Chapter 17 The Good Ones
Ryan
Pat had pushed two tables together without being asked, which at Conroy’s counted as a state occasion. He’d never had this many of us in the place at once.
I was three drinks in before I let myself look around properly.
Same narrow room the color of weak tea, same long bar, same hockey game running silent in the corner, same fryer smell worn so far into the walls it had stopped being a smell.
The last time I’d sat in here, I’d been alone at the rail, three blocks the wrong way from home.
It was the one place nobody who knew me would think to look.
I’d been drinking hard enough to frighten even Pat.
A rookie I barely knew had come through that door anyway, talked to me like I was worth talking to, and poured me into a cab.
Tonight that same rookie was up on the rung of his stool with his glass in the air, trying to get eleven cops to shut up at once.
It was the one bar in the city no cop had ever drunk in, until I brought them.
I was at the end of the table with Luke’s knee warm against mine, where nobody could see it and nobody would have cared if they could.
That was the part I couldn’t get past. Nobody would have cared. I still couldn’t stop checking the room for it.
“Okay. Okay. Hey.” Reid banged his glass on the table twice. “I want to make a toast.”
“You’ve made four,” Chen said.
“This one’s different.”
“That’s what you said about three.”
“To the good ones,” Reid said, ignoring her, and swung his glass in a wobbly arc that took in the whole table. “Every single person here kept their head when it counted. Nobody at this table drank the evil sergeant’s coffee.”
“I drank the coffee,” Doyle said.
Reid froze mid-toast.
“It was good coffee. He was a liar, not a bad barista. I never refuse good coffee.” Doyle lifted a glass an inch. “To the good ones.”
“To the good ones!” the table shouted, more or less together, and drank, and the noise picked back up.
The good ones. Reid’s phrase, coined on the walk over, already sounding like it had always existed.
It wasn’t the whole floor, tonight. It was the people who’d earned the invitation without ever knowing there was a list: the ones who’d kept their eyes forward during the frozen-out weeks, who’d routed the staged war around us without joining it, who’d looked sick instead of entertained when Wright went to work on me in public.
Chen. Doyle. Reid. A handful of others from the division who’d never once made it worse.
Luke had named the list in the stairwell this afternoon without hesitating, which told me he’d been keeping it the whole time, the way he kept everything.
Wright’s name had come up exactly twice all night, and both times the table had let it drop. Nobody drank to him. The mood wasn’t victory. It was relief, all the way down the table.
“I want it noted,” Chen said, sliding into the chair across from us with a drink that had at least five things in it, “that I’m putting this on the big one’s tab.”
“Noted,” Luke said.
“And the next one…”
“How many of those things are you planning to have?”
“That depends on how long the tab stays open, and the tab stays open until I stop feeling things about what happened.” She stirred it with the little straw, watching us both. “I offered your boyfriend my cousin, Hawley.”
The way she said it, with the drink in her, it came out sounding like a different kind of offer, and I laughed into my glass before I could stop it. Luke shook his head.
“She means Marco,” Luke said, dry, to her and not to me. “The paralegal. Legal counsel, for the records case. I knew exactly what you meant when you offered him at my desk, Chen. And I know what you mean now. You can put your cousin’s honor away.”
“I stood at that desk with my whole heart out,” Chen said, riding straight over the both of us, “and offered you Marco, for him, and the entire time the two of you had a superintendent and a forensic analyst in your pocket.”
“Yeah,” Luke agreed.
“Marco doesn’t even like criminal work. I was going to owe him a favor. Do you understand the size of what I was prepared to owe Marco for you?”
“Chen,” I said. “When it’s your turn to be framed, I promise we’ll return your favor.”
“That’s all I’m asking.” She pointed the straw at me, then at Luke, then, apparently out of ammunition, drank.
Down the table, one of the property-crimes guys said the word raccoon, and half the table groaned and the other half sat up.
The story went like this, with Doyle correcting it at intervals.
Years back, on a winter night shift, a raccoon came through a ceiling panel into the property room and set off the motion sensor.
Two constables cleared the room at gunpoint, shelf by shelf, and found the intruder on the seized-goods rack, eating a chocolate bar it had unwrapped itself.
The chocolate bar was an exhibit in an armed robbery.
