Take One With You (13 page)

When she turned, he was on her, kissing her passionately, and for a brief moment she responded.

Thane’s hands were on her neck, surprising her with a gentleness that belied his hungry lips, and moved up to caress her face.

She managed to get her hands between them and pushed him off as politely as she could. “I shouldn’t,” she said.

Thane pulled back, but only slightly. He looked deeply into her eyes, staring until it made her uncomfortable. “You’re lying,” he said.

She just looked at him, frozen.

“You want to,” he said. She said nothing. “You know you do.”

“I have to go,” she said. “Really.”

“Aw, fuck it,” he said, and turned away. But he didn’t leave. When he turned around he was holding the watch in his hand.

“It’s the same watch,” he said. “Same goddamn watch. The meeting was to take my kid to the movies. For his birthday.”

She reached out and touched his arm, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Bitch waited five minutes and left.” He looked up at her, and she saw the rage in his eyes again. It was like she wasn’t even there. He might as well have been talking to a complete stranger. “Five fucking minutes late, and I missed his birthday.”

Suddenly he turned and threw the watch, where it clattered in the street and came to a rest very near the pile of cigarette butts near the sedan. She followed it with her eyes and then looked at the dark man inside, whose eyes she couldn’t see but which she knew were boring into her.

She grabbed Thane and spun him around, pulling his face to hers and kissing him with a desperation that shocked him in its ferocity.

He started to reach for her body, but she pushed him away, and without another word, got into her car, slammed the door, and drove away.

Thane just stood there for a moment, watching as she turned a corner and disappeared out of sight. He felt his wrist and looked up the street toward where his watch must have landed. He briefly considered retrieving it, but then decided against it.

“Fuck it.”

Thane walked back to the parking lot, got in his car, and left.

After he was gone, the dark figure in the sedan started his engine and slowly rounded the corner, lights off.

3 YEARS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE

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Charlie walked home after his argument with Sarah stunned and confused. He had just experienced his first kiss and his first real fight, all in the space of about thirty seconds, and he didn’t know what to think.

It was times like that he really missed his mom.

Losing his father young had made him, for lack of a better term, a mama’s boy, something he’d been called at school as an insult, but which he fully embraced in practical terms. All it meant to him was that he was especially close to his mother, and he never saw anything wrong with that.

Charlie always felt like his dad’s passing was a gift, in a way. A dark gift he would have preferred never to receive, but a gift, nonetheless. In death, his father left him a legacy of maturity he might otherwise have taken years to attain.

It made sense, of course. Being thrust into the role of “man of the house”,
whatever that meant
, at an early age had a tendency to either set a boy on one of two paths: responsibility or recklessness. While he had always considered himself on the former, it sometimes seemed like a fool’s errand. Charlie had a hard time making friends, and had never, before Sarah, had anything close to a girlfriend in his life. He knew it was partly his fault, but he also believed that his failure to relate to others was because he’d grown up just a little faster than his peers.

By the time he realized that everyone had a persona they showed the world, and many families had unhappiness and tragedy they chose not to reveal, he had pretty much set his course as a loner.

He went to a high school party once and stood in the corner all night, pretending to be a tortured soul when all he really wanted was one of the girls he’d watched from across the room to approach and engage him in conversation. To be curious about him, curious enough to come over.

None did.

Soon enough he came to understand you had to be careful about what you pretended to be, because that was often what you would become, like it or not.

It was his mother who always moderated the extremes in his personality. If his father’s death had allowed him to grow up fast, it was his mother’s life that had allowed him to just be a kid.

Her loss was more devastating than his father’s.

And now he had lost Sarah.

Of course, he hadn’t really lost her; they’d only just had an argument. And he wasn’t at all sure he’d ever
had
her, in spite of the kiss. All those years by himself in his room had rendered him clueless about the behavior of others, sometimes.

Being so inexperienced with girls, Charlie wasn’t at all sure about what he was supposed to do. All he knew was that hearing her scream at him like that was the worst feeling in the world, and he never wanted to feel that way again.

He called and texted her several times during the short walk back to his house, but she never responded. He considered walking right back over to her apartment building, but decided against it.

Maybe she just needs a day or so to cool off.

