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walked over to Matt’s desk. He was holding down the call desk tonight, but the phones were mercifully quiet.
    “Did you ever hurt anyone in the line of duty?” she asked.
    Matt was a lifer on the Castle Point force (though force may be overstating the case a bit—Castle Point’s police force consisted of the chief, Matt, Christy and a night-call operator. The three officers traded off every three nights). Matt and the chief had patrolled the town since before Christy was born. If there was a skeleton in anyone’s closet, they knew about it. And Matt, in particular, loved to talk about them. Christy had answered the recruitment ad during her last month at the police academy, and Matt had been the first to interview her.
    “Did you ever meet a man with three testicles?” he asked during their first conversation. She’d gaped at him, shocked both at the inappropriateness of the question, and at the oddity he described. She shook her head no.
    “We got one here in Castle Point.” He grinned. “Lives up the ridge near the crossback. Then there’s the guy who lives down near Smythe’s Grocery who thinks that when he shaves and puts on a wig and a pair of panty hose and a dress that nobody recognizes him when he goes shopping. We pretend not to. Got a lot of weird shit here. You’ll get to learn it all by and by.”
    Christy had grown to like Matt over the past couple months. He was older, but he never treated her like she was a kid. And he needled her like an older brother. Now though, as he looked at her face and saw how troubled she was by the day, he got serious. Matt stood, and put both hands on her shoulders.
    “Listen,” he said. “I was just kidding before. We all screw up once in a while, sometimes because we’re not careful, and sometimes because we can’t help it.”
    His long fingers squeezed her arms in reassurance. “I’ve never hit anyone with a car on duty, no, but I had to shoot a guy once.”
    Her eyes widened at that. While it was a daily possibility that you’d have to pull a gun while on police duty, she knew that in a tiny town like this, it rarely happened. His eyes held hers, and his chin nodded, just once. For the first time, Christy really looked hard at Matt’s face, and saw the crow’s-feet rippling there around his eyes, and the amount of silver that salted his close-cropped hair. On the surface, Matt barely looked forty, but a closer inspection revealed someone who’d been here for the long haul. He was weathered, but still hale.
    “It’s not something I’d care to repeat,” he said. “I’ve fired plenty of rounds into the sky, but we had a holdup down at the gas station one night a few years back. Stupid kid—wore the ski mask and everything. I was actually just a block away when the clerk pulled the alarm, and so I was out in front of the door on foot before the kid could get to his car. He took off running, and I yelled for him to stop. He did. But then he turned toward me, reached into his pants, and pulled out a gun. He’d tucked it right there at his belt buckle when he left the store.
    “‘Back off,’ he yelled, pointing the piece right at me. I was shitting my pants, I’m not ashamed to say. This guy’s got a gun on me, the first time that had happened in something like twenty-five years as a cop. I pulled my own and yelled for him to drop it.
    “He just laughed, raised the gun in the air and then aimed it at me again and yelled, ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’
    “I fired. He didn’t. And when I got to him, he was shaking and crying on the ground. I picked up the ‘weapon’…and it was a kid’s cap gun. I pulled the hat off and saw he was just a kid. High-school kid. I’d tried to shoot him in the arm, but I’d hit him right in the chest…He was bleeding all over and coughing.”
    Christy gulped as she saw the pain that crossed Matt’s steel blue eyes. The humor normally so much a part of his every motion was completely erased.
    “That was the