Through The Doors

"There's a moment after the adrenaline stops where your body asks your brain what just happened, and your brain hasn't got a bloody clue either."

Keith didn't speak.

He walked stiff and deliberate, every step a negotiation between dignity and the mechanics of balance. The cuffs pulled his shoulders forward, but his head stayed up. That mattered. Whatever Keith was feeling — and his jaw was clenched tight enough to crack enamel — he wasn't going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him look at the ground.

I walked half a pace behind him and to his left, my hand not on his arm but close enough to reach it. Academy protocol. You don't grip them if they're walking, you don't steer them if they're cooperating, but you stay within contact distance because the moment you relax is the moment they bolt or swing. Keith wasn't going to bolt. Keith was fifty-eight with a scraped face and fury compressed into every line of his body. He believed — with every fibre of his being — that he'd done the right thing and was being punished for it. Not a flight risk. A pride risk, and those were harder to manage.

Behind us, Mitchell walked with Ryan. I couldn't see them without turning my head, but I could hear the son's boots — heavier than his father's, the stride shorter, angrier, each footfall punching the pavement. Mitchell's footsteps were inaudible. Of course they were.

The crowd hadn't dispersed so much as rearranged. The main cluster around the dead kangaroo had broken into smaller groups along the footpath, and conversations faltered as we passed, faces turning. Not hostile — not exactly. Curious, mostly. Everyone wanted the details right; they'd be discussing this for weeks. A woman outside the pharmacy held her shopping bag against her chest with both hands and stared openly, mouth slightly ajar. Two teenage boys on the opposite footpath tracked us with their phones still raised, filming, and I felt the lens like a physical thing — a small, cold pressure against the side of my face that I couldn't brush away.

Keith's cheek was still bleeding. The graze ran from below his ear to the corner of his mouth, raw and gritty, and a thread of blood had tracked down his jaw and was dripping onto his collar — small, regular drops leaving dark circles on the faded cotton. He hadn't asked me to wipe it. He hadn't asked me for anything. The silence between us had a texture I couldn't name — not refusal, not hostility. He was saving every word for the moment it would matter.

We passed the TAB. The bloke with the beer had gone back inside, but the dog was still there — lying on its side in a patch of sun, utterly indifferent to the procession moving past. A man in paint-spattered overalls leaned against the wall and watched us. He caught Keith's eye and gave a small nod — barely a movement, just a dip of the chin — and Keith returned it. Less than a second. An acknowledgement I wasn't part of. I see you. This is shit. Nothing I can do.

My hands were shaking. I noticed it at the intersection — a fine tremor in my fingers that had nothing to do with cold. The adrenaline that had powered me across ten metres of road and onto a man's back had nowhere left to go, so it was leaking out through my extremities. I pressed my hands flat against my thighs as I walked, willing the tremor to stop, or at least to stay invisible. It didn't stop. I folded my arms instead.

The Sentinel building announced itself before I recognised it. A clock tower — ornate, brick, absurdly grand for a regional newspaper — rose above the shopfronts ahead. Beneath it, the facade of a building that had been important once and was determined to remain so. SILVER CITY SENTINEL, carved into the stonework above the entrance. Established 1885. We were here before you and we'll be here after.

They were already outside.

Two women. The first was small — petite, my height maybe, blonde hair pulled back, her face managing to be simultaneously friendly and calculating. Notepad in one hand, phone in the other, already moving towards us. The second was taller, athletic, dark hair in a messy ponytail, a proper broadcast camera balanced on her shoulder — not a phone, a professional rig, and the red light was on.

The reporter reached us first. She positioned herself on the footpath about three metres ahead, angling so Keith and I would have to pass at close range. She had her question loaded before we'd closed the gap.

"Ellen Pascoe, Silver City Sentinel. Can you tell us what happened back there?"

She was looking at Keith, not at me. Smart. The man in cuffs was the story. Keith stared straight ahead, his jaw working, and said nothing. The graze on his cheek glistened under the afternoon light and I watched Ellen's eyes clock it — the injury, the cuffs, the blood on the collar — each detail being filed, sorted, assigned to sentences that would appear in tomorrow's edition.

She pivoted to me. Blue eyes — bright, sharp, professionally warm.

"Constable, can you confirm that a firearm was discharged on Argent Street?"

"No comment at this time." Flat and automatic, exactly how it was supposed to come out. I kept walking. Keith kept walking. Ellen fell back — she knew the drill, she wasn't going to obstruct — but the camera followed us, the tall woman tracking our movement with a smooth, unhurried pan that would look calm and professional on the evening news and felt, from this side of the lens, like being slowly undressed.

"Mitchell." Ellen had shifted behind us, her voice warm in a way that came from long acquaintance. "Jim, any comment?"

I didn't hear Mitchell's response. I heard tone — low, brief, final — and Ellen's silence afterwards told me she'd accepted it. For now.

We kept walking. The Sentinel building fell behind us. I could feel the camera on my back for another half-block — that prickling, self-conscious awareness that something was watching and would remember — and then we turned the corner and it was gone.

Keith spoke.

"Your hand's shaking."

I looked down. My arms were still folded but the tremor had migrated — my right forearm visibly vibrating against my left, rapid and fine and completely beyond my control. I hadn't realised it was visible. I unfolded my arms and shoved my hands into the pockets of my duty pants.

"Adrenaline," I said.

"I know what it is."

Silence. Another half-block. The station was visible ahead.

