Page 4 of Take the Fall
“Told you I’d be easy to find.”
“You did not tell me that.” He looked at the row of empties Pat hadn’t cleared. Counted them without meaning to let me see. Decided not to say anything about the number, which I gave himcredit for. A lesser man would have made a face. “How many of those are yours?”
“Pat lost count. So did I. We called it a draw.”
“Right.” He blew out a breath. “Let’s get you home.”
“No.”
It came out flatter than I meant. The one hard edge in me the whiskey hadn’t filed down. He blinked.
“Not there.” I turned the glass on its ring of water. “Not tonight. Anywhere but there.”
He took that in. I could see him want the why of it. The kid was made of questions. I watched him decide not to ask. The not-asking was the kindest thing anyone had done for me since a man knelt in broken glass and told me I didn’t have to pretend. The comparison rose up before I could stop it. I shut it off, hard, the way you slam a drawer on your own fingers and decide not to feel it.
“All right,” Reid said. Easy, like I’d asked him for the time. “My place, then. I’ve got a couch. It’s a bad couch. I want to be straight with you about the couch. But it’s horizontal and it’s not there, so.”
Something that wanted to be a laugh moved in my chest and didn’t make it out.
“Don’t have my wallet.”
“I didn’t ask you for your wallet.”
He went down the bar to find Pat. I let him. That was the shape the night had taken hours ago and I’d stopped fighting it around the fourth drink. People deciding things. Me letting them.
I watched it happen from the stool. Reid leaned over the wood and said something low. Pat glanced at me, then back at him, and answered something lower. Two men arranging me between them like a parcel that had to get somewhere safe. I caught a word here and there.Cab.Riverdale.He good?Pat tipping hishead, not sure, an honest man giving an honest read of a drunk he liked. Then a card came out.
Reid’s card. I tried to wave it off and my hand didn’t make the trip. “I’ve got it,” I said, to nobody, to the bar, and reached for a wallet that wasn’t there because I’d left it on a counter in a flat I couldn’t go back to.
“You’ve got nothing,” Reid said, not unkind, not looking up from the machine. “Sit.”
So I sat, and let a constable three months out of college, clearing a little over fifty thousand a year before the deductions ate it, cover a tab I could have settled with what sat untouched in an account I never looked at, in a bank my grandfather used. If anyone in the room had the first idea what I actually was.
The wrongness of it sat in me alongside everything else. One more thing I’d let happen tonight that I’d have to square later. I’d pay him back. He’d refuse it. We’d do that small dance the way you do with a man too proud to be your charity and too kind to let you stay your own.
I put my forehead on the cool of the bar a second. The wood smelled of decades of spilled beer and the rag Pat dragged across it. When I lifted my head the room tilted, held, righted itself.
“Up you get.” Reid had my jacket off the stool, holding it open behind me like I was a kid at a school gate. I got one arm in. Missed the other sleeve. Swiped at the air. Found it on the second try. His hand came under my elbow, steady, taking some of my weight without announcing it.
“I can walk.”
“Nobody said you couldn’t.”
Pat lifted his chin as we went. The same goodbye he’d give a regular of thirty years. “Mind how you go, kid.”
“Night, Pat.”
Then the door, and the cold took the breath out of me. We were on Parliament, the wet street throwing back the streetlightsin long smeared ribbons. The last of the blossom petals lay crushed on the pavement, brown now.
Reid kept a hand between my shoulder blades. Guiding, not pushing. The difference was a thing I noticed because so few people had ever bothered with it.
A cab idled at the curb, light on, wipers ticking though the rain had stopped. He’d called it from the sidewalk before he came inside. Stood out here in the cold and arranged the next part before he let himself see how bad the first part was. He’d run the whole rescue in his head on the walk over. The way you plan an approach to a scene you’re afraid of. The thought put a thickness in my throat I blamed, out of habit, on the whiskey.
He poured me into the back seat, a palm on the top of my head so I didn’t crack it on the frame. The way you do with someone in cuffs. Except gentle. Except the opposite of that. Went around and got in the other side. Gave the driver an address in Riverdale, across the river, the east side. A part of town I had no reason to know and didn’t.
The cab pulled out. Parliament slid past the window. Closed shops, shuttered grates, the one all-night store burning blue-white at the corner. Then streets I didn’t recognize, the whole city smeared and golden through the glass. I let my head rest on the window and let it carry me somewhere that wasn’t a decision.
For a while neither of us said anything. Reid sat with his hands in his lap and his knee going. The energy of him with nowhere to put itself. He glanced at me, then out his window, then at me again. Winding up to something. I knew the build of it cold. I’d watched it in the front seats of a hundred cars, in interview rooms, across kitchen tables. The long indrawn breath before a person hands you the thing they came to say. I just hadn’t often been on this side of it.
