No Witness But the Moon(4)

One. Two. Two seconds. That’s all the time a police officer has to make a decision.

One. Two. A lot can happen in two seconds.

An object can fall sixty-four feet.

A bullet can travel a mile.

And an indecisive cop can become a dead one.

Vega wasn’t aware of squeezing the trigger. But he heard the shots. Like burst balloons.

Bam.

Bam.

Bam.

Bam.

The man crumpled to the ground. The confrontation was over.

The pain had just begun.





Chapter 2


Jimmy Vega’s hands were shaking so much, it took him several tries before he could press the button on his radio.

“This is County twenty-nine,” he said, trying to squeeze the breathlessness and panic from his voice. “I’m in the woods behind Oak Hill Road. Suspect on the ten-thirty-two is down on a four-four-four.” Local code for an officer-involved-shooting.

It was like waking from a dream. Just fifty or sixty feet farther down the hill Vega could see the flashing lights of police cars bathing the woods in a strange, otherworldly glow. Did they just show up? Or have they been there all along? He’d been so focused on the suspect, he’d blotted out all other sensations.

Two uniformed patrol officers with heavy-duty flashlights began climbing cautiously toward him. Vega took a step forward into the pool of light. The suspect was lying on his back, not moving. From this angle on the hillside, all Vega could see were the soles of his sneakers and his tan baseball cap, now lying on the ground near him, soaked with blood. Vega wanted to rush over and begin CPR. That’s what he was trained to do after a shooting. But he couldn’t—not until these officers cleared him to move. He wasn’t in uniform. For all the police knew, he was another perp. He dropped his gun to the ground, slowly removed his gold detective’s shield from his belt, and cupped it in his left hand. Then he raised both hands in the air.

“Police officer! Don’t shoot!” he shouted, waving his shield.

The two Wickford cops stepped into the floodlight. A man and a woman. The woman had a soft chin and frizzy bleached hair that reminded Vega of a dandelion. The man was shaped like a torpedo—with a shaved head beneath his cap and a wide torso made wider by his Kevlar vest. Both officers holstered their weapons as soon as they recognized him from the station house earlier. They were closer to the suspect than Vega was. Vega noticed the woman’s mouth form a perfect O at the sight of the man. Torpedo raised an eyebrow and stepped back.

“No ambulance needed here, Detective. You got him good.”

“Did you find anyone else?” asked Vega. He was still panting hard. His side had a stitch in it like he’d just run a marathon. “I think I heard someone else in the woods.”

“There are police everywhere down there,” said Torpedo. “If there’s anyone else, we’ll find them.”

Vega retrieved his gun from the ground and ran over to the man he’d just shot. He was a homicide cop. He was used to pulling up on bloody, sometimes gory crime scenes. But he was unprepared for the damage he himself had inflicted. He’d aimed, as he’d been taught in his police training, for the center mass of the body—the torso. But as the man collapsed and fell backward, one of the bullets must have caught him in the chin and gone through his skull, cracking it open as easily as an egg. Blood and brain matter glistened, dark and gelatinous, across the fallen leaves. The suspect was unrecognizable from the neck up.

I’ve killed a man. Dear God, I f*cking blew his head off! In Vega’s eighteen years as a police officer, including five in undercover narcotics dealing with hardened gangbangers and felons, he’d never had to shoot anyone. He’d pointed his gun plenty of times and had guns pointed at him. He’d seen people killed. He’d wrestled suspects into handcuffs while they were trying to take a swing at him. But he’d never fired his weapon in the line of duty. The vast majority of police officers never do. You practice for it. Every couple of months you go out to the shooting range and train. But it’s like a fire drill. You do it to stay sharp. You don’t expect to ever really need it.

“Are you okay, Detective?” asked the woman cop with the dandelion hair.

“Yeah.” Vega was shaking badly but he tried to cover it by pretending he was just cold. He began frantically walking the perimeter of the body. “Where’s the gun? He had a gun.”

Torpedo felt the dead man’s jacket then stepped to the side and conferred with his partner.

“Anything?” Dandelion murmured. Torpedo shook his head. “He seems pretty sure he had one.”

Vega paced impatiently. “No,” he muttered to himself. “I just blow people’s brains out for the fun of it.” He hadn’t even realized they’d heard him until he noticed the two officers looking his way. Both dropped their gazes and shined their flashlights on the ground to give them some extra wattage over and above the floodlights. They nudged the leaves with their boots. Nothing.

“He had one,” Vega insisted. “I know he did!”

“We’ll find it,” Dandelion assured him.

More cops were heading up the hill now. Wickford’s Detective Sergeant Mark Hammond was with them, carefully maneuvering his perfectly pressed khakis past the twigs and brambles that had snagged Vega’s own pants.