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By the time he entered his apartment, Danny was seeing nothing but red. He banged the door closed with such force that one of the paintings hanging nearest jumped off the wall and crashed in to the floor.
"Great! That's just fucking great!" He said, making no move to pick it off the ground.
He stormed in to his bed room. The shades were down almost all the way, filling the space with punctured lines of street light that stretched over his unmade bed and closet doors. He couldn't remember if he had left them that way because it had been too late in the night or too early in the morning to get them up the last time he had been there.
His glasses went flying from his face to land on the tussled sheets, in a well practiced gesture that had cost him more than one set of lenses.
He kicked his shoes away next, using one as leverage to take the other out, exactly the way his mother had always told him not to and pulled the clothing off his body with more force than necessary. His shirt bore the brute of his anger when, faced with too many buttons, he just ripped it open, broken buttons flying around him.
"Fuck!"
He knew he needed to calm down, or otherwise his things might not survive the onslaught of his anger. But try as he might, he couldn't stop his head from replaying the afternoon's events over and over again.
When she had come to see him, he knew, just by looking at Stella's grave face, that whatever Mac wanted to tell him would not be good. By the time he had entered his boss' office, he was sure it was something positively bad.
Mac had the same expression on his face that Danny's father used to have when he was about to reprehend one of his boys.
Danny punched the bathroom's door open and stepped in to the shower. 'Never again' he had sworn to himself, he had promised Mac. But here he was again, with a bull's eye smacked across his ass, being hung to dry.
Someone was out there to get him, a serial killer, a wacko, a sick maniac that left accusations in dead bodies' backs and, instead of letting him help catch the lunatic, Mac had send him home, like he was still five years old, being grounded!
He turned the hot water on full force, bending his head so that the spray fell over his tense back. The spray wasn't strong enough to ease his muscles, and hot water wasn't working at cooling him down at all, he realized, turning the tap to cold instead.
His breathe caught in his throat as soon as the freezing water hit his skin. How could he have forgotten that it was the middle of the winter?
"Stupid, Messer," he talked to himself. "That was really stupid."
He quickly washed himself, his mind far from the task as his hands worked through familiar gestures.
The NYPD's psychologist, the one he had been forced to see three days after the shooting, had told him that it was normal to close his eyes and see Minhas face, dead, staring at him in accusation. That it was normal to feel sick to his stomach when ever he touched his weapon. In time, she had said, all of that would be absorbed by his mind and rationalized in to a comprehensive response. Whatever that meant.
He hadn't been really listening, he admitted. The only reason he had stepped in that office of beige walls and weird pictures hanging from them was to get his mandatory evaluation and to return to his job as soon as possible. He needed to be doing his job so that he could prove to himself and the others that he could do it, that he wasn't incompetent. Because, deep down, he knew he had failed.
A gun is a lethal weapon, a piece of metal built with the single purpose of killing. Being a policeman meant that he was allowed to use one, but not allowed to use it wrongly. 'You confirm your target, you make sure you can hit the target and you take down the target!'
The sentence had been yelled in to his ears so many times that it might as well be tattooed in to his brain. He knew it by heart, he'd learned to respect it,… and all of that had gone out the proverbial window when his life had been at risk. He had reacted, not acted like he was supposed to.
He had managed to take down the target, but he had failed on the first two points, the two points that made sure he didn't kill any innocents.
'Confirm your target…. Make sure you can hit the target…'
Danny looked down at his soaped filled hands. He hadn't killed that man, he intellectually knew that, but he also knew that it hadn't been because of his training and professionalism. No.
He hadn't killed that man because he'd been lucky.
And now his luck had run out, because someone out there had found him guilty and was making sure that no one would ever forget what had happened in that subway station.
The sudden realization made him feel weak at the knees. This was exactly why he didn't want to stay home. You think too much at home, you start analyzing stuff that was better left unanalyzed.
With a hand on the wet wall for support, Danny stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel. Wrapping it around his waist, so that his front building neighbours wouldn't accuse him of exhibitionism, he went to the wide window in his living room. Down there, parked on the main street, between two street lamps, was the police car Mac had warned him about. It was as inconspicuous as a flamingo amongst a herd of zebras, but he guessed that was because he'd learned to 'smell' police surveillance cars since a very young age. He had grown up with them. He couldn't seem to shake them off.
The policemen inside that car were supposedly there to keep him safe. Looking at the solitary car in his street he felt more vulnerable than ever.
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