Authors: Michael Koryta
Oddly,
the chest wound was the lesser of my troubles. Eight inches from being my end—
if
it goes in on the left side in the same position, you're dead almost
immediately,
Dr. Crandall told me—but the bullet took a ludicrously
forgiving trajectory and passed through me, leaving behind a broken rib and
some minor soft tissue damage. If it had gone in on the left side, it would
have blown right through my heart.
The
leg wound, which came when Darius fired at me as I fell through the door and
into the garage, was much more serious. The bullet did some arterial damage,
and the only reason I didn't bleed out before the EMTs arrived was that I was
sitting upright and the wound was on the back of my leg, which offered some
level of compression and slowed the bleeding. The crime scene photographs I saw
later showed a spray of blood almost six feet from my body that had been
released when I leaned onto my side to reach for my phone. If I hadn't rolled
back over, pressing the wound against the concrete floor, I would've lost
consciousness before I ever got a word out to the 911 operator.
Fall
on your ass, save your life. It was a hell of thing to think about.
It
turned out there was actually some talk of arresting me, too. I was a civilian,
not a cop, and I'd taken a life. We tend to call that murder. The only thing
that allowed me to avoid at least preliminary charges was the recording, which
supported my story.
I was
coherent enough to watch TV on the second day, when I stared through a fog of
medication and saw an old booking photo of Cash Neloms fill the screen. He was
dead, the anchor explained, but still the focus of several ongoing homicide
investigations.
He
was dead.
It
was over, then. Wasn't it— I thought it was probably over.
No
one heard from Alexandra Cantrell in the aftermath of the shootings.
They
held me in the hospital for ten days. During that time I refused to see anyone
except Amy, Joe, my sister, and the police. My sister, Jennifer, stayed for
five days, the longest visit she'd had since she moved from South Bend to
Seattle, and the first time she'd met Amy. The two of them seemed to get along
well.
Gena
came into town, too, and I was happy to hear that. I didn't find out she'd been
there until the day she left—Joe told me he'd explained to her that I didn't
want a large audience. That rule hadn't applied to her, but it was just like
Joe to quietly respect it, no matter what. It was good to know she'd come when
he needed her.
I
spent a lot of those days asleep. The right kind of drugs will do that to you.
I woke once and heard Amy crying in the chair by my bed, but something told me
that I should not open my eyes, should not disrupt her. I listened to her cry,
and after a while she stopped and reached out and put her hand on my arm, and
then I fell asleep again.
Calls
came in constantly, most of them from the media. A few other friends tried to
call or stop by, and Amy told me that Parker Harrison had come by on three
occasions and been turned away. He was holding a card each time, she said, but
he would not leave it with the receptionists or with her.
An
insider account of the shootings and the crimes that had led to them was
released during my hospital stay. It included significant details but was
largely unattributed, most of it laid at the feet of "an unnamed source
close to the situation." Amy was the source. I'd told her that I wanted to
get as much of the detail out as possible, and have it done as early as
possible. I also didn't want to give any interviews. That wasn't the sort of
balance that pleases the media, but she leaked the story to the right people,
people she trusted, and they did the rest.
Darius
Neloms was charged with attempted murder. We heard that his attorney would
attempt a counterclaim alleging that I had fired first. Amy was worried about
that. I told her we'd deal with it when it came. Then Darius and his attorney
listened to the tape, and evidently found it more conclusive than they had
hoped. By my fourth day in the hospital they were negotiating with prosecutors,
suggesting that Darius could produce evidence proving his nephew was indeed the
murderer of Cantrell, Bertoli, Ken Merriman, and others. Blood ties meant a
great deal to Darius until he was in jail and his nephew was dead, it seemed.
According
to Darius, Salvatore Bertoli had sought Cash out to warn him of Joshua
Cantrell's attempts to get information about the murder of Johnny DiPietro.
Bertoli still believed Cash Neloms to be a friend. In exchange for the warning,
Cash killed him and then Cantrell. Housekeeping. His was a different world by
the time Bertoli got out of prison; he had an empire to protect, and one did
not rule an empire with a soft touch.
While
all of this was the focus for me, the police and prosecutors were more
interested in what Darius had to say about his nephew's associates. Cash was
dead—his network was not. Mike London told me that he was hearing Darius might
get a hell of a deal if he rolled on enough people.
I
didn't know how to feel about that.
Joe
was around often, but he wasn't himself. Anytime he spoke, it tended to be to
make a joke, things like suggesting he and I be the stars of a TV commercial
for MetroHealth's trauma unit. It was a forced sort of good humor, and while I
knew he was worried about my condition, I also sensed something else in the
quiet that filled in the spaces between jokes. He was angry.
It
wasn't until the day before my release that he was in the hospital room alone
with me. Always before Amy had been around, or my sister, or a cop or a nurse.
That afternoon, though, Amy had left for a few hours, my sister was on a plane
for Seattle, and the cops and nurses had other concerns. Joe sat in the chair
under the window. We talked for a few minutes before he lost that false comedic
air.
