Chapter 6
Ryan
My job pretty much sucked.
A job like mine takes a toll on you…on your soul.
It makes you stop feeling human. You always feel empty. You’re not comfortable in groups of people, normal gatherings, you just end up looking around and thinking,None of these people have a clue. And you end up feeling completely and utterly alone.
Cops are willing to do the things you think are beneath you. See the things that you don’t want to see. Run into the places that you’d never go. We’re the ones who hold hands with the dying as they struggle to keep breathing, clawing onto the life that quickly spills out of them. We’re the ones who have to try to protect the innocent, even when they are fighting us and spitting in our face. We see violence, and we have to pull it apart, piece by piece, and try to solve the puzzle of why it came to be—how to stop it—all while being trained to be the most violent part of it.
You work side-by-side with the worst part of humanity. Every single day.
Not many people have the fortitude to deal with it.
Like this morning before breakfast, I met with the mutilated body of one Rosemary Morales. The fifty-seven-year-old was splayed on the floor of her roach-infested apartment, her blood sprayed across the walls and ceiling. She sold drugs for a living, and when that didn’t pay enough, she sold herself. Her killer could be anyone. But I knew within weeks, my team and I would handle it. We’d gather all the evidence, investigate, interview, and ultimately arrest the person who did it. The truth was she probably owed someone money or sold them some bad shit.
We were great detectives.
I skipped eating breakfast, and I figured I’d just binge on lunch, but that’s when we got a call that an eight-year-old kid stumbled upon his parents’ corpses when he was trying to get himself ready for school. Both bodies sat stiff on a couch, heads bowed down in that familiar drugged induced nod, needles still stuck in both of their veins. We called in the proper agencies and made sure the kid ended up in the safest place possible. Always fixing the problems we could. The problem being that humanity was pretty much gone from these forgotten pockets of the world.
The late afternoon was full of watching surveillance tapes and trying to find people to question.
Easy day to handle, really. I was used to the grit of the job. I was used to seeing monsters prey on victims, victims becoming monsters. I was used to fixing the thing that lost its humanity by handing out justice when needed.
What I couldn’t put a handle on was when I was not able to make anything better.
And that evening, for Cameron, that was something I was not able to do for him. The simple act of making him feel better.
I couldn’t help him.
Autism wasn’t something I could arrest. It wasn’t a physical entity I could slap a pair of cuffs on and punish for committing a crime. It was something he was living with, and it was invisible and uncontrollable to me.
I couldn’t help him at all.
And he reacted like his world was ending.
I saw it, plain as day, the minute it happened. The exact second that everything became too much for Cameron, and he just imploded. All my tactical training, range time, criminal justice degrees—I had nothing to use to help him.
It started with a low rumbling. A few murmuring tones under his breath. Then, he was pacing up and down, becoming more and more aggressive with everything.
All I did was try and cook him dinner.
Then, everything flew outward. Words. Screams. Fists. Objects. He was punching himself in the head, over and over. Mumbling words and curses. Slapping, palms open, just slapping at his head. Bouncing up and down on his toes, covering his face and wailing into his hands.
All I did was put a plate of spaghetti in front of him.
He roared and pulled out a drawer, throwing it across the room. With one giant swipe of his arm, things flew off the table, dishes crashed against the walls. The spaghetti hit the ceiling and stuck.
There were strands of stringy, sticky spaghetti hanging down from my ceiling.
Stunned, I grabbed him like he was a perp,my own brother. It gutted me, and I couldn’t hold onto him, becausehe wasmy brother. I couldn’t restrain my screaming, crying little brother. He flung himself away from me and started banging his head against the wall, so hard. He was just smashing his head against the wall. Fists punching at his own face. His eyes completely vacant.
What triggered it?
Was it me?
The television and me talking at the same time? Was it something I said? Just like the covered pot of spaghetti and water, left unattended, he just boiled over.
