35
The house smelled like rack of lamb with olive oil and rosemary, Susan’s specialty, when Behr walked in the door and found them at the table.
“This is restaurant quality, Susan,” Decker said, waving his fork over his plate.
“You’re not drunk already, are you, Eddie?” Susan shot back.
“Maybe just a little,” Decker said. He wore a weathered, olive drab polo shirt with sleeves that cut into his biceps, Gina a dress that was shorter than most pregnant women would’ve dared.
Then Susan saw Behr and turned her face up to him for a kiss. “Sorry, Frank, it was ready to go so we didn’t wait.”
“Rightly so,” Behr said, sitting. “How are you all?”
“Jealously watching Eddie suck down all your liquor,” Gina said. Behr saw a prim glass of white wine in front of the women, while Decker had a tumbler filled with what looked like Wild Turkey on the rocks.
“Where were you?” Susan asked. “I tried the office.”
“I was out.”
“I called your cell.”
“You used the landline. It comes up ‘blocked,’ which is what happens when people from work call from their private lines, so I didn’t answer.”
“Ah, the artful dodger,” Decker said.
“Gotta be. Second thing they teach you in detective school,” Behr said.
“What’s first?” Gina Decker asked.
“How to bill,” Behr said, with Decker murmuring the line along with him. It was an old saw in law enforcement.
“By the way,” Susan said, “I spoke to Chad and heard what happened the other night at that bar.”
Behr and Decker looked at each other guiltily across the table.
“Like a couple of schoolboys, the both of ’em,” Gina said, obviously having heard the story from Susan.
“Don’t worry-you two get your merit badges,” she said, “and thank you,” and that was the end of it.
A pleasant meal passed, filled with lots of chatter, mostly on Susan and Gina’s part, and some laughs. The men bussed the plates to the kitchen and the ladies took over from there. Behr and Decker retired to the living room for yet another drink while they waited for the blueberry cobbler to warm up. Decker had had a good three or four refills of his bourbon during the course of the dinner-not measured shots, but big, generous home pours-and Behr had stayed head-to-head with him, so neither was feeling any pain as they hit their seats.
“Extremities almost completely numb,” Decker said, “almost where I want to be.”
“So when are you back on active duty?”
“Staycation’s over tomorrow,” Decker said. “Modified for a week, and back to the gerbil wheel.”
“Is that what the job feels like?” Behr wondered. It had been a long time since he’d been on, a long time wishing he was-he couldn’t remember anymore.
Decker stared out over the rim of his glass. “The job’s not so bad. It’s me.” Behr understood him well enough but was surprised to hear him go on. “When I was in-the time I spent training, going out with Cal-he was my spotter. We switched it up, but he was mostly the spotter. We’d set up in a position near the airport, in places I can’t mention, and lay hell down on the Ali Babas for forty-eight hours straight before they’d dope us out. Back here, I can’t sit still for half an hour. Without a drink in my hand …” He laughed. “Over there things were just … clear. Take out this target. Set a pomzie surprise on a trail-”
“Antipersonnel mines?”
“Yeah. Or a mud cutter-they were sort of my specialty.”
“Mud cutter?”
“It’s when you bury a short-fuse grenade on a heavy-use trail and remove the pin but leave the handle in place. Step, step boom. Or throw a fifty-caliber party on this group of unregistered bad guys. We’ve got wounded and you need to use your snipecraft to allow the cas evacs in. I knew exactly what I was supposed to do and how to do it. Now, being back. Living like this. Sleeping with my boots off. In a bed. Married. With a pregnant wife. Trying not to crack dipshit motorists and to act like a normal clean-cut citizen … I don’t know … It’s great. I’m lucky … But now, I’m just powered down. Like I hit the mute button or something …” Decker raised a hand in front of him and rubbed his fingers together as if he were trying to grab a hold of something slippery. “Life now’s like eating steak with a balloon on my tongue.”
Behr just looked at him and took a big drink of his bourbon. He rattled the ice in his glass when he was done. Behr felt like another, and he could see that Decker just about needed one, but he couldn’t move. Then Decker leaned in.
“Look, I don’t want to get too personal, but I could use some intel on what’s coming down the pike on the kid front.”
He took the question in. Obviously Susan had mentioned to Gina that Behr had once had a son. He had to assume that they also knew the boy was no longer alive, though perhaps they didn’t know the circumstances of his death. Either way, it wasn’t what Decker was asking, and it didn’t make Behr want to revisit the terrain.
“Well, I remember this: about six days before and six days after the birth, until when her milk comes in, your wife sure isn’t the woman you married. Hormones. Try to remember that when you think you’re living in
Decker just nodded. Behr saw he wasn’t looking for jokes and something resembling sobriety descended on him. The young cop’s question deserved a real answer and he only hoped he was worthy of giving one.
“What do you want to know?” Behr asked, doing his best to keep the iron cauldron lid in his chest sealed up tight.
“Well, I’m pretty sure Gina’s got a handle on the basics. But I want to do things right, and the way I came up, I don’t have much of a … role model.”
Behr turned and looked at Decker, who finished off his drink. For a minute he seemed young, actually resembling his twenty-something years. Behr wanted to help him, and cast about in his brain for a way to do it.
“That doesn’t matter,” Behr began. “When you become a father, the-” he looked for the right words “-the slights and grudges, whatever you want to call the shortcomings of your own childhood, they get pushed aside. They’ve got to, because they’ve got nothing to do with the kid that’s coming. You don’t want to be the same father you had, and you don’t want to be a direct reaction to that either …”
That’s when Behr saw it happen: Decker’s eyes went a flat, distant black. A palpable darkness filled the air, and Behr got the feeling Decker wasn’t really in the room with him anymore. A silence grew to an uncomfortable length, and Behr did something he didn’t often do, which was reach for a social convention and continue in a more positive vein so the whole conversation, the whole night, didn’t crumble to dust.
“It’s a fresh start is all I’m saying. You’re gonna feel that you need to find a way to be more or better than you are, for the sake of the kid … And you will. You’ll do it. It’ll be an inspiration like you’ve never had before. So try not to worry about it.”
Everyone knows the best salesmen believe wholly in their product, and, as such, Behr realized he wasn’t much of pitchman for the bright side.
They both looked at their glasses and grunted and made their way to the counter where the bottle was. That’s where the ladies, bearing plates of cobbler, found them and added a soothing social balm to the proceedings. Susan and Gina talked and laughed. They all finished their desserts, and it seemed Decker came back to himself.
“So, boys and girls, I’m fizzling out here,” Susan said after a bit.
“Me too,” Gina said, and they all stood.
“C’mon, Jeeves,” Decker said to his wife, throwing an arm around Gina’s neck, and then turned to Behr and Susan, “that’s her chauffeur’s name. I got me a designated driver.”
Gina gave him a shot to the stomach. “You get a driver, and I get to carry a bowling ball around for nine months,” she said.
