foreseeable future, Trey needs to stop looking.
The river is sluggish today, moving in muscular, viscous-looking twists. Leaves fall onto its surface, drift for a second, and are pulled under without a swirl or a trace. Cal thinks about telling the kid that Brendan fetched up in there, some accidental way. He could come up with a convincing story, maybe involving Brendan scouting locations for a business running fishing trips for tourists on heritage pilgrimages, or nature retreats for suits in search of their inner wild men, either of which is the kind of thing that the dumbass kid should have fucking gone for to begin with.
He might pull it off. Trey trusts him, as much as he trusts anyone. And although the kid would fight the suggestion that Brendan is dead, he’d welcome the thought that Brendan didn’t deliberately go off and leave him without a word. He would also welcome the opportunity to think of Brendan as a fine upstanding entrepreneur in the making. He might even welcome it enough not to wonder why Brendan would have taken his savings with him to check out suitable locations for actuaries to build tree forts, or why the actuaries would need lab masks.
Cal can’t tell whether he ought to do it. This seems like the kind of thing he should know instantly, on instinct, but he has no idea whether it would be right or wrong. This unsettles him right down to the bottom of his guts. It implies that somewhere along the way he got out of practice doing the right thing, to the point where he doesn’t even know it when he sees it.
That feeling is one of the things that drove Cal out of his job. He associates it, even though he knows the reality is nowhere near that simple, with a scrawny black kid called Jeremiah Payton, who, a few months before Cal retired, robbed a convenience store with a knife and jumped bail. Cal and O’Leary tracked him down at his girlfriend’s house, at which point Jeremiah leaped out of a window and took off.
Cal was older than O’Leary, and heavier. He was three paces behind him rounding the corner. He heard O’Leary yell, “Let me see your hands!” and then he saw Jeremiah turning towards them with one hand rising and one dropping, and then O’Leary’s gun went off and Jeremiah landed facedown on the sidewalk.
Cal was already on the radio calling for the ambulance as they ran towards him, but when they got there, Jeremiah shouted into the sidewalk in a voice that was pure terror, “Don’t shoot me.”
Cal got his hands behind his back and cuffed them there. Someone had started screaming. “You hit?” Cal asked Jeremiah.
He shook his head. Cal turned him over and checked him anyway: no blood.
“I miss him?” O’Leary said. He was cabbage-green and pouring sweat like he was melting. He still had his Glock in his hands.
“Yeah,” Cal said. To Jeremiah he said, “You got anything on you?”
Jeremiah just stared up at him. It took Cal a minute to understand that he couldn’t talk because he thought he was going to die.
O’Leary said, “He was going for his pocket. You saw him go for his pocket.”
“I saw his hand drop,” Cal said.
“For his fucking pocket. Pants pocket. I swear to God—” O’Leary bent over, panting, and burrowed in Jeremiah’s pocket. He came out with a switchblade.
“I thought it was a gun,” O’Leary said. “Well, shitfuck,” and he sat down on the curb like his legs had given way.
Cal wanted to sit down next to him, but the woman was screaming louder and people had started to gather. “It’s gonna be OK,” he said, pointlessly, and he left O’Leary there and headed off to cancel the ambulance and secure the scene.
Cal was feeling a little tender right then, what with Donna having just walked out on him. He had spent most of the past year fumbling in the dark trying to disentangle complications, and complications behind complications; he didn’t seem to know how to stop. He was sure, absolutely, that O’Leary had believed Jeremiah was going for a gun in his pocket, which for a lot of guys would have been enough. But for Cal, that fact seemed to be overlaid and underlaid by so many layers that he couldn’t tell whether or not it was important. What was important was that he and O’Leary were supposed to be out there keeping people safe. They had always considered themselves