Last Shot

by Jay Nadal

  Chiara snatched up a plastic bottle and a cloth, which sat on a white painted table beside the front door. She thrust them into Jermaine’s hands as though mortified she had been caught in the act of cleaning her house.

  “Come in, please. The living room is through here,” she said.

  “Can I get you a coffee, Officer?” Jermaine asked politely and with only a tinge of resentment. It washed off Cade.

  These people were entitled to be distrustful or suspicious of the cops. And to be grieving as well. He took an offered seat on an old sofa. A coffee cup on the floor next to the sofa was an incongruity in an otherwise immaculate room. It put his own apartment to shame. Since Elaine had left, there hadn’t seemed to be much point.

  “No, thank you,” Cade said.

  “Iced tea? Soda?”

  He forced a smile. “Thank you kindly, but I’m fine.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll leave you two to talk.” There was a question in his voice.

  Chiara nodded, giving him a quick smile. Cade heard his heavy footsteps going toward the back of the house, then a door opening and a dog barking.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Johnson. Now that I’m here, I don’t quite know why I’m here. I…” He faltered. All the rehearsed conversations that had run through his head prior to this moment seemed to be useless. He had been eloquent in those conversations. But now his mind was a desert.

  “It’s fine, Officer. Do you have a name?” Chiara was soft-spoken. Her accent was thick Houston Sunnyside, but at the same time, her voice was as soft as a Southern belle.

  “Uh, Tommy. My name is Tommy.”

  “My name is Chiara. I wanted to thank you for what you did.”

  “I didn’t actually do much, Miss…Chiara. ’Cept get myself shot.”

  “My dad was a pastor. He always taught us to forgive. But I keep thinking it’s good that man is dead. He did what he did out of pure evil, and you killed him. And that was good.”

  “Was it?” he asked, still unsure of how he felt.

  She nodded. “I’ve read about that man, and I know what he did…” She put a hand to her mouth, closing her eyes tightly. “What he did to my parents. I’m sorry. He was an animal, nothing more, and he belongs in Hell. My daddy told me it isn’t our place to judge, but I believe God was acting through you to take that man out of this world and send him straight to Hell.” Her voice gained strength, as though she was in her father’s pulpit, preaching.

  “What were they like?” Cade asked. A purpose was emerging from the fog that had clouded his mind. When he had sought out the names and next of kin of the two people Reeves had murdered on Wilmington Avenue, he had felt the urge to come here. But he didn’t know why.

  “They were good people. Kind people. My daddy’s church is just up the road a ways on the corner of Wilmington and Cathedral. The Sunnyside Baptist Church of the Savior?”

  Cade nodded. “I know it.”

  “He founded that church when he was younger than you, helped build it with his own hands. He even had Frank Nelson and Richie Young in there. True. They were my daddy’s flock, and he didn’t stop trying to cure them of their wickedness. He believed in people. He said to me that no matter how wicked a person is, it’s nothing compared to the love of Jesus they have in their hearts. Some people just need help seeing the light.”

  “You think Reeves was like that?”

  “I respect my daddy’s beliefs, but I don’ share them no more. I think some people are beyond redemption. Don’t you, Tommy?”

  And there it was. A moment of crystal clarity. Saul on the road to Damascus.

  It had been years since Cade had set foot in a church, though he had been brought up as a Christian by a mother who saw Hell as an easy place to get to as Odessa. Away from her, his belief had waned, shriveling before the relentless realities of a cop’s life.

  And then there was Elaine. Elaine had been a teacher and an atheist. An atheist in the deepest of the Deep South. The courage of that had been one of the things that had so attracted him.

  She had sworn that she wouldn’t expose their daughter to religion until she was old enough to decide for herself. Even if Cade had still held to his mother’s righteousness, he couldn’t stand before Elaine’s blazing determination.

  And now he had seen the light. Chiara was right. There wasn’t good in everyone. Some people waived their rights to it when they chose the easy path—drugs, gangs, crime.