Except he couldn’t do it. He knew he shouldn’t text her, but he did it anyway, several times a day. It felt so desperate and pitiful, but he just couldn’t help himself. Charlie was incapable of artifice. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and so could not leave things be.

Still, she never responded.

Nights were the worst for him. There was something about the wee hours that intensified his emotions. That made things seem entirely more hopeless and overwhelming than they would be in the light of day. And even though he understood that intellectually, Charlie simply could not own it emotionally.

He was, in a word, miserable.

Or as some would say, in love.

One night about a month later, things got particularly bad for Charlie. Terrible thoughts raced through his mind, feelings of guilt and loss related to both his parents, and shame that he had allowed Sarah to render them both somehow lesser in importance in the pantheon of his guilty conscience.

He hated the fact that he thought of her more than his folks, now, but he had to admit that he did.

After his father died, Charlie often dreamed he was still alive. In his dream, Charlie was always older than his years. He would be spending time with his father, and the penultimate moment was always a handshake, and they were always the same height, which seemed of paramount importance. After the handshake, his father would turn and walk away, and then Charlie would wake up. This dream was strangely comforting.

Charlie was relating to his father man-to-man, which would never have actually happened outside his dreams.

Then when his mother died, Charlie began to dream of the night she killed herself, except in his dream, he arrived home in time to save her.

Since his fight with Sarah, all he dreamed about was Sarah. She was always standing over him in a flowing gown, much taller and older than himself, as if he was a child and she a mature woman. She never spoke, only looked at him with an exquisitely intense sadness, and then she would float away and disappear as he strained to reach out and touch her. Sometimes he would feel the delicate hem of her gown slip through his grasp, and other times the garment was like smoke through his fingers, impossible to hold.

The result, however, was always the same. Sarah was gone, and he was alone.

He began to resent her in his waking hours, as if she’d been a force that had somehow destroyed the peace he didn’t actually possess. He had avoided Brad and Brad had done likewise ever since his outburst, and as a result Charlie was more alone than he’d ever been, without even Brad to remind him to hate.

In an odd way, he missed that hatred, and wanted it back almost as much as he wanted Sarah. He felt like he had committed the ultimate betrayal of his mother. Not only had she been pushed aside by his feelings for Sarah, but Charlie was now living almost harmoniously under the same roof with the person most responsible for her death.

Something had to change.

Then one night he woke up from his dream with the perfect solution to his misery. It had been there all the time, of course, but somehow it had always seemed slightly abstract, like an equation he had to memorize and would remember all his life but never use. There was no planning required, no preparation as he’d always believed. All he needed was the will, which had arrived suddenly and without warning.

Charlie practically leaped out of bed.

Was this how it was for others? He had no idea. But he knew that he had to, as the saying goes, strike while the iron’s hot.

Charlie laughed.
Another perfect idea.

He grabbed his phone for illumination and walked out into the hall, past Brad’s bedroom, and went downstairs to the living room. He saw what he needed. It felt good in his hands. It felt
right.

Charlie felt incredibly light on his feet. He made no effort at all to remain quiet, but very nearly skipped up the stairs by the eerie light of his cell phone. It was an incredible relief to have finally made the decision. He had no idea what he would do afterwards, well, he knew
what
he would do, he just didn’t know
how
he would do it.

But now he knew that he could, and that made all the difference.

Charlie opened Brad’s door, the moonlight from the open window glinting off the brass poker he’d taken from the fireplace downstairs. The heft of the implement gave Charlie comfort. Brad always liked to buy the most expensive of everything whether he actually used it or not, and this was a fine example of his hubris.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, savoring the peace that had come to him so suddenly. Charlie almost couldn’t wait to bury the sharp hook in Brad’s skull, if only because he imagined Sarah’s reaction when she heard the news of his murder-suicide.

They had talked about such things so often, and now Charlie would have her undying respect.

Undying. Maybe that’s the wrong word.

He laughed, and Brad stirred in his sleep, but Charlie wasn’t worried. It would almost be better if he woke up. That was the one tiny flaw in his plan. That Brad wouldn’t see it coming. Charlie really wanted Brad to see it coming.

