#sergeant macdonald

Reed's not a bad liar but Mac's seen a lot of eyes in his years and they always give 'em away, even the young men who believe they can't be hurt.  Reed's not stupid, not really - just new, just some yearling who hasn't settled into his stride yet, who wears his badge like a buck wears a new pair of antlers.  He's a good kid.  A fool kid, but a good kid.  

Mac thinks that Pete can see that, too - which is really part of the problem, isn't it?

Mac'd love to have a beer with the kid, and tell him about Pete.  How he laughs and how he drinks.  How he kids but he's honest to the core.  How he loves, and how he's loyal to a fault.  Mac could tell him stories so raw and rowdy they'd take the blue off the sky.  He could tell Reed how Pete was.

But that's just the problem, isn't it.

When the Captain and the Lieutenant had asked him what he thought of assigning Pete a rookie, he was all for it.  He would've set up a full briefing, with color photographs and pull-down charts and diagrams on the chalkboard, about how they couldn't find anyone in the division better, Pete would for sure drag any rookie through the briar but he'd drag him out too, he'd be by his side all the way.  Pete would tease the kid and teach him.  Mac could've told them all about him, but he typed it out in measured sentences, to only say that yes, he would recommend Pete for the job.  

Pete had talked to him about it.  Pete, being Pete, wasn't too sure.  Pete had always had a patient streak, and he liked to get the facts before he made a move.  

Mac had said, what do you mean?  You remember being the rookie, you just be the guy you needed to bring you along.  

And Pete had said, what I needed was to get a clock upside the head.

But he was grinning when he said it, the smile he had that rose into his eyes when he meant mischief.  

Mac had said, and that's why I've got the stripes and you don't, pal.

By the end of the watch, Tommy was bearing Pete's taunts about his hair with reasonable humor.  Tommy was a stolid kid who still had acne under his ears,  a boy with a bad case of bravery but a kind face, and kind hands.  He came out to inspection his first day with his badge on upside-down, and Mac had liked him immediately.

"He's like you," Pete had told him.

Mac had frowned at him - "I don't know how I feel about that."

Pete, grinning, the laugh at the corner of his mouth, said "Me neither, Mac."

Two shifts in and Mac was pretty sure the two of them were plotting to woo every eligible woman in the division, four shifts and there was a fake scorpion in Walters' locker, but Mac couldn't be too mad, because Pete was teaching the kid to be a good cop.  Pete's tongue was a knife some watch-nights, but it was carving a good man out of the raw-boned boy.

It was a good couple of weeks.  So good, that Mac still yearns for the laugh ringing in the locker room, the way a treble note hangs in the rafters of a church, the way a boy's hand remembers the first shy touch of a girl.  They were riding high, Pete and Tommy, faltering sometimes, but falling to each other's shoulders.  The Lieutenant had said, Mac, you were right about him, for sure.  And the Captain had even thanked him for the recommendation - but please, he'd said, creases milding his eyes, keep them out of my office.  

Mac thought he could do that, he said to Pete, the Captain tells me if you give him any more grey hairs he's going to start charging you for the dye job.

"Just me?  What about Tommy?"

"You're the senior man, Pete.  You've got responsibilities now."

"You mean I've got custody."

"That's another way to put it."

"I'll have him in home and in bed by one o'clock."

"Make sure he brushes his teeth."

"You got it, Papa Bear."

Pete was smiling when he left him, and smiling when he swung Tommy out to the parking lot by the shoulder.  Mac had followed them.  It was a cool night,  and a dense fog had lumbered into the basin, and in the drizzle their breath hovered in front of their faces as they got in the car, talking about something.  Probably women, or perhaps where to go for seven.  Maybe where to stash another fake scorpion.  Mac had a cigarette, watching them pull away.  

The smile on Pete's face, and the way the drizzle had collected like stars on Tommy's jacket collar, are fixed in his mind as sure as a snapshot.  

The next time he saw Pete there had been some expression frozen to his face, something Mac had never seen before, and something that scared him back to being twenty with a rifle in his hands.  The look on his face was like an trapped animal, and his teeth, bared and chattering, shone in the damp black night.  

Tommy was dead on the ground out in front a of a very ordinary looking house, a yellow Craftsman with a picket fence, a slate walkway, a neatly trimmed lawn and a wreath of plastic flowers on the door, which was open.  

Tommy's eyes were open, too, halfway, and his mouth, and Mac thought maybe the light from the porch was casting a long shadow from Tommy's sprawled shoulder but it wasn't, it was blood, and the blood was still wet.

Blood and grass was in Pete's hair, on his jacket, on his knuckles.  There was a man mostly in the patrol car and he'd been cuffed and was spitting onto the curb.

Walters had Pete by the arm, both of them tense, Pete a storm and Walters a rowboat tossed on waves.  Walters' face was splashed with porch-light and pale with hollow fear.

