Arleen Dunson was there. She was there, outside Boise, among the other surrounding police, when three pit bulls came blitzing towards tactical from around the corner of the decrepit house, like sharks with legs, swinging ropes of drool, rodeo-eyed and thinking kill kill kill. Two of the dogs were hooked and pulled away, no problem. The last one, incensed and alone in the dust, bucked and sprung back and forth, the cops scrambling onto the hoods of cars to avoid it, until, with the aid of a patrolman’s boot to the side of its head, the dog saw it was outnumbered and padded back into the shadows, snarling with hollow menace.

Dunson looked away. From the crunch of soil underfoot came a smell like faint smoke. Off the boxy house, with its Swiss cheese color and its peeling brown trim, Dunson sent her attention to the bend of freeway below. She knew what she was supposed to hear—the din of cars and vans winding the ribboning interstate, that sea wind—yet the noise never came. The heat thinned it out.

From the back bumper of her State black-and-white, on the outer rim of the operation, her eyes drifted up to see a face in the home’s second-story window. It was a young man, stretched tall and thin, peeking out from behind a gray bedsheet that had been pinned to the window frame like a curtain. He wore an expression she’d seen before, on the faces of young children who’d witnessed too much; stunned, unreachable, as if woken from hibernation.

Her eyes locked with the man-boy’s. The sheet fell back and he disappeared.

Officially, she was with the auto/vice department— had been there less than a year— but was often getting roped into assisting the overburdened narcotics table with groundballs, easy investigations, like this one, slam dunks.

Tactical formed a column up the front steps of the home. One of them threw a stone-fist at the door: “State Police!”

When no one answered, they rammed through. The wood splintered. Dunson heard the usual scuffle—a yelp at a twisted arm, the toppling of a lamp—and then two older men, their hands cuffed behind their backs in that way that seemed to always make men feel emasculated, were marched out into the sun. The younger man whom she’d seen through the window was pushed outside soon after. The three perps all looked small and pale, more like staggering scarecrows than living, breathing people, and they blinked in the lemon light like they hadn’t been outside in days.

She interviewed the young man through the open rear door of a cruiser. She squatted to talk to him; she had no knee pain; she was thirty-three.

Grover was his name and, for an hour, he tried not to cry. Twenty years old. One of the men they’d just arrested was his uncle. The other, the uncle’s friend.

To seal the deal— to get Grover babbling rather than spend another hour squatting there, soft-shoeing, watching him teeter— Arleen crossed to her car. The scene around her was quieting. Tactical had turned to their paperwork. A forensic scientist paraded a weight of contraband across the yard, his chin raised flippantly, wondering aloud if such a haul might earn them all the “photo-op treatment.” “There’s more than a pound,” he said to nobody. Depending on how it was being sold—gram, eight-ball, ounce—the drugs’ street value could’ve been close to twenty thousand; the uncle was a heavy hitter.

Dunson had been present at the actual drug deal in the parking lot hours before. The transaction was photographed and mic’d and jury-proof, and after the exchange, newly cash-rich, Grover and the two men went out for greasy Chinese food. From there, unmarked cars followed them home. After they’d left the restaurant, thinking ahead, Arleen had gone in and bought a pair of chopsticks and a dinner plate—insisted on paying for them—from the confused, broken-Englished owner. Now, with the man-boy trying not to cry in the backseat of her cruiser outside his uncle’s shitty clapboard house, Dunson took the props from her car, bagged them officially, walked them over, and presented them to Grover as if they were critical evidence. “We matched your DNA from the plate and chopsticks you used at the Chinese restaurant to plastic wrap from the meth lab inside your uncle’s home,” she told him straight-faced.

It didn’t matter that no crime lab on earth could match physical evidence so quickly, or that the timelines didn’t add up—no matter that she was lying through her teeth and trotting out props like a community theatre ham. The twenty-year-old bought it and went planet-eyed.

“That’s impossible.”

“How’d your DNA end up on the packages, Grover?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea, I never saw the lab, I’m barely ever over here. I didn’t know they were doing anything like that, I swear, I have no idea.”

