The Silent Hour (32 page)

    "Then
it's back to Idaho—" Amy asked.

    She
nodded, and I saw Joe take his eyes off her for the first time while she was
speaking.

    "How'd
you meet, anyhow—" Amy asked. It was a classic female question, I thought,
and one that guys never seemed to ask. They'd met, that was all. Wasn't that
enough knowledge— It's no surprise that some of the best detectives I know are
women.

    "One
of my colleagues at Poynter has a time-share up here," Gena said. "I
came to a party there, got bored, and went for a walk. Joe was sitting on the
beach in his lawn chair. Not so noteworthy, you might think, but this was at
ten o'clock at night. It stood out."

    Amy
looked at Joe, and he shrugged. "There were always a bunch of people out
during the day. They got annoying."

    "We
got to talking a little, and he was explaining why palm trees are so resistant
to wind, even in hurricanes," Gena continued, and now it was my turn to
look at Joe.

    "You
learn a lot about palm trees growing up in Cleveland—"

    "I
did some reading."

    "Evidently."

    Gena
smiled. "After a while I realized I'd been gone too long, and I had to get
back, but I also wanted to see him again. He didn't seem to be picking up on
that—"

    "You
can imagine what a great detective he is," I said.

    "Well,
that's what I finally had to use. By then I knew what he'd done, and he knew
why I was here, so I told him I needed to have someone with police experience
come speak at one of my seminars. Talk about public access and the
back-and-forth with the media, things like that. It ended up being a fine idea,
but I'll confess it hadn't been part of the original plan."

    "You
spoke to students—" I said to Joe. "To
journalism
students—"

    He
nodded.

    "Tell
them about the good old days, when there were no recorders in interrogation
rooms and every cop's favorite tools were the rubber hose and the prewritten
confession—"

    "I
might have held a few things back."

    After
dinner, we drove back to Joe's building. He mixed drinks for the three of us
and grabbed a bottle of water for himself, and we went out to the patio as the
heat faded to tolerable levels and the moon rose over the gulf. It was quiet
here, and I thought of Gena's story, of Joe on his lawn chair alone on the dark
beach, and I realized that it had probably been a hell of a good choice for him
to come here, to be away from the things that he knew and the people that knew
him, for at least a little while. We all burn out, time to time. Some people
never find that dark beach and that solitary lawn chair, though. I was glad
that he had.

    At
one point, as the conversation between Amy and Gena became more animated and I
thought my absence would be less noticed, I got up and walked down to the water
and finished my drink standing in the sand. After a while a light, sprinkling
rain began, and I realized the voices from the patio had faded. When I went
back up, Amy and Gena were gone. Joe was sitting alone, watching me.

    "They
go inside—" I asked.

    He
nodded. I took the chair next to him again. It wasn't really raining yet, just
putting forth a few suggestions.

    "Amy
was telling us about your friend," Joe said. "Ken."

    "Friend—
I'd known him about a week, Joseph."

    "That
make it easier, telling yourself that—"

    I
didn't answer.

    "I'm
surprised you're here," he said. "Right now, I mean. Something like
that happens… the guy working with you gets killed, I just assumed you'd dig
in."

    "When
your partner gets killed, you're supposed to do something about it, that what
you mean— The classic PI line— Well, I don't have it in me anymore. So try not
to get killed."

    "Understandable.
Sometimes it's good to take a few days—"

    "No,
Joe." I shook my head. "I don't need a few days, and when I say I
don't have it in me anymore, I don't mean to go find out what happened to Ken.
I should do that, I know. I should be back in Cleveland right now, working on
that."

    "I
didn't say that. I'm just surprised you're not, because it seems to be your
way."

    "Sometimes
your ways change. Or get changed."

    He
was quiet. The sprinkling rain had stopped, but the wind was blowing harder,
and there was no longer any trace of the moon through the clouds.

    "Are
you coming back—" I said. "It's why I'm here, and you know that. I
need to know if you're coming back."

    "To
Cleveland—"

    "No.
Well, yes, I care about that, too, but I mean to work. Are you coming back to
work with me—"

    He
said, "I got a call from Tony Mitchell two weeks ago. You remember
Tony—"

    "Sure.
Good cop, good guy. Funny as hell. What this has to do with anything…"

    "Tony's
retired from the department, too. I expected he'd become a Jimmy Buffett
roadie, but evidently that didn't work out, because he got himself a job doing
corporate security for some big manufacturing firm. Place is constantly hiring
new employees, taking in hundreds of applications a month. They've had some
problems with bad hires in the past and want to put a preemployment screening
program in place. Tony called me, asked if we'd be interested in running it.
Would be real steady work."

    "Screenings,"
I said.

    "I'd
be willing to do something like that," he said. "Make some money,
keep busy. The street work… I've done it for too long, Lincoln."

    "So
you're coming back, but you don't intend to do any street work."

    "That's
about it, yeah."

    "Where
does Gena figure in—"

    "I
don't know yet."

