Page 32 of Take the Fall
The given name, set down deliberate, the way he set it down now when he meant a thing he wasn’t going to say around it.
“Goodnight.”
He went down the short hall. His door didn’t slam and it didn’t whisper; it closed the way a door closes when a man has decided something on the other side of it and isn’t going to perform the deciding for anyone.
I stood in the kitchen with a dry towel and the smell of his cooking still in the room.
Marsh at one end and Reeves at the other and a borrowed login still faceless in the middle, weeks from a name. Murphyholding the slow center of it. Daniel somewhere I’d never be told. The whole structure still standing, and tonight, for the first time, a line I could draw across part of it with my own hand.
And the man two walls away who couldn’t know I’d drawn it.
I’d told himnot right now.I’d left my hand where it was. I’d given him one true sentence and bitten down on the rest, and he’d taken the sentence and thanked me for the part I wouldn’t give, because he’d worked out it was for him without my saying so. He always did get there. That was the trouble with loving a man who read people for a living.
I turned off the kitchen light.
Not as long as it looked. I’d told him that, and I meant to make it true.
Chapter 11: The Building at War
Luke
I drove. He grieved.
“Weeks,” Carlson said from the passenger seat, in the tone of a man dictating his own eulogy. “Weeks I sat in that apartment going quietly to pieces, and do you know the one thing I wanted, every single day of it? This. The desk. The terrible coffee. The noise of people who aren’t me. Outside.”
“You’re outside.”
“I was out for forty minutes.” He held up four fingers, then a zero, in case the scale of the loss had escaped me. “Forty. I had just sat down. Reid made a cake.”
“I know.”
“You looked at it. Did you look at it?” He turned in the seat. “He baked it! With his own hands. It said WELCOME BACK in blue icing, except he ran out of room on the second line, so what it actually said was WELCOME BAC, full stop, and then a small, defeated K underneath on its own, and it was the kindest andmost structurally unsound thing anyone has done for me in a calendar year, and I did not get a slice.”
“You’ll get a slice.”
“It won’t be the same slice! The moment’s gone, Hawley. You can’t reheat a moment.” He slumped against the door. “And Chen brought the good coffee. Not the machine. The actual, from home, in a thermos, because Chen is a serious woman who understands that a man’s first morning back is a sacrament. I had the cup in my hand. I had the cup in my actual hand.”
“And then the phone rang.”
“And then the phone rang.” He said it the way other men sayand then the shooting started.“Doyle answered it, thrilled, because Doyle lives for this. ‘Carlson, line two, crime in progress.’ And like a fool, like a Pavlovian idiot, I set down the best coffee in the building and I picked it up, because weeks of nothing make you stupid for a crime, any crime.”
I kept my eyes on the road.
“And the worst part,” Carlson went on, “the genuinely unforgivable part, is that I had Saunders cued up. He did his little routine,they let you back in, then,and I had weeks of material loaded and the high ground for once in my life, and I was going to be so gracious about it that it would’ve taken him a fortnight to understand it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. And I had to leave it. On the table. Next to the cake I didn’t eat and the coffee I didn’t drink.”
“For a callout to your own front door.”
“For a callout to my own front door! Exactly!” He pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes. “I waited to get out of that apartment, and the very first thing this job does, the first thing, is point me right back at it. Go home, Carlson. Go mind your own doorstep.”
I let myself smile at the windshield.
Here is the thing I was not going to say, with my eyes on the road and the man beside me mourning a cake. For days the chair across from my desk had been empty, and I had been the steadiest hand in the building, which is a thing you can do with your whole face while something under it quietly comes apart. Now the chair was full and the man in it was complaining, at length, with footnotes, about icing. You don’t itemize the indignities of an uneaten cake when the floor’s still gone out from under you. You do it when you’ve got your feet back. The whining was the best sound I’d heard in a long time. I’d have driven him to the far end of the country to keep him doing it, which was the sort of thing I thought now, apparently, and did not examine at red lights.
“So tell me the actual situation,” I said, because the alternative was going on thinking what I’d been thinking.
“A theft,” he said. “In our building. That’s the whole of it. That’s everything I’ve got.”
“That’s all he gave you?”
