Standalone

Nightwork

1

You are ninety seconds from being the kind of person the news uses one bad photo for, and you do not know it yet, because you are looking at your hands.

You are Sam Reyes: thirty-four, eleven years transcribing homicide trials for the county, a person who has typed the word remorse into the official record more times than you have said it out loud, and you are standing in the gravel lot behind the Anchor on Delmore Street at 1:14 in the morning, in the wet dark under a security light that burned out sometime during the current administration, and Vince Rourke is on the ground and he is not getting up.

You came to warn him off. That was the whole plan, the plan you rehearsed in the car: you would tell your sister’s ex that the next time he sat outside her apartment you would make it a police matter, and you would say it flat and cold so he’d believe it, and then you would leave. You are not a violent person. You have spent a decade watching what violence does to the people who bring it, from a stenographer’s chair eight feet from the defense table, and you of all people know better.

You’d sat in your car outside the Anchor for twenty minutes first, watching the door, rehearsing. You knew he’d be here, he was always here, and you knew what he’d been doing to Maya: the parking outside her building, the texts from numbers she’d block and he’d replace, the way she’d started checking the peephole before she’d let herself cross her own living room. You had watched your little sister become a person who checks peepholes, and something in you that had stayed lawful and patient for thirty-four years had finally, quietly, run out. That is the part you will never be able to explain to anyone, least of all a jury: that you did not come here in a rage. You came here calm, and reasonable, and decided, which is so much worse.

You did it anyway. He laughed, and then he put his hand on your chest and shoved, and then it stopped being a plan and became a thing your body did faster than your mind could file it, and now the rain has quit and the lot is very quiet and Vince Rourke is a shape on the gravel that your whole life has just rearranged itself around.

The quiet is the thing you’ll remember, later, on the nights you let yourself remember anything: not the sound the swing made, which you have already begun the lifelong work of not hearing, but the silence after it, thick and total, the rain stopped as if it too had lost its nerve, the Anchor’s dead sign hanging silent, your own car cooling three blocks off on Renwick, and under all of it the enormous new fact of the world: that a man who was alive a minute ago is a shape now, and you are the reason, and nothing (not one thing, ever again) is going to be the way it was ninety seconds ago. You have transcribed the phrase the defendant’s life changed in an instant more times than you can count, and you never once understood it. You understand it now. It is not a figure of speech. It is a sound, and then a silence, and then the rest of your life.

Your phone is in your hand. You do not remember taking it out.

Let the record reflect, says the part of your brain that has never once, in thirty-four years, known when to stop, that the defendant’s first act upon becoming a killer was to check whether he had signal. You put the thought away. It will be back. It is always back. It is the only company you’re going to have for a while, and it is not on your side.

You have, at most, four seconds before the animal in you decides for you.

- To run: to get in the car and drive, away, now, the way every cell in your body is shrieking, and be four towns over before anyone finds this lot, turn to 3 .

- To handle it: a body is a problem and problems get solved, and you are good at problems; to start, right now, doing the things that make this go away, turn to 4 .

- To check him: to kneel and find out whether Vince Rourke is dead, or whether there is still, God help you, something to be done, turn to 15 .

- To call your sister: to hear a voice that loves you, to tell someone, to not be the only living person who knows, turn to 45 .

- To call 911: to say the words there’s been a fight, a man is down, send someone, and stand here in the light and tell them the truth when they come, turn to 6 .

- To stop: to not touch anything, to put the phone in your pocket, to breathe once and do the only thing you have ever truly been good at: read the scene the way you’ve watched a hundred detectives read it, turn to 2 .