The Life Engineered Page 2

  I bit my lip. A kick in the butt? She made it sound like I enjoyed waking up before dawn every morning, working six days a week, and having to beg for favors from friends just to be able to offer my son the semblance of a normal life. It’s so easy to pontificate when your life is perfect. I wanted to tell her that. I wanted to shove it in her face how unfair her comment was, but I bit my lip and I took the blow.

  “Ask for a day shift, even if it’s a desk job, just until you can put Jon in daycare or something. Or find something else for a little while. I’m saying this as much for you as I am for him.” She looked genuinely concerned. “You look like you’re a million years old.”

  And I felt even older than that. Had I always felt this ancient? Had I simply forgotten how it felt not being exhausted? I had never been this worn out.

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe a change of careers might not be such a bad idea,” I admitted. “Didn’t you say Charles was looking for a new secretary?”

  “Tut-tut! Last time Charles had a female secretary, he ended up marrying her.” She pointed a finger to herself. “I’m afraid this is a male-only position now.”

  We both laughed a little. She was even perfect at comforting me, damn her.

  “I’ll ask to be transferred to a desk job or dispatch. I’ll ask today. It’s not quite my preferred career path—”

  “But what it lacks in glamour it makes up for in how good it would be for Jon.”

  She was even perfect at raising my kid.

  I was in a foul mood when I got to the station. The lack of sleep, combined with Helena’s polite but depressing assessment of my situation, had stripped me of all my good cheer from earlier that morning.

  Ours was a pretty small precinct, with maybe two dozen officers and support staff—just enough to serve our small suburban community within the limited budget awarded to us by the municipality. Everyone there knew everyone else, and while I couldn’t say we were all friends, we remained a relatively tightknit group. On the other hand, what we had in conviviality we paid for in lack of flexibility and career opportunities. People didn’t quit or transfer out of the station very often, nor did we see many retirements. It was a great place to have a midlevel position, but a lot less attractive for someone seeking advancement or even just a better shift.

  “Paulson!” Anthony called the moment he saw me walk through the door. If I were to try and imagine a worse person to deal with in my state of mind that day than my bubbly, overeager partner, I’d have my work cut out for me.

  Lieutenant Anthony Blain was difficult to hate, which made snapping at him for being so damn jovial before sunrise as shameful as it was common. It came as a surprise that I managed not to.

  “Good morning, Anthony,” I grumbled as I poured myself a generous mug of vile but potent coffee.

  My young partner wove through the other officers, lieutenants, and detectives, both going on and coming off their respective shifts, and joined me at the coffee machine. As he reached the counter, he magically transformed the annoyed mutterings of his coworkers into mumbles of what could pass for delight at five in the morning. The trick was dropping a large box of assorted donuts next to the percolating demon that kept us supplied in black, oily caffeine.

  “How you doing, partner? Ready to fight crime?” he asked, sipping from a cardboard cup of some fancy, sweet, not-coffee confection.

  “We hand out parking and speeding tickets, Ant. Hardly the stuff of legends.”

  I grabbed a donut before the other vultures picked the box clean. “Ant” was a nickname I’d thought up for him a while ago, and though it was adopted by the rest of the station, it failed to annoy my partner as intended.

  “Well, we can’t all be heroes already, Paulson.”

  “Who’s a hero? My medal must have gotten lost in the mail.”

  “Take some credit, Mel. Everyone knows how hard it must be to raise a kid while doing this job.” He could be sickeningly friendly and positive.

  “Not everyone,” I mumbled as I watched Captain Denis Hutchcroft, our commander and chief, walk out of his office, bleary-eyed and tired. The seasoned relic of our precinct gave the assembled group a polite nod before heading toward the front door.

  “Captain!” I caught myself calling, a mouthful of pastry muffling my voice. Before I’d made a conscious decision, I had walked through the station right up to him.

  “What do you need, Paulson?” he asked, giving his watch an impatient look, fatigued from a graveyard shift he had probably volunteered for.

