II.
Forward
Carlton's desk was the epitome of the word 'tidy.' Everyone in the station knew it. It was pointed out to the rookies as a staple of what the chief expected of her detectives. "This is what your desk should look like," then she would leave the rookies hanging and sweating, "when you leave for the day. No one expects you to have your desk look as neat as Detective Lassiter's all the damn time. Lassiter is the only one who expects it from himself."
Damn right he did. Especially today. He'd been staying late since Monday, scraping his way through his Inbox, stacking up files in the Outbox, running through pens and pencils like a schoolboy just to finish up his work by Wednesday afternoon. Shawn and he were flying out to Indianapolis. He wanted to leave an empty desk behind, wanted to come back in two weeks to an empty desk ready to take on the challenges of heists and, unfortunately, murders.
A whole two weeks away. Those in the office were beginning to talk. Scuttlebutt ran rampant. Lassiter, gone two whole weeks! Some would be less afraid to come to work. Some were looking forward to a heavier workload that was sure to be theirs in Lassiter's absence. Others, in the darkest and shadowiest portions of the station, wondered where their resident psychic was, and why he hadn't been in since Saturday, and if it was true that Carlton kept a picture frame in his desk of him and Shawn together. They had fun with their presumptions, and Carlton never enlisted the aid of truth. He felt, at times, that his desk lay trapped in a box of steel, that there he worked and there he existed as a cop, and at home he was himself—each version whole, each version carrying its own weight and meaning and profoundness. The moment he felt the dichotomy shift was that which saw him at a certain streetlight at a certain part of Santa Barbara. It was there that he left the guise behind, took off his badge and left it in the next seat over, as if it rode along like a silent passenger: Carlton was driving now, not Detective Lassiter. He never felt this way when he left his desk.
His neat, tidy desk.
He couldn't wait for the hands of the clock above the coffee bar to reach an acceptable departure hour. Even the computer clock crept on. His watch's battery had worn itself out, worrying over the lost minutes of the last forty-eight hours. It lay stiff and dead on the picture frame in his desk, over the blue sky above his and Shawn's heads. He had his phone. He never looked at it for the time. He looked at it for Shawn's bitty text messages, those wordy tokens of love in a hundred and sixty characters or less. His phone lay in his coat pocket, next to his hip, near his gun.
"De—" A stall, as Buzz was subjected to Lassiter's look of—of what was it? Not quite contentment, but he was not his usual contemptuous self when a uniform bothered him in the middle of the day. "Detective Lassiter, where's Shawn been? I'd ask O'Hara, but she—" He swallowed, unable to say. Detective O'Hara had laughed and said he should ask Lassiter. He kept his usual sphere from Lassiter, not less than two feet, not more than five. Out of reach of long arms capable of hostilities and mumbled invectives. "We haven't seen him lately. That's all. He sick again? I know the weather's been awful."
Lassiter hadn't grown used to this yet. He'd been with Shawn—Shawn—how many weeks now? But it wasn't weeks any more. It had progressed into months. Soon, he'd be counting by years. Then came decades and anniversaries and old age, infirmary, death, the triumph of love at the end of it all. It made his hands tremble, thinking of what it would be like if Shawn turned to an image ghostly and unnatural, intangible, improbable.
What was Buzz's question?
Oh, right, that—that one.
Carlton answered politely. And if he was polite it generally meant that he was truthful.
"He's giving a speech to the Citizens Police Academy this afternoon. It's the last class. They're graduating today, and they kept wanting to talk to Shawn, so—"
So there it was. McNab smiled, nodding his thanks.
"Did Shawn ever go to that class himself?"
Buzz wished he hadn't asked, but there was a subtlety in Lassiter, something human that Buzz had spent years searching for. It led them two of them to collogue. Shawn was a subject one could converse about easily. He was the unifier. Like food and shelter, one could always talk about him because he rotated importantly through their lives. He was common ground.
"He doesn't need to," said Carlton, setting up his pencils in a row. Then, abruptly, he scattered the pile and endeavored to leave them like that. He didn't need to be OCD about his pencils now that someone had removed the cold pipe from the hot crevice of his ass. "But Sergeant Reyes thinks it's interesting to hold a Q and A with Shawn on their last day. Shawn is more like them than he is like me or you; he's not a cop, but he's worked with us so long that he knows more of what goes on here than," he paused, straightened his tie, raised his eyebrows when looking at McNab, "than he probably should or wants to, really. His dad was a cop. His best friend is married to one. He lives with one."
"Yeah, I see what you mean. Shawn would do well in that class. Have fun on your trip." McNab wanted to get away. That was the most he'd heard Lassiter say in five years that wasn't attached to a shift meeting or a manhunt briefing. At least he'd stopped himself from saying You and Shawn have fun on your trip. There was no proof that Shawn was going. Just the hint of it. Lassiter never would go anywhere without Shawn. And Lassiter had become more human—that word again, as if he'd been a statue before—more personal, then, since he'd swallowed the light Shawn emanated. Auras. Psychics called them auras.
Lassiter checked his phone. The time was unimportant.
He set it back down again, slightly dismayed. No message from Shawn.
But it was one-thirty. He was probably already at the substation, probably already mingling and blending and winning the hearts of everyone there.
A Question and Answer sessions with Santa Barbara Police Department psychic, solver of numerous crimes and a few cold cases. It would be a treat for the students.
Carlton caught his knee shaking up and down. He stopped it. He wished his nerves would recede. He could hear Shawn's voice in the back of his head. "It's a new moon day." Shawn liked to blame moods on the moon. Carlton tried to pass it off as mumbo-jumbo. But Shawn had an answer for him, as he had an answer, eventually, for everything. "You can see the light of the moon, the twist of the stars in the sky, you can feel the wind and the sun's warmth. You live in Santa Barbara. The ocean's right there." He flung his hand at the door, indicating the sea then at neap tide. "If you can see the pull of the moon on the water, on something that enormous, you can call it mumbo-jumbo or gobbledygook or whatever." Lassiter knew he was right. So the moon didn't have any power, huh? Yet how often had he relied on his instincts to lead him in a case? And he couldn't see his instincts, but he could see the ocean succumb to the whims of Earth's satellite.
It was a new moon day, according to the app on his phone. Energy and aggression would be easy. Starting fresh projects. Going on vacation…
Carlton rather wished he could go to the substation and see Shawn perform his regalities as questions were flung at him, as answers wound out of his mouth and hypnotized his audience. Shawn was part magician: he played tricks. He was part god, because Carlton didn't know yet how Shawn got the strength or acumen to execute those tricks. It had to be a blessing from a higher being, from the consciousness of a star, from the slyness of the moon.
Carlton zipped a text off to Shawn. He didn't get an answer back. But, by the time he remembered that Shawn hadn't texted him yet, he was down to the last three cases in the Inbox.
He pushed paper, pencil, keys on the keyboard—and he tried to push around the hours of the day.
One thing was true: Vacations refused to be rushed into.