“There’s a memo,” the property-crimes guy said, reverent.
“I wrote the memo,” Doyle said. “Exhibit 14 was consumed by wildlife. Efforts to recover Exhibit 14 were unsuccessful and are not recommended.”
The table lost it. Reid pounded the wood.
“And the raccoon,” Reid managed.
“Never apprehended,” Doyle said, and drank.
Luke laughed. Out loud, easy, head tipping back, and half the table glanced over, still not used to the sound.
The talk rolled on without needing us, the property-crimes guys now drafting a proposal for a division raccoon.
Nobody was talking about any of it anymore.
For an hour at a stretch we were just a table of cops being loud about nothing, and I hadn’t known how much I wanted that until I was sitting in the middle of it.
Reid worked his way down to our end somewhere around the fifth toast that never happened. He pulled a chair around backward and sat on it the wrong way, arms folded on the backrest, chin down on them, and looked at the two of us. He was exactly one drink past careful, and honest with it.
“I have to say a thing,” he announced, quietly, just to us. “And I need you to not make it weird.”
“No promises,” I said.
He took a breath and dropped the last of the performance, and what was left was just Jordan Reid, honest all the way through.
“The thing is, I look at you two and I’m jealous.
That’s it. That’s the confession. Not, you know…
” A vague hand at me, at history, at the stool at the end of the bar.
“Not that. That feeling retired with honors, don’t worry.
I mean the love thing, the couple thing…
The way he tracks where you are in a room without looking.
The way you two split a problem without talking about who takes which half.
I watch it and I want it so bad it’s embarrassing, and I’m exactly drunk enough to say so.
” He picked at the corner of a beer label. “How do you even find that?”
I looked at Luke. Luke looked at me and raised one eyebrow a quarter inch, which meant it’s your department, which was fair. Feelings said out loud at tables were my department. His was staying quiet.
“You want the real answer or the good story,” I said.
“The real one.”
“We almost didn’t.” I kept it plain. He’d earned that.
“I was scared it would wreck what we had. He had his own reasons, and they were worse than mine. We sat ten feet apart, both of us too careful to say anything. Then we finally got together and spent months hiding it. You saw how that went. The hiding almost cost us everything.”
“So, what do I do?” The way he whined almost made me smile.
“You stop being careful. That’s the whole thing.
There’s no trick.” I turned my glass once on the wood.
“And you already know it, because you did it first. Right there, on that stool. You were scared out of your mind, and you said it anyway, to my face. Bravest thing I ever saw in this bar. That’s the night I figured out my own head. You started all of this.”
Reid nodded slowly.
“Stop being careful. Stop being careful everywhere,” he repeated.
“With potential lovers,” Luke said. “Not crossing the street.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Reid nodded again. Then he looked down into the empty glass, and his ears went red, and he said, very casually, “… I mean. Maybe there’s someone…”
I caught Luke’s eye for half a second. Neither of us moved. He’d worked hard to make it sound casual, so we let it be casual.
“Then don’t take forever,” I said.
“That’s it? That’s the whole advice?”
“That’s the whole advice. Taking so long is the only part I’d take back.” I put my hand on his shoulder and felt him sit up a little under it. “Go be scared with someone, Jordan. It beats being safe by yourself.”
“Okay,” Reid said. To the glass. Then he stood, collected his chair, and pulled himself together and frowned. “This conversation never happened.”
“It never does,” Luke said.
He went off to the bar with his ears still red. Pat set a glass of mostly ice in front of him, and a few minutes later a plate of wings, which nobody had ordered. That was Pat.
The table loosened after that. The property crimes guys got into an argument about a call from four years ago.
Chen and Doyle fell into the low, contented shorthand of two people who’d worked together forever.
The noise stayed high and happy, and it left our end of the table quiet.
Nobody was listening to us. Luke and I sat with our shoulders almost touching.
I could have stayed like that for the rest of the night, but something nagged at my mind. I had planned to do this at home, but somehow it had found its way here anyway.
“Luke.” I put my glass down. “There’s one more piece from all of it I need to give you. I don’t want to carry it through the rest of the night. Okay?”
His eyes came up. The table roared at something down the far end.
“Okay,” he said.