    I
nodded.

    "What
do you think—" he asked.

    "That
maybe it's time to fold it," I said and hated the sound of my voice. I'd gone
for detached and gotten choked instead.

    He
didn't answer.

    "I
don't want to be in this business alone, Joe. I'm not sure I even want to be in
it at all anymore, but I don't want to go at it alone. Hell, you're the one who
dragged me into it. I was running the gym and—"

    "And
losing your mind. You were so miserable—"

    "That
was a different time. I'd gotten fired, I'd lost Karen… things were
different."

    "This
job gave you something back. Did it not—"

    "Sure,"
I said. "It gives, and maybe it takes away a little, too. You're
proof."

    “I’m
sorry?”

    "Look
at yourself. You're happy down here. Are you not—"

    "Generally,
yeah. It's been good. I'm not sure how—"

    "You
had to go fifteen hundred miles to separate yourself from it," I said.
"From the work. The work was you, and you were the work. I saw it every
damn day."

    "I
could take that comment the wrong way if I wanted to."

    "You
didn't have anything else, Joe. Nothing."

    "I
know
I could take that one the wrong way."

    "It
was all you were," I said. "Being a detective didn't define you, it
devoured you, and you know it. Why else did you have to leave, to go so far and
for so long— You did it because if you stayed any closer you knew you'd go
right back to the job, and you were scared of that. Scared, or tired."

    "You
seeing a therapist or just reading their books—"

    "Tell
me I'm wrong," I said.

    He
shifted in his chair, shook his head. "I won't argue it. I could, but I
won't. Certainly not tonight."

    I
didn't say anything, and after a while he spoke again, voice low. "I
thought the biggest headache would be getting you to let me step aside. Didn't
figure you'd be racing me for the door."

    "I'm
tired of the collateral damage."

    "Meaning
what—"

    It
came out in a rush. For a long time, I spoke, and he listened. Never said a
word, didn't look at me, just listened. I talked about watching Joe in the
hospital when he'd been shot, about John Dunbar's frightening fixation on a
case he'd lost, about the way I felt every time I heard that new security bar
click into place at Amy's apartment, and the uncomfortable pull my gun had on
me while I drove to Dominic Sanabria's house.

    "I've
seen a lot of people around me get hurt," I said. "You, and Amy, and
now Ken Merriman. I'm always untouched, but—"

    "You're
untouched—"

    I
nodded.

    "Really—"
he said. "Because you don't look that way right now, Lincoln. Don't sound
it, either."

    We
let silence ride for a while then. The rain held off, and once I heard a door
open and then close again after a brief pause, and I was certain without
turning to look that it was Amy, that she'd walked out onto the balcony and
seen me down here with Joe and gone back inside.

    "So
what will you do—" Joe asked.

    "I
don't know yet. I've still got the gym. Maybe put some of Karen's money into
that. Get new equipment, do a remodel, try to expand. Help you out with the
employment screening thing, if you need it."

    "And
stay away from case work."

    "Yes.
Stay away from case work."

    He
was quiet again, then said, "I'm sorry it didn't work out better for you,
Lincoln. Like you said, I'm the one who brought you into it. At the time, I
thought I was doing the right thing. You were a detective. That was as natural
and deeply ingrained in you as in anybody else I'd ever seen. I thought it
would be good for you, but more than that, I thought you needed it."

    That
night, when we were alone in our hotel room, I told Amy about my conversation
with Joe. I was sitting in a chair by the sliding glass door, she was on the
bed and outside the rain fell in sheets. I thought she might make some
arguments, raise some of the same points that Joe had, remind me that when we'd
met I was trying to make a living off the gym alone and I was a generally
unhappy person. She didn't say any of those things, though. When

    I was
done talking she got to her feet and walked across the room to me and sat on my
lap, straddling me, her hands on either side of my face.

    "If
you can't do it anymore, then there's no decision to be made," she said.
"You just need to step back. Don't feel bad about it, just do it."

    I
nodded.

    "One
rule," she said.

    "Yeah—"

    "You
can leave the job. You can leave the city if you want to. You can leave damn
near anything, but you better not leave me."

    I
shook my head. "Not going to happen."

    "I've
invested way too much into this ill-advised Lincoln Perry rehabilitation plan
to give up now."

    "If
anybody ends this, it'll be you."

    "Remember
that," she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed me before moving
to rest her head on my chest. We sat like that for a long time, and then she
stood and took my hand and brought me to the bed.

    When
she was asleep and the rain was gone, sometime around four in the morning, I
sat on the balcony with a pad of the hotel stationery and tried to write a
letter to Ken's daughter, the one who'd loved TV cop shows. I wanted to apologize
for missing the funeral, tell her how much I'd thought of her father, and
explain that he'd been a damn fine detective and that his work had mattered,
that what he'd been doing on the day he was murdered had an impact on her
world. I sat there for more than an hour, wrote a few poor sentences, and then
crumpled the pages in my hand and went back inside.