Lisa Unger - Smoke

Bloom had his head cocked to Dylan, but his eyes were on the wall beside him, as if the scene were playing out for him there. “Then you took off?” asked Bloom with a frown that was somewhere between surprise and suspicion. “Why didn’t you investigate?”

Dylan and Jez were silent, exchanged a look. “We weren’t sure how it would look,” Jez said finally. “I thought, if they could frame Mount the way they did, why not me?” She paused and looked down at the table. “I have a son.”

Bloom looked at her carefully, with a slight narrowing of the eyes.

“But the van’s gone now,” he said after a minute of considering their story. They both nodded. “Seems like you could have called and told me what you were up to, Breslow.”

“I told you about The New Day when you questioned me. You didn’t seem to be taking me seriously.”

He shrugged. “I was taking you seriously. But some crazy-sounding story about a cult framing your partner and actually seeing the van in front of the residence of the only eyewitness to his crime is a different matter. Don’t you agree?”

She nodded, feeling like she’d let Matt down in a major way.

“Did you get the plate?” Bloom asked Dylan.

Dylan removed a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to the Detective. Jesamyn looked at him. She’d asked him the same question right before the gunfire and he hadn’t had a chance to answer.

“Did you run it?”

Dylan nodded. “The van is registered to The New Day. There are two outstanding parking tickets, one on the Upper West Side, and one in Riverdale.”

Jesamyn started at the harsh ripping sound of a body bag being zipped. She felt despair at the sound of it. “Two.38 slugs to the head,” said Bloom as the ME rolled the corpse out.

Jesamyn nodded. She knew Mount had a Smith & Wesson five-shot at home. His off-duty revolver, smaller and lighter than the Glock he carried on the job. From the look on Bloom’s face, he knew it too.

“You said two shots?” asked Dylan. “You find a third slug?”

Bloom shook his head. “Not yet. We’re not finished with the scene.”

“We heard three shots,” said Jesamyn.

Bloom shrugged. “If it’s here, we’ll find it.”

Jesamyn held Bloom’s eyes. She knew what he was thinking; she was thinking the same thing. If they’d come in here after the shots were fired, what would they have found? She pushed the thought away; there was no point in worrying about that now. But if she had to make the decision again, she’d do the same. Ben came first. He always came first. She fought the urge to put her head in her hands.

Since the slashing of his Achilles tendons, Dax Chicago had had a lot of time to think about the things he’d done. He’d managed to push so many days and moments from his memory that there were big black spaces in the narrative of his life. He liked it that way. Some things he wasn’t supposed to remember, other things he just didn’t want to remember. The little game Lydia played, trying to tease him into telling her things he couldn’t tell. She thought he was keeping things from her. And in some cases, that was true. There were things he couldn’t tell her or anyone. But there were plenty more he’d succeeded in forgetting altogether. Most people didn’t understand how that was possible. But then most people hadn’t been the places he’d been.

Since the accident, memories had returned unbidden. It was the inactivity, the insomnia, the time that was filled only with the pain of his slowly healing legs that allowed his deeds to come marching back. Now people, too, it seemed. People like Grimm. He’d never thought they would see each other again, and that had been fine by him.

Lydia and Jeffrey were ahead of him on the path. She was just within his reach. He wanted to grab her shoulders and spin her around, force her to look into his eyes. Her new knowledge of his past-or what she thought was her new knowledge-didn’t change their friendship. Jeffrey, Dax knew, was comfortable with the gray choices. He knew better than most that the just thing wasn’t always the legal thing. He knew that some people had to die so that other people could live. And Jeff, like Dax, was willing to be the person who made choices like that. But Lydia had never shared those feelings… even when her own life was at stake.

“In our line of work, there’s just a thin line that separates us from the monsters we chase. Once it has been crossed, you’re Ahab, you’ve caught the disease, whether you know it or not,” she’d said to him once. He’d never forgotten those words; they resonated with him. Maybe she was right. Maybe he had the disease and he just didn’t realize it. Maybe she thought she saw it in him now and would never be able to see him any other way. The thought pained him. Jeff and Lydia were the only true friends he’d ever known.

He reached for her but before his hand touched her shoulder, the ground fell out from beneath his feet and he was falling, falling into black. He heard Lydia screaming Jeffrey’s name and then there was nothing.

Jesamyn stood on Mount’s porch, ringing the bell and freezing her ass off. She knew it was pointless and stupid. He wasn’t going to be there. But part of her was just hoping that he’d come to the door in his sweatpants, groggy from sleep.

“What are you talking about?” he’d say, giving her that look he gave when he thought she was acting crazy. “Arrested? On the run accused of murdering one, possibly two people? That’s nuts.”

But he didn’t come and eventually she took the keys from her purse after a few more rings and let herself in. They’d exchanged keys a long time ago. It was in case something ever happened to either one of them and, for whatever reason, one of them needed entry into the other’s residence. She promised that if he was ever hurt or killed on the job, she’d go and take his porn videos and throw them out so his mother wouldn’t find them. Other than that they hadn’t really thought it through. It had just seemed like a good idea. She was glad for it now.

She was immediately assailed by the smell of garlic and oil as she stepped inside. The heat was blasting and she was grateful for the warmth. She closed the door behind her and stood in the living room, listened to the silence of an empty old house. She wasn’t sure why she’d come here, what she was looking for exactly. She guessed she’d know it when she saw it. She felt tired suddenly, the last few days catching up with her in a big way. She sat on his couch, threw her bag down beside her, put her feet on his coffee table and tried to think like Mateo Stenopolis.

He was a person that she knew . She knew her son Ben. She knew her mother. And she knew her partner. She had loved Dylan deeply once and maybe still did but she’d never really known him, at least not in the way she imagined she did. He kept secrets, told lies, wouldn’t share big parts of himself. You can’t know a person like that; you can love him, fill in the blanks with all your own dreams and desires. But, of course, he’ll disappoint you again and again, until you wake up and realize you can’t build a life with someone who won’t give himself up to it. You can’t live a life built on the romantic imagining of a person.

Mount never held anything back; he wasn’t even capable of it. He was hopelessly open and honest, couldn’t lie or be fake if he wanted to. That’s why he didn’t get along well with people; that’s why he was always vulnerable to getting hurt. She let the fatigue take her, let a few tears drain from her eyes and spill down her face.

“Mount,” she said. “Where did you go?”

She heard it before she saw it; it was a slight creaking of the wood on the porch where she’d been standing just a minute earlier. Then a large shadow drifted past the glass. She was grateful that he hadn’t turned on the lights and then wondered if she’d locked the door behind her. She slid from her place on the couch, crouched behind the big overstuffed arm and took the Glock from the holster at her waist as the knob started to turn.