Page 9 of The Evening Wolves

Whatever Nico said back, it sounded broken and small.

“I suppose you have some brilliant advice for dealing with teenagers?” Emery said to Theo.

Theo’s laughter was rich and full, and Emery’s first spike of outrage at the reaction melted into a kind of resigned amusement. He rolled his shoulders and took a deep breath.

“I guess I should go fix this.”

Theo nodded. “You’re a great dad, Emery. The problem is it’s an impossible job.”

“Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“But you still need to hear it every once in a while.”

On his way through the living room toward the stairs, Emery stopped. John had stepped out onto the porch. His hands were open at his sides, almost like he was displaying them. And facing him, still in uniform, were Neecie Weiss and Roy Peterson. Weiss was a sheriff’s deputy, and acting sheriff at least until the special election in April. Peterson was the day watch lieutenant and, as things went in a department as small as the Wahredua PD, John’s second-in-command.

Emery rerouted to the front door. As he opened it, Peterson was saying, “—nothing personal.”

“I know,” John said. Something was wrong with his voice. It was flat, almost affectless, a parody of his usual good humor. And there was a burr in it that, on someone else, Emery might have called anger.

Weiss’s gaze snapped to Emery as the door opened, and she said, “Mr. Hazard, please step outside slowly and show me your hands.”

“What’s going on?” Weiss looked tired, the weariness bone-deep and seeping through her mask of resolve. Peterson met Emery’s gaze, but only for a heartbeat, and then his eyes slid away. “What is this? John, what’s happening?”

“I’m under arrest,” John said, and the way he said it, it sounded like he was trying to make a joke.

“What are you talking about?” The wind sent old snow skittering. “Somebody give me some fucking answers.”

“Em, is everything ok?” Nico asked from the entry hall.

“Girls, why don’t we take some of these cookies to Theo?” Auggie said.

Still no one had answered Emery’s question. Facts, he thought. Focus on facts. “Under arrest? On what charge?”

Weiss dropped her eyes to the ground. Peterson blew out a long, white breath.

“Child pornography,” John said, turning to face Emery. He looked sallow in the porch light, his eyes wide and unseeing. “They’re arresting me for possession of child porn.”

3

In the interview room at the county jail, after being booked, John-Henry waited for his lawyer, and he tried not to think the thing he wanted to think.

He sat in one of the metal chairs, his hands hanging between his legs below the battered steel table. He wasn’t cuffed anymore, and that was something. He used his knees to brace his hands. He was still trembling a little.

The handcuffs on his front porch. The frisk as he stood there, where his neighbors could see the whole thing taking place. The Miranda warning. Peterson had stopped once to clear his throat, and Weiss had suggested he start over, so John had heard it again. The drive in the back of Weiss’s cruiser, the cage separating them, looking out the window and waiting to see a familiar face, for someone to spot him in the back. That had been bad enough.

The booking process had been worse. The casual indignities of being printed, of the mug shots, of men and women he’d known and worked with for most of his life—some of them, all his life—staring at him, disgust contorting their expressions. And then worse yet. Being forced to strip. His pubic hair combed for lice. The full-body search, fingers pressing inside him. A part of him tried to remain detached, to be a professional, to think about the sheriff’s department’s process, about its effect, to consider everything in that clinical light because it would give him useful insight into the procedures of his own department. But his mind wandered. I’m done was the numb thought that kept coming back to him. I’m done. I can never work in this town again.

And now, in jailhouse slides and jailhouse scrubs, his hands locked between his knees to keep them steady, he focused on controlling his breathing, building a wall between himself and the tempest of emotions: rage, humiliation, and simplest of all, the childlike desire to burst into tears.

One trick was to focus on sensory details. The cinderblock room smelled tomatoey, vinegary, with a processed-fat smell like margarine. He’d reviewed enough institutional meals to guess sloppy joes, instant mashed potatoes, some sort of vegetable boiled until it was about to dissolve. The same kind of thing he’d be eating tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. A door slammed somewhere, and John-Henry startled in the seat before catching himself. The silence that came after was worse. The fluorescents buzzed. His head throbbed. He had to be careful not to look around the room, to see the figure in the mirror connected to the observation room. Cameras watched him, and he knew that, no matter what Weiss tried, the footage would be in a hundred different hands by the morning. The chief of police in custody. Be cool, he told himself. Be cool.

Emery would fix this. That was his hope to cling to. Emery wouldn’t stand for this. On the porch, in the aftermath of saying those words, of being forced to say those words about himself, John had watched the fury rise in Emery’s face, and then the iron control as he took hold again. Emery had asked to see the arrest warrant, but Weiss and Peterson had refused. John-Henry couldn’t blame them; if he’d been in their position, he would have refused as well. Emery had simply grown colder. He would drive separately, he’d told John. He’d call a lawyer. And John, who should have been saying something, doing something, figuring out how this terrible mistake had been made, had simply stood there and nodded. Emery would fix this.

How?

That was the question he didn’t want to look in the eyes. The part of him that had been a police officer for close to twenty years, the part of him that knew how the system worked—that part of him knew this kind of thing, the arrest of any law enforcement officer, much less the chief of police, wasn’t something that happened quickly. Someone had been working on this for a long time. Someone had been laying the groundwork. A grand jury had been empaneled. Witnesses had been called. Evidence produced. An indictment had been handed down, and the presiding judge had issued an arrest warrant.

For child pornography. John-Henry felt a moment of dissociation, like his head had separated from his body. And then the need to vomit gripped him, cold sweat breaking out across his body as he rode it out.

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