“Guess that’s why you make the big bucks.” Hugh leaned back in his chair.
“Keep the town running smoothly for me, will you?” the chief said. He had a habit of taking his lunches with the radio chatter turned low, trusting the daily run of the station to Hugh when necessary.
Hugh shook his head. “The guys are going to feel like you sold them out,” he said as the chief walked through the door.
“Not if you explain it to them,” Monroe called back over his shoulder.
Hugh shook his head. “Definitely above my pay grade,” he muttered. He stood up and reached in his pocket for his phone.
Stand by for a Code Red message …
The voice of the dispatcher piped through the intercoms of the building. Hugh let his phone drop back into his pocket. From the window of the chief’s office, he saw Monroe’s car pull out of the lot.
Be advised, we have an active shooter incident taking place at the corner of Juniper and Montfort. All sworn members are to report to the Command Post at 320 Juniper, the Pizza Heaven parking lot, and await further instructions. All responding members are to ensure they have their body armor. This is an active shooter situation. I repeat, all sworn members are to report—
Hugh didn’t hear the rest of the announcement. He was already running out the door.
—
LOUIE WAS WRITING DOWN NOTES in Joy Perry’s file when Harriet came back into the procedure room. She had settled the patient in recovery and had moved the products of conception to the lab room, where she would do a second review. Now she started stripping the paper from the examination table, getting it ready for the next patient. You could never say that their nurses didn’t work their asses off, that’s for sure. “You got any Halloween candy?”
Harriet laughed. “If you keep taking my stash there won’t be any by the time it’s Hallo—”
Whatever she said faded away as a rain of bullets exploded outside the procedure room.
Louie grabbed Harriet and pulled her down to the floor behind the examination table. He put his finger to his lips, for silence. He should have closed the door. Why hadn’t he closed the door?
He knew, right away, what was happening. This was the nightmare that he couldn’t remember when he woke up in a cold sweat; this was the bogeyman, all grown up; this was the other shoe dropping. It was not that he had obsessed about violence as an abortion provider, but he had been aware of the possibility. He had had colleagues who were hurt. Louie couldn’t let himself worry over what might happen to him if he was going to keep doing his job. He knew abortion doctors who wore masks to work to conceal their identities; he had never wanted to be one of those people. What he did was honorable and just. What he did was human. He wasn’t going to hide.
It was not that he had na?vely believed this day might not come. In 1993, an arsonist had burned down the Center, and Vonita had had to rebuild. In 1998, after the abortion clinic in Birmingham was bombed by Eric Rudolph, Louie had gone to offer his support. He remembered the ATF mapping out the trajectory of the bomb, which had been full of nails: pink string, pulled tight from where the bomb had been placed to every chair in the waiting room and the receptionist’s desk, a spider’s web of intended damage. And yet he had listened to the phone ring as new appointments were made and had watched women march right past news trucks to have their abortions. After that, Vonita had contemplated putting bulletproof glass around the reception desk, like her husband had told her to do, but if the patients were strong enough to push past the protesters who told them they were going to hell, shouldn’t the staff be brave enough to meet them face-to-face?
Now, Louie was shaking, hard. He tried to hear where the shots were being fired—if they were getting closer—but there was a strange distortion in the sound. It wasn’t, he thought, like the movies made it out to be. On the heels of that: this was a fact he wished he had never had to learn.
On his first day at the Center, Louie had arrived early. He walked across the parking lot, where he ran into a little old lady carrying a chair. May I? he asked, taking it from her. She thanked him, and a few hundred feet later said that this was her spot. Louie unfolded the chair and realized he was smack in the center of a group of protesters. He walked away and ducked into Lenny’s Sub Shop across the street, where he ordered a chicken salad sandwich and a Diet Coke and sat at the counter. A few minutes later he realized that someone was standing at the window taking his picture—the old lady he’d helped. Do you know her? the waitress asked, and Louie said no, he had never been in Mississippi before today, but that he worked across the street at the Center. The waitress rapped on the window. If you ain’t buying anything, stop loitering, she said. She turned to Louie. Those people need to mind their own business, she said.
When Louie finished his sandwich, the old lady was waiting for him. She followed him across the street, shouting the whole time. You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re not a real doctor. You’re a butcher.
Louie realized two things that day: that the waitress might not be an abortion doctor or even go to a pro-choice rally, but she was an activist all the same. And that you could not underestimate an anti. Had that sweet old grandma wanted to, she had been close enough to shank him.
When he had gotten inside the Center that day, he had broken out in a sweat. For the past ten years, he had never been careful. He didn’t leave the building until the end of the day. He ordered food in. As long as he stayed in the Center, it was a safe space.
Until now.
Harriet was crying. Her hand shook as she reached for her phone and typed out a text. To her husband, maybe? Her kids? Did she have kids? Why didn’t Louie know that?
Louie’s phone was locked up in Vonita’s office, along with his wallet. Who would he contact, anyway? He had no family left, no significant other—for this very reason. Because it was enough that he put himself on the front lines every day, doing the work he did. It wasn’t fair for someone else to suffer by sheer proximity. Dr. King’s words floated into his mind: If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. Would he die, today, for his principles? Or had he already died years ago, by pledging himself to his work and cutting himself off from others who might get close to him? If his heart stopped beating today, would it just be a belated announcement of a death that had already happened?
Sometimes, at bars or conferences or weddings, he met women who were impressed by his bravado. They asked if he was worried about violence at clinics, and he shrugged it off. He’d say, Life is fatal; none of us are getting out of here breathing.
It was easy to make that joke, in response to a hypothetical question. But now?
He did not want to die, but if he did, he hoped it would be swift and not lingering.
He did not want to die, but if he did, he believed he’d been as good a man as he could have been.
He did not want to die, but if he did, he would have gotten more time than Malcolm or Martin had.
And yet. Goddammit. He wasn’t finished yet.
A high-pitched whine wheezed out of Harriet; Louie was sure she didn’t even know she was making the sound. He grabbed her hands and forced her to meet his gaze. “Harriet, you all right?” She shook her head, tears running. “Harriet, look at me.”
Louie could see over her shoulder into the hallway. He flicked his glance away from the nurse, scanning for movement, for shadows. Five minutes passed. Or fifteen. He couldn’t tell.
“Dr. Ward,” Harriet whispered, “I don’t want to die.”
He squeezed her hands. “Harriet. You just keep your eyes right on me, you hear?”