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You come down the next morning to the fishing shack in the village to find the detective bathing in the sea. It must be frigid, you think, and then, ah, yes, there must not be a shower in the shack.
You’re grateful that he seems to be bathing regularly, after your gentle nudge on Tuesday, when he had sat in your shared tub for a long time that night. You thought you had heard a sob or two, but refused to knock and find out. Let the man retain some semblance of privacy, you’d thought, as if you hadn’t seen him earlier that day strip down to his incredibly dirty briefs in the middle of the street to change his pants to something that “would make him notice clues better.” Now, watching him bathe in the sea, you’re of the opinion that perhaps water that is minus six degrees centigrade at its warmest may not be the best thing for him right now.
The detective is a white blur in the gray ocean, his back turned towards you as he rubs himself down quickly. He’s singing something you can’t quite catch - something about mist, something about white cliffs. You see, and try not to see, rising out of the water, the detective's broad shoulders, slumping forward a little - the line down his back indicating muscle long gone to fat - the hair on his shoulders matted and wet, growing sparser further down - the gleam of his wet skin in the morning sun, which is pale and faint, peeking through the clouds. He is very white against the dark sea. You look up at the sky, then half-turn away. It’s going to be another cold day, you think. You push your hands in your pockets and hunch your shoulders. At least you had taken a nice, hot shower that morning, and had even gotten a cup of coffee out of Garte for two reál.
The detective turns, then, wiping his face. You notice, before you can look away, his swollen stomach, his broad chest, his tits - all well-furred. “Kim!” he says.
“Detective,” you say. “I’m pleased to note you availing yourself of the facilities.”
“Kim, it’s fucking freezing,” he says, seriously. His hair hangs wet and limp, darker like this, and his chops draggle down his face. He looks like a half-drowned dog you had once seen Eyes pull out of L’Esperance.
“It is just over one degree outside, according to the Kineema gauge,” you say, and look at the sun again, which shows every sign of disappearing into the clouds in another moment.
“Can you-” the detective says, and gestures at a dark shape on the rocks by your feet, which, as you bend and pick it up, reveals itself as his RCM patrol cloak. The detective sloshes out of the water towards you, and you avert your eyes and hand him the cloak.
“It’s cold,” he says again, but this time, defensively. “Normally it’s, ah. Bigger than that.”
Despite yourself, your eyes drag up to where he’s holding his hand over his crotch. “Did I say anything, detective?” you ask as he takes the cloak and begins drying himself off with it. You watch his bare feet clinging to the sharp rocks, watch them flex as he shifts around, bends down to dry them.
“I was thinking today we could check the docks again,” he says. “There’s something in those containers. I know it.” His teeth are chattering, which makes him hard to understand.
“Yes,” you say. “Probably cargo.” You watch the cloak hit the ground, then watch one foot hop into one leg of his yellow pants, then the other. Not those awful underwear again, thank god, you think. You hope he’s washed them somewhere. Or thrown them out. That would be best.
“Okay, it’s safe now, Kim,” he says, and you look up to see the detective looking the same as yesterday, but cleaner. His eyelashes are beaded with water. His teeth are still chattering. He’s not wearing anything under those pants, you think, your gaze lingering, briefly, on the crotch of his pants, and then you wrench your eyes away and clear your throat.
“I don’t suppose you have any booze. To warm me up,” the detective says hopefully.
“No, detective,” you say, and then take pity on him, and take him back to the small cafe around the corner of the Whirling-in-Rags for breakfast. It’s warm in the cafe, smelling of frying bacon and burnt coffee, and the detective wraps his hands around his mug, which is dwarfed in his hands. He doesn’t stop shivering until halfway through the meal.
You’ve got to let him use your shower, you decide. It had taken you forty minutes last night to clean it enough that you were willing to set foot in it. You had even contemplated driving all the way back to your apartment in the GRIH to bathe, but you were tired from all that running, and although you had set your alarm to 04:00 hours to wake up and do just that, you had, for the fourth time in your life, hit the snooze button.
This man is bad for you. Your self-control, while not perfect, is, you consider, generally very good. This man is chipping corners off it and finding his way inside. Like leaking oil, or a disease. Which is why you find your mouth opening while Harry is investigating the printed placements with the rapacity of Dick Mullen himself, and you hear yourself saying, “Detective, moving forward, you can shower in my bathroom in the Whirling-in-Rags. If you would like.”
He blinks. Then, very cautiously and subtly - he thinks - he raises his arm and sniffs in the direction of his armpit. This does not seem to clear up his confusion, as he looks at you again. “Kim - be honest with me.”
“I will always be honest with you, detective,” you say. You do not make promises often.
“Do I stink?”
“Not right now."
“But I have before.”
“Yes,” you say, thinking of the first day you met him. You wince, and cover it up by raising your coffee cup to your face.
“And I will again.”
“It’s very likely,” you suggest. “It happens to all of us.”
“So - should I shower now?” He blinks at you in the weak light streaming through the diner window. His eyes are bloodshot, making them look very green.
“Do you feel that you need to?” you ask.
He cocks his head, as if listening, but you’re not saying anything. “No,” he says finally, as if coming to a conclusion.
“Well, then, I suggest we head to the docks. Maybe talk to Evrart Claire again…”
“Yes, we can ask him about my gun!” the detective says.
You take the receipt and sigh - you can always submit the expense back to your precinct, although chances are good it will be denied - and take it up to the register. While you are standing in line, you turn back around and look at the detective, who is, apparently, filling his pockets with jam packets. Shaking your head, you pay and return to him - now at the neighboring empty table, filling his pockets with their jam packets. His drying hair, which is starting to wave, hangs down around his face as he Jamrock shuffles his way around the table. You say nothing, just stand by him silently, and as he rounds the table to go, he looks up at you, startled, and then breaks into a grin. “Kim!” he says. “Let’s go!”
You go, walking behind him in what is, you have to admit, a much better-smelling wake than the day before.
≠≠
The next evening, the two of you are sitting in the Whirling-in-Rags eating dinner (you, the beef stroganoff, the detective, the beef stroganoff with added mushrooms - Goracy, while, apparently, being a competent cook, is a limited one) when the detective says, “Did you really mean it? About the shower? Only - I dipped a toe in this morning, and the sea is still pretty cold.” There’s something unfamiliar in his face, something you haven’t seen before.
