Chapter 15 And Now We Wait
Ryan
The date went on the canvass sheet wrong, off by a day, in my own handwriting, and my hand didn’t hesitate over it. Good. It had taken three tries at the kitchen table last night before it stopped hesitating.
I clipped the sheet into the Okafor file and sent the file across the gap between our desks. Luke took it without looking at me. His thumb ran the pages, stopped on the canvass, stayed there. He set the file down in the middle of the gap, open to the page, and squared it so the wrong date faced me.
“Check your dates,” he said. Loud enough for the row.
“The dates are fine.”
“The warrant says otherwise.”
“Then read the warrant again.” I turned back to my screen. “Slower this time.”
Three desks down, a page turned. Wright had been on the same report since we sat down, and the report had maybe six pages in it. Close enough to hear every word. The seat might as well have had his name taped to the back of it.
The whole thing had been my idea. Luke had stood in the kitchen this morning with his arms crossed and argued for the loud part, and I’d told him no, and then I’d told him why, and his jaw had done what it did when I was right and he hated it.
Wright had left that bar certain he’d won, and as long as he stayed certain, he’d wait.
The only thing that would make him move was Luke coming free of me.
Luke got the quiet part, the partner suffering without saying so, and I got the part where I wrecked the partnership in public.
The last thing Luke did before we left the apartment was put his hand on the back of my neck and hold it there. He said, “Whatever he says in there, whatever he does, you don’t put a hand on him. He’s not worth what it would cost you. Promise me that.”
I promised. I even meant it.
Chen’s typing stopped, two desks over. It started again a second later, faster than it needed to.
Luke held my eyes for a long moment, gave me the flat look he saves for interview rooms, and went back to his screen.
He was better at this than I’d expected him to be.
That bothered me more than I wanted it to, and I made myself stop thinking about it and reached for the next file.
The floor adjusted around us by mid-morning.
Nobody said anything, and everybody knew.
Reid quit walking past our desks. A court package that needed both our signatures got left on the corner of mine by a constable who was gone before I looked up.
A question that would have taken ten seconds out loud arrived by email from ten feet away.
Nobody wanted to stand in the space between us, so the space between us got wider, which was exactly what we needed it to do.
Reid cornered me at the coffee machine late in the morning. He kept his voice down and his eyes on the machine. “You two okay?”
“We’re fine.”
“You’re not fine. Whatever it is, take it off the floor. People are watching.”
“There’s nothing to watch,” I said, in the voice of a man lying badly, and he looked at me for a second, decided against saying anything else, and went back to his desk.
Good. Reid was decent, and I felt bad lying to him, but if Reid believed it, everyone would.
Nobody on that floor needed the story explained to them.
Every one of them had watched a partnership die before.
They saw what it looked like and filled in the rest themselves.
Everything they came up with was wrong, and all of it helped.
The only true thing on that whole floor was Luke’s left hand.
He kept it flat on the desk beside his keyboard, not moving, the knuckle standing up pale, and I knew what keeping it still was costing him.
I knew because I was doing the same thing with my voice.
Every time I sharpened it at him, I hated it, and I did it again anyway.
He took it without looking at me. We’d both pay for the day later, at home, where it was allowed.
Murphy’s door stayed shut all day, and that was the arrangement.
I’d sent him the update the night before, from the kitchen table, three lines from the account he’d told me to use.
Front starts tomorrow. The file is live.
No contact on the floor unless something breaks.
He’d answered in ten minutes with one word.
Understood. His people were already sitting on the records system, and had been since the Okafor file went live.
If any login other than mine or Luke’s opened that file, they’d have the login, the terminal, the exact field touched, and the exact time it was touched.
Nobody was going to lead Wright to it. Nobody was going to so much as look in his direction.
The file just sat there, clean and reachable, like all the other case files, and what happened next would be his own hand or nothing.
Murphy had been clear about that from the start. It only counts if he does it himself.
