Before I Wake

by Dee Henderson

  “When is Chet and Laura’s wedding?”

  “Three weeks. I’ll introduce you. They make a nice couple.”

  * * *

  Fighting sleep as she watched the street, Rae knew she needed a diversion. She reached around for her briefcase. She opened it and pulled out the photos e-mailed by Frank that afternoon.

  The Ferrari’s crystal red paint job reflected the camera flash, leaving a white spot on the side panel. It was a beautiful eight-year-old car with less than forty thousand miles on the odometer, a gem of a car but for one crucial fact. Blood had run down the inside windows. The owner had put a twenty-two in his mouth and pulled the trigger. She did not relish trying to get dried blood off the leather seats.

  “You’re serious about cleaning up that car and driving it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need your head examined, Rae.”

  “I can’t see turning the car into scrap parts, not when it’s superficial damage.”

  “It’s got ghosts.”

  “One ghost, and the man did it to himself. If it had been a murder, then that would be another matter.”

  “If it had been a murder . . . do you ever listen to yourself? It’s creepy.”

  “When you’ve washed blood off a ceiling fan, knowing its castoff from a knife attack on a kid, it tempers what bothers you. I need another car, I like one that is fast, and this one I can afford.” She looked again at the photos and knew she wanted the car. She slid the photos back into the folder. She’d tell Frank to buy it, and then she’d worry about how to get it cleaned up to drive.

  * * *

  Bruce sat up straighter. “There’s Bob.” He started the car. “I’ll let you drive next time.”

  “Thanks for small favors.” Rae jotted down the time on the report. “I’m betting he’s returning home.”

  “I’ll take that bet. So what do you think of your first full day as a PI?”

  Rae could think of numerous adjectives but she settled for a diplomatic one. “Interesting.”

  Bruce laughed. “That’s my partner.”

  Bob walked back to the union hall. He disappeared inside again, rather than return to his car. Bruce drummed his hand against the steering wheel. “Well—” He bit off what he was about to say.

  Rae laughed.

  Bruce parked. “This isn’t funny.”

  She was just tired enough that it was hilarious. “Sure it is.”

  She was ready to call her first day of work done. She had the police report and coroner report to read over again tonight and a plan to make for her visit to Peggy’s home tomorrow. And she would take Nathan up on that offer to visit Joe Prescott’s place. But at the moment she couldn’t think of anything more priceless than seeing Bruce’s expression when Bob walked back into the union hall.

  She settled back in her seat and got comfortable, reaching into her pocket for the pack of gum she had bought for just this kind of occasion. If Bob took his time—well, it wasn’t the first time she’d caught a catnap in a car, and it wouldn’t be the last. Walking over to her own car and leaving Bruce here to continue this on his own wasn’t going to happen even if she was ready to call it a day and get some sleep. She liked being back in Bruce’s world, and she relished the captive time with him. Over the years, nights like this had led to some of the most interesting conversations she’d ever had with him.

  “I bet he’s playing a long game or two of chess while he talks.”

  “Shut up, Rae.”

  She laughed and unwrapped the gum. She considerately held out the package.

  Bruce tugged out two pieces. “I prefer Big Red over Juicy Fruit.”

  “Tough it out.”

  “Yeah.” He unwrapped the gum and folded it into his mouth. With a sigh he set out to make thin rolls out of the foil wrappers.

  15

  “Do you like this kind of work?” Rae asked, breaking the comfortable silence in the car.

  Bruce turned to look over at her. “How do you mean?”

  “The following of leads, the watching of people, the fact that there is nothing particularly life or death in the cases now on your whiteboard?”

  “Surprisingly, I do like it. I think it grows on you. I know, you can’t imagine this being the adrenaline-addicted Bruce you know and love.”

  “I’m not exactly the Rae you remember either. And I suppose if I was in Heather Teal’s place, wondering if my husband was cheating on me, it would be worth a few dollars to have the question answered.”

  Bruce tried to stretch out his legs and had to settle for shifting where his knee met the dash. “The case is all in the eyes of the beholder. So we’ll sit and watch for another day until I can try again to get myself fired by my client. I’d just quit, but this case has become something of its own making.”

  Rae thought about that and the man they were watching. She’d studied a lot of people over the years conducting stakeouts but not many like this subject. The man was a civilian in the most pedestrian form of that word, not even showing basic situational awareness as he walked public streets to look around and notice what was around him. Still . . . the man didn’t look blind. “Bob knows you are watching him.”

  Bruce balanced the gum wrappers into a neat triangle on the dash, having borrowed hers to form the base. “He figured that out on about day three,” Bruce agreed.

  “So he’s not going to do anything to tip his hand now even if he was cheating on his wife.”

  “Very true.”

  Rae was amused at the fact Bruce knew his cover was blown and didn’t seem concerned about it. Life had definitely changed. “So are you charging Heather for this stakeout time?”

  Bruce just looked over at her.

  Rae laughed. “That’s what I thought. You’re a softie, Bruce.”

  “I like the fact I’ve got your undivided attention for a couple hours. There’s no need for Heather to pay for me to hang out with you.”