“Yes, of course,” you say. You look at him, fork still in your hand. You have to admit you hadn’t expected him to take you up on it. “After dinner?”
“Yeah,” the detective says. The lights from the disco ball revolve across his face, illuminating his eyes, his reddened and roughened cheeks, the spot of beef stroganoff on his chops. As if he feels your eyes on him, he rubs his hand through his chops. “Do you think Garte’s going to say anything?”
"Probably not,” you say.
The detective turns and looks at Garte, who is standing back from his bar, his arms crossed, watching the customers at the counter argue over a drink. “But what’s he going to think?”
You raise your eyebrows. The detective turns around and catches you. He frowns, his lips parting and pursing as if he’s thinking something out - and then he flushes, his face growing even redder. His neck. “Oh,” he says.
You lean back in your seat. You’d had an extensive conversation on the “homosexual underground,” as he calls it, earlier that day. The detective’s thinking of it too, looking nervously at Garte, at you, around the room. You sigh. “It’s not an order, detective,” you say. Let him freeze in the sea. What do you care? Something sparks in his eyes. You say, “I just thought it might be an improvement over freezing your-”
He pushes his now-empty bowl out of the way and leans forward, his chest half-on the table. His hands reach out, as if reaching for you. “Wait I didn’t - I still want to!" he says. “I just don’t want to make things. Um. Weird. For you.”
“Detective,” you say to him, sincerely, “I don’t think that things can get any weirder for me. Are you ready?”
“Yeah!” He says. He collects your bowls, returns them to Garte, and follows you across the floor. You can feel Garte’s eyes on you, Elizabeth’s. You can hear the Hardie Boys laughing, but don’t turn your head. It’s ridiculous. They’re not laughing at the two of you. As the detective climbs the steps behind you, he says, “I did just shower yesterday, do you really think I need to-”
“Yes,” you say. The detective hovers behind you when you open the door, his breath on your neck, making your shoulders stiffen. You let him into the room, flick the light on, lay out your notebook, your pen, your keys, your gun. The detective makes a small noise of interest and immediately starts going through your room, nearly pressed up against the wall, investigating the bad photograph of Martinaise in the ‘30s that’s been photocopied three or four times until it no longer resembles much of anything, aside from what the world looks like when you take your glasses off.
You go over to the bathroom door, opening it, and realize the detective’s gone silent behind you. You turn around to see -
“Detective!” you snap and he freezes, his shoulders going still, then slowly looks up at you. Like a dog that’s been caught, you think. “What are you doing?”
He puts your notebook back down on the table. “There might be something useful in there!” he says. “For the case, I mean.” The look on his face - and what he’s just said - makes it clear that he did not mean for the case.
You sigh. “Take a shower, and then we can go over my notes. Maybe smoke a cigarette. It’s early, but-” you give him a look that means since some of us can’t help themselves.
He grins, shoots you with both finger guns, and heads to the bathroom, dropping his jacket as he goes. You sigh, pick it up, and put it on the end of the bed. You hear the water turning on, then, underneath that, the rattling of the medicine cabinet - you won’t find anything in there, detective, you think smugly. You notice the detective’s green jacket has a rip in the side - where he had gotten caught in a chain-link fence earlier today in the fish market. Your fingers twitch. But no, this is not your problem to fix. You put his jacket on the bed, smooth it down, and turn away.
You hear the rattle of the shower curtain, the change in water pressure as the detective gets in, and then - a moan, long and loud and vulgar. Your shoulders come up around your ears. Of course he’s not -
He might be, part of your brain thinks. No sense of what’s acceptable. But the noise is not repeated. Just some thumps and shudders that sound and feel through the thin wall as if the detective has dropped the shampoo, has bent over to get it, and has hit his elbow. “Ouch!” he says.
You settle down on your bed, eyeing the partly-open bathroom door cautiously. It’s a long shower, you think, watching the clock, but maybe that’s a good thing. The room starts to fill with steam oozing from the bathroom, the smell of your soap - ugh, you think to yourself. And then you realize what the expression had been on his face before that’d been so unfamiliar.
It had been hope.
When he comes out, opening the door in a big humid wash of air, he’s buttoning up his white shirt, leaving the tails out. He’s barefoot, and his hair is wet and long, wetting the shoulders of his shirt, making them see-through in spots. “Kim, that felt amazing!” he says. His skin is red and so are his eyes, as if he’s gotten shampoo in them. “I don’t remember ever taking a shower before!”
“Yes, I gathered as much,” you say, smirking to yourself. You’re sitting on your bed, legs crossed, looking at your notes. He drops down beside you, and the bed shifts under his weight, knocking him into you - his shoulders bumping yours, his leg pressed against yours. You stiffen, but don’t pull away.
So does he, you notice, and he tries to play it casual, reaching up to his cheek to scratch it. He doesn’t smell like booze, for once. Or other, less desirable things. He smells like you now. It’s strange. Or, well, he smells like you on top, and him underneath, which is. Huh.
“Well?” he says, leaning over your shoulder to read your notes. You sigh, and, despite your better judgement - this notebook has been in no hands but yours since the clerk had put it in a bag for you when you’d first purchased it - you pass the notebook over to him.
That night, when he leaves - after going through your notes together, and, after that, the detective sprawling back on your bed, discoursing on communism, which he doesn’t understand at all, and, after that, smoking a cigarette together on the balcony, Harry nearly jumping forward to light yours - what’s that all about? you wonder - he says, “Bye, Kim! Thanks again for the shower!”
“It was my pleasure,” you say, sincerely, and you think he flushes in the light on the balcony, but you can’t tell. It’s a cold and cloudy night, no moon, no stars, just the sound of aerostatics overhead. You wish you could see them. Sometimes you get flashes of lights through the clouds: red, green. You tell the detective goodnight, and go back into your room. You are going to sleep well tonight. You have been, since the detective has been running you all around Martinaise. You just happen to be opening the blinds, looking down, which is when you see the detective walking out of the hostel, walking through the light bleeding from the doors of the Whirling into darkness, headed for the next street light. When he gets there, lit up again, small and green, he looks back up at you. You can’t tell, but you think he smiles. So you watch him trudge back, until you can’t see him any more, and then you lay in bed, but you swear it still smells like him - like you - and it’s still warm, and you have a hard time falling asleep after all.
