Pariah

TWENTY-TWO

He was driving. Heading uptown on Madison Avenue. She was riding shotgun. Hanging between them was an atmosphere you could almost bang your head against.

Doyle gripped the steering wheel so hard he felt it was about to disintegrate in his fingers. His teeth ached from all the jaw-clenching he’d been doing.

This is not good, he thought. This is precisely why the NYPD has rules about working with spouses, partners and anyone else with whom you’re having any kind of intimate personal relationship. Takes your mind off the job. You lose your edge, the ability to think objectively. And ultimately, that can mean losing your life.

Not that Laura Marino was his wife or his girlfriend or even the object of his affections. Sure, she was good-looking. A real beauty, some would say. Certainly a few steps up from most of the female cops he’d ever met, despite what the TV cop shows would have people believe. But the point was he was married, she was married, and they were working partners — and she was acting like none of that was true.

‘You’re quiet,’ she said. ‘Everything okay, Callie?’

He hated the way she called him Callie. Nobody had ever called him that before. It was her own invention — something she seemed to find cute.

He should have just said, Yes, everything’s fine, and got on with the job at hand, but this time he couldn’t keep it in. This time she’d gone too far.

‘You want the truth? No, everything is not okay. Everything is fucked up.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You wanna talk about it?’

‘Yeah, I could do that. Lemme see, where do I start? How about with all the looks and the winks I got from everyone in the squad this morning? Or the way Kaplinsky kept calling me “Stud”? Or how about the way people kept asking me why I only like eating Italian now?’

Marino did the wrong thing then. She laughed. Put a hand to her mouth and made a farting noise with her mouth like this was some big joke. If she had been mortified instead — if she had exhibited the merest hint of shame — he might have been able to prevent what was coming next.

‘You think this is funny? This is funny to you?’

She tried to put on a straight face, but to Doyle she wasn’t trying hard enough.

‘Well, the Italian thing, that is kinda-’

‘What have you been saying?’ Doyle demanded. ‘What the fuck have you been saying?’

‘Nothing. Take it easy, Callie. I just had a little girlie chat with Kaplinsky. Locker-room talk. You know how it is.’

‘No. Tell me. Tell me how it is.’

‘She’s been asking for a long time now. About you and me. About how we are together. About whether we’ve, like, done the dirty yet.’

‘Uh-huh. And of course you put her straight, right? Told her how we’re just partners, like any two cops on the job. All strictly professional and platonic, right?’

‘Come on, Callie. If I said that, Kaplinsky really would start wondering. Anybody can see there’s a thing between us. A what-you-call-it — a chemistry.’

‘No, Laura. No chemistry. Not unless it’s like you’re sulfuric acid and I’m getting burned real bad. Because that’s how I’m feeling right now. Real burned. So what else did you say to Kaplinsky?’

‘Nothing. She asked whether me and you had got it on yet, and I just smiled and walked away.’

‘You smiled and walked away? That’s it?’ As if that wasn’t bad enough.

‘Yeah, that’s it. Except, well, I might have made a little gesture.’

‘A gesture? What kind of gesture?’

Laura hesitated for a second. When Doyle looked in her direction, she raised an eyebrow mischievously, then put her hands out in front of her, palms facing each other, about a foot apart.

‘Oh, fuck,’ Doyle said. ‘Please tell me you didn’t actually do that.’

Laura was laughing again. Doyle wasn’t.

‘I was paying you a compliment,’ she said. ‘Most guys, I’d just wave my pinky in the air. You should be grateful for me telling it like it is.’

‘Like it is? What the fuck are you talking about? You’ve never even seen. .’ He let his words trail off.

‘You oughtta try taking a walk through my head sometime,’ she said. And then she was laughing again. Huskily, but to Doyle not at all seductively. In fact, this was starting to feel dark and disturbing. Inside Laura Marino’s head did not seem the most inviting of places right now.

