Act of Deceit

NEWSCASTER

Officer caught in a crossfire.

CRANE SHOT: Dead Mexican gangsters lying in the street, all but their snakeskin boots covered by the medical examiner’s plastic sheets.

JUMP CUT: The shooting review board.

VOICE-OVER:

Let’s hear your version, Detective. Tell us what led up to the ambush.

“Ambush,” Donnally mumbled.

“What?” Janie leaned up on an elbow. It was still dark out. “What did you say?”

Donnally rubbed his eyes. “Nothing.”

“It sounded like you said ‘ambush.’ ”

“I must’ve been dreaming.”

“About the shooting?”

“No, not now. It was last night as I was falling asleep.”

Janie reached over and ran her hands through his hair. “Are you fighting a battle in there, or planning one?”

Donnally stared up at the invisible ceiling.

“I don’t know what I was doing.”

“I can’t let this go until I hear him say it,” Donnally said to Janie, as they walked along the fog-curtained Ocean Beach after breakfast. Far ahead of them in the semidarkness stood a shivering crowd drawn to the shoreline by a rough tide’s exposure of the wreckage of the King Phillip, a clipper ship that went aground in the nineteenth century.

“Because of how you think you looked on television?”

“No,” Donnally said. “This isn’t about me.”

They stopped and watched the fog reach inland, over the surf and sand, insulating them, isolating them, the gulls wheeling away, their calls and shrieks fading like distant echoes.

Donnally took in a long breath and exhaled, then looked over at Janie.

“Tell me,” Donnally said. “Which is worse? Them failing to get Brown convicted over all those years or letting him plead no contest and drift away like he did nothing at all?”

Janie didn’t answer right away, her eyes moving, seeming to search the gray around them for something solid to attach her thoughts to.

Finally she said, “I’m not sure there is a worse.” She looked up at him. “Or even that they’re all that different. It seems to me they did the same thing twice.”

Donnally nodded. “And I’m not going to let it end this way.”