There was so much to take in, so much to sort out.  On the back end of it, after the detectives had spit Pete back out and he sat in the locker room half in uniform, Mac had wanted to go to him, like a sergeant would, like a friend would.  But Pete was sitting there in his ruined shirt - the blood had dried in muddy blotches, and Mac thought he could smell it, like meat in the market, or maybe it was just the lockers, just the smell of men's bodies crammed in, joking and sweating and laughing and living.  

Pete just sitting there dumbstruck on the bench, his eyes far-off, looking young and strangely small, as if he'd shrunk a size or two.  Sat there like a kid who'd lost a fight too big to win, waiting on authority to come down on him.

Looking an awful lot like Reed did some nights after watch, an expression pinched with lonesome thoughts, trying to get it right, trying to catch a break, trying so hard he trips over his own feet, his face, his words, his hands.  

Mac isn't sure which of them he wants to grab and throttle more.  Jim, who runs headlong - every damn time - into Pete's wicked tongue or worse his silence, or Pete, too damn stubborn to remember who pulled the trigger.  He wants to shake some sense into the both of them, either of them, whoever runs afoul of him first.  It's a rotten, surly kind of anger, something that makes his chest feel like caving in.

It takes a warehouse bust to finally snap his temper like tinder on a hillside.  Nothing serious, but the kid takes a right-hook to the jaw and a carton of computer parts to the gut.  Reed is writing the report with an bag of ice to his face, when his nose starts bleeding again.  

"Aw, Christ, Reed, wouldya get that fixed?  Look, you're - jesus, you've fucked up your book."

"Sorry, sir," Reed mumbles, fumbling over grabbing a kleenex or shoving the ice-bag into his face.  "Sorry," comes out all muffled.

"Don't be fucking sorry, kid, don't do it!"

In the time he's been Sergeant, Mac has pulled rank less than a hand of times on Pete.  Not because they're friends - but because his friend has never made it necessary.  

"Malloy." He barks, his voice dropping an octave, calling up his service days, and the few officers still around make themselves scarce.

Because they're friends, though, Mac drags him to the locker room and not his office, where the window makes it too easy for the rubberneckers to lurk.

"What in the hell is this about?"

That stubborn kid from the Academy with the smoke-blue eyes is staring back at him with boxer's shoulders cocked.  "What?"

"You! Reed! You've raked that kid over the coals almost every watch I've seen you two - everything he does right, you give him two things he did wrong."

"You wanted me to teach him."

"Teach him!  Pete, you're grinding him down to a nub, lay off, will you?"

"Lay off, what'll that get him?  A fist in his teeth, like tonight?  I let him get complacent, he's liable to get a bullet in his head."

"I'm not asking you to give him free rein, I'm asking you to be reasonable.  A bloody nose isn't his fault."

"It's his fault for getting it, isn't it?"

"Is it?  Who's his FTO, Pete?  Who's his partner?  Who's supposed to be looking out for him?"

That's the wrong thing to say, and Mac knows it.  Pete's face seals it, that stunned look from eight weeks ago, the hands with the blood on them that wasn't his, and the ruined shirt crumpled on the floor outside the showers.  

He's known him long enough to dodge the hit, and he hasn't been so long off the streets that his body's forgotten how to fight.  

If anybody's thinking about coming to the lockers about now, they'd damn well better think twice.

If anybody sees them, he's going to have to save face, he's going to have to be the sergeant, and he can't do it, can't twist the knife he's already jammed in.

So he pins Pete, like he'd wrestle a perp, and Pete curses him, curses his family, curses Jim, curses God and the world, curses Tommy Parker, and finally, finally, he curses himself.

"Jesus.  Jesus fucking Christ, what'd I do, Mac, what'd I do?  I've thought about it a hundred, a thousand times, what'd I do?  Why didn't I think of it, why didn't I remind him, stay to the side?  Why'd I send him first?  He wasn't ready, Mac, he wasn't."

"If you'd gone, it might be him taking a swing at me right now."

Pete laughs a jolting laugh, like boxcars clanging in the yards.  "Tom couldn't hit the broadside of a barn."

"No.  Wasn't much of a fighter."

Pete breathes in deep, breathes out hard.  But his eyes are softer.  

"Pete," he says, letting him up and letting him stand, man-to-man, against the wall.  "It wasn't your fault."

"That's what everyone says."

"It isn't Reed's fault, either."

Pete looks away.  At the lockers.  At the scuffed floor.  At the ceiling, where one panel is askew, because Brinkman and Parker were relieving their high school glory days with an apple from the breakroom.

"Pete.  It's not his fault."

"Yeah." Pete sighs. "Yeah.  I know."

"Well, could you act like it, then?"

"What do you want me to do, hold his hand?"

"Apologize, for one.  Two, treat him like a person.  And three, get him a new ice pack and a box of kleenex."

Pete's smile is shaky, but it's the most genuine Mac's seen on him in two months.  "You gonna write me up for assaulting an officer?"

"No, but if you ever try anything like it again, I'm staking you out on the beach and dumping french fries on you.  Those Manhattan Beach gulls get hold of you, there won't be anything left to write up."

