23. The Kiss
The Kiss
WYATT
Andy came for dinner the next night. And the night after that. And every night after that.
The evenings were different after the camping trip. Andy stayed longer, laughed easier, let Birdie curl into her side on the couch.
On the nights Andy was working late, the house was quieter than it used to be. I'd catch myself listening for the door, waiting for her boots on the porch steps, and when the sound didn't come, it felt like something was missing.
"Is Andy coming?" Birdie would ask, every time the chair was empty. Like the evening couldn't start until she walked through the door.
On the days Andy was off and I was on shift, Barb took Birdie across the street to get her. I'd come home the next morning and Birdie would tell me everything. What Andy made for dinner, what they watched, how Andy let her stay up ten minutes past bedtime. She reported it like a debrief.
Some nights after Birdie was asleep and the house was quiet, I'd sit on the couch and wonder how long it would last. Whether one evening she'd stop showing up, because the good things in my life had a pattern of not lasting.
My father left. Lillian was taken from me.
And this was starting to feel like something I couldn't afford to lose.
But I'd sit there thinking about it anyway.
Whether there was something I could say, something I could do, that would turn the fourth plate into a real place at the table.
The call came in just before noon. Gas leak at a strip mall off Sahara.
The restaurant owner had smelled it before opening, called it in, and we had the block evacuated within fifteen minutes.
Standard procedure. Establish the perimeter, wait for Southwest Gas, keep everyone back until the readings clear.
Sergeant Elliot Handler showed up twenty minutes in with two units for traffic control. I was on the east side of the perimeter, directing a couple of restaurant employees to the staging area across the street, when he walked up to me.
"Pull the tape back thirty feet."
"We haven't cleared that zone yet, Sergeant."
"You've got the source isolated. There's no reason to keep the whole block shut down." He was already waving a delivery truck through. "I've got businesses losing money."
"We don't have readings back on the adjacent units."
"Then get your readings faster."
He walked past me to his officers and told them to adjust the barricade.
Our captain came over. Handler talked past him the same way he talked past everyone.
He addressed his own officers, reopened the lane, and treated the conversation like it was already over.
Captain Thompson radioed dispatch to put the exchange on record.
Knox walked up after Handler left.
"What did Hollywood want?"
"Shrink the perimeter before we have readings back."
Knox watched Handler's cruiser for a second. Then he shook his head and turned back to the scene.
Andy had told me enough about what it was like working under him. Every department had guys like Handler. Firefighters got the same thing. One guy who cuts corners or freezes on a call, and suddenly every crew in the city is answering for it.
But at least our problems stayed in the house.
A cop like Handler had a badge and an audience.
Every time he pulled rank or talked past someone or treated a scene like his personal stage, he was telling the public exactly what kind of department they were paying for.
And the officers who did it right, the ones who didn't have the rank to push back, had to carry that weight on top of their own.
I turned back to the perimeter and went to work.
Birdie had been losing the fight with sleep for the last twenty minutes. Her head kept dipping forward every few seconds, snapping back up like she thought nobody noticed. The cartoon was still going. She hadn't followed the plot in at least two episodes.
"Bird," I said. "You want to head to bed?"
"Five more minutes."
Her eyes were already closing. She leaned sideways and caught herself with one hand on the carpet.
Barb put her book down and stood up from the armchair. "Alright, sweetheart. Let's head off to bed."
"But I'm not tired."
"You're falling asleep on the floor."
"I'm resting my eyes."
Barb scooped her up. Birdie's protest lasted about three seconds before her head dropped against Barb's shoulder.
"Night, Birdie," Andy called after them.
Birdie lifted one hand off Barb's back and waved without opening her eyes.
Andy and I listened to Barb's footsteps disappear down the hall. The bedroom door closed. Then it was just us.
She flipped the TV to the news, turned the volume down, and leaned into the arm of the couch. I wasn't watching. My arm was resting on the back of the couch and her braid was right there, the end of it brushing against my knuckles every time she shifted.
