by Jess Walter
“Let him go!” the woman yelled. “Donnie! Donnie!”
Dupree brought his side handle baton up and hit the woman and she fell back, leaving the blade in his shoulder. The other officer grabbed the woman and wrestled her to the ground.
“You okay, baby?” screamed the man on the ground and he squirmed beneath Dupree. Not knowing what else to do and wanting to tend to the knife in his shoulder, Dupree cranked a little harder on the man’s arm. “Aaah!” yelled the man, but he finally went limp and allowed Dupree to handcuff him.
Other police cars were arriving, as well as paramedics. Dupree reached back over his own shoulder and felt for the knife handle. He pulled it out. It was a small kitchen paring knife. It had gone straight in and not too deep, maybe a couple of inches. Still, Dupree knew what this meant. The Big Worry. There were plenty of small worries on patrol. Break up a street fight and it’s like you’re wading into a giant petri dish of unknown germs and bacteria and viruses. Drag some old transient to detox and you automatically start scratching, whether you’ve picked up his head lice or not. But the Big Worry was something else entirely, something that dried out your mouth every time you noticed a scratch on your arm, every time you found someone else’s blood on your skin.
He didn’t know a cop who hadn’t been strapped with the Big Worry at least once. In the everyday buzzes of adrenaline on the street, you don’t notice the bite marks or the dried blood until later, when you’re alone with your thoughts. Of course, the odds were astronomical, but that didn’t matter at three in the morning, after your shift, lying next to your wife, wondering whose blood cells were mingling with yours. Dupree had never known a cop or paramedic to get it that way, but that didn’t stop the Big Worry. This little paring knife had slashed both of these drunks and then had been calmly deposited in Dupree’s shoulder, joining their blood as plainly as a transfusion.
A paramedic arrived and Dupree took his uniform shirt off and then his T-shirt. The blood made a circle on the back of his T-shirt the size of a baseball
“I love you, Donnie!” the drunk woman was yelling as the paramedics finished bandaging her wounds and the cops eased her into a patrol car.
“I love you too, baby!” Donnie yelled back.
“That’s touching,” Dupree said quietly, under his breath. The paramedic applied some cream to his shoulder. It burned worse than the stabbing.
“You need stitches,” the paramedic said.
Dupree rolled his eyes. “Can you do it? I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
“Sorry. I’ll bandage it for now, but you’re gonna have to go in and get stitched.” The paramedic reached for his kit. “When was your last tetanus shot?”
“I had one for lunch today,” Dupree said.
The patrol corporal came by with his camera and snapped a picture of Dupree’s wound, and then Dale Henderson, the zombie-eyed graveyard sergeant for Charley Sector, came over to look. He was a few years younger and Dupree was taken aback by the condescension in his voice, even as he tried to make a joke. “I guess this is what happens when you respond to a call off your shift.”
“I guess,” Dupree said.
“You had us a little worried,” Henderson said. “Why’d you turn off your radio?”
“I don’t know. My shift ended…and I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
Without looking up from Dupree’s shoulder, Henderson asked, “Where were you drinking tonight, Alan?”
“I wasn’t drinking!” Dupree didn’t like the snap in his own voice. It was a natural question for Henderson to ask. “I wasn’t drinking,” he repeated more quietly.
Henderson checked his watch. “Okay, but you understand my asking. Two hours after your shift ends, you just happen to be driving past a call in another sector?”
“I wasn’t drinking, Dale.” He blew a mouthful of air toward the other sergeant.
Henderson shrugged as he wrote something in his notebook. “It’s no big deal. You’re clearly not drunk. I was just curious.”
But Dupree couldn’t shake the desire to explain himself. “Debbie and I split up almost two months ago,” he said. He told Henderson everything that had happened, from the Christian concert to his decision to drive by his wife’s house when his shift ended. Henderson quietly took notes. “I was sitting outside her house and it was so quiet,” Dupree said. “I guess that’s why I turned off my radio, because of that quiet.” He told Henderson about the fight and the knife in his shoulder, and when he was done Dupree laughed ironically. “Just put down that I was drinking. That’s a lot less pitiful.”
