“You think he hurt her,” I finished. He met my eyes and he looked miserable. There was no other word for it. “Do you have any reason to think that?” I asked, my stomach bottoming out at the thought.
“No, just a hunch. Or just expecting the worst. Seems about right; some promising kid pays with her life for telling her boyfriend no. Isn’t that what it’s like everywhere?”
“It sure as hell was in the city. And I didn’t tell you, for all my commendations from the mayor and stuff, I also had a major disciplinary incident a year ago.” I said. I wondered how to tell him what I’d done to that guy without having to pretend to be sorry about it.
“I saw your file,” he said, his tone clipped. “It’s against regulations. That’s why you had to be disciplined. No one is above the rules, not even us.”
“I know,” I said. “And I did it anyway.”
“Do you regret it?”
“I didn’t want to lose my job over it,” I said by way of an answer.
“Saying you didn’t want consequences isn’t the same thing as being sorry you broke both a man’s hand. Why his left? Was that significant?”
“I knew he was left-handed.”
“So you don’t believe in anger management?”
“For me or for domestic abusers?” I asked sarcastically.
“Either, I guess,” he said with a half-smile. “You got an unpaid suspension and you had to do conflict resolution training, right?”
“Right.”
“So did it help?”
“I didn’t beat the shit out of anybody else, if that’s what you mean.”
“So you restrained yourself because of what you learned in training?”
“You can look at it that way if you want,” I said. “Or you could say I didn’t run into any more repeat offenders who put their toddlers in the hospital. Did my record say what he did to that baby? For crying, Brody. He was mad that the kid was crying during his Call of Duty match or whatever game. So he decided to shut him up. That kid is never gonna be okay again. And I think maybe neither will I after what I saw. That—monster—should be glad I didn’t kill him.”
“Did you want to?” he said honestly.
“Yeah. The reason I didn’t is it wouldn’t help the baby. And he’d escape punishment if he was dead. Also I didn’t want to go to jail because criminals aren’t nice to cops in there.”
“So it was a decision based on mercy and compassion?” he said wryly.
“I feel some things very deeply, what can I say?” I shrugged. “I’m not proud of the way I acted, but I don’t lose any sleep regretting it either. The little boy survived and he can even walk again now, but it’s never really going to be over for him and his mom.”
“Or for you?” Brody asked, his voice gentler than I’d ever heard it. I shook my head.
“Part of the job,” I said roughly. “Seeing shit nobody else can face, so maybe we can stop it.”
“You got that right,” he said.
At the next stop, a parking lot behind a closed-down car lot, we found nothing but a bunch of candy wrappers and some fast food bags, an empty bottle of a cheap whiskey that gave me the sickest hangover of my life. I watched Brody pick it up and put it in a trash bin. He looked at me over his shoulder.
“Did you and Damon ever drink that?” I said.
“Whoa yeah we did. Thought we were badass, too.”
“How’d that go for you?” I teased.
“Fine. We were strong, mature men. We never suffered from a hangover at all. I personally didn’t get found curled up in a fetal position on the bathroom floor by my dad afterward either. I had to mow every lawn on my street for two months just for being so stupid. He actually marched me to every door while I was still miserable from the headache and puking, and made me tell the neighbors I was going to be mowing their lawns for free for the next eight weeks to teach me a lesson about responsibility.”
“Did it teach you anything?”
“Don’t fuck up in the middle of July. Lord, it was hot that year. And I couldn’t quit till they were all done. It took all day every Saturday and sometimes part of Sunday, too. I was so worn out I didn’t party the rest of the summer.”
“So your dad’s strategy worked,” I observed.
“Not really. I partied pretty hard Labor Day weekend. We went out on the river; some fool took his dad’s boat. We got drunk, damn near drowned ourselves trying to act cool. Someone had the sense to make us all strap on life jackets before we got wasted, or we’d be dead,” he chuckled.
“Isn’t that a sign of old age, Brody? Laughing about the dangerous crap you did when you were young?”