THE SIMPLE TRUTH by DAVID BALDACCI

He looked back at Sara. “I kept arresting the same guys over and over and it seemed like before I filed the paperwork they were back on the streets. And they’d blow you away like stepping on a cockroach. See, they lived the game of ‘us against them’ too. You lump people together. Young and black, catch ’em if you can. Blues coming at you? Kill ’em if you can. It’s quick and you don’t have to make choices about individuals. It’s like a drug addiction.”

“Not everybody does that. The whole world isn’t made up of people like that.”

“I know that. I know that most people, black, white or whatever, are good people, lead relatively normal lives. I really want to believe that. It’s just that as a cop I never saw any of that. Normal ships didn’t sail by my dock.”

“So did the shooting make you rethink things?”

Fiske didn’t answer right away. When he did, he spoke slowly. “I remember dropping to my knees to check the guy, who it turned out was faking a seizure. I heard the gun go off, my partner scream. I pulled my pistol at the same time I was turning. I don’t know how I got a round off, but I did. It hit him right in the chest. We both went down. He lost his gun, but I kept mine. Pointed it right at him. He wasn’t more than a foot from me. Every breath he took, blood kicked out of the bullet hole like a red geyser. It made this swishing sound I still hear in my sleep. His eyes had started to freeze up, but you never knew. All I knew was that he had just shot my backup, and he had just shot me. My insides felt like they were dissolving.” Fiske let out a long breath. “I was going to just wait for him to die, Sara.” Fiske stopped talking as he recalled how close he had come to being another blue in a box, buried and mostly forgotten.

“Your father said you were found with your arm around him,” Sara gently prompted.

“I thought he was trying to grab my gun. I had one finger on the trigger and one finger stuck in the hole in my gut. But he didn’t even put his hand out. Then I heard him talking. I could barely make out what he was saying at first, but he kept saying it until I did.”

“What did he say?” Sara asked gently.

Fiske let out a breath, half expecting to see blood kick out of his old wounds, his tired, betrayed organs calling it quits on him forty years early. “He was asking me to kill him.” As if in answer to her unspoken question, Fiske said, “I couldn’t. I didn’t. It didn’t matter, though, he stopped talking a few seconds later.”

Sara slowly sat back, unable to say anything.

“I actually think he was terrified he wasn’t going to die.” Fiske shook his head slowly, the words becoming more difficult to put together. “He was only nineteen. I’m an old man already, next to him. His name was Darnell — Darnell Jackson. His mother was a crack addict, and when he was eight or nine she would whore him out for drug money.”

He looked at her. “Does that sound horrible to you?”

“Of course it does. Yes!”

“To me, it was the same old shit. I saw it all the time. I’d become immune to it, or at least I thought I had.” He licked his dry lips. “I didn’t think I had any compassion left. But after Darnell, I got some back.” He flashed a troubled smile. “I call it my steel-jacketed epiphany. Two slugs in my body, a kid dying in front of me, wanting me to finish him off. It’s hard to imagine one event having enough force to make you question everything you’ve ever believed. But it happened to me that night.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Now I think of the whole future of the world solely in the context of Darnell Jackson. He’s my version of nuclear holocaust, only it won’t be over in a few seconds.” He looked at her. “That’s the terror that drives me.”

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