≠≠
The detective gets a name - Harrier Du Bois - his badge - revealing him to be a lieutenant double-yefreitor - and the realization that the sunken motor car is his. You’d known it for days, clocking it as a Coupris 40, RCM issue, as you’d driven into Martinaise on the very first day. No wonder he’s not showing his face, you’d thought. Probably embarrassed. He should be. Now, you’re not sure you think that. Now, you think of what a double-yefreitor title means, of the detective’s bright eyes, of the working-class husband he had been so focused on finding. You can see how overwork could lead to - well, to a motor carriage in the sea.
The detective is lucky the sea was not deep enough to take him with it.
You know who Detective Harrier Du Bois is, of course. You’ve heard of him. Who hasn’t? Some of the other officers call him Dick Mullen, or other, less flattering names. He’s a genius. He’s a madman. He once spent three days moonlighting as a prophet on the corner of Perdition and la rue d’Automne crying about the end of the world.
The detective, of course, knows none of this. All he knows is that his name is Harrier Du Bois, that he has three confirmed kills - extremely low, you try to impress on him - astounding, really, for someone with as many solved cases as he has - and that he has driven his precinct’s motor carriage into the sea in a substance-fueled suicidal rage.
He takes it hard.
He’s a long time in the bath that night. You make him eat dinner, and say to him, “Detective, how about we go up to my room. Review the case. Perhaps you can take a shower. Warm up a bit,” you suggest, and then you follow behind him up the steps. You feel an insane urge to put a hand on his back - his shoulders slumped, his head looking at the ground - but don’t.
He runs an actual bath, the water thundering through the walls, and he sits in there long enough that you think, I hope he’s not trying to drown himself. And then you leap to your feet and walk over to the door swiftly. You put your ear to it and listen. You hear the slosh of water, his low rasp of a voice, speaking very softly. You knock.
“Yeah?”
“May I come in?”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
You go in. The detective is sitting slumped in the tub, arms around his knees, his wet shoulders gleaming under the cheap yellow lights. You try not to look in the tub, and fail, and look back at him. “Harrier Du Bois,” he says out loud, emphasizing the syllables. “Harrier Du Bois. I don’t know if it’s right, Kim,” he says, rolling his head to look at you. You notice with some dismay that his eyes are yellow where they’re not green. Pyrholidon. His badge is laying on the floor beside the tub, wet where he’d clearly been gripping it in the bath. You crouch down beside him, pick it up, hold it up next to his face. As if unconsciously, his face assumes that godawful expression on the badge, although the man on the badge is at least ten years younger. You look back and forth between the man on the badge and the man in the bath. Only the eyes are the same. Dolores Dei. You don’t drink much, but you’ll never drink again after seeing this.
The man in the bath grimaces at you. He shifts, one hand dangling where it rests on his knees.
“I’m afraid it is, detective,” you say. “Perhaps you’re a Harry Du Bois, and not a Harrier. Maybe that’s the issue.”
He brightens a little. “Maybe,” he says. Then he slumps again. “Kim, I’m sorry about the car.” His face twists into something wretched. He sounds like he’s about to cry.
“Detective, you don’t have to apologize to me. I’m neither the motor carriage nor your precinct.”
“But you love cars,” he says. His voice cracks.
You force yourself to shrug. “They’re only motor carriages,” you say, softly. You are so very close to the edge of the bath. If you reached out a little farther, you could put your hand under the water. Warm, cooling now, you think. Could touch his wet knee. His side. His chest heaves as you look.
“Can you try it?” he says.
You startle, badly, but manage to hide it. He is very close. “Try what?” you ask.
“Can you call me Harry? Or Harrier - whatever. I just want it to feel - I think it’ll feel right when you do it.”
“Of course, Harry,” you say instantly. His eyes light up and he grins uncertainly. “Monsieur Du Bois,” you say. He straightens up a little, sloshing water as he does. “Harriet the detective,” you say, referencing a children’s book he no doubt doesn’t recall. “Lieutenant double-yefreitor Harrier Du Bois,” and then, because fuck it, “my partner, Harry,” you say.
“Shit,” he says, and his grin is so bright it bounces off the tiles you had cleaned just a few days ago. He reaches out to take the badge from you and you let him, your fingers brushing his wet warm ones. They’re wrinkly from the bath. You want to - it really doesn’t matter what you want to do. He holds the badge up before him, squints at it, and traces the badge-Harry’s face with two fingers. He says, “It really is me, huh, Kim?”
“Yes, Harry,” you say. “It is.”
≠≠
The next morning, you go down to Harry’s shack and knock on the door, as you have the past three mornings. “ Who is it?” he says, and when you announce yourself - like it’s likely to be anybody else, you think - there’s a loud thump like he’s dropped a pot, another loud thump, a strange scraping sound, and then his footsteps coming to the door. He opens the door just enough to shuffle out of it before closing it rapidly behind him.
“Detective,” you sigh.
He’s got a guilty look on his face, like the dog of a former lover who used to scratch holes in your walls when you weren’t around. The dog, not the man. You had broken up with the man because of this dog after two years. Really, it wasn’t just the dog; it was both of them. It was all too much. They always seemed to want something from you. This man had called you a cy-bot, several times, an emotionless robot bent on domination from the sci-fi books you got out of the Jamrock Public Library. You had watched some of the movies together with him. You don’t understand it. You have plenty of emotions. Too many, even, and at inconvenient times. And after two years, that he still didn’t know that? That he could call you a cy-bot and really seem to believe it? Another former lover had said the same thing. It’s a pattern, which, logically, means that you are the problem. Any man, historically, who looks twice at you, comes to this conclusion in the end.
Which is what makes the detective’s open adoration of you baffling. It’s just imprinting, you tell yourself, like a duckling. You seem to have been the first person who was kind to the detective, which makes you feel - it’s not relevant what that makes you feel, or how it makes your lungs hurt. You’re running too much. You need to quit smoking. That’s all. Ah, you’d thought when the detective had laid eyes on so-called Martin Martinaise. There goes that. It would make it much easier to work with the detective. Except he doesn’t stop. He’s always turning those brilliant green eyes on you. Always holding his breath when you start to speak, always asking what you think. Like he really cares.
