"I understand, sir. I'm just relaying what's in the file." The call ended a minute later, and Francis stood in his living room holding a phone that suddenly felt very heavy. What is it?
Regina asked, already rising from the couch. Francis told her, watched her face shift from confusion to disbelief. To something harder, something that looked a lot like the fury she'd carried in the driveway that morning. "They're lying," she said. "On paper."
After everything that happened, after the whole street watched. I know. Francis sat back down, rubbing a hand over his face. This isn't about today anymore.
This is about controlling what people believe happened. He thought about Mason's face when the badge came out. The flash of fear quickly buried under pride. Men like that didn't apologize.
They regrouped. And Mason had clearly spent the rest of his shift doing exactly that, building a paper trail that turned Francis into the aggressor before anyone outside that driveway could say otherwise. "What do we do?" Regina asked.
Francis was already moving toward the hallway closet, pulling out his laptop bag, his mind shifting into the same gear it used on federal cases. Methodical, patient, relentless. "We document everything," he said. "Tonight, while it's fresh."
He sat down at the kitchen table and opened his laptop, the screen casting pale light across his face. Regina sat across from him, pulling up the video she'd recorded that morning, scrubbing through the footage frame by frame. "This proves it," she said, turning the screen toward him. "Right here, the taser. Your hands. You never moved."
"It proves what happened in front of the camera." Francis said, "Mason's counting on the fact that most of this won't make it past his report."
That's how this works. A lie on paper outlasts the truth in someone's memory. He thought about his car parked in the driveway where it had sat the whole encounter. He'd installed a dash cam months ago after the second time a patrol car had slowed to watch him pull into his own garage.
He'd never had to use the footage before. "The dash cam," he said suddenly. "It would have caught the whole thing. Audio, too."
Regina's eyes lit up with the first real hope she'd had since dinner. "Then we have proof. Real proof." "We do."
Francis began typing, drafting the first lines of a formal complaint, laying out the timeline exact and unshakable. But proof doesn't mean anything if nobody looks at it. I have to file this the right way. Build it so it can't be buried.