Dark Streets, Cold Suburbs

by Aimee Hix

  I shuffled everything back in and laid the file on the passenger seat. I’d spread it all out when I got home with pen and paper and build my own detective notes. Then if she didn’t give those over, I was going to need to take my own witness statements. On a case that was sixteen … no, seventeen years old.

  I was ten. I had been destroying fractions in fourth grade. The legal wrangling to allow me to move in with Dad and my new stepmother had finished with minimal peeps from my biological mother, Leila. We were moving into our new house. My parents were a few months away from telling me I was getting a new brother or sister. The Andersons would be moving to the neighborhood in two years. And Jan had been trying to solve her first murder case.

  Chapter

  5

  I put the truck in drive and headed back to the house. I hoped that Seth was gone. I needed to talk to my dad. Alone. Mom would already be out the door for her day at the local elementary school. Once I had hit high school, she had resigned at the hospital and taken a job as a school nurse. She said it would be better if she was home in the afternoons with us. Despite Dad being there. She’d never said anything, but I had always thought that because Ben was so much like her and I was so much like Dad that if she was home, she could ensure we all got balanced time. Or maybe she was just worried Dad and I would eat junk food all the time and die of a sugar overdose. I couldn’t honestly say it wasn’t a possibility.

  “Dad?”

  He was already in the office. The light was on. He was sitting behind his desk, still in his robe. A cup of coffee sat on a stack of files, unsteady as hell.

  “You’re going to spill that.”

  “You sound like your mother.”

  “Duh. Where do you think I got it from? You got a minute?”

  He put down the file he hadn’t been reading. His reading glasses sat folded on another stack of files. I may not have known the stakeout case was an elaborate play, but I could pick up a detail like that.

  “Is this about last night?”

  Dare I repeat duh? Better not. He was always going to be my dad even if he wasn’t going to be my boss forever. I nodded.

  “You’re mad and not just at Seth. You’re upset that I would send you off on a wild goose chase. You feel like it wasn’t respectful. You’re thinking that if I pull something like that again, you’ll quit.”

  Wow, nailed it. Dad wasn’t clueless, by any means. He was a damn good detective. But that was so on point I was more than a little stunned. It must have shown on my face.

  “Nancy might have mentioned that it could blow up in my face.”

  Now that made sense. Dad ignoring her and doing what he wanted made even more sense. It blowing up in his face, that was pretty much guaranteed. You ignored Mom at your own peril. She was always right.

  “If I promise not to do anything like that again, will you stick it out with me?”

  I nodded again. That had gone much easier than I thought it would. So well, in fact, I hadn’t had to say anything.

  “You should know by now that not listening to her is a bad idea.”

  “You know, every time she doesn’t say ‘I told you so,’ I think that. At least you kids are smarter than your old man.”

  “Us kids? Clearly you mean Ben because I am a huge dumbass for falling for that fake stakeout.”

  “Nah, you’re doing great. I was treating you like a dad and not a supervising investigator.”

  I sat down at the chair that went with my pint-sized desk. It was like he found it at the Take Your Daughter to Work Day office furniture store. There really hadn’t been room for a second desk so I didn’t complain about it. It was a sweet gesture.

  “Dad, I’m fine. I promise. You don’t have to baby me.”

  I had even managed to make eye contact with him for most of that confession. I wasn’t lying about any of it. Therapy had gone well. Martial arts training was too. And I’d always been a crack shot. He didn’t need to baby me.

  The fact that I still woke up choking down screams at least once a week, well, I hadn’t mentioned that and he hadn’t asked. It wasn’t the first secret I had kept from him, it wouldn’t be the last. I was great at keeping secrets. I could have won a gold medal in secret keeping at the Olympics and no one would even know.

  Work through the pain, suck it up, keep going, never give in, never say die. Pick your hard-ass, tough-guy, stoic cliché. I had learned them and learned them well. And I only rarely complained. It took a lot too. I hurt less than I should and more than I wanted. The bruises and broken bones had healed.

  “You’re fine?”

  “I’m mostly fine. It’s not a light switch you can flip, Dad. No matter how much you guys want to watch me all the time, you can’t. I have to be fine in the time it takes.”

  “Bah.”

  Who says bah?

  “And that means what exactly?

  “It means that’s psychobabble.”

  Yeah, it was psychobabble. And as much as I hated to admit it, it was working. “I know you don’t believe in therapy. I’m not sure I do completely either, but Mom insisted and you know I don’t ignore her when she tells me something. Unlike some people.”

  “I just don’t see how lying down and talking about feelings for an hour helps anything.”

  Typical Dad. He didn’t understand it so it couldn’t work. He didn’t understand exactly how cell phones worked either but he used one. And I was annoyed he was putting me in the position of having to defend something I was only doing begrudgingly, no matter how effective it seemed to be.

  “She didn’t make me lie down.”

  “I’d just nod off.”

  “I get it, Dad. You think it’s stupid. You think the problem can be solved by making me do fake stakeouts and lying to me.” I pushed my chair back and started to leave but then turned back. “And if you ever pull that kind of shit on me again, I will quit so damn fast your coffee won’t even have a chance to go cold. The ATF still has a spot for me.”

