The Silent Hour

mean to go find out what happened to Ken. I should do that, I know. I should be back in Cleveland right now, working on that.”

“I didn’t say that. I’m just surprised you’re not, because it seems to be your way.”

“Sometimes your ways change. Or get changed.”

He was quiet. The sprinkling rain had stopped, but the wind was blowing harder, and there was no longer any trace of the moon through the clouds.

“Are you coming back?” I said. “It’s why I’m here, and you know that. I need to know if you’re coming back.”

“To Cleveland?”

“No. Well, yes, I care about that, too, but I mean to work. Are you coming back to work with me?”

He said, “I got a call from Tony Mitchell two weeks ago. You remember Tony?”

“Sure. Good cop, good guy. Funny as hell. What this has to do with anything . . .”

“Tony’s retired from the department, too. I expected he’d become a Jimmy Buffett roadie, but evidently that didn’t work out, because he got himself a job doing corporate security for some big manufacturing firm. Place is constantly hiring new employees, taking in hundreds of applications a month. They’ve had some problems with bad hires in the past and want to put a preemployment screening program in place. Tony called me, asked if we’d be interested in running it. Would be real steady work.”

“Screenings,” I said.

“I’d be willing to do something like that,” he said. “Make some money, keep busy. The street work . . . I’ve done it for too long, Lincoln.”

“So you’re coming back, but you don’t intend to do any street work.”

“That’s about it, yeah.”

“Where does Gena figure in?”

“I don’t know yet.”

I nodded.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“That maybe it’s time to fold it,” I said and hated the sound of my voice. I’d gone for detached and gotten choked instead.

He didn’t answer.

“I don’t want to be in this business alone, Joe. I’m not sure I even want to be in it at all anymore, but I don’t want to go at it alone. Hell, you’re the one who dragged me into it. I was running the gym and—”

“And losing your mind. You were so miserable—”

“That was a different time. I’d gotten fired, I’d lost Karen . . . things were different.”

“This job gave you something back. Did it not?”

“Sure,” I said. “It gives, and maybe it takes away a little, too. You’re proof.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Look at yourself. You’re happy down here. Are you not?”

“Generally, yeah. It’s been good. I’m not sure how—”

“You had to go fifteen hundred miles to separate yourself from it,” I said. “From the work. The work was you, and you were the work. I saw it every damn day.”

“I could take that comment the wrong way if I wanted to.”

“You didn’t have anything else, Joe. Nothing.”

“I know I could take that one the wrong way.”

“It was all you were,” I said. “Being a detective didn’t define you, it devoured you, and you know it. Why else did you have to leave, to go so far and for so long? You did it because if you stayed any closer you knew you’d go right back to the job, and you were scared of that. Scared, or tired.”

“You seeing a therapist or just reading their books?”

“Tell me I’m wrong,” I said.

He shifted in his chair, shook his head. “I won’t argue it. I could, but I won’t. Certainly not tonight.”

I didn’t say anything, and after a while he spoke again, voice low. “I thought the biggest headache would be getting you to let me step aside. Didn’t figure you’d be racing me for the door.”

“I’m tired of the collateral damage.”

“Meaning what?”

It came out in a rush. For a long time, I spoke, and he listened. Never said a word, didn’t look at me, just listened. I talked about watching Joe in the hospital when he’d been shot, about John Dunbar’s frightening fixation on a case he’d lost, about the way I felt every time I heard that new security bar click into place at Amy’s apartment, and the uncomfortable pull my gun had on me while I drove to Dominic Sanabria’s house.

“I’ve seen a lot of people around me get hurt,” I said. “You, and Amy, and now Ken Merriman. I’m always untouched, but—”

“You’re untouched?”

I nodded.

“Really?” he said. “Because you don’t look that way right now, Lincoln. Don’t sound it, either.”

We let silence ride for a while then. The rain held off, and once I heard a door open and then close again after a brief pause, and I was certain without turning to look that it was Amy, that she’d walked out onto the balcony and seen me down here with Joe and gone back inside.

“So what will you do?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’ve still got the gym. Maybe put some of Karen’s money into that. Get new equipment, do a remodel, try to expand. Help you out with the employment screening thing, if you need it.”

“And stay away from case work.”

“Yes. Stay away from case work.”

He was quiet again, then said, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out better for you, Lincoln. Like you said, I’m the one who brought you into it. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing. You were a detective. That was as natural and deeply ingrained in you as in anybody else I’d ever seen. I thought it would be good for you, but more than that, I thought you needed it.”

That night, when we were alone in our hotel room, I told Amy about my conversation with Joe. I was sitting in a chair by the sliding glass door, she was on the bed and outside the rain fell in sheets. I thought she might make some arguments, raise some of the same points that Joe had, remind me that when we’d met I was trying to make a living off the gym alone and I was a generally unhappy person. She didn’t say any of those things, though. When I was done talking she got to her feet and walked across the room to me and sat on my lap, straddling me, her hands on either side of my face.

“If you can’t do it anymore, then there’s no decision to be made,” she said. “You just need to step back. Don’t feel bad about it, just do it.”

I nodded.

“One rule,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“You can leave the job. You can leave the city if you want to. You can leave damn near anything, but you better not leave me.”

I shook my head. “Not going to happen.”

“I’ve invested way too much into this ill-advised Lincoln Perry rehabilitation plan to give up now.”

“If anybody ends this, it’ll be you.”

“Remember that,” she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed me before moving to rest her head on my chest. We sat like that for a long time, and then she stood and took my hand and brought me to the bed.

When she was asleep and the rain was gone, sometime around four in the morning, I sat on the balcony with a pad of the hotel stationery and tried to write a letter to Ken’s daughter, the one who’d loved TV cop shows. I wanted to apologize for missing the funeral, tell her how much I’d thought of her father, and explain that he’d been a damn fine detective and that his work had mattered, that what he’d been doing on the day he was murdered had an impact on her world. I sat there for more than an hour, wrote a few poor sentences, and then crumpled the