Nothing broken. That was the first good news of the morning, and I held on to it. Deep contusion, they said. Muscle strain. The shoulder would be sore for a long time, and the side where the probes had gone in would be tender, and I would need to take it easy, which is the kind of advice paramedics give to a man who has just been Tased on his own lawn and which sounds almost funny until you realize they mean it.
Painful enough. That was my own summary, and it was accurate. Painful enough to remind me, every time I moved my arm for the next week, that a baton is not a prop and a Taser is not a toy, no matter what uniform the person holding them is wearing.
Denise arrived on the porch while agents photographed the yard.
She did not run. That was Denise. She had spent thirty-four years as a pediatric respiratory therapist, and she knew what panic looked like in a parent. She walked out onto the porch, looked at me lying on the grass with paramedics kneeling beside me, looked at the agents and the cart and Curtis standing with his hands visible, and she came down the steps with the same steady pace she used walking into a hospital room.
"You look awful."
I tried to smile, and it probably came out crooked.
"I feel younger already."
"You are a terrible liar."
"Yes."
She sat beside me on the grass, carefully, the way you sit beside someone who is hurt without jostling them, and she put her hand on my good arm, and for several minutes neither of us said anything. We did not need to. The yard was full of people doing their jobs, and the mockingbird had finally gone quiet. Denise's hand on my arm was the steadiest thing in the whole scene, and I was grateful for it in a way I did not try to put into words right then.
Then Kayla arrived with Derek.
I heard the car before I saw it, and then I heard her voice, and then she was running across the yard toward me, all fourteen years of her, fast and loud and completely uninterested in the agents or the tape or the fact that her grandfather was lying on the grass with a contusion and a Taser burn. She stopped just before hitting my injured shoulder, catching herself, and then she hugged me carefully, her arms going around me without pressing on the bad side, and I felt her shaking a little, or maybe I was shaking a little, or maybe we both were.
"You got Tased."
"Yes."
"That was stupid."
"Yes."
"You're agreeing too much."
"I'm injured."
She pulled back just enough to look at my face, and her eyes were doing that quick scan that Denise's eyes did, the scan that checks whether someone is all right or saying so. Kayla had her mother's quick smile and her mother's faster mouth, and she had spent most of the year living with us, and she knew me well enough to know when I was deflecting.
She looked toward the federal vehicles parked down the street, the ones that did not have blue and amber lights on a golf cart but had the plain, serious look of government cars that belong to people who do not need to advertise.
"Is it over?"
I shook my head, because shaking my head fast hurt my shoulder.
"No."
"But they arrested them."
"That isn't the end."
"What is?"
"Evidence."
"Charges."
"Trials."
"Answers."
She nodded, and I could see her filing those four words away the way she filed everything away, carefully, in order, to be taken out later and examined. Derek stood behind her with his hand on her shoulder, and he looked at me, and I gave him the smallest nod I could manage, and he nodded back. He worked offshore rotations, and he had driven here fast, and he was not going to say anything dramatic in front of his daughter. That was enough. We understood each other.
Federal warrants were executed elsewhere that morning.
I did not see them happen. I was still on the grass, and then I was sitting on the porch steps with an ice pack on my shoulder, and then I was answering questions from an agent who wrote down my answers without rushing me. But I knew the plan, because Teresa had told me what the morning would look like if Palmetto did what Palmetto had always done, which was to show up and act like the law. While Curtis and his men were being taken into custody on my lawn, other teams were moving at other addresses, and the day that had started with a baton in my driveway was also the day the investigation stopped being a file and became a series of doors opening at the same time.
Grant Mercer was taken into custody on charges arising from the investigation already underway. Not on charges invented that morning. Not on charges built out of what happened to me. The case against him had been building for months, through contracts obtained by lawful process, through licensing records, through financial relationships traced from one company to another, through residents who had finally agreed to talk to agents who were not wearing Palmetto uniforms. My morning was the incident that made the news. Grant's arrest was the result of the work.
Victoria was arrested separately. I thought about that later, about the fact that she was not taken from the same scene, that she had her own arrest, her own charges, her own moment of understanding that the structure she had helped build was coming apart. She was forty-eight years old, with perfect blonde hair and perfect nails, and she could tell you your driveway violated standards while complimenting your garden, and she had signed the cream envelope with the Bayou Pines seal herself, citing an article that did not exist. She was not a bystander in any of this. The investigators knew that, and they treated her accordingly, separately, on her own conduct.
Other Palmetto employees were charged or detained according to their own conduct. That phrase matters, and I want to be precise about it, because it would have been easy, and wrong, to treat every person in a navy uniform as the same person. Some of them had done terrible things. Some of them had followed orders they did not fully understand. Some of them had known exactly what they were doing and had enjoyed it. The investigators separated those categories the way investigators are supposed to, by looking at what each person actually did, not by looking at the shirt they wore.