"First time you've done that," Keith said. Still not a question.

I didn't answer. I didn't have to. He already knew.

The station smelled the same. That was the first stupid thing I noticed — the same stale coffee, the same chemical tang of floor cleaner, the same faintly human undertone of a building where people spent too many hours under fluorescent light. I'd left here two hours ago with Mitchell to walk the beat and learn the town, and the station had been a quiet place doing quiet Friday afternoon things. It didn't feel quiet now. Nothing had changed in the physical space — same desks, same chairs, same motivational poster on the wall that someone had blu-tacked up in 2007 and nobody had bothered to remove — but something in the air had shifted. Tighter. Alert. The way a room changes when a phone rings at three in the morning.

Constable Haynes was at the front desk. Young, maybe twenty-four, still new enough that his uniform sat on him like a costume. He'd been leaning back in his chair when we came through the door, and the sight of Keith — cuffed, face bloodied, walking ahead of me — brought him upright so fast he knocked his coffee mug sideways. He caught it. Barely.

"Jesus," he said. Then remembered himself. "Sarge — should I — "

"Sit tight," Mitchell said, from behind me. Calm. Unhurried. As though he walked arrested men through the front door every Friday. "Massey, bring him through."

I guided Keith past the front desk and into the corridor beyond. The fluorescent strip overhead buzzed — a low, insistent whine that I'd filtered out this morning but now couldn't unhear. Keith's boots scuffed against the linoleum. His breathing had changed since we'd come inside; the tight, controlled rhythm from the walk had loosened into something heavier, almost resigned. The audience was gone. No footpath crowds, no phone cameras, no Ellen Pascoe with her notepad. Just the corridor, the buzzing light, and the smell of floor cleaner.

Mitchell appeared beside me. He'd left Ryan with someone at the front — I caught a glimpse of another officer steering the son towards a chair, one hand on his shoulder, firm but not aggressive — and now he reached for Keith's wrists.

"Turn around, Keith."

Keith turned. Mitchell unlocked the cuffs with a small key from his belt, and I watched Keith's hands come free — the wrists red and indented where the metal had pressed, his fingers flexing open and closed, open and closed, restoring circulation. He rubbed his left wrist with his right thumb, slowly, and the gesture was so private, so involuntary, that I had to look away.

"In here." Mitchell opened a door to the left — not a cell, just a room. A table, two chairs, a window with frosted glass that let in light but no view. It might have been an interview room on good days and a storage overflow on others; a cardboard box labelled CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS sat in the corner, half-hidden behind the door. "Sit down. I'll get you some water."

Keith walked in and sat. He didn't look at me. He put his hands flat on the table, palms down, and stared at the frosted glass, and the stillness that settled over him wasn't calm — it was the careful, deliberate immobility of a man holding himself together by refusing to move.

Mitchell closed the door. Turned to me.

"Put Ryan in the other room. Separate. Don't talk to either of them."

I nodded and went back to the front. Ryan was in the chair where the officer had put him, elbows on his knees, head down, one leg bouncing — a rapid, metronomic vibration that shook his whole body. His fists were still clenched. The knuckles were white. The officer beside him — I didn't know his name, older, greying at the temples, the comfortable slouch of someone who'd been stationed here for years — glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. I jerked my head towards the corridor, and he understood. Between us, we got Ryan up, through the corridor, and into the second room without a word. Ryan went because there was nothing else to do.

Back in the corridor, the door to Harding's office was open.

I could see Mitchell standing inside, his hat in his hands — the first time I'd seen him hold it rather than wear it. Harding was behind his desk, both palms pressed flat against the surface, leaning forward. His jaw was set and his eyes were fixed on Mitchell with the concentrated attention of someone receiving information they did not want. Mitchell was speaking — low, measured, his back to me — and I caught fragments. Discharged. A pause. Argent Street. Another pause. Constable Massey responded.

Harding's eyes flicked past Mitchell's shoulder and found me in the corridor. Just for a second. Long enough for me to register what was in them — assessment, calculation, something that might have been annoyance and might have been respect and was probably both — before his gaze returned to Mitchell and his hand came up to his forehead, thumb and forefinger pressing into his temples, and the office door swung shut.

I stood in the corridor. The fluorescent light buzzed. Through the thin wall to my left, I could hear Keith's chair creak — a single, slow adjustment of weight. Through the wall to my right, nothing. Ryan's silence was louder.

My hands had stopped shaking. I noticed it the way you notice the absence of a headache — not with relief but with the sudden, hollow awareness that something had been there and wasn't anymore. The adrenaline was gone. In its place, a flatness. Not exhaustion, not yet — that would come later, probably around two in the morning when my body finally remembered what I'd asked it to do. For now, just a strange, suspended blankness, as though my nervous system had processed the emergency and was now waiting for someone to tell it what to feel next.

Haynes appeared at the end of the corridor. He was holding his phone at arm's length, screen towards me, and even from three metres I could see what was on it — a video, shaky, vertical, the unmistakable colours of Argent Street in the afternoon. He opened his mouth.

"Don't," I said.

He closed it. Pocketed the phone. Went back to the front desk.

I leaned against the corridor wall. The plaster was cool through my shirt. From Harding's office, the low murmur of voices continued — Mitchell's steady baritone, and now Harding's, sharper, asking questions I couldn't make out. The words blurred into a hum against the wall at my back, indistinguishable from the fluorescent buzz overhead.

Somewhere in the station, a phone was ringing. Nobody was answering it.