Pete shrugs. "Fair."  Pete brushes his uniform off.  Tucks the hem of his shirt back into his pants.  "Mac."

"Yeah?"

Later that evening, Mac had sat up with Pete in the bathroom, waiting patiently for him to empty his stomach, turn it inside, or pass out entirely - or some combination of the three.  Pete had given him half the money, insisted on it - and five dollars wasn't something to sneeze at, not then, not as young men with glory in reach - even as Mac demured.  I didn't exactly help, Mac had said.  And Pete had insisted again: you kept me from falling in, after, didn't ya?  

Mac's grateful that Pete's cultivated some better sense, in the intervening years.

Mac thinks about this when he looks at Jim Reed, pacing the waiting room in Central Receiving like a fresh-caught colt in a pen.  He thinks about this and watches Jim, because if he doesn't he'll have to think about Pete in surgery, about Pete lying in the dark for hours waiting, about how many more hours he could've been there, without Jim's determination.  He is too tired, just now, for what-ifs.  If Mac thinks too hard, he's going to have to sit down, and he's not sure he's going to get up again.

He ought to tell Jim to go home.

He could chastise him, too, for disobeying like he did.  Going off to the park, like that.

But Jim was right, wasn't he?  Pete probably would've been proud of him, after he cuffed the kid one across the ears.  For stubbornness.

How many times were either of them right, but bullheaded, how often did they get a stripe taken off them, how many tired sighs and half-rolled eyes did they get, put together, from the Lieutenant, when he was watch commander?

More than he or Pete would like for Jim to know.  

Mac remembers the time - they were still kids then, throttled by their ties and tangled up in the hasty thoughts of young men, their immortality - he was hit by a car on a scene, it was a 211, a liquor store robbery and he got caught by the getaway driving screaming around from the alley.  

So he was told.  He has a only a rough memory of that night, something like the blueprint of a call, an empty house bricked up with hurt, god did it hurt, going from standing to sprawling wondering how the world had turned to sky of a sudden.  Sky and sirens and Pete, yelling his name, and a later - a long, gauzy time later - Pete's voice rough at his side, saying, you dumb Scottish bastard, you got to wake up, you hear me?  You got to wake up sometime.

Down into the dark and back up from the depths.  Something to hang onto, there, something that wasn't the pain thumping in his broken body, something that wasn't the tiresome burn of the needle in his arm or the board and the bandages tying it to the bed.  

(you ripped it out, Pete told him.  You tried.)

(well, he'd said, not feeling better but trying to, well, I am just a dumb Scottish bastard.)

Pete's in surgery, so the doctor says - a young doctor, with thick glasses and blow-dried hair, spouting a cascade of terms and tasks he has no real frame of reference for, words like cross-matching and transfusion and infection control and trauma - and family, does he have any family?

Mac tells the doctor he will have to check the personnel files.  That his parents live outside Seattle, that he has a brother in Chicago and another in Texas, and another who fled up north to Canada once the draft started sniffing around.  

He knows what the doctor wants: to know who they'll call in case Pete dies.  Who's gonna pack up and come down to the morgue and pull down the sheet and say yes, that's him, that's our son, that's our brother, thank you now we've come to take him come.  

"James Reed," the nurse says, suddenly at his elbow, with a clipboard and a starched cap and a pencil stuck in her hairdo like a waitress.  "That's the name in the record.  Next of kin."

"Jim?" Mac says, knocked askew, brought back abruptly to Pete in his hospital room, playing solitaire on the bedside table, quieter than Pete most often was.  

"Sarge?"

Jim had been pacing so like a metronome from tile to tile and wall to wall that Mac had sort of forgotten he was there.  

"Mister Reed?" the nurse asks.

"Uh, yes ma'am, yes, that's me."  

"Are you family?"

Jim, bless his eyes, his good heart, is about to say something stupid, and Mac knows it - years of experience knows it, and the uncommonly gentle look at the lieutenant's face as he watched Pete flip cards from the door of his hospital room (sometimes he thinks he dreamed it) tells him to get his mouth in gear before that happens.  

"Yes," he interrupts.  A biting look at Jim, who shuts up at once.  "Yes, Jim's, uh, he's Pete's brother." Another pointed look, at the kid gets the picture, and all at once the muscles in his neck soften and his hands unclench.

The young doctor accepts this readily and moves to return to whatever the ebb and flow of a doctor's life is, in the labyrinth of the hospital.

The nurse, sharp as a tack, knows he's lying.  But, wise as water, she understands.  "Mister Reed," she says, "your brother will be under for a while yet.  Why don't come sit in the lounge and have a cup of coffee.  You can have a peach tart, Mabel always brings them on the nightshift.  Come on."

Jim follows her down the long hall, whose institutional-gloss paint and scuffed tile seem to shimmer under the flourescents like a mirage, like a dream you wake up feeling in your chest more than you remember.  

He can't say Pete's gonna be fine, he learned a long time ago not to say things like that, not to make promises he can't keep.