Chapter 32 What I Used to Be — Ii
I looked at those hands, folded on her arms, still now. I believed her the way you believe the ground.
“The pour pattern on Larch,” I said. “First fire. You made us at the curb. You called it before we did.”
“I smelled it a block off.” She almost smiled. “I’ve been not-saying that for two months and it’s been eating me alive.”
The kettle went. She made two cups without asking how I took it and set mine down black, which is how I take it, and I decided not to ask how she knew that, because I already understood she’d clocked it the first time I drank coffee at a scene, and I was going to have to get used to being read by someone whose whole life had been reading.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” she repeated, warier.
“Here’s my face not doing anything.” I drank the tea.
It was very good tea. “You’ve been cleaning up after him.
The Larch fire, the rec center thing everybody’s still confused about, the device by Ren’s that turned up already dead.
That was you, quietly, ahead of me, every time, and you ran before I got there because you cannot be seen doing it. ”
“Yes.”
“Why can’t you be seen doing it?”
And there it was, the one place her steadiness cracked, a hairline, quick. She looked at the photograph turned toward the wall.
“That’s a longer conversation,” she said, “and it’s not tonight’s.
Tonight’s is: I know what he’s doing and you don’t, not all of it, and you have jurisdiction and a badge and I have neither, and George Ostrander is in a hospital bed because two experts have been loose in your town for months and neither of us has been able to work in the light.
So.” She sat down across from me. Her knee was almost against mine under the small table. “I’m proposing we stop that.”
“Proposing what, exactly.”
“That you keep knowing what I am,” she said, “and don’t put it in a file.
And that I stop cleaning up in the dark and start telling you what I see.
You bring the badge. I read the devices.
Nobody in this town ever hears the word ‘sergeant’ out of your mouth.
” She swallowed. “I need you to understand what I’m asking.
I’ve spent three years making sure not one person in Halford could hand me anything that mattered.
And I’m handing you the whole thing and asking you to hold it and not drop it, and I don’t do that. I have not done that since I got here.”
I sat with it. The rain, the gutter, the good tea, a photograph she couldn’t look at straight.
“When you moved the crowd at Larch,” I said, “before anybody told you to. Were you scared?”
She blinked. It wasn’t the question she was braced for.
“I’m scared all the time,” she said. “I was terrified. That part’s not the act. That part was never the act.”
“Then you’re the only witness I’ve had in nine years who was scared and got it exactly right anyway,” I said. “That’s not a liability. That’s the whole job.” I put my hand out across the table, flat, an offer, not a grab. “I keep it. I don’t drop it. Partners.”
She looked at my open hand like it might go off. Reading it. Then she put hers in it, and her grip was dry and sure and it did not shake at all, and for one second neither of us let go, and the little kitchen got warm in a way the kettle hadn’t managed.
“For the record,” she said, taking her hand back and wrapping it around her cup, “I still apologize to doors. That’s not going anywhere. I’ve been doing it three years, it’s load-bearing now.”
“Wouldn’t dream of taking it from you,” I said, and she laughed, surprised, the first real one I’d ever heard out of her, low and startled, and I thought: there she is. That’s the sound. That’s the woman under all of it.
She drank her tea and studied me over the rim of the cup, and I let her, because I’d figured out already that letting Birdie Vance look at you long enough was how you earned anything with her.
“You’re not going to ask,” she said.
“Ask what.”
“Everybody asks. The ones who find out. They ask what the worst thing I ever saw was, or whether I killed anybody, which, no, the entire point of my old job was that nobody dies, and they never believe that part, they want it to be a war movie.” She set the cup down.
“You didn’t ask. You asked if I was scared when I moved the crowd. ”
“That was the only part I needed,” I said. “The rest is yours to keep.”
She was quiet a second. Then she nodded, once, a small businesslike nod I’d see a lot in the weeks after, the nod she gave a thing when she’d decided to trust it.
“Okay, partner,” she said. “Then let me tell you what I already know about the man who did this, and you’re going to want to write some of it down after all.”