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November 21, 2014, Seattle, Washington
There were a few more people than normal at happy hour. The bar hadn’t changed. It was still a cop bar, dark, wood booths and tables, a Coors neon sign behind the bar.
Angie looked around at the people who had become so very important in her life. They were looking a bit battered, but they were alive, and that was a miracle. She reached out and touched Mac’s arm, almost as if she needed reassurance that he was real and here with her. He looked at her and raised an eyebrow in question. She shook her head, one small movement. He smiled at Angie and took her hand.
Anna Rodriguez was with them; that was a first. But then Nick wasn’t really able to get around on his own yet. He was here, in a wheelchair. Angie worried about him.
Janet was sitting with Stan, of course. Their house was still under construction. She was still living at the Parker house with the rest of the crew, but gossip had it she spent a lot of time at Stan’s apartment. She had invited them to Thanksgiving dinner at the Parker house next week. Paulina was having it catered. Smart women.
And the latest package of stories was being talked about for a Pulitzer — could they have two up in the same year? Angie didn’t know. Well, maybe this story actually wasn’t in the same year. Janet just rolled her eyes and reminded people she named her dog Pulitzer for a reason — he still didn’t come when she called him, even after all this time.
Stan had his arm resting on the back of Janet’s chair, and it looked natural there now. She wondered if she’d ever get the whole story about why he was in the Seattle bureau now instead of D.C. Maybe she should just ask?
Maybe after another drink.
Or two.
Joe looked thinner, haunted. She still knew very little about him. He was a very private man.
Speaking of private men, there was Rand. But he just looked like Rand. He’d gone up to the mountains for a week. When he came back, he appeared more centered. The others didn’t understand that, but she did. And if she hadn’t been so dang busy, she would have gone with him.
Rand had lost his last illusions about the people when Sensei turned out to be someone he’d once respected. She wondered if he trusted anyone outside the people at this table. And the old veteran who ran Outside Adventures up in the North Cascades. Well, really, that was a lot of people, when you thought about it. These were people he knew he could trust with his life, after all.
Shorty had joined them tonight. He was actually turning their startup front into a real project, working with the Winters brothers and Mac. She laughed to herself. It might even make a profit someday. She owned a couple of shares herself.
Juan Moore was here too, which was a surprise. Not Paulina — the children, Juan said. She had the Rodriguez children too.
“So, Nick?” Janet asked. “What’s the latest prognosis?”
The man had no affect Angie thought, but his eyes looked haunted. A lot like Joe’s. It changed a man when your own co-workers tried to kill you. And they came damn close too.
Nick shrugged, and then winced. “I’m alive,” he said. “The doctor is pretty confident of that.”
Everyone laughed a bit — more at the effort than because it was funny.
“I met with a department personnel officer yesterday,” he said. “When the doctor thinks I’m ready, I can come back to desk duty. And isn’t that a joy to look forward to? But the department has put out a couple of ideas for me to consider. One is for me to join IA. They could use me, the personnel officer said. I wanted to say ‘no shit’ but alienating the man who determines my future as a cop seems like a bad idea.” He paused to breathe for a bit, and then continued. “The department also floated a new position for me — an ethics and responsibility education position. And of course, I’m eligible for full-disability if I want to retire.”
The table felt grim, and Angie looked around at the others. She’d missed something, because she thought those were interesting ideas. She looked at Nick. “So those sound like good positions for you,” she said slowly. “Why the grim face?”
“Coming back to the force in my old job as a detective isn’t on the table, Angie,” Nick said bluntly. “I liked being a detective. And I was good at it. They won’t say it, but they don’t think I’ll regain my health enough to do it. And maybe they don’t think I’d be welcomed back to the unit. Not that there is much left of the unit.”
Angie closed her eyes a bit. Way to go, rip that wound wide open, she jeered at herself. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m alive,” he responded. “I’m going to get to see my kids grow up.” He smiled at her. “And we’re going to buy one of those houses down the block from Joe’s new fixer-upper. And the Moores put an offer on another one. Urban renewal is coming to that little pocket of Queen Anne.”
“We’re going to be neighbors?” Angie exclaimed. “That’s great.”
There was silence at the table, and everyone looked from her to Mac and back. Oops, she thought with a laugh. She looked at Mac and laughed. “You tell them,” she said.
