“That’s all this victimization bullshit you see on TV.”
“The TV’s all the extremes.”
“Then why does everybody watch?”
“It comforts them to think everything’s out of control.”
“Bunch of goddamned whiners, if you ask me.”
Hess studied her. He had a way of looking disapproving and tolerant at the same time. Maybe she was making it up.
“Power,” she said. “Everything comes from the power you have inside yourself. Your will.”
That look again.
“You’ve got this look, like you think two things at once.”
“I guess I do.”
“Well, what are they?”
More of the same look. “Can I just say that I admire you a lot? Your youth and everything it implies. I like the way you wear it, what you’re doing with it.”
“Even when I screw up?”
“Yeah.”
She considered. “You’re still thinking two things about me at the same time — things that don’t go together except that you’re making them.”
“I’m wondering how you can be so bright and so dull at the same time. How you’ll either do really well for yourself or you’ll fail big. Just notions.”
“Hey, I’m your commanding officer.”
“You asked.”
“I’m happy with this. This burger is great and it’s nice to just sit here and talk about being a cop and a human being. Mike talked a lot but I don’t think he listened to my side very much. Then it was either TV or bed.”
Hess said nothing.
“Can you still, Hess?”
“Still what?”
“You know. It. Make love.”
His face went red and he looked at her again with that double-thoughts kind of expression.
“I mean, when you’re close to seventy, can you?”
“Of course you can.”
A slight edge to his voice as he looked at the TV and the light from the screen played off his face. She couldn’t tell if it was still red or not.
“I wonder if my mom and dad still do it. They’re your age.”
“You could ask them.”
“They’re kind of sensitive.”
She was truly surprised to see him laugh. She realized she’d never seen him do that before and it changed everything about his face: lines backing into shape over his eyes and around his mouth, actual dimples on his cheeks. A happy light.
Kind of amazing, really, how laughter could change a man. She realized she was looking at him with a kind of dumb astonishment.
He really let go, then. Eyes wet, big chest and shoulders moving and the goofiest look on a face that had held no goofiness she’d ever imagined until now.
“Good God, young lady. You’re funny.”
She wasn’t sure how to feel about this. “Well... really?”
“Really.”
She felt confusion about what she’d said, and some embarrassment along with it, and some shame, too. She wasn’t a zoo chimp who’d done something cute. She thought of how heavy and tired he’d felt when she helped him out of the chair on Friday evening and thought he owed her more for that than just this sudden amusement.
“Merci, I’m sorry. It’s just that I haven’t laughed in so goddamned long. I was not trying to make you feel bad.”
“Not at all,” she said.
“Really.”
“I know. Did you know we both use blue notebooks?” Anything to dampen the comedy.
“Yeah, I did notice that. Hey, would you like to take a walk?”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s a warm summer night and the ocean’s right there and you can digest your meal and feed your soul.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Something had gone out of her — the lightness, she thought, the freedom to say what you want to say. She felt tired and miles from home. She tried to think of something to cheer herself up.
“Hess, don’t you wish it was raining and we had one of those upside-down umbrellas to collect the rainwater?”
“God, those were great.”
“I would have bought one, but I was too busy being a hardass.”
“You ate him alive, Merci.”
“Sure did, didn’t I?”
They took the boardwalk north toward the pier, staying to the pedestrian side while skaters and bikers whizzed by them. Merci looked out to the water and watched the waves crashing in. She thought of Hess actually out riding those monsters at the Wedge. She’d gone down there with Mike once to see the bodysurfers and couldn’t believe that they’d take such chances. For what? She’d dreamed about big waves in a black ocean since she was small. She’d never questioned where the dream came from because its message was so clear: stay out of the water and save yourself. Easy enough. You didn’t have to be Old Testament to interpret that one.
The pier was hopping on this summer Sunday — lovers and skateboarders, white punks and gangster-style Mexicans, college kids and bikers, bums and cops and glum Asian fishermen with their lines in the water and an occasional mackerel flap-flapping on the wet cement.
Merci walked just a half step behind Hess and watched him more than occasionally. She was waiting for something from him but she didn’t know what. She thought it might come from his face rather than his mouth, plus, she just liked the way his head looked, battered but still noble, like a horse that had done great things. She wondered if that was where they got the term war-horse. She had this oddball desire to see what his hair felt like — that straight-up, almost jarhead, white wave in the front cut that made him look like a general from some war that was filmed in black and white.
He may think I’ve got the manners of a zoo monkey, she thought: but I know enough to keep my hands to myself. But if I could distract him for a second...
They had a drink at the Beach Ball and another at Scotty’s and another at the Rex. These were her idea. It seemed to Merci that you got closer to people when you were high on alcohol, so long as they were high, too. Like taking a little trip together. She had never considered herself a drinker, but here she was two nights of the weekend, knocking back some pretty stiff stuff. You couldn’t even tell with Hess. He was the same whether he had none or three. It surprised her he could drink his way through chemotherapy and radiation. Maybe it helped. For herself, the drinks made her feel hazy and warm and a little passive, which was good because she usually felt sharp and cool and prepared to kick serious butt. It was nice to get a glow you knew would be gone in a few hours, in the company of somebody you like. Temporary insanity.
But outside the Rex there was a scuffle on the sidewalk and Hess pulled Merci back from it just as two NBPD bike blues jumped in and broke it up.
Her anger just cut right up through the alcohol, sharper than it was when she was sober, and she felt her spirits rise then rankle in unfamiliar ways. Maybe that’s why they called it spirits. Scotch was kind of spooky stuff.
She looked back and saw the bike cops handcuffing a skinny wino to a parking meter. His opponent, a muscle type with a goatee, had a stream of blood running down his forehead.
“I feel like I have to do something in a situation like that.”
“Let it go. You’re a homicide investigator, not a beat cop.”
“I hate to see that kind of crap going down. Two meatballs, two perfectly good heads. Makes me want to bang them together.”
“It’s over. Relax.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s go down to the water.”
She trudged across the sand. The Scotch and the receding adrenaline left her legs heavy and her mind light. When they got to the berm near the waterline they stopped. Merci watched the faintly luminescent suds swoosh up toward them then fade back down. Small birds darted across the shiny slope before the brine soaked in.