Page 9 of Take the Fall
Nothing came.
There was a stack of my own files squared at the corner. Real work, the kind I could lose an hour in on a good day. I opened the top one. Read the same line three times. The words stayed words and refused to become anything. Across the desk the empty chair sat where he’d have been sitting. Tipped back on two legs, talking too much, drinking the vending coffee he claimed to hate and drank anyway. The chair was just a chair this morning. I kept reading the line that wouldn’t take.
A month ago I’d have called the empty chair a mercy. He’d been a noise I worked around. A man who filled the bullpen with himself and made me feel like furniture in my own division. I’d counted the days like a sentence. I hadn’t noticed when the counting stopped. No moment I could point to. No day I decided he was anything but a problem the force had handed me. It just happened, under the surface, the way water gets into a wall before you see the stain. Now the chair was empty the way a house is empty when you don’t know if the person’s coming back.
That was the part I couldn’t get over. Not that I wanted him back. That I wanted anything at all.
After the last time I’d settled it. The way you settle a debt you can’t afford to carry. No more of this. Not on the job, never again on the job, where a man could take your heart and hand it to the brass like evidence. I’d shut the door on that and meant it. Kept it shut for years. It had cost me nothing I missed.
Then they put Ryan Carlson across a desk from me. Of all the men to get past a door like that. Loud where I was quiet. A performer where I’d made a religion of giving nothing away. The kind of pretty that walks into a room already knowing it’s being watched. Everything I’d taught myself to distrust on sight. He should have been easy to keep out.
He talked and flirted and shone at everyone in the building and I watched it from behind my own glass and felt nothing buttired. And then somewhere it stopped being a performance I was watching and started being a man I couldn’t stop watching, and I still couldn’t tell you the day it turned. That was the part that unsettled me more than the wanting did. I knew how to refuse a thing I’d seen coming. I had no idea what to do with one already in.
He’d come apart on the floor and I’d put my hand to the back of his neck without deciding to. For a moment he leaned into it like it was the only solid thing in the room. His heart going under my hand. Mine going too, and I’d let him feel it.Ryan.The name came up before I could stop it, the way it had started to, in the place where I used to keep him filed under his surname and the job. Then the panic came into his face and he was up and gone.
There was a colder reading under the kindness I’d told myself. That I let him go because some part of me had been braced for the running the whole time. And bracing for it is halfway to wanting it over with. I’d been the one left in a doorway once before, watching a man decide I was a cost he couldn’t carry. I’d promised myself, after, that I’d never go that still again. Then last night I knelt in the glass and let him walk out anyway.
I shut the file. The line never did take.
Across the room the coffee maker started up where Sergeant Karen Chen had set it going. She came past a minute later with two cups and put one down by my hand without asking, the way she did. Stood there a second longer than the coffee accounted for.
“You look like you slept here,” she said.
“I didn’t.”
“I know. That’s worse.” She didn’t make it a question, which I was grateful for. Chen had partnered near me for years and learned early that the way to get something out of me was to not reach for it. She followed my eyes to the empty chair and read it the only way she had to read it. Which was the wrong way. “It’sa rotten thing they did to him,” she said, lower. “Putting him on a desk. After 52, after all of it. I figured it’d land on you too. You two finally found a rhythm and they break it up the second it works.” She shook her head. “It’s not right. For what that’s worth.”
It was worth something. It was aimed at a target a foot to the left of the real one. I let it stand. She thought the weight on me was Carlson benched. The suspension, the unfairness of it, a partner done dirty by the machine that had done me dirty once. Anyone in the building would have read it the same. None of them would have guessed the rest. That he’d kissed me on a kitchen floor and run. That I didn’t know which city he’d woken up in. That the worst of the weight wasn’t the desk at all. I let her keep the easy version. It was the only one I could afford to have her holding.
“He’ll turn up,” she said, taking my silence for the agreement it almost was. “Drink the coffee, Hawley.”
She moved off. I drank the coffee. Bad in the specific way station coffee is always bad, and hot, and somebody had thought to put it in my hand. I sat with that longer than the coffee deserved.
A phone rang on an empty desk and rang out. The day went on assembling itself around me whether I was ready or not.
I could sit here. That was one option. Sit at my squared desk with my squared files and let the machine work. The force had a process. The process had a man’s name in it now. It would grind whether I sat still or not. Internal Affairs had reopened his file. The paperwork was already moving in rooms I’d never be allowed inside. The decent, disciplined thing, the thing I’d built my whole career on, was to keep my head down, do my own job clean, and let the people whose job it was do theirs.
I’d kept my head down once before. It cost me more than I’d known I had to lose.
Years back. My last posting. A partner I’d let myself fall for, which I’d sworn off doing on the job and done anyway, quiet, the way I did everything. For a while it was the one good thing. Then the brass started circling, and he was the one who handed it over. Gave them the dates. Confirmed what they only suspected. Then stood in a room full of senior officers and told them the wanting had been mine alone. Said it to my face the next morning, in front of half the shift, loud enough that nobody would have to wonder. Broke it off. Put in for a transfer to a cleaner division. Gone inside the month.
I didn’t transfer. That was the part people never seemed to follow. He left, and I stayed, and staying meant working the same hallways while the talk went around. Men I’d trusted my back to found reasons not to stand too close at a scene. The side-eyes followed me to the locker room and the lot and the line for coffee. He walked out clean and I wore it, because leaving would have looked like agreeing with them. I told myself staying was its own kind of spine. Mostly it was being the only one left to point at.
The discipline I was so proud of had been, that time, just another word for letting them win.
I was not going to do the disciplined thing twice. Not while it cost a good man his whole life for the crime of doing his job. Even if this time the man didn’t know yet there was anything to lose.
I looked at the empty chair a while longer. Then I stood up.
Inspector Murphy’s office was at the end of the bullpen. Glass-fronted, blinds half down the way he kept them when he was reading something he didn’t want the room reading over his shoulder. He was in early, which he always was. Through the gap in the blinds I could see him at his desk with his glasses on, which meant reports, and a folder he’d had under his hand for two days. Manila. Worn soft at one corner from being carried. I’dwatched him take it to the briefing room and back, to his car and back, like a man who didn’t trust a drawer with it.
I crossed the floor before I could build a reason not to.
Knocked once on the frame. He looked up over the glasses. Whatever was on my face, he read it the way he read everything, fast and without showing me what he’d found. He took the glasses off and set them down.
“Shut the door,” he said.
I shut it. The bullpen noise dropped to a hum through the glass. He didn’t tell me to sit and I didn’t sit. I stood in front of his desk with my hands at my sides. The sentence I’d carried across the room had gone somewhere. What came out instead was lower and barer than I’d meant.
