START
We sat out in the yard and Sam Peters held onto his beer with both hands like he was praying. He was young, like they said, only a year or two out of the police academy. In the space of a few minutes, all his media training unraveled. He told me everything under the swaying trees of the yard.
‘So then you went back to the girls?
‘Yeah. Lerman is…half his chest is missing. The room’s a fucking nightmare and my partner—’
‘Officer Furow?’
‘Yeah Davey,’ Furow is dead. He takes a moment. ‘I don’t know where he was standing, but he must’ve had a better read on what’s happening, because Davey straight up put his gloves on and started trying to resuscitate one of the girls. I saw the other one had her eyes open, so I went over and started trying to get her up. I had her half out when she starts screaming. I thought, you know, it was just her seeing Lerman’s messed up body, like she was just seeing it properly for the first time, but that wasn’t it. It…’
Peters looks back at the house.
‘You had to shoot him again, right?’
‘I did. He was getting back up.’
‘Did he still have the gun?’
‘Yeah, kinda.’
‘Did he point the gun at you?’
‘He had it, you know, that’s all. I couldn’t wait around for him to start pointing it at people.’
The paper usually did the right thing by the department, so they let me see the reports. It was a clean shoot. Lerman was on a cocktail of things: AD40, alcohol, prescription meds. On leave, aggressive, he’d been causing trouble all night. When he started in on the girls and when one kid (no one’s saying who) saw him bite a women, a gun was produced — something heavy gauged — and Lerman took two in the chest and the police were called. Peters and Furow were on the scene in four and a half minutes.
MIDDLE
The police report listed all the guests. I visited Sabrina Roberts, twenty-two. She lived up in the hills. In her parent’s sitting room, she looked like she was dying. She couldn’t stop sweating.
I asked my questions. She told me about Patricia Dartmouth, the surviving girl from the room, the one Lerman clawed and bit before he was shot. ‘I told you, she went crazy,’ said Sabrina.
‘But she was dead right?’ I said.
Sabrina nods.
‘We were all there in the ward after, when she died. The doctors said we could go in and say goodbye, and I don’t know what happened. Someone messed up because she wasn’t dead. Patricia was standing there hunched over another bed when we went in.’
‘Did she say anything to you?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing at all?’
Eighteen stitches laced around Sabrina’s arm.
‘She looked angry. I thought she’d been coughing up blood. She was…I went straight to her, to help her, you know but…’
‘And that’s when…’
She holds up her arm. ‘Yeah, that’s when this happened.’
END
— IAIN
PS: Read my public-facing thoughts Twitter and see how I live my life on Instagram.
PPS: This newsletter is brought to you by Pity / Piety by Jesu.
PPPS: Buy my book THE STRIP, it’s available everywhere (including Amazon):