“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 fucking 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.
Vega ignored them all. He crouched down next to the dead man. The suspect’s bloody right hand was turned palm-side down. There was something underneath. It was too small to be a gun. A knife, perhaps? A box cutter? Vega knew he wasn’t supposed to touch anything. But he had to know. He uncurled the fingers slightly. Staring up at him was a creased, blood-smeared photograph of two Hispanic men and a teenage boy.
There was nothing else in the dead man’s hand.
Vega’s stomach lurched. He felt light-headed and dizzy. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, ran over to the nearest tree, and vomited. He heaved again and again until there was nothing left inside of him. The man I killed was involved in a home invasion robbery, Vega reminded himself . He ran after I identified myself as a police officer. He refused to surrender. He turned on me.
He had no weapon.
That thought beat out every other in Vega’s brain.
The other officers on the scene gave Vega space. No one said anything to him. They probably thought that’s what he needed right now, and a part of him did. But another part of him would have given anything for someone to tell him he’d done the right thing. Instead, everyone went about their business like actors on a stage waiting for someone to feed them their lines. Nobody knew what to say. Two EMTs started up the hill but were quickly turned back. Vega watched their faces absorb the news in the ghoulish alternating flashes of red and blue light.
Hammond eventually walked over and patted Vega gently on the back.
“Come sit in my car, Jimmy. Okay? Maybe call your family? No sense you being out here.”
Vega nodded, not trusting himself to speak as Hammond led him down the hill and into the front passenger seat of Hammond’s unmarked Toyota.
“I thought for a moment you were gonna put me in back,” said Vega.