  That was the problem dealing with the venerable Captain Hutchcroft: as a workaholic himself, he had difficulty empathizing with those of us with common lives and more modest aspirations.

  “I want to talk about changing my shift.”

  His eyes bulged a little, discomfort and a hint of panic written in the lines of his face. It was strange for a thrice-wounded veteran to show so much fear at the mention of a human resource situation.

  “Ah . . . Have you talked to your supervising officer?”

  “Lieutenant Breville’s off on paternity leave for another three weeks, sir.” I tried to maintain eye contact, to let him know I was serious.

  “Ask him when he’s back then. I really have to get going, Paulson. Settle this with your lieutenant.”

  Before I could gather the composure to interrupt, he was out the door and off into the foggy dawn.

  “What’s that I hear? Are you trying to ditch me, Mel?” Anthony asked in a faux hurt tone.

  “No, no,” I replied, defeated. “Just trying to get more time with Jonathan. Do you know what our shift is like today?”

  “Meadow Glen Mall,” he answered, disappointment tainting his tone.

  The assignment suited me fine, even though it lacked the excitement my young partner hungered for. I was more than happy handling traffic violations all day. Boring is good. Boring is safe.

  Everything was routine until lunch—or breakfast, if your schedule is normal. We had caught a handful of people running the red light at the corner of Riverside and Fellsway and doled out a single parking ticket. Apart from the mildly confrontational reaction of our “customers,” everything was moving along smoothly.

  Ant took the opportunity during lunch to go on at great length about the progress of his hockey league. On several occasions I had to remind myself that boring was good, but as a whole I found myself almost enjoying his enthusiasm.

  Then the shit hit the fan. Hard.

  Our community wasn’t prone to acts of violence. Somerville is far from being a sleepy rural village, but the area that falls under my precinct’s jurisdiction is as close as you could get to an ideal suburb. Crime is infrequent, let alone bloodshed or murder.

  That’s why no amount of training could have prepared Anthony or me for the situation that faced us.

  I didn’t even recognize the noise for what it actually was. From where we sat, at the window of a burger joint, it sounded like a loud pop that reverberated across the mall’s parking lot. It echoed for a second before we heard the screams of panic. Anthony was up almost immediately, while I sat, frozen.

  A gunshot.

  Years ago, when I’d first joined the academy, I was comfortable with the risk associated with the job. Unlike being an accountant like my father or a therapist like Helena, being a cop gave the words “mortality rate” significantly more weight. There were classes and seminars dedicated to coping with the loss of coworkers. Workshops discussing insurance options in the event of a career-ending injury, not to mention dying in the line of duty. As with soldiers and firefighters, death is a part of an officer’s life. Once, I had been prepared for it, but the moment I heard the gunshot and the panic that ensued, I found myself paralyzed.

  Not Anthony Blain, however. By the time I had shaken off my torpor, he was already out the door, dodging between cars toward the commotion. This was the moment Ant lived for—his turn to be the hero. Almost every discussion I’d had with him since he became my partner had
been about how he wanted to make a difference—not just through handing out speeding tickets but by saving lives and stopping the bad guy.

  I caught up with him as he crouched between two SUVs, his sidearm drawn. He nodded in the direction of the laundromat.

  Pacing nervously in front of the storefront was a skinny man wearing washed-out jeans and a stained sleeveless shirt. His pale skin was dark with filth. His gray, matted hair was streaked with dirt. In his right hand he held a large revolver, while his left kept flexing nervously.

  At his feet lay a body. The owner of the laundromat. Larger than his attacker and clearly the victim of the gunshot, he crawled painfully on the parking lot asphalt. I couldn’t see any blood from my position, but his legs didn’t seem to work anymore, and his left foot was twitching unnaturally.

  “That’s Eddy Roach,” Anthony whispered, as if I didn’t already know.

  Edward Rochester, or Eddy Roach as we knew him at the precinct, was a small-time drug peddler and heavy user. His brand of petty crimes and minor offenses usually had him bouncing in and out of jail every few months or so. If he wasn’t on probation, then he was on bail and usually violating both. Roach was the kind of small-time offender that cost the judicial system more than he was worth.

