Chapter 16 Out Loud
Ryan
The kettle had gone cold twice.
I’d boiled it the first time out of habit, the way you do something with your hands when the rest of you has nowhere to go.
Then I’d forgotten it. Boiled it again. Forgotten it again.
Now it sat there ticking as it cooled, and I stood at the counter in a flat that was too quiet, listening for the street door three floors down.
Murphy’s call had come at quarter past ten.
He’s all right. That was the first thing the Inspector had said, before hello, because he knew me well enough to know what I’d do with a silent second. He’s all right, Carlson. He’s at St. Michael’s. He’s going to be fine.
And then nothing useful for the rest of it.
I’d been at Conroy’s when the first call came, the one that put me out the door at a run.
By the time I’d got to the hospital they had him somewhere I wasn’t allowed, and Murphy was standing in the corridor like a man set there to be a wall, and every question I put to him came back sanded down to nothing.
An assault. On the way home. They were looking into it.
He’d be kept a couple of hours and released.
Go home, Carlson. Get some sleep. He’ll be along.
Go home. As if I were nobody.
I’d gone home because the only other option was standing in a corridor being managed, and I have enough pride left to refuse to be managed in public.
So I waited.
And the thing about waiting, when you’ve spent years doing this job, is that you can’t switch off the part of you that reads a room.
The part that knows when a story has a seam in it.
And this one had a seam. Murphy didn’t go vague.
Murphy was the most precise man I’d ever worked under, a human lie detector who’d built his whole career on never saying a word more than the truth allowed.
And tonight he’d handed me fog. Deliberate, careful fog.
They’re looking into it. Who’s they. Looking into what.
A mugging gone wrong gets a report and a shrug, not the Staff Inspector standing personal guard at midnight.
Something was off. I couldn’t get my hand around it. It sat just past the edge of what I could see, the way a name sits on your tongue and won’t come, and the harder I reached the further it slid.
I gave up reaching and went back to listening for the door.
He came back at midnight.
Luke looked worse than Murphy’s fine and better than my worst hour of imagining, which is to say he looked like a man who almost lost a fight.
There was a butterfly strip over his eyebrow, on the old scar side, the cut under it gone dark.
His lip was split at the corner. One side of his face had the beginnings of a bruise that would be spectacular by morning.
He held himself stiff down the left, an arm kept close, and he came up the last step slow and even, governing it.
But he was upright. He was walking. He was here.
“Luke.”
“Don’t,” he said, before I’d got anything else out. Not unkind. Just tired down to the floor. “I’m fine.”
I stepped back to let him in, and the relief and the fury arrived in me at the exact same second, braided so tight I couldn’t have pulled one from the other, and I didn’t trust my voice, so I just got out of his way and shut the door behind him.
He stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked at it like he was glad to be standing in it and wasn’t going to say so.
“Sit down,” I said. “Sit down before you fall down. What do you need. Ice. You need ice, the freezer’s got that bag of peas. Have you eaten? They don’t feed you in those places.”
“Ryan.”
“What did the doctor say. The actual words.”
He almost smiled. It pulled at the split lip and he stopped.
“The actual words,” he said. “Bruising. Nothing broken. Nothing torn. Take it easy a few days. Painkillers if I want them, which I don’t.
” He lowered himself onto the kitchen chair like a man twice his age, and the careful way he did it gave the lie to the take it easy a few days being nothing.
“That’s the lot. I’m sore. I’m not hurt. ”
“You’re gray.”
“It’s artificial light and a long night. I’ll be gray till I sleep it off.” He set his good hand flat on the table. “I’m fine, Ryan. I promise you I’m fine.”
I got the peas out of the freezer because I needed my hands again. Wrapped them in a tea towel. Set them down by his arm. He looked at the little green bundle and at me and something moved behind his face, there and gone, the thing he did when a kindness landed somewhere it wasn’t braced for.
“What happened,” I said.
And I watched it close.
It was the smallest thing. A man who isn’t trained would have missed it.
The eyes went level, the jaw set a half-degree, the whole face composing itself into a surface with nothing on it.
I’d seen him do it across a hundred interview tables to people who wanted things from him. I had never once had it done to me.
