Some questions are the first page of the file.
Chapter Two
The Fourth Morning of His New Beat
Ryan Holt woke the way he had woken for a year now, by negotiating with his hip.
The ache lived deep on the left side, and it made the first move of the day a decision instead of a habit. He lay still in the dark and took his inventory. Hip, bad. Knee, fair. Head, clear, which counted as a mercy. Somewhere along the way, a man stopped waking up and started reporting for duty, and the report, most mornings, was not good.
He swung his legs out slow and sat on the edge until the joint agreed to hold him. The department doctor had used the word arthritis and then the word surgery, and Holt had stopped listening somewhere between the two, because surgery meant weeks on a couch and a couch meant thinking, and thinking was the one duty station he had spent thirteen years arranging to avoid.
Thirteen years. He said it sometimes to new men, the way other men said a lottery number they still believed in. Thirteen years on the Portland force, patrol the whole way, never wanted a desk, never wanted stripes. What he wanted was a car, a street, and the simple arrangement where his word was the end of most arguments. The force had given him that for a long time. Lately it had also given him Laurelhurst.
This was the fourth morning of the new beat, and he still took it personally.
Laurelhurst was old money and old trees, wide lawns, houses that sat back from the street like they were being polite about their size. The calls out here were garden party calls. A noise complaint about a leaf blower. A dog off its leash. A resident who wanted an officer, an actual sworn officer, to come and look at a fence line and agree that the neighbor's hedge had crossed it by six inches. People in Laurelhurst did not run from police. They waved police over and offered them their version of events at length, with names, and dates, and the home number of their attorney.
Holt preferred streets where his arrival ended conversations instead of starting them.
He dressed in the dark, out of habit older than the marriage that had not survived the job. Boots, belt, radio on the counter charging beside the coffee maker, its green eye open all night. He ate standing up. He took the stairs one at a time, favoring the left side, and by the time he reached the parking lot the ache had settled into the steady burn he could work through. Pain, he had decided, was just information. He declined the information.
At the precinct the day room smelled of coffee and floor cleaner. Dispatch was already talking. A resident across the river had called twice about a pain in his chest and a pain in his life generally, and an ambulance had it, and nobody needed patrol. The board filled with the small change of a city morning. Holt poured coffee and looked at the assignment sheet.
Price, D. The rookie. Again.
Daniel Price had six months on the job and the shine still on him, and he rode the way he did everything, like the manual was watching. He said "sir" to Holt in the tone of a man who means it, which Holt found harder to take than disrespect would have been. Disrespect he knew how to answer. Earnestness made him want to ruin something, just to set the world right.
"Morning, sir," Price said, already at the cruiser with the checklist. "Tires, lights, tank at three quarters. She is ready when you are."
"She," Holt said. "It is a car, Price. It does not care about you."
"No, sir," Price said agreeably, and held the passenger door.
That was the moment Holt made the decision, though he would not have called it one. He looked at the rookie's hand on the passenger door, at the whole arrangement of the morning, the soft beat, the soft partner, the ache in his hip like a second heartbeat, and he felt the old need to put his own hands on the wheel of something.
"I will drive today," he said.
Price blinked. "Sir, the sheet has me driving."
"The sheet is not in the car," Holt said, and took the keys off the roof where Price had set them, and lowered himself into the driver's seat with the care of a man who would rather bleed than grunt in front of a rookie.
They rolled out into a city rinsing itself in early light. Holt drove the beat the way he liked it, slow, proprietary, a hand loose at the top of the wheel. Gardens. Porches. A jogger who moved over without being asked. He felt the morning start to bore him, and boredom, for Ryan Holt, was a kind of hunger.