Greer

Present

“Jesus. He’s missing half his dick.”

“What kind of psychopath bites a cop there?”

“That angry little Detective Diversity Hire has been gunning for him for months. Find her.”

Well, it’s five days before Christmas. The snow’s coming down. Bells are ringing, chip readers are beeping, Mariah Carey is back on top of the charts. And I’m huddled behind a dented plastic manger filled with rotten hay, praying my ex-fellow cops don’t find me here shivering, covered in sticky fluids, and with a chunk of Sgt. Troy Kessler’s scrotum lodged in my back molar.

My hands won’t stop shivering, so I press them into the hay. The nativity creaks when I shift, plywood groaning like it knows I never once cracked open that Bible they gave me at confirmation. I flatten myself deeper into the roughage, which scratches my palms, works its way under my sleeves and nails, sticks to the tacky smear drying along my wrist and to the fresh blood and bits of intestine I tracked in. My thigh slips in something cold and I have to bite down on the inside of my cheek to keep from squealing in pain. Another splinter bites just under my shoulder blade. One piece sticks to the tacky streak and I almost gag at the sound it makes when I pull it free. I’m blinking back tears now, because of course I am. Because I always do. I’ve just learned to do it in the evidence locker where nobody sees.

I probe my molar with my tongue, tasting copper, congealed non-alcoholic eggnog, and, yup, a fibrous little scrap of Kessler’s nightstick. Still there. I should probably try to dislodge it. It’s evidence. Evidence they’ll barely look at before deciding: Unhinged. Guilty. Monster.

And can you blame them?

A beam of light skims the edge of the manger, close enough to catch the shine on the parts of me that are still sticky. I scramble out of the way just in time, frantically searching for cover.

“Sorry,” I whisper to the plastic baby Jesus as I rip the blue velvet robe off his mother and toss her half-naked plastic body aside. He stares up at me, one tiny painted fist raised in a blessing clearly meant only for those of us not going to hell. I tug the robe tighter around my shoulders. It smells like dust and incense and whatever cheap cologne the youth pastor bathed in. The velvet lining sticks painfully to the drying blood on my forearms as I position them in gentle prayer, bowing my head, trying to look serene instead of like the demented, blood-spattered psychopath I’m still coming to terms with admitting I am.

I duck and scramble backward further, holding my breath, locking my lungs down the way we do — cops, that is — when we clear buildings. I know how these guys search. I know they know silence doesn’t mean there’s no one here.

Seconds tick by like hours as I feel my face becoming a fat blueberry waiting to burst. When they finally step away, I topple, gasping, into the smelly hay.

Look, nobody plans to spend the most wonderful time of the year as a wanted cannibal. No — not cannibal, because I didn’t eat it. I didn’t chew. And I definitely didn’t swallow. At least, I hope I didn’t.

I bit down because for three years, Kessler had had it coming. Because three days ago, the last straw came down. And because when he shoved me into a hallway and cut off my oxygen supply with his penis, I temporarily ran out of satisfactory alternatives.

Smile, he’d murmured, fingers tight in my hair. Relax. You owe the department a little gratitude, sweetheart.

I was taught long ago to go limp when men grabbed me; to smile on their command. But this time, when I parted my lips, it was only to bite down. 

When I left him, he was lying on the altar with his head cracked open, after slipping in his own blood under a banner that read JOY TO THE WORLD.

If that means I’m a monster now, well. There are worse ways to become one.

Radios crackle. A second set of boots joins the first. Someone calls for backup. Someone else laughs, high and thrilled at the spectacle. A K-9 barks somewhere near the steps. The circle tightens.

“Check behind the manger.”

Of course. That’s where the sinners hide.

No, I didn’t plan to spend Christmas like this. But if Kessler bleeds out on the altar of the Portland Episcopal Cathedral tonight and I go down with him, at least there’s a chance somebody else might fix what he did.

And that’ll make it all worth it. It’s the only thing that’s ever made being a cop worth it to me. Being the only one on the inside who cares whether the true stories are told instead of the convenient ones. Having the power to do what nobody ever bothered to do for me.

But that’s all over now, it seems. My story. My job. My life, for all intents and purposes. I’m not afraid of going to prison, honestly. I’m just terrified of letting them silence me again.

Someone’s approaching. I latch my fingers onto the Virgin’s veil and pull it tighter, screwing my eyes shut, waiting for the burst of white light and the fabric to be ripped off me. For freeze, motherfucker, even though no cop in history has ever actually yelled that. For the bite of cuffs, wrists wrenched behind my back, cheek in the snow, a knee between my shoulders. For transport. Processing. Chains. For the slow erasure of everything I just did and —

“Well, shit, Mercer.  I always knew you were a virgin.”