Thalo Blue (21 page)

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Sergeant Pinkertt and Officer Shears from the York Regional Police Service arrived a little more than an hour into Doctor Holmsund’s questionnaire, long before she was finished with it.

Pinkertt fired up a mini tape recorder and held it while he ushered himself and Sebastion through the ‘law enforcement’ side of the questions. Shears hung back, saying little. Holmsund remained, assured by Pinkertt that they wouldn’t be long and she could return to her forms within the hour. She had conceded her spot in line easily enough but made sure to stay. During the inquiry she watched Sebastion nearly as closely as Pinkertt.

The first area, which the sergeant belabored almost too much, Sebastion thought, was whether Sebastion had known the man who broke into his house. For a second, Sebastion’s mind flashed across the dark-skinned boy from years before, but then, with an eyelash flutter, that thought was gone. No, he had not known the man who broke into his house. And he told Pinkertt that he had not a number of different ways.

Pinkertt then asked him about someone named Willem Nash. That name too, along with Ahmed Itzad Farukh, was an alien phrase. Pinkertt seemed like he was at a bit of a loss with the information, as though he fully expected the Redfield kid to pipe up and say something like,
Yeah, I knew him, sure. I owed him a little money after some back-alley financing and he wasn’t too happy with me.

Shears didn’t step forward the whole time. Instead he let Pinkertt tell Sebastion most of what had happened in his house the morning of the assault—that’s what Pinkertt called it,
the assault
. As he talked it came out laborious, and trite, like he was reading cue cards, or worse, a type-written police report, verbatim. Or maybe a press release, a tightly scripted one. Worded with careful and dry consideration.
Maybe
, he thought,
the psychologist from Houston had helped with it.

“And you
are
?” Sebastion finally interjected, asking Shears.

“
Me?
Officer William Shears.” His eyes were tight and he was holding his visor in his hands like a bible. He was solemn, even appearing a little out of place. Sebastion thought it odd that a street officer, likely used to dealing with domestic abuse situations, homicide crime scenes and the like, should come off as so...so
what
? Distant? Is that what it was? “My partner, Owen Lipnicki, and I arrived first. We broke down the front door and came across you and Mr. Farukh in the last bedroom at the end of the hall. I tried to get him to put down his weapon. But...when Owen saw him start to squeeze the trigger on the pistol held to your face...h-he...He fired on him. In the confusion, the perpetrator shot himself. Owen’s—
Officer Lipnicki’s
shot...
hit you
. I know how bad he feels. And he couldn’t be here himself, but I just wanted to say how deeply sorry he is—
we
are—for all of it.”

“William Shears...,” Sebastion said thinking, nearly as though he hadn’t heard a word Shears had said. “Bill. Billy Shears.
And Sergeant Pinkertt
.” He let out a laugh at how it sounded in his own head. That Narcan sure was working. And it was not taking its time.

Sebastion looked at all of them, each in turn, his vision a little wobbly. He raised his eyebrows in an expression of disbelief, then literally burst into a loud rendition of “Sergeant Pinkertt’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”—even despite his parched throat and hoarse voice. Shears looked at Pinkertt who looked at Holmsund—the trio was at a loss and all of them looked mortified with embarrasment.

“
Bi-lee SHEeeeeeeaaaars!
” he continued, smiling a wide shiny grin of teeth, even waving his arms as best he could. And then he started with lines from the next tune, “With a Little Help from My Friends.” In his head, he could hear Ringo’s voice perfectly, but from him, on this Wednesday, it came out awkward, loud and garish. He looked at their faces, as the air in his lyrics leaked away.

Just like that, he had become the drunk at a party—one whom everybody knows will end up on the coffee table doing karaoke at the top of his lungs. All the other guests fully expect it; it’s just a matter of how far into the evening it will start.

He stopped, realizing the discomfiture in his timing. He looked at Malin Holmsund, who was blushing and straightening the collar of her mauve jacket. Then he looked back at Officer Shears, closed his lips and cleared his throat. He took a new breath and asked Shears about his partner.

