by L. A. Witt
But the call never came. In fact, when I stepped out briefly to go to the locker room, I passed the captain in the hallway. Aside from a quick look and a grunt, he barely acknowledged my presence. My curiosity was killing me as I went through the motions of taking my pill and tucking away the bottle. What had the two of them talked about? How much did Corliss know? Or rather, how much did he think he knew?
No idea. As far as I could tell, though, he hadn’t thrown me under the bus. If he had, then the captain and Thibedeau were keeping the card close to their vests. Maybe holding on to it until they had enough to send me out the door with IA’s boot up my ass. I wouldn’t put it past Thibedeau to play like that. He’d been after my badge and my hide for years.
There was no way I would ever get them to tip their hand, though. If I wanted to feel out what was happening, I had only one potential source of information: my new partner.
When I got back to my desk, I picked up my jacket off my chair. “Let’s take a break. Go get something to eat.”
He looked up from the copy of Jake’s statement. “Huh?”
“Eat. You know, food?” I draped my jacket over my arm. “You were right. Blood sugar’s getting a little low.”
He eyed me uncertainly. His gaze flicked toward the candy bar that was still on my desk, wrapped and untouched. I thought he might object, but then he muttered something, closed the folder on the statement, and got up. “You driving, or am I?”
“I always drive.”
“Of course you do,” he grumbled, but he picked up his jacket and followed me out to the garage. Once we were in the car, there was no chance of anyone overhearing us unless IA had him wearing a wire. Not that I would have put that past them. Either way, I didn’t speak yet.
Two blocks from the station, though, Darren broke the silence. “So, now that we’re alone. Where did the heroin come from?”
I almost choked on my own breath. “What?”
“Don’t play stupid.” He turned to me and coolly asked again, “Where did the heroin in Jake’s bedroom come from?”
I shot him a glare before returning my focus to the road. “Captain Hamilton wants to know, eh?”
“No. I answered his questions already. Now I want you to answer mine.” He shifted around so he was facing me as much as the seat belt would allow. “Because here’s the thing: I got called into the captain’s office, had to listen to him read me the riot act, and I looked like a fucking idiot rookie who doesn’t know how to do his job—all because I was covering your ass.”
I glanced at him again. He’d covered my ass? Well, that would explain the lack of an angry summons from the captain. Maybe I was wrong about this kid.
“So,” Corliss went on, “since I took the heat for whatever the hell happened back there, I think I’m entitled to an answer or two.”
Still guarded, I said nothing.
He huffed sharply. “For fuck’s sake, Ruffner, we—”
“Andreas.”
Beat. “Huh?”
“Listen.” I tapped my thumbs on the wheel. “If we’re going to be partners, we might as well be on a first-name basis. So . . . Andreas.”
“Oh. Um. Fine. Then call me Darren. But don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not changing the subject. Here’s the thing, Darren—we should be on a first-name basis, and we should trust each other.”
“Right. That’s what I’m getting at.”
“I’m not done.” I paused to take a left onto a narrow two-lane street. Traffic was thicker here, so I slowed down, and as I matched the speed of the car in front of me, I glanced at Corliss—Darren—again. “One thing you need to trust me on is that I won’t jeopardize your life or your career. If I’m on the wrong side of the people we’re trying to collar, it’s me in the crosshairs, not you. And if IA or the captain decides to come down on me, it’s my ass, not yours.”
My skin prickled. Though I didn’t look at him, I could feel him watching me.
“So, what?” he said after a moment. “You’re not going to tell me where the dope came from because then I have plausible deniability?”
“Call it whatever you want.” I shrugged. “But if the captain or that son of a bitch in IA ever ask you questions, you can look them in the eye and say you don’t know. They can give you a fucking polygraph, and you’ll still come out looking like Detective Perfect. And if I have to take the heat for something, it’s me, not you.”
Darren exhaled, but didn’t push. I knew better than to assume this was the end of it. He was smarter than I’d initially given him credit for, and I suspected he was working out a strategy to get past my defenses to the answers he wanted.
