Habit by T. J. Brearton

that had been holding his neck, and it was streaked with blood.
    Slowly, carefully, Brendan passed through the opening between the house and garage and into the garden area. Kevin was prone just a few yards away. The lowering sun glimmered through the neighboring trees, while the house threw a large rectangular darkness over the greenery. The stalks of grass and copses of vegetables still in the sun painted shadow-webs over the ground. The afternoon held the heat from the earlier day, but a cool breeze moved in from the trees surrounding the place, and some leaves detached and drifted into the garden area, twirling to the ground to rest.
    Kevin Heilshorn was on his back. Brendan spied the gun – a Glock pistol, by the look of it – a few inches from his open hand. The young man was staring up at the sky. He had fallen into one of the raised garden beds, and his hips were out-thrust since he had landed across the wooden gusset of the bed. There was blood everywhere. On the vegetables, on the grass, on Kevin’s clothes and skin. A tear just below his jaw, where the round had nicked his carotid artery, was oozing dark fluid. Brendan could smell the metallic odor of blood amid the flowery scents of the garden.
    Kevin was breathing. Brendan stood over him with the .38 aimed down. Cautiously, with an even, smooth movement, he bent and reached for the Glock pistol. He pinched it by the handle-grip and lifted it up and tossed it to the side, just beyond the bed. Then Brendan stood back up.
    Kevin Heilshorn’s eyes rolled down to look at Brendan Healy. His breaths were shallow and rapid. His artery pumped out the blood into the garden bed where it was sucked into the dark, rich soil.
    Why ? Brendan wanted to ask. He suddenly felt nauseous, his calm broken at last. He felt hurt too, as if there were something terribly wrong with this scene, and more than just the obvious gore and violence of it. Looking down at this twenty-five-year-old man, with his surfer blond hair, his good looks, his grief and torment, Brendan felt like he was looking at a victim, not a killer.
    Still, the young man had just driven up to the house of the psychologist, Olivia Jane, and started blasting away. He had attacked a woman and a police detective in broad daylight, with a kind of machine-like determination. He had put Brendan in a situation where the detective had no choice but to protect himself and the woman, and take deadly action.
    Why ?
    The question lingered. Brendan sensed Olivia very gingerly approaching from behind him. He took his free hand and reached down to his belt and plucked his cell phone from its holder. He brought it in front of his face and dialed 911. He pressed the phone to his ear.
    During all this, Kevin Heilshorn continued to watch the detective. His eyes were alert, seeming to take everything in. His body, however, remained motionless. Brendan had shot the young man in the neck, in the arm, and in the chest.
    Brendan felt detached, as if operating his muscles now from somewhere remote. He heard himself talking to the 911 operator. He gave her his name and badge number with practiced ease. He described his location, and the nature of his call. There was an officer-involved shooting. A man had been hit three times and was suffering from massive wounds. An ambulance was needed on the double. A woman had been involved and needed medical to check her out, too.
    The sound of his voice was strange, as if the vocal chords belonged to someone else. He hung up and put his phone back in its holder. Brendan felt that calm continuing to slip away. His nerves no longer fired in perfect sync. He began to feel dissonant and out of touch. Warm waves of nausea filled his stomach with sourness, and there was a distant firing of pain in his gut.
    “An ambulance is coming,” he said to Kevin Heilshorn. But Kevin Heilshorn was dead. His eyes now looked at nothing but the picture of the last thing he had ever seen, frozen forever in his idle