Page 45 of Trust my Heart

“Did he take it,” he said instead, barely above a breath?

“He took it,” I said. “All of it.”

His throat moved once. Then he tapped the folder like we’d settled something about filing, said, “And now, we wait.”

Chapter 16: In the Open

Luke

“Don’t tell me nobody on this floor eats crullers,” Wright said, loud enough to carry, both hands full. “I refuse to believe it. Chen. You look like a reasonable person.”

He’d come in with two trays of coffee balanced on one arm and two boxes of donuts stacked under the other, the morning of Ryan’s hearing. He worked the bullpen desk by desk. Cups handed out by name. A joke for the duty sergeant. He’d remembered who took what, that was the thing; he’d been back in the division half a year, and he’d kept forty coffee orders in his head, because that was the kind of work he did instead of his own.

“You’re a saint, Sergeant,” somebody called from the far row.

“I’m bribing you all shamelessly,” Wright said. “There’s a difference.”

Laughter, easy, up and down the floor. He set the last cup down on the corner of Ryan’s desk without a word, the benched man’s desk, the bare one by the copier, and he did it gently, no performance to it at all, and that was deliberate. The whole floor watched him do it, and half of them thought better of him for it.

Ryan said thank you. To him. Then he went back to his photocopying.

They’d taken his gun and his cases the morning after he split his knuckles on Wright’s mouth. Administrative duties pending review. For two days he’d sat at the bare desk doing work nobody fought over, disclosure indexes and witness lists for other people’s court dates. He’d kept his head down and taken the floor’s pity, which was worse than the anger, because we’d built the anger ourselves and the pity was real.

Reid came to my desk before the coffee was even cold. He didn’t sit. He put one hand flat on the file I was pretending to read and kept his voice down.

“Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“Don’t do that.” He glanced across at Ryan, then back. “They benched him and there’s a hearing on the board this afternoon with a superintendent, Luke! For paperwork errors and whatever happened in that washroom that nobody will say out loud. That’s not a review, that’s a burial. So, talk to me. What’s going on?”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t.”

“Can’t.”

Chen rolled a chair over, which for Chen was practically an intervention. “My cousin’s a paralegal,” Chen said quietly. “Employment side. If Ryan needs someone who isn’t the Association, I can make a call tonight. Off the books.”

“That’s kind of you,” I said. “But don’t make the call.”

“Somebody should be doing something, Hawley!”

“I know how it looks, but…”

“Do you?” Chen’s eyes went over my face the way they went over a scene. “Because from here it looks like your partner’s drowning ten feet from your desk and you haven’t stood up all week. Don’t tell me you believe he’s guilty?”

That one landed. It was supposed to. I looked at my hands and made myself say nothing, because the truth wasn’t mine to tell on that floor, and everything else was a lie I refused to tell friends.

Doyle came last, on the pretext of returning a stapler nobody had lent. Doyle didn’t do speeches. “Is it true he hit somebody and tampered with evidence?” Doyle said, barely a question, barely audible.

I shook my head. Not a no. Just a refusal with an apology on it.

“Okay,” Doyle said, and looked at me a second longer, and something in it was disappointment, and I took that too, because I couldn’t explain. “Okay.”

They pulled back to their desks and left the two of us alone in the middle of forty people, and the whole floor felt it, and nobody named it. The people who would have fought for us stood down because I made them. They didn’t know why, and I couldn’t tell them that in a few hours it would make sense. I just had to sit there being the asshole who wouldn’t fight for his partner, one more morning, and let them think less of me.

I could see Ryan’s right hand from my desk. The knuckles had gone dark, purple, the split scabbed at the edges, and he made no effort to hide them. That was the story we were telling, a man with nothing left to hide, and his hand told it better than we ever could have.