So. The detective looks guilty this morning. But he doesn’t smell like alcohol, or rather, only smells faintly of alcohol, the old-brewery smell of a man who has been drinking, but is not currently drunk. So you shrug, and then follow him as you run all around Martinaise - from Evrart’s container, to the far edges of the fish market, around all the phasmid traps, back to the pawn shop to get a tape player that the detective absolutely insists on having. The detective picks up a bagful of tare, clinking as he runs, a stained leopard-print leotard, a LOST DOG poster he pulls off a light pole, a few assorted pills he thinks you don’t see as he palms them clumsily and drops them into his pocket.
You manage to invite yourself back to the detective’s shack to look for alcohol. You think that’s what the guilty look is for. The shack, when you step in, is clean enough, although there is dirt in the corners. The detective’s clothes are heaped over a chair, spilling onto the floor. The air is damp and cold and stale, and the blankets on the small bed in the corner are balled up. There is, in fact, neither a shower or a bath. There is also, you note, a sword laying on the square table, and a pair of white ceramic boots half-hidden under the bed, as if clumsily shoved there when someone had knocked.
“Detective, do they even fit you?” you ask, fighting the urge to take your glasses off and rub your eyes.
He shuffles his feet. It’s dim in the shack, and he moves in the gloom. It’s hard to make out his features. The glitter of an eye, the flash of his hand as he gestures, the sound of his breath through his nose. He says, “Lely and I have a lot in common. He thought they would fit.” Which isn’t an answer. You realize he hasn’t tried the boots on, somewhere around the same time as you become aware of the sickening-sweet odor of death filling the room.
“That’s really great, detective,” you say. “Maybe next he can tell us who killed him?”
He scratches the back of his neck. “I’m still working on that.”
“Of course,” you say.
The detective finally agrees to let you take the body back for processing. Thank god. You wrestle it out of the bear fridge, which the detective pats on the head, and which is absolutely not endearing in any way whatsoever. He hovers over you as you shut the Kineema door on the body. The windows are already down, despite the chill. You’re going to have to drive as fast as possible to beat the smell. It’s a damn shame.
You turn to the detective. He stands there, hands shoved in his back pockets, rocking back on his heels. “So,” he says, and then, in a burst, “The GRIH is only 28 kilometers away,” his head cocked to the side, and how he can do that and not remember what the RCM is baffles you. “You really can’t come back tonight?”
You glance at the mainland. It’s been dark all day, and night is starting to come on in the corners. The streetlights will be on soon. Harry - the detective - looks at you, helplessly. He’s trembling, a little. Cold, or nerves, or withdrawal. You’re not sure. You say, as gently as you can, because you are not responsible for this man, only for yourself, and this case, “I need to take the body back for processing - log it, fill out all the forms - no, detective. I will be back tomorrow morning.”
“Right,” he says. “I can - do some stereo investigations. Go get dinner.”
You should give him the key to your room, you think suddenly. Let him take a shower, at least. Sleep somewhere warm. But then you picture his room again. Garte’s still working on cleaning it. He complains loud enough you can hear it through the walls, which you think is on purpose.
As if he’s reading your mind, the detective says, “Don’t worry, Kim. I wouldn’t trust me either. I’ll be fine,” he says. “Really. I will.”
“I’m happy to hear it,” you say.
The Kineema’s engine, when you start it up, sounds familiar. It sounds like coming home. You hadn’t realized you missed it til now. He stands and watches you go, giving you a little wave that he drops as soon as he thinks you aren’t looking. You are almost out of sight when you glance back again to see him walking, in the direction of his shack, head down.
You take the body back to your precinct, where you spend a few hours logging it as evidence, filling out the requisite forms, and enduring the jibes you get from the officers on duty for working with Dick Mullen. News travels fast. There are no windows in your part of the building, so you’re a little disoriented when you step outside and it’s fully night, the streetlights on, the fog creeping in thick from the sea. Martinaise is a spotty series of lights across the water, only twelve kilometers away as the hawk flies. Twenty-eight on the roads. It is 20:00. Your work here, in the GRIH, is technically done.
You look at Martinaise for a minute, then turn away.
You pick up some takeout on the way home and eat it in your apartment, which feels too silent, your chewing too loud. You get up and turn the radio on, and sit back down, hunched over your coffee table with a fork in one hand, and the other pressed flat on your notebook to hold your case notes down. Notes for your other cases. You need a break from the hanged man, you think. From the detective who is so intense and all encompassing. He swells to fill Martinaise until there’s barely room for anyone else, just his broad green back you follow through the wastes like a beacon. But you can’t concentrate, not on your notes, not on the radio. You try changing the stations until you end up on one you’ve never been on before. The music comes out cheap and tinny, sounding a bit like the nights at the Whirling where Harry sits, chin in hand, staring dreamily at the stage. “I think I could be a star, Kim,” he’ll say, “do you think I could be a star?"
You wonder what he’s doing right now, before you can help yourself, and then you think, he’s probably bothering Garte for a drink. He’s probably sprawled on his bed in the gloom of the shack - no, he’s probably sitting with his arms locked around his knees. Mostly in shadow. You should call him. Say, “About the case, detective…”
You can’t. The shack has no phone line, and you’re certainly not going to call the Whirling looking for him like a lovesick girl. Besides, you’ll see him tomorrow. The idea is ridiculous. What would you even say? So you turn the radio up, and put your head down once more. You’ll take a shower, you think. Something to clear your mind. But you’ve got to get through these case notes first. Maybe then you can relax. Let go.
≠≠
The next morning, it takes a minute or two of knocking before the detective opens the door of his shack, hanging on it and looking blearily out at you. He’s hungover. Actually, he might still be drunk, and this is absolutely not your fault.
“You came back,” he says, almost like he didn’t believe you would.
The thought irritates you. “I’ll give you a few minutes, detective,” you say, and step back to allow him some privacy.