  It was so much easier to extort than work to start your own business, so much easier to drown emotion in a chemical soup rather than face your demons. There was no redemption. They were animals. Rabid animals.

  And suddenly he knew why he had come here. To see this woman who had been so cruelly deprived of her parents. When he had spoken to Mr. Rivera, he had been left unsatisfied, with his refusal to acknowledge that Reeves deserved to die. His insistence that it was society that made innocents into monsters and punishment wasn’t the answer.

  He didn’t want to hear that anger was not the way. He didn’t want to force that anger down. He didn’t want to see the other side of the argument. He wanted revenge. He wanted to be able to make Reeves pay. Make him suffer. Hear him scream and watch him bleed.

  Chiara had taken her comfort in the knowledge that Reeves was suffering right now. Cade couldn’t. He could take his comfort from suffering in the real world. He wanted them to pay. The strutting gangstas and the shambling junkies. They destroyed communities, turned bad everything that was good. Why should they be allowed to get away with it?

  He felt a soft touch on his arm and realized he had been sitting with his fists clenched together until his knuckles were white.

  “I think you and I see things the same, Tommy. And I know if you had your chance over, you would shoot that dog down for what he done. God demands it.”

  Cade’s jaw ached from clenching it. The anger needed a release. It was burning his muscles. His arms were rigid, veins standing out on his forearms. His head was down as though in some parody of prayer.

  He had attended all the PTSD sessions at the HPD Travis Street HQ. He had made all the right noises. He had even cried. That had seemed to satisfy Dr. Carmichael. She had even signed his paperwork to say that he was fit to work. She had never glimpsed the seething pit that now existed at the heart of him. He had kept it carefully covered.

  11

  The gun was a muted roar. Cade fired a full clip at the target, then hit the button to bring the target up from the end of the range. Not his best marksmanship, but not too bad. Good enough for the regs, anyway.

  “Hey, man, you’re slipping. You used to be the man on this range,” Cash said, glancing over his shoulder.

  “Yep, getting old. Eyes are going.” Cade shrugged it off.

  “Yeah, man, hard to see through a black eye, I guess. You been taking on the whole HPD boxing team or something?”

  Cade turned away. It wasn’t the first time he had shown up for work with bruises on his face from a fight the night before. He ignored Cash’s question. He knew why he wasn’t grouping his shots into a nickel any longer.

  There were times when the gun shook in his hand. It wasn’t because he had killed two men. They weren’t even the first men he had killed with his firearm. It was the thoughts that came into his head when his hand closed around the weapon, the anger.

  It wasn’t a target he was shooting at. It was Clinton Reeves. It was the sneering guy trying to kick his face in, having already done the same to a defenseless girl. It was the faceless HPD bureaucracy that gave him a gun, taught him how to use it, and treated him like a criminal when he did.

  Cash slapped him on the back. “Hey, you okay, man? You’re awful quiet.”

  Cade had to take a breath. He had been ready to turn around and shoot him. He felt the muscles in his shoulders seizing, iron hard at the contact. Before he could stop himself, he shrugged Cash off roughly.

  “Hey. Wassup?” There was a note of offense in Cash’s voice. “Fuck, man. Know who you
r friends are.”

  Cade didn’t answer. He slammed out of the door, storming down the hallway that separated Sunnyside storefront firing range from the rest of the building. His shift was over, and the only reason he had gone to the range was because he was still too wired to sleep.

  He should have been exhausted. He always had been after a shift, even when nothing dramatic had happened. It took energy to maintain the alertness needed from a cop who expected to survive their shift. But lately, he came off duty taut.

  He reached the locker room. The next shift had already been through. The air was thick from the hot showers, and there was a haze of deodorant that went to the back of his throat with every breath.

  No one in there to talk to. Good. He went to his locker, taking off his uniform. The door opened, but Cade didn’t turn around.

  “Hey, brother,” came a deep voice.

  Cade knew the voice, knew the officer. “Hey, High-T.”

  Darnell Bryant was almost as long in the tooth as Cade, a giant who was nicknamed ‘Hightower’ because of his resemblance to the character from Police Academy.