As he stood in the doorway contemplating whether or not to wake up Brad before staving in his fucking skull, Charlie was almost tingling with anticipation. His entire body was practically vibrating.

Charlie looked down. It was a text.

He lowered the poker, which he hadn’t been aware he’d raised, and brought the phone to eye level.

fu chikless

Charlie stared at the screen, not noticing that Brad had just opened his eyes, not quite comprehending what he was seeing: A silhouette in his doorway, holding some sort of weapon.

Charlie turned and left the room.

***

“What the fuck are you doing?” He threw her report on his desk in disgust.

Anita Hellstrom just stared at the Chief of Detectives sullenly, not quite knowing what she should say. Undercover work was all pretty new to her, and she wanted to tread carefully if she could.

“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

Myers laughed derisively. “Tell me how this isn’t just a goddamned waste of resources.”

“I just got started, sir.”

“Shit,” he said, almost spitting out the words. “You came to me on this, officer.”

“No I didn’t!” Anita said. He really caught her off guard.

Myers narrowed his eyes. “I mean you came to me about the deaf kid,” he said. “Which, by the way, amounted to dick. The kid never repeated any of that shit about Parks going after the homeless guy.”

“I can talk to him again. He trusts me.”

“Too late for that. The homeless guy disappeared.”

“So why did you put me on Parks, then?” she demanded. “Sir.”

“Watch your tone,” Myers growled. He stood up and walked to the window, as if considering just how much to tell her. From the beginning, Anita could sense some of the higher-ups had it in for Thane, and based on what the deaf boy had told her, she was all for taking him down.

After spending time with him, however, her thoughts on that were a bit more conflicted. She trusted the kid’s version of events, but maybe Thane had a good reason.

He’d jokingly mentioned “taking out the trash” once or twice, as in cops who were known to be exceptionally rough and even murderously violent with certain perps, much like the prison hierarchy that demanded retribution for certain offenses. Maybe Thane knew something about the homeless guy they didn’t.

Myers turned around to face her. “Look, I need you to get closer to him.”

“Captain – ”

“You practically blew him when you left that bar a couple weeks back, for Christ’s sake!”

Anita flinched as if she’d been slapped, and stood up. “Fuck you.” She turned and headed for the door, but Myers caught her hand on the knob. She whirled around, backing him up. “And why were you tailing me that night, anyway? I follow him and you follow me? Is that how it’s done? Jesus!”

“Anita,” he said, almost but not quite apologetically, “sit down.”

She turned and shot daggers his way, but followed the instruction. Myers let her stew for a minute before continuing.

“What’s the problem?” he finally said.

“I’m married!”

“I cleared it,” he said, visibly exasperated.

“You
cleared it?
With who?”

“Who do you think?” Myers asked, and looked like he immediately regretted it.

She looked at him, incredulous. “You brought my husband into this?”

“I gave him a heads up so there wouldn’t be any problems,” Myers said. “I’m looking out for you.”

She laughed bitterly. “Thanks for your concern.”

“I’m looking out for both of you! John wants to make detective, you want off the streets. How the fuck do you think you get promoted around here?” he scoffed. “Merit?”

“I guess Thane learned that pretty quickly, huh?”

Myers glared at her. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’ve spent too much time with him already.” He stood up as if to dismiss her, but she quickly reconsidered. She wanted to advance, and she knew this was the quickest way.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll stay on him. It’s just awkward, you know?”

“Yeah, he’s got a thing for you, I got it. Part of the job.”

“Why can’t I just shadow him?” she asked.

“We tried that. He picks it up. Got a sixth sense for that shit.” Myers sat down. “That’s why Internal Affairs closed the books on him. But he’s got something going on. I got instincts, too.”

“Whatever works, though. Right, Captain?”

“Of course. I’m just trying to keep you from wasting your time, that’s all.”

“I understand,” she said, and stood up to leave.

“Anita,” Myers said, stopping her at the door. “You get something solid, I can run with it. I don’t give a shit how you do it. Just be careful. Parks is good.”

“How good?” she asked.

Myers grimaced, as if he might choke on the words. “If he ever learned how to play ball, you’d be spying on the next Chief of Detectives.”