Part Sixteen: The Badges

I retired eighteen months after the trial, at fifty-five, with thirty-one years.

It was the back.

It was mostly the back.

On my last day the shift did the thing they do, and there was a cake with the wrong name on it, and Reyes gave a speech that was ninety percent insults, and I went out to my car at four in the afternoon in the same lot where a black SUV had come in at an angle across two spaces.

Evelyn brought the girls to the retirement thing.