Troubleshooter

Chapter 29

Guerrera's duty car was an Impala that Bear hated because of the creepy autonavigation voice-a spacewoman on ludes calling out each turn. "Left in two hundred yards."

Bear looked ridiculous stuffed in the driver's seat; he didn't do well in cars.

Tim hadn't done an advise-next-of-kin call since he'd received one himself from Bear the night of Ginny's death. He thought about asking Bear to handle tonight's, but he felt he owed Marisol's grandmother both their presences in the face of the news.

"The old man asked me if I thought he should yank Jim."

"I figured."

"Right turn in forty-five feet."

Tim looked at the camera mount on the center rearview mirror, the same model that had captured the assault on Dray. "Do I come off so coldhearted that my wife gets shot and the marshal asks me if another guy's taking the case too personal?"

"I think-"

"Oops. Make a U-turn."

"Shaddup, lady. Jesus Christ, I want to get nagged like that, I'll get hitched." Bear turned the car around and got them back on course. "I think since you fucked up on that front so profoundly, the marshal bets you won't go that route again. And more important…"

"What?"

"Well, you do go stone cold, Rack. When you're mad. You don't get stupid, and you don't get sloppy. Stupid and sloppy are what Tannino-and the mayor, for that matter-is worried about. And frankly, if you handle business and the rest of the Sinners wind up ten toes up like Chief, I don't think anyone's gonna lose any sleep. But it's gotta be clean work." They drove a few minutes in silence, but eventually whatever thought Bear was working on got the better of him, and he said, "Jim's an easy call to pull off the case right now. He's not the one who the marshal-and you-should be worried about."

"What does that mean?"

"I dunno. Young deputy. A comer. Could go this way or that way or some other way. And-as everyone but you has noticed-idolizes you. For all the wrong reasons, I might add."

"Guerrera?"

"You think?" Bear shot Tim a you'd-better-think-about-it glare and feigned a sudden absorption in the cookie-cutter triplexes flying by on his left.

A few minutes later, they eased up to the house. Bear let the car idle, ignoring the solicitous autogal-"Next location, please."

Bear stared at the house, his face shifting. "Fuck. I hate this. I fucking hate this." He bounced his forehead off the top of the steering wheel a few times. "Okay, let's go."

At the door Bear's and Tim's painful Spanglish only made the encounter more demeaning to everyone and prolonged the agony of the revelation. Immediately the woman took in their dread by osmosis, but they had to run through "We're siento, Marisol is muerto" three or four times until the denial-fueled hopefulness dwindled from her eyes and her composure crumbled. One of her arms flared to help her keep her balance and Tim caught it and walked her to the couch, but she refused to sit. The footrest, now re-covered in plastic, bore a few stains from their last visit.

Tim focused hard on her hysterical Spanish and figured out she was asking variations on what he and Bear had termed the Impossible Rhetorical-"? Como pudo pasar?" How could this happen? He was having a difficult time keeping his emotions in check; they came at him from hidden angles, each trailing a memory: Bear's mud-caked boots the night he came to tell him and Dray that Ginny had been killed. The sheriff's dispatcher's static-laced voice announcing that a pregnant deputy had been shot point-blank. Tim's exhaustion caught up to him in a rush, and the room seemed to close in on him-the oppressive kitchen humidity, the sticky-sweet smell of the Advent candles, the woman's anguished sobbing.

Everyone murdered is a son or a daughter. Cops and deputies start burning out once they acknowledge this simple fact. The awareness-the true awareness-leads to a kind of insanity, a blurred vision. So they fight it tooth and nail. They fight it with the bottle. They fight it by pushing away what is theirs with what is not. The smart ones fight it with a cynical eye and gallows humor. And some of them-sometimes the toughest of them-just decide to give up one day and eat their guns or ride motorcycles into brick walls. To acknowledge the essential humanity of each bludgeoned face, each sprawled corpse, each Dumpster baby, is to run the gauntlet with every nerve exposed. But not to acknowledge it is a kind of denial, a kind of death in itself.

The shotgun blast that had entered Dray had also knocked Tim's careful system of balance and countermeasure out of whack. His compartments bled into one another; his boundaries slid; his lines blurred. In the haze he sensed a barely conscious choice at hand: He could take either nothing personally or everything. He could either connect the dots between his comatose wife and the other victims or deny them all a place in his heart.

Somewhere the woman's halting English returned. "She will be home. She have to come home to me."

And Bear's soothing murmur: "I'm so sorry, ma'am. We're so sorry."

Hurwitz, Gregg – Rackley 03

Troubleshooter (2005)

She looked impossibly frail in Bear's embrace. Tim cleared his throat and blinked away the wetness in his eyes.

"I just make her bed again. Her bed is ready for her." The woman tore at her shirt, her knuckles knobby from years of hard work. She collapsed on the couch, face pressed to the cushion.

Bear did a double take at Tim. "You all right?" he mouthed.

Tim wiped his nose, nodded.

"Why don't you go to the car?"

"I'm fine."

"You'll be finer in the car."

The woman's hoarse sobbing was audible all the way down the walk.

Bear climbed into the car twenty minutes later. Tim's eyes and nose were rimmed red, the contrast severe against the pallid skin of his face. His breathing had settled, the calm after the storm. Bear looked more than a touch unsettled. Tim wouldn't turn to meet his gaze, so Bear faced forward, hands on the wheel, elbows dangling. His head was ducked; he was at a loss.

They were pointed east, and morning leaked at the horizon, a slow, orange bleed.

Tim's voice was cracked and quiet. "Take me to Dray."