  “How’s things, brother?” Bryant asked, sitting on a bench beside Cade’s locker.

  “Things are great, thanks,” Cade replied.

  “Naw, naw, naw,” Bryant said, shaking his head. “Naw, they ain’t. Blind man can see that. Folks been saying you’re tough to work with lately.”

  “That right?” Cade replied.

  “Yep, that’s right. Folks been saying you got some anger issues to deal with. I hear that, brother. I got them same problems myself.”

  “If you say so, High.”

  Bryant kept his eyes on Cade as he nodded. “Yep, I sure do. I can see it.”

  Cade pulled on a pair of jeans and slammed his locker closed. “Maybe I do. What’s it to you?”

  Bryant stood, his six-foot-five, topping Cade easily. He was standing close enough that Cade had to peer up at him.

  “Don’t be bringing no attitude with me. Because I ain’t the kind to stand for it. Now, I think I can help you out. And I think you can help me out, too.”

  “No disrespect, High. But I’m just looking to get through my shift and go home.”

  “Go out and get into a fight, you mean. Now why you feel the need to go out beating on people when you’re out of uniform, huh?”

  Cade ran a hand through his hair, rubbing at the tension at the back of his neck, the tension that hadn’t left him since Wheeler’s Discount Liquor. “Going to just tell me what it is you’re about, Bryant? I’m tired.”

  “Hey, man. You need to put in to partner with me on the next shift. Rice won’t mind. You and I hit the streets together.”

  Cade knew that Bryant liked to dispense his own brand of justice on the streets. Just like Cade had once been happy to defer to the OG’s, Bryant and a few other officers felt entitled to dole out a beating or two to keep the neighborhood in order. Once upon a time, Cade would have quit before sharing a cruiser with cops like that. Now…

  “Interested, man?” Bryant asked.

  “Maybe,” Cade admitted.

  “Hey, you know it makes sense. It’s a cliché, I know, but it’s a jungle out there. And those brothers walking the streets ain’t nothing better than dogs, most of ’em. And dogs need to know who the master is. You show ’em the stick. You beat down on them, and they don’t never step out of line. That’s how you take care of a community like this. You got to be ready to deal justice. You with me, brother?”

  The big man put a hand on Cade’s shoulder. It practically engulfed the whole area.

  He leaned closer. “I always thought a tough guy like you had what it takes to be a real cop. After that Discount Liquor shit—whooohooo. Man, that was cold. Stepping out in front of a man with a loaded gun. And then Sparrow Street. Five rounds into a cuffed guy—a rapist and a woman beater. You did real good. That’s when I knew you and I were on the same page.”

  Cade realized that the big man was right. He was on the same page. He couldn’t be the compassionate community cop anymore. They didn’t deserve it. They didn’t deserve empathy. They didn’t deserve anyone to know how they ended up where they were. They were scum. Bryant was right. There was only one way to deal with people like that.

  “Okay. Set it up, High. I’ll ride with you.”

  “Hey, hey, my man.” Bryant clapped his back. “We are going to rule them streets, brother.”

  Cade didn’t go home. The decision made to ride with Bryant hadn’t lifted the mood that had been on him since Rivera…since Discount Liquor. It was easier to use the name of the place where it had happened instead of that actual event itself.

  He couldn’t face it. In therapy sessions, he had talked. Read the therapist with a cop’s intuition and understanding of what it took to get back on the streets. He said what he needed to say, but those were just words. They had no real meaning, empty. They were an act you went through to show you were still a balanced individual who wasn’t about to start shooting up the place.

  But he couldn’t face it in his own head. He headed north, searching for a strange neighborhood and a bar. A few beers would stoke his belligerence. After that, picking a fight would be easy. There were always plenty of scum out there thinking they could take you, looking forward to it even.

  Cade just wished there was some satisfaction for him at the end of it. There wouldn’t be. Just the unquenchable anger and the empty feeling again. His phone rang. He saw it was Rissa and accepted the call before he thought about what he was doing.

  “Hey, Tommy. What are you up to?” she asked.

