One thing I had learned while working with Chris was that it was so easy to fool people into giving you information you shouldn’t have. And once I found out he was discharged, it wasn’t hard to follow him from his apartment to physical therapy.
You don’t just go charging into someone’s workout session when it’s been three months since you last saw him. Instead, I found his car in the parking lot and sat on the hood, holding a manila envelope in my lap, my feet crossed at the ankles and rhythmically thumping against the bumper.
He’d parked under a cottonwood tree, and I enjoyed the shade, along with an intermittent breeze that blew the smoke out of my clothes. Summer was on its way out. My peers had long since packed and headed off to freshman orientation at whatever schools they’d chosen. They were stuffing their valuables into plastic tubs and vying for bathroom space in their dorm rooms and doing icebreaker exercises on campus quads.
And I was wasting time, waiting for my recently attacked unofficial-as-hell partner in justice to hobble out of the hospital and talk me down off the ledge . . . again.
After what seemed like forever, I finally saw his form making its way to me. He was walking with a cane now—how ironic, I thought, given that this whole ordeal had started with a cane—his limp pronounced, but his gait quick. He paused when he saw me, raised his hand to shade his eyes, then continued his journey.
“Hey,” I said, when he got close enough to hear. Like it was nothing to run into each other here after all this time.
“You’re sitting on my car.”
I glanced down. “You’re right. I’m so sorry. I’d hate to do something to take away the aesthetics of your bullet holes there.”
He stared at me, his face giving away nothing. I hated this. Normally, he would have a smart-ass comment to throw right back at me. This new and unimproved Martinez was so serious.
“Fine,” I said, sliding off the car. I took a few steps toward him, holding out the manila envelope. “I just wanted to let you know that I can’t do it. I thought I could, but I was wrong. I can’t. Sorry. I know you’ll be disappointed, but I’ve gotta look out for numero uno, you know? And numero uno is not interested after all.”
At first he just stared at the envelope, looking from it to me and back again. Then he reached out slowly and pulled it out of my hand. “What is this?”
“The application,” I said. “Police academy? Ringing any bells?” I was hoping it would, for more than one reason. I wanted him to remember pushing me about becoming a cop, because that would mean he remembered something about our time together after Dru’s death. I wanted him to remember, and be ready to help me get to the bottom of everything once and for all, even though the doctors had said that pushing him to remember things was likely to do the opposite.
He leaned the cane against his leg and opened the envelope, sliding out its contents. “Of course I know what the police academy is,” he said. “I’ve lost a couple months, not my whole life.”
“But you don’t remember forcing me into it.”
He gave me a look that couldn’t even be called incredulous. It was more like you have got to be fucking kidding me. The same look Dad had given me when I mentioned that I might be looking into pursuing a career in law enforcement. The same look I’d given Chris when he’d first suggested the idea to me. Guess Nikki Kill playing the role of Upstanding Administrator of Justice wasn’t believable to any of us.
At the time that I picked up the paperwork, Chris was lying in a hospital bed, unconscious. He had just saved my ass in every conceivable way. And I’d saved his. We’d become a team on a level I’d never imagined we could. I’d thought he was dying. I’d thought of making a promise to go into the academy as some kind of tribute. Or maybe a bargaining chip with God—make Chris pull through and I’ll become a decent person after all. I honestly didn’t know why I was doing it. I only knew that I’d told myself, sleeping Chris, and my dad of all people that I was going to do this.
And there was no way in hell I could do this.
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “I’m not going. I can’t.”
He glanced at the application, which was blank, pushed it back into the envelope, and held it out for me to take. “Okay. Why not?”
“Because. I can’t be a cop. I mean, who would want to be one, right?” I gestured the length of his broken body.
“I did. I still do.”
“Yeah, but you’re not normal. You’ve got all that crazy annoying yellow, and . . .” I trailed off, realizing too late that I’d casually been talking about my synesthesia. Of course, I’d told him all about it at his bedside, but he apparently didn’t know that, and now that he was alive, awake, looking right at me, it felt weird to talk about it. Why was I able to do so many things when he was sleeping that I was unable to hold to when he was awake? Why was I such a chickenshit? It was disgusting.
“Yellow?”
I shook my head. “Never mind. I just mean . . . you were meant to be a cop. I wasn’t.”
He thrust the envelope toward me again; I still didn’t take it. “Listen, Nikki. I can’t remember what happened that made me give you this, but if I thought you could be a cop, then I probably had a good reason.”
“The reason was charity. Or, I don’t know, recruitment quotas? Do you have those? I told you then that I couldn’t do it, and I’m still telling you that.”
“Okay.” He dropped the envelope on the ground between us. He started to make his way past me and to his car.
“Okay?”
He turned. “Okay.”
“That’s all you have to say? I’m telling you that I’m giving up on the cop thing, and it’s just okay?”
He shrugged. “What’s it supposed to be? No, please, think about it some more? Don’t give up? You can do it? It’s natural to be afraid? Will any of those things help?”
I gritted my teeth. “No.”
He shrugged again. “Then okay. You already told me you didn’t want to do it, and I don’t remember any of this anyway. So do it or don’t do it. Nothing I can change about it. All I know is I’m exhausted and my leg hurts and I want to sit down and drink a beer and get this day over with.” He started toward his car again, his limp more pronounced now that he’d been standing for a while.
“This is the first time you’ve seen me since you were mowed down right in front of me and you want to go home and drink a beer? Nice.”
He turned back to me. “Mowed down. You were there?” he asked. Or maybe he said it: “You were there.” I couldn’t tell. Maybe he couldn’t tell, either.
I nodded. He shuffled toward me.
“Why?” He licked his lips. “Why did I do it? What had me so distracted?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Why did you do what?”
“Walk out in front of the car,” he said. “Was I going somewhere?”
Jagged-edged mint built a bridge between us. His confusion was obvious. He was searching for answers. He had only pieces of what happened—the ones told to him. Somehow he’d gotten the impression this was a true accident, maybe even his fault. Of course he had. Nobody else had been there but Arrigo Basile’s mother and me. I could tell them it looked like a purposeful hit all day long, but I had nothing to prove it, other than the fact that the driver hadn’t stopped. God knows what Arrigo’s mom would have told police. She had been half-crazed with fear, and had an entire family of criminal thugs to protect—including Arrigo himself.
And, damn it, I had been too busy rushing to Chris’s crumpled body to think about looking for a license plate. All I knew was it was a black Monte Carlo. Not like there weren’t a few zillion of those out there or anything.
“You didn’t walk in front of it,” I said. “They came out of nowhere. They hit you on purpose. And then they ran.”
He frowned, as he tried to take it all in. “Who?”
I deflated. “I was hoping you could tell me,” I said. “You were being really secretive about something. You wouldn’t let me in.”