Page 24 of Take the Fall
The clock on the wall turned quietly.
“The case,” I said.
He held my eyes through it. The plant. The beads. The particular patience of a man who’d been doing this longer than I’d been a detective.
Then he let it go.
“The case,” he agreed, even. The way he closed a line of inquiry when he’d judged the pursuing of it would cost more than the answer was worth. He didn’t believe me all the way and we both knew it and moved past it, because the case and the man were pointed at the same thing and Murphy had decided that was enough to work with.
“One thing, as your inspector, because this once the two want different work out of you. A man putting a wrong right does it thorough and slow. A man saving one particular person does it fast, and fast is how careful men get seen before they’re ready. The steadiest hand in a room is the one with the least of himself riding on it. I need that hand to be yours.” A beat. “The day I’m not sure it is, I take this off you and give it to someone who doesn’t give me the face you’re giving me right now. We clear.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then that’s all.” He picked the sheet up, folded it once more, and held it across. “Burn that tonight. Paper, nothing left.” He waited until my hand was on it. “Get him back at that desk, Hawley. That’s what this is. The rest is only how we get there.”
The bullpen had filled while I was upstairs. Saunders grinding someone down at his desk. Two detectives trading paper across a partition. The printer in the corner having its regular disagreement with itself.
Carlson’s desk sat across from mine. Chair pushed square, surface clear. He kept it that way, the one orderly thing in our flat and the one orderly thing here. I’d thought, early on, it was a performance. I wasn’t sure anymore.
Reid had left a sticky note on the monitor while I’d been gone. A smiley face in blue pen, nothing written. One of the smallautomatic kindnesses the kid handed out like he had a surplus of them.
I peeled it off. Stood there with it a second. Dropped it in the bin.
Then stood looking at the bin, knowing exactly which feeling I’d acted on and not being proud of it.
I sat down at my own desk. Across from his empty chair.
Seven weeks, and a name would come off a routine report and we’d know who’d gone in under a borrowed face to check the seal on Ryan Carlson’s buried file. And everything under that name would start to come apart. The chain, the order, the structure they’d built to frame a clean detective and protect a dirty trade. Slow, and quiet, the way you take a thing apart when you mean to keep all the pieces.
I’d told him to wait this morning and I’d meant it. The ground was moving under him already and I wasn’t going to set this on top of it, even where the telling would have been the easier thing for me. He’d carry enough. He didn’t need to carry the fact that someone in his own building had been holding the frame around his name steady this whole time.
What he needed was the frame to come down.
Seven weeks. I could live in seven weeks the way I’d lived in the one before it. Carry it quiet, do the work that left no marks, stay clear of anything that pointed back at me or Murphy or Daniel. That part was straightforward. I’d done harder with less.
The other part, the kitchen and the hand and the morning, went where it had been going since the night I stood on the far side of his door listening to him sleep. A separate drawer, and a good lock on it. I’d check it in seven weeks, when the ground was a floor again and a man could see what he was standing on.
Ryan.Just that, in the quiet behind my own eyes, with no one in the room to hear it. Just the name and the thing I’d decided.
I opened the desk drawer and got to work.
Chapter 9: Afraid You’ll Swim
Ryan
The last time I spoke to my father, he hung up first.
He always hung up first. A small thing, and somehow the whole thing. That was half of why I’d stopped picking up at all. The last call he’d run through my mother, a week back, and ended it while I was still holding the phone. He spoke, I endured, he decided when it was over.
This morning I broke ten years of not calling him.
His direct line. The one he gave me the year I finished university and recited once across a boardroom table like the giving of it was a small ceremony, the one I had not dialed in the ten years since. He picked up on the second ring. Expecting it, or waiting for it, and with him there had never been a difference between the two.
I need to speak to you.
Today, then. One o’clock. I’ll have a table.
No surprise in it. No checking of a calendar. He’d been waiting on that call for a week and wasn’t going to pretend he hadn’t.
