Page 50 of Swerve
Tears break in her voice, and he looks across at her, wishing for a moment that he hadn’t given her such a comparison to make. “If she’s anything like you,” he says quietly, “she’s mentally tough.”
Emory wipes a hand across her eyes, staring through the windshield. “I don’t feel very mentally tough right now.”
“Think about the things you’ve taught her, though, just by being who you are. How many eighteen-year-olds could take over the role of parent to an eight-year-old? She’s absorbed strength with you as a role model.”
“You’re kind,” she says in a barely audible voice.
“That’s not something I often get accused of.”
“What do you get accused of?” she asks, looking at him now.
“Getting the job done. Being efficient. Knowing what the end goal is. But kindness isn’t usually necessary to get those things done.”
“You care about how I feel right now. That’s kind.”
He shifts in his seat, switches hands on the steering wheel. Continuing to declare the label as ill-fitting seems like drawing attention to something he’d rather not draw attention to, so he chooses silence as the best option.
“What was the hardest training mission? The one you thought you might not endure?”
“Hell week and staying awake for five days straight. I always took sleep for granted. I could grab three or four hours and be fine if I had an exam in college or stayed out half the night partying and had to get up for class the next morning. But you go that long without any, and reality takes on a new meaning. You’re seeing stoplights in the middle of the ocean. Think you see a whale float by.”
“Hallucinations?”
“Yeah. Your buddy next to you is seeing things too, so you resist the urge to feel like you’re going crazy.”
“How did you stay awake? Caffeine?”
“No. That stopped working on day two. Moving was the biggest thing. If you stood still, you would fall asleep instantly. Moving was the only thing that kept you awake.”
“Why did they make you stay awake so long?”
“To make sure you can do it in a war zone. Seventy-two hours awake on a mission happens. You can’t stop and sleep. You’ve got to be able to complete what you’re there to do.”
“Working as a detective must seem simple compared to that.”
“Both jobs require you to deal with war. It’s dressed up a little differently, but some of the things I’ve seen in domestic situations have been a lot harder to process than what I saw over there.”
“How so?”
“In a war, you have a declared enemy, and, once identified, your job is to take them out. Here, when you get a call to a house where a husband has just shot and killed his wife and children, and he’s sitting in his living room holding the gun he used, you don’t get to finish the job and take out the enemy who just wiped out an entire family. You have to cuff him with restraint, read him his rights, and escort him to the legal system that might or might not fully hold him accountable.”
“That’s hard for you,” she says in a voice that tells him she doesn’t need him to agree. “Do you believe in vigilante justice?”
“The correct answer is no,” he says.
“You don’t believe there’s ever any justification in a person taking the law into his own hands?”
“There shouldn’t be.”
“You think our legal system works perfectly and the guilty are always punished?”
“No.”
She considers this for a moment. “I once read about a mother who worked late shifts as a policewoman. She let her daughter sleep over at her best friend’s house when she had to work nights. When her daughter was twelve, she told her mother that the husband had molested her several times when she stayed there. The mother reported this to the police, but didn’t get what she thought was a fast-enough response. She thought other children might be in danger. So she abducted the man and drove him to a wooded area where she made him take off his clothes and tell the truth about what he’d done. After he got cold enough, he confessed, and she drove him back to the police station so that he could confess there also. He was arrested for rape, but the mother was also arrested for kidnapping with intent to commit murder. She was facing five years in prison but ended up getting probation. He went to prison for four years. Do you think she should have gone to prison?”
“No,” he says instantly.
“Me either.”
