as something to celebrate. It’s not that I felt guilty about it; he had a gun and most likely would have killed me had I not shot first. My reaction was textbook police work, and would stand up to any scrutiny from anybody.
Gallagher also was likely the man who murdered Judge Brennan, so his removal from the planet was certainly not going to usher in a round of hand-wringing from me or anyone else. I expected I’d feel a little better when evidence tied him conclusively to the Brennan murder, but I was quite sure that it would. But for the moment, I was uncomfortable receiving plaudits for ending a young life.
I called my answering machine at home, and discovered it was filled. There were eighteen messages, mostly from people I worked with, calling to congratulate me, and inviting me to come down to the Crows Nest that night. It’s the bar we always go to whenever there is something to celebrate, or whenever there isn’t.
The only nonwork person who called was Linda Farmer, a girlfriend I had broken up with two weeks before. She hadn’t seemed that devastated by the breakup at the time, perhaps because we dated less than a month. But apparently my new hero status was motivation for her to try and resurrect the relationship.
I decided that I’d go to the office and do more of the mountain of paperwork that I would have to fill out. Then I’d go home … no ex-girlfriends and no celebrating that night. Just me and a frozen pizza.
It was while I was at my desk that Lieutenant Billy Heyward called me. He had been assigned to take over my supervision of the case, now that I had become a key player by shooting the suspect. Billy was a good friend, and a very good cop.
“There’s something I think you should know,” Billy said. “They found a note.”
I knew instantly what he meant, but I confirmed it anyway. “A suicide note?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Looks like you may have done him a favor.”
“Did the note mention Brennan?”
“No. Boilerplate ‘my life isn’t worth living’ kind of stuff. He wrote it to his brother; said: ‘Sorry I couldn’t be more like you.’”
“Have you found the brother yet?” I asked.
“Working on that now. He’s a Marine in Afghanistan.”
I got off the phone and thought about what this meant. I couldn’t get away from the realization that it was entirely possible that Steven Gallagher was raising the gun to shoot himself in the head, before I made that unnecessary. He certainly looked like he was in the kind of pain that made that possibility credible.
None of this made him less likely to have killed Judge Brennan; if anything it probably argued for his guilt. And it certainly didn’t make my claim of self-defense any less justified, at least not to the legal system. Unfortunately, it did make it less justified to me, even though I believed at the time that I was about to get shot at.
I changed my mind, and as soon as I finished the paperwork I headed out to join my friends at the bar.
Not because I wanted to celebrate.
Because I wanted to drink.
The C-130 landed at McGuire AFB at one thirty in the afternoon.
Chris Gallagher got off the plane refreshed and well rested, having slept a good portion of the way. It was a trait com
mon to Force Recon Marines, that branch’s version of the Navy Seals and Army Green Berets. They had the ability to sleep whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself. In their line of work, there was no way to know when the next chance would come.
Of course, sleeping on the plane did not require any special talent or training. There was absolutely nothing else to keep him occupied or entertained, not even conversation, since all of his fellow travelers were asleep as well.
Chris expected to hitch a ride with someone towards New York City. There were always people heading that way from McGuire; New York was the obvious first choice for soldiers coming home from Afghanistan. It was the anti-Kabul.
It turned out that Chris didn’t have to look around for a ride. Waiting for him was Laura Schmitz, his brother Steven’s ex-girlfriend. Chris had called and told her he was coming home, but she hadn’t mentioned that she would meet his flight, and he certainly had no reason to expect that she would.
Laura and Steven had broken up two years before, but she remained his friend, and good friends were what he needed as much as anything. She was always there for him, but like Chris, she was ultimately powerless to help him turn his life around. She and Chris kept in contact because of their shared caring for Steven, and while they celebrated his successes, they more often commiserated about his inevitable setbacks.
Laura looked pained and upset, no surprise to Chris, since Steven was in such serious trouble. “Thanks, but you didn’t have to come,” Chris said.
“Yes, I did,” Laura said, in a tone that sent a cold chill through him.
“What’s wrong?”
“In the car. Please,” she said, and they walked out of the building and into the parking lot.
There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that her first words when they got into the car would be, “Steven is dead.” He had been dreading the words, but knowing that he would hear them, for years.
What he did not expect was her next sentence: “The police shot him.”
It didn’t compute. A drug overdose, that was the most likely cause. Suicide, as horrible as that was to contemplate, was always a possibility, when the pain became too much.
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