Watson turned pale. “I’m just—”
Porter slumped, shaking his head. “No, wait—that came out wrong. I’m on edge. They’ve been pushing me to see a shrink, and I know I should, I know I need to, but every bone in my body objects. It’s like when you’re a kid and your parents tell you to do something and you do the opposite because you don’t want to do whatever it is they asked you, even if it’s the right thing. It’s the stubborn ass in me.”
Watson gave him a slight nod. He fidgeted with the evidence bag in his hands, the pocket watch rattling around inside. “Nash said she was shot.”
Porter nodded once. “We always made coffee in the morning before we headed off to work. That night we ran out of milk, so she went to the store to get a carton so we’d have some the next day. I had fallen asleep watching TV in the bedroom. I didn’t hear her leave. She probably didn’t want to wake me. I got up and found a note on her pillow telling me where she’d gone. It was only about eleven thirty, and since I had been sleeping, I wasn’t sure if she’d left five minutes earlier or two hours, but I had been out for nearly three hours. This job will do that to you—you run and run, and when you finally get a chance to breathe, it catches up to you and you collapse. Anyway, I got up and went out to the living room to read a book, figured I’d wait up for her. Another twenty minutes went by, and I started getting nervous. We usually go to this little corner market about a block away, five minutes each way tops, maybe another five or so inside the store. She should have been back. I tried her cell phone and got voice mail. Ten minutes later I decided to walk down myself.”
He paused, his eyes fixed on the road.
“I saw the lights. As soon as I rounded the corner onto Windsor, I saw the lights and I just knew. I knew it was my Heather. I started running. When I got to the store, the building was all taped off. Half a dozen patrol cars were blocking the street. I ducked under the tape and started for the door, and one of the uniforms must have recognized me because I remember hearing my name. Then someone grabbed my arm, then someone else, and someone else . . . It seems more like a bad dream than something that actually happened.”
“You were probably in shock.”
Porter nodded. “Probably.”
“Robbery?”
“Yeah. Just some kid. According to Tareq, the night cashier, Heather was in the back of the store when this banger came in and shoved a gun in his face. I’ve known Tareq for going on four years now. Good guy, late twenties, wife and two kids at home. Anyway, Tareq said the kid pointed the gun at him, asked him to clear out the register. Tareq had been robbed before and knew better than to put up a fight, so he started bagging the cash in the till, thinks he had around three hundred and change. Tareq said the kid was shaking something awful, and you know that’s the worst kind of robber. The calm ones treat it almost like a business transaction—everybody plays their role and everybody walks away. The nervous ones, though, they’re another story. Tareq said he could barely hold the gun straight, and he thought for sure it would go off. And that’s exactly what it did, only he didn’t shoot Tareq. He shot the woman he glimpsed from the corner of his eye, the woman he didn’t spot when he came into the store. She startled him. He spun around and clipped the trigger. The bullet caught Heather below the right breast, passed right through the subclavian artery, a through and through.”
Watson lowered his head and stared at his hands. “She would have bled out fast. Nothing you can do for that.”
Porter sniffed and pulled a hard left onto Roosevelt. “The shooter took off, didn’t take the money. Tareq dialed 911 and tried to stop the bleeding, but like you said . . . nothing you can do for that.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You wanna know the real kicker? When I was heading home that night I remembered we were nearly out of milk. I was gonna stop for some, but the market looked busy when I got close, so I let it go, figured I’d head back out a little later. Do you believe that shit? I lost . . . because I was too damn lazy to spend a few minutes in line.”
“You can’t think like that.”
“I’m not sure what to think right now. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t think I could have sat around that apartment one more day—neighbors all staring at me in the hallway, everybody treating me with kid gloves. Everything is off. Even this—” He waved his hand between them. “I figured bringing you along would be easier than Nash or Clair, but it’s no different. Part of me wants to talk about this with someone who doesn’t”—he cleared his throat—“who didn’t know her. Another part doesn’t want to talk about it at all, and the rest of me has no idea what I should be doing. Working Homicide, I’ve had to tell so many families about the death of a loved one. I became numb, detached. Twenty-three years of telling people, breaking that news. That kind of hurt became systematic to me. Would you believe I’ve got two or three speeches down cold? One to fit each scenario. Nash and I used to flip a quarter—loser had to give the death speech. I’d tell them what happened, explain how their loved one is in a better place, how they should move on and get past their personal tragedy, how time will heal. Now, though, all of that seems like complete bullshit. When I lost . . . I lost Heather . . . Christ, I can’t even say it out loud without getting choked up. She wouldn’t want me to get choked up. She’d want me to focus on all the good memories and forget about these past few weeks, not let them define the relationship we had. But I can’t do that. I want to do that. Every time I see something of hers—the book she was reading that she’ll never finish, the toothbrush that will never be used again, her dirty laundry, her mail. We played Scrabble once a week, and the last game is still set up on the board; I can’t bring myself to put it away. I keep looking at her tiles, wondering what her next word would have been. I wake in the middle of the night and reach for her side of the bed, and just find cold sheets.”
He downshifted again and swung around a taxicab slowing for a right turn, then yanked the wheel hard to the left to avoid a minivan pulling out from a Burger King.
“Maybe we should put the light on,” Watson suggested. “Or I can drive, if you want.”
Porter wiped his eye on his shirtsleeve. “No, I’m okay. I’ll be fine. I guess I should have warned you before you got in the car. All of this should be coming out in therapy, not on a rookie CSI. You didn’t sign on for this.”
“You need to talk to someone. That’s how we heal. Keeping it bottled up isn’t healthy. It’ll grow in you like a cancer if you keep it all inside.”
Porter chuckled. “Now you sound like a shrink. That may be the longest spiel I’ve heard you string together since we met.”
“One of my degrees may be in psychology,” Watson said sheepishly.