“My aunt and her lover decided that co-habitation was working better this time around,” Mac said with an eyeroll. Anna Marie wasn’t his favorite person. He liked her in small doses, but he fully understood why his aunt had kept her own place. “So, Angie and I are going to buy the house from Lindy. We moved Lindy out and moved Angie in recently.”
That seemed a bit brief of a synopsis for such a momentous decision, Angie thought. But what else was there to say? Lindy was keeping her bedroom at the Queen Anne house — just in case she needed a break, she said. Mac and Shorty had packed up the stuff that Lindy wanted and moved it to Anne Marie’s place — a ultra-modern three-bedroom apartment in the U District. It was gorgeous, Angie thought, although completely different from the bungalow on Queen Anne, which had this artist studio vibe going. She was interested to see how Lindy’s art got incorporated into the apartment with its sleek lines and minimalist style. If it got relegated to the back bedroom, that wouldn’t be a good sign for the future of the relationship. The upside, though, was that Lindy could walk to her studio at UW.
After Lindy’s stuff was moved out, Angie and Mac had walked through the house and decided if there were things that needed to go, and what they might want in its place.
“To make it a home,” Mac said, and there was always a sense of yearning when he said that word. It hit her in the heart when he said it. “Our home.”
So they’d bought a new couch — the old one had been there when Mac was in high school, he said. And Angie added a lot of her photography to replace the art Lindy had taken with her. She didn’t have a lot else to move in. Neither Mac or she had much stuff. Her parents brought down a load of things stored at their house, and they’d put the boxes in the garage. Someday soon she’d find out what she thought was worth keeping when she left her first life behind.
Her father and Mac hit it off which made her happy. She liked her father. Loved him, of course, but liked him too. But she had to admit that Mac and her dad didn’t have a lot in common. When she said as much to Mac after her father left, he had said, ‘We have you, babe, and that’s enough.’ And just thinking about that made her want to tear up again. So, she pulled her thoughts back to the present gathering of friends.
“We’ll have to have a housewarming party soon,” she said to those seated around them, and then laughed at Mac’s appalled expression. He grinned at her though, so maybe they would.
“Maybe a roving one,” Joe said. He’d made an offer on one of the fixer-uppers. Not the one where the shooter had been hiding, but one near it. He said it would need a fair amount of work before he could move in.
Juan nodded. “Might be a while before ours is livable,” he said, rolling his eyes. “But we’ll have enough room for the kids to grow up in. And contractors have started repairs on the old house. We’re just going to do the basics and put it up for sale. But the basics are quite extensive. Who’s going to buy a house full of bullet holes?”
Anna Rodriguez nodded. “Same contractors are going to do ours. You know? The neighbors have never reached out or said a word. I wonder what they think now?”
Angie thought it bothered her that they hadn’t cared enough to ask. It would bother her too. She smiled in sympathy at the older woman.
So a lot of things happening in their group, Angie thought. She looked around at them all and wondered if she could take a photo — an ‘after’ to the ones she shot earlier in the fall. Because these men and women were not the same. But then maybe no one needed the reminder of how much things had changed.
Mac lightened things up by grinning at Joe. “So, tell me,” he teased. “Were you really doing both of the phone phreakers?”
Angie laughed, and she saw Shorty snort his drink out his nose and cough. Surely, he wasn’t surprised? She eyed him suspiciously.
Everyone else was laughing.
“Jesus, Mac,” Joe said. Then he grinned. “It was their tats,” he said. “They got me, you know?”
Mac laughed harder, and Angie was grinning. “They part of your Queen Anne plans? One or both of them?”
Joe shook his head, laughing too hard to even answer. “They said they’d be by,” he said finally. “They’d give me a call.”
Angie had another screwdriver. It was as frou-frou as was really acceptable with this crowd. Anna and Janet were drinking wine, but she didn’t really like wine — sangria on occasion, but this bar didn’t serve it. Mac had a Mountain Dew, and it reassured her that some things hadn’t changed. But Nick was drinking water, and that was a reminder of just how close they came to losing him.
And now that she had some liquid courage, she asked Stan why he’d come out to Seattle.
“Besides Janet,” she added, and grinned at her boss. Well, her boss’s boss.
He was silent for a moment. “You all know of Rebecca Nesbitt, right?’
Angie hadn’t met her, but she knew the name. An FBI researcher into the far right and Christian nationalist movements in the United States. She had a doctorate in political science and was an expert in religious terrorism. Rebecca had been an unnamed resource for a number of stories.