"This
is how you like it, right—" He waved at the bed, at the monitors around
me.
I
smiled. "Sure. My bed at home doesn't have any of this stuff."
He
wasn't smiling. "You're okay lying in that bed with me in the chair next
to it. That's all right with you."
"What
do you mean—"
"Exactly
what I said—it's fine with you if you're in the bed and I'm on my feet. Just
like you were okay going to see Alvin Neloms alone, nobody aware of what you
were doing, because I wasn't there, Amy wasn't there, nobody you care about was
there."
"What
are you talking about, Joe—"
"You
think that if there's nobody around you, then there's nothing for you to fear.
If nobody gets hurt but you, then who cares, right— You can deal with that. You
can't deal with the other."
"I
have dealt with the other."
"Not
too well," he said. "Not too well."
I
twisted my head on the pillow, turned away from his gaze.
"You
sent me home," he said, "and then went back over there alone.
Why—"
I
didn't answer.
"We
could have talked to Darius," he said. "It's what we'd gone over
there to do. Then you backed off, said it was a bad idea, that we should pass
it to Graham. Told me that, went home and said the same thing to Amy, and then
loaded your guns and went back alone, without a word to anyone. I'd like you to
explain why you did that."
I
reached up and rubbed between my eyes, sucked in a gasp of pain at the
movement. It still caught me off guard. I'd spent six days lying here with
nothing to think about but the damage the bullets had left behind, and still
the pain caught me off guard.
"I
guess you're not going to explain why you did it," Joe said. "So I'll
go ahead and explain for you. You went down there alone because you're afraid
for everybody around you, and not yourself. It's so much easier to isolate
yourself, right— Nobody to worry about then. Well, there are a handful of
people—poor misguided souls like Amy, like me—who would tell you that's a
pretty damn selfish idea."
"You've
got a hell of a bedside manner. Should have been a doctor, maybe a
chaplain."
"I'm
not worried about my bedside manner," he said. "You're fine. Took two
bullets. I've taken two of them myself. So if you expect me to sit here and
sponge off your forehead, forget it. You'll get better. You're getting
better."
I
turned back to him. "What do you want me to say, Joe— Apologize for not
bringing you along to get shot again—"
"I
don't want you to say anything. I want you to
understand
something."
"What's
that—"
"What
you're doing to yourself, LP."
"I
don't know what that means."
"Let
me ask you this. Why'd you decide to quit the job back in the summer—"
"I
told you—I was tired."
"Tired
of what—"
"Everything."
"No.
You gave me the phrase, said it right to my face—collateral damage. Ken
Merriman got killed, and it was too much. After what had happened to Amy, what
had happened to me, it was too much. I understood that. Amy understood that. So
we supported you, didn't question it, let you quit. I didn't think it was the
right thing for you to do, but I—"
"You
had already quit, Joe. Don't remember that—"
"I'm
also sixty-two years old! I did thirty years as a cop; you did five. Don't see
any differences there—"
Neither
of us said anything for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was
softer.
"I
didn't think it was the right thing, but I didn't argue because I don't know
that there are many things more deeply wrong than one person telling another
how to live. So I let you quit. Now, a few months later, you're in here because
you
couldn't
quit."
"Should
be a little easier to make it stick now."
Now
it was his turn not to answer.
"You
remember the way Dunbar looked when we went out there and showed him the Neloms
connection—" I said. "You remember how he went into his bedroom and
found his files, Joe— In his bedroom— A man who has been retired for years— He
was obsessed. And wrong."
"And
a different man than you."
"Yeah—
I don't know about that. Don't know how different he is from you, either, if
you hadn't forced yourself to disappear, forced yourself to quit this work.
He's what waits at the end of the tunnel."
"Something
you need to understand, Lincoln— There are a lot of tunnels, and you do your
own digging."
Neither
of us spoke after that. He stayed in the chair until a nurse came in and gave
him an excuse to leave.
We
didn't have another conversation like that. The next time I saw him, there were
other people around and he was back to his forced cheerfulness. I'd never seen
him so funny, in fact. He seemed like he should have his own late-night show.
I
stayed at Amy's apartment after I was released. The stairs were easier to
negotiate there, and her place was more open, had better daylight. That sort of
thing matters to you when you spend most of the day sitting around.
I was
coming back fast. That's what the doctors and the physical therapists told me.
Coming back faster than I had any excuse to, in fact, largely because I'd been
in outstanding shape at the time I'd taken the bullets. All those obsessive
workouts were worth something, then. Good to know.
Amy
and I talked about the shooting often, but always in a journalistic fashion—how
strong the case against Darius was, what the potential legal ramifications for
me might be, things like that. At first I wondered if she was keeping that sort
of distance for my sake, and eventually I realized it was for hers. In the
silence that grew after one of our conversations, I told her that I was sorry.
"You're
sorry—" she said. "For what— Getting shot—"
"For
putting you through all of this."
She
gave a sad smile. "One of the last things you said to me, the night before
you went over there, was that you had to do one last thing, and it had to be
done alone."