Dig all you want, Detective. You’re going to need more than a day to get that out of me.
I pulled up in front of a café I frequented and shut off the engine. We both took off our seat belts, but neither of us opened our doors.
Facing me across the console, Darren said, “Let’s get one thing clear.”
“All right?”
“You can’t have it both ways—either you trust me and we work together, or you leave me out of the loop. And don’t feed me bullshit about plausible deniability. Either we work together or we don’t.”
I looked him right in the eye. “You can call it bullshit all you want. At the end of the day—”
“At the end of the day, you either trust me or you don’t.”
“I don’t even know you,” I threw back.
“But you already know I’ll take the heat to keep you out of trouble. Could you at least tell me what it is I’m hiding from the captain?”
I studied him. He was right to want to know, but he was also right that I didn’t trust him. Not yet. It was much too early, and he was in much too tight with IA.
Exhaling, I took the keys out of the ignition and twisted to rest my elbow on the center console. “Listen, I’ve spent a lot of years trying to bring down the assholes we’re investigating. In the beginning, I played by the book.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“We’ll see how conventional you are in twenty years. Anyway, I tried doing things on the straight and narrow, and nothing came of it. And all that time, I was going to crime scenes for people who’d died as a result of these fuckers and others like them. Addicts. Bystanders. Women. Kids.” I paused. “You ever been to the scene of a crime after someone murdered kids to keep a father quiet?”
Darren gulped and shook his head.
“Give it time. And when it happens, you’ll understand why I’m willing to push the envelope if it means getting these people off the streets for good.”
He stared at me, but said nothing.
I gestured past him at the café. “Come on. We need to snag a table before this place starts getting crowded.”
We got out of the car, and Darren didn’t say anything or even look at me. Whether that meant I’d gotten through to him or he was just tired of my shit, I didn’t know, but at least that conversation was over for the moment.
The silence continued until after we’d ordered our food. The waiter took our menus, and Darren stared into his water glass.
“So, um.” He cleared his throat and met my gaze. “You mentioned you have kids.”
Thank God. He’d let the subject drop. I nodded. “Yeah. I’ve got four.”
His eyebrows jumped. “Four?”
I laughed. “Is that so hard to believe?”
“No, uh . . . I just, I mean . . .” He shook his head. “You didn’t have any pictures of them on your desk or anything.”
Good save, kid.
“I don’t usually put pictures of my kids on display in a place where we occasionally escort violent criminals.”
He sobered. “Oh. Yeah. I . . . hadn’t thought about that.”
“Neither did I until a few years ago.” I paused for a drink. “What about you? Any kids?”
Darren shook his head. “No. I mostly help my mom take care of—” He broke eye contact. “I d
on’t really have much time for relationships, let alone kids. So, it’s just me.” He paused, then forced a smile as he looked at me again. “So how old are they? Your kids, I mean?”
I was curious about what he’d stopped himself from saying, but he obviously didn’t want to go there, so I played along. “Twenty-four, twenty-two, twenty-one, and four.”
“Wow.” He chuckled cautiously. “Bit of a gap there before that last one.”
“Yeah.” I picked up my glass and avoided Darren’s eyes. “Bit of a gap.” I took a swig of water, hoping he would also recognize the signs of a subject that didn’t need to continue.
He sat up a little and folded his arms on the table. “So, I have a question. Might be a bit personal, but I’m curious.”
Eyeing him, I said, “All right?”
He glanced down at my wrist, and I knew the question before he asked it: “Seriously. What’s the deal with the medic-alert thing?” He showed his palms. “You don’t have to go into detail. But, like I said before, I should know if—”
“Like I said before,” I said through my teeth, “I’m getting it under control.”
“Yeah, well, it’s obviously not under control yet, so could we please cut the crap?” He tilted his head. “Look, I’m not trying to pry. I’m not looking for gossip. But, I mean, if you drop and I’ve got to call the paramedics for you, what do I tell them? That you’re diabetic? That you’re a fucking reptilian? I mean, throw me a bone here.”
