Page 64 of Take the Fall
“Don’t,” I said. “Whatever you’re going to say. I can’t have your voice right now, Luke.”
“One minute.” He was wrecked. “Please. Then I’ll go.”
I turned around. I hadn’t decided to.
“The men last night,” I said. “The three thugs. They were my father’s men? Did my own father send men to beat you up because of this investigation?”
He didn’t say no.
That was the whole of it, right there. He didn’t say no. His mouth opened and what came out was my name, low, like a hand held out, and it was not the word I needed. Notno, God, it was strangers, it was nothing.The silence where that word should have been went down into my stomach like swallowed ice.
“Say it wasn’t him.” I wasn’t level anymore. “Say it. Lie to me, I don’t even care, I’ve had the practice today. Tell me the men who put you in a hospital weren’t sent by my father and I will go home like a good boy.”
“Ryan.”
“You can’t.” I was shouting in the street now, and a woman steered her kid wide of us, and I didn’t care. “You can’t say it because it’s true. My father had you beaten. He put three men with a bat on my partner and broke him on the pavement, and you knew it on the road, you knew it crawling home, and you got in our shower and let me say I loved you with it sitting in your chest.”
“I was keeping you out of it. That’s all it ever was.”
“I don’t care about the case!” It tore out of me and it was true, and the truth of it cracked something open. “Do you hear me. I do not care about the case. I know how it works, I know there are things a partner carries that he can’t hand you. I know that. I’d have forgiven you that. I’d have forgiven the whole time of you keeping it off me, if that were all this was, two cops and a secret. I swear to God I would have.”
I had to stop and find the air.
“But you’re not a line in a file, Luke. You’re the one they hit. He didn’t come after a case. He came after you. My father looked at my whole life and found the one thing in it I love and he sent men to break it, as a message, and the message worked, it’s working right now, because all I can see is the next three thugs coming your way. The ones he sends when a warning isn’t enough.”
He reached for me. Of course he did. He’s Luke. And God help me I wanted it, I wanted to put my face in his neck and let him tell me he had it handled, that he’d be careful, every soft lie that works. That was the worst of it. That after all of it I still wanted his arms more than I wanted to be safe from him.
I stepped back, out of his reach.
“This madness needs to stop,” I said.
I left him there on the sidewalk, holding his ribs, shouting my name, and I walked, and I did not look back, because if I looked back I would have gone to him.
Chapter 19: Rightful Place
Ryan
The jacket pinched under the arms. Did I gain weight? Not a good moment to have such a ridiculous thought.
It was the best suit I owned. Navy so dark it read black, from the life I’d walked out of, the kind of money that doesn’t show a label. Three of them had hung in a garment bag at the back of my closet for years. I’d never said why I kept them. This morning I knew why. You don’t walk into my father’s building in off-the-rack. He’d price it in a second, and the nerves behind it too.
I hadn’t seen Luke in days. Damn I missed him, but it couldn’t be helped. And no way I was bringing him into this hell hole.
I won’t pretend that was the easy part. I stayed away from all of it. From the apartment, from the phone, from the one thing that would have made the rest of this bearable. It had to be that way. I told myself that on a loop and most of the time it held. I had to see this through by myself, make sure I could focus on what needed to be done.
Murphy gave me the days off I’d asked for without much of a fight. He looked at me a long moment across his desk, then said go. He thought I was running on empty, maybe, needing a break.
I drew a breath and went in.
The lobby was all stone and hush, a security desk the size of a small car. I gave the name I’d spent a third of my life not using. Branford. It works like a key in that building. The guard found me in a system, his manner shifting by a degree, and a private elevator took me up fast.
The executive floor opened straight off it. Glass, pale wood, a long row of white orchids, the lake out past the windows gone flat silver under a low sky. People crossed it fast in good shoes. Nobody hurried, because at that height nobody is allowed to look like they hurry. A phone rang once and got answered before the second ring.
His office was the corner with the most lake in it.
A woman stood up from the desk outside it. Good glasses, careful hair, the calm of someone who’d turned away better men than me.
“Can I help you.”