Shears paused, perhaps still startled by the moment of song. How does one follow that? “He—uh—well, he wasn’t hurt. No, only you and Mr. Farukh were injured. Owen is healthy, but he...
he quit the service
.” Shears started losing what little composure he had at this point. The stammering got worse and it was obvious that he was uncomfortable. “He’s in a bit of a mess, to be quite honest. I don’t think he has been handling what happened very well. None of us have.” He looked down at the police visor he was thumbing. “But I don’t need to tell you that.”

“Billy,” Sebastion’s look now, remarkably, matched the solemnity in Shears’, “I don’t hold anything against you. Or your partner. I’d have done the exact same. You both saved me...saved me when I thought it was all over. I was positive that was it, and you two were there. It doesn’t matter how it happened. The specifics aren’t important. I’m here now, and—look at me—I’m well enough to sing loudly
and very badly
—” They all smiled at that, even Malin who had looked the most perturbed by his outburst. “—so everything is
fine
. Fine,
okay?
I want you to keep up the good work. And when you see your partner, please tell him thank you. From me. I don’t know if what he saved is worth his job. But I’m grateful anyway.”

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Owen Lipnicki met his soulmate, or at least the woman he truly, wholly believed to be his soulmate, one year after his high school graduation.

Her name was Maddiea, a Kurdish immigrant who had left Iraq with her parents and one brother when she was eleven. Elton John singing
Levon
could make a subtle lump rise in the back of her throat, she didn’t like the taste of beer, and she still got excited when snow fell gently from the sky in winter.

Luco’s Bakery Café hired Maddie a few months after Owen had started working there and Owen would watch this beauty arrive then disappear behind the counter while he cleared tables and poured cups of coffee. After closing, near the end of his shift most nights, Maddie would be slicing and bagging warm loaves of bread for the next morning’s early customers. The machine she used was near the doorway of the bakery side of the shop and she would stand there, waiting for the bread to filter through the blades before standing it on its nose in her hand and rocketing it upward into a readied plastic bag filled with air.

Most nights, Owen would stand leaning on his broom for a few minutes at least, shadowed in the turned down lights of the dining area. His discplayer headphones would be blasting some marginal, outside-the-spectrum heavy metal into his ears, and he would just stare at her. Maddiea would be partially turned away from him, visible in the doorway, with that long slender plastic bag bobbing phalically in front of her. She would fill it with a giant loaf of Italian, step away to tie it up, and another bag would fill with air, reaching to the fluorescents above her head.

The light would catch a glisten on her lipstick which was always perfect. And her black-as-night hair, held in a loose ponytail by a red band behind her hat, would toss like little waves of shiny oil as she turned. Owen thought her the most enthralling woman on the planet. And he thought her beautiful.

At night he would swallow his medication without water, lay down in his room at one end of his mother’s darkened house and think of
her
, think of
Maddiea
, wishing that he could know everything about her, then cursing himself for being so stupid, for expecting something so fantastical. He knew he had a habit of doing that. He would expect something so much that it was all but real. Waiting for it, he would believe it so much that it hurt and when it was made out to be just that, fantastical, he would be let down so low that his brain would literally ache. Doctors prescribed pills and that helped him a little but accepting the way things were was never his strongest suit. Owen was lost and muddled in his young life, looking at a future of mediocre jobs pushing brooms and unloading trucks. He had done those, quit them, and had moved on to a string of five other new jobs in eleven months. Depression about his future multiplied his problems. His disorder scared his mother in those days, scared
him
in the back of his head too. But he had this strange feeling deep in him, that if he could be with Maddie everything would eventually work out fine. He could lick the dark mind-set and never feel so low again.

But the fantastic notion that he could one day even
know
her came a step closer to actually being real, a dangerous predicament if Maddie had been anyone but the uncomplicated and open girl she was. The two of them finally spoke one night after work and struck up a friendship that eventually got comfortable enough for Maddie to tell him about their boss, Luco, and how he would sometimes put his pudgy hands on Maddie when the baking room door was shut against the customer half of the shop. In her quiet way, she told him that she thought it wasn’t right, what that grubby Luco was doing, but did not know what to do to fix it.

