Chris tried repeatedly to intervene from a distance, and when he was able to get home on leave he sometimes took more forceful action. Once he arranged to be there instead of Steven when his dealer, known only to Steven as Nick, came by to drop off cocaine and collect his money.
Chris attempted to reason with Nick, proposing in a respectful manner that the man stop peddling drugs to his brother and in return Chris would continue to let Nick live. Nick was six foot four and two hundred twenty pounds, meaning he was three inches and thirty pounds larger than Chris. It was that difference in size, as well as a serious misjudgment of his potential opponent, that made Nick laugh in response to the threat.
Once he heard the dismissive laugh, there were a number of ways that Chris could have handled the matter. He could have put a bullet in Nick’s brain, or slashed him across the throat with a knife, or broken his neck with his bare hands.
He chose option three.
He didn’t do it in anger; Chris had lost the capacity to experience anything approaching rage in the mountains of Afghanistan. Instead he did it with dispassionate resolve, and a sense of justice that he realized was unique to himself. It was as if he watched himself do it, with a measure of approval, but felt neither triumph nor guilt afterwards.
Once Chris decided that something was right, or necessary, or both, then he did it and never, ever looked back. Nick deserved to die, so he had died, and his body was never found.
But Chris knew that there would be other dealers, each willing to take full advantage of his brother’s human failings. There was a limit to how many necks Chris could break, especially since he was stationed so far away. So he tried to focus his efforts on helping Steven, rather than dispatching his suppliers and enablers.
He got him into therapy, once even a six-month program as an inpatient in a rehab facility. There were signs of hope, but months of positive progress would inevitably be undone by a single moment of weakness. And for Steven, weakness was always just around the corner.
The criminal justice system’s built-in insensitivity made matters worse. It was not set up to recognize that Steven suffered from a disease, and a noncontagious one at that. It treated him as a criminal, though he was clearly the sole victim of his own “crime.”
So it became a cycle of jail and rehab and progress and falling back, until the latest arrest and conviction. Judge Daniel Brennan had expressed a frustration and lack of patience with Steven, and had made it clear that he was going to sentence him to a prison term that would remove him as a problem for a very long period of time.
So now Chris was heading back home, not to pick up the pieces of Steven’s life, and certainly not to put them back together. He was coming back to witness his own greatest failure.
The loss of his little brother.
Who never hurt anyone but himself.
Steven Gallagher lived in a basement apartment in Paterson, New Jersey.
It was on Vernon Avenue, in one of a dreary collection of box-like houses. They were relatively well kept; these houses likely assumed their dreary persona within an hour of the time they were built.
Emmit and I were going to be the point men; we drove through the neighborhood a few times to get the lay of the land. We’d be the ones to go in and do the actual questioning. We didn’t have a search warrant with us, but one could be gotten quickly were Gallagher to prove uncooperative.
Such was the importance the department placed on this case that we had four officers with us as backup, positioned in the front and back of the house. We had no reason to believe yet that Gallagher might try to run, but if he did, he wouldn’t make it fifty feet.
Emmit and I went to the front door of the house to speak to the owner, who the records showed lived on the first floor. The basement apartment had an entrance and windows only at the back, so there was no way Gallagher could have known we were there, if he was at home. But in any event, we had the back well covered.
The owner was not on the premises, and there was no reason for us to wait for him. “Let’s go talk to our boy,” I said, and Emmit radioed our plans to the backup officers. Emmit walked around the right side of the house to the back, and I approached from the left.
There was a door with a broken screen, beyond which there were three concrete steps down to another door. We drew our weapons and I opened the first door. I walked down the steps, while Emmit stayed at the top, which gave him a better view of the whole picture.
I knocked on the door. “Gallagher?” I called out, but got no response. “Gallagher?”
“Leave me alone!” finally came the answer from inside. “You said you wouldn’t come back here!”
It was a voice filled with about as much stress as a voice could be filled with. “We’re the police, Gallagher. We want to talk to you.”
“NO! LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!”
The voice had become firmer, more decisive; this was not a guy who wanted to talk. Which, of course, made him a more interesting candidate for us to talk to.
I edged to the side of the door, in case he was planning to fire a bullet through it. “Open the door, Gallagher.”
“No! I’m not going with you.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere. We just want to talk.”
“LIAR!”
“This is not voluntary, Gallagher. We’re going to talk; no reason to make this difficult. Nothing for you to worry about.”
There was no reaction at all. In these cases talking is good, no matter what is said. Silence is not so good.
“Open the door, Gallagher.”
Still no response. Emmit and I made eye contact, and he spoke softly into the radio, alerting the backup officers that “we’re going in. Suspect is present but uncooperative.”
I edged up along the side of the door, reaching for the knob, but expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t; it turned easily. This was the dangerous moment; there was no way to enter without being exposed, no matter how quickly we did so. If Gallagher had a gun, we had a problem.
I nodded to Emmit, and signaled that I would go first and he would follow. When one enters situations like this, the plan is not to saunter in saying, “Honey, I’m home.” Even though there is effectively no chance for surprise, as much shock and chaos must be created as possible, to rattle the suspect.
So I slowly turned the knob, took a deep breath, threw the door open, and burst through, screaming. I felt Emmit barreling in behind me, screaming as well. When it comes to barreling and screaming, he makes me look like an amateur.
The room was sparsely furnished and dirty. A small kitchen table had partially eaten food on it, and the bed, which was more like a cot, had only a blanket, no sheets or pillow. There was a small television sitting on the floor, with a “rabbit ears” antenna, and there was a laptop computer next to it.
I didn’t notice all these things until later, because my attention at that moment was on Steven Gallagher, sitting on the floor against the wall. More specifically, my attention was on his right hand, which was holding a gun, finger on the trigger.
It wasn’t pointed at me, which at the moment did not provide me with that much comfort. I pointed my own gun at him and screamed, “Drop the weapon!”
He looked at me strangely, almost as if he was trying to understand what I was saying. I saw a look of pain on his face, misery like I don’t think I have ever seen before, and I’ve seen a lot of it. Of course, everything I’m describing happened in a split second, so I could be wrong about all or part of it. But I don’t think I am.
He didn’t say anything, but he raised the gun. His finger was still on the trigger.
I didn’t wait to see what he would do with it; I put three bullets into his chest, pinning him back to the wall. Which means I never got to find out what he was going to do with the gun.
The moment my weapon discharged, I was no longer involved in the investigation.
Instead I became a witness and had to relate in excruciating detail exactly what transpired. I also, in the minds of at least some members of the public, was about to become a suspect. I had killed a man, and the burden would be on me to show that it was a justifiable act.
Emmit called in the report, and the scene immediately became chaotic. Captain Barone arrived pretty much at the same time as the homicide detectives, which meant that he was monitoring the situation very closely. It was far more involvement than was typical for him, but then again, calls from the Governor about a case were rather rare.
After I had given the first of what would be a number of official statements, Barone came over to me. “You OK?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah.” This was the first person I had ever killed; I had shot a previous suspect, but he was not badly wounded. I had even managed to serve in Iraq during Desert Storm without firing a weapon in anger.
I was feeling a little shaken by the experience, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from having killed Gallagher or from the realization that I could have been killed myself.
“You did what you had to do,” Barone said.