The detective is quiet this morning, head down, pursuing leads - pushing the Hardie boys more, talking to the drivers, sniffing around after Ruby. Around lunchtime, you notice his hands beginning to tremble, badly, and he notices you noticing, and ducks his head. It’s a miserable day, wet and cold and foggy, and you can’t help but think of your desk in the precinct - even with all of its drawbacks. At least it’s dry. The detective keeps running you back and forth across the marsh wastes down on the coast, neatly dodging grayish stagnant puddles in his disco shoes - there is no way this man is not at least a little queer - as if he’s dancing.
He notices you pausing, looking at a particularly large and deep puddle, trying to find the best path of crossing. Your depth perception is not very good. He takes his patrol cloak off with a flourish and tries to lay it down for you to cross over.
“You’ve been reading too many paperbacks at the bookstore," you say.
He squints at you, then frowns. “How did you know?”
“I read the back of one while you were reading it outside yesterday. I imagine that’s why Plaisance doesn’t like you.”
“You’re wrong there, Kim. Women love me.”
“Ah, yes, of course,” you say. “What was it that clued you in? Perhaps it was when Lilienne refused your advances? Or maybe when our prime suspect, Ms. Klassje, refused your advances? Or maybe it was…” You’re too busy watching him listen to you, his head cocked, a smile on his face, to really pay attention to where you’re placing your feet, and you slip on a rock, stumble, and fall into the creek, landing hard on your ass. You curse.
“Oh, shit, Kim, you okay?” you hear behind you. You hear Harry splashing forward. He’ll ruin his shoes, you think, and feel his hands on your arms, tugging you up.
“I’m fine, detective,” you snap, and and turn to see his worried hangdog eyes. Fuck, your ass is wet. And cold.
“Kim?” he says. “We can go back.”
“I’m fine,” you say again. “Let’s keep going.”
Of course, you think, an hour later, I might not have said that had I known he would be doing things like checking every damn phasmid trap on the coast. In between throwing you worried looks, of course.
“Nothing,” he says at the last trap.
“How surprising,” you say, and cringe at the bitter tone in your voice.
He’s crouching down beside the trap, hands dangling between his knees, and he looks up at you. The detective is bad at hiding his emotions. At dealing with them, too, you’ve noticed. On his face you can see confusion, hurt, irritation. Then his eyes rake down you, your soaking pants. You can see him thinking. Then he says, “You’re right, Kim. I think there’s something wrong with these traps. Or the plasmid doesn’t want locusts. Maybe-” he digs in his pocket and pulls out a piece of salami. You don’t want to know how long he’s been carrying that around. He puts it in the trap, then closes it up. He stands, grunting a little as he pushes himself to his feet. He walks over beside you, close enough that your shoulders almost touch. He says, “Maybe we should go back to the Whirling. It looks like rain.”
You look at the sky. You don’t see it, but you say, “Why not, detective? I think we’re at the end of our investigating today. We can review the case notes.”
“And play Suzerainty,” he says, slyly.
And shower, you think, shifting in your damp clothes.
It does rain on the way there - you’re almost back at the Whirling when the skies tear open - and the two of you run the last ten meters to the doors, Harry laughing, you grinning. You drip all the way up the steps, Garte glowering at the two of you. You both shed your wet clothes all around the bathroom and take turns showering, Harry singing something you think is supposed to be “An Asshole is a Mouth for Shit (And I’m Puking).” You duck in after him, the room steamy and warm, the floor wet where he’s stepped, the water already warm for you. Overall, the detective is more considerate than you’d expected. The beer can sous vide is not repeated. There are no strange wads of hair left in the tub, and he even brings his own soap - a dried-out cake he’d proudly told you he’d found under the bed at the fishing shack. “It belonged to a redhead,” he’d said, and did not elaborate.
Once you’ve warmed up, you dress in clean clothes, and give Harry - the detective - some spare clothes of yours, which are too tight everywhere - shoulders and chest and gut - and too short in the legs, exposing his bony ankles and feet. He doesn’t seem to care, though, sprawling across your bed to set up a game of -
“Detective, how did you get a complete Suzerainty board game into my room?”
“Stashed it downstairs, in case we needed it. Got it while you were in the shower,” he says. “Goracy watched over it for me.”
Dressed in my clothes like that? you think. Dolores Dei. He doesn’t seem to realize, just grinning at you, wriggling the cardboard pieces at you.
You spend the afternoon on your bed - you sitting crosslegged, the detective sprawled across your bed, leaning on his elbow. He’s studying the pieces intently under his eyebrows, like they’re real, like they matter. Maybe that’s why his kill count is so low, you think. Less than half of yours. You make up for it by thrashing him at the game. Twice. Harry shifting every now and then, his - your - shirt riding up over his hairy stomach, the way he pushes his hair back with one hand when he’s focusing on the game, his eyes never leaving your hands as you move a piece, as if you might do something unexpected, as if you might surprise him. Your clothes scattered all over the room, jackets on chair-backs and visible in the open door to the bathroom. Green and orange.
The sun comes out, briefly and unexpectedly, around 16:00, a brilliant gold spill of light, warm where it falls on you through the single window that just reaches the bed. Harry grins crookedly at you. The light picks up the gold in his eyes, the fine wrinkles around them, a few graying threads in his hair.
Ah, fuck, you think. This is bad.
≠≠
The next day, as you’re crossing the marsh, the detective stops you, hand on your arm. “Kim,” he hisses. “Hold still. Do you see that?” You hold still and look where he points while he digs in his pocket and pulls out the MISSING DOG poster he had nabbed last week. He holds it up against the sky and squints at something in the distance. “What do you think, Kim?” he asks.
You sigh. “Detective, I can only see a brown blob. My eyesight-”
“Oh, yeah, right,” he says. “Sorry.” He looks sheepish. He studies the poster a moment longer, then looks at the brown blob, which appears to be sitting still and studying you back. Then he puts the poster away. “Don’t worry, Kim,” he says brightly. “I can be your glasses.” You startle, badly, at this piece of the past come back to you. Like the Pale, returning. “Like how you’re my - well, everything,” he says, and then he turns to you. You must not have control of your face, because he says, “What is it, what’s wrong?” his grin fading.
And for a wild moment, you want to tell him. But mercifully the urge passes. “Nothing,” you say, shortly. You sigh. “Detective, do you really insist on trying to capture what is possibly a stray dog?”
“It’s not stray, Kim. It’s loved,” he says, very seriously. “I can feel it.”
