Chapter 16 In the Open
Luke
“Don’t tell me nobody on this floor eats crullers,” Wright said, loud enough to carry, both hands full. “I refuse to believe it. Chen. You look like a reasonable person.”
He’d come in with two trays of coffee balanced on one arm and two boxes of donuts stacked under the other, the morning of Ryan’s hearing.
He worked the bullpen desk by desk. Cups handed out by name.
A joke for the duty sergeant. He’d remembered who took what, that was the thing; he’d been back in the division half a year, and he’d kept forty coffee orders in his head, because that was the kind of work he did instead of his own.
“You’re a saint, Sergeant,” somebody called from the far row.
“I’m bribing you all shamelessly,” Wright said. “There’s a difference.”
Laughter, easy, up and down the floor. He set the last cup down on the corner of Ryan’s desk without a word, the benched man’s desk, the bare one by the copier, and he did it gently, no performance to it at all, and that was deliberate.
The whole floor watched him do it, and half of them thought better of him for it.
Ryan said thank you. To him. Then he went back to his photocopying.
They’d taken his gun and his cases the morning after he split his knuckles on Wright’s mouth.
Administrative duties pending review. For two days he’d sat at the bare desk doing work nobody fought over, disclosure indexes and witness lists for other people’s court dates.
He’d kept his head down and taken the floor’s pity, which was worse than the anger, because we’d built the anger ourselves and the pity was real.
Reid came to my desk before the coffee was even cold. He didn’t sit. He put one hand flat on the file I was pretending to read and kept his voice down.
“Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Don’t do that.” He glanced across at Ryan, then back.
“They benched him and there’s a hearing on the board this afternoon with a superintendent, Luke!
For paperwork errors and whatever happened in that washroom that nobody will say out loud.
That’s not a review, that’s a burial. So, talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t.”
“Can’t.”
Chen rolled a chair over, which for Chen was practically an intervention. “My cousin’s a paralegal,” Chen said quietly. “Employment side. If Ryan needs someone who isn’t the Association, I can make a call tonight. Off the books.”
“That’s kind of you,” I said. “But don’t make the call.”
“Somebody should be doing something, Hawley!”
“I know how it looks, but…”
“Do you?” Chen’s eyes went over my face the way they went over a scene. “Because from here it looks like your partner’s drowning ten feet from your desk and you haven’t stood up all week. Don’t tell me you believe he’s guilty?”
That one landed. It was supposed to. I looked at my hands and made myself say nothing, because the truth wasn’t mine to tell on that floor, and everything else was a lie I refused to tell friends.
Doyle came last, on the pretext of returning a stapler nobody had lent. Doyle didn’t do speeches. “Is it true he hit somebody and tampered with evidence?” Doyle said, barely a question, barely audible.
I shook my head. Not a no. Just a refusal with an apology on it.
“Okay,” Doyle said, and looked at me a second longer, and something in it was disappointment, and I took that too, because I couldn’t explain. “Okay.”
They pulled back to their desks and left the two of us alone in the middle of forty people, and the whole floor felt it, and nobody named it.
The people who would have fought for us stood down because I made them.
They didn’t know why, and I couldn’t tell them that in a few hours it would make sense.
I just had to sit there being the asshole who wouldn’t fight for his partner, one more morning, and let them think less of me.
I could see Ryan’s right hand from my desk. The knuckles had gone dark, purple, the split scabbed at the edges, and he made no effort to hide them. That was the story we were telling, a man with nothing left to hide, and his hand told it better than we ever could have.
I’d held that hand this morning, before the sun was properly up.
He’d been awake when I woke, lying on his back looking at the ceiling, and I’d taken the hand and turned it over in the grey light, and pressed my thumb, very lightly, next to the split.
“You promised me one thing,” I said.
“I know.”
“One thing. I asked you for one thing. Don’t touch him.”
“Technically it was a fist.”
“Ryan…”
“I know, I know. I broke it.” He watched me hold it. He didn’t take it back. “Go on, scold me.”
“You could have wrecked everything. The op, the complaint, your career, in one second, over words.” I heard my own voice, and it wasn’t angry, and that was the problem. “Some part of me is glad you hit him, and I don’t love what that says about me.”
