“Why?” Boyd asked.
Harry raised his eyebrows. “That’s what suspen—”
“Why am I being reviewed? Why now?” Boyd asked. “By whom?”
Harry glanced at the computer screen. “Apparently what triggered it was a bail bond you signed for recently. Questions were raised about how you could afford it.”
“I put my apartment up as collateral—”
Harry hushed him. “Tell the review panel, not me,” he said. “Call the union rep, go home, book a weekend away or something.”
“I—” Boyd trailed off and scrubbed his hands over his face. He could still smell Donegan. “What the hell, Captain?”
Harry’s face tightened unhappily, and he glanced at the door for a second.
“Look, I asked questions,” he said. “You’re a good firefighter—a damn good one. I told them that. No one argued with me, but we’ve still got to go through the motions. Do you understand?”
It felt as though someone had wrapped Boyd’s brain up in a giant ball of tinfoil and was rolling it around inside his skull. So…. “No. I haven’t done anything.”
Harry looked exasperated as he rubbed his thumb along the bridge of his nose. “Boyd, this isn’t personal. It’s political. You have to understand that sometimes you have to play the game.”
“I get that,” Boyd said. “I just don’t understand how I’ve ended up in the penalty box when I didn’t even know I was in play.”
The chair creaked again as Harry sat back. He looked tired and a little resigned. “You spent your whole life in Cutter’s Gap, Boyd,” he said. “Is this the town you remember from when you were a kid? Do you think we got as many opioid overdoses ten years ago? Twenty? Were there as many shops standing empty? How many kids at your school were hungry or dirty or both?”
Boyd shifted uncomfortably. His memories of the town were tainted by what had happened to Sammy, the shadow of paranoia and suspicion that had kept a close eye on his childhood after that day. But he knew what Harry meant. Cutter’s Gap had been a mining town, then a mill town, then a factory town… all of it gone now. There were a few farms outside of town, short-run contract jobs in the warehouse outside town, or people could drive three hours to the Wal-Mart, but not much else.
He just didn’t see what that had to do with his career.
“People want to change that. They want to bring in new business, convince people to invest in us, maybe even get some tourist money coming in,” Harry said. If he was trying not to sound cynical about that prospect, he failed. “And they don’t want the first thing people think about Cutter’s Gap to be that it’s the place kids disappear.”
“One kid,” Boyd said, as though that mattered. Of course, there were other children who’d been kidnapped or killed over the years, but never so… totally. “And so what? They want to get rid of me because I was Sammy’s friend? What are they going to do next, fire Mac because he was involved in the investigation?”
It was a ridiculous suggestion, but then Harry pursed his lips, and Boyd realized he was right. Almost, at least.
“Mac’s been under pressure for a while,” Harry said. “He just didn’t think it was anything you—or Shay and Donna—needed to worry about. They aren’t trying to rewrite the past, Boyd. They just want it to stay buried. No more investigations, no more bloggers, no more news crews, and no more chasing down leads and drawing attention.”
Boyd exhaled as he sank back in the chair. Then he fidgeted to his feet, a jolt of adrenaline with nowhere to actually go itchy in his joints. He paced back and forth and then stopped abruptly behind the chair and gripped the back of it.
“I won’t forget about Sammy,” he said. “Mrs. Calloway won’t. For fucks sake, Harry, everyone in town grew up with early curfews and escorts home. No one is going to forget about it.”
“That’s not who they care about,” Harry said. He rubbed his hand over his cropped silver hair and sighed. “Me? I’m always going to remember that year. I’m never going to forget his face or how scared I was for my kids. But the reporters, the true crime writers, the vultures don’t care about me or anyone else in town. They want to see the grieving best friend, the broken older brother, the mother who still believes in miracles.”
Boyd leaned his weight on the chair until it creaked and tried to control the tension that burned in his muscles. “Imagine it as blue smoke,” he’d been told as a kid. “Breathe it out and shake it off.” It didn’t work. He dragged himself upright with a jerky movement that shoved the chair into the desk with a crack.
“Fuck it,” he said. “And fuck you. I don’t deserve this.”
Harry narrowed his eyes momentarily but let the swear word slide. He sat back and rubbed his hand over his face.
“If we all got what we deserved,” he said wearily, “Sammy Calloway would have made it home that day, and none of this would matter. Go home, Maccabee, and… maybe think about what you want. This isn’t going to stick this time, but if enough complaints are made, it won’t matter if there’s truth to them. I know Sammy was your friend, but do you really think he’d want you to flush your life away?”
It wasn’t funny, but it made Boyd laugh anyhow.
“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll ask him,” he said as he stalked toward the door. “Next time I see him.”
That thought lasted until Boyd had grabbed his bag and stalked out onto the street. Then last night—this morning’s—hard words caught up with him. It wasn’t that he’d hung on to the fight, but he didn’t know who he wanted to be there when he knocked on the door. That didn’t seem fair to either of them.
Maybe he’d find the answer in the bottom of a bottle. Or two. Why not? It wasn’t as though he had work in the morning.
