“Come on, level with us,” Mason smirked, showing off yellowed teeth. “The suspect just scared the shit out of you, right? A real mean-looking muthafucka.”
“Give me a break,” Shannon said. “I got sick. I think I have some sort of virus.”
“Virus, huh?” Poulett said. “Let me guess where you caught it.” He put his head back and stuck his thumb near his mouth and made with the drinking noises. Then he broke out laughing.
“That’s not funny,” Shannon said.
“Maybe not,” Poulett agreed. He was grinning, but his eyes had a coldness about them. “Neither is embarrassing us. How do you think the punks on the street are going to react to hearing about a pussy cop passing out at the sight of a thirteen-year-old? You better get a grip on yourself, pal.”
Shannon pushed himself to his feet and leaned forward. “You better shut up,” he said very softly.
Poulett stood his ground for a moment and then cracked a smile and stepped back. “You better get a grip, pal.” He pointed a thick finger at Shannon as he walked away. “You need it bad.”
“You know, it really doesn’t look good—” Jacoby started.
“Shut up,” Shannon ordered under his breath as he turned to face him.
“A little touchy, aren’t we?”
Shannon turned and saw Captain Martin Brady standing over him. Brady’s pudgy face was set in an unhappy frown.
“Yeah, maybe a bit,” Shannon admitted.
“Bill, let’s talk,” he said and then turned and headed to his office in the back of the squad room. Shannon, not having any choice, followed him. DiGrazia was waiting for them, sitting impassively, barely looking up as his partner entered the office.
Brady went behind his desk and sat with his hands clasped in front, his eyes staring, unblinking. “You’re having a rough time, are you?”
“Just got sick for a moment, some type of virus, I think.”
“Is that so? Maybe you could use some time off?”
“I’m okay now. Nothing to worry about.”
“Well, now, I think there is something.” Brady showed a troubled smile. “Joe has been suggesting that two weeks of rest would do you a world of good. I agree with him, Bill. I’m going to put you on two week’s short-term disability, effective immediately.”
“You have no right.”
Captain Brady didn’t bother to say a word. He just continued staring at his detective, his smile showing some strain.
“I’m going to the union with this,” Shannon threatened. “You have no cause to force me on leave.”
“I’m not talking about a leave of absence. Only short-term disability.”
“You’ve got no cause!”
“Absenteeism would be a damn good cause,” Brady said, nodding slightly. “Unprofessional demeanor. Intoxication—”
“I haven’t been drinking a damn thing!”
“Looks drunk to you?” Brady asked DiGrazia.
“Stinking drunk,” DiGrazia answered.
“And that’s from your own partner.” Brady sighed. “Bill, I’m trying to do you a favor. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be. At best, all you’d accomplish with a union protest would be to embarrass yourself.”
“I’ll be fine, you don’t have to do a thing—”
“Yes, I do. There’s a pattern with you, Bill. A weird pattern, but a pattern nonetheless. It’s become pretty damn obvious.” Brady lowered his voice into a conspiratorial tone. “I’ll be honest, if you weren’t such a damn good cop I’d’ve bumped you from the force years ago. It’s kind of unsettling the way you fall apart a few weeks every year. But you are a damn good cop. Smart, determined, you keep your caseload moving. It would be a damn shame to have to lose you. So take the next two weeks off, relax, maybe go to Florida with the wife. Enjoy yourself.”
Shannon had his eyes closed tight. He shook his head slowly. “You don’t understand—”
“It might help if I did, but I don’t suppose you’d tell me?”
Shannon opened his eyes and stared helplessly at his commanding officer. After a long silence he shook his head. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“I suppose not. Joe, why don’t you take Bill home, see that he gets there okay. Give his wife a call also.”
“Sure.” DiGrazia stood up, continuing to avoid eye contact with his partner.
Shannon took a deep breath and then stood up and forced a smile. “Well, Marty,” he said. “I guess I’ll be seeing you in two weeks.”
“I certainly hope so. Send us a postcard.”
The two men left the office in silence. As Shannon passed through the squad room he could feel his fellow officers staring at him with a mix of curiosity and amusement. He had an urge to grab Poulett and kick his smirking face in, but he swallowed it down and kept walking. At the door, he turned and addressed the room, announcing that due to his remarkable service he was being given two weeks paid leave and the rest of them could just go screw themselves. Someone threw a half-eaten doughnut at him. He barely got out in time to avoid the barrage that followed. DiGrazia hadn’t been as lucky. His eyes burned as he picked part of a tuna fish sandwich out from under his jacket, but he kept his mouth shut.
Outside, they got into Shannon’s Grand Prix, with DiGrazia behind the wheel. Shannon broke the silence, calling his partner an asshole.
