“Damn,” I said.
No sooner had I said that, than the other cops burst into the room.
“Damn,” I repeated myself for good measure.
Duncan spoke to the new arrivals, “Watch your step, don’t trip. He tried to bar himself in, in the room with the boy’s body. Watch for the mess on the floor, too. He was throwing soap around. I think he’s a little disconnected from reality.”
“Drugs?” one of the officers asked.
“I wouldn’t definitively rule it out,” Duncan said, without taking his eyes off me. “There’s only so much we know about him.”
“How much do you really know about anybody?” I asked.
“Just as I said,” Duncan asked, deadpan. “Irreverent, disheveled, disconnected. Self-harming, apparently. He was threatening violence earlier.”
“So were you,” I said. It sounded feeble.
“Looks like he got you,” one officer said. There was something dangerous in his tone. He didn’t look pleased when he looked at me.
Aw fuck. No police officer liked it when one of their own was attacked.
“I know the usual protocol,” Duncan said. “But he’s clearly troubled. I looked at his sheet. He was homeless for a stretch. A few near-misses with the law, hospital records suggest he was the victim on more than a few occasions. Go easy on him.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure,” Duncan said.
I’d hoped Duncan would approach and slip on the soap at the pivotal moment. But he hung back while the officers carefully made their way over the soap.
I glanced at Rose.
Sorry.
She started to reach for the drawer, hand in a fist. To knock?
I shook my head.
She moved her hand away.
When I looked at Duncan, he nodded a little.
Evan stood behind him, in ghost form. Duncan was oblivious to the little boy.
“Hands behind your back,” one of the officers said, as he carefully made his way over the sea of soap.
I obeyed.
“What were you doing, huh?” he asked.
I kept my mouth shut.
I heard fluttering.
Duncan had half-turned, still holding the gun. Evan-in-sparrow-form was halfway inside his coat, wings still flapping violently. I heard rustling plastic.
“What the fuck?” one of the officers asked.
Duncan pressed one hand against his coat, holding it against Evan, only for Evan to move, slipping higher up. More rustling. For an instant, it was like something out of a cartoon, Evan dodging every time Duncan’s hand moved.
It wasn’t for good, though. Duncan moved his gun-hand to help block the bird’s path and then reached into his coat. He came out with a bird in hand.
“Oh,” Duncan said. He looked at me, clearly displeased, then back to the bird. “Enough of that.”
“What the hell is a bird doing in here?” the officer asked.
“Rifling through my pockets,” Duncan said.
What did he have in his pockets?
The tools the Behaims had lent him? He’d stopped by the lockup.
Evan was still seeking out the items I’d sent him to find?
Now he was caught. The officers moved my arms, and for a moment, I could only see Duncan and Behaim out of the corner of my eye.
Evan tried to turn back into boy-form, Duncan held on, and Evan was forced to revert to being a bird.
The officers turned me around.
One on each side of me, they marched me down the hallway, Duncan and Evan following.
“You’re going to let the bird outside?” one asked.
“Yeah, I’ll get it outside,” Duncan said.
They didn’t seem to catch the distinction between let and get.
“If I happened to want to complain, again, about the issue of Duncan being involved, here,” I said. “A third time, no less…”
“I was downstairs,” Duncan said. “I had words with Ellis, at inventory, and I heard a commotion. It would have been remiss to not check and see what was going on.”
We ascended the stairs. Things weren’t as odd as they had been at their worst. I still wasn’t absolutely sure about what was real and what was the natural wear and tear of the police station, though.
Duncan stepped out of the same side door I’d entered after dropping down to the parking lot.
His back to the officers as they led me further up the stairs, he twisted and snapped Evan’s neck.
To say the strength went out of me wasn’t right. I felt like everything that was holding me upright was gone. As if all the contents of my torso just bottomed out and hit ground. Muscle sloughing from bone, brain liquefying…
The only things keeping me from hitting the stairs face first were the two officers who held my arms.
I wasn’t really disintegrating. But I felt like it. The sensation of my toes and shins banging against stairs as they hauled me forward felt out of place given the immensity of what had just hit me.
The deal I’d struck with Evan, the de-facto deal, was to keep him from Death. Death, even with outside intervention, wouldn’t claim him.
But that deal, holding to that deal? That took power.
I was dimly aware as the dead bird was tossed at the side of the building. I felt it like a physical blow when salt was tossed onto the body.
Duncan shut the door, bringing in a brief draft of cold air, equally discordant in terms of the sensations on my skin and how they jarred with the pain and general devastation that simple act had wreaked.
Cold air…
Something clicked.
“…Feel ugh,” I said, almost incomprehensible, even to myself.
“What’d you take?” the officer asked.
“Need fresh air.”
“You’ll have to make do with this air,” he said. “There’ll be a toilet you can puke into if you need it.”
I need the door open, I thought. It’s one of the things I need.
I looked for Rose and found her reflection reflected in a black LCD screen. One glance told me she’d felt the effects of Evan’s second death just as much as I had.
There was no way I was going to put up a fight. I could barely move. Rose couldn’t affect this world.
Evan… Evan was lying in a snowbank with a snapped neck, until he pulled himself together.
If I was going to win this, we needed to achieve it with this alone.
“I’m sweating, I don’t feel good. I need some cold air,” I said, stressing the word cold.
All true, on each individual count, taken separately.
“Deal,” the officer said.
My eyes didn’t leave Rose’s, as I was dragged further along the path between cubicles.
“Maybe Officer Behaim can interrogate my ghost a few hours from now,” I said, trying and failing to sound angry enough to fit the line. It was forced, it was obvious enough that Duncan would twig to what I was doing, and I wasn’t sure if it was a lie or not.
Nothing seemed to change, though, and I was short enough on resources that I suspected I’d be able to tell if I burned any more.
“You sound a little-” Duncan started.
Rose interrupted him. “June.”
She’d caught my hint.
Duncan had gone straight to the inventory room, where all the crime scene evidence was locked behind a caged door. I’d thought he was collecting his trinkets, the ones the Behaim family had given him, but that wasn’t it, or it wasn’t the whole story. He’d anticipated that I would come back for my things, and had waited for me there.