Jonathon King: The Blue Edge of Midnight

"Surgeons tell us you're one lucky officer, Freeman," he said. "They say a couple inches the other way could have been fatal."

Of course a few inches the other way and I wouldn't have been hit at all, but being such a lucky officer, I decided to hold on to that charm and not respond, even if I could. I hadn't yet attempted to speak. My throat felt thick and swollen as if I'd been to the dentist and the guy had pumped me full of novocaine all the way down to my collarbone.

I swung my eyes over to my uncle, who'd taken a deferential step back from the chief. Since he was studying either the end of the bed or the top of his shoes, I took a clue.

"They say you're out of the woods now. So don't you worry. But as soon as you're ready, we'll need a statement," said Osborne, tipping his head to the beancounter as part of the "we" but not introducing him.

There was an awkward silence. You can't have an interview with a mute man. You can't say congratulations to a shot cop. You can't say "good job" to an officer who just killed a child.

"We'll check back, Freeman," Osborne finally said, reaching out until he realized my hand wasn't going to move, and then issuing what seemed to be a consolation pat on the side of the bed instead. The chief and the guy I would later dance with in his role as human resource director walked to the door, had a few short sentences with Sergeant O'Brien and left.

My uncle Keith came to the bedside, making eye contact for the first time. Giving me the Irish twinkle and waiting a good safe period before flashing his more consistent fire.

"Assholes," he said, not elaborating on who he was giving the title to and letting it sit wide ranging. "How're ya, boy?" he finally said.

When I tried to answer, I couldn't get even a croak through the novocaine-like block. My right hand went again to the left side of my neck, a movement that was already imprinted in my postsurgical psyche.

"A through and through," he said, nodding his head to the right.

"Punk kid threw a.22 at you before you got off the knockdown. The EMS guys said the slug went straight through muscle, missed the windpipe and the carotid artery."

He told me how the slug had passed through my neck leaving an entrance wound as clean as a paper punch. The exit wound was twice as large and raggedy. The lead had then pucked into the brick facade of the Thirteenth Street Cleaners, chunking out a thimble-sized hole with spatters of Max Freeman's blood around it.

"Fuckin' kid was a real sharpshooter," he said before catching the look in my eye. Keith was like the majority of cops in Philadelphia and on every department in the country. In twenty-five years he had never pulled his gun in the line of duty. If the department hadn't instituted a mandatory range qualification a few years back, the rounds in his old-style revolver would still be rusted in the chamber. But he had seen the results of shootings. He'd known officers who had killed and seen them change. Nobody took it without changing.

"Both of 'em DOS," he said. "Crime scene guys bagged them right on the sidewalk."

He hesitated, looking away.

"Twelve and sixteen years old. Both from North Philly. Down doing Center City for the night."

He went on how the newspapers and radio talk shows were already howling about their new discovery this month that kids were carrying guns. He said a witness across the street on Chestnut was screaming that I took the first shot, cut the kid down without a warning. He said Internal Affairs had my gun and would be all over the shooting investigation, but being wounded and all, I didn't have to worry.

He was talking, but I had only been hearing, not listening. My eyes had gone to the ceiling again, my right hand to the bandage on my neck.

I must have been forty strokes shy of the landing at Thompson's Point when the spotlight beams hit me full in the face. I had covered the last mile and a half in nearly thirty minutes and had kept a consistent seventy strokes a minute the entire time. My gray T-shirt was black with sweat and I had worked through a stitch in my side that had started stabbing me after the first fifteen minutes.

I kept cranking into the light when a voice called out and two more cones of light swung onto me. I never slowed, just kept the rhythm until I felt the bottom of my canoe hit the boat ramp gravel.

"Shoot fire, Max! Slow down, boy!"

Cleve Wilson's was the first face I could make out as he walked down the ramp to greet me.

"We was just about to head up your way," he said with an uncharacteristic hitch in his voice and cutting his eyes to either side of the dock.

Shaking the sweat out of my eyes I brought the rest of the five-person ramp party into focus. There were four men and a woman. Two of the men were thick in the chest and waist and were dressed in the brown uniform of the Florida Highway Patrol. The other two seemed thin, and both were dressed in canvas pants and oxford shirts rolled up at the sleeves. The younger one cursed in Spanish when the river water lapped up onto his loafers.

The woman was as tall as the other four and I picked up the glint of blond hair in the flashlight beam, but averted my eyes. The night was already full of too much memory. I didn't want to think about the rattle that that wisp of hair put into my heart.

I looked back at Cleve and registered the hesitation in his face. I was already trying to figure out how they'd already heard about the child's body when he started in.

"We was just heading up to the dam," he said. "These folks got some sort of tip that there might be some kind of clue to an investigation they got going."

Cleve was putting on his old Florida Cracker voice, the one he'd used with me for the first month I knew him. It was his way of gathering intelligence, by hiding his own and letting others mistakenly try to send things over his head. He was about to make introductions when the oxford shirts did it on their own.

Detectives Mark Hammonds and Vincente Diaz, county sheriff's investigators on a joint task force with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. When Hammonds stepped up he used the practiced firm handshake of a businessman and the old interviewer's trick of staring straight into your eyes like he could see the truth hanging back in there where you couldn't hide it. I'd used the look myself many times. I held his gaze until he flinched, then I took half a step back. Hammonds was the kind who made sure you knew he was in charge without using the words. He was a thin man in his fifties, tired around the eyes, but he squared his shoulders and like so many in his position seemed to will himself to appear bigger.

Diaz was quicker with the handshake. He was a clean-cut, young-looking Hispanic and couldn't help himself from being amiable. If cops had junior executives, he would be it. Eager to learn, eager to please. He had big, white, square teeth and even though he tried, he couldn't keep from smiling a little bit.

The woman refused to step closer to the riverbank and when Hammonds introduced her as a Detective Richards from Fort Lauderdale, I too kept my ground. We nodded our acquaintance. She stood with her arms folded as if she were cold, even on a night when the air was hanging warm and gauzy at the water's edge. Her perfume drifted by on a swirl of river wind and seemed distinctly out of place. When I turned to talk to the others I could feel her eyes on my back.

"So somebody already called this in?" I finally said, directing the question to Cleve while I bent to pull my canoe higher up on the ramp.

"Called what in?" Hammonds said.

"You've got a crime scene out there," I said but I could tell immediately that even though it wasn't unexpected news, it still caught all of them hard. Hammonds' lips went tight together and Diaz winced. I felt the woman take an instinctive step closer.