Going Home
Travis Starnes
Going Home
Travis Starnes
Table of Contents
Going Home
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
About The Author
Other Books
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Going Home
Copyright © 2022 by Travis Starnes
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-1-7372156-7-7
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http://tstarnes.com/preview-notification-newsletter/
Chapter 1
I unlocked the deadbolt to my apartment and paused, letting out a long puff of air as I focused on the worn door in front of me. Like a gladiator preparing for a fight to the death, I steeled my nerves for the battle ahead.
Ok, so I was being a little melodramatic. But it’d been a hell of a long day and the last few months, almost every night ended in a fight. With one last deep breath I pushed the door open and walked in, almost relieved to find the lights off and the apartment quiet.
I switched on the hallway light and pulled off my uniform cap, setting it upside down on the table by the front door and dropping my keys into it. Kicking off my shoes and sliding them under the table holding my hat, I headed to the bedroom. From the moonlight streaming in through the blinds, I could see the bed was empty.
“Terri?” I called out and received silence in return.
Shrugging, I went to the nightstand on my side of the bed and pulled out the small gun safe I kept in there, punching in the code that unlocked it. Opening the lid, I set my sidearm into it and shut the lid back down, resetting the lock.
This had been happening a lot too, I thought, as I began to shed the rest of my uniform. I’d drag home after my shift and the house would be empty. I couldn’t decide which I preferred, the fighting or the absence. Of course, I was suspicious of my wife’s late-night disappearances, but the ability to relax after a long day without the evening devolving into a screaming match was a big plus.
To be fair, while I found these nights she wasn’t home troublesome, it’s not like I had proof that anything was going on. She always had an excuse for why she was home so late, and they weren’t even unreasonable excuses. She worked as a nurse at St. Barnabas on Third Avenue and the bus routes to our apartment on Arthur Avenue weren’t a straight shot. She was right that it could take a while to make it home once she was on the bus and she was right that the buses were always delayed. But she worked the seven to seven day shift, meaning she started work at seven in the morning and finished at seven in the evening on the days she was scheduled. I worked the four to twelve shifts at the forty-eighth precinct which actually meant I got done around eleven-thirty and made it home just about midnight.
Being on the job, I came in contact with nurses and paramedics on a fairly regular basis, so I knew it wasn’t uncommon for a nurse’s shift to get crazy, forcing her to stay late. And I knew that sometimes another nurse would call in sick, and someone would have to cover. But it seemed to be happening a lot over the last several months, and with increasing frequency.
I’d asked a few of the nurses I know and they all seemed to agree it would be weird for someone who just finished a twelve-hour shift to have to work another five or six hours to cover, and even weirder for that to happen once or twice a week. They all swore Terri was cheating on me, and I guess they were probably right.
What really surprised me was how little it upset me. I wasn’t crazy about my wife stepping out and the general idea of it pissed me off to no end. But when I thought about Terri, specifically, I found I just didn’t care that much. I had passed that at some point in our marriage and all I could manage these days was a weary apathy when I thought about her.
With a stop by the kitchen to grab a beer, I headed into the small living room of our one-bedroom apartment and flopped on the couch. It was late and the city was as quiet as it would ever get, but it always took me an hour or so to wind down from the job, no matter how exhausted I was.
And I was always exhausted. I’d only been out of the academy for two years and they still had me walking foot patrol. My beat wasn’t the worst in town, but it also wasn’t the best. It was rare to go a whole night without having to chase someone down for doing something stupid. Plus, there’s the walking for about five of the eight and a half hours of my shift. It’s an understatement to say my feet hurt when I finally got to sit down.
Thirty minutes later I had polished off three beers and was on the back end of a nice buzz. My head was resting against the wall behind the couch and I closed my eyes for just a moment, trying to relax. I’d planned on getting up and falling into bed in a few minutes, but I was feeling relaxed and didn’t have it in me to move right away. Of course, a few more minutes often ended in waking up three hours later with a massive crick in my neck, but it was a risk I was willing to take.
