Her slippers slid in the wet grass and her arms windmilled, and somewhere far away she heard Evelyn screaming her name, but the sound had to travel through the roar of the hose to reach her, and by the time it arrived it was thin and small. Water filled her ears. It ran down her throat and she coughed, and coughing let in more water, and her body understood before her mind did that she could not breathe properly while facing the stream.
She turned her head sideways. The stream followed.
Holt stood with both hands wrapped around the hose, feet planted wide, face red and jaw clenched, leaning into it the way a man leans into a job he believes is righteous. Up close he did not look like an officer anymore. He looked like a man settling a personal score with the universe, and the universe was wearing a cream blouse and gardening gloves.
The pressure was worse than anything she had imagined. It found the seams of her clothing and forced its way inside, cold fingers running down her spine, pooling at the small of her back. Her ears filled and the world went underwater dull, and through it she heard her own breathing, ragged and thin, a sound she did not recognize as hers. Somewhere in the roar she thought of the courtroom, of the bailiff's voice calling order, of how she had always believed that calm was a kind of armor. The armor was failing. Water forced her eyelids shut and still found the corners. Her knees buckled and she caught herself on the edge of the rose bed, thorns scratching her palms, and the small bright pain of it was almost a relief, something real to hold onto while the rest of her dissolved into cold and noise.
"You want to disrespect me?" he shouted over the water.
Naomi tried to answer and produced only a choked spray of syllables. Her scarf tore loose and whipped away. Her blouse plastered itself to her skin, cold and clinging, and the water hammered her collarbones and ran down inside her collar in icy rivulets. She raised one arm over her face and the pressure pounded through the thin shield of her forearm and found her eyes again.
"Maybe this teaches you manners," Holt yelled.
Her foot found a slick patch of mud at the edge of the rose bed and went out from under her. She fell hard onto her side, the impact driving the breath from her lungs in a ragged gasp, and the stream came down with her, pinning her there, drumming against her shoulder and her temple. A rose cane snapped under her elbow. Petals scattered across the lawn like something festive, like confetti at a celebration, and the obscenity of it almost made her laugh before the water stole that too.
Daniel grabbed Holt's arm with both hands. "Stop it! You're going to kill her, stop it!"
Holt shoved him backward with one shoulder without ever loosening his grip on the hose. Daniel stumbled and caught himself on the little white garden border, and the decorative stones scattered. The retired man in the cardigan shouted something. The woman with the golden retriever had both hands over her mouth. The jogger had stopped running entirely and stood frozen on the sidewalk with his chest heaving.
The teenager on the bicycle yelled at the top of his lungs, "He's drowning her! Somebody do something!"
Nobody on that street would ever forget the sound of the water. It filled everything. It filled the space between the houses and the trees and the held breath of every witness, a hard hissing roar that made thinking impossible. Naomi curled onto her side in the mud, one arm still raised over her face, and felt the cold working its way into her bones, and some distant professional part of her mind, the part that had sat through a thousand hearings, noted with terrible clarity that this was what it felt like when the law left the room.
Holt did not stop.
Chapter Eighteen
The Water Kept Coming
Ten seconds.
Evelyn Porter had stopped screaming Naomi's name and started screaming for help, raw wordless cries that tore out of an eighty four year old throat with shocking force. "Somebody stop him! He is killing her!" She had her phone in one shaking hand, still recording because some instinct older than fear told her the world needed to see this, and with the other hand she gripped her porch railing hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
Twenty seconds.
The teenager on the bicycle was crying now, tears running down his face while he held the phone steady, because his hands knew what to do even while the rest of him fell apart. "He's drowning her!" he screamed again, and this time his voice cracked clean in half. "Somebody call the chief! Somebody call somebody!"