INFECTION 2.0

~ FOURTEEN ~

Had a person asked Lockley how his day was going he would have answered by sighing ‘holy s**t’ as if those two words and the tone should explain it all. After the shooting in the holding cells, he knew a couple of simple things. One, that he knew nothing of what lead to the incident, and two, that he needed to get as far away from the police station as possible to keep from getting involved in the clean-up. Both the physical clean-up and the inter-political BS that always happens in an officer-involved shooting.

Barking orders and fighting to control the situation he got the other officers gathered to move the detainees to other cells or places. It didn’t matter, go handcuff them to office desks, to patrol cars in the parking lot, anywhere. Just get them somewhere away from the scene. No one needed to see the mess that had been created. Two dead men and one other that didn’t look like he’d make it. Those three were out of Carson’s control. He asked one of the officers to do his best until the paramedics arrived. The other two? They were left for the medical examiner and whoever was going to document and investigate the circumstances.

What Carson did other than try to get some sense of control back in the place, was to get the woman officer out of there. This wasn’t so much about being a nice guy. He had a very selfish motivation behind his compassion. The way things were going, his twenty-four hours shift was quickly heading toward a forty-eight-hour shift if he didn’t find an excuse to get out of there.

He took the woman, led her to the restroom, and followed her in. She gave him a strange look. Car simply smiled. If she needed privacy she could go into a stall. For the time being, though, he didn’t feel she should be allowed to do much of anything on her own.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” he suggested.

She either was unaware or didn’t care, that there was a little blood splatter on her face. He expected her to freak out a little bit and go into a frenzy of washing and scrubbing. Instead, she just kind of stared at herself in the mirror. No, not at the mirror, through it, her thoughts miles away.

Lockley looked around knowing he wouldn’t find what he wanted. Without a better option, he got a handful of the rough, brown, recycled paper from the dispenser. Getting them wet, he turned the woman to face him then began to dab at the speckles. He talked to her, much in the way he would a child, though he didn’t mean to. It came naturally to him to do so, not that he meant to talk down to her, only that he was trying to be the one thing nearby that seemed calm and reassuring.

Soon enough she seemed to come back to the real world. Then she took over with washing and felt the need to get out of her service blouse when she noticed there was blood on that as well. The man waited patiently as she disappeared into a stall claiming she suddenly felt sick. She may have been feeling nauseous but he didn’t hear any sounds of it. Butterflies, big bad butterflies, Lockley thought, he was feeling them too, to some degree.