“She and I had a long talk after the Army of God attack on abortion clinics out here,” Stan said now. “She’s scary smart, you know? She says she’s been worried ever since the FBI disbanded the research team on right-wing Christian nationalism in the U.S. You remember? I think you used that team’s report in your stories last spring. Report came out in 2008? Something like that. The Justice Department pulled it in three days because of the uproar from the conservatives in Congress and the media. Within two years, they disbanded the office entirely. Politics, she said, nothing new. But what troubled her was that the distinction between right-wing white nationalism and the Republicans’ conservative, fundamentalist base was blurring. Blurring in their own minds. She said she thought hard times were ahead.”
“Hard to argue with that,” Mac said.
“No,” Stan agreed. “And I was high enough in the bureau that the politics of that was going to make my job harder, and eventually I’d be gone. I could see it in her words. And I knew it was time to leave D.C. while I still had some choice on where I went next. Here, because of Janet. Because I like the Northwest. Because here, movements like the Sensei aren’t deemed acceptable when they’re brought to light.”
He stopped, and took a breath. “Sometimes I wonder if Howard Parker happened today? Would anyone care what he’d done? Or would they see it as a plus, a sign that he would be tough — tough enough to get the job done, as they say.”
Mac grimaced at that. Angie squeezed his hand.
“So, I came here, as soon as the bureau had an opening,” he said, and shrugged. “Can’t say it’s been any less exciting.”
They all laughed.
“I heard from Rebecca recently,” Rand interjected. “She’s going back to teaching at Georgetown.”
There was silence. “She’s leaving the Bureau?” Stan asked. “I hadn’t heard.”
“I think it was one of those ‘you can’t fire me, I quit’ moments,” Rand said. “I suggested she head out here. UW would be glad to get her, I’d think. But she’s got family. She starts fulltime at Georgetown in January.”
Angie excused herself to use the restroom. When she came back, Stan Warren was leaning against the bar waiting for her.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, a bit puzzled.
“No, seriously, how are you doing? You killed a man. And you were right to do it. But still, that weighs on a person,” Stan said gently.
Oh, she thought, that, and took a deep breath. She let it out as she looked over towards the table. Mac had his back to her. “Last spring, when Mac first taught me to shoot, he said a lot of it was mental preparedness,” Angie said slowly. Once she started, she realized she did need to talk about it. And Stan was more likely to understand than most. “He said I had to get it firmly in my mind that if necessary, I would shoot. Having a gun and hesitating was just providing my assailant with another weapon to use against me.”
“True,” Stan agreed. “And did you?”
She half-shrugged. “Kind of? I thought I did. When things got bad in the Cascades, I knew I might have to use a gun. And I made up my mind that I would. To save my life or someone else’s. But it didn’t feel real.” She looked at Mac as she went on. “Mac is bigger than life, you know? And when I was with him up there, I felt safe. I felt like he could handle anything and everything, and all I had to do was keep up. And I did — I was proud that I did. And even beyond Mac, there was Rand, and Ken, and even Craig Anderson. Capable, confident men. And although I was committed to do whatever needed to be done, I also knew that the chances were good I wasn’t going to have to actually use the gun Mac gave me.”
“And you didn’t,” Stan said. “But you decided to keep practicing with it?”
She shrugged. “Really, it was just something Mac and I could do together,” she said. “And I got comfortable holding a gun in my hand. I can’t say that I got good with it. But comfortable. And still, there was this sense of complacency. I didn’t need a handgun. I had Mac.” She grinned at him. “Which is like having a weapon you have to feed.”
Stan laughed. “It is,” he agreed. “And then things went bad at the Parker house. And you stepped up.”
She nodded. “Everyone else was too far away. I heard Rand yell, but he was on the roof and didn’t have the shot. Brian was down, and Mac was crouched over him, practically holding him together. And there was that man, Andy Malloy, and he had his gun drawn and was aiming it at Mac. He was so close even I couldn’t miss at that distance. And he hated Mac, you could see it. And I knew he was going to kill him. And I could see that Mac knew it. That Mac thought he was going to die. And I swiped the Glock from the guard house and shot him.”
“And you saved Mac’s life, probably Brian’s, and maybe more of us. They were through the gates, and they had the firepower to do it,” Stan said.
