other refuse. I could see the wide eyes of the drug dealer staring at us in the dim light of a fading day. I could smell his fear. He held a gun in his hand and he was pointing it first at Danny and then at me. Danny was pointing a gun back at him. I was standing a few feet away from them both, looking at one and then the other, confused.
“You take me down and you go down with me,” the dealer said to Danny. “I know who you are. I know your partner. You can’t touch me. Touch me and you pay the price.”
I made a sound of surprise, and that got his attention. As the dealer turned his head toward me, Danny shot him right through the heart and fired again, hitting the man in his forehead as he dropped to the floor. I stared at Danny in horror, then looked down at the dealer.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
The gun had slid out of the dealer’s hand and Danny walked over to it. He picked it up, looked at it for a moment, then turned and stared at me, puzzled, as if he had never seen me before.
“Danny?” I asked as he raised the dealer’s gun, took aim—and shot.
I fell to the floor, wounded in my right shoulder, and Danny squeezed the trigger again. This time, it was a shot straight through the heart. He walked over to my body and stared down at me, betraying no emotion, then leaned over until he was inches from my face. He said my name just once: “Fahey?” Satisfied that I was dead, he wiped the gun he still held with a handkerchief, then knelt down and placed the gun back in the drug dealer’s hand. He aimed toward me and took yet another shot, hitting the wall behind where I had been standing, leaving residue on the dead drug dealer and his clothing.
Danny stood up, rubbed the small of his back as if it was aching, then looked around the room, thinking. He walked over and swapped out his weapon for mine. He took the gun he’d used to shoot the dealer and laid it next to me, then took my own from my ankle holster and pocketed it. No one would know. We’d been together too long. And we were using unsanctioned weapons to begin with, smaller revolvers that were easier to conceal and, as Danny often said, easier to aim.
He’d proved it that day.
He knelt by my body, checked my pulse once again, and found nothing. Only then did he pull a cell phone from his pocket and make the call. “Officer down,” he shouted into the phone. “A bust went bad. Fahey is down.”
Down. Yes, I was down—and then down some more. The memory of my last few minutes alive faded and Danny and I were falling again, falling into space, the rocks below rushing up at us, Danny’s eyes locked on mine, his terror emanating from him in palpable waves.
“It’s okay. I forgive you. And it’s not so bad being dead,” I tried to tell him, but time had started again and we had reached the bottom. For me, it was nothing. I was simply there, on the ground, looking down at Danny. For Danny, it was the end. He lay shattered before me, his body broken by the jagged rocks at the base of the cliff, his skull shattered by the impact.
My old friend. My partner. My killer.
He was gone. I had glimpsed the defining moment of his life or, perhaps, more accurately, the defining moment of his death: my own grim passing.
This was what Danny had been concealing from Maggie. This was what Danny had been afraid she might find. That was what had caused him to follow Maggie, to watch her to see what she discovered, to try to find out what she knew about his role in my death and his role in whatever dark partnership had led to my killing. He’d had nothing to do with Hayes except a need to stop Maggie from searching, to stop her and others from looking into our cases and noticing how many Danny had sabotaged.
I’d never known, never even suspected, never been sober enough to notice that my partner was not only unkempt, incompetent, and uncaring—he was also a dirty cop. The one thing I had prided myself on not being.