Time Running Away
By Ria
Time is a funny thing. At times running away from you. At others, slowly trailing behind you. Sometimes a mixture of the two. They say bad things happen in slow motion, but Sara would dispute that. This had happened fast. Too fast. One moment they were knocking at a door, Brass standing there warrant in hand, the next, the guy had a gun pointed at Brass's head.
It happened so fast, time had to have been speeded up. No one could move that fast, not normally. And where had that other gun come from? The one she held in her outstretched hand, pointed straight at the head of the guy they were only meant to be questioning.
Voices came in fits and starts. Yells to drop the gun, drop the weapon, some of it, Sara supposed, had to have come from her although it was entirely done without her thinking. It was as if the trained part of her, the part that had sat through classes on gun control, hostage situations, taking in everything in the planned and logical manner of someone with a photographic memory, had taken over her body, leaving her to panic.
She was staring straight at the guy. He had the greenest eyes she'd ever seen. Flecks of brown littered at random intervals. As if his DNA couldn't decide between the two colours, so threw both in for good measure. Brown hair, spiked with gel, cropped close to the skin, he was just 19, Sara recalled. Probably scared out of his mind, and not knowing what else to do. He was still holding the gun at Brass though. Absently, Sara wondered where the warrant had gone.
She was standing sideways on. Present as little as target as possible. Her eyes had never broken from his. Her demands for him to drop the weapon had never ceased. She daren't look at Brass. See what he felt, to see if he was scared. She doesn't want to know what he's thinking, because she doesn't need that distraction right now, needs to concentrate on talking the gun away from where it's pressed against Brass's forehead.
Sara's voice, she can hear, is calm, steady. Her hands are still. Two hands holding the gun, although she can shoot just as well one handed. Not even her finger, pressed lightly against the trigger, is trembling. There's no overt signs of stress. No outward signs of the fact that this is the first time she has ever pointed a gun at a suspect, ever, let alone in a hostage situation.
A conversation from long ago, in the break room at work, came back to her. After the case where a bunch of air passengers killed a guy on the flight after he'd gone berserk and tried to open the door mid flight. The argument about whether if your life was in danger, you could kill. She had been adamant that she couldn't kill someone just because her life is in danger. And in some ways, that still holds true. It isn't her with the gun pointed at her head. It isn't her facing death. She has the gun in her hand, and she could kill with a simple pulling of the trigger but it's not to save her life, but to save another. Whilst her professional self carried on with the unflinching eye contact, the soft but firm demand to release Brass, to drop the weapon, inside she was wondering if taking a life to save a life wasn't just as bad.
A cell phone rang. The sound loud in the otherwise silent room. Sara didn't know who's it was. Didn't stop to think. As the suspect's eyes cut to the side, off her, looking around for the source of the noise, she took her only chance.
Later, she would reflect that she had just been waiting for that moment. She could have shot him in the head at any time. He had enough of head showing that she could see his eyes. She was four foot away. She did regular target practice as per regulations. She didn't want to kill him though. Oh, she could have shot him, and have him dead, long before he pulled the trigger on Brass. Probably. But it wasn't that. It was the fact that she believed in justice, and shooting the suspect in a rape case for holding a cop hostage wasn't justice. She wanted him to stand trial, to have a guilty sentence passed, to have to spend a lifetime thinking about his crime. Death seemed too good, too easy somehow.
So she had waited. Still as a statue. Never flinching, never looking away. Waiting for the perfect shot. And as the cell phone rudely interrupted, that moment had come. He'd looked away, his body moving with him, and the bullet had torn through his shoulder before he'd even heard the gun go off.
The gun previously held to Brass's forehead clattered to the ground. The slight trail of blood on Brass's arm, the necessary flesh wound Sara couldn't help to get the bullet where it needed to go. The suspect on the floor, looking up at her with terrified eyes as she stood over him, gun in hand. Wondering that she had done it without a moments hesitation. Wondering that she could shoot someone if somebody else's life depended on it.
'You shot me.' Brass says unnecessarily as he hands the cuffs to Sara.
She shrugs. 'No choice.' She says as she puts the cuffs on the suspect. Although he was no longer a suspect of course.
Brass looked at her, then at his arm, which really is just a flesh wound, a small cut, and then down at the perp on the floor. 'Nice shot.' He finally says, sounding even a little appreciative.
Sara shrugs again, finding it easier to do non-verbal communication at the moment.
Later they would talk about it. Brass would admit he had been scared. And slightly awed at how patient Sara had been. And at her marksmanship. As they watch Anthony John Sim get sentenced to life for rape and attempted murder. As he is led away to pay for his crimes.