“Three thugs,” he said. “On the way back. It was over fast.”
“Three of them.”
“It happens. Wrong street, wrong hour.”
“What did they take.”
A beat. Half a second. But I was looking right at it, and I caught the half-second land.
“Does it matter.”
“What did they take, Luke.”
“Nothing worth chasing.”
Which is not an answer, and we both knew it was not an answer, and he let it sit there being not an answer and looked at me steady, daring me, almost, to make it into the thing it was.
“Your wallet,” I said. “Your phone. They’re in your coat. I can see the shape of them from here. Three men put you on the ground and didn’t take your wallet or your phone.”
“Ryan.”
“That’s not a mugging. You know it’s not a mugging.
I know it’s not a mugging. Murphy knows it’s not a mugging, which is why Murphy stood in that corridor and lied to me with his mouth shut for forty minutes while you were being treated.
” The thing past the edge of my sight slid closer and still wouldn’t come into focus, and the not-knowing was a hand at my throat. “What is this. What is it actually.”
“Leave it,” he said.
Quiet. Final. The door pulled all the way shut.
He got up. Steadied a second on the back of the chair.
Then he started for the hall, unbuttoning his shirt as he went, slow, one button at a time with the hand that worked, and I understood he was done.
The conversation was over because he had decided it was over, the way his bedroom door used to close in the first weeks, no slam and no whisper, a man ending a thing on the far side of it.
“I want a shower,” he said, to the hall, not to me. “I’ve got half the road on me.”
And he just walked away from it.
That was the thing that did it. Not the shutting down. The walking away mid-sentence, mine, like I was weather he could step out of.
“No,” I said, and went after him.
He’d got the shirt off by the bathroom door.
I saw his back before he turned the light on, and it stopped the breath in me.
A bruise the size of a dinner plate coming up dark over his ribs on the left.
A scrape down one shoulder blade, road rash, cleaned but raw.
The whole long muscled length of him marked like he’d been dragged, which, I understood with a lurch, he probably had.
“Luke.”
“It looks worse than it is.”
“It looks like three men tried to take you apart. Why?”
He didn’t answer. He reached into the shower and turned it on and stood waiting for it to run warm, his back to me, and I stood in the doorway of that cramped off-white room with its hospital-green tiles and I felt the whole night come up my spine at once.
“You don’t get to do this,” I said. “You don’t get to come home looking like that and say it happens and walk into the shower like I’m not standing here.”
He tested the water with his good hand and stepped into the shower. Pulled the curtain half across. The water changed sound as it hit him. Nothing. Just water.
The water ran. The steam climbed. My heart was going like I’d run the eight blocks again.
“I care what happens to you. Do you understand that?” My voice cracked and I let it crack.
“I’ve been out of my mind, Luke. I sat in that kitchen and I couldn’t get a full breath, because nobody would tell me anything and I didn’t know if you were okay.
That’s not nothing. That’s not a colleague.
” I was nearly shouting now and I couldn’t get under it.
“I worry about you all the time. I can’t shut it off. I worry about you because I love you.”
The word was out before I’d cleared it for takeoff.
It just left me so suddenly, I almost didn’t realize it.
The water shut off.
Time did a strange thing. It stopped, and went very loud in the stopping, the drip off the showerhead suddenly the largest sound in the world.
The curtain pulled back.
Luke turned around. Water running off him, off the dark bruise and the raw shoulder and all of it, his hair flat to his head, and on his face an expression I had never seen there in all the months of reading him. Stunned. Wide open.
I stood there with my hand still half raised from the shouting and felt the blood go out of my face.
“I” was as far as I got.
He moved fast for a man who’d told me he was stiff.
His hand came out of the shower and closed in the front of my shirt, and he pulled, and I went, no resistance in me at all, over the lip of the tub and into the water and into him, shoes and clothes and all, and his mouth came down on mine before I’d got my feet under me.
It wasn’t the careful kiss of a careful man.
It was the other thing. The thing all the carefulness had been holding back.
His hand slid up into my hair and held my head where he wanted it and he kissed me like he’d been keeping it in a locked drawer for months and the lock had finally given, and the water came down over both of us, and I made a sound into his mouth I didn’t know I had in me.