“The ugly is in everybody,” Ryan said. “He’s spent his whole life finding it in people and using it. Too bad for him, he opened his mouth and found mine in a washroom, that’s all.”
“What did he say?”
The room got very quiet.
“Nope,” Ryan said.
“Ryan…”
“Ask me anything else and I’ll answer it. Not that.”
“I’m not made of glass. I know what he’s like when he wants blood.”
“I know exactly what he’s like when he wants blood.
” He turned toward me then, and there was no cover on his face at all, none of the operator, just Ryan at dawn with his hand in my hand.
“I’ll tell you this much. What he said, it was filth and I hit him.
And after, cleaning my knuckles in that sink, I decided I’m done carrying his filth into what’s ours.
He doesn’t get to be a nasty ghost between us.
What he said stays in that room. Not because you couldn’t take it.
Because it doesn’t deserve to live here. ”
And he leaned over and kissed me, slow and sweet and nothing else in it, just a thing being said, because no words were good enough. I let the question go. I’d like to say it was hard, but it wasn’t; that was the strange part. He’d told me no and somehow I’d ended up with more than I’d asked for.
“Besides,” he said, settling back, “you’ll want your anger fresh for today. Don’t spend it on me.”
“About the other thing,” I said. “What I said at your desk. The lonely thing…”
“You don’t have to…”
“I do, though. Playing strangers with you for eight hours is the loneliest work I’ve ever done.” His mouth moved at that, finally. “There’s no version of alone that has you in it. I needed to say that.”
“I knew what it was,” he said. “The second it left your mouth. It still did something to me, hearing you say it.”
Then he laid out the day one more time, flat and short, the way he did when he’d already lived through a thing in his head and was waiting for the world to catch up.
And I put my hand on the back of his neck, the way he’d put his on mine before the worst workday of my life, and I held it there and felt him breathe.
We drove in together and split up in the garage, one last time, him to his desk, me to mine.
If it worked, we’d never have to do that again.
If it worked.
The visitors started arriving mid-morning.
A superintendent I recognized from downtown.
Two people from Professional Standards, a man and a woman, carrying the kind of folders that have handles.
A civilian I’d never seen before, a small quiet woman wheeling a cart with a laptop and a projector on it, who set up in the glass conference room off the bullpen without asking anyone where to plug anything in.
The blinds stayed open. Nobody closed the door.
The floor read it the only way the floor could. Brass, Standards, exhibits. A review board, assembling in full view, for Carlson.
Not everyone took it hard. Wright had his believers, a handful who’d warmed to him since the transfer, who’d decided the sunny sergeant was owed the benefit of every doubt, and that morning they didn’t bother hiding it.
Two desks by the corridor had their heads together, and whatever was said there ended in a smirk aimed our way.
Somebody, not quietly enough, said it was about time somebody audited Carlson’s caseload.
Wright himself only got kinder. He moved between the desks lighter than I’d seen him in years, sorrowful, gracious, sergeant of the year, come to watch it done with a heavy heart.
I sat with a case file open in front of me and read the same paragraph for an hour.
I knew him. That was the thing nobody else on that floor could say. I knew what his face did when he’d won. And under all that gentleness it was doing it.
He came to Ryan’s desk near the end of the morning. He didn’t lower his voice much. He wanted the nearest desks to hear the shape of it, if not the words.
“I spoke to the superintendent this morning,” he said, one hand resting light on the back of Ryan’s chair.
“I wanted you to hear it from me first. I’m not after your badge.
I told him that, on the record. So, whatever happens in there this afternoon, if they go easy on you, that was me.
These things happen, Carlson. Good cops hit bad stretches.
I’ve watched it take better men than you. ”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Ryan said flatly as he stapled copies.
Wright leaned down, and the volume came down with him, and this part reached me only because I’d stopped breathing.
“You’ll be fine, you know,” he said gently.
“You’ll land somewhere. Guys like you always do.
Some quiet posting up north, property crime, nice and small.
I’ll even write you a reference, if you want. I mean that.”
Ryan sat still under it, eyes down.
And then he lifted his head, and for one bad second I thought he’d break character. Then Murphy’s door opened.
“Sergeant Wright?” Murphy stood in it with his glasses in his hand. “A moment of your time, please.”