Glock on his hip and a ruby ring on one pinkie. His accent was strong, his attitude was good-ole-boy friendly, but his eyes, deep in their fatty sockets, were smart and inquisitive. He could have been typecast in one of those southern-cliché movies like Walking Tall, if not for the fact that he was black. And something else: a framed certificate of graduation from the FBI’s National Academy in Quantico hung on the wall next to the official portrait of President Trump. That was not the sort of thing you got by mailing in cereal boxtops.
“All right, then,” Sheriff John said, rocking back in his office chair. “I haven’t got long. Marcella hates it when I’m late for dinner. Unless there’s some sort of crisis, accourse.”
“Understood.”
“So let’s get right to the good part. Why’d you leave Sarasota PD and what are you doing here? South Cah’lina doesn’t have too many beaten tracks, and DuPray idn’t exactly on any of them.”
Ashworth probably wouldn’t be on the phone to Sarasota tonight, but he would be in the morning, so there was no point in gilding the lily. Not that Tim wanted to. If he didn’t get the night knocker job, he would spend the night in DuPray and move on in the morning, continuing his stop-and-start progress to New York, a journey he now understood to be a necessary hiatus between what had happened one day late last year at Sarasota’s Westfield Mall and whatever might happen next. All that aside, honesty was the best policy, if only because lies—especially in an age when almost all information was available to anyone with a keyboard and a Wi-Fi connection—usually came back to haunt the liar.
“I was given a choice between resignation and dismissal. I chose resignation. No one was happy about it, least of all me—I liked my job and I liked the Gulf Coast—but it was the best solution. This way I get a little money, nothing like a full pension, but better than nothing. I split it with my ex-wife.”
“Cause? And make it simple so I can get to my dinner while it’s still hot.”
“This won’t take long. At the end of my shift one day last November, I swung into the Westfield Mall to buy a pair of shoes. Had to go to a wedding. I was still in uniform, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I was coming out of the Shoe Depot when a woman ran up and said a teenager was waving a gun around up by the movie theater. So I went up there, double-time.”
“Did you draw your weapon?”
“No sir, not then. The kid with the gun was maybe fourteen, and I ascertained that he was either drunk or high. He had another kid down and was kicking him. He was also pointing the gun at him.”
“Sounds like that Cleveland deal. The cop who shot the black kid who was waving a pellet gun.”
“That was in my mind when I approached, but the cop who shot Tamir Rice swore he thought the kid was waving a real gun around. I was pretty sure the one I saw wasn’t real, but I couldn’t be completely sure. Maybe you know why.”
Sheriff John Ashworth seemed to have forgotten about dinner. “Because your subject was pointing it at the kid he had on the floor. No sense pointing a fake gun at someone. Unless, I s’pose, the kid on the ground didn’t know that.”
“The perp said later he was shaking it at the kid, not pointing it. Saying ‘It’s mine, motherfucker, you don’t take what’s mine.’ I didn’t see that. To me he looked like he was pointing it. I yelled at him to drop the weapon and put his hands up. He either didn’t hear me or didn’t pay any attention. He just went on kicking and pointing. Or shaking, if that’s what he was doing. In any case, I drew my sidearm.” He paused. “If it makes any difference, these kids were white.”
“Not to me, it doesn’t. Kids were fighting. One was down and getting hurt. The other had what might or might not have been a real gun. So did you shoot him? Tell me it didn’t come to that.”
“No one got shot. But . . . you know how people will gather around to watch a fistfight, but tend to scatter once a weapon comes out?”
“Sure. If they’ve got any sense, they run like hell.”
“That happened, except for a few people who stayed even then.”