Chapter 1 The Wrong Direction #2
So I told myself the easy version. I was benched and frightened and grabbing the nearest solid thing in the room.
That was all. A man whose life is going out from under him reaches for whatever’s closest and calls it more than it is.
Once the case cleared, this would settle into what it had always been.
A partnership. A shared sink. A wall between two rooms.
I almost believed it. For a sentence at a time I managed it.
I shut my eyes against the corner TV. Opened them. The kitchen was still there, brighter than the room.
The phone rang again. I made myself look.
Inspector Murphy. My dear boss. The closest thing to a believer I had left. I watched his name ring through and didn’t pick up. Even if the mess wasn’t his fault, I felt betrayed somehow.
He wouldn’t leave a message. He treated voicemail like an insult, and a missed call from the Inspector said more than a message could have anyway.
He’d want me in the chair across his desk by morning, telling me in that flat way of his that sometimes you give up ground to win the war.
The trouble with morning was the walk back, and the door at the end of it, and the man behind the door I’d spent the whole evening trying to drink down to a size I could carry.
I’d been at it for hours and the size hadn’t changed.
The whiskey had only turned the volume down, the way you turn down a radio you can still hear through the wall.
The ringing stopped. The screen went dark. The dark screen said it louder than any banner.
Two days ago he’d slid the reassignment folder across his desk and asked, careful, whether there was anyone I wanted to phone.
I’d told him no. He’d let that sit, then put a hand on my shoulder going out the door.
Brief. The weight landing once and lifting.
He didn’t do that. He’d done it for me. And I’d answered it tonight by watching his name light up and letting it die.
I should have called him back. I knew that the way you know a thing and don’t do it.
Pat set a basket of pretzels in front of me. “Eat something.”
I ate one. Salt and nothing. I ate a second because the first hadn’t tasted like anything and some animal part of me kept expecting the next one to. It didn’t. I left the rest.
The phone buzzed again. I let it go two rings while I worked out I was going to answer this one. Then I turned it over and understood why.
REID. Constable Jordan Reid, our dear rookie.
I picked up.
“Carlson.”
“Detective.” Fast, bright, breath high in the line. “Hey. Where are you?”
I got the answer out through a mouth the whiskey had loosened in the wrong places. “Conroy’s. Some bar.”
Wind on his end. Footsteps. Traffic. He was on a sidewalk somewhere, already moving.
“You drunk?”
“Working on it.”
A pause. I heard him decide not to ask the obvious next thing. “Stay there,” he said. “I’m coming. Twenty minutes. Don’t move.”
He was gone before I could tell him not to bother.
I laid the phone face-up and watched the light drain out of the screen.
I hadn’t asked him to come. I’d told him where I was and let him decide.
Close enough. He’d come through that door, find me like this, and not say a word about it.
That was Reid. Twenty-three, three months out of college, with a crush sitting plain on his face every time he set a coffee on my desk I hadn’t asked for.
I thought about the others I could have called and hadn’t.
The women whose numbers were still in the phone, any one of whom would have come, none of whom would have looked at me and seen anything I didn’t show them.
My uncle’s office, where someone was waiting up to take my call the second I made it.
The Inspector, who’d have come too, and asked the right questions, the ones I couldn’t answer tonight.
I’d let all of them ring. I’d answered the kid.
None of it was anything I should have been putting to use tonight. I was going to put it to use anyway. A man who wants to believe the best of you is worth a great deal when you’ve run clean out of better options. I’d run out around the second whiskey.
The clock over the door said a quarter to ten.
Twenty minutes. I started counting them down without deciding to, the way you watch a kettle.
The counting gave the night a shape it hadn’t had since the bench by the water.
Something coming. A door that would open and be the right one this time, or at least one I could walk through without learning anything new about myself.
I thought about what I’d tell him. Not the truth.
The truth was back at the apartment on a kitchen floor and it wasn’t getting in a cab with anybody.
The desk duty would do. That part was real, and bad enough on its own to put a man on a stool on a weeknight with no wallet and a taped finger.
I could let Reid think the benching was all of it. He’d believe me. He’d want to.
I picked the phone back up and opened the contacts.
My thumb went where it always went. I didn’t watch it go. I kept my eyes on the gauze and the grain of the bar, and I knew without looking which name it had come to rest on, the way you know a stair is there in the dark before your foot finds it.
I didn’t look down.
I held there until the pad of my thumb went numb against the glass.
I let myself think for one second about what the tap would do.
A line opening. A long ring somewhere in the apartment, on a counter or down on the floor beside a man cleaning up what I’d left.
He’d see it. He’d answer, or he’d let it ring out, and either way I’d learn something about how he’d looked at me when I broke and ran.
I didn’t have it in me tonight to find out it had been the wrong thing.
It was easier not to know. A coward’s kind of easier. I took it.
I closed the contacts and turned the phone face-down.
The drink in front of me was the fifth, or the sixth. I’d lost the count around the unknown number, and losing it was the only thing all night that had gone the way I wanted.
The door opened and my chest jumped before I could stop it.
For one stupid half-second I let it be him, broad in the doorway, come after me anyway.
It was a woman in a red coat with a small dog on a lead, scanning past me for someone who wasn’t there.
Then the dog towed her back out and the cold went with her and the door fell shut.
The disappointment went through me sharp and unearned.
I made the next one last. The water glass was still there, sweating a ring onto the wood. I picked it up this time. Drank half of it. Pat clocked it from down the bar and didn’t say anything, which was its own kind of saying something.
The two men settled their argument or gave up on it.
One laughed at something on his phone. The other watched the loop in the corner with the flat patience of a man with nowhere better to put his eyes.
Pat racked clean glasses to drain and hung his towel over his shoulder.
The hockey ran, the same goal going in against a goalie who never learned.
A quarter to ten became ten.
Reid was out there on a sidewalk, walking the fast walk of a young man who’s decided to be useful.
The Inspector’s name sat unanswered in my phone.
Behind it the family. Behind all of it the one name I’d come to and not called, back at the apartment, on the other side of a door I’d shut myself.
I’d answered the kid and let the rest of them ring.
I couldn’t have told you why if you’d pressed my hand flat to the bar and made me.
The order had been mine to set. I’d set it without quite deciding it.
I’d live inside the shape of it in the morning.
I watched the door of Conroy’s and waited for it to be the wrong man.