“Well, if something happens”—I gestured at the bracelet—“you know where to get the information.”
He exhaled sharply. “Awesome. So my partner is a damn fortune cookie. All I have to do is crack him open and I can read the secret message.”
Our eyes locked.
And we both laughed.
Normally, it annoyed the shit out of me when people noticed the bracelet, never mind asked about it, and he’d been pushing for it ever since he’d seen it at Jake’s house. But I had to admit, the fortune-cookie thing was pretty funny.
I pushed the bracelet under my sleeve. “Just some seriously low blood pressure. That’s why I got dizzy when we ran after Jake.”
Darren’s eyebrow rose. Mirroring me, he folded his arms on the table and leaned closer, still holding my gaze. “Let me ask you something, then.”
“Okay?”
He pointed at his face. “Do I look like the biggest moron who ever walked the earth?”
“Is that a baited question?”
“Whatever.” He sat back. “All right, if I have to call the paramedics, I’ll take a look. But honestly, I’m just trying to make sure I know how to help you if you get fucked up.”
“Much appreciated.”
“So is this how every conversation is going to go?” He absently ran his finger around the rim of his glass. “I’m going to have to pry every detail out of you?”
I chuckled. “Consider it practice for when you’re interrogating a suspect.”
He just shook his head and let it go.
Turns out, the best part of the whole fucking day was lunch.
I hadn’t imagined that Andreas would invite me to use his first name on our first day, not after the rough beginning. He wasn’t exactly forthcoming about anything else, but I was starting to get a sense for the guy. If strong and silent was an archetype, then he was its embodiment. Couple that with his mysterious family life—four kids, and the oldest one was only a few years younger than me? Crazy―and the medical issue that I wouldn’t get to know about until it was maybe too late, and I sort of felt like I was working less with a detective, and more with an undercover superhero or something. The dark, gritty, complete asshole kind of superhero.
The food at the café was good, the coffee was strong, and by the time we returned to the precinct, I was feeling cautiously optimistic about my future. We could learn to tolerate each other. Andreas would begin to trust me. I’d get my answers, and we’d get a lot of good work done in the process.
Unfortunately, the afternoon lacked both the energy of the morning and the comradery of lunch. The culprit? Paperwork. It’s not that I didn’t know going into being a detective that there was a lot of paperwork associated with it, but once we got back to our desks, Andreas went to do more work with getting Jake into witness protection, while me? I read case files.
“You said you wanted to catch up,” Andreas said after plunking the stack of files down on my barren desk. “Knock yourself out.”
By the end of the day, I wanted to knock myself out. Parsing through tiny type, looking at pictures of murders so graphic they would turn anybody’s stomach, seasoning my brain with conflicting witness statements and sketchy timelines, all while actively keeping my chair from tipping over for four hours―it was like being plunged into a bureaucratic hellscape. Andreas was long gone once I finally finished up with the files.
As I left work, I felt beat to shit, mentally and physically. I wanted nothing more than to head back to my tiny apartment, shower for as long as the hot water held out, and binge-watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Screw dramas, I needed a comedy right now. But that wasn’t in the cards. Instead, I had a quick shower at the precinct, threw on my gym clothes, and drove out to the suburbs, where Mom, Vic, and Asher lived in the house I’d done most of my growing up in.
I frowned as I pulled up to the seventies-era, ranch-style home. The hanging plants looked like they hadn’t been watered in days. Mom was usually really good about that kind of thing—she babied her plants. I walked up the steps to the front door, surreptitiously hefting one of the plants as I did. Way too light—the soil was probably dry as a bone. I tried to open the front door, but it was locked. Weird.
“Mom?” I called out as I let myself in. “Vic?”
“I’m in the kitchen, sweetheart.”
I followed the well-worn hall to the back of the house. Mom was putting Saran Wrap over a casserole dish, but she stopped when she saw me. “Darren!” She opened her arms for a hug. “How was your first day?”
