Cape Disappointment by Earl Emerson Page B

chance played out in certain careers.
    I couldn't help thinking about my links to Maddox while I thumbed through
Golf Digest
and waited for him to return to the office. I had loved every aspect of being a police officer and would have been one still if it hadn't been for a young man named Charlie Rivers, a fifteen-year-old with a short history of antisocial behavior. Everything about Charlie was short: his height, his temper, his educational credits, even his life span. He'd served time in juvenile facilities for burglary, car theft, and glue sniffing. Me? I'd been top ranked on the department pistol team and practiced shooting for long hours each week. It must have been karma that our paths collided.
    When Charlie Rivers spotted a Volvo station wagon idling outside a liquor store, he took it as an invitation to a joyride, a felony he'd committed before and no doubt would have committed again. My partner and I had been passing through downtown when another unit caught sight of the Volvo blowing a red light and gave chase. When the other SPD unit inexplicably lost him in the vicinity of Fourth and Bell, we were nearby and took up the hunt. At the same time our dispatcher called and told us the owner of a furniture store in Belltown was reporting suspicious activity in the alley behind his store, so we broke off our search to handle the call. After walking through the store with the owner, I located the stolen Volvo in the alley behind the building. The suspicious activity behind the store turned out to be our quarry, Charlie Rivers. My partner went back to get our car so he could blockade the alley while I remained at the rear entrance of the store.
    When I saw activity inside the Volvo that indicated he might be getting ready to bolt, I stepped into the alley and approached the vehicle. The engine fired up and the Volvo rocketed toward me. Charlie steered directly at me in an attempt, I could only surmise, to crush me against the wall. I was on foot and had few options. As I drew my weapon, I found a niche where the brick walls of two buildings were not joined evenly and pressed up against it, realizing it wasn't going to protect me from a ton and a half of steel.
    The vehicle thundered onward. I leveled my pistol and placed a single bullet through the windshield. Any other driver, it probably would have hit his chest, but Charlie was small for his age, so the bullet penetrated the windshield and entered his face, lodging in the back of his skull. Missing me by a mere ten feet, the Volvo nosed into the wall. The whole incident took less than eight seconds to play out, though oddly, it became a cancer that over the course of the next year finished off my law enforcement career.
    I couldn't help thinking about Charlie Rivers as I sat on the sofa in Jim Maddox's office. Maddox's phone call the day before had resurrected the past in a way I hadn't thought possible. What destroyed my equanimity more than anything was the fact that I'd probably spent fifteen hundred hours on the pistol range practicing so that when the time came to do what I eventually did, I did it flawlessly. It was an impeccable shooting borne of endless impeccable rehearsal. For yearsafterward they told my story in the academy. Your gun may be the only tool between you and hell. Practice, practice, practice. I had and it was. I'd drawn, flicked off the safety, aimed, and hit him just under the right eye, all so quickly that neither of us had time to register what was happening.
    When I stepped over to the wrecked car, I found Charlie slumped across the gearshift, gasping for breath as if he'd been hit in the lungs instead of the head. I could smell the hot steam from the Volvo's broken radiator. I reached past him and shut off the motor. Quarters were tight because Charlie had short legs and had moved the seat forward. Except for the heavy breathing, he was motionless, conscious, and reasonably alert, even though his eyes weren't working. The eye on the side