  “I’m sitting here yawning on you.”

  “You have been fighting to keep those eyes open,” he agreed. He nodded to the case notes and went back to answer her real question. “I’m not going to lie on the report I hand Heather, saying I was watching Bob when I wasn’t. And I’m not going to continue to charge her when I determined on day two that there was no real job here to work. I’m just working out the details of how to get Heather to comfortably trust her husband again.

  “Get her annoyed enough with me, she’ll blow up at Bob and start talking to him again, which is what she should have done in the first place, and they’ll sort out whatever got her wondering about him. All will be fine in Tealville again. A few hours of my time to make that happen is worth it. It’s the one thing I really have to offer these days—time.”

  Rae was startled by his words. “That’s your plan?”

  “For want of a better one. I don’t think anything can make Heather Teal less suspicious and less of a cynic, but I’ll make an honest run at it. They’ve been married thirty-two years; that’s got to mean something. Heather can learn to relax and trust Bob again.”

  Rae felt confusion settle in place of the surprise. Bruce was not only volunteering his time, he was doing it for a noble reason. “You didn’t used to be this positive about people’s ability to change.”

  He started to answer her, then just stopped and shrugged. “I got religion somewhere in the last eleven years. The idea that even the worst of people can change their stripes no longer seems naive.”

  Rae set aside her questions about this particular case, more interested in the first glimpse into the missing years between them. “What happened?”

  He studied her, then turned his attention back to the union-hall door. “It’s a terribly long and boring story.”

  She knew the look and the cautioning tone under the words. Bruce placed it as an answer she wasn’t ready to hear or would regret having pursued. She hesitated. Over the years she’d learned to trust his judgment about that, to pass when he thought a topic
was better left alone for a later time.

  His look had been born in those early days of his being an undercover cop, of his wanting a relationship with her that was honest and open, but still protected from what he dealt with. He did it to protect her from knowing what would be hard to forget, rather than to protect himself from the telling.

  “I don’t mind talking about religion,” she finally replied. “And while it might be terrible and long, the story is probably not boring.” If he was willing to talk about it, she wanted to know.

  He conceded the point with a small nod. “Maybe a story best told in chapters then.”

  He hesitated and looked back across the street. Her memory of him was more like this, of caution, of weighing details for what he might say, of considering the word picture he’d leave her with before he said the first words.

  “I got shot six years ago.”

  Her breath didn’t flow in right. It blossomed like an ache in the center of her chest. She’d expected a lot of things. Not this. “I didn’t hear about it,” she whispered.

  “I didn’t want anyone to know.”

  He gave her a wry smile and a shrug that was anything but casual. An apology, such as she would take it.

  She’d take it. She knew part of what was coming now before he ever went on to add substance to those words.

  “I’d been undercover for so long, the guys I studied and watched were almost friends. You have to like the guys at some level to be around them seven days a week and be authentic. They were good with repairing cars and following sports and loving their families.” He rubbed his breastbone. “Someone gave up my name as being an undercover cop. I took three in the chest in a drive-by.”

  “You had a vest on.”

  “Purely by chance. Even so, one round got through as I twisted. Most of the energy in the round had expended, so it didn’t splatter my insides all across the block, but it was enough to put me down in a pool of blood. I recovered, but I never went back. I wonder now what happened to those guys I hung with, how their families are doing, who’s gotten married, who’s had a kid, basic stuff like who’s still alive. It’s strange the way you still wonder about the chapter of life that is over.”

  “The cops don’t know who shot you.”

  “I could have named a dozen names, all as probable as the other. I told my boss not to push, to protect the informants I’d built up, and use my believed passing to get another undercover cop working up the ladder. They were smart enough to take my advice. That many years undercover, there weren’t many wholesale dealers on the south side whose organizations I hadn’t penetrated on one level or another. The fact I’d made it as long as I had was the surprise.

  “I’d be dead if my face appeared in the neighborhood again—that’s understood. But I still miss those guys in the middle layer. They preferred to talk about the latest baseball scores than how to move more product on the street. Drugs were the business they knew from grade school, the easy career path. But some of the guys were better than that life. Some of them left it. And those were the stories that kept me going.

  “I’m not softening it; I hated drugs more by the time my career was ending than I did in those first years—and I was pretty intense about it back when you knew me. I put away more dealers and confiscated more product than any other cop to work that side of the city.

  “Those last couple years, they were having to spread the public credit for my busts around the districts to keep from having a bounty go down on the guy who happened to be given the job of taking the microphone and claiming credit in order to keep my existence buried from the press. Those last days were heady, and I suppose I should have read the writing on the wall. That kind of run historically ends with a bullet.”

  Rae absorbed that and felt a deep regret inside. “I wish I had known; I wish I’d been there for you. I wondered why you weren’t working undercover anymore. I’d heard that news through the grapevine, but I wasn’t in a position I could call.”

  “Undercover yourself?”

  She nodded.

  “The physical recovery was reasonably quick. My boss tried to transition me back inside, but I wasn’t cut out for a desk job or a supervisor’s shield. It was easier to retire and settle on something new.”

