Chapter 4 The Long Way Home
Luke
Court took the whole day. The Micallef trial, an armed-robbery file from two years back when I still worked alone.
I was the detective of record, so it was mine to sit through, and I sat through it.
Forty minutes on the stand and five hours of hallway.
The defense spent his forty minutes asking me the same three questions in different orders.
I gave him the same three answers in the same order every time, and eventually the Crown said I could go.
Nobody tells you that the talking is the exhausting part of a day like that, all of it, the stand and the hallway and the small polite exchanges with lawyers by the elevator.
Ryan can do eight hours of that and come out the other end with new friends.
I came out the other end wanting to not say words for a week.
Ryan had texted twice from the division. The first said the vending machine had eaten his loonie and that he wanted it on the record that he died as he lived. The second was about dinner. I grinned at the first and answered the second one.
By the time they let me go, the rain had settled in for the night. I drove back east with the wipers on high and the streetlights coming on early, and I wanted exactly two things: to hand in the pool car and to go home to Ryan.
Chen called when I was five minutes out.
“Where are you?”
“Coming up Front.”
“Good. Sergeant Wright’s broken down. Shuter Street, off Parliament. The tow gave him a forty-minute wait, and I’ve got nothing to send but scout cars. Pick him up and bring him in.”
There was a second where I didn’t say anything.
“Hawley?”
“I’m turning around,” I said, and turned around.
It wasn’t a big thing. That’s what I told myself at the light.
A colleague was standing in the rain next to a dead car, and I was six blocks away with a live one.
There was no way to say no that wouldn’t have needed explaining.
Colleagues get picked up. I’d spent two weeks deciding the past was going to stay the past, and this was just that decision, in the rain.
He was at the curb on Shuter with the hood up. No umbrella, soaked through the shoulders, not doing anything about it. His own car, a gray sedan a few years old, civilian plates. They hadn’t assigned him an unmarked yet; it seemed he’d been running his own in the meantime.
I pulled in behind him and got out into the rain.
“It turned over twice this morning,” he said, instead of hello. “Then nothing. Now it won’t even try.”
“Battery?”
“It’s ten months old.”
We bent under the hood together anyway, rain coming off the metal, and I turned the key while he watched the engine, and we got one click and then not even the click.
Dead. He shut the hood, took a canvas bag off the back seat, and got into my passenger side.
I got in after him and the doors closed.
We hadn’t been alone, the two of us and a shut door, since the night he ended it. Neither of us said so. The wipers went. I put the car in gear.
For the first while nobody talked. The radio was off and I left it off, and then I wondered whether leaving it off said something, and turned it on low, and it was the traffic report, which said rain.
He looked out his window. I drove. Years ago, we could sit in a car for an hour without a word and it was comfortable. This was the other kind of quiet.
He broke it on procedure, which was the right call.
“Thanks for this. I’m guessing Chen didn’t give you a choice.”
“She gave me one. It had paperwork on the other side of it.”
He laughed, once, easy, and some of the weight went out of the car.
We did the small things after that. Left the keys for the tow company in the gas cap and would meet them at a repair shop in Scarborough tomorrow.
The car had never done this before. He’d had it two years and was rethinking the whole relationship.
He was dripping on my passenger seat and apologized for it, and I told him the seat had survived worse, and he said he didn’t doubt it, this being a pool car, and named the two worst things he’d ever seen happen in one, both of which I’d also seen, one of which I’d cleaned up.
The windows started to fog, and I put the defrost on.
It was ordinary. Two cops in a car in the rain, complaining about fleet vehicles.
If you had watched us from the sidewalk you’d have seen nothing at all.
“What were you doing down this end?” I said.
“Headquarters. Transfer paperwork, the benefits thing. Two hours for four signatures.” He tipped his head back against the rest. “So now I sign out at the division, and then I’ll call a cab.”
The light at Queen went green and the rain came across the windshield in a sheet when I turned. A cab, in this, at this hour, could be an hour coming.
