moment to absorb that idea—the shooting board—and then shook it off.
“Anyway...she was going back and down, back into the rear door. I pivoted on my hip and Karen was coming right back at me—I could hear her coming, her shoes scraping—and I figured she was after my weapon because that was what she was focused on. I put the gun on her and I said... I have no idea what I said. She lay down on her face, I went over and cuffed her...and next thing I knew my legs gave out and my ass was on the ground and my back was up against the side of the truck and there was blood in my eyes.”
She looked down at her hands.
“My first day,” she said, mostly to herself. “I can’t fucking believe it. I’m on the job five hours and I’ve fucking killed someone.”
Tears close but not there yet, her blue eyes wide, blood in the right eye and on her cheekbone, a little blood on her teeth as she tried to find the words. Redding put his hand on her right shoulder, feeling the warm wet blood on her uniform shirt, the red stains on her gold braid.
“If the dash cam shows the same thing—”
She hardened up.
“It will.”
“Then it was a good shooting. Take a deep breath. You did just fine. Better than fine. I’m proud of you, Julie. Remember that.”
The EMT bus had arrived, complete with sirens and lights, and now there were County cars rolling in from both ends of the street, along with two K-9 units of the Highway Patrol. And right behind them, Mace Dixon in his Supervisor truck.
Redding leaned in close to her, speaking low but urgently, making the point.
“It’s going to get real intense real fast, Julie. You’re not to talk, got that? Not to anyone. You can answer health questions for the EMT people. Everybody else, you have nothing to say. Got that? Nothing. Not even to the CO. You’re just confused. Your head is killing you—”
“It really is,” she said, trying for a smile.
“You’re too shook up to talk right now. Mace will understand. You don’t talk until you’re discharged from the hospital and you’ve had a good night’s sleep, and we’re back at Depot, and your Patrol Advocate is sitting beside you. And I’ll be right there too. It’ll take a couple of days before that happens. They’ll be taking you to Immaculate Heart to look at that head wound. Our guys will be around everywhere and they’ll keep you safe. They won’t ask you about the shooting. They all know better. But you don’t talk about the shooting to Flagler County. Or any city cops. Or to the medics. Basically, not even to Jesus Christ Himself if He appears in your room with a six-pack of Coronas and a box of Krispy Kremes. Not to anyone.”
She managed to laugh at that, and then the tears finally came, and she was looking at her hands, at the blood on them.
“I killed a living person,” she said. “That girl was alive just a few minutes ago, and now she’s dead, and she will be dead...forever.”
Redding put a hand under her chin, lifted her head and turned her to face him.
“Yes, you did. It was your sworn duty to do that, and you did it. You put the aggressor down and you stayed alive and no civilians got hurt. It was your job to protect the public, and you did that. You killed a crazy bitch who was trying to kill you. And when you were dead she’d have taken your gun and then what could have happened? She could have started firing into the crowd and killed a lot of innocent people. But you stopped her. Stopped her dead. And you know what you need to think about, every time you think about this?”
“What?”
“Fuck her. Better her than you.”
She looked up at him, trying to take that in.
“Really?”
He put a hand on her shoulder, a thin smile.
“Yeah. Really. Welcome to Cop World, Julie.”
* * *
A few minutes later Redding and Marsh and Halliday watched the EMT wagon roll away with Julie Karras, lights but no siren, as Mace Dixon, who’d been speaking to a Flagler County staff sergeant, came across to talk. To listen, actually.
They laid it out for him in the most basic terms, and he took it all in without a comment, other than one or two clarifying questions.
Dixon made sure he got it all straight, and then he lit up an Old Port, using the brim of his Stetson to shelter the match from what was left of the rain.
“Okay. We’ll look at the dash cam. If it holds up, I think we’re gonna be okay on this. Media is gonna make a BFD out of it being a kid killed. A female. And all of these people around here, the civilians, every one of them has probably got sound and video on the whole thing. Look at them, they’re still shooting cell phone video. They’re like goddamn zombies with little metal rectangles attached to their foreheads. What happened here, it’s going all over social media. They probably know about it in fucking Oslo by now. Nothing we can do about that. It is what it is.”
The Officer Involved Shooting Unit was on the scene, dropping tiny yellow cones all over the place and taking video. Two satellite trucks from the Jacksonville stations, Fox and CNN, were being held off a block away. So far no Eye in the Sky news choppers had arrived to screw up the crime scene with rotor wash. Redding could see the hard white lights as the reporters did Eyewitness to the Shooting interviews with everyone who wanted to be on television, which was close to a hundred people by now.
Dixon blew out the smoke, turned to the three of them. “You figure she’s still out here somewhere?”
“Has to be,” said Redding. “Flagler County guys have sealed off the entire neighborhood.”
“Might have broken into any one of these houses along here,” said Dixon. “We’ll have to get foot patrols out, go from door to door.”
“Might be out there in the reeds,” said Dixon.
“I think she is,” said Redding. “That’s where we last saw her. We’ll get the flatboats out looking for her. If she went in there, Mace, we’ll flush her out.”
They turned as a burst of angry barking came from the direction of the Suburban. Two K-9 Unit officers were dragging their dogs away from the driver’s side of the truck.
Redding watched the dogs, both big German shepherds. They were both fighting to get free of their leads, barking furiously. The handlers were pulling them away from the truck, the dogs resisting as hard as they could, straining against their harnesses. Both handlers were looking confused, angry, fighting the dogs.
“What the...” said Redding, walking across to talk to one of the K-9 handlers, a serious heart-attack blonde named Jennifer St. Denis. St. Denis had the dog under a tight grip as Redding reached her.
“What’s with the dogs, Jen?” Redding asked.
St. Denis shook her head, looking exasperated and puzzled. “I have no idea.”
Now her dog, a big muscled-up German shepherd, was staring up at Redding, panting heavily, gazing up at him as if he knew him, which he did.
He’d once spent nine months with this fine dog before he’d handed him off to another K-9 officer, the one before Jennifer, a guy who was KILO now, killed in the line of duty, after which this same dog, Killington, had mauled the shooter so badly he lost his left ear, most of his left cheek, all of his left eye and over two quarts of blood from his ripped-out carotid. Killington’s DNA made him nothing less than an apex predator.
Guy later sued the Highway Patrol and the State of Florida for Excessive Use of Force. He was on Death Row at the time. He lost. A while later they spiked him dead and buried him in unconsecrated ground.
The dead K-9 officer’s friends took Killington out to the convict’s grave every now and then and they’d stand around drinking beers until they were all