Dupree remembered Henderson’s own messy divorce, six, seven years earlier, in that same cluster of breakups as Pollard’s. Henderson had been dating a woman in the prosecutor’s office, a clerk he later married. Dupree’s story seemed to have softened him. “Well,” he said, “you were a big help with the homecoming king and queen over there.”
“Yeah, I should’ve stayed asleep.”
“You should’ve called in and told someone you were off work,” Henderson said, a scolding tone in his voice. “You’re gonna have to write this up yourself, you know, explain how you got stabbed outside your sector, two hours after your shift ended.”
“Yeah,” Dupree said. “I figured as much.”
Henderson flopped his notebook closed and considered Dupree carefully. “You takin’ care of yourself, Alan?”
Dupree just nodded and watched Henderson walk away. The paramedic finished taping the bandage on his shoulder and handed Dupree a handful of antiseptic creams in small packages connected at the ends like sausages. “After they stitch you up, you’re gonna need to keep an eye out for infection,” the paramedic said.
“Thanks,” Dupree said. He put his uniform shirt on, and gave the T-shirt to a patrol officer to take to the evidence room. When he stood up to button his shirt, Dupree noticed an old man across the street, pressed against the chain-link fence of the boat dealership, watching him, a guy in a security uniform. Dupree walked over.
“I don’t envy you guys,” the old man said. “I don’t know where you get your restraint, how you don’t just shoot idiots like that.”
“Did you witness our little party here?”
“I’m the one who called the police. They were just walking along, both of ’em as drunk as the day, just laughing, and I’m watching ’em, thinking how nice it is that even drunks get to fall in love. And then she wanted to go one way and he wanted to go the other and next thing you know…Battling Bickersons.”
Dupree looked through the fence, past the old man to the rows of yachts and smaller boats in the sales yard of Landers’ Cove. In the center of the huge lot was a glass-and-steel showroom that was in the process of being remodeled. Construction crews had set up a trailer and a small crane, and the one-story, glass storefront had been stripped to its metal frame, which apparently was being expanded.
“What’s going on here?” Dupree asked.
The security guard noted the construction and turned back. “They’re expanding, adding Jet Skis and snowmobiles. What do you call ’em? Snowboards. I guess they’re gonna call the new part Landers’ Mountain.”
Landers’ Cove had been here at least forty years, and during that time the wealthy South Hill people had been forced to come down to this ever-worsening neighborhood to buy their boats. The owner had continued to pour money into the place, hoping to wait out the neighborhood. Of course, Dupree had seen neighborhoods gentrified. But he never would’ve seen it coming in this neighborhood. Across the street, a three-story brick building also was being remodeled. It had housed a dive bar and two levels of lowlife apartments for as long as Dupree could remember. Now the facade was being scrubbed and a demolition crew had set up a chute leading to a dump truck and was gutting the building of its lathe and plaster.
“What’s going in across the street?” Dupree asked.
“Electronics store,” the old man said. “’Course, if they keep cleaning up the neighborhood, I’m gonna be
out of a job.”
Dupree remembered when he’d been on the task force, mistaking Kevin Verloc for a potential suspect, only to be reminded that Verloc ran the biggest security company in the city. “You must work for Verloc,” Dupree said.
“That’s right,” said the old security guard.
“How long have you worked here?”
“At the boat shop? Six, eight months.”
“And how long have you worked for Kevin?”
The old guy smiled wryly. “Ever since the doctor slapped his butt.”
“You’re his father?”
“Paul Verloc,” the man said and gestured toward the fence, as if to show he would shake hands if they weren’t separated by the chain link.
“It’s good to meet you,” Dupree said. “I’m Alan Dupree.”
Verloc’s father nodded. It seemed like years ago that Dupree had been fishing for tips and had mistakenly called Kevin Verloc.
“You ever talk to anyone about these murders?” Dupree asked.
