Page 5 of Take the Fall
“Detective.” He stopped. Started again, quieter, like the rank was a wall he’d decided to come around. “Ryan. What happened?”
And there it was. The drink had a hand on the lid of me and the lid came up without a fight.
“They’re reopening it.” I heard the slur and couldn’t be bothered to fix it. “The thing from 52 Division. The thing they already used to bury me once. They dug it back up this afternoon, because I got too close to something, and tomorrow I sit at a desk like a good boy and answer the phone while they decide somewhere over my head whether to take the rest.”
“The desk thing’s temporary. Inspector Murphy said so.”
“Inspector Murphy.” I laughed. It came out wrong, too sharp for the small warm space of the cab. “He benched me to protect me. I know. He told me to my face and I believe him. Everybody’s saving me tonight. You. Him. Whole city lining up to save me.” I scrubbed a hand down my face. The gauze on my finger caught on two days of stubble. “Doesn’t change where I’m sitting at eight in the morning.”
The city kept sliding. A streetcar swung past the other way, lit up and nearly empty, one man asleep against the glass with his head bobbing. I watched him go. Wherever he was headed, he’d get there without it costing him anything.
He was quiet a moment. I thought that might be the end of it, that he’d let me have the window and the dark and not push. He didn’t.
“Can I say something,” he said. “And you don’t have to answer. You can pretend you’re asleep. I’ll let you.”
“Go on.”
“You didn’t do it,” Reid said. Quiet. Certain in a way I hadn’t earned from him. “The leak. Whatever they’re saying. You didn’t do it.”
“You don’t know that. You’ve known me a month.”
“I know you slipped a domestic-violence card to a scared woman when you thought nobody was looking.” He said it to his window, not to me. Embarrassed to have noticed that much. “I was looking. Guys who do that don’t sell out the people who trust them. Doesn’t track.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. It went into me somewhere low and lodged. A splinter I couldn’t afford to look at, not tonight, not from him. He’d been in the room. Of course he’d been in the room. The kid was always in the room, in the corner, watching, taking it all in with that open face, and I’d never once thought he was filing any of it. I’d had him wrong. I had a lot of people wrong. It was turning into the theme of the week.
I turned my face to the window so he wouldn’t catch what was on it.
“It’s not even the desk.” The words came on their own now, the whiskey walking them out one after another and me too tired to stop the line. “They’ve done this to me once already and I let them. They had a mess at 52 and I was the cleanest thing in the room to wipe it on. So they wiped it on me and called it a transfer, and the whole building nodded along like it was the weather. And now they need that version to be true. So they’re going back to make it true. New evidence.” I laughed, flat. “There isn’t any new evidence. There’s a decision somebody made in a room I wasn’t in, and a file they’re building backward to fit it.” The bitterness surprised me. I hadn’t known I was carrying that much, this close to the surface. “I followed every rule they handed me. Every one. It counted for nothing the first time. It’ll count for nothing now.”
“That’s not true,” Reid started, and stopped, because I wasn’t listening. The thing had its own momentum now and I was just the throat it came out of.
“And here’s the funny part.” I pressed the heel of my hand against one eye until the dark bloomed with color. “If they take this, I’ve got nothing underneath it. There’s no second floor. I don’t know what I am if I’m not this. I never have. Other men have a backup. A trade. A wife. A thing they’d rather be doing if the job let them go. I’ve got a badge and a face that tests well and that’s the whole inventory. That’s the whole man. Take the badge away and all that’s left on the sidewalk is the face. A guy in a costume. Somebody who was only ever playing at a job until they finally noticed and made him stop.”
The cab went quiet. Reid didn’t rush to fill it. He let it sit there in the dark with me, the silence and the engine and the wipers ticking against a windshield that didn’t need them. I wouldn’t have guessed a twenty-three-year-old had that in him. The discipline to let a man’s worst sentence stand without papering over it.
Then, after a while, he said it to his window, low. “My dad was a cop.”
I didn’t say anything. You don’t, when someone hands you a thing like that. You hold still and let them keep going or not.
“Twenty-six years. Same division the whole time, out east.” A pause. “He used to say the job took everything you had and then asked what else you were holding. I thought he was being dramatic. I was seventeen.” He turned the words over. “He’s gone now. Three years. And I joined up anyway, which he’d have called the stupidest thing I ever did and been proud of at the same time.” He glanced at me. “I’m only saying it because. You think the badge is the whole of you. My dad thought that too. He was wrong about himself the way you’re being wrong about yourself right now. There was a whole man in there the job never got near. I saw it. I just didn’t say so while I had the chance.”
The cab hummed. The city went by. I looked at the side of his young face and didn’t have a single deflection ready, which almost never happened to me.
“That’s the most you’ve ever said at once,” I told him.
“Yeah, well.” The flush came up the side of his neck, the one he hated. “You’re a captive audience. Literally. You can’t even do stairs.”
Jordan. I’d thought of him as the rookie for a month. Somewhere on the far side of the river he’d quietly earned his own name.
The driver’s eyes came up to the mirror once. Took the read. A cop and a drunk in his back seat at this hour, one of them crying without making any noise about it. He’d seen worse. He looked back at the road and turned the radio down a notch, which was its own small mercy, the third or fourth of the night, and I’d stopped being able to tell the mercies apart.
We crossed the river. The valley opened on both sides, trees and black water and the parkway lights far below, then closed again into streetlights and low brick. The east side. People lived out here their whole lives and were happy, probably, in the ordinary way I’d spent thirty-one years performing and never once managing. Houses with lights on. People behind them who knew exactly who they were when the badge came off, because they’d never needed a badge to be anyone.
“For what it’s worth,” Reid said at last. Careful, picking the words up one at a time. “You’re the best interview I’ve ever watched. I’m not just saying that. I’ve seen people open up to you who wouldn’t give the rest of us the steam off their coffee. That’s not a face, Detective. You can fake a lot of things. You can’t fake that part.” A beat. Then he added it like it cost him nothing. “Hawley says it too. In his way. Which for him is two words and a grunt, but he means it.”
I went still.
I didn’t decide to. It just happened. The way the whole body stops when you step on something in the dark. His name, dropped into the warm fug of the cab as easy as a coin into a jar, and everything in me locked down around it.
