Later, he would wish he’d called the whole thing off. Just aborted the mission and headed straight back to the precinct station house. Set off again when his head was straight, and preferably with a different, more stable, partner.
But hindsight can be a merciless instrument of torture sometimes.
The reason they had originally hit the streets — before all this personal shit became an unwanted diversion — was to look for a lowlife named Anton Lomax. Lomax was a junkie who’d had a relationship with a girl named Bernice Thompson. What made Lomax worth seeking was that Bernice had been found in a Harlem flophouse naked from the waist down and with a bread knife sticking out of her chest. Word was that Lomax had recently been spotted scoring dope on 125th Street, which made it a sensible place to start.
As they headed uptown, Doyle told himself he needed to focus and to stay calm. He still had a mass of pent-up anger that Laura had somehow managed to prevent him from releasing. It nestled inside and gnawed at him like a stomach ulcer. He felt as though he had not really cleared the air with Laura; if anything, their discussion had served only to bring down an impenetrable fog.
He worried that the latest rumors started by Laura were going to get back to Rachel or Danny, or both. He worried more that Laura had every intention of making the situation worse. He didn’t know why she would do such a thing — he didn’t understand how her mind worked — but the way she had acted earlier told him that she was capable of making his life hell if she felt so inclined.
Distracted as he was, it was Laura who was the first to spot the four young black men huddled under a streetlamp.
‘It’s Lomax,’ she said. ‘Stop the car!’
Doyle took the car across onto the next block and pulled it into the first space he found. All of his personal concerns had suddenly run for cover. He and Laura got out of their car, both pairs of eyes fixed on the knot of men, both detectives automatically checking ease of access to their handguns. With practiced, wordless efficiency, they split up and attempted to approach the gang from opposite directions.
Lomax spied them as soon as they began to cross the street, and in a flash he cut away from the group and took off.
Shit! thought Doyle, and started his own sprint. He saw that Laura was also running, and that her trajectory was going to get her to Lomax first.
Lomax saw this too, and in the last moment before a confrontation became inevitable he cut to his left and raced up the steps of a graffiti-adorned apartment building. He disappeared inside, swallowed up by the gloom.
Seconds behind her quarry, Laura drew her gun as she too entered the building. Anxious not to get left behind and leave Laura without backup, Doyle picked up the pace and took the steps two at a time. He pulled his gun and dived into the lobby. He heard footsteps pounding up the stairs.
‘Laura!’ he shouted.
‘Up here!’ she called back. ‘He’s heading up.’
Panting, Doyle followed her, still jumping onto alternate steps. He listened to the heavy footfalls above him, growing louder as he closed the distance between them. Just as he thought one final push would bring him into sight of Laura, he heard the creak and slam of a door. There were more footsteps, then another creak and slam. And then silence.
‘Laura! Laura! Wait!’
He practically soared over the next flight of stairs, his strides covering whole sets of steps at a time. In front of him was a brown wooden fire door containing a small reinforced window. He crashed through the door, heard its hinges squeal in complaint. From the far end of the dimly lit corridor came the sound of yet another door being slammed shut.
Ahead of him, Laura was moving swiftly toward the apartment at the end of the hallway. Above its entrance, a light flickered on and off, over and over. Each time it came on, it illuminated a faded brass plate indicating that this was apartment 4D.
‘That it?’ Doyle asked, finding his words difficult to force out as he simultaneously tried to suck in much- needed air.
Laura, in similar discomfort, just nodded.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes!’
‘Okay, go!’
They would worry about the legal niceties later. About how the suspect’s flight gave them probable cause to enter the apartment. About how they both remembered announcing clearly and unequivocally that they were police officers, despite what anyone else heard or didn’t hear. For now, the main thing that concerned them was time. Every second they wasted now gave Lomax and whoever else was in that apartment time to arm themselves and prepare for an onslaught. Every second lost in hesitation magnified the danger several-fold.
And so Doyle hurtled himself at the door, raising his foot. He knew that Lomax had not had time to put an array of bolts and chains in place. When Doyle’s foot connected, there was a loud smash and a splintering of wood, and the door almost came off its hinges as it flew open.
Sailing into the room under his own momentum, Doyle had no time to register the finer details of his surroundings. He didn’t see the living room in terms of its faded and ripped green sofa or its flat-screen TV or its coffee-table collection of porn magazines. His radar was alert only to people and signs of danger. What that told him was that this room was clear. But what it also drew to his attention, as if it were lit up in neon, was the door to the bedroom.
The door was painted in cream, and a crack ran the length of one of its panels.
And Doyle could see that it was moving. It was slowly swinging shut, as though someone had just entered that room.
He was convinced of this. In that instant of time, he was surer than anything that the door was moving.
And so he called out to Laura, ‘Bedroom!’ and he raised his gun in cover and watched as, in complete faith, she headed toward the room he had just indicated. She had heard the unwavering conviction in his voice, was absolutely certain now that this was where their quarry lurked, and so that’s where she went, trusting to the experience and judgment and sincerity of her partner.
When Laura’s back exploded, the universe disappeared for Doyle.
If he was unaware of his surroundings before, they had now winked out of existence.
What remained was. .
. .Laura, a huge hole punched into her back, falling and twisting, her face contorting in pain. .
. .the sound. A blast that filled the room, its shockwaves bouncing and rebounding off the walls. .
. .and Lomax. Standing in the doorway of the room to Doyle’s left.
That room being the bathroom.
Not the bedroom. Not the room into which Doyle had just sent Laura. Not the room with the cream door and its cracked panel. The door that was moving. Because, so help me God, it was most definitely moving.
Lomax was not alone. He had a gun for company. A sawed-off double-barrel shotgun, one of its dark deadly eyes still smoking after its look at Laura.
And now the other eye, the one still capable of seeing, was turning in search of another victim. The gun was swinging in an arc that, in the next fraction of a second, would bestow upon that eye full sight of Doyle.
In the moments which followed, Doyle discovered something profound. He found an understanding that had eluded him before — something that is likely to elude anyone who has never looked death in the eye before.
What was revealed to him was that, in a situation like this, you lose control of your body. You lose the ability to think, to rationalize, to make conscious decisions. You become an entity that functions solely by reflex, a biological unit within which every muscle, every sinew, every neuron is acting in unison to the tune of one overriding message. And that message is to survive. At any cost.
And if that objective entails the complete obliteration of another human being, then so be it. There is no morality here. No appeals to God or to humanity. There is only the law as laid down in our veins through millions of years of evolution.
What Doyle found himself doing was pulling the trigger of his Glock not just once, or twice, or any accountable number of times. He found himself pulling that trigger again and again and again, absorbing the kick
