This was the part that was, admittedly, a little less fun. Walking the beat and moving around the city, talking to people and chasing clues you could see, that was the stuff Hanna always excelled at in academy and loved on the job. Any cop did. But James always told her that more than a healthy dose of patience was needed to be an exceptionally good cop. It wasn’t about pulling out guns and badges and chasing down perps. It was about justice and finding it anyway you could, even if that meant burying yourself in paperwork.
“What the fuck kind of bookkeeping system is this?” she asked, dropping another box of papers on the table.
“Sorry, do the Caracals have labeled manila folders?”
She glared. Papers were going in every direction. Some were folded, some were crumbled. Maybe only two in every handful were dated in a way that made sense, and none of the handwriting seemed really legible.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“Stock deliveries always require a signature,” she said. “And a copy of the manifest goes to the recipient. We’re looking for that. It’ll have contact information for the supplier that day, maybe even the delivery man. But if not, it’s the best start we have.”
He groaned.
“Yeah I know, it’s so difficult when you’re not red in the face from threatening to give people cigarette burns.”
“It’s way too early in the night for you to be this irritating,” he said, pulling out a pile and beginning to sift through.
“And you’re thirty-two years old, you’d think you’d know the proper way to run a business.”
“My business runs fine.”
“Well, maybe this will be a lesson to you to get your fucking shit together. If we can’t find your sister, maybe it’s because you didn’t give a shit to keep your books in order.”
She regretted it as soon as she said it. But it felt so good to say it. Getting digs in, releasing that little bit of red you saw in front of your eyes when you were angry, it was like doing a shot. For five seconds she felt invigorated by the look of hurt on his face. She didn’t even know he was capable of human emotion that didn’t end in violence or drinking your brains out in the back alley of a seedy club.
But then the adrenaline was gone and all she felt was sorry. He covered over the look of pain quickly with heavy brows, tightly knit together over the bridge of his nose. His dark eyes seemed to grow sharper and harder as they moved quickly over the piece of paper in front of him. She’d finally found a way to get him to shut up and she felt just a little bit awful about it. That was the real surprise, she supposed, not his reaction but the possibility that she could actually feel sorry for him and the kicked puppy look on his face.
She didn’t say a word, and instead turned to look at her own pile of papers and began the grueling work of tracking down a single delivery man in Los Indios.
***
It was well past three in the morning when she was jolted awake by her own dream. It was her father’s face, the one she never recognized. It was the mask he wore after the drugs had invaded every part of his system that they could. It wasn’t anger or anything scary. It was always like looking in the face of pure evil. It was someone she loved, but the mirror image, the evil twin. She stared at it enough times and forgot how to love the original at all. But in dreams, she couldn’t run from things like she did before.
So she was awake in the dim, flickering light of the lamp in the corner just barely on its last leg. The papers were still on the coffee table but they’d changed since she saw them last. Instead of being a jagged pile with corners in every direction, they were stacked in symmetrical piles, ends meeting. The ones that had been folded or crumpled had been pressed out and flattened into something workable. Notes had been written on many of them, with legible dates and labels for what they went to.
But Roarke was nowhere to be seen.
In front of her as well was a cup of coffee. She placed a hand around the outside of the mug and felt it still warm. She picked it up and brought it to her lips, feeling the warmth and smelling the familiar bitterness before it hit her tongue and it was like a balm to cure all ailments. She’d learned long ago to think of even the most disgusting cup coffee as water in the desert when it was just before sunrise and you were running on a small catnap you took in the passenger seat of the patrol car on the way back to the station. This was like the elixir of life by comparison.
She stood up, keeping the mug close to her, taking in the continued vapors and the smell they carried. Roarke’s apartment was exactly what you might imagine. Several used bongs sat around. Cigarette butts could be seen in several places and piles that had become makeshift ashtrays were on several flat surfaces. Takeout menus lined the counter, dirty dishes sat in the sink, and several bags and empty containers of takeout food were sitting around. For all this mess, it didn’t smell like the wad of garbage she expected to hit her nose when she first walked in. Several scented candles kept the place manageable.
She walked through until she saw the shadow of his body on the balcony. His shoulders were slack and he stood shorter as he leaned over the railing. A puff of smoke appeared over his head and dissipated in the moonlight. He looked like a statue but she could feel everything buzzing in him, even from there. He looked so different than the man who carried a puffed out chest and a smirk all day long. Even his hair seemed to have gone through several rounds of his fingers running through it that it was stuck sticking out in odd directions.
She considered her options. She could step out there and ruin his reverie for the sake of her own selfish need to apologize. That was one way to look at it. Or she could step out there and try and grant him some peace of mind that she’d stolen when she let her words fly a little too freely and little too sharply. Or, the third option, she could stare and stare and wonder about him until the sun came up or he eventually turned around and the spell they were mutually under was broken.
