“Get me something or get away.”
“Donald, if they catch you here with him that’ll be the end of it,” Samantha said. “The end of everything.”
Garvey looked at her. “I shot a man, Sam,” he said. “I’ll… I’ll call for help and try and get him to a hospital.” Then he shook his head. “Go. Get out of here. I won’t have you caught with me.”
“Donald, please.”
Garvey bound the man’s wound tighter. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know you didn’t, but-”
“I didn’t do anything wrong. And that’s all that matters. I have to stay, Sam. I shot a man. I shot him. Someone has to do something.”
“Donald, please, come with us. We can leave. We can just… we can leave all this behind us.”
“No,” he said softly. “Don’t you understand? No. I can’t.” He looked at her a moment longer and then turned back to the body lying on the cement.
Samantha felt herself moving toward the mouth of the alley. She looked back and saw Garvey on his knees, streaked in filth and blood and still tending to the man’s leg. The man was ashen and pale now. Lips sluggish and white. His final moments watched over by the filthy, doomed creature beside him, who did not know him and never would, tending to the man’s injury as though there were no one else in the world but the two of them. Then Hayes pulled her forward and they were gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Garvey used anything he could to bandage the wound. His shirt and strips from his pants and a nearby newspaper, all wadded up. Still the blood seeped through. The man’s crotch was a mass of dark red and Garvey’s arms were smeared and crackling up to the elbows. Occasionally he would stop and listen to the man’s chest, as his pulse was now too weak to feel. Each time he’d hear the organs within slacken and fade a little more. Once when he lifted his head away he saw he had left a pattern upon the man’s shirt in mud and gore and sweat. His own molten face impressed there, mute and panicked. Then he turned and shouted for help once more.
After a while he was unable to tell if the man was dead or not. He suspected he was. The pulse had been too faint for a long time and he could not tell if any breath still went through the man. But the blood still came. Drooling out of the edges of the sodden bandage.
Garvey picked up his service revolver and opened the cylinder and took out each of the rounds. He lined them up on the cement next to him, copper points toward the morning sky, the last one’s nose open and smelling of sulfur. Then he laid the gun before them and sat on his knees. He was not sure why he did it. It was some ritual he had never known before, or perhaps had never yet existed. Some urban rite for those who died in these cement passageways, unshriven and unmourned.
They took their time to come. He was not surprised. The response time in these neighborhoods was terrible. As dawn came the end of the alleyway lit up with a half-dozen beams of light and he saw the glint of little shields and buttons behind them like sparks. Someone shouted at him to put his hands up.
He held up his badge. The beams stayed on him for a moment and then drooped as though disappointed. Then they walked to him and someone said his name and they all stood in the alley and looked at the man on the gore-streaked ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
They picked Garvey up in Lynn and gave him a coat and sat him in the back of the car. Half the district had shown up, guns and truncheons in hand, pacing back and forth over the cement like animals with their blood up. The detectives raced to beat the sun and keep the body from the residents, but it was already too late. By eight a crowd had formed. By eight-thirty someone had squawked out the name of the body, then begun to put together who had shot him down. Soon the bottles and the rocks were flying through the air and the patrolmen had their truncheons out, but they were retreating step by step. Stones struck Garvey’s car and the glass of one of the passenger doors turned to frigid webbing before falling in on the seats.
“Christ,” someone cried. “Get him fucking out of here.”
They drove Garvey to Central but he barely noticed. He was drifting along. The shot still echoing in his ears. Samantha still calmly peeling back the bandage. Hayes gasping over the wound.
They stuck him in a back office. Collins came in and said, “Think. Just think. Don’t say anything yet. Just think.” Then he was gone.
Solidarity, he thought to himself. It had always been solidarity before. But the city had changed, he knew. Police were now its casualties along with all the regular citizens. Protectors no longer, perhaps never again.
He watched the ordeal through the slits in the blinds. Collins was speaking with two men, their faces impassive. High Crimes, he guessed. They handled the internal stuff. Collins wasn’t arguing with them, and that was troubling. Just talking. There seemed to be a lot of nodding going on. Then Garvey saw the gold glimmer of a full regalia hat, though they were not wearing the rest of the official uniform, certainly not at this hour. Everyone stood up straight and they maneuvered into lines. Someone big had come, Garvey guessed. Brassy. The commissioner, maybe, but Garvey couldn’t make out his face.
He wished he could take a shower. He had crawled through miles of piping behind Hayes and Samantha, shedding clothing when it became too sopping wet. He stank of bilgewater and sweat and his hands and arms and thighs were still smeared with the blood from the union man. It seemed as though he would never get it off. As though the stain went down through each layer of his skin to soak into his own veins and perhaps touch his heart.
He looked up. Collins was walking toward him, face set. He opened the door and came in and looked Garvey over. Then he took out a small green flask. “Here,” he said, holding it out.
“I don’t want it,” Garvey said.
“Yeah you do.”
“I don’t. I really don’t, Lieutenant.”
Collins hesitated, then replaced the flask. He sat down next to Garvey and asked, “You hurt?”
“No. I need a shower, though. That High Crimes out there?”
“Yeah. They ran down here the second they heard.”
“And the commissioner?”
A long silence. Collins said, “Yes.”
“What does the commissioner say?”
Collins did not answer.
“I’m being strung out, aren’t I,” Garvey said. “Cop drops a unioner. Deep in Lynn. That’s… that’s as dirty as it gets, isn’t it?” He pulled the coat tighter around him.
“It depends on the story,” Collins said quietly. “It depends on that. If you can sell it clean and sell it real, you can still come out ahead. Still come out police.”
“Does the Department have a story for me to tell?”
“We’re still putting it together. Why don’t you give it to me first? Run it by me and I can see if there’s any irregularities.”
Garvey told him. Told his story in full. Collins listened and did not speak for nearly five minutes once it was done.
“That’s your story?” Collins asked.
“Yeah.”
“That’s what you’re going to tell High Crimes?”
“If they ask.”
“And the commissioner? If he asks?”