I was pulled out of slowly falling asleep by the sound of keys in the front door followed by the deadbolt sliding back.
Terri walked in, carrying her large purse and wearing scrubs, although with more makeup on than she normally wore to work and her hair done up, not in a ponytail like she wore most days.
“You’re home late,” I observed.
I didn’t really mean anything buy it. I mostly just felt like I should say something instead of just watching her walk past, but it came out a little harsher than I planned. Maybe the apathy was only on the surface and my subconscious was pissed and venting a little. Who knows?
“What does that mean?” she said, stopping in the middle of the room to glare at me.
“It seems pretty self-explanatory to me. It’s late and you just got home, so ‘you’re home late.’”
I might have been numb to our relationship but getting attitude from her after she’d almost certainly been out on a date with someone else pissed me off. I’d always had an anger problem, which was one of the things she complained about the few times we’d tried marriage counseling, so I was working hard to control it. Unfortunately, my way of keeping my temper in check seemed to always be passive aggressiveness instead.
“Fuck you, Henry. I’m going to bed. You can keep sleeping out here.”
And just like that, all of the techniques the marriage counselor had given me for controlling my temper went right out the window. I wasn’t one of those guys who went with the whole ‘this is my house’ routine since she worked just as long hours as I did and nurses had it pretty hard. That being said, I’d had a long ass day including trying to bring in a homeless guy who was harassing and assaulting passers-by that, when my partner and I stopped to talk to him, whipped out his junk and straight pissed on me. It had been almost an hour before I could get back to the station and get changed into my spare uniform pants, and the shoes would probably stink in the morning, since the best I could do with those was hose them off.
I’d only been out on the couch because I’d been too tired to go to bed, but our couch was uncomfortable and about two inches too short for me to stretch out, which meant I couldn’t get my legs all the way extended but I also couldn’t drape them over the back of the couch, making it all-around uncomfortable.
Mostly, though, was the fact that I’d been at home right after work where I was supposed to be, and she’d been out doing God knows what even though her shift had ended hours earlier. Pointing out she was home late without pointing out that everyone she worked with knew she was sleeping around was an act of charity on my part.
“The hell I will. I wasn’t the one whoring around all night. I’ll sleep where I God damn well want to,” I said, blowing right past de-escalation.
“What did you say to me?”
“You know God damn well what I said. I know you’ve been seeing other guys when you’re ‘working late.’ You realize half the people you work with hate you, right? They straight up told me what, or should I say who, you’ve been off doing when you’re supposedly ‘working late.’ If you think you’re going to get some kind of attitude with me when you’re the one in someone else’s bed, you’ve got another think coming.”
“You know what,” she said, grabbing her purse back up. “I’m glad you decided to be an asshole tonight. I was going to leave this until the morning so I didn’t have to be here when you whined and begged me to stay and try counseling again, but fuck it. I’ve filed for divorce.”
She dropped a fat manila envelope on the front table and started putting her shoes back on. I saw this coming, of course. With a marriage as shit as ours had been ever since I washed out of the NFL and her dream of becoming a team wife went with it, we’d been spiraling. The fact that we made it five more years had been a miracle.
“That’s fine with me, sugar lips. I’m tired of dealing with your shit anyways.”
She grabbed her keys and flung open the door, pausing right before she slammed it to say, “And yeah, I have been sleeping around, and all of them are better in bed than you’ll ever be.”
With that last shot, she slammed the door behind her and stormed out. I left the envelope where it was. I could see the name of one of those sleazy divorce lawyers who advertised on TV in the corner and they’d probably gone for the jugular. We didn’t have children to deal with, thank God, but I’m sure she’d found a way to stick it to me one last time on the way out. I didn’t much feel like dealing with it tonight and left it where it was as I walked through the front room into the bedroom.
I overslept and continued to ignore it the next morning. I had a short turnaround and was scheduled for patrol again today, which meant another day of lugging around heavy shit, chasing stupid people, and getting paid pennies for the pleasure. The last thing I wanted to deal with was her bullshit on top of all of that, so I’d left it for later instead.
