Take the Fall (Apartment 402 #2)

Chapter 1 The Wrong Direction

Ryan

The bartender stopped asking what I wanted around the third whiskey. After that he just watched the glass and topped it when it got low. I let him. Choosing felt like more than I had tonight.

I’d picked Conroy’s because it was the wrong direction.

Three blocks down Parliament from the apartment instead of toward it.

A narrow room the color of weak tea. One long bar, a few empty tables, a hockey game running silent in the corner.

The fryer smell had been in the walls so long it had stopped being a smell.

Nobody from the station drank here. Nobody in my family could have found it with a map.

For a couple of hours that had been enough.

His name was Pat. He’d worked out I was a cop in the first round and never made a thing of it. He’d called me kid the first hour and I’d let it stand. Being somebody’s kid for an hour was a relief I hadn’t gone looking for.

He came back with the bottle. Filled the glass without asking. Then he stayed a second, the rag going in slow circles.

“Walking home tonight?”

“It’s not far.”

“Mm.” He let it go. Wiped further along the bar. “Slow night. Always is, this end of the week.”

He’d left the opening there for me. I didn’t take it. He didn’t mind. That was the thing about Conroy’s. A man could sit and leak quietly and nobody made him account for it.

He moved off down the bar. Came back a minute later with a glass of water and set it next to the whiskey without a word. Didn’t tell me to drink it. Didn’t make a thing of it. Just put it there. I looked at it and didn’t touch it and he hadn’t expected me to.

“You want food, kitchen’s still on for another hour,” he said. “Toasts. Soup, if you can call it soup.”

“I’m all right.”

“You’re not, but that’s your business.” He said it easy, no edge on it, and turned the tap on a glass to rinse it. “Long as you’re upright when you leave.”

Two men in work fleeces argued about a referee at the far end.

One kept slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other to make the point land.

The other shook his head at everything, slow, a man who’d decided he was right an hour ago and was settling in to enjoy it.

I watched the way you watch weather. They had a thing to be angry about that fit in one hand.

They’d go home tonight still arguing and wake up friends.

I envied them more than I’d have admitted to anyone, including myself, including Pat, who’d already worked out most of it anyway.

The cut was on my right index finger. I’d bought gauze and tape at the corner store and made a poor job of it on a bench outside, hands not cooperating.

The tape had gone on crooked. The edge had bled through and dried brown.

Every time I lifted the glass the gauze caught on the cold of it and stung.

Every time, I drank and let the thought slide under.

The corner store had been the only stop I’d made on purpose.

The rest of the evening I couldn’t account for.

I’d walked out of the apartment with no plan and let the city take me.

Down to the water first. A bench by the lake, the water flat and black past the boardwalk, a jogger going by once and then not again.

I sat there until the cold came up off the lake and drove me back into the streets.

Then a church on Power Street. Locked, this hour.

I stood on the steps and watched two pigeons take turns in a puddle longer than a grown man should.

I’m not a praying man. My family did its worshipping at galas.

But I stood on the steps of a shut church a while because it was somewhere to stand, and because the saint over the door was looking at the middle distance like he’d given up on the lot of us, and that felt about right.

The pavement was dark from the afternoon’s rain.

Blossom petals stuck flat to it, going brown at the edges, more of them down than left in the trees.

The light went orange over the rooftops and then went out.

By the time I climbed onto this stool the streetlights had been on a while and I’d stopped feeling the cold, which I knew, distantly, was its own kind of warning.

I’d grabbed my jacket off the hook going out. That was about all the reflex had managed. No wallet. No keys. Luke had the keys. He’d taken them out of my shaking hand a night ago to work the lock, and they’d be on the counter in there now with everything else I hadn’t had the wits to carry out.

The phone sat face-up by my elbow. I’d been doing a poor job of not watching it.

It buzzed. I had it half off the wood before I read the screen.

Not a name. An unknown number, the kind that comes through a switchboard for a man who doesn’t dial his own.

A lawyer’s floor. An assistant. My uncle’s office, most likely.

The family I’d spent ten years keeping a city’s width from the job.

