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Chiefly
by Helen W.
Cascade, WA
November 30, 2006
10 a.m.
Mayor-elect Simon Banks leaned forward across his broad desk, reducing their separation by half. "Let me cut to the chase here, Jim. I need someone I can trust to replace me as chief. And that's you."
Chief of Police for the second-largest city for 500 miles. It was a job that Jim Ellison had never considered wanting. A job that, he'd have wagered, most people who'd known him when he was in the army, or during his first years on the force, would have thought him completely inadequate for.
A decade ago, he'd only been able to do decent work alone, but Sandburg had cured him of that pretty quickly. When he'd taken over Major Crimes four years ago, he'd had to make an even larger adjustment to how he conducted himself on the job - he'd had to learn how delegate, how to trust his colleagues not to screw things up - but he'd soon found that he actually liked managing people, and in retrospect this wasn't all that surprising. He'd always enjoyed mentoring people, and leading a team of 20 cops really wasn't all that different from teaching Danny Choi and his friends how to throw a curve ball. And the skills he'd honed in the Army and with the Chopec were useful as well - he could still be a real bastard when he needed to be.
And they seemed to be doing things right, him and Simon and the other division heads. Due to reduced federal dollars and ongoing war-related national guard call-ups, the PD had fewer cops than pre-9/11, and yet they'd kept their solve rate high and experienced a steady drop in the rate of serious crime going back to the late 1990s, unlike most other U.S. cities of similar size. Simon could take credit for a lot of this (and had; it's what had gotten him elected) but Jim knew the performance of Major Crimes had been a big factor. If you crossed the line in Cascade, you got caught, and that was about as big a deterrent as there was.
And it wasn't just him playing mobile crime lab, either. When he'd taken over Major Crimes, his days of real detective work had pretty much ended, but that had only seemed to increase his staff's energy and attention to detail. Maybe it was that they were afraid the boss would find something they'd missed, or maybe it was just that people knew not to waste time bickering or griping anywhere near him. Or perhaps the reputation of Major Crimes drew people interested in excellence.
Would any of this scale? Could he manage a force of 2000? Maybe. Probably. It would take everything he had, and he wouldn't necessarily be able to use the same techniques as he did in Major Crimes, but he'd learn and adapt. And he would still have Simon to bounce things off of.
And not just Simon, of course.
"I... Let me sleep on it, sir," he said.
"Yes, yes, I know, I shouldn't have bothered to make you the offer without Sandburg in the wings, but it's harder to get on his schedule than mine these days. Go talk to him and get back to me."
On his way out of the building, Jim ducked into Major Crimes to tell Rhonda he was heading up to Blair's place. "Overnight?" she asked, and Jim shook his head. Cassie (let's hear it for Singulair!) and Megan's case had taken an unexpected turn, and he wanted to spend some time with them on it later. But what he had to tell Blair wouldn't wait until the weekend.
He hated that Sandburg's compound/camp/whatever was such a haul from the city, but today he was glad to have the long drive to think about the conversation he had to have with Sandburg.
And anyway, the drive was nowhere near as aggravating as having Sandburg work with his clients in the loft that first summer after the dis fiasco. Man, hadn't that been a pain!
Not that Sandburg had done that for long. But that summer had been... difficult for them both. Almost as soon as the cameras had stopped clicking in Jim's face, Blair had started to get letters, calls, emails, people on their doorstep. "My little girl won't eat anything but fruit, and won't wear anything but pajamas." "They say my son is autistic, but he's very social. What do I do with him?" "My brother can't even go into a supermarket." "My parents don't know where I am, but I just couldn't live in that house anymore." "Why do I notice the fog so much, when nobody else is blinded by it?" "I can read things nobody else can and pick out individual voices in a stadium. Surely there's something useful I can do with this?" "The nursing facility says my mother is delusional, but she's always been able to see and hear things nobody else can. It's never been a problem. Can you write a note saying she's sane?" "Can you help my child?" "Can you help my friend?" "Can you help me?"
So Blair did.
It had been a major factor in Blair's decision not to go to the academy - "I don't think that's my calling" - and, yeah, Jim had to agree that Blair's pull was elsewhere. So they'd worked out a settlement with the university and with Naomi's overzealous publisher friend that got Blair enough money to pay off his debts. He'd also negotiated a shot writing up a thesis on - hell, Jim couldn't even remember what. Most importantly for Jim, the U. had begged Sandburg to teach a class that fall, which got Blair an office to work out of again come September.
