Page 19 of Trust my Heart

“I’ve got three years to a pension and a place near Bancroft with my name on it.” She said it without apology. “What I’ve just given you is true, and it’s worth nothing. You already know the difference between those two things, or you wouldn’t have driven across the city at dawn to hear it in a parking lot.”

“Why tell me at all, then?” I said. “You don’t know me.”

“No. But you are from 51, you drove out here at dawn, on your own time, to ask a stranger about Adam Wright. That means it’s already happening to you, and you’re somewhere around my year one. Somebody should have said all this to me back then.” She put the cigarette away for good. “And you’re going to do whatever you’re about to do no matter what I say. You have that face. So take the one piece of advice I’ve got, and then we’re done. Stay clear of him. All the way clear. Whatever he came back to 51 to have, be standing somewhere else while he takes it, if you plan on keeping your career.”

She turned for the building, and I thought that was the end of it. Then she stopped.

“How did it start with you?” she said. “Little things in your files. Flags you can’t rule out.”

I didn’t answer.

She nodded, exactly as if I had.

“Watch your paperwork, Detective,” she said. “And don’t come back here. I mean that kindly.”

I went back through the lobby to sign out, because the book had a column for an out time and my morning was already in it in my own handwriting. The desk sergeant slid it across to me, friendly as ever.

“Find her all right?”

“I did. Thanks.”

“You said 51.” He tapped the book, pleased with himself. “Adam Wright’s over there now, you know him? Transferred back in the spring.”

“We’ve met.”

“Good guy.” He said it the way everybody said it, in both buildings. “Tell him the front desk says hello. Heck, I might give him a call myself.”

“Yeah, you do that.” I said, and signed my name for the second time that morning, and left.

The rain followed me back across the city. I added it up at the long lights, because there was nothing else to do. I had a witness who would never speak, a pattern that wasn’t proof of anything, and a story about a warrant that would end her career faster than his.

The rain gave up somewhere along Lake Shore, and the traffic thickened toward the middle of the day, and I spent every slow stretch of it looking for the way out.

I went through it the way I’d go through a case, and it came out the same every way I turned it. Brar would deny all of it to anyone who wasn’t me, and I didn’t blame her. Murphy was fair, but fair only reached as far as the paper, and the paper said what it said. A complaint put my word against a saint’s, the jealous boyfriend with a theory, and Wright had already shown me, at my own desk with the floor cleared, exactly how that sounded. The IT check was the one card still face down, and I’d stopped expecting it to save me. Nothing he’d done could be touched, and everything I could do looked like the thing he’d built me to look like.

And there was Luke. I built the sentence at the red lights, the one I’d have to say tonight or not at all. I went to see somebody about Adam today. Tell him, and I handed him back everything he’d finally set down, on the strength of a story the teller would deny, about a man the whole floor loved. Don’t tell him, and I’d be sitting ten feet from him within the hour, smiling, with all of this in my pockets. Both were bad. I couldn’t pick which was worse.

The desk sergeant would mention me to Wright sooner or later. Buildings like that talk. Maybe it was already done.

By the bridge I had nothing. By our exit I still had nothing, and I took it anyway, toward home, and Luke, and the thing I still hadn’t decided whether to tell him. Nobody was coming to get me out of this. Whatever the way out of Wright’s mess turned out to be, I’d have to build it myself. I put both hands on the wheel and drove the rest of the way like that.

Chapter 7: Clearing the Air

Ryan

I didn’t tell him that night. I didn’t tell him the next night either.

Both evenings I walked up our stairs with the sentence ready. I went to see somebody about Adam. Just a few words to start it, and everything after would have to follow, and both evenings I got to the door and heard him inside, moving around, easy, and I put the sentence away and went in and was pleasant all night instead. I told myself I was choosing the right moment. There was no right moment. I just kept not telling him, and by the second night I understood that was a choice too.

So, the third morning started with the two of us walking to work like usual.

It was a good walk, which made it worse. The sun was shining, Luke was smiling, and he took the traffic side the way he always did, without once mentioning it. It was playoff season, and Toronto’s hockey team had been breaking the city’s heart since long before either of us was born. Every spring the whole town talked itself into believing, and the season ended early anyway, and the city swore off the team forever, and by October everybody was back. Luke had run that cycle his entire life. This year the ending had come four nights ago, in the fifth game of a series they were supposed to win, and he spent most of our walk explaining, calmly and in order, why he was finished for good this time. He had watched that last game standing up. I knew, because I had been in the room, keeping my distance.

“I bet you said the same thing last spring,” I said.

“Last spring I meant it less.” He said it completely straight, and I laughed.

It was the easiest thing in the world, and I would have felt better if it had been hard.