Darkness peering by Alice Blanchard

Storrow
walked to the edge of the roof, looked down at Billy with his ice-blue
eyes, gold badge glinting in the sun, and said, "A conscience doesn't
come with a dimmer switch, son." Then he began to glow as if lit from
within. Eyes smoldering, he leapt into the sky and disappeared. And
in his hand, Billy found his father's revolver. His heart pounded as
he pointed the gun at his own head and pulled the trigger, and his
bones dissolved and his brains came rushing out the back of his skull
as he crashed to the ground.
    Billy woke up drenched in sweat. The bed was damp, the sheets
stifling. He kicked them off, sat up, rubbed his eyes. His hands were
trembling. "Stupid fuck," he said. "Stupid shit ... stupid fuck .."
    He switched on the light. Three in the morning. He got up and started
re shelving some of the books stacked haphazardly around the room. He
stacked them alphabetically by author. He'd made the floor-to-ceiling
scrub pine bookshelves himself.
    A distant memory came to him. He must've been three or four years old
when he found a moldy old baseball in the backyard and brought it
inside to show his father. Nalen Storrow snatched

    the baseball away and chopped it in half with a hatchet. Only Billy
couldn't be sure if it'd actually happened that way or if perhaps he
had dreamt it. He wasn't sure of anything anymore.
    Now the familiar nagging thoughts, bad thoughts, corrosive, tried to
pry their way into his brain, and he did what he always did whenever
that happened. He picked up a book among the stacks of books that
littered the house and skimmed its pages. He didn't usually buy
self-help books, but this one was about the children of alcoholics. He
paused to read a random paragraph: Some children grow up to become
"super-coping adults," extremely diplomatic and capable ofivorking very
hard for little reward; people who set out to save others.
    That was Rachel, he thought. Whereas Billy fit the category of those
who had low self-worth and difficulty maintaining intimate
relationships. That was him, no self-esteem. Just a big emptiness
inside he kept trying to fill up with a human being.
    Billy didn't know who he was; he didn't fit into the world. He browsed
and re shelved until dawn cracked the horizon; this was the way he
dealt with his nightmares.
    rachel's conversation' with billy had left hlr feeling raw, angry and
confused. For the first time, she understood what McKissack was
talking about and she hated him for being right. She was too close to
the case, and the hard weight of this knowledge sat inside her like a
stone. She'd recognized pain in the sharp, cracked color of her
brother's eyes and that had stopped her from questioning him further.
Still, she wasn't ready to give up just yet.

    Looking downrange at the target, she attempted to create in her mind a
potentially life-threatening situation. She told herself she had no
backup. It was just her and the perp and her life was in danger. What
should she do? Her heart pumped rhythmically as she tried to imagine
the perp's face but couldn't. He was a cipher. A face in shadow.
    She'd been a patrol officer for three years now, a detective third
grade just over a year, and yet she'd never shot at a suspect, never
killed anyone. On Boy Range back at the police academy, she'd learned
to shoot at the body-shaped targets stapled to stanchions across the
range. The bullets were caught in sand piles behind the stanchions
embedded in concrete. In her headset and goggles, she stood with the
other recruits in the ready position, gun drawn, arm extended. "On the
whistle, fire two rounds." Unload and reload with the speed loader.
Fire off four rounds in fifteen seconds.
    And always at the back of her mind was the question: What did it feel
like to get shot? What did it feel like to turn your gun on yourself?
To take your own life? Head ripped apart at the pressure of your own
finger?
    No, don't think about that now. Stay