“What the hell?”

The sound of his own voice worked to help Weston pull himself out of one of the deepest sleeps he’d experienced in a long, long time, but it almost wasn’t enough. The sound of his ringing phone blaring on the bedside table right beside his ear almost wasn’t enough, either. For a man with such an acute case of insomnia as Weston Daniels had, the kind of sleep he was having on this night was nothing short of extraordinary. It was something he could have blamed on the drinks, but he’d been drinking plenty over the past few weeks, hell, over the last seven years, and it hadn’t helped him with his sleeping any, that was for sure.

The only other thing that might have had anything to do with it, aside from a massive fluke, was the conversation with the girl. He didn’t know if just talking to a girl could have that kind of an effect on a man, but he also couldn’t think of anything else that might have done it. Whatever it was, his sleep was deep, the deepest in recent memory.

He woke to the sound of his phone cursing, bleary eyes and sick with the sleep he still hadn’t gotten. His first thought was that he was going to fucking destroy whoever it was who’d decided the middle of the night would be a good time to call him. His first guess, if he’d been in the mood to place bets, which he wasn’t, was that it was Vick. Vick was his partner and also a friend, sure, okay, but he was also sort of a son of a bitch with a sick sense of humor. This only got worse when he was drinking, and unlike Weston, for him that was an every night type of occurrence. By the time he actually got his sleep-clumsy hands on his phone, he was so sure that it would be Vick that he almost didn’t believe the name he saw flashing across his screen. He thought about putting the phone on silent, ignoring it and pretending it hadn’t happened at all, and then swiped the screen and put the phone up to his ear.

“Clara? Clara, is that you?”

“Weston! Weston, are you there? Please, God, are you there?”

“Clara. Calm down. That’s the first thing I’m going to need you to do. Calm down, or this conversation isn’t going to work. Can you do that for me?”

“I...I don’t know. I really don’t, Weston. I feel...I feel like I can’t breathe! I feel like there’s something concrete sitting on my chest and it’s suffocating me and I won’t be able to breathe no matter what I do!”

Weston sat up in bed quickly, not even noticing the cry of protest his back let out. He’d been only half awake just moments before, but now he was every bit as awake as he would have been if he’d been on some of the most top quality uppers available out on New York’s mean, dark streets. It was one of his talents, making such sudden switches as this one, and he couldn’t think of a better time to put it to use than this one.

He recognized that sound in Clara’s voice, and it was a dangerous one. It could be one of the most dangerous things in a person if it wasn’t handled correctly. Panic. Clara’s voice was full of blind panic, the kind that took a skilled individual to handle. Weston had dealt with it countless times. He most often heard it in people who were caught in interrogations they knew they weren’t going to be able to get out of, or in people who were standing on the proverbial ledge and about to take the plunge. Weston had dealt with more of those situations than he liked to remember, the people who were so broken they didn’t feel that they could go on anymore. Some of them he’d managed to talk back down to safety, but some of them? Some of them took that final plunge and all of them had voices that sounded just like the way Clara’s was sounding to him right now.

“Clara,” he said in a voice that was low and almost eerily calm, “I want you to try very hard to follow the sound of my voice. Do you think you can do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said again, her voice taking on an even higher pitch than it had been before, her grip on whatever remained of her sanity starting to loosen just a little bit more. “I really don’t know.”

“You want to know what I think?”

“Yes,” she whispered, “I think. I don’t know.”

“I think you can. I know I don’t know you, at least not well or anything like that, but I talked to you enough tonight to know that you’re a smart girl. A hell of a lot smarter than me, I’m sure of that. Probably ran circles around me on your SATs.”

“No, don’t say that. You’re smart. I can tell. I think you might be one of the smartest men I’ve ever met.”

Weston felt his heart lurch a little bit at that. This was good, the way she was talking now. She was, at heart, a sweet and kind young woman, something he’d been able to tell about her just by looking at her the first time he’d walked through the door of her small, well-kept apartment. With a girl like that, appealing to her instinct to make other people feel not only okay but good about themselves was an easy way to distract her, to get her mind off of the thing that was making her completely freak out. She’d done exactly what he thought she would do, and yet here he was, still surprised. The thing was, he wasn’t surprised by her reaction, he was surprised by his own. Because when Clara said those things to him, he believed them. He believed that she held such a good opinion of him, that she thought he was such an impressive man. Hearing the way she talked about him, Weston felt himself begin to wonder if maybe there wasn’t some kind of truth to her words. Maybe there was more to him than he’d given himself credit for. Maybe he wasn’t just some piece of shit cop, who hadn’t been able to protect the only people in his life that had ever really mattered to him. He was stunned by that line of thinking and might have gone off somewhere deep into his own thoughts if it hadn’t been for the return of Clara’s voice, and with it, the creeping rise of her panic bubbling back up to the surface.

