Tricks of the Trade (30 page)

“It was a little too noisy for me,” I said, taking the paper from Lou's hand. “We'll see how this place does.”

Pietr just smiled up at the ceiling, a kind of sad, nostalgic smile, like he knew he wasn't going to get any more invites to stay over, in the new place. Instinctively, I reached out—and was met by a hard, impenetrable surface. Huh.

“I'll catch you guys tomorrow,” I said. “Gotta go see a man about a wall.”

I found him exactly where, no magic involved, I'd known he would be: on the stoop of my soon-to-be-old apartment building. He didn't look up when I stopped in front of him, so I sat down beside him, feeling the cool brick soak through my pants and numb my ass.

There were any of a dozen things I could have said, from the funny to the horrifyingly blunt, from the excruciatingly personal to the offhandedly polite. What came out was: “Would you really have given Wells to the imp, if he'd balked?”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” I echoed.

Of course he would have. Benjamin Venec didn't bluff—or if he did, and you called him on it, he followed through, which was probably the same thing as not bluffing.

If he had any doubts about what we'd done, about where the high ground was, and where the quicksand waited, he didn't show it.

Dealing with Venec on a daily basis was never going to be a cakewalk. It would, in fact, be the antithesis of everything I'd ever looked for in a relationship: awkward, frustrating, complicated, and with the potential for big ugly meltdowns on a regular basis if we didn't watch what we were doing. And I didn't even know where half of his sore spots and hot buttons were. Hell, I probably didn't even know a quarter of them yet, Merge or no Merge.

But the thought of walking away, of cutting him out of my life, of him cutting me out… It left an ache larger than anything I'd ever felt, even worse than when Zaki died, even worse than my first and worst broken heart combined. Like there was a chunk of my soul that had gone walkabout, and left a stone in its place.

“You shut me out. Today, I mean. Walls back up.”

“You found me, anyway.”

“You weren't exactly trying to hide.” I gestured behind me. “I live here, had to come back sooner or later.”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

Great. Now he was giving me Zen koans to suck on. I opened my mouth to ask him why he was making things so damned difficult, when we'd gotten past that, when he reached out and put his unbandaged arm around my shoulders, pulling me into what might have, to an outsider, looked like a casual, if uncomfortable, embrace.

I didn't resist; his arm was at an awkward angle at my throat, but it felt okay, and I was afraid that if I said or did the wrong thing, he'd pull away again, disappear behind even higher walls.

“You did well this week,” he said. “All of you. Two cases at once, both tied up, wrongdoers punished…”

“Wrongs left wronged,” I said, finishing the sentence.

“Yeah. Well. That's not our job, is it? We're not here to save the world, not even our corner of it. Just to identify, isolate, and incriminate the bad guys.”

He'd managed to put a finger on exactly the sore point. “What we did went beyond that, though. Forcing Wells to make the choice he made…it went way beyond our charter, such as it is. And it…wasn't very moral.”

“No. Not particularly. It was coercion, justified only by the fact that that bastard had imprisoned his wife and son for years, and deserved to be punished.” Ben exhaled, his scent thicker in my nostrils than a second before, the smell of ash and dark rum and clean male sweat. “We gave him the choice of what that punishment would be.”

His arm at my neck felt a little like a choke hold now,
but I couldn't bring myself to wiggle out of it, even a little. There's a physical metaphor for you, huh?

“We're not supposed to be the judge or jury. Just the investigators.”

“I know. But…” His arm relaxed a little, sliding down to rest around my shoulders. “Circumstances—and Ian's grandstanding little stunt—put us in a position where we had no choice. Let him carry the guilt for that, okay?”

I considered the suggestion.

I wanted to argue with his argument, find the hole that J would have found, turn it back on him and somehow make it all black-and-white again, good guys and bad guys. I couldn't. J wouldn't approve—he was all about standing on your own feet and owning your own actions, but J…hadn't ever been here. Or if he had, he'd made different decisions.

He was a different person.

I'd taken this job because I needed the money, and as an intellectual challenge, but also as a way to put myself to good use, to do something that I felt strongly about. I still felt that way, still believed in the cause. Maybe even more so, now. The world we're in isn't black-and-white, or if it is, that's only for Council, people who take themselves out of the scrum. Down here, it's always been shades of gray…and I'm living—working—smack in the middle of it. That grayness was bound to rub off onto us, sooner or later.

My turn to exhale, and I put my entire body into it. Next to me, I felt Ben's body shake a little with laughter. All right, maybe it had been a smidge overly dramatic.

“Don't shut me out,” I said. I meant to add “we work
well with it—it made this case possible to close,” or maybe, “I don't mind feeling you always rubbing along the edge of my awareness…we'll figure it out as we go along,” or possibly, “I kind of like knowing that you're there.” But I didn't say any of that, because he turned his head and shifted his arm again, and then his lips touched mine, and I inhaled the scent of warm flesh and a faint hint of aftershave, and felt the rasp of a soft tongue and my fingers were tangled in that dark shag of curls, pulling his mouth harder against mine, and anything I was going to say went purely to hell.

And then my fingers unclenched and his arm fell away, and there was space to breathe between us.

The walls were still up. But I could see where the outline of a door was etched; one that swung both ways. I touched my fingers to his mouth, not sure if it was me, or him who was trembling, and smiled, and got up and went up the stairs, leaving him sitting there alone.

Shades of gray. We'd figure this out.