Doyle pulled a sudden left turn across honking traffic and into the only free space he could see. Which happened to be the entrance to the parking garage of the swish hotel next door.

‘Hey,’ Laura said. ‘What are you doing?’

Doyle put the brakes on, left the engine idling. ‘We need to talk, Laura.’

‘And you can’t talk while you drive?’

‘No. Not when every brick wall I see makes me want to head straight for it.’

She pulled her neck in and squinted at him like she thought he was loopy. Like she just didn’t get what all the fuss was. How could she not get that?

‘So, like, okay. What do you want to talk about?’

He turned toward her on the seat, took a deep breath.

‘This me-and-you thing. Don’t get me wrong, Laura. I like working with you. I think we make a good team. But that’s as far as it goes. The things you’ve been saying about me, the way you’ve been acting, you’re going to land me in a whole heap-load of shit.’

She pulled the me-no-understand face again, and then there was another laugh. Doyle felt his fists bunching. He’d never hit a woman in his life, and now he was thinking of taking it up as a career.

‘Callie! Lighten up, will ya? It’s just a joke. Cops talk about other cops like that all the time — you know that. Give it a few days, it’ll blow over. Anyhow, it’s such a bad thing, people thinking you managed to talk me into the sack? I thought you guys liked stuff like that. Another notch on your bedpost, and all that.’

‘Maybe in Neanderthal World, Laura. Maybe when we were both teenagers with more hormones than sense. But aren’t you forgetting a fact or two? Like Danny and Rachel? You think they’ll laugh their socks off at this big joke of yours?’

Laura rolled her eyes. ‘Well, not Rachel — that’s for sure.’

‘Oh. .’ Doyle bit his lip, trying to hold in his fury. ‘Fuck you, Laura.’

And then he was out of the car, slamming the door so hard the window almost shattered. He forced air through his nostrils and paced the ground like a mad bull on the lookout for something to charge.

A uniformed valet emerged from the dark mouth of the hotel garage.

‘Excuse me, sir. Are you a resident of the hotel?’

‘No. Just give me two minutes.’

Not sensing the danger he was in, the valet continued: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t park here. You’re blocking the-’

‘I said go back into your hole. Now!’

As the man skedaddled to the hotel entrance, muttering to himself, Laura got out of the car.

‘Come on, Cal. We got places to be.’

She said this so matter-of-factly, as though their disagreement was over something as trivial as whose turn it was to drive. For a moment, Doyle couldn’t help wondering why he was the only one feeling there was a problem here. He stepped around the car.

‘Listen to me, Laura. This is serious, okay?’

‘Callie, you’re making this out-’

‘No! Listen. To me, it’s serious, even if you don’t give a shit. And quit calling me Callie. The name’s Cal, okay?’

She rolled her eyes again, like she was a teenager being chastised by her father for staying out late, and who has no intention of sticking to the rules he’s laying down.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Cal. Whatever.’

He started ticking items off with his fingers. ‘First of all, it’s bad enough a story like this is going around the job. I’m not talking about the grunts: they’ll have their laughs and be done with it. But something like this gets back to the brass, then we got some explaining to do.’

‘Cal-’

He cut her off by jabbing another finger in front of her face. ‘Second of all, and more importantly, I have a family to consider. And before you start mouthing off about Rachel again, you should know that I love her and I have no intention of doing anything that would hurt her. Ever. Whatever you and Danny have between you, that’s your business. You want to hurt him, go ahead. Just leave me out of it. The heat you caused between me and Rachel last time was bad enough. I don’t want to go through that again. Point three-’

‘Last time? What last time?’

‘Last Christmas. You do remember that, don’t you?’

A dreamy smile appeared on Laura’s face. ‘Oh, yeah. Christmas.’

