Page 21 of Take the Fall
Then I stood at the window a minute. Gray sky, the wet street three floors down, a streetcar grinding past with two faces in it going somewhere ordinary. I watched it out of sight.
Sitting in things had never once moved a thing an inch.
My phone was on the side table, plugged in to charge. Of course it was. He’d found the cord, matched it, set it where I’d see it. I picked it up. The headache pulsed under everything else.
There was a knot of all this I couldn’t touch. The file. The room across the city. The slow clean machine taking me apart where I’d never get a hand on it. I couldn’t fight that. Not from a desk. Not from here.
There was one thing I could.
I went into the contacts I never open. Past the women’s names, the ones who’d come if I called and never see a thing I didn’t show them. Past the lawyers. Down to the floor of the list, where the family lived.
My uncle’s office. My father’s direct line, the one I’d never once dialed. My mother.
My thumb sat over my mother’s name. She was the soft one, the one they sent in first because they knew I’d pick up. Call her and she’d be glad and a little teary and have my father on the line inside a minute, warmed up and waiting. That was the whole trick of her, and she’d run it anyway, because she loved me, and the loving had never once stopped her handing over the phone.
I took my thumb off her name.
Not yet. Not unwashed and shaking, with him still on my skin and a hangover where my judgment should be. A man like my father can hear all of that down a line from a mile off, and I wasn’t handing him a single inch I didn’t have to.
I carried the phone to the bathroom and set it on the edge of the sink. Turned the shower on. Stood there while the water ran cold, then warm, then hot enough to hurt.
I couldn’t touch the file. I couldn’t take back the kiss. The only wreck left in the building that had my own hand in it was the one with my name on the front of it, and I was going to have to walk back into that house to do anything about it.
I got in the water and started there.
Chapter 8: Spending Their Calm
Luke
The machine by the bullpen gave you something hot for a dollar. I’d stopped calling it coffee. It may have been caffeine, but it was an insult to all coffee lovers.
I stood there while it ran and let my head be where it still was, which was two hours back in that kitchen. His hand under mine. The moment after I’d taken my hand away and told him to wait...sensible, he’d said, with something dry underneath it that I’d heard and hadn’t addressed and had walked out the door with instead, because the phone had gone and the phone was the reason I was standing in a building at noon trying to care about a plastic cup.
He’d saiddon’t waitwithout saying it. I’d heard it and named it something else. Those were the facts, and I couldn’t fix them from here.
The cup filled to the line and stopped. I took it.
“Detective!”
Constable Reid came up on my left, a folder under his arm that had no business being there, and the particular look of a man who’d been waiting for me at the machine.
“Reid.”
“Late start.”
“Had a thing.”
He nodded like that covered it and fell into step beside me, which meant he wasn’t done. “Took the nine-o’clock with Saunders. Shoplifting, Gerrard Street. The kid was sixteen and I think he just wanted someone to see him, you know? Saunders went old-school at him, which.” He half-shrugged. “What can you do.”
“Not much with Saunders.”
“No.” He shifted the folder. “Is Carlson coming in this week?”
Five words. And the thing inside them.
I looked at him. The open face. The concern sitting in it a degree warmer than a man worries about someone he shares a building with. Reid had liked Carlson from day one, the way the whole room had wanted to like him before it became inconvenient, and what I was reading now was something more specific than that. A softness around the question. A particular quality of attention that I recognized because I’d spent six weeks being careful to keep it off my own face.
The heat went through me before I’d cleared it for arrival. Quick, low, with no credentials and no apology.
