Lawrence Block - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

“Philip,” she said again, reaching out to take his hand in hers, “I have something to tell you.” It was too late to stop it now, and he knew that whatever she said next he would try to believe, but he would never believe. And it was clear to him that no matter what happened, the most difficult and complicated part of it was likely just beginning.

©2007 by Art Taylor

© 2007 by P. J. Parrish

Kelly Nichols, aka P.J. Parrish, is the author of the critically acclaimed Louis Kincaid mystery series, coauthored with her sister, Kristy Montee. The books have made the bestseller lists of the New York Times and USA Today, and been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Shamus awards. Their latest novel, A Thousand Bones (Pocket Books, July) is the debut of their spin-off series featuring Miami homicide detective Joette Frye.

He sat alone in the dark cruiser, staring out the windshield into the shimmering darkness. It was just starting to rain, more of a mist really, tiny glittery drops that seemed to fall from nowhere and disappear before they hit the ground.

He turned off the wipers and after a few moments the glass began to blur, the rain working like a slow silver paintbrush to erase his view of the bridge and the man on it.

A.J. sighed softly, tiredly. The car was a comforting coc-oon of drifting shadows, blinking red radio lights, and the familiar hug of the old leather seat on his back.

There weren’t many moments like this, so he held on to it for a while, maybe another full minute, before he hit the wipers again. In the wet glow of the cruiser’s headlights, the bridge and the rookie standing on it came back into focus.

The rookie was young, with an awkward, bent-stick way of walking. His face, with his crooked Alabama smile, was eager, anxious, and hopeful. Not a whole lot different from the last rookie A.J. had. Or the one before him or the one before that one.

The bridge was old and plain, too big, really, for the trickle of brown water that flowed beneath it. The bridge’s face, a stretch of plain, bleached concrete, was chipped and scarred by too many drunks, and smeared in more recent years with red and yellow slashes of gang graffiti.

The bridge seemed to be the only thing standing still in the drifting night. Maybe it was just the distant city lights as they played off the underbelly of the low-hanging clouds. Or maybe it was the fog slithering around the rookie’s feet. Whatever it was, it was the kind of night that held something A.J. had felt before. It was the kind of night he always thought could crawl inside you and suck something out, something you couldn’t see leaving but you could feel.

A.J. glanced out the side window, his mind drifting with the trickle of raindrops down the glass.

Lorraine liked these kinds of nights, but she never saw them like he did. He recalled her saying more than once, usually on one of their anniversaries, that it had been raining like this — this weird glittery kind of mist — when he proposed to her.

He smiled slowly. It was like they were being sprinkled with love dust, she said.

She had a special word for this kind of night, but right now he couldn’t remember that, either. What had she called it?

Londonesque. Yeah. That was it. Must be what London is like, don’t you think, A.J.? Do you think we could go there on our honeymoon, A.J.?

He never understood the word Londonesque, but he didn’t tell her that. Never told her he didn’t understand most of her fancy words. Didn’t tell her he suspected she even made some up. They didn’t go to London on their honeymoon. In fact, they hadn’t gone anywhere on their wedding night. But Lorraine kept planning other “honeymoons” to other places. Places, like her made-up words, that she thought could make her someone or something else. Something smarter or prettier or better than what she was. A cop’s wife.

A.J. had never been much farther than St. Louis, but for the moment, in this weather, and maybe because he was feeling a bit lonely lately, and a bit kindly toward Lorraine right now, he could imagine, if things had gone differently, that he and Lorraine might be in England. Strolling around the outside of one of those grand old castles, taking pictures of the stiff-lipped, fuzzy-hatted guys standing guard outside.

He sighed softly.

She’d been gone a long time now. Left him, married her dentist, and moved to Knoxville, where he knew they had no castles, but he guessed they had a few pink-bricked houses with big backyards. A few years later, he heard that the dentist had bought her a bigger house with a bigger yard. He didn’t know where she lived now. Didn’t know if she had ever gotten to England.

A.J. looked back at the rookie on the bridge.

His name was Andy. The leather jacket squared off his shoulders, making him look tougher and beefier than A.J. knew he was underneath the stiff leather. Andy’s blue trousers were knife-creased, and speckled with rain and mud from the climb down the hill. They were a might short, too, and every time Andy leaned on the bridge, A.J. could see a flash of his bright white tube socks.

Andy’s eyes, A.J. had noticed earlier, were a pale brown, the color of beach sand. Kind, trusting eyes, but eyes that held no sense of command. A.J. knew that people — bad people — noticed things like that. A nervous gesture, a tremor in the voice, a wrong step in the wrong direction, all those small things that told the bad guy who was in charge and who would win if it ever came down to it.

Andy would have to lose that look if he was going to survive.

A.J. shifted in his seat to ease the stiffness in his lower back and glanced at the clock, wondering where the detectives were. It was almost midnight, shift’s end. Usually he could gauge the time pretty well without looking, and he was surprised it was this late. He raised his hand to the flickering computer screen to check his watch. The crystal was a little fogged and he blew on it to clear it. Sometimes that worked.

The watch was probably in its final days, but it had been a good watch, the kind a cop needed. Something that could get smacked against a wall, dropped in a lake, and even stepped on, and still just keep on ticking, like the old commercial said. When it died, he wouldn’t throw it away. He would lay it to rest in his jewelry box along with all his old service pins and outdated badges.

It had been his daughter Sheila’s last gift to him, given to him in June of 1998. He had thought it was a Father’s Day gift until he realized it was wrapped in Christmas paper, left over from six months earlier when he hadn’t shown up in Knoxville at the dentist’s house like he promised he would.

Sheila didn’t understand too many things back then, like how long it took to remove crumpled cars, wet Christmas presents, and dead bodies from a freeway interchange. She didn’t understand that he had called the next morning to apologize and wish her a good Christmas. And she didn’t understand that ex-wives had their own reasons for not giving daughters messages from their fathers.

He supposed most sixteen-year-old girls didn’t understand stuff like that. They saw the world only through their own narrow, selfish prisms, and sometimes one tiny mistake could be that one thing they thought ruined their life forever. His not being there that Christmas was that one thing for Sheila.

He hadn’t made it to Knoxville the following Christmas, either, but he had called and asked Sheila to come see him. The day before, she canceled, leaving a message on his answering machine telling him she had places to go and cool people she wanted to see over the holidays. A.J. wasn’t one of them.