Page 28

"Sort of," I murmured absentmindedly.

"Great. Love that."

"You sound like Sissily."

"I'm going to let that go," he said, "on account of the hour."

He let out a breath that crackled the mic, and when he spoke again he'd put his cop voice back on like a coat. "Okay. Well. I'm not hurt either, since you didn't ask, which, honestly…" He couldn't be bothered hiding the hurt in his tone.

I felt like crap.

"I was going to ask."

"You were not."

"I was getting there." But we both knew I was lying. Damn it.

I put my forehead down on the table. The wood was cold and smelled of flour. Up close I could see a burn in it by my elbow, a proper one, old and blackened at the edges. Somebody had set a pan down in this kitchen at some point and ruined a table Alex built and nobody had ever done a thing about it. I decided I liked that about this place. It was the imperfect perfection.

"Davon," I said, into the wood. "I didn't know what to say. They had you on the floor."

"They did."

"With tape on your…"

"They did, yeah." His voice was flat. A door opened on his side, someone said something apologetic and the door closed again. He huffed into the phone. "I went back to work after, you know. That's the whole story, that's all of it. I'd rather talk about literally anything else, so let me talk about the thing I've been calling you about for eight days."

He told me.

It took a while and it came out scrambled. He kept losing his train of thought and doubling back, and twice he started a sentence and abandoned it halfway, which is not a thing Davon ever does. This is a man who used to recite laws verbatim at me when I parked badly. Whatever those two weeks had been, they'd taken something out of him. My chest grew tight at the thought.

Shaking my head to clear it, I forced myself to focus on what he was saying. Seventeen open files since September. Eighteen, depending how you counted one of them, and he clearly had opinions about that one he wasn't going to get into at two in the morning. Different neighborhoods. Different kinds of people entirely. A man in Tremont. Two kids in Slavic Village who were probably unrelated to anything but he didn't like it anyway. A woman in her seventies out near the lake who'd called the police four separate times about noise before somebody killed her. And on every single file he'd compiled there was a stamp. Jurisdiction transferred. Case closed. A signature he couldn't read and nobody would explain.

"They're taking your cases," I said. Lucky I was already sitting down, because the realization was going to knock me on my ass.

"They're taking my dead people, too."

It came out too loud for a stairwell. He knew it the second it was out, and he didn't say anything for a moment. I sat in a dark kitchen and listened to a man I used to sleep next to get his breathing back under control twelve miles away.

I didn't try to fill the silence. That's one of maybe three useful things I've learned about Davon in my entire life. He needed time to process things internally.

"The department loves it," he said eventually, normal again, or doing a decent impression of it. "Clearance rate's never been better. My lieutenant bought a cake so we can celebrate the efficiency of the crime unit."

"A cake," I deadpanned.

"A whole cake, Hazel. Sheet cake. Slathered with buttercream."

"That's the worst thing you've said tonight and you opened with the corpses."

He laughed. It was a bad laugh, mostly air and about a second too long, but it was better than the dejected way he'd spoken since I called and I'd take it.

I sat back up and started picking at the candle wax on the table with my thumbnail. Got a good long strip of it off, which is the only genuinely satisfying thing that happened to me all night, before I gathered enough courage to say the words.

"I need a favor," I told him. "And I want you to know I'm aware of the nerve it takes to ask you for one right now."

"Ask."

"Just like…"