They had been at a party at a fellow cop’s house in Queens. Danny and Rachel were there too. Laura got drunk within the first half-hour. Kept making suggestive remarks to Doyle, pinching his ass — that type of thing. Rachel witnessed much of it in stony-faced silence. Danny seemed never to be in the same room. The last straw was the kiss: Laura with a sprig of mistletoe in one hand, the other clasped behind Doyle’s neck in an embrace that lasted far too long. By the time Doyle had recovered enough from the shock to push Laura away, Rachel had disappeared and gone home. The nights that followed had been pretty lonely ones for Doyle.

‘Point three,’ Doyle repeated, and then got cut off again when he heard voices at his side and saw that the valet had returned with a balding man in a pinstripe suit who was making threats to call the police if the car wasn’t moved.

Doyle dug into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and flashed his shield. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Call the cops. And then we’ll come by here and arrest you for possession of an illegal comb-over.’

As the pair retreated to consider their next move, Doyle tried again with Laura. ‘Point three is maybe we should think about calling it a day.’

It took a moment for this to penetrate. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I think tomorrow morning I’m going to speak to the boss about working with another partner.’

‘Are you serious? Why would you want to do that?’

‘Have you been listening to a word I’ve just said? You’ve gone too far, Laura. You’re getting too. . intense.’

‘Intense? Really? Because this is all on me, right? I mean, you would never throw me any signals of a less-than-professional nature, would you? You would never make any comments about my figure or my hair. Nobody would ever catch you asking what color panties I’m wearing today, would they?’

There was a silence while Doyle chewed on his answer. He had flirted with her, that was true; but then he’d flirted with every woman he’d ever met, even the ones who looked like Shrek. He couldn’t help it: it was in his blood.

‘Maybe I said some things I shouldn’t have. But you’ve taken it to another level, Laura. You’ve endangered my job and my marriage.’

‘You go to the boss for another partner, and you endanger my job.’

Doyle started moving back around to the driver’s side. ‘Get in the car, Laura. Let’s do some work.’

‘Fuck you, Doyle.’

This stopped him in his tracks. It wasn’t the words: she was a cop, and cops use expletives all the time. It was Laura’s tone: it had a disturbing, menacing quality to it that he’d never heard from her before.

He looked across the roof of the Crown Vic at her; she glared back at him.

‘You take this to the lieutenant,’ she said, ‘make me look bad like that, and I’ll really start to let everyone know what’s been going on between us. See what your precious Rachel thinks about them apples.’

‘What?’ Doyle said. ‘Is that a threat, Laura? Are you threatening me?’

She remained silent, and Doyle started to retrace his steps back to her side of the car.

‘Is that what I’m hearing, Laura? Are you trying to blackmail me?’

He kept walking until he was inches away from her, astonished that he’d never seen this side of her before. In a heartbeat she had switched from partner to perp. He could quite easily have spun her around, slapped on some cuffs, and dragged her ass to jail. A quick tune-up in some quiet alley was not out of the question either, the way he felt.

And then, in another beat, it was as if a second button was pressed in her head. She suddenly softened, and the burning died in her pupils.

‘What are we doing?’ she said. ‘Look at us! How crazy is this? Jesus Christ, Cal, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of that shit. Really. You just got me so. . worked up, you know? Forget what I just said. Please. I was just lashing out. Come on, let’s get out of here.’

She slid onto the passenger seat, flashing him a smile that seemed to carry no warmth. Doyle watched her every move, feeling that he no longer knew this woman, no longer understood her, that he was no longer capable of anticipating her next move. It was one of the most uncomfortable sensations he’d ever had.

‘It’ll be okay,’ she said. ‘Come on, Cal. Relax. Everything’s just fine. Get back in the car. You want me to drive?’

Doyle was frozen to the spot. He had been ready for a fight, and now it had been taken away from him. He didn’t know how to react to an enemy who worked like that, who was that unpredictable.

For a few seconds, Laura had let her dark side out, and now she was trying to cover up, to pretend that it was uncharacteristic. But it had been there, unmistakably so. And it had been scary in its concentrated spitefulness.