  That should do it. The ATF offer bugged him. It bugged him because he thought I should have taken it and he was worried I would still take it. It kept us at a nice state of imbalance; me knowing I had it in my hip pocket to whip out when I needed an ace in the hole and him thinking that he was being selfish to not encourage me to take it. The fact that Nancy was dead set against it kept us at stalemate.

  He didn’t need to know that I had only briefly considered the pitch. I liked my own rules. I liked knowing it was a family business. And we were a good team despite our differences but mostly despite our similarities.

  I’d planned a quick nap and then I’d head to the apartment. At the door to my bedroom I checked my phone, the time showing it was just before nine. Seth would already be in his temporary office at the undisclosed location while he worked the unspecified task force.

  He’d wanted to keep that low key considering the last time his job and mine had overlapped, there had been considerable mayhem. Which I now liked to refer to as The Incidents. I think the legal terms the district attorney had threatened me with were “obstruction of official duties” and “criminal mischief” before the ATF had shut him down. The poor guy had practically been swallowing his tongue when he’d had to apologize.

  I laid down on the bed fully clothed and shut my eyes. I hadn’t needed to use the trick the therapist gave me in a few days but I pulled it out since I was in a “troubled emotional state that might negatively affect sleep.” I started to visualize drops of water falling steadily onto the side of a bowl and letting them run down into the basin full of water, no splash or sound just the slow drip and slip. That just reminded me I needed to take a shower and wash off the … everything from the Pay by the Hour but It’s Not Really a Front for Prostitution motel.

  As I finally rinsed off the perceived grime from the cheap motel (trying and failing not to catalog the odd
s of getting an STI from the air), washed and deep-conditioned my hair (a necessity in the dry winter air), and shaved (something I had to do regularly now that I was sharing a bed with another person I wanted to touch said legs), fatigue tried to take over but sleepiness was out on an errand. If I couldn’t get in any rest, I’d survive. I’d gone without sleep longer than a night many times.

  I combed my hair out and added leave-in conditioner. The way January had been, super cold and extremely snowy, I wanted to protect my mop as much as possible. I had become obsessive about it since someone had grabbed a handful of it to keep me from running away from him and yanked out a patch the size of a silver dollar. That was the part that had pissed me off the most. I mean, he’d done it to get a few more punches in and not out of any desire to wound me emotionally (wounding me physically was enough for him), but women are funny about their hair.

  I knew it was stupid and vain but it was one thing I could control, so I was overly determined to care for it. The bruises faded in the time it took bruises to fade. The broken ribs healed slowly and still ached when it was cold—so pretty much all the time. And four months later the scars were fading too slowly for my liking as I caught Seth staring at them more and more. His jaw would clench and he’d get that look in his eyes and then he’d want to spend hours at the gym running through drills or at the range shooting silhouette after silhouette.

  Too much on my mind and not enough space to shove it all down past the ignore line. My conscious could do it, but it just burbled back up when my subconscious took over. Then the fight began between the two parts of my brain trying to protect me and not being able to agree on how best to do that. But once my body shut down, letting my subconscious take over, the dreams began.

  Nightmares. Of fires, which I knew too well. And explosions, which I had no idea about but I’d imagined was like if someone threw you into a brick wall. That was on fire. And terrifyingly silent after the initial blast took your hearing. And of a house that I didn’t know and a room by room search for someone who I wasn’t even sure was there. And the choking and raw throat of breathing and pushing through smoke. My eyes burned. The temperature rose as I climbed the stairs, knowing that going up was dangerous, that I could end up trapped trying to rescue someone. These weren’t merely bad dreams but memories of being trapped in a fire. Of feeling the weight of responsibility on my shoulders for saving someone else. And then the chase was on as I felt rather than heard someone running up the stairs behind me.

  Someone hunting me. Wanting to hurt me, not being content to let the fire take me. Wanting to do the damage with his fists. Wanting to watch. I didn’t run. I knew running would be giving in. I stepped deliberately up into the hall that was finally in front of me and the door that lay at the end. I turned the knob and saw Michael. Not as I remembered him, but as I tried not to imagine him. Torn open, broken, bloodied, screaming in pain. And still I didn’t wake up. His eyes were full of pain. And I still didn’t wake up. His face morphed into Seth’s and I felt the obscene heat of the fire reach me, finally overtaking me.

  Chapter

  6

  I wasn’t getting back to sleep after that last bout with the man who wanted to kill me. Fire was scary. I had forgotten how scary. The sound of it, how alive it was, how the smoke curled and eddied. I had purposely forgotten how scary it had been. I stared determinedly at random objects in my room, grounding myself in reality as I waited for my heart to slow.

  There were times in the days after the fire that my eyes would begin to water, my lungs would feel as if they were tearing open, the smoke slicing through them, my throat would burn just from the memory. I walked away from that fire with minor smoke inhalation and a healthy respect for the awesome power of flame. And the fire and all the scariness had then been eclipsed by later events. And then it was all over, as quickly as it had begun, and I was bruised and battered and broken. And none of it had felt much like a victory.

