I’d hot-wired a vintage Honda Accord and driven it into the city, where I’d left it in a parking garage. Coincidentally, and weirdly, I found a dead ringer for Nick’s fur hat on the dash, which I “borrowed” -the warmth it offered my still-fragile head trumping its questionable aesthetics.
I’d walked the five blocks to the familiar apartment building. Imitating my partner’s gruff voice, I’d told a furious random resident via intercom that I’d had too much to drink and forgotten my house keys and after they’d reluctantly buzzed me in, I’d picked the lock of the rent-controlled sublet in which I was now squatting.
It was unlikely my host would be feeling particularly hospitable when he arrived home. Being either sound asleep or unconscious would in all likelihood make things even worse, so I forced myself to yet again methodically to go through everything that had led up this night. Even in my addled state, I knew that something might land differently, trigger a new memory or provoke the kind of tangential thought process that could lead to fresh insight. Two hours later I was drifting on a thick cloud of despair, exhaustion, throbbing pain and borderline concussion when I heard the apartment door squeal open.
I tried to stand, but my head felt like an anvil. I crashed back down into the armchair as Nick walked into the room and switched on the light.
His jaw dropped as he spotted me-the beaver still on my head, a thick stream of dried blood plastered to the side of my face and a fine coating of rock salt down the length of one trouser leg.
“What the fuck… Sean?”
“So you don’t know already?”
“What are you talking about?”
My voice was weak. “No, I just thought… they would have called you by now.”
He went to fish his work BlackBerry out of his pocket. “My phone’s on silent. It’s been a big night, I mean…” He hesitated a bit, like he was unsure about what to say, then added, “Tinder booty call, you know how it is-”
Then he saw the screen.
“Shit,” he grumbled. “Eleven missed calls.” He raised his eyes and studied me, then any remaining light dimmed right out of his expression. “What’s going on?”
“Sit down, man. Just… sit down.”
I finally told my partner everything.
The whole messed-up story, starting with my first encounter with Kirby. I didn’t give out Kurt’s name, though. I figured I owed him his anonymity, and Nick didn’t pick at it. Instead, he just sat there and listened, shaking his head but holding back his unspoken disapproval and saying nothing until I was done. Then he just sat there in silence for what felt like a hell of a long time.
He finally took a long, haggard breath, leaned forward, and looked me squarely in the eyes. “You need to hand yourself in, Sean. It’s the only way. Every second you’re not in custody just makes it look worse.”
“No. No way.” I was too burnt out to elaborate.
“It’s the only way. At least then, you have a chance they’ll believe you. You have to do it. Spill the whole story. The blackmail, the files. Everything. You know how it works. If everything you say is true, which we know it is, if it can all be verified, which I can make damn sure of, then maybe there’s something just north of a snowball’s chance in hell that your version of the past twenty-four hours will be believed as well. Or at least considered till evidence is found to support it.”
In my mind, the chances of that weren’t even worth considering.
“No,” I said. “Look, they’ve been protecting this Corrigan all along. For whatever reason, they don’t want him found. They’ll claim he never existed and bury me.” It sounded much worse now that I was voicing it. “I need to find him myself.”
“Right, because you’ve been so stunningly successful at it so far?”
I lost it. “What do you want from me, Nick? Look at me. I’m fucked. You want me to just serve them up my head on a platter?”
“Jesus, Sean,” he shot back. “Listen to yourself. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“We were struggling for the gun when it went off,” I yelled. “My prints are all over it. His wife saw me. Me-no one else. Just me.”
“There wouldn’t have been a struggle if the guy in the beard wasn’t there,” he yelled back. “It was self-defense-”
“Which is impossible to prove if I can’t wheel in the beard to back up my story.”
“You think you’re in any fit state to be doing anything? I mean, look at you. It’s a miracle you’re not laid out on a sidewalk somewhere.” He took a breath, studied me some more, then his tone calmed. “It’s got to stop, Sean. You’ve got to stop with the lone vigilante shit. I need my partner back. I need my buddy back. I’ve watched you get totally obsessed by this Reed Corrigan, and… you’ve changed, man. All these secrets… And your focus isn’t there any more. Your mind used to be one hundred percent on the job, but ever since last summer… You’re always disappearing off on your own, doing Christ knows what.”
“We got Daland, didn’t we?”
“We got Daland because however much your attention is elsewhere, you’re still a damn good agent. Nothing will ever change that. But look where it’s got you. I mean… Christ!”
I was too tired to argue, but I heard the edge of desperation in my own voice. “You think I’m enjoying it? You think I’m happy my partner is down on me the whole time? I can barely concentrate on anything without that bastard popping into my head? It’s the same thing at home. Alex may be OK-better, at any rate-but I’m still back there. Every time I look at him, I think about what they did to him, and it just… I can’t let go, Nick. And now there’s my dad, too…” I tailed off, took a couple of deep breaths. “I need to know what happened to him. And I have to do it alone. More than ever.”
“What if you find something you don’t like, something you were better off not knowing?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if your dad was in bed with these guys and really did kill himself out of guilt?”
“‘Guilt?’”
“Maybe. Who knows. Maybe he was part of something nasty and he couldn’t live with that. I mean, what do you really know about him, Sean? Sometimes, some doors are best left unopened. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to know about everything my dad was up to after he left us.”
I was too incensed to even begin to answer him, but even in my worked-up state, I couldn’t dismiss his words entirely. All I could bring myself to say was, “He wasn’t part of anything nasty. He was a good guy.”
Nick shrugged, calmer now. “Yeah, well, I hope he was, buddy. I really do.” He sat there and just stared at me, nodding his head slowly, deep in thought.
“OK,” he said. He nodded again, to himself, solemnly, then pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll go make us some coffee.”
I leaned back and closed my eyes, eagerly anticipating the caffeine hit. I hadn’t been sure that Nick would see things my way, but I had to keep pushing. We were partners, after all.
I must have dozed off because I woke as Nick walked back into the living room, a steaming mug of coffee in each hand.
“Should have stayed the night with Rochelle.” He placed his mug-bearing the deeply ironic slogan “Husband of the Year”-on a low table in front of a battered sofa. “She offered, you know. But there I was thinking I needed a clean shirt for the morning. Big mistake, huh?”
He turned to hand me one of the black-and-white FBI mugs from The White House gift shop, a gift from yours truly.
“It’s been a night of big mistakes,” I muttered.
Then, just as I took the mug, he grabbed my wrist, cuffed it and pulled the other end down toward the metal arm of the chair. The mug smashed against the hardwood floor, splashing scalding hot coffee across us both.
Using his downward momentum against him, I tried to wrench his arm all the way toward the floor so I could lock my free arm around his neck and pull his gun with my cuffed hand, but he knew exactly what I would try and was already exerting counter pressure in an upward trajectory-enough to bring the open cuff level with the metal tube. He closed the cuff with his free hand and stepped back.