  “Where did that idiot get a gun?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  As I spoke, Roach lifted his firearm, pointed it unsteadily at his victim, mumbled something unintelligible, and fired.

  The bullet went straight through the target’s head. Without pause or ceremony, the laundromat’s owner went limp, his face hitting the cold asphalt. Disturbingly, his foot kept twitching.

  “Don’t move, Eddy!” Anthony shouted as he popped up from our hiding spot, abandoning more of his precious cover than I felt comfortable with.

  Instantly, Roach trained his weapon on my partner, and for a split second I was convinced he’d shoot; instead, the twitchy little drug dealer just stood there, opening and closing his mouth like a fish trying to breathe out of water.

  As my partner was putting his life on the line, recklessly confronting an unstable and armed individual, I realized that my hands were empty. My sidearm was still securely tucked in its holster, safety firmly on. I was good at writing up traffic violations, but when the chips were down I was useless. Helena was right, I thought—it would be better for me to get a desk job.

  I didn’t linger on the idea for long, however. Falling back on my training, I reached for what I was taught was my most important weapon as an officer of the law. My first line of defense in any crisis. My radio.

  “Dispatch, we have an armed suspect at Meadow Glen Mall. Subject has already fired two shots, and we have one victim down. Requesting backup.”

  I didn’t wait for confirmation before pulling out my sidearm, removing the safety, pulling myself up to lean on the hood of our impromptu cover, then training my weapon onto Eddy Roach.

  So began the longest ten minutes of my life.

  “Get down, Anthony!” I ordered my partner, barely noticing I was using my “mother voice.”

  Looking behind Eddy, I could see that the laundromat was still full of terrified customers. I was more than a little concerned that one of them would decide, much like my partner, that he wanted to be a hero. Fortunately, they all seemed to be in an appropriate state of shock.

  “Blain? You have your cell phone on you?”

  Anthony nodded without taking his eyes off of Roach.

  “Pull it out and find the number of that laundromat and call. Tell them to get to the very back, hide as best they can, and stay the hell inside!”

  From his hesitation, I could see that he was reluctant to put his weapon down, but he couldn’t argue with the logic and importance of my request. In fact, I was surprised myself. The initial shock and helplessness I felt was gone. In some way it was almost as if someone else had taken over. Like drawing on another’s experience. For the first time in years, I felt my age or even younger. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but I wasn’t tired anymore.

  “Eddy?” I called out, wishing I’d spent more time studying negotiation techniques. “Eddy, it’s Officer Paulson. Do you remember me?”

  “Yeah, I remember you!” he yelled back. His voice was deep for such an emaciated frame, but it was trembling on the precipice of panic. “You arrested me last year!”

  Off to a great start, but at least I had him talking instead of shooting. He was clearly high on some kind of drug—which wasn’t out of the ordinary—but there was obviously something else wrong with him. Roach was a user, a seller, and a thief, but he had never been violent before.

  “You deserved it, and I won’t lie to you, Ed. I’m about to arrest you again.”

  “No!” His answer brimmed with fear.

  “Eddy, I have a gun pointed at your head. You put down your weapon right now, and no one else needs to get hurt, but you—”

  He shot at me. My first thought was how rude he was being for cutting me off, which felt like a strange concern under the circumstances. Only after a second did I think to duck and make sure I wasn’t hit. As I did, I could hear the distant squeak of hinges and an electronic door chime go off.

  “Shit! He’s going in the laundromat!”

  I peeked up over the hood of the SUV to confirm my fears. Indeed, Roach had gone back inside the store, stirring the terrified occupants into a screaming panic. Anthony ran from car to car, making his way up to the front of the laundromat. With a sigh, I followed his lead, catching up to him just as he reached the closest vehicle to the storefront.

  Then we heard the fourth gunshot, muffled from inside the building. It was immediately followed by screams.