So you sigh again, and you follow the detective, unzipping your jacket and putting your hand on the gun as you approach the blob, which coalesces as you get closer into what is unmistakably a dog - four legs, brown and white and gray. It looks well-fed. There is even, you notice, a red collar on it. It does look like the poster, you have to admit. The dog backs up as you approach, but it doesn’t run away. The detective calls out to it, making kissy noises. You do not look at his mouth. The dog steps uncertainly forward on its paws, dancing in place, then back again.
“There’s a good boy,” Harry croons to the dog, and you absolutely do not shiver. If you do, it’s the cold. That’s all. Harry ducks down, looking under the dog, and - “Yeah. Boy.” He crouches down - you flex your fingers around the butt of your gun - the last thing the detective needs is to get rabies, you think - and says, in a strange, half-high pitched voice, “C’mere, baby. We’re not gonna hurt you. C’mere. C’mon.” He clicks his fingers together, chucks at it.
You say, “If only you had that-”
Your words fail you as the detective pulls a clearly sticky breakfast sausage out of his pocket. A napkin comes with it and he frowns, picking it off with his other hand, then crumpling it up and putting it in his pocket. Shards of napkin cling stubbornly to the sausage. You suppose the dog won’t care. “Had a feeling I might need it,” he confesses to you. The dog takes a few steps forward, eyeing the sausage, then, belly to the ground, slinks the last few steps to Harry. The detective feeds it the sausage, which it gobbles up in a swipe of tongue and teeth. He grabs the dog’s collar quickly with one hand and licks his own fingers with his other hand. You should be repulsed. You are. And yet his tongue is shockingly pink around his fingers -
“Hang onto this,” he says, and suddenly your hands are full of wet and stinking dog. The detective strips off his tie, chin up - you glance at his neck, reddened and roughened from his razor, from the cold wind - and back down at the dog, which looks up at you, lolling its tongue and panting. You pat its haunches, mechanically, and it pants hard.
“He likes you, Kim!” the detective says with delight.
“Khm,” you say, as the detective knots a leash out of his tie and slips it into the dog’s collar, and then pets it: behind the ears, its back, its haunches, and then, when it drops to the ground and rolls over, its belly. “You’re not mean at all, are you?” Harry says down to the dog. “You’re just a little scared, huh? C’mon, Kim!” he says. “Let’s get Etienne back.”
“Etienne-?” you say, but can’t help but follow him: the dog, then Harry, then you. You make a ridiculous tableau, you think, especially looping around all the phasmid traps, which the dog sniffs with interest, particularly the one the detective had put the salami in. The salami, which is now gone, and which the detective is very excited about. You let him have it.
When you drop the dog back off at its owner’s apartment, the man is absurdly grateful, pressing a 20 reál reward into Harry’s hand. Harry winks at him, shoots him a set of finger guns, and then says, “I’m, uh, gonna need this,” in what you’ve come to recognize - already - as his mysterious voice. He bends down to take his tie off the dog’s collar. “Bye, Etienne!” he says to the dog as you leave the man’s apartment.
The dog barks back at him, as if to say goodbye. Of course it does.
You say, “That was a very kind thing you did, detective. Although not, strictly speaking, RCM business.”
He turns tortured eyes on you. You’re shocked. You had expected him to be happy, based on the way he’d talked to the dog. Based on the little high he seems to get from successfully completing tasks. He says, “I think I ran over a dog once. Before. I was drunk. And high.” He pulls the MISSING DOG poster out of his pocket and smoothes it out against his ledger.
“Penance?” you say, softly.
“I can’t ever make those things right, can I? Whatever I did back in my life.” For some reason, he picks at his ledger, rubs at a dented spot.
You want to take that look away from him. You want to tell him he can be a new man now, that none of those things matter anymore. But you can’t lie to him. You told him you wouldn’t. You say, instead, “You can’t ever take them back, no. Things once done can’t be undone.”
“Have you ever done anything really horrible, Kim?” he asks, and turns his red, watering eyes to you.
“Yes,” you say, shortly.
Something flickers over his face. Sorrow? Relief? You’re not sure. “How do you go on living?” he says.
You shrug. “You just do, detective. And because sometimes - well. You can give a man his dog back. Or solve a crime. Which, incidentally, is what we are here to do, detective. Come on. Perhaps we can go back to the coast…”
He grins at you, a watery thing, and follows you. You swear you can hear him sniffle behind you, but you don’t turn around to check.
That night, the detective disappears. After a half hour of checking your notes - and the windows - and going to your Kineema to radio in a completely useless report - and checking your notes again - you go into the alley behind the Whirling to find the detective in a shouting match with Cuno. You pull the detective away, ignoring the slurs and accusations leveled at you by the little red-headed wretch. “I’m sorry, Kim,” the detective says as you pull him around the corner. “I needed to drink. I needed some courage. You don’t know what it’s like, Kim, you’re cool all the time-”
“Detective, that’s not true at all,” you confess, but he just shakes his head. You’re irritated, suddenly: you’re just another cy-bot to him. You grip his arm, hard, where you’ve got hold of it, and step in, crowded him back against the building. “Detective, I am a man just as you are,” you say. You swear his eyelids flutter shut, then open again. He’s got a strange smirk on his face, almost that awful Expression, but there’s something else in his eyes, which keep dipping down towards your mouth as you speak. “I need courage just as much as the next man. Maybe more,” you say. What am I doing? you think to yourself. God, what am I saying? I’m confessing like I’m back in the church, like I’m a child again. Why do you want him to believe you so badly? To see you?
“I know,” Harry says, his face going grave. “I see you, Kim. I don’t think - I mean I don’t think anyone else sees that, but I do, and that’s why I mean - that’s why you’re so cool, I mean you’re so put together, even if you’re not underneath-” he huffs out a sigh, gestures with his free hand, thunks his head back against the wall. “I’m not explaining myself. Am I?” He rolls his head to look at you, eyes bright. You can smell the booze on him. His shoulders are loose and relaxed. You get the sudden, wild thought to drop to your knees, here, and -
He says, hoarsely, “Kim, you’re the best man I’ve ever known.”
You can barely breathe for a second. You let go of his arm and he slumps a little, as if you were holding him up. Then you compose yourself enough to say, “That’s not saying much, detective. How many men would you say you remember knowing as well as you know me? Which, incidentally, is not well at all.”