“Weston?! Weston, are you still there? Please, oh please, oh please. Still be there. You have to still be there.”

“I’m here,” Weston answered quickly, wanting to punch himself in his own nuts for allowing her to undo the work he’d already managed to do. “Don’t worry, Clara. There’s no way I’m going anywhere. Not until you tell me you don’t want to talk to me anymore. I’m yours for as long as you want me.”

“Can you come? I know it’s so late, and you probably think I’m crazy, but will you? It’s important.”

“Can you tell me what’s happened? I think it might help me if you could manage that. It might help us both, even.”

“But I can’t. I just can’t. I wouldn’t even know where to start. I don’t know how to explain things so that they make sense. I only know that things are getting worse. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who really believes me, and maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe I’m going crazy, you know? Maybe I’m really losing it. I don’t know! I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to tell!”   

“Don’t worry, Clara. You don’t have to figure anything out right now. I’ll come.”

“You will?” she asked in a broken, cracked voice that was full of tears that made him want to put his fist through the wall, to rip a new one in the person who was making her feel that way. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Just tell me one thing before I get there, okay? And this one’s important. I won’t be able to get there safely if you don’t.”

“Alright,” she answered in a small, doubtful voice, “I’ll do my best.”

“Are you safe? Inside of your apartment, I mean. Are you safe there right now? Do you have everything locked tight? Checked the windows to make sure nothing’s open?”

“Yes, I checked those things. I don’t see any way for somebody to get in, and I checked everywhere to make sure nobody was still here. I even checked under the bed. Can you believe that?”

“Yes,” he said with closed eyes and through a clenched jaw, his head suddenly full of the images of what could have happened if she’d gone looking that way and actually found somebody in her apartment with her. “I can, actually.”

“Of course, you can. I’m sure you’ve seen just about everything there is to see.”

“Probably pretty close to it. So you’ll stay put, right where you are, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you won’t open the door for anyone. I’ll call you when I’m outside and that’s the only time I want you to open that front door for anyone. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“And Clara?”

“Mhm?”

“Try and stay calm, if you can. Everything is going to be okay. I’m going to make sure it’s okay. I promise.”

He hung up the phone then, without waiting to see what her response might be and wincing while he did so. Never in his life had he felt like such a cop cliché, and there was another thing he’d sworn he would never do done, and it was impossible to take back. He promised. He’d promised her that he would make sure everything was okay, and what the hell had he gone and done a thing like that for? Every cop knew not to do something like that, even the ones still in the academy and so wet behind the ears they might as well have still been babies. You never promised to make anything happen as a cop, never made any guarantees—because there were none. Even if you did everything you could, everything in your power to make sure a person stayed safe, sometimes it still wasn’t enough. And who the hell knew that better than he did? Sweet Christ, he’d lost everyone he’d ever sworn to himself he’d protect, and here he was making another stupid promise! A man like him, a man who went and said things like he’d just done to Clara, maybe he deserved the shitty cards he’d been dealt.

“You gotta get your shit together, brother,” he spoke out in his empty bedroom, his voice actually sounding like it was reverberating off of the walls of his too empty loft. “You can’t go down this road. Get your shit together or get out.”

He wished to God he sounded stronger than he did, that was for sure. His voice sounded weak, unsure, and part of him was screaming out that the only thing for him to do now was to call Clara back up and tell her her’d gotten a call from the captain, that he had to go into the station and wouldn’t be able to come to her rescue, after all. He might have done it, too, if he weren’t so goddamned stubborn, but he was stubborn, very much so. He was also bound and determined never to do a thing or refuse to do it out of fear, and that was exactly what he would be doing if he ran away from this. It would mean that, after everything, he’d turned into a coward, and that was something he refused to let happen. Instead, he got wearily to his feet, dressed in some of his civilian clothes, and headed out into the muggy dark. It was that part of time that hung somewhere in the balance between night and day, the time when it felt as if life had been suspended for some unknown purpose. This was the time that always made Weston feel like a puppet whose strings were being pulled by someone unknown, and it was that feeling that drove him to keep doing, to keep moving. Since he was little, that feeling had made him afraid to stand still, because one thing he knew he really didn’t want, was to let that puppet master catch up with him  and show his stranger’s face. Just thinking about it made him walk faster, wanting to get to his car and get this thing over with. Whatever the “thing” was.