Blair continued to help Jim out some with his police work (including the odd bit of sentinel-related stuff), and others in the PD had also started consulting Blair about this and that. Enough that Simon, with a sigh, had put him on the payroll as a part-time consultant, which kept Blair around the station. It was almost like things had always been.
Blair'd finished writing up his thesis almost a year to the day after the press conference, and defended to a packed room and a standing ovation. So maybe not every student or professor at Rainier was a loser or a homicidal maniac. The closed-door part of Blair's defense took 20 minutes, and then it was over. Jim'd amused himself for about a week calling Sandbaurg "Doctor" at every opportunity.
Once Blair had begun seeing people - they wouldn't be called clients for a while yet - at Rainier, Jim had found himself taking an interest in Blair's work with them. Helped Blair figure out what to say in notes to teachers and the like. Drove one runaway home with Blair and helped another get settled in the social services system. Let Blair bounce off him what he was hearing from the people who tracked him down.
Together, they came to the conclusion that an awful lot of people had sensory management issues, they all seemed to have Blair's address, and Blair needed a more systematic way of dealing with them.
And so Blair found Mark and Jane and went pro, with a suite in the Cascade Medical Complex and someone to answer the phones and everything. Well, actually, Jane, a LCSW Naomi's age who'd been working with atypical (and, she thought, sometimes misdiagnosed) autistic children for two decades, found Blair. She got him hooked up with people in the medical profession who were looking into sensory perception issues, worked out licensing so that Blair could legally call himself a therapist and be covered by insurance, and introduced him to Mark, a newly-minted Ph.D. psychologist. Mark was more of a flake than Sandburg, but he'd spent most of his childhood thinking he was deaf and half-blind because everyone in his family had been able to see and hear more than he could. Mark just seemed to innately know stuff about how people with enhanced senses could function as "fully integrated, productive members of society".
It was Mark who convinced Sandburg that they needed to move part of their operation out of the city. That weekly or bi-weekly or 24-a-year 50 or 90 minute sessions weren't what a lot of the people that came to them needed. Their clients didn't (or, didn't just) need to learn how to manage having their senses, they had to learn to truly use them, in a more natural environment. Jane had been skeptical - she tended to take on their clients who were the most adversely affected by their senses, and her goal was usually basic functionality - but Mark's ideas jived well with Blair's thoughts on the evolutionary nature and usefulness of sentinel abilities.
In addition, there were some clients who just didn't seem to be able to cope with modern city life - be it because of the noise, or the pace, or sensitivity to environmental contaminants - and giving them a place where they could have a better shot at a comfortable life had been a very Sandburg thing to do.
Jim had sat stiffly during their bull sessions in the loft, wondering why they couldn't work things out in the office, while the two professionals who were giving Blair everything he'd ever wanted convinced him it was time to move on.
No, that wasn't quite fair - it had been Jim who'd seen a reference to the old scout camp somewhere, and he'd even driven the first time they went and looked the place over. And, well, he'd actually liked it quite a bit from the start. It hadn't been built with people with chemical sensitivities in mind, but the years had allowed most volatiles to evaporate or wear away, and Jim had helped identify the very few things, mostly some fairly-recently-installed pressure-treated wood that reeked of arsenic, that needed getting rid of.
They bought the place for a song (about six months before the real estate boom hit the greater Cascade region) and started fixing up cabins with the help of the first wave of residents - a handful of people (including a few high-sensitivity children, with their parents) who agreed to see if life would be better if they got out of Cascade or Seattle or Portland. Some of the adults found, or maintained, employment in Cascade or in the small towns nearer the camp; others, Sandburg hired as cooks or teachers for the kids or to do maintenance.
And Sandburg also got himself a few students - well, acolytes, really - who were interested in the more personal approach to therapy that Blair himself liked to practice, as opposed to the occupational approach of Jane or the systemic approach of Mark. Jim CORIed the hell out of them and Blair gave them clients to work with and cabins of young people - more and more, teens of various shades of 'delinquent' seemed to be finding their way into Blair's orbit - to babysit.
Jim had thought it would be awful in the loft without Blair there. To find himself living alone again in his early forties. But, after the first week, it had been, well, nice having a den again. And then came his promotion, and he'd been even busier than before.
