Life or death situations could bind you to a stranger, the way I mourned every day for the children my father killed. For the children I’d let him kill before I turned him in. We were in the same position, those kids and me. At the mercy of a psychopath. But they had died, and I had lived.
Survivor’s guilt, the textbook would say. It wasn’t me who had caused that pain; it was misfortune, coincidence, the melody of a madman. I was a victim too, they said. I was the one who had suffered, not the one who caused suffering. Except I hadn’t ever suffered, not really. No one had ever hit me or continued to touch me when I said no.
Creepy men in white vans took one look at the jaded knowledge in my eyes and kept on driving. They knew there was no innocence left to corrupt—just a hollowed out space where my soul should have been.
I didn’t want those men to hurt me because I liked pain. I wanted them to hurt me because I knew I deserved it all along. I’d escaped it through a twist of fate. I’d let the hurt fall to other more hopeful children. And for that, I would always deserve to be punished.
Hennessey was leaning against his car when I pulled up. Morning light glinted off his smooth jaw. He seemed somehow younger than before. He looked bright and put together, as if yesterday’s stress and upheaval had meant nothing to him. Threatening a child molester with death was like fetching coffee for him. Implying he might let his rookie partner get raped was like filing a paper. Part of the job, easy peasy.
He nodded toward the passenger side. “Get in, rookie.”
“Where are we going?”
“To catch a bad guy. Where else?”
His voice was light, and I took that airiness into myself. I made it mine. Let this be a joke. At least then I could be in on it. A coping mechanism, the textbook would say. Life was one big coping mechanism, one more beat passing without desperation, another moment without fear. I wasn’t afraid of a joke.
We didn’t go back to the prison. Instead, we went to the permitting center and rode a creaky elevator to the fifth floor. A large dusty room contained architectural plans and permits for the entire city, in no sort of order that made sense to me. There were gaps, too, I learned. With a building changing from one survey to the next without any official construction permit being filed. The thin fading carbon copies chronicled the growth of a metropolis, only hinting at the people who lived within it.
And I found that looking for a building near the docks shaped like an M was fucking hard. We found a seemingly endless amount of possibilities, and we set each one aside so we could check into its current usage and ownership. And the worst part was knowing we could miss it in this haphazard pile. The proverbial M-shaped needle in the biggest haystack in Texas. For all the fancy gadgetry we oohed and ahhed over in the academy, actual detective work was a backward business. We peered into the past, hoping it would help. But history held onto its secrets like a forest at night, shrouded in moonlight and steeped in folklore. There was magic in these dusty volumes, but all we could see were shadows.
We walked over to a diner for lunch, where I ordered a salad and two eggs sunny side up. Hennessey ordered a burger loaded with cheese and bacon, fries, and a milkshake. I raised my eyebrows as the waitress left us.
Hennessey grinned, almost boyish. “Sorry, I don’t share. You’ll have to get your own if you get tired of rabbit food.”
I snorted. “My arteries will thank me later.”
“You’re not into living dangerously?”
“I’m an FBI agent working one of the highest profile cases south of the Mason Dixon. My danger quota is full.”
He nodded, turning pensive. “You’re probably right. Though sometimes…it gets to be too much, to live a normal life with a dangerous job. We build up all this steam, and we don’t have the release of money and drugs the way the criminals do.”
“Maybe you don’t,” I deadpanned, and he laughed. His smile changed his whole face, made him younger and so handsome that my heart squeezed. Synapses lit up in my brain, firing into places long asleep. Like waking up and finding the world more vivid than your dreams.
His smile faded. He looked me in the eye. “Truth is, I never planned to live very long. In this job, there’s always a bullet out there with my name on it.”
I looked down, tracing a groove in the laminate with my fingernail. Not a grown up response, but it was all I could manage in that moment. I had the sense of a ghost again, of Carlos Laguardia and a hundred other criminals, all gathered around us with sinister incorporeal faces.
Since I was in this job too, there was a bullet with my name on it. But that didn’t bother me. That was why I was here, if I were being honest. Some criminals sought their deaths using suicide by cop. Me? I’d been working at suicide by criminal my whole broken life.
But if Hennessey were killed…that would hurt. He was a larger-than-life hero in my mind, his death unthinkable to me.
I never planned to live very long. His words chilled me.