  “Anthony . . .”

  It was too late. He was off, and I surprised myself by following his footsteps.

  We both stormed into the store, spreading to the sides, each finding cover behind a row of quarter-operated washing machines. Every step of the way, as we acted like action movie heroes instead of trained professionals, a voice trapped deep inside my heart was begging for me to stop, to wait for backup to arrive—but I ignored it.

  The storefront was empty. Half-folded laundry and boxes of generic-brand detergent were left abandoned here and there. A large dryer was still going through its cycle with an uneven hum. Eddy had herded his hostages to the back of the store.

  “Roach!” Anthony called out. His tone was stern and uncompromising. There wasn’t a hint of diplomacy in his voice. He was too confrontational. This was going to be a disaster. “Come out with your hands where we can see them!”

  There was a moment, a heartbeat frozen in time where I thought and believed that my partner’s foolhardy actions had actually paid off. I could imagine him arguing with Captain Hutchcroft that he valued life more than regulations and results more than procedures.

  As Eddy Roach stepped out from behind a large industrial dryer, I imagined that Anthony Blain had become the action hero he’d always dreamed of being and that, through sheer courage and confidence, he had saved the day.

  That moment melted away as my heart sank to my heels. Roach came out of hiding all right, but as he did so, his left, shaking hand was closed on the shoulder of a petrified and trembling boy roughly my son’s age. His other hand held his gun at the child’s head. It took a moment to register, but I noticed that the boy’s shirt and face were stained with a mist of blood.

  “Back off, Anthony,” I said in as even a tone as I could manage. My partner shot me a look that told me the situation had suddenly escalated beyond what he was ready to cope with. He glanced back and forth between me and Roach, his confidence evaporating with each turn of his neck.

  Meanwhile, Eddy was slowly inching forward, making his way to the front door. As he got close to Anthony and me, he started pointing his gun erratically. First at the boy, then me, then Anthony, then me again and back to the boy. He repeated this pattern over and over, each time taking another step forward.

  The closer he got, the more nervous and out
of control Roach appeared to be. Sweat glistened on his forehead, and his left hand was more unstable than ever. Flashing blue and red lights reflecting off the front window informed us that our backup was finally here.

  When he got to within six paces, Eddy stopped. To reach the door, he’d have to walk between Anthony and me, turning his back to one of us. I could see the panic in his eyes. Dilated pupils darting between the two of us, trying to decide what his gambit should be. Then, as if reaching an epiphany, he settled on my partner. I readied myself, prepared to disarm and incapacitate him the moment opportunity presented itself.

  It didn’t.

  Quickly and with stunning accuracy, Eddy pivoted his pistol and shot again. This fifth bullet found a home in Anthony’s right knee, bringing my partner down like a bag of stones dropped to the floor, with a wail of agony that splintered the ears.

  The attack happened so fast that by the time I reacted, Roach had spun around and was crouching to use the boy as a human shield. The gunshot and resulting chaos broke the child out of his shock-induced paralysis, sending him into screams of panic and tears.

  I leveled my weapon at Eddy’s head but couldn’t find an angle that didn’t endanger the boy further.

  I looked at the blood covering him, staining his shirt and cheeks. It wasn’t his blood. Was it a friend’s? A parent’s? The crisis had done nothing but deteriorate. I caught myself wishing I could just walk away from it, leaving the disaster for others to clean up.

  “Tell . . . Tell those cops out there to get the hell away from here,” Eddy finally spat out.

  Between the moans of pain from poor Ant, the terrified mutterings and sobs of the other trapped clients, and the hostage’s crying, the whole place had become a cacophony of chaos.

  “This is Officer Paulson,” I spoke into my radio. “Clear out the perimeter. The suspect has a hostage. I repeat, the suspect has a hostage.”

  I knew that my colleagues would withdraw, but only so they could establish a larger perimeter, turn off their lights, and wait to see how the situation played out. Hostage negotiators would arrive shortly, along with helicopters and probably a SWAT team that would escalate things further.