I had a car, a sixty-four Mustang that I’d bought when I first got my NFL contract and loved more than almost anything but couldn’t ever really drive it, because nearly everything associated with a car in New York City was expensive. Besides it wasn’t like you could get anywhere easily because of traffic, so I kept it in a small storage lot way out in the sticks. What that meant for me now was a subway ride, at least until I could get an apartment closer to the station I was currently assigned to. When I’d first gotten out of the academy, I’d been stationed in the Bronx, so that’s where we’d gotten an apartment. Last year, I got moved to a station in lower Manhattan, which was generally a better posting, since we had more chances to work events off-duty and pick up extra money, but it also meant I couldn’t just walk to work.
Even after years living in New York City, I still found the whole place loud, dirty, and smelly, and this went triply so for the subway. At heart, I was still a West Virginia boy who remembered what it was like to live in a small town where you could actually smell the mountain air.
The sun wasn’t even up yet as I walked the three blocks down to the subway and my stomach was yelling at me for only putting beer in it the night before. There was a little bodega not far from the subway I kind of liked. It wasn’t too dirty, they did a breakfast sandwich thing that was pretty good, and I liked the guy that owned it. He was always cool when I stopped in and on the days where I wasn’t running late, we’d sometimes talk for a bit before I climbed down into the subway hell.
Most of the places along the street were still dark, but Julian opened early to catch the poor slobs like me who had to get to work at the crack of dawn, so his was the only light on in the small stretch of storefronts.
A small bell tinkled as I pushed through the front door and looked around for Julian, since he was usually upfront in the mornings making sandwiches for people or getting them their cigarettes or whatever else they needed to make it through the day. It was strange not to see him up there since he’d usually already had his delivery by this point. If I was picking up a drink or something pre-packaged I’d just put my money on the counter and leave, but I only had a twenty and a couple of tens on me at the moment and I wanted my sandwich and my change.
I headed towards the back to see if maybe he was in the restroom or something and how long it would take for him to come back out front. I went through the swinging door and looked off to the left where his office was and froze. Julian was kneeling on the floor, fiddling with his safe, while a kid that couldn’t be older than nine held a gun that looked like a small canon in his tiny hands. I’d been facing the rear exit, heading to the back alley to see if anyone was there, so I was facing away from the kid while he was more or less pointed in my direction.
I hadn’t been paying attention, and I knew it was going to cost me. Maybe it was because I hadn’t expected anything to be wrong, or maybe it was because of the mess with Terri, or maybe it was just the sight of a child pointing a gun in my direction, but I had been caught completely flat-footed. It was almost a full second before my training kicked in and my hand started to go towards my service weapon. Unfortunately, it was a second too long.
“Drop it,” I shouted as my hand reached my gun, pulling it from its holster.
The gun practically leaped out of his hands as it went off, nearly bashing him in the face as his arms jerked up and the weapon went over his shoulder. He looked absolutely terrified, as if he had no idea how loud and violent firing a gun could be until he actually pulled the trigger, which could have been the case. People who only see guns fired on TV don’t realize just how much more extreme they can be when you do it for real, especially in a small walled-in area where the sound has time to echo.
Most of those thoughts didn’t occur to me until afterward, when I had time to look back on the event, however, as soon as he pulled the trigger, while the gun was still leaping from his hands, it felt like my leg was exploding as the bullet ripped through my calf, sending me tumbling to the floor. As I fell, searing pain shooting up my leg, my hand banged hard against a metal shelf and I dropped my weapon, which went skittering under another set of metal racks. I reached down and clutched at the wound with one hand while I tried to reach my weapon with the other as the kid went tearing past me, hurtling over my good leg and out of sight, leaving Julian staring after him, dumbfounded.
I gave up on getting my gun and reached up to where my radio should have been, only to realize stupidly that I didn’t have it, since I hadn’t gotten to the station yet.
“Throw me that towel and call an ambulance,” I called out to Julian through gritted teeth.