The decision was made for her when her feet moved forward on their own. Her brain only caught up when her hand was on the sliding glass door. She hesitated, just a minute. It felt like it might be the difference between everything before and everything after. She could keep her mouth shut, keep Roarke at arm’s length and continue to monitor him like the criminal and jerk he’d always been. She could stay safe in that world and not worry about the possibilities of the unknown that waited beyond if she began to let him be another person entirely in her eyes.
She opened the door.
He jumped, just a bit, at the sound, but didn’t turn around. She stepped up next to him, the warmth of the coffee steaming visibly in the cool air of night. The moonlight lit it up like a sheet rising into the sky and disappeared from view. It was fascinating how little things like this could seem so important in the dead hours of night. Fights seemed more painful, laughter seemed to hit deeper, questions seemed more intelligent, and simple things like the steam from a crappy cup of coffee seemed like they might hold some fundamental answer to the secrets of the universe.
“Thanks,” she said, quietly, afraid to speak too loudly in the stillness.
He nodded. He took a long drag of the cigarette and she watched the tip glow and glow until it seemed like it couldn’t take anymore without catching fire completely. Then it went out as he released it and blew the remnants out. Smoke and the smell of the tobacco filled the air and then it was gone, muted, before the process began again.
Then there was more silence. She was going to have to work for this. It was funny, how willing she was to uproot her life and completely change her psychology to pretend to be the thing she hated most for the sake of her job, but in this, she hesitated and hesitated.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said, staring out into the dim lights of the town. “I was way out of line. I’m overworked and tired and that’s my fault. And what I said was my fault, too. Some psycho assholes took your sister and we’re going to find them and her.”
She got it out in a ramble, hoping to hit all her bases as best she could with one fluid sentence because she didn’t think she’d be able to start up again with the apologies if she stopped. He didn’t say a word or make any move to show that he’d heard her at all. He just continued to stare, like sleeping with his eyes open.
“Feel free to hate me, I deserve it. But I don’t want you thinking you did anything wrong--I mean sure, you’re an ass and a prideful prick, but that has nothing to do with your sister and what happened,” she said.
“It has everything to do with it,” he said quietly, pulling the cigarette into his mouth for another drag.
“Roarke--”
“She was always the good one and I was always the awful one. You know I broke a kid’s arm when I was just eight? I liked it too. I liked the feel of the break and hearing him yell. I started smoking weed when I was twelve. I fired my first gun when I was fourteen, I’ve always been the worst kind of person,” he said. “But she wasn’t. And she’s the one getting punished.”
“That’s not your fault.”
“No, but it hurts a lot.”
She couldn’t quite fix that. She sighed. She didn’t know how to help him with that. It was true, in a cruel cosmic truth, he was right. And she had to admit it sucked a lot. But she wasn’t going to admit that out loud. They needed to be on all cylinders. Not moping.
“Let’s head back inside,” she said. “Keep the momentum going before you die from lung cancer.”
He took one last long drag from his cigarette before dropping it off the balcony and walking back inside. She followed and closed the door. He walked to the fridge and she heard the clink of bottles. He pulled out two beers, holding them by the neck. He used the end of his lighter to pop off the tops and he handed one to her without a word or a question as he walked past and headed back into the office.
He dropped onto the couch and took a long gulp. She followed suit with a little more grace and looked at his neatly constructed piles.
“You were busy,” she said.
“Yep.”
“You could have woken me. I didn’t even realize I fell asleep.”
“All the more reason that you probably needed it.”
He was a completely different person. She knew the second the sun came up and the world returned, he’d be back to the way he was and everything would be irritating and blood pressure inducing once more. But for now, she’d let herself take it in and be happy with what she could get.
“You were having some dreams,” he said, picking up a stack and leafing through it.
“That tends to happen when people sleep.”
“Lots of mumbling. You seemed a little upset.”
“Not all dreams can be fluffy bunnies and worlds of rainbow.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“Not really.”
That was new too. And it would also go away with the sunrise. She wasn’t ready to go that far yet. Besides, Hanna’s backstory was something else entirely to Laura’s. She wasn’t about to confuse them further by telling him the truth, not now.
“I’m impressed,” she said, changing the topic and pointing to the pile.
“Funny enough, putting things into piles is pretty kindergarten stuff.”
“Well, deciphering the dates on those is actually the impressive part.”
“Yeah, that took a fuck ton of work, I’ll be honest.”
She chuckled as she picked up her own pile and, after three seconds of leafing through it, found exactly what she was looking for.
“Looks like it paid off,” she said, holding up a piece of paper with a list of stock items delivered on the day of Isabelle’s birthday.