Chapter 21 Tox — Ii
He listened the way he listens, which is completely, the good ear turned to me, saying nothing until I was done.
“You’re reading a curve,” he said.
“I’m not reading anything. I’m out.”
“You’re reading an escalation curve, Sergeant.
You just briefed me on it for ten minutes flat with zero flutter and correct terminology and you told me the target set and the probable next window.
” He set his cup down. “That’s not a woman who’s out.
That’s a woman on a job who hasn’t admitted she’s on it. ”
“I made a box safe and went home. That’s not a job. That’s a bad habit.”
“Whose block is it.”
“Don’t.”
“Whose block, Birdie.” He waited. “You said the kid. Theo. You teach him where the wind goes?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. He’s known me eight years. He watched my face do the thing my face does about Theo, and he nodded slow, like a man confirming a reading on an instrument.
“Here’s what I know,” Tox said. “I know that whoever’s doing this is getting better and braver, and that’s the worst combination there is, because better means fewer mistakes and braver means less to lose, and the two of those going up at the same time is how somebody gets killed who wasn’t even the point.
And I know that you are, almost certainly, the only human being within fifty miles of that river who can look at what this guy’s building and know what it wants before it does it.
” He let that sit. “You’re not out because you left the Army, Birdie.
You’re out because you decided you’re not allowed anymore.
Those aren’t the same thing and you know it. ”
“I got somebody hurt, Tox.” My voice cracked on it, the old crack, three years old and fresh as a cut. “I was the calm one and I read it wrong and a kid lost a leg. You were there. You know I —”
“I know you flagged the secondary,” he said, quiet, and hard, and true, “and got overruled by a captain in a hurry, and went in anyway because you weren’t going to let the rest of us go without you.
I know you carried Ellis out yourself. I know he calls you every year on the day.
Not to blame you, Sergeant. To thank you.
You just hang up before he can finish, every year, because you’ve decided the story and you won’t let anybody, including the guy who was there, tell you a different one.
” He reached over and put the good hand flat on my shoulder, heavy, warm.
“You’re not scared you’ll fail. You’re scared you won’t.
You’re scared you’ll be good at it again and it’ll matter again and somebody’s life will be in your hands again and you’d rather sell drawer pulls. ”
I looked out at his dark fields for a long time. The cicadas here are the same as Halford’s. The whole state is one long August at night.
“I can’t get involved,” I said, finally, and heard how it sounded, and hated it. “There’s a marshal. Calder. He’s good. Really good. He’s already halfway onto me, he watches me like it’s his job, which it is. If I get involved I get seen. And if I get seen —”
“You’d have to be who you are.”
“I’d have to be who I was.”
“Same woman,” Tox said. “You just took her name off the door.” He whistled Biscuit up onto the porch and heaved himself standing on the sticks and looked down at me, and he wasn’t gentle anymore, he was my team leader.
“Go home. Do whatever you’re going to do, which we both know is keep patrolling that block till you drop, because you already are.
But quit telling yourself you’re out. You’re not out.
You’re just working without a team and without permission and without letting one single person help you carry it, which, I’ll remind you, is the exact thing that goes wrong, every time, in this line of work.
You taught me that. Mother.” He almost never uses the callsign.
He used it. “Don’t do the thing you spent eight years telling boys not to do. Don’t be the only one who knows.”
I hugged him hard enough to feel him wobble on the sticks and I got in my car and I drove two hours south and somewhere around the third exit the flutter went back on like a wet coat, and I let it, and by the time I hit Halford I was Birdie Vance again, hopeless and jumpy and beloved, and lying to everyone, most of all me.