The afternoon was the hard part. Not the fighting. Not being able to touch him.
I hadn’t understood how much of us happened in passing until we shut it off, even temporarily.
He refilled my coffee when he got his own.
I straightened the jacket on the back of his chair when I walked by, because it bothered me and it didn’t bother him.
His hand landed on my shoulder when he leaned over to read my screen, and neither of us had ever once mentioned it.
At one point he reached across for a file and his arm stopped an inch from mine, and the inch stayed there, and he took the file and sat back.
His breath went out slow through his nose.
He did that when a shift had taken more than it gave.
That one was real. I kept my eyes on the canvass sheet until I was sure of my face.
Wright drifted past twice that afternoon.
Once to the printer, the long way, probably with nothing worth printing.
Once with a coffee, moving slow, letting his eyes rest on the two of us, unhurried, satisfied.
He didn’t hide his good mood. He didn’t have to.
On that floor, on that day, a sergeant looking sympathetic about the Carlson-Hawley situation was the most natural thing in the world.
I gave it until the shift began to thin out. Then Luke slid a redraft across the desk with my deliberate mistake flagged in the margin, in his small square handwriting, the way he’d flag a rookie’s work, and that was the opening. I read it. I put it down.
“Third one today,” he said.
“I can count.”
“Can you? Because from where I’m sitting, I’m doing your job twice. Once when you do it wrong, and once when I catch it.”
“Nobody asked you to catch it.”
“The Crown asked. It’s their case you keep stepping on.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to; the room had gone quiet enough to carry it for him. “I’m double-checking everything that leaves your desk now. Everything. Ask me how long I can keep doing both our jobs.”
“Then stop. Go ask Murphy for a partner who meets your standard. His door’s right there.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Say it louder. I don’t think the whole floor heard you.”
He looked at me for a long second. Then he said it, quiet, even, the way he said the things he’d already decided. “At least working alone, I’d only be checking one man’s work. It couldn’t be lonelier than this desk.”
That one wasn’t in any script we’d written. I stood up fast enough to send my chair into the desk behind me.
“I’m done,” I said, to him, to the row, to the floor at large. “I am done.” And I walked.
Nobody followed me. Nobody even looked up as I went, which meant every one of them was watching.
The men’s room off the back corridor was empty, one light dead over the end stall, the far tap dripping the way it had been dripping since I transferred in.
I put both hands on the counter and let my head hang and breathed.
I stood there a moment, and then I hit the edge of the sink with the side of my fist, once, hard enough to feel stupid about it, and the sound bounced off the tile and died.
Part of that was performance, in case the door opened.
Part of it wasn’t.
The door opened.
It didn’t bang and swing shut behind somebody in a hurry. It opened, and paused, and closed slowly. In the mirror, I watched Wright cross to a sink two down from mine and turn on water, washing his hands.
“Long day,” he said. To my reflection, not to me.
“I’ve had that day. The one where you look across the desk and there’s a stranger sitting in your partner’s chair, and you try to figure out when it happened, and you can’t, because it didn’t happen on any one day. It happened while you weren’t looking.”
I turned on the cold tap and put my wrists under it and said nothing.
“He’s not sleeping,” Wright said. “You can see it from across the room. He’s carrying something, and he can’t put it down, and he can’t hand it to you, because you’re no longer it.
” He shut his water off and pulled a paper towel and dried his hands, taking his time.
“I knew that look on him before you ever met him. I’m the one who used to fix it.
And here’s the thing, Carlson. Murphy sees what the whole floor sees.
Give it a month and he’ll split you two himself, for the good of the division, and put Hawley with somebody solid.
Somebody who steadies him.” He folded the towel once and dropped it in the bin.
“Say what you came in to say.”
“I came in to wash my hands.”
“You’ve been circling us since first thing this morning. You couldn’t stay away if you tried. So, say it!”
He smiled at the mirror, and then he turned around and leaned his back against the counter and crossed his arms, a man settling in to enjoy something he’d paid for.