She nodded. “But Stan, I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about buying time for Rand to get in place, or anything. All I saw was Andy Malloy and his hate, and he was going to kill Mac. And I shot him before he could.”
“Do you think you shouldn’t have?” Stan asked.
“No, to use Mac’s words, it was a righteous kill,” she said. She looked at Mac again. “But it changed things. Changed me. I killed a man, and I have to live with that. And I can. I’ve had some nightmares, but I did the right thing. And I’d have a lot more regrets if I had hesitated, and he shot Mac.”
“Did it change things between you and Mac?” Stan asked, following her eyes as she kept looking from Stan to Mac.
“It has,” she answered. “For the good, I think. He treats me as his equal now. I would have said he did before, but he treated me as his sidekick really. He respected me, don’t get me wrong. And he admires my photography, and I can’t tell you how much that matters to me. But when it came to things like the Cascades or the Parker house, I was someone to protect. I finally got him to see me as part of his team, not a civilian to send out of harm’s way.” She paused when Stan started laughing, and she grinned. “You know I’m right,” she said.
“You are,” he agreed. “And I fight that with Janet too.”
Angie nodded. “But even as part of his team, he saw me as someone to protect. An embed, he called it, journalists who go out with a squad of Marines.”
Stan laughed again, but he gestured for her to continue.
“But now, it’s different. I’m part of the team. I saved his life, and he knows he can count on me when things get tough. And more than just trust that I would step up, he knows I will, because I did.”
“And how do you feel about that?” Stan asked, more perceptive than Angie was really comfortable with.
“It’s weird,” she said. “It’s what I wanted — or thought I did. I wanted to be one of his team. I talked to Janet about it on the way out to Rodriguezes that first night actually. But I realize now, that I was still in the mode I was in up in the Cascades. One of the team, but confident I would never be called on to do the hard stuff because Mac was invincible. He’d take care of it.”
She thought about that for a moment. “But in the long run, that would have kept me almost like a child, wouldn’t it? I’m not sure our relationship would have worked out like that.”
“It might have. At least for a while,” Stan said. “I know a lot of cops and soldiers who are that way. They’re the protector, and their wives are the protected. But...,” he hesitated. “The wife gets stunted, I guess, and eventually, you’re right, they seem child-like. Or, they burst free, and to do it, they have to destroy the marriage. In the long run, partner is better. Knowing that he will take care of you, but that you’ve got his back too.”
“Do you feel that way with Janet?” she asked.
He looked at Janet with a half-smile that made Angie want to melt a bit. “Yeah, she’s got my back,” he said. “And I’ve got hers.”
He looked back at Angie. “What you and Mac have now is more like what Joe and Nick have — partners in that sense of the word. Of course, you’re partners in a romantic sense, as well. But it may take getting used to.”
She nodded. “I’m a bit chagrined to admit it, but it turns out I liked being the protected sidekick,” she said ruefully. “I felt cherished.”
“And now?” Stan asked gently.
Angie thought about it. Really thought about how did she feel now? And she grinned happily. “Now I feel loved,” she said firmly.
“Good,” he said. “And if you need to talk? And you may, because killing a man can hit you hard at strange moments for a long time, you know where to find me.”
She nodded, and patted his arm. “Thank you,” she said sincerely. “I needed to articulate it to truly understand it. Usually I process things through my camera, but this? There wasn’t anything to photograph. Feelings are hard that way.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, and they walked back to join the rest of the group.
“A toast,” Nick said, when they sat down. “To us. To friends you can count on to come when you call. And who support each other no matter how rough the road.”
Angie raised her glass and clinked it against Mac’s Mountain Dew — in a glass, because the waitress said drinking from a can was gauche — and then against Rand’s beer, also in a glass.
“To friends,” she echoed. And to partners. “And a photo of us all!” She made them all shove together and got the waitress to take the picture so she was in it. She just ignored the protests.
“And to a future,” Janet said when the waitress handed Angie her phone back. “Wasn’t sure there was going to be one, at one point.”
There was some rueful laughter at that.
“A future with good things to come,” Mac said, surprising everyone. “What?” he demanded.
“That’s almost a Hallmark card, Mac,” Shorty said with disgust. “I mean, really. Toughen up!”
Mac glowered a bit, while others laughed at him. Then he put his arm around Angie and hugged her.
“Cheers,” he said.
Angie rested her head on his shoulder. “Cheers,” she said softly. “Cheers.”