He shoots you, softly, with his finger guns. One to the right lung, one to the neck. Pow. Pow. He’s getting pretty good with those things.
“You’re getting pretty good with those things,” you say.
“I want to know you better, Kim,” he says.
“Don’t expect me to improve upon better acquaintance,” you say.
“You’re wrong,” he says. “You’re wrong.”
That night, he insists on singing karaoke at the Whirling, dedicating the song to you. It’s the song you’ve heard him sing before, in snatches, in the shower, in the sea, but this time stronger, self-assured - the alcohol, you think, sadly, watching him - and sadder. God. It’s so sad. Not for the first time, watching him as he closes his eyes and sings - poorly, you have to admit, but with so much feeling - from deep in his lungs, you wonder what it must be like to be so free. So uninhibited. To let all of the things you’re feeling come pouring out of you so that anyone could see. Maybe I should take up drinking, you think to yourself. Maybe it would be good for me. Loosen me up a little. That’s what you’ve been told is wrong with you. That’s one of the many things you’ve been told is wrong with you. The lights revolve over Harry as he opens his eyes and looks directly at you. He shoots you again with the finger gun not holding the microphone. Pow. Right on target.
That night the detective doesn’t shower in your bathroom, but you do smoke a cigarette together, outside, his shoulders bumping into yours. The alcohol is wearing off - you know he has the bottle in his pocket; you can hear it when he moves, clinking off everything else in there. The man is a walking Jamrock shuffle. He takes a very long time to smoke his cigarette, as do you. They go out and are relit several times. You catch him glancing at your cigarette, as if trying to pace himself off you. He fails, of course, as your self-control is impeccable. No. It’s slipping, and you’re trying to hold onto it with both hands. What is it about this man? You know what it is. You just don’t want to admit it. Finally, when you’re done with your cigarette, he sighs, his hands dropping out of his pockets and down by his sides. “I should go,” he says.
“We have had a long day,” you say, slowly.
“They’re all long days,” he says, and pushes himself off the wall, slowly. “Night, Kim,” he says, and heads off, slowly. Alone. He turns back to look at you twice, as if he can’t help himself. Despite no longer having a cigarette, you wait until he is out of sight to go back inside.
≠≠
The next night is hard on both of you. You get Harry’s - the detective’s - gun back from The Pigs, Harry’s voice surprisingly soft and gentle as he’s talking her down, your shoulders tense the whole time as a gun wavers back and forth between you and your partner. Again. It’s your worst fucking nightmare. It’s why you don’t have partners. That, and no one wants to work with you. Except this man, who has a gun - his own gun, that he had sold for 15 reál so he didn’t shoot himself - pointed at him. He talks The Pigs down even as your fingers flex around your gun, and his voice is soft when he talks to her, and why are you surprised? You can see the wounds oozing out of him like the stained glass window you had always used to look at in church, St Marie with the swords sticking out of her chest, her hands cradled around them as if they were something precious. The night gets worse when Harry hangs on the payphone and dials. You stand off to the side, excepting more nonsense, but the way his breath hitches in when someone clearly picks up has you turning back, your shoulders around your ears.
It’s hard to listen to. You want to turn away but can’t, the tears dripping down the detective’s face, his voice rising into anger although its clear he doesn’t know why. When he hangs up and tries again, and again, and again - wordlessly, you give him a few centimes when he holds out his hand to you - and there is nothing, he slumps, sways, as if he’s going to fall to the ground. You reach out to him, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his arm. “Detective,” you say. “Harrier. Harry.” You take his chin in his hand, tilt his face up towards yours. He looks at you. He looks ten years older in the half-light thrown by the blinking street light. The wind blows cold and fishy off the coast. A man died here very recently, you think. Men die everywhere. Men are always dying.
It’s freezing out, literally, and you get the detective to come back to your room at the Whirling with you, get him to take a shower. He’s in there for a very long time. If he takes any longer, there won’t be any hot water left, you think. Finally, you go in and check on him, and see his shadow standing there behind the curtain, his head bowed, the water beating down on him. I shouldn’t be seeing this, you think, and you turn to go.
“Kim?” he says, in a very small voice.
“Yes, Harry?”
“Will you stay?”
“Yes,” you say, and settle back against the sink, arms crossed over your chest. It’s a very long time before he talks, and he draws a long shuddering breath before he does, and says something about the case - the bullet trajectory again, the old thing you return to when you both want to talk to each other but have nothing much to say. You respond, in the way you do. When Harry gets out, you hand him his towel. Your fingers brush.
“Thanks, Kim,” he says, looking down. Then he looks up at you and almost smiles. You almost believe it, something haunted in his eyes, his hair wet and limp. Something clenches, hard, in your chest.
“I guess I should go, huh,” he says, glancing at the clock, then outside, his shoulders slumped. And you think of him trudging back - wet hair in the freezing cold, trying to put one foot in front of the other. Maybe going back to the payphone. Maybe going back to the shack, alone. Maybe going out to the edge of the fish market dock and -
“No,” you say, sharply, and he looks up at you, surprised. “You shouldn’t - not with wet hair. You’ll catch your death of cold.” You realize you sound like an old woman and frown, pressing your lips together, but something in his face brightens a little.
“Are you sure?” he says, and from the sound of his voice, it’s all he’s ever wanted to have been asked. To stay. He says, “only, there’s one bed - and I probably snore-”
“You do,” you say. “I heard you through the wall while you were still here. The bed’s large enough. Come on. Maybe we can still get something hot to drink downstairs.”
And he follows you down the steps, as you think, I shouldn’t be doing this - I shouldn’t be doing this - I shouldn’t -
You both fall asleep in your bed, an appropriate distance apart. You are completely aware of Harry’s slow breathing, as if he’s doing it on purpose, because you know you’re both alert and awake. What am I doing? you think to yourself. You haven’t shared a bed with someone in over five years. You’ve never shared a bed with a fellow RCM officer. But all you can think of is the detective’s voice on the phone running through your head. “I’m sorry,” he’d said. “I’m so sorry. Please.” Or the way he’d looked kneeling at the foot of the stained glass Dolores Dei, his head tilted back. She’s beautiful, Kim. You never liked her anyway.
