Taking the Highway

“VISITOR,” ANDRE’S APARTMENT SAID in its sultry voice. From his deep armchair in front of the window and the depths of the black mood that seemed to hang in front of him, he silently made himself two bets.

He walked over to the buzzer. “May I help you?”

“Open the f*cking door.”

I win, Andre thought wryly. He called the door open. Danny Cariatti bustled in with a box in his arms, heeled the door shut behind him and set his burden on the floor.

“Beers-of-the-World?” I win again.

“Beers-of-the-World.” Danny took off his jacket and tossed it over the chair. He stripped off his holster and weapon and looked at the hooks beside the door. Andre’s empty holster hung there like a shed snakeskin.

“The captain has it,” Andre said. The indifference in his voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Of course he had a backup piece. Every cop did. But the Russian-made Yavorit sat untouched in the gun safe bolted to his bedroom floor. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cleaned it, much less fired it.

Danny passed through to the kitchen without comment. Soon, Andre heard the clinking of bottles and the chuff of his icemaker being dumped over them. Danny appeared with a tub full of ice, brown bottles with colorful labels peeking out here and there. He plonked it down between the two chairs and dropped into the other one. He fished around in the tub and pulled out two bottles, inspecting the labels. “Bali or Tongo?”

“Balinese beer?”

Danny shrugged and handed him the other bottle.

Every Christmas, every birthday, and for all Andre knew, every minor holiday in between, one of Danny’s many relatives gave him what they thought was an original gift—a monthly six-pack of a different beer. On the day of his promotion to Lieutenant five years ago, Danny had received no fewer than fifty-six subscriptions to the Beers-of-the-World club. He drank the good stuff, brought the merely interesting to pot-lucks and barbecues, and poured the worst of it down the drain, but at any point in the year, his basement looked like a global party store.

They sat in silence, drinking exotic beer. Eventually they progressed to genial argument about where exactly Tongo was located and why the beer would taste like breadfruit. When the point of contention became how either of them could say what breadfruit did or did not taste like, the whole debate became moot when Andre peered at his label again and announced his beer was not Tongan but was, in fact, Tobagonian.

“Not Trinidadian?” Danny asked with concern.

“Apparently not.”

“You need to stay out of it, Andre.”

“Trinidad?”

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean.” Despair threatened to roll over him like a wave again. He swallowed it down and chased it with another gulp of oddly sweet beer. “All my clearances have been cut off and no one from the task force will even take my calls.”

“No one?” Danny said it with a casual lift of the eyebrows and a polite look of interest.

“You know about Sofia.”

“I’m a detective. I detect.”

“You’re a nosy bastard and I’m not describing her body for you.”

“How is it?”

“Stellar. Athletic, flexible, ass like you’d not believe.”

“I’d believe. She giving you the shoulder too?”

Andre drank again, deeply. “No. I can’t say that. She showed up yesterday. I wouldn’t let her in. Told her to stay away from me. This is big enough to wreck her career too.”

Danny snorted. “Your career ain’t wrecked, you melodramatic f*ck.”

Laughter, hoarse and unfunny, bubbled up and Andre belched at the same time. “Yeah. I can hear the Commissioner’s speech now as he hands me an award.”

“No.” Danny’s tone was infuriatingly reasonable. “You won’t be getting a promotion anytime soon out of this. But you didn’t kill those people.”

“Sixty-four people.”

“I know how many people. Everyone knows. Sixty-four dead. Hundreds injured. You tried to save them.”

“If I hadn’t—”

“Stop.” Danny waved a beer bottle at him. “Just stop. Now. I had to crawl through five kinds of gridlock to get here because you can’t live Downriver like a reasonable cop. I brought you the beer, I’m letting you be slushy-mushy-weepy. The least you can do is listen to my bullshit as if it’s actually cheering you up.”

“Yeah.” Andre scrubbed a hand over his face. “I saw the newsnets. Even with timed lights, the surface streets can’t handle that many cars.”

“The monorail would have been worse. They’re packing them into the aisles.” Danny drained his first bottle and reached for a second. “The road wasn’t that bad. I cop-patrolled my way around the worst of it and once I got through the oh-zone—”

“Is 75 shut down too? I thought it was just 94.”

“Chill, my man. Chill. This will pass, right? It will pass.”

“I don’t know.” Andre gestured to the comscreen. “Everyone loves a good controversy. The conspiracy theories are very . . . hell, even I’m convinced half of them are true.”

“The first thing you need to do is shut that shit off.” Danny set his beer down and used both hands to make his point. “You don’t just sit here, you man up.”

“And do what, exactly?”

“When one job goes into the shitcan, you find another. I hear fourths are scarce on the ground these days.”

“You think I can fourth.”

“I’d pick you up.”

“After I told the two biggest spinners in Detroit that a fourth—that I—crashed Overdrive.” Andre levered himself out of his armchair and marched to the companel. He scrolled through calls from the last two days until he found the one he wanted. He pressed the button and Bob Masterson’s face filled the screen.

“You don’t know how long it’s taken us to get even a slice of credibility.” Bob snapped his fingers. “And it’s gone, like that. My regulars didn’t even want to pick me up today and then they demanded a discount for hazard pay. Like I’m going to crash their car! I’m the one who needs hazard pay. You ruined us, Andre LaCroix. You shit on our heads and made us take the blame for it. Don’t even think about fourthing again. No one will answer your FITs. In fact, if any single member of the union sees you fourthing, we have been cheerfully instructed to pound you into human purée.”

The recording ended there and the companel automatically started on the next message, this one from his mom. He cut it off before the repeat of her latest tirade.

“He can’t stop you from fourthing,” Danny said.

“He can stop me from wanting to.”

Danny gestured to the screen where the face of Andre’s mother stood frozen mid-sentence “How’s she doing out there? Santa Fe, right?”

“Sedona.” Andre made a small scoffing noise, grateful for the change of subject. “Mom’s all right. She’s worried.”

“I guess she heard. National news and everything.”

“Not me. She’s worried about herself. She wants me to help her with some finance stuff. I’ve been putting her off because of the task force, but now—”

“Now is the perfect time to help her.”

“She sent me every file on her hard drive. It will take hours, days.”

“Hours and days when nothing more is going wrong.” Danny put a hand on Andre’s shoulder and gave it an almost imperceptible squeeze. “You’ll get through this.”

Andre felt his eyes burn a little with Danny’s simple kindness and he widened his eyes and looked out the window until the excess moisture evaporated. It was getting dark.

Danny stood. “Time for home.”

“You aren’t going to drive.”

“I had like two beers. One and a half. From halfway around the world. I told Julie I’d be home for dinner. If I leave now, I just might make it.”

“How is Julie?”

“Great. Good. She said to say hi.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Well, she sort of said it.”

“‘Daniel, if you don’t stop helping that mangy dog out of trouble, you’re going to end up with fleas yourself.’“

Danny grinned. “Like I said, she said hi.”

Andre saw him to the door. “Get home safe. Use the siren.”