The home—Arleen didn’t even have to step inside to catch the familiar reek of cat urine, ammonia, rotting eggs.

“They told me their kitchen stove kept breaking,” the man-boy said, eyes darting everywhere. “That that’s why the place smelled like that. They had ventilation issues and the landlord was a piece of shit and never fixed anything. I swear, I had no idea.”

Arleen spoke softly. She liked such moments to have the texture of a confessional. “You were there at the drug deal, Grover. We watched you the whole way. You saw your uncle get out of the car, get a backpack from the trunk, go into the park, and come back without a bag. What else could have been happening?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” Hearing himself say it, his bottom lip began to tremble cinematically. “They said it was no big deal. I asked them what we were doing and they said not to worry about it. I don’t know what they were doing. I thought it was weed or something like that.”

He began to cry. She watched him. Most criminals either tried to be tough—even in moments where they were beyond the scrutiny of their circle—or, through so many times imagining being caught for their crimes, had built up a preparatory callous. Grover hadn’t. He blubbered— rocked forward, back, side to side. Dunson considered the watch on his wrist. It was bright blue and plastic with hands that wobbled cheaply, emblazoned with some cartoon character she didn’t recognize. He wore old sneakers, grime-stained, with the tread worn down to flat, uncolored rubber. Nothing about him spoke of drug money.

“I swear,” he squeaked.

As she squatted beside him, the cuff of her jeans browning in the dust, he said he was on the college basketball team, a sophomore, pursuing a degree in economics, and that, with their disciplinarian athletic director, the arrest was sure to get him kicked off the team and get his scholarship rescinded. Fucked, in other words.

She exhaled through a small hole of a mouth. There was something about his face, sitting there. Freckles were set high on his cheeks. His hair fell in a natural, impeccable part. No pollution in his eyes.

“I’ve got a baby on the way.” Was that what he’d said? Something about a baby—she leaned in. “I’ve got a baby on the way. We just found out. My girlfriend is pregnant.”

She looked towards a copse of pine beyond the dirt yard as if they were her advisors, her cabinet: What to do here? What's the move? Punishing those in the wrong place at the wrong time— those ensnared by thickheaded relatives—it wasn’t her job. That was something she held onto, fought for, believed in; it wasn’t her job to punish the unlucky.

Arleen Dunson was in love. She was in love with her Romanian boyfriend Petre. It was a love that blurred the hard edges of objects, softened colors, and endowed people like Grover with simplicity and purity and principle. All light looked honeyed. The air always carried the smell of peaches. Her future—marriage and motherhood and a lifetime of watching Petre frown while fishing (he was a terrible fisherman)—was twisting within her grasp like a ripe apple, on the whorl of her fingertips, so accessible it was practically already happening.

Thirty-three-year-old Arleen offered the young man a tissue, and when he didn’t see it through his cinched eyes, thirty-three-year-old Arleen took a knee beside him, within the open door of the cab, and dabbed his tears like she knew something about who he was or why he was crying.

Months later, she found herself sitting against the smooth wall of the auto/vice anteroom, a grated window shedding a square slant of winter light across her desk. Knuckles rapped on its surface.

Her eyes lifted from her typewriter to the face of a typical detective. Middle-aged and unhandsome; penguin-bodied, navy suit. She didn’t immediately recognize him. He said he was with violent crimes. “Did you interview Grover Stillerman? Does that name ring a bell? You would’ve met him at a bust about half a year ago.”

His tone made her push out from her desk and turn her face away from him, wearily, bracing. “Why?”

The VC detective wheeled over a chair in a slow manner that portended tragedy. He sat and faced her. This must be how he talks to the families of victims, Dunson thought. The way he’s looking at me now. Grave, chin lowered, sad eyes leveled at her through the tops of his bifocals.

He told her. Grover was in holding. The twenty-year-old—the promising young man whose tears she’d dabbed like a doting mother while he’d wept in the backseat of the cop cruiser only months before—who’d been excited for fatherhood and the upcoming season of basketball—had, after his girlfriend gave birth to a stillborn son, beaten her beyond recognition in a McDonald’s parking lot. Practically killed her.

