The dress blues scratched against my skin as I stood stiff in the courtroom, sweat slicking my palms beneath the bulk of my tactical gear. At my feet, Diesel, our K9, rested loyally, his tail gently tapping against the wooden bench. He didn’t know this wasn’t just another testimony—it was the one. The one that could change everything.
Across the room, Maria sat motionless, fingers interlocked so tightly they’d turned white. Five years we’d ridden together—she trained me fresh out of the academy, had my six every single time. I’d never seen her look so small.
She met my eyes for a flicker of a moment. I looked away.
The judge called me up. My legs felt like they were hauling bricks. Diesel walked beside me, carefree as always, tongue lolling like we were just clocking in.
But we weren’t.
There was a thirty-second hole in the audio from the warehouse body cam footage. Maria had been the last officer on site that night. A suspect walked the next morning—case dismissed for “lack of evidence.” Now Internal Affairs wanted answers. Official ones.
Diesel nudged my leg.
He always knew when I was in too deep.
I reached down and scratched behind his ears, hoping the familiar motion would ground me. But the storm of doubt inside me only grew louder.
The footage gap was damning. And I couldn’t explain it—not without pulling Maria into it. She was there that night. And if I said what I saw—if I admitted that she crossed a line—it wouldn’t just end her career. It could take mine with it. And our friendship? Gone.
Still… truth doesn’t stay buried forever. It finds a way out.
I inhaled, slow and deep, as the judge gestured me forward. Diesel sat when I did, his quiet stillness grounding me more than anything else in the room.
“Officer Maxwell, please state your full name for the record.”
“Officer Benjamin Maxwell,” I said, voice steady even though my insides were anything but.
“Officer Maxwell, can you clarify what occurred during the thirty-second audio lapse in your body camera footage during the warehouse incident?”
My fists curled, knuckles aching. I could feel Diesel pressed close, steady and warm. I clung to that.
The truth was brutally simple: I saw Maria slip something into her jacket after the raid. Something that never made it into evidence.
Her words echoed in my mind even now—rushed, tense.
“Ben, don’t say anything. I’ve got this under control.”
She’d said it while glancing around, before vanishing out the back with the rest of the scene barely secured.
I had stayed behind, finishing reports, doing the clean-up. Later, reviewing the footage, I saw it—the moment her hand dipped into the evidence bag, pulled something small and wrapped from it, and tucked it away.