He imagined himself saving her from the bakery owner a hundred times: on a dusky Friday night, he would catch Luco with his hand on Maddiea’s hip and he would storm into the baking room. He would clock the old man and take Maddiea by her long slender wrist—

But of course that would never happen. He would never tell her his dream for that, but he
would
tell her about the wellspring where it had been born. He wanted to save people, thought he was
meant
to save people. “Owen,” he told her one time, “It means ‘young warrior.’ My father was a policeman and I want to be one too.”

He wanted her to quit, to just walk away from Luco and his bad touch. She wanted to get back at Luco somehow. She said she felt filthy when he looked at her, that in her culture such a disgrace was horrible to live with. But Owen’s detached rationality appeared to hold. He told her, “Sometimes confrontation doesn’t solve anything. Sometimes leaving a bad situation solves it best.”

They agreed to quit together, walked out one summer day at around noon, aprons fluttering to the floor behind them. They left Luco standing there in that little crooked baker’s hat of his. His fat arms shot into the air—he was immersed in a midday rush all alone.

Things moved along from there, as things do. Owen quit his medication. They each got new jobs, an apartment together and, with her support, he was accepted into one of those private law enforcement schools that were now legalized in Ontario. They were married the same year he was sworn in as an officer for the York Regional Police Service. Everything had turned around.

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God he loved that dark-skinned beauty
. When the lights went out at night, he saw her face, and when they came on again in the morning, she was there beside him, her warm body pressed against his. Keeping him lit like a candle in a large drafty room.

Time after time, his investment in her, in
them
, saved his life. She was the sweet taste in his mouth and he looked to her as everything. And to her, he was the very same:
every thing
.

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But not one tells you that you hold lives in your hand, that you can squeeze them shut or open like a dripping faucet, squeeze those lives
open or shut
,
shut or open
, you decide, when your finger pulls on the trigger of your service pistol. Not one, not the instructor that you learn from before you go in, that
expert
who will verse you in everything you’ll ever need to know. Not the professional they send you to after—that
expert
that knows how to ‘talk’ to you after your on-the-job ‘incident’. Not the sergeant officers, not the senior partner officers. No, not
Shears
, not even William Shears,
Mr. No-One-Wants-To-Die-Shears
.

Not one of them tells you what it’ll be like to pull on that trigger. Because not one of them knows.
Not a single one has even the slightest whiff.

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It was a cool evening in fall, months after the shooting at the Redfield home in Vaughan, when his taste fell to a bitter flavor. In the weeks and days following that night, he would close his eyes and see only that flower bloom of his service pistol, only those two bodies, suspended in air and looking like a shotbolt had struck them. All he would hear was that awful crack, like a hollow whip, dully amplified.

It stayed with him, and he fell into a droning selfish pit. Not one of them told him it would be like this.

Then there came an adjustment to the horror he saw when he closed his eyes: the blurred face of Sebastion Redfield, whom he would never formally meet, had dissolved into a blank piece of flesh—a nameless and unknown thing. A fallen man taken hostage by fate and left unsaved. They switched places, behind his eyes, the dark skinned perp and the lighter one, the victim—Redfield was his name, the reports had said.

At one moment, the perp held the gun from behind, and at the next Redfield did, standing behind and grinning like the madness was
his
disease instead.

And then, nearest the end, Owen would close his eyes and see his trusted beauty, the Kurdish girl who had come all that way across land and water to him, he once believed, as his soulmate for life. But she wasn’t serene there in his psyche’s eye, she wasn’t smiling. She was that dark-skinned creature in the grip of another. Her body was naked, lucid and flowing...but her face was frightened and tense. And behind her was Owen, squeezing the trigger on a stained derringer.
Crack!
That whip blew through his ears like a recording he couldn’t shut off.