  Getting the crap beaten out of you rarely felt like a win. Unless you were a masochist. Which I had been accused of a time or two. But getting punched in the face was not how I liked to spend an evening. Having someone try to knife me was not a good time in my book. Dropping out an open window the size of a boot box and falling fifteen feet to the ground so I could bruise my tailbone and have my boyfriend narrowly escape being burned alive was definitely not fun and games.

  Masochist I was not. But I didn’t shy away from the hard stuff. I couldn’t. There were people I loved who needed to be protected. And I’d never back down from that. Not from knives or fists or fire. I didn’t consider myself a badass although a few former coworkers, cops no less, had used that word when visiting me in the hospital. I hadn’t set out to be a hero. But if putting one foot in front of the other and doing good ended up in some bad-assery, well, those were the risks you took.

  I picked up my phone and pulled up the contact log.

  “Agent Gordon.”

  He knew who was calling and answered like that to annoy me.

  “Gordo.”

  “I hate it when you call me that,” he said, weariness making him sound as close to whiny as he could get.

  “I know. It’s why I do it,” I said, brightly.

  I heard him sigh. It sounded exasperated. I had plenty of experience with that one.

  “I just need to know one thing and it’s not even for me. What’s going on with Seth lately?”

  “How is that not for you?” he asked. I heard a door shut. He’d probably gotten himself off to one of those privacy cubes they sequestered themselves in when non-work calls intruded on workspace. That way no one heard anything they weren’t supposed to. I always envisioned them like those isolation booths on old game shows. I had to use my imagination because despite a job offer from the ATF, I had never been given a tour of even the lobby of one of their facilities.

  “Because it’s for Seth. You know, emotional support and whatnot,” I said.

  “Emotional support and whatnot.” He chuckled.

  “Jeez, someone sees your soft underbelly once and they lose all ability to remember you’re a badass capable of action movie–level heroics.”

  He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Emotional support. Whatnot. Heroics. I’m taking this deeply seriously now.” The only thing deep was his voice.

  “Gordo, is this task force stressing Seth out or what? I just need to know.”

  He sighed again. “I don’t know. We’re not working together right now, Willa.”

  I bit my lip. We didn’t exactly have a warm and fuzzy relationship, not like I had those with … well, anyone, really, but he was someone I trusted.

  “He’s … off.”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence racked up.

  “Listen, I’ll give him a call. Suggest a beer,” he said.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “It’s the least I can do for the only superhero I know,” he said, laughing again before he disconnected the call.

  I knew Seth wouldn’t be home until late afternoon so I headed to the apartment to pick up my laptop. I’d left it there two nights ago and wanted to get it before I had to develop a plan to deal with his crabby ass.

  Being in his space with his things made me angry at him again. I’d fought getting involved with him, and his behavior at the stakeout was exactly why. But I didn’t have time to think about his weirdness so I distracted myself by opening the file Jan had given me and actually doing my job. I spread the papers on the couch and, as usual, got sucked into the puzzle of the case.

  My sympathetic nervous system clicked on before I consciously recognized the sound of keys in the lock. I checked the time but saw that it was way too early for Seth to be home from work. The door opened and Seth’s dad, the man we referred to as the Colonel, was standing on the other side. He seemed startled to see me too.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi, Willa. I
’m sorry. I thought you were at the office with Arch otherwise I would have knocked.”

  How many freaking people had keys to this apartment?

  “Seth told me you were going to be out. He didn’t want you here when I came to pick up Michael’s things.”

  Of course he didn’t. He hadn’t talked to me about any of it, so why would he have mentioned that his father was coming to clear out Michael’s room? Or that he was going to do it today? No, he’d much rather wait until he thought I wasn’t home. I was surprised that he’d decided to have the Colonel come take the boxes.

  “He’s been packing up while I’m out. He doesn’t seem to want me to be involved.”

  “I’m sure he’s trying to … how are you doing with all of this, Willa?” the Colonel asked.

  I looked for an uncomplicated answer to a complicated question. I didn’t find one.

  “I’m okay with letting go of Michael’s things. That doesn’t mean I’m letting go of him. He was my best friend. He made me a better person and he’ll always be in my heart. I don’t know that Seth is as okay as I am. He keeps saying all the right things, but I’m not convinced.”

  He looked surprised. Maybe my honesty was more than he expected. He started fiddling with the keys he held. It was uncharacteristic. The Colonel had always been self-possessed with a still, military air about him. I watched as his thin fingers wound a key off the ring. He handed it to me.

  “You should have this now. Your dad tells me you’re moving in.”

  My dad told him? Not Seth? Not his son who had asked him to come over and take away Michael’s things?

  “Um, thanks, but I already have one. You should keep it. For emergencies.”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes so I focused on his hands as I pressed the key back into his palm. His hands were little compared to Seth’s. And Michael’s, too, if I thought about it. The Colonel’s sons looked nothing like him. Or their mother. Both the Colonel and Barbara were small, fine-boned people while their boys were taller, sturdier, more substantial. Seth looked like he could muscle through walls. Michael has been taller and leaner, but he had towered over his parents.