For a moment, I wanted to tell her the truth. It sucked. It sucked so hard. But I looked closely at her face, saw the red eyes and the lack of mascara that meant she’d been crying, and decided that no matter how bad my day had been, hers had probably been worse.
“It was fine,” I said, stepping into her embrace. I had almost a foot of height on her, but I still felt smaller than her somehow whenever she hugged me. Safer. “I met my new partner, arrested a few guys, managed to only make Captain Hamilton yell at me twice. It was a good day.”
“That man.” My mother sighed as she stepped back, her hands still resting on my arms. “It’s a wonder his blood pressure isn’t through the roof.”
“It might be, you should hear Marla talk about it.” Movement at the door caught my eye. “Hey, Vic. Everybody says hi.”
He scoffed, lumbering into the kitchen with a sigh. Vic wasn’t much taller than my mother, but he was a barrel-chested, broad-shouldered beast of a guy. He’d been a state champion wrestler in high school, and had taught me how to handle myself way better than the academy ever could have. “What everybody? I’ve been gone for a whole month. They’ve all forgotten me by now.”
“Oh, honey.” My mom turned to kiss him, which he accepted with a little grumble. “Nobody could ever forget you.”
“Eh.” He shrugged and opened the fridge for a beer. “Maybe they should. I’ve forgotten all about them.”
I coughed, throwing a muted “Bullshit” into my throat-clearing.
“Yeah, yeah, smart-ass.” Vic handed me a beer as well, and we clinked the necks of the bottles together. “Here’s to surviving your first day as a detective, son. I hope you enjoyed it. That shit won’t get any easier.”
“Truth,” I muttered before taking a sip. “So how’s Asher?”
The complete silence wasn’t at all reassuring. Mom broke first. “He had a confusing morning, sweetheart. He got a hold of his phone somehow and called in to the office, and when they said he didn’t work there a
nymore he . . . well, he got upset. He tried to leave, and when we said he couldn’t, he got a little . . .”
“He almost broke his hand punching a damn wall,” Vic said. “He hasn’t come out of his room since before noon.”
“I set some dinner aside for both of you, if you want to go and eat with him.” My mom sounded hopeful. “I’m sure he’d love to see you.”
Usually, Asher did. Tonight might not be one of those nights, but I wanted to see him anyway.
“Yeah, I’ll take him some dinner.” I grabbed the plates, and another beer as well, then walked back down the hall to the room that Asher and I had once shared. I banged on the door with my foot. “Open up, nerd. I’ve got food.” Nothing. I banged again. “Open the damn door before I dump your plate on the ground and keep your beer for myself.” Still nothing. “Asher! C’mon, man, open the fucking—” The door swung open before I could knock my foot against it again.
“You,” my older brother said as he took a plate out of my hands, “are a whiny bitch, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told. Repeatedly, over the years.” I stepped inside, and he closed the door behind me. The room looked . . . strange. I could never quite get over the transformation it had undergone, all our teenage paraphernalia thrown out to make room for as much of Asher’s adult life as our parents could cram in here. His framed degrees were hung above the desk on the far wall—both from pre-law and law school. There were pictures on the walls of people I barely knew: coworkers from when he was with the DA, college friends, trips to places I’d only ever heard about. Of the two of us, Asher was the ambitious one, the guy who was going places. I’d busted my ass to make detective, but he’d been on track for greater things.
Now he couldn’t even remember what he’d had for breakfast most days. Early-onset Alzheimer’s, the doctors called it. It was genetic, probably passed down from our absentee father, the bastard. Asher had been diagnosed when he was thirty-three, five years older than I was now. It had been the end of his career and his marriage. It had almost been the end of his life.
I sat down at the desk chair, and he mirrored me on the bed. He was wearing suit pants and a button-down shirt, both way nicer than anything I owned, but the shirt was buttoned wrong. I resisted pointing it out. His right hand was wrapped with gauze across the knuckles. “So. You got into a fight with a wall and lost. Pussy.”