  “Just finishing my shift.”

  “On your way home?”

  “No.”

  Now, why on earth wouldn’t he lie about that? Easy enough to say yes. Easy enough to say he was going home to drink a couple of beers and watch the Cowboys. But something had made him tell her the truth. There probably wasn’t another person in the world anymore that he would be that honest with. Elaine would have been—once.

  “So where, then?” she asked.

  “Where d’you think?”

  “Well, tell me where you are, and I’ll meet you there.”

  “No, Rissa. You and I don’t drink in the same establishments. I’ll be somewhere where they don’t abbreviate their cuss words.”

  She scoffed. “Hey. I’m not a fragile little flower. Just because I choose not to swear doesn’t mean I can’t bear it from others. I’ve done enough newsroom shifts, believe me. So, which bar, tough guy?”

  “I’m really not in the mood for company,” he said flatly.

  “Exactly. Except for the bozos who are going to be beating you up.”

  “I do some beating, as well.” Cade found he couldn’t help but defend his manhood.

  “Can’t believe you. Actually can’t. Are you really trying to prove to me how big your thing is? That’s a spectacular missing of the point, doofus.”

  Cade growled something to himself that he wouldn’t ever have said to her face. “Rissa. Just leave me alone for a while.”

  “No. Flat no. I’m not standing by and letting you self-destruct. You want to get drunk. Get drunk with me and sleep on my couch and go back to work hungover. I will call your precinct if I have to,” she threatened.

  Cade slammed the horn as a car in front failed to pull away from lights as quick as he would like. The city was closing in on him, and Rissa was trying to deny him his only escape.

  Frustration boiled in him. He held onto his control by his fingernails. He knew that Rissa was the last anchor he had to a decent life. He knew the road he was traveling on was a dark one.

  He had been stepping onto that road, and his steps were gaining speed. It was like he was being pulled on, drawn into the night. The conversation with Bryant had cast a shade over him.

  Rissa was the last light he had to cling to. He couldn’t push her away. He could reject his friends and colleagues. He could reject his job. But a last, desperate instinct for self-
preservation refused to let him give up on Rissa.

  “I’m not hearing anything from you, Tommy. So, what’s it to be?”

  Cade snarled and pulled across traffic onto a side street. He pulled in with a screech of brakes and a blaring of horns from offended drivers. He punched the center of the steering wheel.

  The Ford’s horn blasted, earning surprised looks from passers-by. As quickly as the anger had overwhelmed him, he had it under control. Red-faced and breathing hard, he picked up the phone from the passenger seat.

  “I heard that. Scrap bars. Come to my place. I’ll make lasagna, and we’ll re-watch America’s Game. If you agree to sit through the ’81 49ers, I’ll sit through the’71 Cowboys. Deal?”

  Cade smiled and grabbed at the lifeline. He wasn’t lost yet.

  12

  “Man, this place is depressing,” Bryant commented from the passenger seat.

  “Sure is,” Cade agreed.

  They were on Scott Street. Summer had passed into September. Temperatures had dropped a little, but not much. The intensity that gripped the streets in June lingered.

  The trees appeared still as stone in the sodium arc glow of the streetlights. He had returned to work three weeks ago. He still had a limp but didn’t need the cane anymore. He had specifically requested night duty. He couldn’t look at these streets in daylight any longer.

  He needed the night to hide the worst excesses. The trash that no one bothered to move. The houses that no one bothered to take care of. He didn’t want to see the dealers stalking the streets like they fucking owned them. Or the junkies, just waiting to be exploited.

  “You don’t talk much anymore, Tommy boy,” Bryant said.

  “Nope,” said Cade. Bryant boomed a laugh.

  “That’s okay, brother. I got enough words for both of us. You know me.” He sipped from a thermal mug. “Damn, that’s good. You ever try this? Ethiopian. Now, that’s a place with special significance for any black man. Nubians come from there. That’s as black as you can get. And this coffee is good. Hmm mmm. I’ll make you up a cup one day. You can’t try it and not love it. Trust me.”