They didn’t make warning calls. By the time I heard from them at all, the decision had been made in a room I wasn’t in, and the call was only to tell me which way it had gone.

Somebody on Bay Street had heard, this afternoon, that the police were reopening the file on me. The one they’d buried when they ran me out of 52 Division and called it a transfer. It hadn’t taken them six hours to pick up a phone.

I turned the phone a quarter-turn so the screen faced away.

It buzzed again. Same number. I let it run out.

One of the men in fleeces had drifted up the bar for a refill. He waited near me while Pat poured, and I felt him looking. Not the friendly look. The other one, the one that starts as a frown and turns into recognition. I kept my eyes on my glass.

“You’re him,” he said. “Off the television. The cop, the one with the drug thing.”

Cold went down my back, fast, the old animal kind.

The PR face. The bust that had made the news for all the wrong reasons.

A year ago I’d have leaned into it, given him the grin, signed whatever he wanted.

Tonight I just held still and counted the exits without meaning to, the cop reflex and the other reflex firing at once, the one that had spent a lifetime making sure nobody got a clean look at me.

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” I said.

He squinted. Half-sure. Pat slid his drink across before he could land on it. “On the house, Tommy. Go watch your game.” Said it light, but it moved the man, and he went, glancing back once, the recognition already coming apart in the drink and the bad light.

Pat didn’t look at me. Wiped the bar where the man had stood. “He’s three sheets. Won’t remember his own name tomorrow, never mind yours.” A beat. “Which I don’t know, for the record. And don’t want to.”

“Thanks.”

“Mm.”

I drank. My hand wasn’t quite steady on the glass. So much for nowhere. Even here, even three streets from anywhere I belonged, the face found its way to the surface and gave me up.

The voicemail icon came up and stayed. I didn’t need to play it. Ryan, it’s your uncle’s assistant. He’d like a word at your convenience. The convenience would not be mine. It never was.

I pushed the glass forward. Pat read it and poured.

The whiskey had got behind my eyes by now, into the place where the thinking happened. The thinking had gone slow and round and kept washing up in the same spot. I gave up steering it. It went to a kitchen floor and stayed there.

His hand at the back of my neck. That was the part I couldn’t get past. The kiss was in there too, all of it, but it was the hand my mind kept circling.

The weight. The warmth. The way it stayed, fingers in my hair, when I’d have bet the last thing I owned that a man like Luke didn’t have that in him.

A month ago he’d looked at me across the Inspector’s office like something tracked in on a shoe.

The Bear, the station called him. Six foot of silence who ate alone and spoke in single words and had run two partners out of the division before they handed him me.

They’d locked us in a behavioral program and a shared apartment because we were each one mistake from being put out of the police for good.

For the first weeks I’d counted the days until I could be quit of him.

Then somewhere I hadn’t been watching, he stopped being the thing I was counting down from.

He bandaged me up after a fall took me off a roof.

He took a punch meant for me and didn’t make a thing of it.

Tonight he’d knelt in the broken glass and held me while I came apart and said you don’t have to pretend with me, like he’d seen straight through the version of myself I’d spent my whole life building.

I’d kissed people before. That was what I kept setting this next to, so it would come out the same size as the rest. Women.

A long easy parade I’d charmed and walked away from.

A couple of men too, years back, drunk, in the dark, nothing I’d let mean a thing by morning.

I knew the shape of all of it. I knew which drawer it went in.

This one wouldn’t go in the drawer. I’d been working at it for hours and it kept sliding back out.

He hadn’t pulled away. I had. And the part of me that had done the pulling was getting harder to hear over the part of me still down on that floor with his hand in my hair, not wanting to be anywhere else.

I tried to put it somewhere. I was good at that.

A lifetime of putting things somewhere, smiling, moving on, never once getting caught holding anything heavier than a grin.

I’d liked women easily my whole life. No complications.

I knew what I was the way you know your own name.

And here was a thing that wouldn’t file, wouldn’t fit, wouldn’t stop, and it scared me worse than the folder on the table back home, worse than the call I hadn’t answered.