11. Sofia
SOFIA
The coffee shop sat two blocks from the precinct, close enough that Callahan could walk it in the rain without ruining his shoes, far enough that nobody from either building ever wandered in by accident.
He had a table in the back already, two cups untouched, a folder closed under his elbow like it might try to escape.
"You look tired," he said, no hello, which was as close to a greeting as I ever got from him anymore.
"Try the week I had."
"I heard. Fire at a warehouse two piers down from your terminal." He slid a cup toward me, still steaming, black, exactly how I'd been drinking it since I was old enough to need it. "Walk me through it."
I gave him the version I had built on the drive over, small and careful, sanded down at every edge that mattered.
"A container fire. Contained within the hour. One worker treated for smoke inhalation and released the same night."
"That's it?"
"It is."
Callahan studied me the way he studied everything, patient and flat, waiting to see if the silence would pull anything else out of me. It didn't, because I had rehearsed the silence too.
"No word on cause?"
"Electrical, probably. Old wiring near a loading dock nobody's updated since the eighties." The lie came out smooth, no hitch in it anywhere, and some small, disgusted part of me noted exactly how easy that had been.
"Huh." He turned his cup a quarter turn without drinking from it. "That's not what I heard from the fire department's incident log."
My pulse did something unhelpful, the same unhelpful thing it always did lately, though I kept my face steady enough that he wouldn't see it.
"What did you hear?"
"Arson. Accelerant at two points. A pin left at the scene that somebody in gang intelligence is very interested in." He watched me while he said it, unhurried, giving the words room to land. "You want to try that answer again?"
I could have told him everything.
It would have meant giving him Doyle's name, the pin, the way Maxim had stood in front of a room full of frightened dock workers and promised them safety in a voice that hadn't once risen.
I could have given Callahan the whole shape of the war I'd watched catch fire in real time, and I would have handed him exactly the case he'd spent four years waiting for.
"There was some kind of dispute," I said instead. "A rival operation. Nothing I've got a name for yet."
"Reyes."
"I'm telling you what I actually know, Frank. I'm not sitting on gang intelligence, I'm sitting on rumors from a dock floor that hasn't stopped talking since it happened." Every word of it was half true, which somehow made it worse than a clean lie would have. "Give me time and I'll have a name."
He didn't believe me. I could see it in the set of his mouth, the stillness he wore when he'd decided not to push on something he knew he couldn't win yet, and he let it go anyway, which scared me more than if he'd called me a liar outright.
"Seventy-six days left," he said, standing, dropping bills on the table that didn't come close to covering either of our coffees. "I gave myself twenty minutes to decide whether you're protecting a source or protecting something else. I'm still deciding."
He left before I could answer that, which was becoming a habit of his I no longer found reassuring.
I sat there a long moment after he'd gone, turning the coffee cup in slow circles, hating how easily the smaller version of the truth had come out of me, hating more that some part of me had already been rehearsing it before he'd even asked the question.
I walked back toward my car with my collar up against a wind that hadn't been there an hour ago, and that was when I noticed the sedan parked across from the coffee shop, engine idling, two men inside who weren't pretending to drink coffee or read a newspaper, who weren't doing anything except watching the door I'd just walked out of.
I told myself it was nothing. Cops idled near precincts all the time, and Chicago had more unmarked cars per block than most cities had streetlights, though I'd seen that same sedan, or one built just like it, parked outside the terminal gate twice already this week.
I filed it away the way I filed away everything lately that didn't have an easy answer, and kept walking.
My phone buzzed before I'd made it three blocks, Nina's name lighting up the screen, all caps, no punctuation to speak of.
"OFF AT SEVEN. YOU AND ME. NO ARGUING."
"I have work in the morning," I typed back, already knowing it wouldn't save me.
"You have a face like you haven't smiled in a week," she wrote back. "Different priority tonight."
She wasn't wrong. I hadn't smiled the real kind in longer than I wanted to count, not since before the fire had turned Marcus's hands into something the hospital had to bandage and Maxim's voice into something I hadn't heard from him before.
I told her yes before I'd finished deciding, the same way I said yes to most things when Nina decided I needed rescuing from myself.
O'Malley's sat three blocks off the highway ramp, the kind of dive bar that had never once tried to be anything else, sticky floors and a karaoke machine older than both of us and a bartender who called every customer boss without bothering to check if it fit.
Nina ordered margaritas before I'd even claimed a stool, salt rims and all, and clinked her glass against mine hard enough to slosh some over the side.
"To surviving the week," she said. "Whatever's actually in it that you're not telling me."
"There's nothing I'm not telling you."
"Sure. Drink your lie juice."
I drank it anyway, and it tasted like limes and bad decisions, and for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, something in me finally started to loosen.
By the second round Nina had signed us both up for karaoke, a crime I hadn't consented to and fully intended to make her pay for later, and by the third I no longer cared, my voice cracking through a song I hadn't listened to since high school while half the bar cheered and the other half booed with real enthusiasm.
I laughed until my ribs hurt, actual laughter, the kind that had nothing to do with cover stories or careful editing or a debrief that had already gone sideways twice that day.