  Bruce smiled. “But you know me, Rae. I never do something the easy way if I can do it the hard way. After about six months of retirement I was close to being both a drunk and a bum, and I had already picked a couple fights only a fool would pick.”

  “I noticed the broken nose.”

  Bruce rubbed it. “Makes me look young and stupid, doesn’t it? That was one of my wilder fights. I put on weight, I got mad at the world, and basically I wasn’t much fun to be around.”

  “You were decompressing.”

  He nodded as he sighed. “I know that now: decompressing hard and fast and in the roughest way a guy can do it. Then I was just looking at the newspaper each morning and seeing more drugs killing more kids, and I decided that the finger I stuck in the dike for the best years of my life hadn’t done a bit of good.”

  His expression turned distant and she could understand part of what he was saying, the realization that he felt like he had wasted the best part of his life on something that had made no difference.

  Bruce glanced over at her. “I think I flipped from the anger to depression to emptiness in one particularly ugly weekend. Life just hurt.”

  “I’m sorry.” There weren’t words for this hurt, and she didn’t try to find any.

  “So am I.”

  He looked across the street, thinking, then nodded to himself and went on. “I ended up sitting in church one day. A Wednesday, I think it was. I’d followed some good-looking lady inside. Don’t ask me what I was thinking or what I was wearing or what I thought I’d say to her if I caught up with her. Turns out a guy we both know was there. Remember old man Cayger? The guy that used to sell those blistering hot polish sausages from that street cart?”

  “Sure. He was a fixture in the neighborhood.”

  “There was some kind of weeknight prayer service happening. Anyway, we got to talking. And I got to deciding it was okay to think there was a God in charge of this world and of making things right, and it wasn’t Bruce.”

  “You always knew that.”

  “After so many years of Catholic school, I should have. But it started to mean something again that night, religion. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I do.” Faith could be set aside as a passing piece in life, but eventually it moved up in importance relative to everything else in life. Family, career, health, possessions—they all crashed as the years passed by—and at some point religion started to look like the one stable thing left in life.

  “I bumped back into religion again. I didn’t go looking for it, but I was at least smart enough to see what it was I’d rediscovered. Substance, in the person of Jesus.” Bruce shifted in his seat, looking marginally embarrassed at the emotion in the history he was telling. He glanced over at her. “You know Jesus?”

  “Not as well as I need to,” she replied, not minding the turn he’d taken in the conversation. She had a feeling if she didn’t hear the details tonight, he’d tuck the matter back into his past and she’d just be left with her questions.

  “Same boat here—I’m learning.” Bruce sighed. “I don’t know if I can explain it, Rae. All that stuff in the Bible that Jesus said and did—it always ended with Jesus saying ‘Follow Me.’ As if that was the answer to the rest of the questions and decisions and confusion in life.

  “That Wednesday night—I was a man seeing life as something to be endured, who suddenly encountered in Jesus someone who said life is special and there’s something more to be found—so follow me. And I did. I made the choice to say yes and mean it.

  “I was too old to make it the partial kind of decision, the check-it-out-and-see-what-I-think-of-this, kind of toe-in-the-water approach. I’d had a lifetime messing up my life and I just wanted that whol
e swamp turned over to someone else to fix. I started going to church again, that prayer meeting gathering, and a Sunday service. I found an old copy of the Bible my cousin had left around and started reading it.

  “I’m not sure God was particularly thrilled to get me in the sad shape I was in, but I’m walking around proof that people can change. You wouldn’t have liked me back then, Rae, in the months after I left the force. You’ve got a good heart, you’re kind, you were always willing to take a lot of grief from me after bad days on the job and never give it back—but even you would have walked away from me back then and had cause. It took about a year of God going after my insides before the anger of the past broke. It healed slowly, that hurt, that sense of having failed to make a difference, but the past finally started to go to rest.

  “From there, in a very long roundabout way, I ended up here, in Justice, with a storefront detective agency, an old restored car, a big old house becoming a place that feels like home, and something to do with my days that occasionally feels useful again.”

  His words ended and he rubbed the back of his neck before looking over at her. “A long story and not particularly interesting to someone other than me. I don’t expect you to understand the religion thing or the passion and relief I’m describing in what I found. I know what I got rescued from. I was in a pretty deep black hole and Jesus pulled me out of it. But it’s my own journey. I told you mainly because you’ll be brushing up against that past when you hang out with me and I don’t want you feeling surprised by it.”

  She thought about what he had said. “I appreciate the fact you told me. The job and the career don’t last; we both know that. Religion is the one thing that does last. Personally, I’m no longer willing to say it’s a small part of my life either.” She thought about her last eleven years and her smile was sad as she shook her head. “Besides, I’ve got a few chapters in my own life much like yours.”

  Bruce studied her. “I figured you might.”

  She waited for his question, but Bruce didn’t take the opening. “Not going to ask?”

  Bruce shook his head. “No need. You keep secrets, Rae, but never about the important things. When you’ve figured out the words in those chapters of yours, when you’re ready, you’ll share what’s been happening.”