No Witness But the Moon(21)

Greco grinned. “Nobody said you can’t talk to me. Even in the middle of the night. I’ll curse your unborn descendants. But I’ll try to help you through this. That said however, I still think you should call her.”

“I’ll think about it.” Vega tucked the slip of paper into his wallet. He put his hand on the door then hesitated.

“Hey, Grec?”

“Yeah?”

Vega sat back in his seat. He didn’t know how to formulate the question that was swimming around in his brain.

“You’re still a cop,” he said finally. “You’re still married to Joanna.” Duh.

“And you want to know how I got through it. You want a road map. Is that it?”

“Yeah.”

Greco was silent for a long moment. Then he let out a long slow breath like the last vestiges of that terrible day had finally been expelled. “Make something good happen.”

“Huh?”

“Something really bad happened here. You can’t deny it. Can’t run away from it. So? You gotta make something good come out of it.”

“How?”

“In my case, I started reading up on how to handle mentally ill people. I pushed for department-wide training on how to de-escalate situations involving the mentally ill. A few years after the shooting, I talked a schizophrenic man out of taking his life and his girlfriend’s life. If I’d quit the job, I’d never have done any of that. I found my good. And when I found it, it saved my life.”

“What’s my good?”

“I can’t find it for you, buddy. You’ve got to find it for yourself.”

“I don’t even know where to look.”

“You’ve got to start by realizing that you can’t just go back to the person you used to be. That’s where guys get in trouble. You either work on that or it works on you.”

Greco frowned at the steering wheel. He seemed to want to say something and be afraid of saying it at the same time. “I heard the suspect was reaching for a photograph when you shot him.”

“Yeah.” It pained Vega more than anything to have to admit that. “I’ve got a copy of the picture on my cell. I keep looking at it even though I shouldn’t. It just makes me feel worse.”

Greco shifted in his seat so that the full force of his gaze was on Vega. He had dark, grandfatherly eyes. The kind of eyes that saw you for who you were but imagined in you something better.

“Think about it, Vega. You had a gun trained on this guy. And yet that photograph was so important, he gave his life to show it to you.”

“I guess.”

“You want to find your good? Figure out why that picture mattered.”





Chapter 7


Marcela Salinez didn’t sleep Friday night. There were calls to make. To her mother in Honduras. To Alma, the mother of her father’s two young sons in the Bronx.

“The police will not get away with this!” sobbed Alma. “I will make them pay!” Alma had taken over her father’s life when he came to the United States. Now it seemed she planned to take over his death as well.

“You must not listen to that woman. She talks crazy,” said Byron early the next morning, as he got dressed for work. His “fish clothes,” he called them. Jeans and T-shirts reserved exclusively for when he worked gutting and slicing fish at the smoked seafood plant in town. No matter how much Marcela washed those clothes, they always smelled faintly of fish, brine, and charcoal.

“Alma just became a widow,” said Marcela. “And I lost my father. All because of a police officer’s recklessness. We have a right to be upset.”

“Of course you do,” said Byron. “But not like this. Alma wants to tell the whole world that her sons’ father was shot robbing a house. Is that a good thing for those boys? No! She can do what she wants. But you, Marcela? You must not talk to anyone about this.”

“Not tell anyone my father just died?” Marcela put down the spatula from frying his eggs. She was incredulous. She tried to keep her voice low. Yovanna and Damon were still asleep.

“Tell them he was sick.”

“But it’s all over the news.”

“It’s all over the news that the police shot and killed a Honduran dishwasher. No one has to know he was your father. You don’t use his last name.”

“You want me to deny my father?” Marcela couldn’t hold back the catch in her voice.

Byron came up behind her and gave her a hug. Then he turned her around to face him. He was a broad-shouldered man with a nose like a block of granite and hair that had started to thin like beach grass across his scalp. She fell in love with him not so much for his looks but for his temperament. Unlike so many other Latin American men she’d known, he truly considered her his partner. They asked each other’s advice on everything—which was probably part of the reason it pained him so much that she’d brought Yovanna here against his wishes.

“I would never ask you to deny your father,” said Byron. “Only the circumstances of his death.”

“You mean pretend I didn’t see what the police did to him?”

Byron winced. He knew the enormity of what he was asking. “Tell as few people as possible then—and no norteamericanos, especially not your housecleaning and babysitting clients. If they hear that your father robbed a house and was shot by the police, they won’t side with you. They’ll side with the police. They’ll figure, like father, like daughter.”