Small Mercies

“Come on! Come back!” Now Rum is standing in the doorway of the room.

“Yeah, Deb.”

“She only dates doctors.”

“She’s a clerk.”

“Who looks like Raquel Welch. Are you fucking kidding me? You got a better chance dating the real Raquel than you do dating Deb.”

“What, she’s a friend of yours?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“So you think you gotta shot with her.”

Bobby snorts at the notion. “I’m an out-of-shape cop ten years older than her. I got zero shot. And I know it. Which is why she doesn’t mind chatting with me. You, on the other hand, I bet you slap on some Aqua Velva, go leaning into her counter all ‘What color lipstick you wearing?’”

“Fuck you.”

“‘You do something with your hair?’”

“No, really. Fuck you.”

“Officers, please!”

“We’re fucking detectives,” Vincent shouts. Then to Bobby: “No chance, uh?”

Bobby shakes his head. “Two of you stranded on a desert island, she’d still probably hold out two, three years — at least — in case of a rescue.”

“You’re such a prick.”

Bobby gives it some thought. “You’re not wrong.”

“Please!”

They both look over at him. He’s leaning on the doorjamb, not wanting to risk stepping into a room of heavily armed people who, if they glance at him at all, do so with contempt. His blood-encrusted jeans are definitely stuck to his thighs and groin. His eyes are leaky again. “I can’t go back out there.”

Bobby and Vincent stare back at him with vacancy signs in their eyes.

“Please don’t make me.”

“We have nothing to hold you on,” Bobby says.

“Go with God,” Vincent says.

“Arrivederci,” Bobby says.

“Vaya con dios,” Vincent says.

“You just said that,” Bobby tells him.

“No, I didn’t. I said, ‘Go with God.’”

“Frank Toomey,” Rum says, “made us go back into the station.”

Someone in the squad room whistles, low and long. Everyone’s looking at Rum Collins now.

Rum looks at Bobby like a guy who knows his life will never be the same again. “He told us we had to finish the job.”

20

According to Rum, after Frank Toomey told them to go back and “finish the job,” he stayed where he was. Leaning against his car.

“So he didn’t go with you?”

“No.”

“And he didn’t elaborate on what ‘finish the job’ meant?”

“No.”

“He didn’t get any more specific?”

Rum shakes his head. “Uh-uh.”

Bobby can already see Frank’s defense attorney going, “So, ‘finish the job’ could have meant going home for the night, cleaning up the bottles you broke, or could have even meant helping get Auggie Williamson to a doctor.”

Finishing the job, Bobby knows, could mean fucking anything.

When it came down to what they did do when they returned to the platform, Rum was sure that someone rolled Auggie Williamson onto the tracks but was somehow unsure who that someone could have been.

And how could that be?

“I was taking a piss,” Rum informs them.

This fucking job, Bobby thinks. You have them, they’re on the ropes, ready to talk, and then some pestilent germ of a polluted idea works its way into their hamster brain and they think, I can get out of this.

And you’re back to square one.

Bobby’s too tired — and on his night off — to go back to square one.

“Rum,” he says, “it takes two people to roll a body. Otherwise, the body goes right when you want it to go left, or left when you want to go right, it’s a whole thing. So, you and George, you rolled Auggie Williamson off the platform. And he fell and hit the back of his head and died. You didn’t mean it, but it happened.”

Rum says, “That’s not what happened.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Okay, we rolled him off the platform, okay, we did that.”

Bobby nods.

“But then he got up.”

“He what?”

“He got up. Like he rose to his feet?”

Vincent stops writing. They watch Rum Collins. He’s not looking up and to the right anymore — a sure sign someone’s lying. He’s looking in — a sure sign someone’s remembering.

“He got up. And then he fell back down. And then he kinda got to his knees. And the girls were crying cuz it was, like, pathetic? So we climbed down there with him?”

“All of you?”

Rum looks at them. Nods.

“And then what happened?”

“Someone found a rock.”

“Who?”

Rum looks at them and says nothing.

“Who found the rock?”

Rum says, “It wasn’t me.”

“So who was it?”

Rum grits his teeth. “It wasn’t me.”

Bobby watches him for a bit. Looks at Vincent, who gives him a tiny headshake — they’re at the part of the dance where they could lose this kid.

“Let’s forget about who has the rock for a minute,” Bobby says. “Just tell me what they did with it.”

Rum turns that over in his brain for a bit. He’s too stupid to know at this point that he’s already copped to half a dozen felonies, including attempted murder.

He opens his mouth and, in a sentence, ties himself to it for life. “They — the person — hit him in the back of the head with the rock.”

“Hit Auggie Williamson.”

“Yeah.”

And this was the piece that has never lined up with every story they’ve heard or every theory they’ve surmised about what happened that night — how did Auggie Williamson get the fracture at the base of his skull?

Now they know.