He tossed me the towel and stood up to grab the phone on his desk while I tried to bandage up the wound as best I could. I’d been on the scene for a couple of shootings since I’d joined the force and we had pretty good first aid classes so we knew how to do the basics until EMS could show up and take over, so I was pretty sure the wound wasn’t life-threatening. I’d been to a call where a guy shot himself in the thigh the previous year, and he’d hit the artery. We were the closest unit and got there maybe five minutes after it happened, and he’d already bled out, and by bled out I mean there was a serious pool of blood that had all come from the one wound.
Since I wasn’t bleeding anywhere near that much, I thought I’d make it. I did stupidly try and get up to see if maybe I could hobble out of the store, but just moving it sent shock waves of pain up my body that felt a little like getting tased.
So I just sat there, in a smallish pool of my own blood, and waited for the ambulance to show up, trying to keep calm and focus on anything other than the pain in my leg.
I was a cop and I’d managed to let a literal child get the drop on me and then get away after shooting me. I felt angry and stupid simultaneously, which considering how my week was going so far, seemed about right.
Chapter 2
They hooked me up with some fluids in the ambulance, but I couldn’t get anything for the pain until we got to the ER. At least I was wearing the uniform, which meant they pushed me through the line, since a simple bullet wound in New York City doesn’t always get you fixed up right away.
They took some x-rays and determined that the bullet was a through and through, but they didn’t like what they saw on it and scheduled me for surgery. Once I’d heard that the bullet passed through and wasn’t still there, I’d assumed they’d just clean the wound, stitch me up and send me home, since that’s what happened to the guys on the force who’d gotten hit somewhere non-vital. They admitted me and transferred me up to the pre-op ward, but it took almost an hour and a half for someone to explain to me why I needed surgery. Thankfully, they’d given me pain meds, so I wasn’t being tortured while I waited.
I also had visits from my shift commander and some of the guys from work, partially to check on me and partially to get what they needed to fill out reports. They assigned it to a detective, but other than Julian’s and my descriptions of the kid, they didn’t have anything else on him.
He wasn’t a regular in the store and the cameras in the bodega were all for show, so everyone knew they’d never find him. This would just end up as one more unsolved shooting. A reporter came by and got some statements and snapped some pictures, but I wasn’t seriously wounded and the story wasn’t all that compelling, so no one was overly excited. If this had been a smaller jurisdiction it might have been a big deal, but a non-fatal leg wound was just a statistic in New York City, not an actual story.
“Officer Brewer?” the doctor said when he came into my hospital room.
“Yeah,” I said. “No one would tell me downstairs why I needed to get surgery. It’s been a while so I’m guessing it isn’t urgent. Can you tell me what’s happening?”
“I can. The surgeon who did the consult on your x-rays was concerned by a deformation on the bone where it looks like the bullet hit and changed trajectory before it left your leg. Have you had surgery in the past on this leg?”
“Yes. I played very briefly in the NFL and took a bad hit that shattered a section of the bone. They had to reconstruct that section of the bone and put a plate in to hold it all together.”
“That makes sense. It looks like the bullet clipped the plate as it passed through and deformed it. We’re concerned about the long-term damage of that deformed plate, especially since it looks like the bullet sheared off a bit which might cause it to be cutting into the muscle near it. We want to go in and at the very least replace that plate so you aren’t continually tearing your muscle every time you walk.”
“Yeah, I would prefer not to have that. Will I be able to walk like normal after this?”
It had taken a bunch of physical therapy, almost a year, to be able to walk without support after my initial injury and it still hurt like a bitch in cold weather.
“We aren’t seeing any major damage to any of your connective tissue or the bone, so baring any shearing damage or spidering from the connection points of the plate, you should be okay. You’ll probably be on crutches for a few weeks and a cane for a month or two while your muscle heals, but after that everything should return to normal.”
They ran some tests and were in and out all day, but apparently, they weren’t that concerned about it, because I didn’t end up going into surgery until almost nine that night, with a different surgeon than the guy I’d seen that morning.