You can hear the sounds of the Whirling - Harry’s breathing, the music, faint, from downstairs, the sea, far off. The light comes in through the window of your room strangely, and you can make out Harry’s form beside you. He’s starting to slip into sleep, whistling through his nose a little, the rising and falling of his great big chest slowing - and slowing -
You wake up at one point, startled, to a strange scraping sound below you. Your heart pounds, trying to place where you are, what that noise is. Who’s beside you in the dark. It’s chairs being put up below, Garte closing up. Harry is beside you. You can smell him, soap and his warm skin. Harry rolls over, reaches out, puts a hand on your chest. It’s heavy, a warm weight. “Shhh, it’s okay, Kim,” he mumbles, and you’re trying to wake up enough to tell him you know that, or, at the very least, to move away from his hand, but you fall back asleep before you can.
You wake up again in a gray light, staring at the ceiling. You feel slow and relaxed, your entire body sore as it has been from the last week and a half of running over every inch of Martinaise. You turn your head enough to see that the clock says - once you squint - 04:30. You can make out everything in the room vaguely, dark blurs in the gray space. Harry’s back is to you. You turn to face him, leaving an appropriate amount of room between you as you curl up, and then fall asleep again, quickly.
≠≠
It is three days before Harry really, truly, wakes up. It’s not a surprise. He’s been shot twice, and there is only so much you can do, despite your first aid training, and why isn’t his lazareth coming to help him? What is wrong with his precinct? You slink out of the room twice, three times, to the Kineema, radioing in with updates, not sure why they’re not coming, and then back to the room again, petrified somehow that something has happened while you were gone. The detective thrashes in his feverish sleep, and you stay in your stinking room with him, your head pounding, curtains drawn against the sun, which hurts you, fighting down waves of nausea as you stitch his wounds shut, as you clean him.
There is nothing much to do but wait. Garte brings food up for you, fresh medical supplies, his opinion completely altered on the detective after Harry had gotten himself shot - twice - for the honor of Martinaise. Or something. You’re not really sure. You just keep coming back to the look in Harry’s eyes as he had stared at something behind you, his eyes full of horror, and said, no -
You’re having trouble sleeping. You have bad dreams. Dreams where Harry dies and when you get to him and he’s Eyes, dreams where Eyes dies and when you get to him he’s Harry, dreams where they are both dying and you have a hand on each wound, gut and leg, but it’s not enough, it’s not enough pressure, your hand is slipping in the hot blood, you need to let go of one of them to put enough pressure on the other, but which one, which one -
You can’t sleep because you’re in a chair you’ve pulled up to the bed, is what it is. There’s nothing much to do. You can’t focus on your case notes with your pounding head. Your whole face aches. Wearing your glasses is agony. With the curtains closed and dim light fighting to come through, the time stretches out, endless and unmarked. The downstairs of the Whirling is quiet. The calm before the storm, or just after.
You change Harry’s bandages. You give Harry sponge bath after sponge bath, hot water in a bowl as he tosses and turns and grunts under you. He moans when you get to his wounds. “Shh,” you say to him, “It’s okay, Harry.” You want to comfort him - your hand on his forehead, on his shoulders, his chest. You don’t. You keep it professional and medical. It would be inappropriate. It wouldn’t help anyone. Except Harry has bad dreams. Nightmares, you suppose, based on the way he whimpers, and thrashes, and moans. He’s referenced them once or twice before, his nightmares, and when he’s having one you want to wake him out of it, gently, but you don’t.
Instead, you wash Harry’s clothes in the tub, scrubbing the bloodstains out, and lay them out on the balcony to dry. When they do, you stitch up all the gunshot tears while Harry tosses and turns and groans. And then you fix everything else, too. The rip in the side of his coat. The tearing out at the armpits of his shirt, at the crotch of his yellow flares. The torn lining at the pocket of his blazer, which has caused him to lose, he had told you, three pens and several centimes. You draw the line at his socks and underwear, though. You stitch everything up until it is fixed, until it is ready to wear again, and you look over your needle at the detective, the cloth warm in your hands from your grasp, as if it’s just come off his body. The detective’s chest rises and falls. You want him to wake up so you can hear his rasping voice. To hear him say your name. To see him smile at you.
On the third morning, when it is not quite day - 04:00 or so - you can’t sleep, another restless night full of nightmares of falling aerostatics, of dying partners - you rise in the early morning and fill a bowl with hot water in the bath. Harry has woken twice so far. The first had been when you and Titus had been pulling him into the Whirling, and he had woken up and screamed. The second time had been when you’d been sleeping in the chair pulled up to his bed, head on your arms on the edge of his bed. You’d sworn you’d felt a hand in your hair, something gentle and heavy, a thumb brushing over your forehead, but when you’d gotten yourself awake, Harry’s hand was limp by his side.
On the third morning, you open the curtains because your head does not hurt so badly anymore, and you crack the windows to let some fresh air in. It’s cold over your skin when it comes in. Outside, the sun is brilliant on the wet ground. A Revacholian spring. The detective’s wounds seem better, and as you give him another sponge bath, he mumbles something and turns his head towards you. You swear you hear your name. His chest flutters a little as if he’s breathing hard. His eyelids flicker. You put the sponge back in the bowl, slowly, and just as slowly, reach out and place your hand, which is hot, on Harry’s chest. His skin is chilled. Almost without thinking, you slip your fingers through his chest hair, press your hand flat against his chest, over his heart and lungs, where they all converge. You can feel the heat transferring from your hand into his cold skin. He grunts, turns his head to follow you as you lean over him, but he doesn’t open his eyes. A low whine.
“Shh,” you say. “Harry. It’s alright.” His breathing calms, slows, under your hand, and you stay there, sitting on the edge of his bed, pressed against his hip, your hand rising and falling with his breath, your own breath falling in line. You should get up. You should go, empty the bowl of water, dry him off, rewrap his bandages. Take your own shower. But you don’t move. “Shh,” you say to him again, “Harry, it’s okay,” watching his eyelids flutter, the snort of his breath. Something passes over his face. It’s almost a smile. He’s going to wake up soon, you think, but he’s not awake yet, which means you can keep sitting here, your hand on his chest, waiting for sunrise.