“Couple weeks ago,” Paul Verloc said. “A woman came by and asked if I’d seen anything out of the ordinary.” The old guy laughed. “It’s amazing what you start to think of as ordinary. I’ve walked around corners and seen kids, fifteen, sixteen years old with a needle stuck in their arm, givin’ some old drunk a smoothie. And a cop asks if I’ve seen anything out of the ordinary and I can’t come up with a thing.”
Dupree nodded. “I know what you mean.”
“I do miss the girlies, though,” the old man admitted. “Some of ’em were rude and you couldn’t trust ’em, but most of ’em you felt kinda sorry for.” Absentmindedly, Paul touched his middle finger to an age spot where his hairline had once been, running the finger across the lines of his brow beneath his silver, receding hair. “You figure they moved to another neighborhood?”
“For the time being,” Dupree said. He finished buttoning his shirt and checked his watch. Going on three now. “Well,” he said, “it was good talking to you.”
Paul Verloc touched his radio to his temple and tipped it toward Dupree.
In the car, Dupree sat for a moment staring at the blood-streaked sidewalk. He’d been punched or kicked or scraped weekly as a patrol officer, usually breaking up a fight like this one, but this stabbing was the most serious injury he’d ever sustained as a cop. As a young man he’d imagined police work as a series of Walter Mitty daydreams, in which he was stabbed or grazed by a gunshot while protecting some beautiful young woman, solving some master crime. But this was the truth of the job—a paring knife in your shoulder from a drunk woman you were trying to help.
Dupree pulled a small notebook from his pocket and jotted down a few notes to make sure he included them in his incident report. He wrote down exactly what he’d heard the woman yell, the name of the side street, the closest businesses and the distance between the chain-link fence and the sidewalk. He started the car and had begun driving toward the hospital when it occurred to him that he should probably write his report tonight, before he got his stitches. He turned the car and headed for the cop shop.
He drove over the Monroe Street Bridge and pulled his car into a space in front of the Public Safety Building, saving his explanation at the garage for later. He used his ID card to go in through a back door, emerging in the dark hallway outside the detectives’ offices, and was on his way to the front desk when he realized he was standing in front of the door to the task force office. Dupree stood outside it for a moment, listening. It was quiet inside. He pulled out his ID badge, with the dark magnetic strip down the side. By now they should have changed the lock or taken his ID off the list of those that would open the door. But when he swiped his card through the runner, the lock clicked open.
It was dark inside, the entire room lit by two desk lamps left on by detectives. Dupree walked straight to Spivey’s desk, his old desk. The thing that galled him wasn’t that a shit like Spivey was valued more than he was by the police department. He’d been around long enough to know that police brass were as impressed as anyone by the power of youth, the lure of a person who seems to know new things. This was especially true of cops, who fell all over themselves before a cop who could turn on a computer. But even that didn’t really bother Dupree. To be honest, he had been slow to make adjustments. He should have gotten a profiler on the case. He should have gotten the computer database up and running and done a better job with follow-ups. What bothered Dupree was that he hadn’t seen it coming. From a purely political standpoint he’d underestimated Spivey completely, allowed his dislike for the kid to translate into dismissiveness. He could have used the kid’s expertise and it would have helped them both, but instead he shunted Spivey to the side. And for what?
Two spots over, her chair was pushed deep into the well of her desk, a sweater draped over the chairback. Spivey had gotten the job in Major Crimes that Caroline deserved. That’s why he gave the kid such a hard time, why he did so many things.
He walked to Caroline’s desk, picked up the photograph of her mother, then set it down. Absentmindedly he pulled one of the drawers in her desk, but it was locked. He stepped away from her desk and took in the whole room, the room he’d once commanded—without Spivey’s knowledge of science and profiling and computers, surely, but with a certain integrity. Mostly life is an ascension, it seemed to him, and he wondered what happened when you stopped climbing, when your progress began to be measured in the other direction and the best a person had to look forward to is retirement, the loss of responsibility and opportunity, the loss of function and friends.