Since I was on pain meds, I was mostly bored more than anything else. I wasn’t surprised my wife never came by. Odds were she never went home after storming out the night before and didn’t know anything had happened to me, and it was doubtful she’d come and check on me even if she did. She’d always been kind of heartless with very little caring for people that couldn’t do something for her, but I’d been able to ignore that personality trait when it had been directed at other people.
The doctors said the surgery went well, but all the memories of discomfort and annoyance I had after my football injury came rushing back as they discharged me from the hospital.
I got back to my apartment around lunch the next day to find it completely cleaned out. I’d like to say I was surprised that Terri would have used my hospital stay as an opportunity to take everything that wasn’t nailed down out of the apartment, but I wasn’t. This was exactly as petty as she could be.
She’d taken everything from the bed and TV all the way down to the shampoo out of the shower and the silverware out of the drawers. Hell, she’d taken all the hangers, leaving my clothes in a pile on the floor.
The worst part was, she hated most of the stuff we had. She always complained it was cheap and ugly, which was generally true, but New York City was crazy expensive and neither of us made enough to really afford anything that didn’t come flat in a box for us to build ourselves.
This was all a problem for tomorrow, really. I was exhausted and was supposed to go by the precinct in the morning for a meeting with my union rep and my lieutenant to find out how this would affect my position on the force. The couple of guys that stopped by told me word had already traveled the entire precinct that a small child got the drop on me and there’d even been a small story about it in one of the local rags, and it wasn’t going over well.
I knew Julian didn’t have any working cameras and the very brief report I’d written up at the request of my PBA rep had been extremely dry and to the point, which meant the only other person who could have talked about what happened was Julian himself. Considering I’d done him a pretty big favor, since the kid had shot me before he could rob the place or hurt Julian, I’d hoped he’d keep me from looking too bad when he’d retold the story and was a little pissed he hadn’t.
That was New York City for you.
I hobbled into the precinct the next morning for my meeting. It would be another week of healing before they started any serious PT and I’d picked up enough experience on crutches after my football injury that it wasn’t slowing me down too much, but it was still a pain in the ass, especially making my way up the steps to the station, which were really not ADA compliant.
“Hey, look who it is. I think a Boy Scout troop is coming through later, so keep your head down,” the desk sergeant said when I walked it.
Cops have a dark sense of humor at the best of times, so I’d expected something. If I had died, they would have all looked properly remorseful and held a big parade for their ‘fallen brother,’ but since I lived I was a target for mocking and ridicule.
“Funny. Has Lieutenant Folson made it in yet?”
“I think I saw him. You must have stirred up some shit for him to come in before second shift.”
The Lieutenant was famously not a morning person, to the point that he’d worked out a deal with the captain to get permanently assigned to the second patrol shift. While it would probably hurt his long-term career goals, he’d apparently decided that getting up in the late morning was worth the tradeoff.
“Getting shot by a child will do that,” I said, as he buzzed me through the door that led into the rest of the station.
The first shift had already gone out for the day, so this end of the station was pretty empty at the moment. The detectives would be getting into their various departments but wouldn’t be to the point in their morning where they’d need to come down and review some statement or another, and the first shift hadn’t been out long enough to start bringing in perps that required enough paperwork to do it here instead of in a patrol car or save it for later in the shift.
All that meant was that the station was really quiet, which was the kind of message that was hard not to notice. I could only think of one reason they’d want to bring me in to talk when no one was in, and it didn’t say a lot of great things for my career.
I hobbled down the hall past the locker rooms and the briefing room to the shared patrol lieutenants’ office and knocked on the door.
“Enter,” he said, after looking up through the window and seeing me.
I opened the door and saw my PBA rep was already inside waiting for me.
“How are you feeling, Henry?”
“Not bad, actually. They said the only real damage was to the plate on my leg from back in my football days. Other than that, it was a through and through and should heal pretty well.”
“What did they say about your long-term recovery?”