Arleen vouched for Grover, had bent over backward to bury his record, had sworn to his character. An image of him, there as she’d met him in the backseat, full of promise. Though she couldn’t reconcile the image with the person about whom she was hearing, they were the same. It didn’t matter what she thought. The gears of the world spun impersonally and impatiently, whether or not she had an opinion. Because she’d been naive, a twenty-year-old woman was forever changed. It was her fault. The story settled like humidity. She felt the mistake work its way into her blood and change her chemistry. Her life folded into two different halves; she was a different person than the moment before.

The doorbell threw her.

No, she wasn’t there—she wasn’t in the District 3 anteroom, looking into the pudgy face of a violent crimes detective whose name she could no longer remember. She was at home, upstate. She was sitting at the kitchen island, her coffee turning cold in her left hand, her cat serpentining around the legs of the high stool, the doorbell echoing through her large, empty house.

Her knees cracked as she rose. You’re fifty-nine, they complained.

“Cop lady,” the delivery driver said when she opened the door.

“Hey.”

He handed over her food—two biscuit sandwiches, one for breakfast and one for lunch— meaningfully, with sustained eye contact, as if delivering salvation.

“The extra sauce is in there.”

“Amazing.”

She closed the door, set her back against it, and lifted her right hand to look at her index finger. It had brushed the delivery man’s hand. The crackle of the contact; she hadn’t been touched in a long time. Removed from the hustle and bustle and without a commute, handshakes had become so rare they’d taken on the sweetness of soft serve. Not long before, she’d rubbed shoulders with a guy in the bank, the bank’s lobby condensed by one of its unending, unspecific maintenance projects. (Excuse our mess! Sorry for the inconvenience!) When the bank man’s upper arm, coiled with at-rest muscle, had grazed her sleeveless shoulder, she could feel old synapses sparkle, from the tips of her fingers to the base of her spine. Outside of those rare moments—a stranger in tight quarters, a half-hug from a friendly baker—the only regular touch was that of cat fur on her unshaven legs. Or the finger of a sentimental delivery man, apparently. Like a reminder of forgotten talent.

From the entryway, she set the biscuits on the kitchen island and crossed through the sliding glass doors to the poured cement back porch, where she took in the wide view of the surrounding Selkirk Mountains. Chill brushed the tops of her feet and ankles—the exposed skin under her pajama pants, above her cheap slippers. The fog hung like lamb pelt. The soil smelled thick and churned and ready.

Everyone who had grown up in those mountains measured life by a different metric. You couldn’t help but compare yourself to the grandeur of the ranges, to their feat of being. You took things slow. No point in rushing. There had only been two eras in all of history: before and after the mountains had formed. Looking out—finding it impossible to fix her sight on one point of focus, trying to take in the scene individually yet at once—she felt contemporaries with the bow-and-arrow Kootenai, the extinct breeds of bear, and the first white explorers. The landscape reduced her personal history to rubble. There was nothing she could think or achieve or fuck up that would register against such broad beauty.

Cop Lady. Like she carried the stink around. Like her intimacy with worst-case scenarios had changed her into some bruised and separate species. Strangers spotted it in an instant, like a dog standing on its hind legs. She wished she hadn’t been that, a “Cop Lady.” That she’d done something else; taken over her dad’s garage or stuck with the Air Force or sold insurance, something. She could’ve been a different person with a different slew of thoughts. She could still be a member of the school; fish-eyed, unaware. One of those people who could admire the architecture of passing homes rather than dwell on what might be happening inside.

As if sensing the exact wrong moment to call, her phone rang from inside. She went to the kitchen counter. On the screen was her old commander’s name.

“Arleen?”

A breeze brushed Gussy Knettet’s mouthpiece; he was outside, in a forest somewhere, on a scene.

“I could use your help with something,” he said. “It’s a dump job near Rathdrum. Four decedents unearthed so far. Fully decomposed. You free?”

Cop Lady. That wasn’t what she’d wanted. She hadn’t set out to be a cop lady and she didn’t want to be one now. She told Knettet no, ate both sandwiches, and fell back into bed.