The driving helped, just as it always had. Driving made Weston feel like he could run without being held accountable for it. It gave him a sense of freedom he never had when he was standing in one place. By the time he got to Clara’s apartment he had almost convinced himself that he’d made more of the whole thing than was really called for. She was probably just too drunk and looking for someone to pay her a little bit of attention, which wouldn’t be the worst offence in the world, but also wasn’t something he needed to worry himself about. Hell, by the time he actually got to her door and called her the way he’d told her he would, she would probably already be passed out, the strength of the liquor outweighing the force of her need. That he was wrong about, and as it turned out, it was the first of a long string of things he would be wrong about when it came to all things Clara. When he called her, she answered on the first ring, and by the time he was at her door, she already had it open and stood waiting for him with her arms crossed protectively across her chest.

“You came.”

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

“You did, but I wasn’t sure. You never really know with people do, you?”

“I’m not just people, Clara. I’m a police officer. I told you I would come, and that’s what I did. Is it really so hard for you to believe that a man would stay true to his word?”

His voice had begun to rise as he spoke to her, and he saw her flinch and then draw back from him a little. And why wouldn’t she? Here she was, already beyond stressed and afraid, and he was on the road to yelling at her after promising to make things better. Good start, right? Good start if the goal was to prove what a prick he could be.

He shook his head, shook it fast the way his pops used to do when he was pissed off and wanting to get rid of the bad thoughts, and ran his hand over his mouth. She didn’t say a word, just looked at him, waiting for him to let her know what tone the conversation was going to take moving forward.

“Look, I’m here, okay? I’m here, and I want to see what upset you badly enough to call me.”

“In the middle of the night the way I did?”

“I didn’t say that,” he answered gruffly, feeling himself growing impatient all over again despite the fact that he’d just told himself he wouldn’t do so. What was it about this girl, anyway? What was it about her that made it so easy for her to get under his skin? Being detached was one of his greatest assets as a cop. Vick liked to say he was really a robot, that one day he would get shot and instead of blood there would be a bunch of white shit oozing out of him—just like that freaky fake person in the first Alien movie. Being so detached helped him to stay level headed, which in turn allowed him to see things other cops sometimes couldn’t see.

With Clara, though, he couldn’t seem to get to that part of himself, the part that let him see people as two-dimensional things rather than actual human beings. With her, he seemed to lose his cool at the slightest provocation. He took a deep breath, a breath that was meant to be steadying but that actually made him feel like some kind of junky who hadn’t been able to find a fix. Not that he’d ever been one of those, but he’d seen enough to know that those were the kinds of shakes he was feeling at the moment.

“Look, why don’t we start again?” he said quietly, actually impressed with the small amount of control he had managed to regain over himself. “This isn’t how I meant for this to go.”

“Alright. Me either. I’m sorry. I’m just upset.”

“I know that. I knew that when I got here. I should have been more sensitive to it. Why don’t you show me what it is that’s got you that way?”

“Sure. You’ll probably think it’s nothing. I guess most people would think I’m making too big of a deal out of it, but...but it doesn’t feel like it to me, okay? Please just try and remember that. It doesn’t feel that way to me at all.”

He nodded and realized that now he really did feel calm. It wasn’t that detached calm that had led him so effortlessly through so many different investigations over the years, but it was something, and for the moment, that was enough. If he’d gone onto one of those talk shows chicks seemed to like so much, one of those things like Oprah or Doctor Phil, they would probably spend an entire hour dissecting what it was that had turned him into the sort of person who needed to be detached from those around him in order to feel like he was in control, at the end of which he seriously doubted that he would feel any differently about things. As far as he was concerned, at the moment the why of it didn’t matter one bit. What mattered was that he figured out what the hell was happening here, and what, if anything, he needed to do about it. With this in mind, he followed her down the hallway of her apartment slowly, not wanting to get too close to her for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand. As he made the walk, part of him was sure that what he would find in her bedroom was another flayed animal there, another unfortunate pet that would undoubtedly scar her for life. That wasn’t it, though, nothing so gory and stomach-turning this time. Instead, it was what looked like a massive portfolio, a dossier of sorts that looked completely unassuming. When he glanced at her face, however, he could see that unassuming was just about the last thing in the world she would consider it to be. Quite the opposite, actually. Her face had gone so white it looked as if she might faint dead away right then and there, and without giving it any thought, he put an arm around her waist in order to steady her. When she looked up into his face, he saw no disapproval or resentment there at the feel of his touch. Instead, all he saw was gratitude and a kind of blind trust that made him feel as if it would now be him who reeled backwards. Whatever this stack of papers and, from the looks of it photographs, represented to Clara she was absolutely horrified by it, and she was relying on him to make it all better. He’d promised that he would do so, too, although he hadn’t a clue whether or not it was something he could actually make happen. He’d promised he would, and so now he would do everything within his power to make sure nobody ever frightened her or harmed her again.

“Tell me,” he said in a voice far huskier than he had intended it to be, “tell me everything I need know.”