A margarita went over sideways somewhere around the fourth round, mine or Nina's, neither of us could agree whose glass had started the chain reaction, and we mopped it up with bar napkins while the bartender pretended not to notice and charged us for it anyway.
"Tequila," Nina announced somewhere past ten, sliding two shot glasses across the bar like she was dealing cards. "Three rounds. No negotiating."
"I have to be a functioning adult tomorrow."
"You have to be a functioning adult in eight hours. Right now you have to be my best friend having a good time." She pushed the first glass into my hand. "Drink."
I drank.
Three shots in, the room had gone soft and warm at the edges, Nina's laugh landing half a second delayed like the whole night was buffering, and somewhere in that golden haze my phone ended up in my hand instead of my pocket.
I didn't fully remember deciding to text him.
I remember deciding his eyes were unfair, an actual injustice, the kind of thing somebody should have to answer for in court, and I remember thinking that seemed like important information he needed immediately.
"your eyes are a crime," I typed, thumbs a full syllable slower than my thoughts. "like weaponized. how is that even legal. tell doyle im sorry for whatever he did to deserve you being mad at him, your face is too distracting to focus on the actual details"
I hit send before the part of me that still technically carried a badge could stop me.
The horror arrived about four seconds later, sharp and sobering in a way three tequila shots had no business allowing.
"Oh no," I said out loud, to nobody, to Nina, to the universe in general.
"What?" Nina leaned over my shoulder, read the screen, and made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a war cry. "You did not."
"I did."
"You called his eyes a crime."
"I'm aware of what I did, Nina."
She was still laughing when my phone buzzed back, one word, and I nearly dropped it trying to see the screen fast enough.
"Noted."
That was it. One word, no punctuation past the period, and somehow it undid me worse than a paragraph would have.
Twenty minutes later, give or take, the door opened, and the temperature of the whole bar seemed to drop enough that I sat up straight on a stool I'd been slouching on all night.
Maxim crossed the room like the sticky floor and bad lighting were simply beneath his notice, stone sober, jacket still buttoned, nothing about him suggesting he'd been anywhere near a bed at whatever hour this actually was.
"You drove here," I said, which was not what I meant to say, but tequila had apparently repossessed my filter along with my good judgment.
"I did."
"How did you even know where I was?"
Something flickered behind his eyes, gone before I could read it properly. "You told me. In your text. At length, about my eyes specifically."
"I did not put an address in that text."
"No," he agreed. "You didn't."
I looked past him, out through the front window, and there it was again, the same sedan, or one close enough to it that the difference no longer mattered, parked across the street with its engine running and two men inside who weren't doing anything except watching a door.
Nina, delighted beyond all reason, leaned across the bar to get a better look at him. "Oh, he's real. You said hot boss like it was an exaggeration."
"Nina."
"I'm just saying the file photo really did not do him justice." She patted my hand, entirely unhelpful and entirely pleased with herself. "This is romantic. This is the kind of thing they put in movies. He drove across the city because you texted him about his eyes."
"It's not romantic. It's the opposite of romantic." I looked at the sedan, then at him, then back at the two shot glasses still sitting empty in front of me. "Nina calls it romantic. My undercover brain calls it surveillance. We're both a little bit right."
Nina raised her glass to that like it was a toast, entirely missing how not-joking I actually was.
Maxim didn't argue with either interpretation. He held out a hand for my jacket, waited while I fought my arms into the sleeves with the coordination of a woman three tequilas past graceful, and settled the tab before I'd finished locating my other sleeve.
"I can get myself home."
"You can. You're choosing not to, because I'm already here and the walk to your car is longer than the walk to mine." He said it without heat, a fact laid down the way he laid down most things. "Say goodbye to Nina."
Nina hugged me hard enough to steal my breath, whispered something about texting her every detail in the morning, and waved us off with the smug satisfaction of a woman who considered her matchmaking work for the evening successfully completed.
The car ride passed mostly in silence, streetlights sliding across his profile at steady intervals, my head heavier than I wanted to admit against the window glass.
"Your eyes really aren't fair," I said at some point, apparently unable to let the subject die with any dignity. "For the record."
"Duly noted." A ghost of a smile, there and gone in the dark. "Go to sleep, Reyes."
I didn't remember much after that, just the careful way he walked me up to my door, waited until I'd gotten the key into the lock on the second try, and didn't come inside even though some reckless, loosened part of me might have let him if he'd asked.
He didn't ask. He just waited until the door clicked shut behind me, the way he'd waited outside a hundred doors before mine, protecting something or watching it, and I still hadn't decided which one described him better.
Lying in bed with the room tilting gently at the edges, I turned the whole night over in my head, the debrief and the lie that had come too easily, the sedan outside the coffee shop, the sedan outside the bar, a man who drove across the city at midnight because three tequila shots had made me honest about his eyes.
Nina thought it was romantic. Two months ago I would have called it exactly what my training taught me to call it, a target managing an asset, a man keeping his investment close enough to control.
I wasn't sure which one was true anymore.
Lying there in the dark with my pulse finally slowing and his voice still warm somewhere in my chest, I understood the real problem wasn't that I couldn't tell the difference.
It was that if someone made me choose between them, I wasn't sure which answer I'd give.