Nolan Briggs lived now in a small apartment on the second floor of a building that had seen better years, and he lived in it the way a man lives in a place he is hiding in, not the way a man lives in a home. The curtains were drawn. They had been drawn since the morning after the arrest, when the first reporters found the address and the first camera crews set up on the sidewalk below, and Briggs had pulled the heavy fabric across the windows and left it there, as if cloth could keep out the world that was suddenly watching him.
Inside, the apartment was dim even at midday. The television glowed in the corner, turned low but never off, because silence felt worse than the noise. The phone rang, and rang, and rang, until Briggs finally picked it up, listened to nothing he wanted to hear, and turned it off altogether, setting it face down on the kitchen counter as if that might stop the calls from existing. It did not. The calls simply went to a silence he could not hear, which was, in its way, a small mercy.
Outside, the reporters knocked. They knocked in the morning, polite at first, and then less polite, and then with the persistence of people who are paid to wait. They knocked in the afternoon, when the light changed and the shadows moved across the hallway carpet. Sometimes they called his name through the door, as if he might answer to it the way he had once answered to his own name with pride. He did not answer. He sat on the couch with his hands in his lap, listening to the knocking, counting the seconds between each knock, wondering how long a person could live like this before the walls themselves began to feel like a cell.
The neighbors stared. He saw it when he risked a look through a gap in the curtains: the woman from downstairs pausing on the steps, the man across the hall turning his head quickly away, the children on the sidewalk pointing up at his window and then being hurried along by their parents. He had once been the man people waved to, the officer on the street, the uniform that meant safety. Now he was the man in the video, and the video had replaced everything else about him, the way a single photograph can replace a whole life if enough people look at it.
He watched himself on television. He could not stop watching, even though every viewing made it worse. The clip played on the local channel, then on the national channel, then on a panel show where strangers discussed him as if he were a case study and not a man sitting in a dark apartment two miles away. In one segment, a civil rights lawyer appeared, a sharp eyed man in a dark suit, and called Briggs a contemptuous name for an abusive officer, a name meant to sting, a name that reduced a whole career to a single ugly word. The lawyer spoke with the confidence of a man who had never been punched in a park and never punched anyone either, and his words landed in the apartment like stones thrown through a window.
Briggs picked up the remote and threw it at the wall.
It hit the plaster with a crack, bounced off the couch, and clattered to the floor, its battery cover popping off and skittering under the coffee table. He stared at it, breathing hard, his hands shaking the way they had shaken in the booking room, the way they had shaken when Mercer took his keys. He had not meant to throw it. He had meant to turn the television off, to silence the lawyer, to make the room quiet again. But his hands had decided otherwise, and now the remote lay broken on the floor, and the television was still talking, and the lawyer was still talking, and nothing had changed except that Briggs felt smaller and more alone than he had a minute before.
He got up and walked to the window, pulling the curtain aside just enough to see the street below. The reporters were still there, two of them now, sitting in a car with the windows down, drinking coffee from paper cups, waiting. A neighbor walked past with a dog, and the dog barked at nothing, and the sound seemed very loud in the quiet street. Briggs let the curtain fall back into place and stood in the dim room, his forehead resting for a moment against the cool glass, trying to remember what his life had looked like before the Sunday morning in the park, before the hoodie, before the fence, before the punch that had changed everything.
He could remember the uniform. He could remember the cruiser, the radio, the feeling of driving through Northgate with the windows down and the city moving around him. He could remember the pride of it, thin and bright, the pride of a young officer who believed that authority was something you wore and that wearing it made you right. What he could not remember, no matter how hard he tried, was the moment when that pride had turned into something harder and colder, the moment when he had stopped seeing the people on the street as people and started seeing them as problems to be controlled.
Chapter Thirty One
The Three Knocks Of Victor Kane