Page 18 of Take the Fall
“The ground thing. I’ve got Internal Affairs taking me apart by the inch. A note from my own partner that I was sitting at my own table talking about ground at two in the morning is exactly the kind of thing that ends a man’s career and gets everyone calling it a kindness.”
“I’m not Internal Affairs.”
“You’re a cop with a duty to flag it.”
“I’m a man who poured you a glass of water.” Flat. He didn’t blink. “I’m not building anybody a case against you. Not them. Not the brass. Not your father. If I ever put a word about you on paper, you’ll hear it from my mouth first.”
That landed somewhere I keep covered.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay.”
“God.” I scrubbed my face. “I gave you all that.”
“You gave me pieces. I didn’t ask for them.” He pushed the toast onto a plate and slid it across. “Eat.”
I ate a corner. It was sawdust, but it stayed down, and the worst of the swimming eased off a notch.
“You went down hard,” he said. “Whatever else happened down there, you were past being responsible for much. The booze gets a vote.” He turned the mug a quarter. “You don’t have to drag any of it into the daylight if you don’t want it there.”
There it was. The door, held open for me. All I had to do was step through it light, the way I’d stepped through a hundred.
I looked at the coffee. I looked at him.
“I was drunk,” I said. “I barely.”
It stopped. Right there in my mouth. The lie, dead on the runway.
Because he’d been right there with me. He knew to the inch how gone I was and how gone I wasn’t. I could sell a story to a room full of brass and have them shake my hand for it. I could not sell this one to the man who’d carried me up the hall.
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing that. That’s not what I came out here for.”
He went still. Waiting.
The mug shook. I set it down. “I’m in the middle of all of it, and every way out has one of them standing in it. I can’t get a clean breath, Hawley.”
“What’s going on with your family.”
“Nothing you want any part of.”
“I already heard some of it. Two in the morning, remember.”
“You heard the edges. The edges are bad enough.” I dragged a hand down my face. The gauze caught on stubble. “There’s a name behind mine. Money. The kind of name that doesn’t lose at anything, ever. That’s the whole of what you get this morning.The rest stays in a box. People who get near it end up paying for it.”
He took that in. Didn’t reach for it.
“This name,” he said. “The kind I’d know if you said it out loud.”
“You’d know it.”
“And your father wants you where.”
“Out of the job. Back in the fold. A suit that costs what you clear in a month, a desk with my name on a brass plate, shaking hands with people I’d cross the street to dodge.” I pushed the mug a few inches. “He’s patient about it. That’s the part that gets under you. He never asks twice. He just moves the ground till you’re standing where he wanted and can’t work out how you got there.”
He didn’t push. He’s the only man I’ve met who can let a thing go and have it land harder than the next question would.
I made myself look at him.