And he still saw a lot of Sandburg. Blair was in the city two or three days a week to see clients at his clinic, and they rarely went a week without grabbing lunch or an early dinner before Blair headed home. And, of course, if Blair had a reason to be in Cascade overnight, he stayed at the loft. Jim also found himself up at the camp every second or third weekend, working with the teens mostly. They did a lot of tracking in the woods, because it seemed to be something the kids craved, though it wasn't one of Jane's life skills or Mark's social skills. And group cooking (which made Jane and Mark happy) and just general hanging out and talking about the various things that he had found his own senses useful for (which pleased Blair). He wasn't precisely out about the extent of his abilities, but it seemed pointless to pretend like they didn't exist.
Pulling in the driveway (which needed to be paved, but with what?) he got a few waves from a couple of youths - the J's, Jason Wagner and Jonathan Coleman - who were kicking a soccer ball around on the not-yet-dead lawn in front of the closest cabins, and from Jane and her high-needs client, Rosemary, who was doing some season-end leaf-raking. There was a tactile challenge!
He parked the truck and, after a rat-tat-tat and a quick listen to make sure Blair wasn't working with a client, walked into Blair's cabin.
Blair slid the paperwork he was doing into a folder as Jim entered; Blair had always been good about both documentation and confidentiality. "Have a good Turkey Day?" he asked.
Jim shrugged; he'd been up at the camp the previous two Thanksgivings, but had had to stay in town this year. "Whatcha working on, chief?"
"How to get someone who's never trusted anyone in their lives to bond with a therapist enough to start getting somewhere. The whole 'guide' thing, basically."
It was something he and Sandburg had danced around when they'd been essentially partners in the late 1990's, but had never really been able to quantify. What role did someone like Blair play for a person with enhanced senses? Was that role essential only when that person was learning to cope, or take on a new job or something? Or was it a life-time partnership? Or something in between?
"What's the theory this week?"
"In flux, as usual," said Blair. "Hell, I haven't even figured out whether it's different for true sentinels than for people who just have more-acute-than-normal senses."
"Sentinel? You're still using the term?"
"Most of our clients, they aren't really that far out the bell curve, and I don't think they have access to the spirit plane the way you do. But, yeah, I definitely think of you as embodying the sentinel archetype, and I think a few of our clients might also. Mark is sure of it, but I'd want your input before I did any labeling like that."
Jim shrugged and dropped into the seat across the desk from Blair. The spiritual aspect, as Blair termed it, of what he was had always troubled him, and he really didn't want to get into any of that today. "Anyway, I'm not exactly working sentinel thing these days."
"Don't sell yourself short," said Blair. "You and Simon have made a tremendous difference in the quality of life in town, and I know you've put your whole self into that. Immigrant business owners no longer live in fear of being shaken down. Anyone who wants to ship drugs into Cascade in large quantities has to be crazy. And I can't tell you how happy the African American community has been the past few years, with the changes Simon made to how the force operates top to bottom."
Jim nodded, because, yes, they had been doing a good job. Which, really, was why he was here.
Might as well get it over with. "Simon has asked me to succeed him as chief of police," he said.
Blair looked like he wasn't the least bit surprised. "I figured something like that was up when you called earlier. And you told him?"
"I'm thinking about it." He paused. He should be honest here. "That is, I'm taking it."
"You can handle it, man," said Blair. "Wouldn't have thought so ten years ago, but you'll do great. And it's the next step, isn't it?"
"Yeah, it's about the best someone like me can do in life. And, you know, I'm even kind of young for the job."
"Beats Bill hands down."
Jim shrugged. None of this was about his father. Well, it hadn't been, thank-you-very-much, Sandburg.
"So - why am I sensing hesitancy here?" Blair asked.
And here it came. "The hours."
"What? How could they possibly be worse than what you've always put in?"
Jim leaned forward and tapped his fingers on Blair's desk. "I don't know if you've noticed, but I spend an awful lot of time up here."
"Yeah..."
"Taking off at noon on Friday once or twice a month. Sometimes staying until Tuesday if there's nothing critical drawing me back."
"Yeah, but you do nothing but work when you're home, and there are months you don't make it up here at all."
"Twice that's happened," said Jim. "The point is, I prioritize coming up here - spending time with the kids, as well as hanging out with you. And if I've got a high-profile job, I won't be able to. For practical reasons, and for the example that it sets."
Blair nodded. "Have I ever told you how much I appreciate what you do up here? What you do with them, it's something that nobody else can give them."
"Mark..."
"Mark tries, and he's good, but he's not a sentinel. And I've been backing out of doing primary work with our clients up here so that I can work more with the families on support stuff."
