He clicks the handcuff in place.
"Do me a favor, pig. Take your gun, put it under your chin, and pull the trigger," the suspect says, and Danny stops breathing.
He hands the woman over to Baez, then pulls his partner aside and gives her his weapon and his badge.
"Danny, what's wrong?" she asks.
He shakes his head, gets in his car, and drives off.
He can't go home—he doesn't want Sean to see him like this.
He tries to call Doc while he's driving, but he's shaking so hard he drops the phone under his feet.
He's hyperventilating when he gets to Doc's office—which is only 10 minutes away from their crime scene.
He gets out of the car, stumbles to the door.
The building is locked—it's almost midnight—and he goes back to his car, gropes around on the floor until he finds his phone, and sits down on the curb to call Doc with shaking hands.
"Hello?" Doc says sleepily.
"Doc, I…I need…"
"Danny, where are you?"
Doc sounds wide-awake now.
"Sitting…sitting outside your office. I…I was…cuffing a suspect…and she…she told me to…take my gun and…and kill…kill myself."
"Do you have your gun on you right now?"
He shakes his head.
"Danny, do you have your weapon? I need you to answer me."
"N…no; I…I gave it to Baez."
"Good. I'll be there in ten minutes; stay there. Don't hang up, okay?"
He nods, and listens to Doc talking him through some breathing exercises to slow his breathing down, and chatting calmly and quietly about the weather and a soccer game he'd watched on TV earlier that afternoon.
He's stopped hyperventilating, and is feeling really stupid for over-reacting, when Doc sits down next to him. "I need to ask you something, and then we'll talk about what happened. Were you afraid you might blindly do what the suspect said, and put your weapon to your head without thinking?"
He nods—that's freaking why he gave it to Baez in the first place.
"Okay. Can you tell me what happened?"
He walks Doc through the case…because the nice thing about talking to Doc, is he can tell him details that he can't tell the general public. Confidentiality and all that $#!.+. He tells him about getting a lead on the suspect, then finding her, and then the arrest, which had been going smoothly until the suspect told him to go kill himself.
"How did that make you feel?"
"Exposed. Like…like this d*** knew my weakness, could see I'd tried it before. All she wanted was another dead cop, another dead…'pig.' She sees all of us as bad, sees the bad cops before she sees the good. She's one of the ones who defaced all the patrol cars last summer. Her type would be happy if every cop in New York—hell, every cop in America—ate his gun."
He shakes his head, looks up at Doc, whose face is blurry. "I…I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this, Doc. She's not the first, but…she…"
He scrubs his eyes to try to clear them. "My car…the undercover one…was vandalized last year. I… got a friend to fix it so the rest of my family wouldn't find out. Even Sean doesn't know. They wrote 'PIG' and 'ACAB'—that's, 'All Cops Are B $+ rds' on it, broke a window. Cost me a couple hundred to fix it. They also left a note on the driver's seat, with detailed instructions on how I should kill myself."
"Danny, when was this?" Doc asks, and now he sounds concerned.
"Last summer, June or July, I don't remember."
"And you didn't let your family know? Didn't talk about it in our sessions?"
He shrugs. "You were getting enough flak, being the 'Cop Doc'—and you were on vacation that week. My family…I figured they needed a break from worrying about me. It's not like I was hurt or anything."
"But that message, Danny…can sink in, get internalized without you even noticing. Given your history, you should have talked to someone. You can't tell me it didn't upset you."
"I'm not saying it didn't!" he yells, standing from the curb and pacing around his car. "I…"
He kicks his tire, feeling tears pricking his eyes. Stupid f-g tears. "When my boys were little, they looked up to me…they loved telling everyone their Daddy was a cop. Now…Sean's getting grief at school; and I know they wonder every day if I'm gonna make it home or not—not because of the dangers of the job, but…they're worried the stress of the job, in this climate, is gonna make me eat my gun."
"They've said that to you—explicitly?" Doc asks, and he nods, remembering the conversation only a month ago, two days after Sean's high school graduation.