“I don’t know what you’re bitching about,” DiGrazia mumbled, stone-faced. “Two weeks paid leave sounds pretty good to me.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“You’re repeating yourself.”
“Yeah, well, in this case it’s well deserved.”
“You didn’t give me any choice,” DiGrazia said. “It was either get you on leave or get another partner. And I don’t want another partner.”
Shannon sat quietly, his face forming a peevish look. Finally, he thanked DiGrazia for spreading the word about his fainting.
DiGrazia started laughing. “You’re really losing touch with reality, aren’t you, buddy boy? There were half a dozen fellow officers in that apartment watching me drag you out of the kid’s bedroom. Think about it.”
The ride turned silent again. Finally, Bill Shannon asked to be dropped off at an address in Brookline.
“I need to see my therapist real bad,” he explained.
Chapter 9
Susan Shannon had been out of it all day, making mistakes, losing her concentration. As the afternoon wore on, her frustration built, severely creasing her brow and tensing her small face. When she lost an hour’s typing by hitting the wrong mouse button, the color dropped right out of her. She sat frozen, struggling against the impulse to smash her computer against the wall. Then she stood up, her body rigid, and held her breath before heading towards the ladies’ room. Sid Lischten, one of the law firm’s partners, spotted her and was about to start bitching about how long it was taking to get his contract typed up. He opened his mouth and then closed it. Even though Susan Shannon stood only five-foot-one and weighed at most ninety-five pounds, at that moment she didn’t look like anyone you wanted to tangle with.
When Susan saw herself in the ladies’ room mirror she let out a disgusted giggle. Her face looked like a ridiculous parody of itself—frozen into a hard, anxious mask.
She leaned over the sink and splashed cold water over her face. After a while she could feel the hardness softening. She glanced in the mirror and saw her face was almost back to normal, only a little tightness stiffening her mouth.
There were obvious reasons for her anxiety. The workplace was stressful as all hell. The associates for the most part were bastards, the partners petty little tyrants. They were adapting well for the nineties, cutting three secretaries and dividing their work among the remaining four. The official message given to the office staff was just be thankful you have a job. The unofficial message was a little more blunt; if you complain about having to work lunches or coming in an hour early or leaving an hour late, then your ass—even if it’s as pretty as Sus
an Shannon’s—will be out on the street.
But that was only a small part of it. She could live with all that. What she couldn’t live with was what was happening to her husband. As much as he promised her this year would be different—that he was making progress with his therapist—she knew it was going to turn out the same as it always had.
It was all starting up again. A week ago he jolted up in bed at four in the morning, moaning, his body soaked in sweat. It took her almost a half hour to get him out of it. Since then, the nightmares had come nightly. After the nightmares came the moodiness, the depression, his just staring into space. She didn’t have a clue if he’d gone to work today. She had tried calling home a half dozen times and no one answered, but that didn’t mean a thing. If he was home, he’d just let the phone ring. Probably wouldn’t even be aware of its ringing.
Once he got out of bed he was better, almost functional, but getting him out of bed was becoming harder and harder.
She knew the signs as well as she knew anything. She’d been living with them for over ten years. Two days ago he had stopped showering or shaving or even brushing his teeth. That was bad. That meant the drinking was only a few days away, at best.
And once the drinking started . . .
Her stomach tensed thinking about it. Absentmindedly she put a hand to the pain and massaged it. Once the drinking started was when the real fun began.
The drinking would be heavy and intense, but it wasn’t even like he’d get drunk. More like he’d just fade away from her. Sometimes he’d become catatonic, other times he’d move around their apartment like a zombie, looking through her as if she didn’t exist, as if he didn’t have any idea where he was. The more alcohol he’d pour into himself the more frequent his trances would come. Sometimes they would last ten minutes, sometimes an hour, and then he’d be back, staring at her blankly, not even aware that anything had happened. Not even able to remember that anything had happened.
Then one day he’d be gone. Just plain disappear. He’d usually come back a week later looking emaciated, like he’d just gotten out of a P.O.W. camp. One year, he was almost dead with pneumonia when he staggered back to their apartment. Another year, he had rat bites up and down both his legs. Then last year, he was so dehydrated he had to be hospitalized. The doctor told her another day and she would’ve been out shopping for a casket.
He would never be able to tell her what went on during his disappearances. The way he would explain it was that one moment he would be drinking in a bar or restaurant or out of a bottle in some alley and the next moment he would be someplace else, realizing he’d better get home. He could never remember what happened between those two moments even though they could’ve been more than a week apart.
They never found out what happened during his disappearances. Except for one year . . .