“It should be good. They replaced the plate, so now I just have to wait for it and the bullet wound to heal. They said two months in the boot plus another month in physical therapy to get motion back and I should be good.”
“That fast?”
“Yeah. The plate really protected me from any serious injury beyond muscle and nerve damage, and they were able to remove most of the dead tissue caused by the bullet while they were replacing the plate, which they said will help my recovery time.”
“I see,” he said, sounding almost disappointed. “Henry, do you like being a cop?”
“What?” I asked, the non-sequitur taking me by surprise.
“You’ve been here for about a year, and while I don’t have any complaints about how you handle yourself, you have the general air of someone who doesn’t like it here. It seems like the only reason you do the work is because it’s your job, and you have to. Not because you have a passion for public service.”
“I’m … not sure what to say about that. I mean, I didn’t like getting shot yesterday, but overall, I’m happy.”
“I guess the reason is your old shift commander from your last precinct called, and we got to talking, and he had some of the same thoughts.”
“I feel like you’re trying to say something, but you don’t want to hurt my feelings. Do us both a favor and don’t tie yourself in knots trying to go easy. Just say what you have to say.”
“Some of the mayor’s new initiatives to move services from us to social services will start going into effect in June. I know they’re saying they aren’t looking to ‘defund the police,’ but that is, in fact, what they’re doing, since they are taking some of our budget and giving it over to social services so they can hire new counselors and the like. They’ll be handling some of the non-criminal or low-level stuff like mental wellness and vagrancy checks, which would be fine, since those calls are mostly bullshit anyway, except that it’s going to cost us some officers. The mayor had to make some promises to the PBA that we wouldn’t be forcing out any existing officers and instead the only cuts would come from early retirements and the like. The problem is, even with that, we’re still low on our numbers, and we need to find some places to trim down.”
“Don’t think of this as a punishment,” the PBA rep said. “You’re not the only guy we’ve talked to, and we’re making sure you’re taken care of. Because the doctors are saying there’s a chance you might not heal fully, they’re offering to let you out on full disability retirement. You’d have to work another ten years for your pension to equal that. It’s a really good deal.”
“So, you want to kick me off the force to make room in the budget, and you don’t expect me to take this personally.”
“I want to be clear, we aren’t doing that. We’re just discussing your options. You are, of course, welcome to stay, but since you’re not going to be in the field, we’re going to have to move you to the property room. Our concern is, there might not be enough spots in rotation for you when you’re ready to come back, and you might get stuck there.”
The property room is where they put old-timers who needed time to qualify for their full pension but didn’t have the heart or weren’t physically able to stay in the field. It was essentially where police officers went to die. Without any more street time, without putting up arrest numbers or finding moments to shine, it was next to impossible to get a promotion. You essentially became an armed piece of furniture.
They weren’t telling me I had to take the disability, but they were making sure that it was my only option. If I stayed in the property room, I’d never make enough money to afford anything but my shitty apartment, and even that would be scraping by now that it would be only my paycheck since Terri had left. I was screwed either way.
On the other hand, they could be right. I didn’t love being a cop. Or rather, I didn’t love being a cop in New York City. The criminals hated us, the citizens mostly hated us, and we generally got a raw deal all around. I’d been coping with it, or at least I thought I had, right up until that kid pointed a gun at me. Sitting in the hospital bed afterward, I’d had some time to think, and I realized I was almost glad he shot me, since the alternative would have been shooting and probably killing a nine-year-old. I couldn’t imagine what that would have done to me, but I’m pretty sure it would have screwed me up.
I’d never grown up wanting to be a cop, and I’d never really wanted to live in the city, let alone the largest city in the country. I’d wanted to play football, get famous and rich, and eventually buy a farm somewhere. I hated my apartment. I hated the smell. And he was right; I also hated being a cop.
“Fine, I’ll take the severance,” I said.
Of course, now I was going to have to figure out how to live in this place I hated on half the salary I’d had yesterday, which didn’t even consider there would be no money coming from my future ex-wife. It seemed a fitting end to what had to be the worst three days I could imagine.
Chapter 3