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Before Carter had laws, she had rules and regulations. Before that, she had principles, because her parents raised her right. Sometimes, though, it was all too easy to see why people, good people, principled people might...compromise. In dark alleys and foreign deserts, in corner offices and comfortable homes, people gave in a little bit more every day.
How much easier must it be, to be able to lay down your burden for a little while, to be able to sometimes, just sometimes, look the other way. But she had seen what that sort of thinking had done to people. She had seen the howling desperation rise up in the soldiers who had taken that one step too far, the story writ in the lines of their young faces saying ‘I don’t know if I deserve to make it back home anymore.’ Worse than that, though, was when even the howling thing started to fade, and soldiers who had once been brave and bright started to walk around like corpses. It was then that they stopped caring who it was that they hurt.
She had been to a lot of funerals, over the years, because of people who had taken that first step too far.
And seeing that, knowing that that was what was waiting for her if she wasn’t very, very careful, terrified her. More than she wanted rest and respite, she wanted that howling thing to never catch her, because once it caught you, it never let go.
She had thought, once when she was knee deep in shifting sand, that as soon as her tour was over and she was back home again with her son and her family around her that she would never have to see that awful, destructive thing again. Instead she traded in an automatic weapon for a graceful little handgun, chain of command for city ordinance, and a uniform for a detective’s badge. The howling thing stayed. She saw it every time she glanced at the desk across from hers and met her partner’s eye.
He made her wonder, though, if it couldn’t be caged, or tamed, or banished, because sometimes when she looked at Lionel Fusco, the monster was hardly there at all. But then it would come back, howling louder than ever, right up under the surface of his skin. Those days, she made sure they never locked eyes. Those days he could barely stand to look at her.
Those days, she redoubles her search to find her mystery man, the tall guy in the suit. Catching him won’t make Fusco’s monster go away, she knows, but at least it’s something she can do to make the world a little better.
She had been chatting once with Donnelley in the break room about her guy. He had called him a spook. Everyone knew he meant spy, but someone (probably Fusco--it was his style) had made a snappy comment about ‘Carter’s ghost,’ and while no one called him that to her face, she knew the name had stuck, that that was how they were referring to him all around the city. Some of them were doing it to help themselves try to be a little less afraid. Some of them were doing it to be cruel, to make her look ridiculous. She didn’t always make friends, and when you got right down to brass tacks, cops were people too, in all their corruptability. Fusco’s weren’t the only howling eyes to be seen around the station. She remembered all the time now what it was like to be truly alone, that cold fear wrapping around her spine, untouched even by the ferocious heat of the Afghani sun.
She was surrounded by ghosts and demons.
Still, she supposed that she hoped none of them met her specter walking down a dark alley at night. He was a different kind of broken. The haunt that had come to her as a raggedy man ready to die had done terrible things, but he had never strayed until he had been forced to. He had never looked away, and he wouldn’t start looking away now, Carter thought. A good soldier betrayed could be a fearsome thing.