Page 51 of Trust my Heart

“Marco doesn’t even like criminal work. I was going to owe him a favor. Do you understand the size of what I was prepared to owe Marco for you?”

“Chen,” I said. “When it’s your turn to be framed, I promise we’ll return your favor.”

“That’s all I’m asking.” She pointed the straw at me, then at Luke, then, apparently out of ammunition, drank.

Down the table, one of the property-crimes guys said the word raccoon, and half the table groaned and the other half sat up.

The story went like this, with Doyle correcting it at intervals. Years back, on a winter night shift, a raccoon came through a ceiling panel into the property room and set off the motion sensor. Two constables cleared the room at gunpoint, shelf by shelf, and found the intruder on the seized-goods rack, eating a chocolate bar it had unwrapped itself. The chocolate bar was an exhibit in an armed robbery.

“There’s a memo,” the property-crimes guy said, reverent.

“I wrote the memo,” Doyle said. “Exhibit 14 was consumed by wildlife. Efforts to recover Exhibit 14 were unsuccessful and are not recommended.”

The table lost it. Reid pounded the wood.

“And the raccoon,” Reid managed.

“Never apprehended,” Doyle said, and drank.

Luke laughed. Out loud, easy, head tipping back, and half the table glanced over, still not used to the sound.

The talk rolled on without needing us, the property-crimes guys now drafting a proposal for a division raccoon. Nobody was talking about any of it anymore. For an hour at a stretch we were just a table of cops being loud about nothing, and I hadn’t known how much I wanted that until I was sitting in the middle of it.

Reid worked his way down to our end somewhere around the fifth toast that never happened. He pulled a chair around backward and sat on it the wrong way, arms folded on the backrest, chin down on them, and looked at the two of us. He was exactly one drink past careful, and honest with it.

“I have to say a thing,” he announced, quietly, just to us. “And I need you to not make it weird.”

“No promises,” I said.

He took a breath and dropped the last of the performance, and what was left was just Jordan Reid, honest all the way through. “The thing is, I look at you two and I’m jealous. That’s it. That’s the confession. Not, you know…” A vague hand at me, at history, at the stool at the end of the bar. “Not that. That feeling retired with honors, don’t worry. I mean the love thing, the couple thing… The way he tracks where you are in a room without looking. The way you two split a problem without talking about who takes which half. I watch it and I want it so bad it’s embarrassing, and I’m exactly drunk enough to say so.” He picked at the corner of a beer label. “How do you even find that?”

I looked at Luke. Luke looked at me and raised one eyebrow a quarter inch, which meant it’s your department, which was fair. Feelings said out loud at tables were my department. His was staying quiet.

“You want the real answer or the good story,” I said.

“The real one.”

“We almost didn’t.” I kept it plain. He’d earned that. “I was scared it would wreck what we had. He had his own reasons, and they were worse than mine. We sat ten feet apart, both of us too careful to say anything. Then we finally got together and spent months hiding it. You saw how that went. The hiding almost cost us everything.”

“So, what do I do?” The way he whined almost made me smile.

“You stop being careful. That’s the whole thing. There’s no trick.” I turned my glass once on the wood. “And you already know it, because you did it first. Right there, on that stool. You were scared out of your mind, and you said it anyway, to my face. Bravest thing I ever saw in this bar. That’s the night I figured out my own head. You started all of this.”

Reid nodded slowly.

“Stop being careful. Stop being careful everywhere,” he repeated.

“With potential lovers,” Luke said. “Not crossing the street.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Reid nodded again. Then he looked down into the empty glass, and his ears went red, and he said, very casually, “… I mean. Maybe there’s someone…”

I caught Luke’s eye for half a second. Neither of us moved. He’d worked hard to make it sound casual, so we let it be casual.

“Then don’t take forever,” I said.

“That’s it? That’s the whole advice?”

“That’s the whole advice. Taking so long is the only part I’d take back.” I put my hand on his shoulder and felt him sit up a little under it. “Go be scared with someone, Jordan. It beats being safe by yourself.”