He was just finishing the paperwork when she arrived, having dawdled during the past half an hour, waiting for her. He’d decided to tell her about the tramp with the blood-red eyes, in part because she was his partner and he was loath to conceal anything significant from a partner. He and Ricky Estefan had always shared everything, which was one reason he had gone to see Ricky before returning to Special Projects, the other reason being that he valued Ricky’s insights and advice. Whether the threatening hobo was real or a symptom of mental collapse, Connie had a right to know about him.
If that filthy, spectral figure was imaginary, perhaps just talking about him with someone would puncture the balloon of delusion. The hobo might never appear again.
Harry also wanted to tell her because telling her gave him a reason to spend some off-duty time with her. At least a little socializing between partners was advisable, helped strengthen that special bond between cops who had to put their lives on the line for each other. They needed to talk about what they had been through that afternoon, relive it together, and thereby transform it from a traumatic experience into a polished anecdote with which to annoy rookies for years to come.
And in truth, he wanted to spend some time with Connie because he had begun to be interested in her not only as a partner but as a woman. Which surprised him. They were such opposites. He had spent so much time telling himself that she drove him nuts. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about her eyes, the luster of her hair, the fullness of her mouth. Though he had not wanted to admit it, this change in his attitude had been building up speed for some time, and today gears had finally shifted in his head.
No mystery about that. He’d nearly been killed. More than once. A brush with death was a great clarifier of thoughts and feelings. He’d not only had a brush with death; he’d been embraced by it, hugged tight.
He had seldom harbored so many intense emotions all at once: loneliness, fear, aching self-doubt, joy at just being alive, desire so acute that it weighed upon his heart and made breathing just a little more difficult than usual.
“Where do I sign?” Connie asked, when he told her he had completed the paperwork.
He spread out all the requisite forms on his desk, including Connie’s own official statement. He had written it for her, as he always did, which was against department policy and one of the few rules he had ever broken. But they split chores according to their skills and preferences, and he just happened to be better at this part than she was. Her own case narratives tended to be angry in tone instead of solemnly neutral, as if every crime was the most grievous personal affront to her, and sometimes she used words like “asshole” or “shithead” instead of “suspect” or “arrestee,” which was guaranteed to send the defendant’s attorney into rapturous spasms of self-righteousness in the courtroom.
Connie signed all of the forms that he put in front of her, including the cleanly typed statement attributed to her, without reading any of them. Harry liked that. She trusted him.
As he watched her scribble her signature, he decided they should go somewhere special, even with him rumpled and damp, a cozy bar with plushly padded booths and low lighting and candles on the tables, a pianist making cocktail music — but not one of those slick guys who did polyester lounge versions of good tunes and sang “Feelings” once every half hour, the anthem of sentimental inebriates and mush-heads in all fifty states.
Connie couldn’t stop fuming about being labeled Batwoman and other abuses suffered at the hands of the media, so Harry had difficulty finding a moment to insert an invitation to drinks and dinner, which gave him too much time to look at her. Not that she looked any less appealing the longer he watched her. Just the opposite: when he took the time to study her face feature by feature, she proved to be more attractive than he had ever realized. The problem was, he also began to see just how tired she was: red-eyed, pale, large dark smudges of weariness beneath her eyes, shoulders slumped under the weight of the day. He began to doubt that she would want to have a drink and rehash the events of the lunch hour.
And the more aware he became of her exhaustion, the more profoundly weary he felt himself.
Her bitterness over the electronic news media’s tendency to turn tragedy into entertainment reminded Harry that she had begun the day angry, as well, troubled by something she had refused to discuss.
As his ardor cooled, he wondered whether it was really such a good idea to have a romantic interest in a partner in the first place. Department policy was to split up teams who developed more than a friendly relationship when off-duty, whether gay or straight. Long-enforced policies were usually based on a wealth of hard experience.
Connie finished signing the papers and gave him a once-over. “This is the first time you’ve ever looked as if you might consider shopping at the Gap instead of exclusively at Brooks Brothers.” Then she actually hugged him, which might have stirred his passion again except that it was a buddy hug. “How’s your gut feel?”
Just a dull ache, that’s all, thank you, nothing that would inhibit me from making passionate, hot, sweaty love to you.
He said, “I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“God, I’m tired.”
“Me, too.”
“I think I’ll sleep a hundred hours.”
“At least ten.”
She smiled and, to his surprise, affectionately pinched his cheek. “See you in the morning, Harry.”
He watched her as she walked out of the office. She was still wearing badly scuffed Reeboks, blue jeans, a red-and-brown-checkered blouse, and a brown corduroy jacket — and the outfit was worse for the wear of the past ten hours. Yet he could not have found her more alluring if she had been shoehorned into a clinging, sequined gown with canyonesque décolletage.
The room was dreary without her. The fluorescent light painted hard, cold edges on the furniture, on every leaf of every plant.
Beyond the steamed window, the premature twilight was giving way to night, but the stormy day had been so somber that the phase of demarcation was excruciatingly subtle. Rain hammered on the anvil of darkness.
Harry had come full circle from physical and mental exhaustion to thoughts of passion to exhaustion once more. It was almost like being an adolescent boy again.
He shut down the computer, switched off the lights, closed the office door, and filed copies of the reports in the front office.
Driving home in the depressingly leaden fall of rain, he hoped to God that he could sleep, and that his sleep would be without dreams. When he woke refreshed in the morning, perhaps the answer to the mystery of the crimson-eyed hobo would be apparent.
Halfway home he almost switched on the radio, wanting music. Just before he touched the controls, he stayed his hand. He was afraid that, instead of some top-forty number, he would hear the voice of the vagrant chanting: ticktock, ticktock, ticktock….