Wondering whether he needed to call in an exorcist, Doyle returned once more to the driver’s side and got behind the wheel. He looked at her long and hard, searched her face for answers. But all he got was a goofy smile.

‘Chill out, Callie,’ she said. ‘It’s hormones or something. No big thing. Let’s roll.’ She opened the glove compartment, pulled out a small bag. ‘Here, have some M amp;Ms.’

Feeling like he’d just teleported to a parallel world, Doyle put the car into gear and drove off. For now, he had nothing to say, nothing that would help to make any sense of this situation. But he guessed it wasn’t over.

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said. ‘Okay?’

She tossed candy into her mouth, nodded her head playfully. ‘Sure, Callie.’

As he drove, he tried to turn his mind to the job, to give it something rooted in the real world to work on. But his subconscious had other ideas. It kept showing him reminders of Laura’s face, her words, of a few minutes ago, and of how unbelievably vindictive she’d been. It kept tossing out imagined images of Rachel, crying and screaming at him, asking him why he would do such things. And it kept interrupting with questions like, So now that you know she’s a crazy-ass bunny-boiler, what are you going to do about it?

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 of the Glock as it spat its fire and took chunks out of the man in front of him. He found himself moving toward Lomax, every fiber of his being saturated with the necessity of wiping that motherfucker from the face of the planet. To Doyle, Lomax was not a man with thoughts and feelings; he was just a threat to his own existence.

Even when Lomax was on the floor, blood pumping from the holes already in his body, Doyle kept on firing, his eyes observing dispassionately as Lomax’s dying form jumped with each bullet. He tried to shoot long after the gun was empty, long after the sounds of its explosions had faded. His trigger finger just kept on twitching. And even when his subverted consciousness began to exert some kind of control, he still experienced an almost irresistible impulse to continue the devastation.

He understood then. He had never killed before, never come so near to being killed. And now he understood.

There have been numerous times that cops have been vilified by the media for being apparently trigger-happy. Even Doyle himself, despite being a police officer, had occasionally wondered whether such extensive lethal force had been necessary.

But here he was, holding his Glock 19, now empty of the fifteen rounds it held in the magazine and the additional one in the chamber, and still he felt the urge to ram its butt into the skull of the corpse beneath him.

Shoot the gun out of the man’s hands? In your dreams. A clinical and effective double-tap? Yeah, right. Fire three times and assess? Sure. Try standing here in my shoes and saying that afterwards.

Yes, he understood completely. And he would never be the same again.

It took some time before the world materialized around him once more, before he could tear his eyes away from the lifeless form of Lomax. He was that wired, it came almost as a surprise to him to see the second body in the room. He found it difficult to work out what he should do next. All of his police training seemed to have deserted him.

When he finally fished out his cellphone, he issued a garbled call for an ambulance, and then he went to his partner. She was showing faint signs of life, but she was a mess. The whole of her back was stained with her dark wet blood, and a puddle of it was growing next to her.

He didn’t know why, but he felt a need to gather her up in his arms. He sat in the warm wetness of her blood and held her close, rocking her gently.

And when the time finally came for her to leave, he told her how sorry he was.

It was only the beginning.

In the days, the interminable weeks that followed, truth became lies and lies became truth. Without Laura to retract them, her rumors became fact. To Doyle’s colleagues, to Internal Affairs, and even to Rachel.

He’d been having an affair, they concluded. It was becoming public knowledge and he wanted a way out, they surmised. He was responsible for Laura Marino’s death, they decided.

He knew they were all wrong. But when you believe one thing and everybody else believes another, you start to lose confidence. You start to have doubts. You start to wonder whether your own mind is deluding you.

And when that happens, you start to ask yourself whether, in fact, a tiny hidden part of you really did seize upon an opportunity to rid yourself of what was becoming a major problem.

And occasionally — in the dead of night when nobody else is listening — you ask yourself whether, in fact, that cream door with the cracked panel really was moving.