Page 68 of Take the Fall
My back hit the cold stone. My legs went loose. The breath came up wrong. The tears climbed into my throat and stuck there, hard, that place I’d been packing everything into for ten years, and they didn’t fall, because I wouldn’t let them, not on his sidewalk. My hands shook. My lip throbbed in time with my pulse, already swelling.
And David. It came in sideways, the way the worst ones do. David in my kitchen with his hand warm and heavy on my shoulder, handing me the one thing he said my father had sworn him to keep. My father’s heart was going, he’d told me. Two procedures, more coming. That part was just true, no angle on it. He had looked at me and said all of it and known the whole time it was a lie.
The one man in that family I’d let myself believe never lied to me. He had bought my trust years ago in twenty-dollar bills and a kitchen table that asked nothing of me, saved it all this time, and spent it in a single night on his brother’s errand. Even the last thing he gave me at the door, that I could call him, him and not the firm and not my father, had been part of it. He’d put it last so it would be the one I carried out with me. It was.
A streetcar went past. A man with a coffee. A woman steering a stroller wide around a grate. The whole ordinary city, going on, that never once needed my father’s say-so to exist.
I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand. The red came off on my knuckles. I breathed in, all the way, the first full breath in days. The thing in my chest that had been screaming sincethe hospital went quiet. He couldn’t touch me now. He couldn’t touch any of them now. I’d made sure of it the only way I had, in the only language he ever spoke to me.
And under it, where he always was, was Luke.
I wanted to go home to him so badly I leaned at the curb.
I loosened the top button. Pulled the cold air all the way down. Then I put my arm out for a cab, my blood drying on my hand. When the cab pulled away, I didn’t look back through the glass, and I didn’t look back at him.
Chapter 20: What He Did in the Dark
Luke
Voss went into the cells ahead of me. The door clicked shut on him, a flat steel sound with no give in it, and I stood there a beat longer than the job needed, watching him work out that it wasn’t going to open again.
I was the one who walked him in. Murphy let me have that, which was not regulation and not like him, and I understood it for the gift it was. Voss. The detective out of 52 Division who’d built the frame that almost burned Ryan’s career to the ground, who’d spent months turning a clean cop into a dirty story and, by every account, enjoyed the doing of it.
He didn’t say much. They never do, the careful ones, once the careful stops working. He’d had a speech ready and you could see him decide, somewhere around the booking desk, that there was no room left to give it in. The cuffs did that. The cuffs and the IA people standing in a way that meant this was real and federal-serious and not going to be talked sideways.
Marsh went down the same morning at the 52 end. The detective who’d run as the courier between Voss’s desk and headquarters, carrying the dirty papers back and forth, keeping both ends clean by never letting them touch. The network didn’t move without her. Now it wasn’t moving at all.
Reeves had handed us the first thread weeks back, and then this week the rest of it. A records clerk at headquarters who’d watched the files get quietly rewritten for months and finally decided that being afraid of them was worse than being afraid for herself. She came in with a lawyer and her nerve up and laid the whole sick architecture out. Without her there’s no morning like this one. I’ll never get to tell her that properly.
And Whitfield walked.
That’s the part that sat wrong in all of us, the part Murphy couldn’t put down on the drive back. Deputy Chief Charles Whitfield, Robert Branford’s friend of twenty years, the man who’d pushed Ryan’s transfer through in six days and dropped him exactly where the fire would start. And there was not one page in the whole case that could be made to stick to him. He’d keep his rank, or take a quiet retirement with a watch and a handshake, and walk out of it clean, same as the man who’d paid for all of it. The two of them at the top, untouched, while the men who did their work for them went into the cells. Murphy said it flat, hands on the wheel, not looking at me. “We got the network. We didn’t get the men who own it and we need to be satisfied with it.” I’ve been a cop long enough to know that’s most of what winning ever looks like.
It came apart clean. That almost never happens.
And the whole time, every hour of the worst week I’ve worked in years, the gathering and the briefing and the planning and the not-sleeping, I kept turning to tell Ryan something and finding the air where he should have been.
I missed him so much I’d started seeing him.
That’s the truth of where six days had got me. Twice this week I’d caught him out of the corner of my eye, the line of his shoulders at the edge of a doorway, the particular way he stood with his weight cocked like a question, and turned, and found a stranger, or a coat on a chair, or nothing. This morning I’d have sworn he was at the back of the bullpen while I walked Voss through. A shape by the far wall. I didn’t look twice. You don’t, when you’ve started wanting a thing badly enough to invent it.
He’d pushed me away on a sidewalk six days ago and I had not understood it then and I did not understand it now.
I’d called him. The first day. The second day and every subsequent one without any response. He hadn’t come back to the apartment either. Every night I’d come through the door and the wrongness of it hit me like a freight truck.
I’d told myself he knew what he was doing and would come back. I’d told myself a lot of things. None of them filled the air where he should have been.
By the time I came up the stairs after the final arrests, I was past the end of myself. The takedown was done and the adrenaline had drained out hours ago and I was empty, and I wanted, with no dignity left about it, to sleep for a week and wake up with him there.
The bad stair creaked. I got my key in the lock.
The apartment was warm. The lamp was on.
I froze with my hand still on the door.
He was on the couch. Sitting forward, elbows on his knees, like he’d been sitting that way a long time. He looked up when the door opened and he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either, and the whole six days came up my throat at once.
I crossed the room as he stood. Before he could get a word out, I got my hands on his face and pulled him up and kissed him.
