Down River Read Free Page A

white gloves, painful swabs, and a fat paramedic with sweat hanging from his nose. Light flashed red and they lifted me out. The hospital solidified around me: sounds I knew and odors I’d smelled one time too many. The same ceiling they’d had for the past twenty years. A baby-faced resident grunted over old scars as he patched me up. “Not your first fight, is it?”
    He didn’t really want an answer, so I kept my mouth shut. The fighting started somewhere around age ten. My mother’s suicide had a lot to do with that. So did Danny Faith. But it had been a while since my last one. For five years I’d moved through my days without a single confrontation. No arguments. No hard words. Five years of numbness, now this: three-on-one my first day back. I should have gotten in the car and left, but the thought never occurred to me.
    Not once.
    When I walked out, three hours later, I had taped ribs, loose teeth, and eighteen stitches in my head. I hurt like nobody’s business. I was pissed.
    The doors slipped shut behind me, and I stood, bent to the left, favoring the ribs on that side. Light spilled out across my feet, and a few cars passed on the street. I watched them for a couple of seconds, then turned back to the lot.
    A car door opened thirty feet away, and a woman climbed out. She took three steps and stopped at the hood of the car. I recognized every part of her, even at that distance. She was five eight, graceful, with auburn hair and a smile that could light a dark room. A new pain welled up inside me, deeper, more textured. I thought I’d have time to find the right approach, the right words. But I was empty. I took a step and tried to hide the limp. She met me halfway, and her face was all hollow places and doubt. She studied me from top to bottom, and her frown left little question of what she saw.
    “Officer Alexander,” I said, forcing a smile that felt like a lie.
    Her eyes moved over my injuries. “Detective,” she corrected me. “Bumped up two years ago.”
    “Congratulations,” I said.
    She paused, looked for something in my face. She lingered on the stitches in my hairline, and for an instant, her face softened. “This is not how I thought we would meet again,” she said, eyes back on mine.
    “How then?”
    “At first, I saw a long run and a hard embrace. Kisses and apologies.” She shrugged. “After a few years with no word, I imagined something more confrontational. Screaming. Some swift kicks, maybe. Not seeing you like this. Not the two of us alone in the dark.” She gestured at my face. “I can’t even slap you.”
    Her smile failed, too. Neither of us could have seen it happening like this.
    “Why didn’t you come inside?”
    Her hands settled on her hips. “I didn’t know what to say. I thought the words would come to me.”
    “And?”
    “Nothing came.”
    I couldn’t respond at first. Love dies hard, if at all, and there was nothing to say that had not been said many times in the far past of that other life. When I did speak, the words came with difficulty. “I had to forget this place, Robin. I had to push it down.”
    “Don’t,” she said, and I recognized the anger. I’d lived with my own for long enough.
    “So what now?” I asked.
    “Now, I take you home.”
    “Not to my father’s house.”
    She leaned closer and a glimmer of the old warmth appeared in her eyes. A smile flirted on the lines of her mouth. “I wouldn’t do that to you,” she said.
    We moved around her car, and I spoke over the roof. “I’m not here to stay.”
    “No,” she said heavily. “Of course not.”
    “Robin…”
    “Get in the car, Adam.”
    I opened the door and sank into the car. It was a big sedan, a cop car. I looked at the radios and the laptop, the shotgun locked to the dash. I was wiped. Painkillers. Exhaustion. The seat seemed to swallow me up, and I watched the dark streets as Robin drove.
    “Not much of a homecoming,” she said.
    “Could have been worse.”
    She