Orientation by Ashe Gregory

Author:Ashe, Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodgkin and Blount
Published: 2019-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

The shower upstairs had been running for at least an hour.

Listening to the steady thrum of water, North sat in the corner of the office. A few months ago, he had put the chair there. He had shoved the desk up against the wall, dividing the office—not down the middle, but into two parts: detective and not detective. He had done all this after his license was suspended, after the Marvin Hanson case had been settled, after he was sure Shaw still wanted him coming to work. But shuffling seats and rearranging furniture and putting himself in the corner, those were all just physical things. Precise spatial adjustments that were supposed to reflect where everything stood for North: close but not too close; friends and colleagues but, temporarily, not professional equals. From this distance, North could clock Shaw right in the forehead with a crumpled piece of paper. At exactly this amount of yards and feet and inches, North could watch every smile, hear every hummed note to every bizarrely obscure opera, smell the spiky musk of whatever hipster-boutique-bespoke product was in his hair—and, of course, smell the pot on him too. North could sit where he was and take it all in without giving himself away, without altering where they stood. And knowing where they stood was a matter of life and death, for North, when it came to Shaw.

Touching the throbbing cut at the corner of his eye, North checked to make sure the bandage hadn’t peeled away. In light of all the effort to make perfect, visual sense of where the two of them stood, North couldn’t figure out how things had slipped so far out of the frame. Part of it, he knew, was the lying. North adjusted the tape over the fresh, broken weal that Tuck had opened along the back of his hand last night. His mind followed its usual divided path. One part of him was already explaining, a kind of internal autocorrect that wrote over the events of last night. Tuck had been tired. Tuck had been worried. Tuck had a temper, and he was jealous, and North—if he were totally honest with himself—liked that he was still able to get a rise out of Tuck, liked that just by coming home smelling like leather and sweat and cigarette smoke, he could turn Tuck into a maniac. North had basically been asking for the strap. He really only had himself to blame.

But the other part of his mind was tiptoeing through dark rooms, already stitching together the story he’d tell Shaw to explain the split skin near his eyes, the bruises, the broken weal on the back of his hand. Boxing. Boxing had worked for a long time. North would just say that he’d gotten up early, headed to the gym, and gotten in a few rounds of sparring. It’s not like Shaw would wonder. It’s not like Shaw would even know what time boxing gyms opened. Hell, for that matter, North didn’t know what time boxing gyms opened.

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