Ch. 16 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask
The last forty-eight hours in the hospital had passed in a haze. Booker had gone through basic physical therapy, received a referral to a local physical therapist, and left with a collection of prescriptions. The other homicide detectives, Donaldson and Waithe, had interviewed him for hours that had groaned on for him into stretched days.
The morning they released him, Virgil LeDuff picked him up in a boxy, decades-old sedan. The drugs still lingering in John Bowman Booker’s veins proved a contraindication to driving and the older man had volunteered the service. The two barely spoke on the ride.
Somewhere in the traffic between Oceanrest Memorial and his apartment, Booker broke the silence. “Find the guy yet?” he woozily asked.
Virgil answered with a noise between grunt and snort.
“How bad’s it going?”
“Bad. But not so bad it can’t get worse.”
“You can’t send just anyone into Squatter City.”
Virgil turned down a side-street away from the main thoroughfare. “I don’t have much of a choice,” he said. “We all knew what sort’a shit could happen, sending badges up to Squatter City, but we can’t just let this psycho slip through our fingers.”
Booker leaned his head against the passenger seat window and chuckled. “He ain’t even up there anymore, man. All the farms and forest in this county? He’s out there, somewhere. Living in a cave for all we know.”
Virgil didn’t reply at first. He sighed, a sound so practiced by the man that it perfectly expressed the tight commingling of frustration and disappointment within him. After the sigh, he reached for the radio knob, decided against it, and returned his hand to the wheel. For a while, Booker didn’t think Virgil would respond at all. Had he somehow gone too far?
But Virgil cleared his throat as they approached their destination. “Sooner or later, you know, someone else is gonna sit in my office.” He sounded older than his years, saying that. His posture wilted. “Someone else is gonna carry the responsibility and wield all the goddamn power. It…it scares me, John. Scares the shit out of me.”
“Huh?” Booker muttered, only half-listening through the medicinal fog. “What?”
Virgil signaled his entrance into the condo complex. “Not too long from now, might be I step down and retire. Might be they make me. Or might be someone else just gets the seat…but sooner or later, there’ll be another Chief. And I don’t have any idea what kind of person he—or she—is going to be. A man…a person in my position, they could do a lot of harm.”
Booker nodded. He didn’t voice his immediate response: that any person, any person, could do a lot of harm if they just chose to. The world had made doing harm exceedingly easy. It was doing good that took work.
“So, uh…a’yeah.” Virgil parked the car in front of Booker’s building. “You need help getting up the stairs?”
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