“Where are you living?”
“Pape. North of the Danforth.”
“I’ll run you up after,” I said. “It’s filthy out. No sense standing at the door waiting for a cab.”
He looked over at me. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then thank you. For twice in one night.” And he left it there. He didn’t make it into more than it was, and that made it simple, and I noticed that everything with him lately was easy. I was starting to forget it had ever been anything else.
At the division he was in and out in ten minutes, the canvas bag in and back out with him, a signature left somewhere. Through the glass doors I watched him stop to say something to the night-desk constable that made her laugh, and keep moving without waiting to enjoy it.
He came out with his collar up, dropped into the seat, and brought the cold in with him.
“Last leg,” he said. “I owe you a coffee at minimum.”
“You owe me nothing. It wasn’t trouble at all.”
The drive up to Pape was twenty minutes in weather like that. It took us thirty, and somewhere in the middle of it I stopped minding.
It started with names. He asked what had happened to Marchetti, who used to run the evidence room and made you sign for staples, and I told him Marchetti had retired to Wasaga Beach and came back once a year to complain about how the room was run now.
He asked whether Delorme’s daughter had made the OPP, because Delorme had wanted that more than he’d ever wanted anything for himself.
I said she had, two years ago. He said good, quietly, like it mattered to him, and I believed that it did.
That was always the thing with him. He remembered what people wanted.
“What was it like out there,” I said. “The other division.”
He took a second. “Quiet. Good people. Smaller board.” A shrug I caught at the edge of my eye. “Nobody knew me. Plenty of work.”
Then it was cases. The bail jumper who hid in the ceiling of his mother’s laundromat and came down on his own at the smell of her cooking.
The landlord on Sackville who reported the same tenant for the same thing every full moon, only ever the full moon.
I heard myself laughing in the closed car. It startled me.
“Is Murphy still not watering that plant,” he said, somewhere along Broadview.
“It’s the same plant.”
“It can’t be the same plant.”
“Nobody has ever seen him water it, and it has never finished dying. Reid has a theory it’s plastic. Chen says she checked once, and it isn’t, and everybody stopped asking questions after that.”
He laughed at the whole picture of it, the plant, Reid’s theory, Chen checking, and I heard how much of the division he already had.
“You still write plate numbers on your wrist,” he said, at some point.
“When the notebook’s in the wrong pocket.”
“It took me most of a year out there to stop looking left,” he said. He said it flat. “Passenger side. Wherever you were. Partner habits.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t find one that was safe to give.
“We were a good team, once,” he said to the windshield. “Whatever else. That part was real.”
He let it lie there. So, did I. The wipers went.
It was hard to stay careful across thirty minutes of that, and I knew it while it was happening, which was not the same thing as being able to stop it.
Part of it was the ease. Part of it was older.
I had spent years believing that some of what happened to him was mine to carry, and I had never been any good at staying guarded against a man I thought I owed, a man I had loved.
The rain made the car small. It had been years since the two of us were anywhere this small together, and it was pleasant, and it should not have been pleasant, and both of those stayed true the whole way up.
The heat in the pool car had never really gotten ahead of the rain. My hands were cold on the wheel. I hadn’t said so. I hadn’t especially noticed it myself, past the general cold.
He was in the middle of a sentence when he reached over, without looking at me and without stopping talking, and turned the vent on my side so the heat came at my hands instead of at him.
He kept talking. The pound, the keys, the forms. The work.
I stopped hearing any of it.
He used to do that. Once, years ago, outside a building on a warrant that never came, at the coldest end of the night, without a word and without looking. And now he’d done it again, in the middle of a sentence about a tow pound. The same gesture. The same hand.
Or it was only a decent man who had turned a vent.
It was a cold night. Anyone who had ever sat in a cold car with another person had turned a vent.
He hadn’t paused to see whether it landed.
There was nothing in it, or there was everything in it, and there was no way to know which.
I had never in my life been comfortable with a thing I couldn’t rule in or out.