Page 88 of What We Bury

“No shit, Sherlock.” I lock my phone. I don’t need Eli to tell me to keep an eye on it. I was keeping eyes on things long before Eli was running around acting like the boss of hangings. No one appointed him leader. He kind of just took it and has been a broody pain in my ass ever since. But, I don’t fight it because the alternative is five men with no coordination, and I’ve seen how that goes.

The shift changes and the precinct fills up around me. Detectives trickling in, desk phones ringing, the coffee machine gurgling its last death rattle before someone has to refill it. I watch them all without looking at them directly. They file reports, study for the sergeant’s exam, lie to their spouses that tonight will be the night they make it home by six.

These are decent people. Most of them became cops for the right reasons—or at least reasons that weren’t entirely wrong—and they go home every night believing they did something that mattered.

I used to believe that. Before I learned the system I swore to protect is a machine that processes evil into paperwork and calls it justice—handing known rapists suspended sentences because a victim couldn’t stop crying long enough to testify clearly, as though trauma should present itself in a court-admissible format. Before I learned what it meant to watch a man walk free and know—down to the marrow—that he’ll hurt again, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it except go home and break your own furniture.

I arrested and released so many of them they started to blur. Then I caught the case that broke me. Reya.

Three years into uniform, I took her statement in a fluorescent box of a room while she described the worst night of her life in words a prosecutor could use—and apologized the whole way through. For crying. For not remembering the exact time. For the skirt she’d worn, like the fabric had a vote.

The evidence was solid. I made sure of it. The defense took her apart on the stand anyway, because that’s the job—find the crack, drive the wedge.Not guilty.

I carried her file down to storage myself. Stamped it. Shoved the box onto a shelf in a room nobody ever walks into.

Before she signed, she’d asked me,do you think we’ll get a retrial?

I told her yes. That’s the job—to lie with conviction. I wrote my resignation that afternoon and never handed it in. Still don’t know why.

A week later, the man who’d walked out of that courtroom smiling and adjusting his cufflinks washed up on the rocks at Carrum Point. Hands and feet bound. A 9mm hole in the side of his head. Whoever did it hadn’t bothered to dress it up as anything other than what it was—they’d just dumped him light, and the tide gave him back.

I stood over him in the gray light and felt none of the things I was supposed to feel. I was annoyed someone had gotten to him before me. That there was another person out there willing to do the thing I didn’t have the balls to.

I wanted to be the man pulling the trigger.

More than I ever wanted anything in my life.

Two days later a man sat down across from me at the diner I ate at before every shift. Lean. Expensive. Calm in a way that doesn’t come from a badge. He knew about the floater. He knew about the slug the M.E. had bagged. He knew about the box with Reya’s name on it.

“That bullet’s going to be a problem for somebody,”he said.“Be a shame if it got logged wrong. Lost between intake and the locker. Happens more than people think.”

I should have arrested him. Instead I thought about Reya apologizing for her skirt, and every victim still flinching at shadows while the man who made them that way walked around adjusting his cufflinks.

“Chain of custody’s a mess on that one,”I said.“These things happen.”

He left a card on the table. I’d learn his name later—Loki—and the rest of it later still. For now there was just cream cardstock, a gold snake coiled through two letters, and a date a week out.

The slug went missing.Gang-adjacent, the file said. Nobody pushed. Nobody ever pushes on men the system’s already decided not to mourn.

A week later I walked into a club with no sign and let two men talk to me for two hours about everything I’d known for years and never once heard said out loud. I said yes before the drink they poured got warm.

For a while that was all it was—the man on the inside. A name flagged before it reached the right desk. A report a little duller than the truth. I told myself I wasn’t doing the thing, only making room for it.

Then they called me to a parking structure where a kindergarten teacher sat against the wall beside a body he’d beaten out of this world with his bare hands, shaking, while a silent giant stood watch over him like a dog guarding a downed soldier.

That was the night I met Knox. And Eli.

We framed it as a mugging. I handled the paper. And parked outside Eli’s place in the small hours—because none of us trusted him alone—Knox and I got to talking. Two of us doing it clean, one doing it with his fists, all three wanting the same thing. So why were we doing it apart?

We pitched Odin a unit. Dedicated. Built for one kind of man and nothing else. He said yes. Eli looked at us like we’d handed him a reason to keep breathing.

Almost five years of ropes and clean exits. It lets me sleep. Most nights.

And now there’s a dark-haired girl with a kill of her own, and for the first time in years the thing I can’t stop turning over isn’t whether I did the right thing.

It’s whether I can keep her out of the box.

A call comes in on my desk phone.