He and Carlyle seemed a really good match.
Carlyle laughed at his jokes and seemed to appreciate musical theater.
Gideon was willing to learn about monkeys.
There were so many worse ways to enter into a work marriage.Gideon was much encouraged.
Puppies and Teeth
“HEY, CROSBY,how’s it hangin’?”
“Low and inside, Chadwick, like a good curveball, right?”
Chadwick’s laugh at the tired joke set Joey’s teeth on edge.Six months in, he was starting to appreciate a few things.The job and how it varied day to day.The unit and how everybody wanted to learn, to get better, to make their world better.The weather—it got cold in New York, even in the fall, and having gotten there in April and surviving the salt-mugginess of the summer, Joey was thrilled to experience the honest to God cold of October.After six years of hot in South America, the cold he remembered from a childhood in Massachusetts was to be appreciated.
And Joey had started to appreciate Chadwick.A lot.Because he was wicked smart, wicked funny, and a wicked stone-cold killer.
Chester Schumer wasn’t the only psychopath they’d come up against, and Gideon Chadwick—who looked like a college professor and analyzed with the clear-eyed precision of a human computer assessing other humans—could draw his gun and fire without batting an eyelash.
And his marksmanship was outstanding.Joey had been the hotshot of his unit, but he and Chadwick competed weekly, and after six months were in a dead heat for small weapons.
They were both aware that the rest of the team had stopped betting on these occasions.You could only have a draw so many times.
And while Chester Schumer was one of three fatalities over that time (and the only one killed in hand-to-hand combat), after twice watching Chadwickliterallyshoot the hat off a suspect’s head and then watching the suspect drop to the ground in fear and surrender, Joey was starting to feel safe with the guy.
Sure, he’d drag Joey off to a rock concert or a stage musical whenever he could score tickets, and he’d literallyforcedJoey to read a book by Richard Feynman (that Joey reluctantly enjoyed), but that just meant that, like the combat skills and the brilliant analytical mind, Chadwick haddepth.
Joey, who had always thought his ability to survive was the one thing that made him unique, was starting to appreciatedepth.In fact he was starting to appreciate how being partnered with Gideon Chadwick seemed to give himmoredepth.
But what he didn’t particularly appreciate was how happy Chadwick was tospreadthe depth.
The Kathy thing hadn’t lasted long.Yeah, they’d done the thing.She’d come up to Manhattan or he’d go down to DC for a weekend, but after two months, Joey had seen him getting bored, and with that sort of commute, it was easier to let it fade.Joey didn’t ask, but he was sure it was done “amicably,” because that’s how you did things when you enjoyed something, but it was too much hassle to continue for long.
Joey hadn’t been happy about the Kathy situation, but Kathy hadn’t taken much of Chadwick’s focus when he’d been at work, or evenoffwork, so he’d dealt.
But the Crosby situation… that wasirritating.
Joey couldn’t even saywhyit was irritating.Crosby himself wasn’t as bad as Joey had first thought.Helookedlike he should be a meatloaf.He held himself with the sort of humility that recognized he wouldalwaysbe a meatloaf.But while Chadwick and Joey held the small-arms title in their unit, Crosby held the long-range weapon title, from bolt-action to semiauto, from hunting rifle to extreme long-range sniper rifles.Crosby had the fortitude, patience, physics awareness, and instincts to fire a projectile across several football fields and have it go exactly where he’d planned.
It wasn’t a stupid man’s specialty.
Neither was Crosby’s people sense, which was unfailingly on point.Joey and Chadwick would arrive on scene, and Chadwick would start scouting a profile, and Joey would start scouting evidence and opportunity, and Crosby, without fail, would be talking to the actual victim or sometimes the perpetrator.Nine times out of ten, Joey had watched him de-escalate a situation by treating somebody scared and freaked out and terrified into remembering they were a human fucking being.
It was that one time out of ten, when they were dealing with a psychopath, that Crosby needed the entire unit to back him up.
And usually he had Pearson.Joey would have saidshewas a psychopath, except she wasn’t.She wasterrifyinglygood with knives and carried an illegal five-inch fixed blade in a holster in the small of her back and another three-inch at her ankle.Of the three fatalities, one had been Denison—the perpetrator had been too high to even know she was cutting off the air in his windpipe with her garotte as he held a gun to Harding’s head.One had been Chadwick’s sure shooting—the bad guy had been rushing Joey with his knife out while Joey was handcuffing the man’s brother, and nobody was close enough to take him down any other way.And the other had been Pearson.
She’d been grappling with a man twice her size, and when she’d broken away and pulled her defense weapon, he’d laughed and jumped right on top of her.
And had been dead before she’d sidestepped him as he hit the ground.
Joey had seen the aftermath.You’dthinkthere’d be a lot of blood with a heart wound, but she’d hit it so cleanly, it had stopped beating before much blood had spurted.
Nobody on the team was afraid of battle—not even Crosby, who had fired a couple of shots to wound and had done it accurately without hesitation.
So Joey couldn’t pinpoint his irritation with the guy.He was friendly, paid his bar tabs when everybody went out after work, contributed to the conversation, and was often even funny.And he spent his Saturdays either taking seminars, working on classes, or helping with open cases with the rest of the unit.
He was like the guy at school who was the class president, the school valedictorian, the guy who tutored kids on the side for his church, and who, in person, was funny and decent.