On the screen, the segment changed. A reporter standing in front of an apartment building, yellow tape in the background, talking about a string of unsolved break-ins.
And then there was Handler, badge on camera, standing in front of the lens like he'd been waiting for it.
Giving a statement about the department's active investigation, the steps being taken, the assurance that the community was safe.
"Handler shrunk our perimeter on a gas leak the other day before we even had readings back." I nodded at the screen. "And now he's on TV like he runs the department."
Andy's jaw set. She turned back to the screen and didn't say anything.
"You okay?"
She didn't answer right away. Handler's voice was still coming through the speakers.
"Can I tell you something?" she asked.
She was sitting with her knees pulled up, her arms wrapped around them, chin resting on top. She was looking at the screen, but she wasn't watching it anymore. Her fingers were picking at a loose thread on the knee of her jeans and her shoulders had drawn in.
I shifted on the couch to face her, pulled my arm down from the back.
"Anything."
She looked at me.
"Handler and I dated for four years."
I stared at her. "You're serious?"
"We did."
Four years. Andy Walsh spent four years with that guy?
"He's the reason I moved across the street. We broke up."
She told me everything. That he was her field training officer. That he asked her out the day the program ended. That he asked her to keep the relationship a secret the whole time.
"About a year in, he told me he was going for sergeant.
He needed something big on his record to stand out.
" She stopped picking at the thread. "He'd been tracking something on his beat for months.
Drug activity. He was trying to build it into something big enough to get noticed, but he couldn't put the pieces together.
He'd come home and talk about it. What he was seeing, who kept showing up, what didn't add up.
One night I noticed a connection he'd been missing.
Something in the pattern that tied everything together.
After that, the whole thing came together.
It turned into the bust that got him promoted. "
The night she told me about the colleague who took credit for her work. "I helped that guy get where he is," she'd said, and shook her head like there was more she wasn't saying. I thought she was talking about a bad sergeant. She was talking about the man she'd been seeing for four years.
"When he made sergeant, he told me he couldn't have done it without me." She paused. "I was proud of what we'd accomplished together. I didn't care that my name was never on the report. I didn't need anyone to know. Knowing that we were building something together was enough for me."
Four years. Andy loved this man for four years, helped him build his career, and never once thought she deserved anything for it.
"After that, he changed. Any time another cop came to me for my opinion on something, he'd lose it. At first I thought it was jealousy. Like he didn't want other men around his girlfriend." She stopped. "Looking back, I don't think that's what it was."
She pressed her lips together. Her fingers stopped on the thread. She held still for a second, like she was bracing.
"He cheated on me with a woman named Kim. I know because she texted me a few weeks after we broke up to apologize. She knew the whole time that Elliot and I were together and she still saw him anyway."
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
I moved closer and put my arm around her. She didn't pull away. She leaned into me, her forehead against my shoulder. I felt the full weight of her settle against my body like she'd been holding herself up for a long time and had just decided to stop.
"Did you text her back?"
She shook her head against my shoulder. "She can have him."
"But what hurt the most wasn't that he cheated on me." Her voice cracked. "It's what he said after."
Her thumb pressed into her own palm, slow and hard, like she was holding herself in place.
"He turned it around on me. Said the only reason guys at the precinct came to my desk was because I was sleeping with them.
Every detective who asked for my read, every officer who came to me for advice.
He said that's what it was. Four years of me taking the job seriously and he reduced it to that. "
I already didn't think much of Elliot Handler. Now I knew for sure. Whatever small chance he had of ever earning my respect died on that couch.
"As if I didn't already have enough reason to want to punch him." It came out before I thought about it.
She laughed. Small, wet, half-buried in my shoulder. But it was a laugh.
We sat like that for a while. The news had moved on to something else, the volume low enough that I couldn't make out the words anymore.
"I hate myself for it," she said. "But sometimes I still think about the man he used to be. Not whoever the hell he is now."
She was quiet for a second.
"Do you miss her?" she asked. "Your wife?"