"But you can manage, with me here less."
"Well, yeah, sure. Especially if you can at least come up, you know, Saturday and Sunday sometimes. Enough to work with the staff if not the kids."
"That's the thing," said Jim. "Simon needs me and you don't."
"Simon needs you?"
"I'm not going to say that I'm the only person who could possibly do the job. Someone from outside might be better, in fact. But - it's taken us forever to undo the mess Tommy Yuan made. Simon and I trust each other and understand each other. And our goals are the same."
Blair got up and walked to one of the cabin's south-facing windows, and Jim joined him. The boys were still kicking the soccer ball around, and Jane was still with her client, though they'd put down their rakes and were facing each other, Jane loosely holding the other woman's hands. Rubbing them lightly and talking the woman through a breathing exercise, it looked like. On his previous visit, Rosemary had told him that she'd been drunk since she was twelve, before coming to the camp. There were worse things, Jim had found, than having your father bully your senses out of you.
And better; here, at least.
The soccer ball skirted past the women, missing them by inches, and Jane jumped more than Rosemary. Good for Rosemary! Jason chased the ball into some dense undergrowth; also good.
"How's Jason Wagner doing?" asked Jim.
Blair turned and shrugged. "You tell me. We've gotten him to focus well enough to start reading finally. And, did you notice how he's been blocking the ball with his shins as well as his feet? A month ago, he couldn't have tolerated that sort of impact. And, look, he just scraped his hand on that bush. But he's just shaking it and going back to playing."
Jim nodded, remembering the boy becoming almost hysterical when he'd nicked his upper arm on something a few months before.
"So he's doing okay."
Blair turned away. From the window, and... from him?
"The thing is, we can teach them to function like normal people," said Blair. "If there's not too much damage already, or there's not some deeper emotional or physiological thing going on. But, the ones that might be like you - we can't teach them to be sentinels."
Jim thought of how Jason had been in the woods a few weeks before. He'd complained about the dirt and the bugs and the branches that wiped at his face, but finally Jim had gotten him to stop and sit and breath and the boy had started to cry because even there there had been too much. But then Jim had talked him through what he was hearing and feeling, and two hours later Jim had had to almost physically drag the boy back to the camp.
And Jim flashed to a year or two from now, when Jason might be able to sit in a normal classroom and learn in the normal way and maybe he'd even be able to handle a party or a large family dinner - but should that be their goal? Jim had no more true insight than Blair did.
Beside Jim, Blair sighed. "No, Jim, I don't need you. I can run this place. I am running this place. I don't need you," he repeated, "but I think they might."
"I don't know what's right for them," said Jim.
"Maybe not, but you know what's WRONG for them."
And damn if Sandburg might right.
"Move up here," said Blair. "*This* is where you're needed."
"What? Give up the opportunity of a lifetime? To, what, work for Mark?" It sounded even more ridiculous saying out loud.
"Details, man, don't get bogged down by the details," said Blair. "If it's meant to be, we can make it happen."
"It's not about money," he wanted to make sure Blair knew.
"Yeah, I know," said Blair. "You're the Sentinel of the Great City, not a camp counselor."
Yeah. That was it. Maybe. Hell, he didn't know.
"But I'm positive you're not meant to be the ONLY Sentinel of the Great City. And doesn't, like, Seattle deserve one of its own someday? How about Walla Walla?
"Come on, man. You could build the future up here. At least put Simon off for a bit and think things through more - if you're meant to be chief, a day or week won't change THAT either."
"If I do end up living up here, you're going to have to stop talking like that," he said.
Blair laughed. "You coming up this weekend?"
Jim nodded.
"How about you do some thinking about what you really want and when and how you want it. We'll talk more then."
Simon wouldn't be happy with 'maybe' for an answer; for longer than Jim had known Blair, Simon had been calling the major shots in his professional life, hadn't he? And Jim knew that, given a few days, Blair could come up with reasons for him to chuck his police career that Jim would find impossible to argue against.
But, in the end, neither Blair nor Simon got a vote.
For the first time in a decade, Jim had absolutely no idea what he should do.
* * * * THE END * * * *
All feedback is, as usual, appreciated, here or to helenw at murphnet dot org.
This story was originally written for the November, 2006 challenge on SentinelAngst. It benefited greatly from the comments of many on an earlier version, especially those of (sticking to LJ ids here) carodee, earth2skye, snycock, and kerravonsen.