Page 81 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Something is wrong before I open the door. Not anything I can point to, just the specific quality of the flat through the window, the way a space looks when it’s only got one person’s absence in it rather than one person’s presence. I stand at the door for a moment. Then I put my key in the lock.

The flat is empty.

I know before I’ve taken two steps. The sitting room, the silence, the lamp on its timer, and nothing else. He’s gone.

I stand in the middle of the room and I let it land. I’m good at letting things land, I’ve been doing it for a very long time, taking the fact of a thing and putting it somewhere it can be looked at. I look at this.

He left.

He woke up and he left, because whatever the bandaging and the blanket and the turned hand meant, it wasn’t enough, it couldn’t be enough, not without the words, and I never said the words. I didn’t say I’m not going to arrest you and you’re safe here, I actually mean that, you are safe here. I didn’t say I saw the link the stalker sent and I understand now, I understand why, and it doesn’t change how I feel, if anything it changes it in the other direction, and you deserved someone to say that to you a long time ago and I’m sorry it took me this long to be that person. I didn’t say any of it. I said hi, in the rain, at two in the morning, and I turned my hand over, and I put a blanket on him, and I thought tomorrow, I thought tomorrow I would find the sentences.

There is no tomorrow. There’s just this empty flat, and a lamp on a timer, and the note I left on the counter still there because he didn’t need it, he was already going to go.

Suddenly, I stop standing in the middle of the room feeling sorry for myself and I start reading the space the way I’d read any scene. Habit and professionalism ticking over under the grief, alerting me to the things I should have seen straight away.

The blanket isn’t folded, isn’t even bundled the way a person bundles a blanket they’re leaving behind, it’s on the floor in a heap with one corner still hooked over the armrest, dragged rather than dropped.

I touch the mug on the coffee table without lifting it. It’s on its side, and the coffee that came out of it has already dried into the shape of a small, dark continent on the carpet, which tells me it’s been down for a while, not something that happened in the last five minutes.

I look at the door. No forced entry, no marks on the frame, no splintering round the lock, which means whoever came in either had a key or didn’t need one because Micah opened it himself, half-asleep and feverish and trusting in a way he has no business being with anyone but me.

And then I see the shoes.

They’re under the edge of the sofa, the ones he arrived in, still wet through from the rain, exactly where I left them when I slipped them off his feet last night.

Nobody leaves without their shoes.

The picture assembles itself with the horrible clarity that an entire career’s worth of crime scenes gives you whether you want it or not.

Not gone. Taken.

My phone rings.

Unknown number. I answer it.

The voice on the other end is one I’ve never heard, and it is delighted with itself in a way that makes my skin crawl, the specific self-congratulation of someone who has been waiting a very long time for exactly this moment.

“I have him,” the voice says. “Finally. He’s mine now, the way he was always supposed to be.” A pause, enjoying it. “I saw the flowers worked. He liked them. Then I saw you rushing over there to play the hero. Very touching. Very stupid.” Another pause. “He’s not yours. He was never yours. And you’re never going to see him again.”

“Where…” I start.

The call ends.

I stand in my sitting room with my phone in my hand and the blanket on the floor and the water glass on its side, and for a moment I don’t do anything at all, because there’s a version of me that wants to call this in properly, wants to say the words missing person and abduction and stalker into a radio and let the machine of the job take over the way it’s supposed to, and there’s another version of me that already knows the machine is too slow for this, that every hour it takes to spin up a response is an hour I don’t have. And even if the machine does find Micah, it’s still going to punish him when that blood sample cleans up.

I stand there with both of those men arguing inside my skull, and neither one wins, because my phone buzzes before either of them can.

A text from the same number. One word. Enjoy. And a link.

I open it.

A video feed. Grainy, lit by a single light, and there is Micah. My breath catches at the sight of him. He’s alive, he’s conscious, his hands are behind him and his back against something structural, and he’s doing the thing he does when something costs him and he’s not going to let it show, the specific, contained stillness of a person who has survived difficult things by going quiet inside them. He looks pale under the flush of fever on his cheeks. The wound will still be hurting. He’s not looking at the camera. His eyes are glassy. He’s looking somewhere far away, retreated to a place where he has a better chance of surviving what happens next.

I hate that it’s a well-worn look. As if the muscles in his face are so used to this configuration, they settle into it easily.

The person holding the phone is moving around Micah. The camera swinging to show his prize, proud of it, this specific triumph. And then, as the camera swings away as it’s turned off, it passes a window.

I stop breathing.