Page 53 of Take the Fall
The quiet on his end changed weight. When he came back the give had gone out of his voice. “Say that again.”
“No hospital. It goes in a system the second they wheel me in. Assault on a detective. A report, my name on it, every reason I’m down here on a file someone can pull. Weeks I’ve left no paper. I’m not starting tonight.”
“You’re going to listen to me.” Flat and hard now. A door slammed on his end. Keys off a hook. Fast feet. “I’ve watched you do this. Walk it off. Swallow it. Call it nothing. That’s why you’re in a gutter and those men are driving home under the limit. You think the silence keeps the work safe. The silence is what put you on the ground.”
“Inspector.”
“I’m not finished.” He didn’t raise his voice. He bore down instead, which was worse. “The ambulance is rolling and you’ll be in it. St. Michael’s, off the air. The paper is mine to handle and I’ll handle it. Your job is to stop bleeding and do as you’re told. Are we clear.”
I didn’t answer fast enough for him.
“Hawley. Stay on that wall and wait for me. Don’t get up. Don’t wave them off. Don’t talk those medics into letting you walk. You wait. For me. Say it.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Good.”
He was gone.
Chapter 16: Out Loud
Ryan
The kettle had gone cold twice.
I’d boiled it the first time out of habit, the way you do something with your hands when the rest of you has nowhere to go. Then I’d forgotten it. Boiled it again. Forgotten it again. Now it sat there ticking as it cooled, and I stood at the counter in a flat that was too quiet, listening for the street door three floors down.
Murphy’s call had come at quarter past ten.
He’s all right.That was the first thing the Inspector had said, before hello, because he knew me well enough to know what I’d do with a silent second.He’s all right, Carlson. He’s at St. Michael’s. He’s going to be fine.
And then nothing useful for the rest of it.
I’d been at Conroy’s when the first call came, the one that put me out the door at a run. By the time I’d got to the hospital they had him somewhere I wasn’t allowed, and Murphy was standing in the corridor like a man set there to be a wall, andevery question I put to him came back sanded down to nothing. An assault. On the way home. They were looking into it. He’d be kept a couple of hours and released. Go home, Carlson. Get some sleep. He’ll be along.
Go home. As if I were nobody.
I’d gone home because the only other option was standing in a corridor being managed, and I have enough pride left to refuse to be managed in public.
So I waited.
And the thing about waiting, when you’ve spent years doing this job, is that you can’t switch off the part of you that reads a room. The part that knows when a story has a seam in it. And this one had a seam. Murphy didn’t go vague. Murphy was the most precise man I’d ever worked under, a human lie detector who’d built his whole career on never saying a word more than the truth allowed. And tonight he’d handed me fog. Deliberate, careful fog.They’re looking into it.Who’s they. Looking into what. A mugging gone wrong gets a report and a shrug, not the Staff Inspector standing personal guard at midnight.
Something was off. I couldn’t get my hand around it. It sat just past the edge of what I could see, the way a name sits on your tongue and won’t come, and the harder I reached the further it slid.
I gave up reaching and went back to listening for the door.
He came back at midnight.
Luke looked worse than Murphy’sfineand better than my worst hour of imagining, which is to say he looked like a man who almost lost a fight. There was a butterfly strip over his eyebrow, on the old scar side, the cut under it gone dark. His lip was split at the corner. One side of his face had the beginnings of a bruise that would be spectacular by morning. He held himself stiff down the left, an arm kept close, and he came up the last step slow and even, governing it.
But he was upright. He was walking. He was here.
“Luke.”
“Don’t,” he said, before I’d got anything else out. Not unkind. Just tired down to the floor. “I’m fine.”
I stepped back to let him in, and the relief and the fury arrived in me at the exact same second, braided so tight I couldn’t have pulled one from the other, and I didn’t trust my voice, so I just got out of his way and shut the door behind him.