Three years ago, he had ended up in a crack house in Chelsea living with a prostitute. A few weeks after he came back home, the girl showed up at their apartment to give Susan back Bill’s driver’s license. She also wanted to tell Susan about it. She was no more than eighteen, haggard looking, thin, her skull just about shining through her flesh, her arms nothing but a mess of scars. It broke Susan’s heart to look at her. The girl was pretty much doped up but she was able to describe in detail her week with Bill. She thought Susan had a right to know about it. She was also hoping that maybe Susan could give her some money.
Susan almost left him then. She came within a heartbeat of packing her clothes and getting the hell out, but she knew he didn’t have any idea of what he’d done. That it was a completely blank screen to him. So he begged and pleaded with her, his eyes as tortured as anything she’d ever seen, and in the end what choice did she have? Besides, at the time she probably still loved him. She wasn’t sure, though, whether she could forgive him.
As it was she wouldn’t have sex with him for six months, and after that only with condoms for another year. And there were his periodic HIV tests. And time fixed things, at least it dulled the hurt.
That was three years ago. The year after that was when he came home with the rat bites up and down both legs. And then last year . . .
It was all starting up again . . .
Of course, he would never tell her what triggered his yearly breakdowns. Whenever she pressed him, he’d become silent and distant. He knew what was behind it, but he wouldn’t trust her with the knowledge. That was the one thing she couldn’t forgive him for. Maybe more than anything that was why she thought constantly about leaving him.
Susan dried her face with a paper towel and then gave a quick glance in the mirror before leaving. She didn’t like the look in her eyes, but under the circumstances she looked as normal as she could expect. On her way back to her desk, Sid Lischten, having been laying in wait, sprung out at her.
“You were in there twenty minutes!” he accused. He was an old man without much flesh around his face or body. As he stood staring at Susan, his mouth twisted unpleasantly.
“Excuse me?”
“What the hell were you doing in there, your laundry?” he demanded, his voice booming throughout the office. It didn’t seem possible for so much noise to come out of such a withered body. Susan could feel heads turning towards them.
“No, I wasn’t doing my laundry,” she stated slowly, her own voice trembling.
“What else could you’ve been doing in there for twenty minutes?” Lischten asked sarcastically. The unpleasantness around his mouth had spread throughout his face, leaving his small eyes bulging. “Unless you just needed to get away from it all. Is that it, a little vacation, huh? You’ve had over an hour and a half to get me the Haines contract. I could’ve typed it myself in half that time.”
“I’ll have it for you as soon as I can.”
Susan turned and started towards her desk. Lischten yelled out to her back that if she thought she was too pretty to lose her job then she’d better think again.
By the time she sat down she was shaking. Donna leaned over and whispered to her that it would do the old bastard right if someone slipped Ex-Lax into his coffee. “Maybe it would loosen him up,” she added. “He looks constipated, doesn’t he? Anyway, we all know he’s full of shit.”
“I hope he chokes on it,” Susan muttered.
“Yeah, you’re not the only one. What do you call a hundred dead lawyers on the bottom of the ocean?”
“A good start.”
It was a lame joke, one that they told each other whenever things got unbearable. Donna gave Susan’s arm a little squeeze before turning back to her work. Susan was still shaking. She hugged herself tightly trying to stop. She couldn’t afford to lose her job now, not if she was going to leave Bill.
The thought stopped her. Had she already made the decision?
The phone rang. It was Joe DiGrazia calling to tell her what had happened to her husband. She listened quietly and then thanked him. After getting off the phone, she sat for a minute and then forced herself to type up the Haines contract.
Chapter 10
As Bill Shannon lay on Dr. Elaine Horwitz’s couch, he turned his head and caught her fidgeting with her pants, trying to smooth out a crease that had formed. The sight of her brought a genuine smile to his lips. She was pretty, maybe not as much as his wife, Susie, but in her own way very attractive. Frizzy red hair, dazzling green eyes, and the softest, most alluring smile he had ever seen. Maybe her complexion was a bit too pale, and her lips too full, and maybe there was a slight awkwardness to her body, but it all seemed to add to her sensuality.
He knew he made her nervous; he also knew she dressed up for him. On the days of his scheduled appointments she’d usually be wearing short skirts, sheer stockings, a soft rose–colored lipstick, and always her contacts and faint traces of Giorgio perfume. Whenever he would show up unscheduled she would almost always be in pants and wearing wire-framed glasses, barely any makeup and never any perfume.
She caught him smiling at her and she smiled back. “You se
em to be feeling better,” she said.
He nodded and kept smiling at her.
“I wish you hadn’t missed your last appointment.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t feeling up to it.”
“Those are the times you have to come here,” she reprimanded, her smile weakening. “Tell me why you were so angry at being put on short-term disability?”
“I felt betrayed,” Shannon said. “Sonofabitch should’ve cut me some slack.”
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