He put his hands palms-down on her desk. For twelve years this was the only relationship he could have with Caroline, that of sergeant and officer, of mentor and student, and so he approached it with the heat and passion of an affair. He taught and inspired and cajoled her. He worked behind the scenes on her behalf, praising her in reports, whispering her name for promotions and big cases, coaxing her career with an honest zeal. He did more than that, of course, more than he should have, and more than she knew. It was ironic: To this woman, he had been faithful. And now that she was finally on the inside—everyone he cared about was inside now, it seemed, the curtains drawn on every house he drove past—Dupree was stuck on the outside. He ran his hand along the sweater on her chair, ashamed of the tactile thrill of her clothing, and his life suddenly seemed to him like a ship that had gone off course somewhere—although that wasn’t quite right, because he knew exactly where and when. He wondered how many times he’d replayed that night in his head, how many times he heard her frightened voice on the radio, still two blocks away. Yelling at her to wait, he was almost there, her saying there wasn’t time and then the terrible clap of a gunshot. Stumbling out of his car and down the driveway, finding her in the backyard beneath the sizzling bug lamp, pointing the gun at the drunk wife beater, who lay still at her feet. The mess at the crime scene and the interviews, the crush and bustle, then back at her apartment, the night stretching until dawn and seeming heavier than the collective weight of every night since, so that Dupree found himself believing that if they had just made love, it wouldn’t be such a vivid and haunting possibility, would be just a memory: simple, sweet, and gone.
38
Shaking, Caroline backed into her house, grabbed her cell phone off the dining room table, and unholstered her gun from the shoulder strap hanging over a chair. She punched 911 on the phone, but already her mind was telling her that maybe she hadn’t really seen Lenny Ryan, so she didn’t hit the send button right away. She pressed herself against the wall to keep from being silhouetted by the lights in the house. She edged across the room to the wall, turned off the lights, and then crouched in front of the front window. The red car was gone, and immediately she wondered if it had ever been there. She grabbed her car keys from the entryway desk, dropped to her stomach, and crawled to the open front door. Nothing. She looked both ways, then came outside slowly and stood in a crouch, keeping the gun pointed to the ground as she came down
the porch steps and climbed into her car. Her tires chirped as she backed out of the driveway.
She lived only a few blocks from Division, the main north-south street in the city, so she went that way, her head swinging from side to side as she looked down residential streets for some sign of the red car. She tried to be calm, to second-guess herself the way she would question an unreliable witness. She had just interviewed the exotic dancer who was approached by Ryan in a red car. So maybe she had just seen a red car slow down in front of her house (it happened all the time; she lived at the corner of an uncontrolled intersection) and imagined the man inside to be Ryan in a beard and baseball cap. Had the car even been red? It had happened too quickly for her to get a license plate number or a make and model, and colors at night were tough to see. But it was a small sedan, she knew that. Four doors. Maybe a GM product but more likely Japanese, a Nissan or a Mazda, she thought. Yes, Nissan. A Sentra, maybe. And yes, she was sure it was red.
If patrol got out now, they might have a chance of finding him—again, her mind cautioning, if it was him. And if it wasn’t? Who knew what Spivey would make of this. She turned on her radio, but the dispatcher was on something else right now, two drunks fighting on East Sprague and some patrol officers who apparently had gotten into it with the drunks. Then, as she was fiddling with the radio, six blocks ahead Caroline saw what looked like a red car pass under a streetlight and turn right onto a side street. She stepped on the gas and flicked the switch to turn on her grille lights, veering past the cars until she reached the side street.
Her fingers clenched the wheel. The gun was a dead weight in her lap—a dumb place to carry a gun when you’re speeding around like this. She carefully put it on the floor of the passenger side. When she reached the side street that the red car had turned down, Caroline cornered hard and saw it only three blocks ahead now, its driver as calm and even as someone on his way to work.
Within two blocks she caught him and he pulled over slowly, then seemed to reconsider, veering out toward the street, then settling back on the shoulder, in front of a clapboard house. The driver turned to the side and she could see the silhouette of a baseball cap; he turned forward again and sat still.
