Cops in movies are always asleep when phones ring at three in the morning. Groggy, cranky, cliché.

Gerard didn't have the classic wake up sequence because he wasn't sleeping.

At all.

He'd stopped pretending last week and forgone pajamas for his usual clothes or dressing gown. Now he sat in that stupid hoodie like some angst plagued teenager while watching a musical on mute. The house was dark.

Suddenly, his phone was not.

"Gerard here."

The other end of the line was still. Not silent, exactly, for Gerard could hear someone breathing through his or her nose. But still. No motion.

"Hello? This is Deputy Gerard," he tried again.

"I'm here."

Gerard paused at that. He cocked his head, watching Mary Poppins fly over a house.

"Are you sure?" Sam asked. "Because you don't sound…"

"I'm awake."

"Sure, Richard. Whatever you say. You do realize that it's Sunday night."

"Yes."

"And three in the morning."

"You're not sleeping either."

"Shut up. You did not call me at this godforsaken hour to berate my sleeping habits."

Kimble said nothing.

"Did you watch the Laker's game?" asked Gerard, trying to rouse the bear.

"I'm not much for sports."

"Why doesn't that surprise me? C'mon. There's got to be some sport you like."

Richard was silent. Something rattled in the background.

Gerard's spine went from supine old man to steel girder so fast it popped. His own breaths echoed back from the receiver, faster now. "Richard? Where are you right now? Talk to me."

"What?" Richard sounded surprised, an insult to Gerard's galloping heart. "What's wrong?"

"You…" Sam massaged his chest as if that would help it stop the trapeze impression. "You're not somewhere…dangerous…are you?"

"What? No. I'm in my garage, Sam. Just working on the new truck. I'm at the tire wells for the moment. Stubborn things won't align. I've always been horrible with cars."

Sam. He finally called me Sam. The very first time ever.

"Sam?"

"Yeah, I'm here."

"You okay?"

"That's what I'm asking you."

Richard scoffed but it didn't hide something shaking in his breathing.

"New car." Gerard swallowed, going for humour. "You call that heap of bilge new?"

"It was cheap!"

"It sure was."

"I wanted a fixer upper."

For reasons Gerard didn't want to probe, both went very muted. Sam suddenly wanted nothing more than to see that Richard was in one piece. That he wasn't going over the deep end like Sam had feared at Christmas. That he, Gerard, wasn't going over the deep end.

A more likely scenario, really.

Richard sniffed. "Remember that time I called you from Sykes' house? When I found evidence and you traced the call?"

"Yes." Sam frowned.

"And." Kimble hesitated. "And you came."

"What does that have to do with—?"

"Because I'd never broken into anybody's house before that day and it smelled weird but familiar. His house was offensive, you know? Because it was domestic. It was normal."

Everything came over Sam in one pop. He stood. "Richard. It's going to be—"

"Like he stole it from me. Stole it. And, man, you probably don't realize, but I heard everything agents hissed at you over the phone."

"Ri—"

"It's not like that helped when I had to crawl back out the window. You lied on the phone. But you came to the house. Which made it less like a lie."

Sam's voice went unbelievably quiet. "Richard. Tomorrow…you'll do fine."

"Thanks," Richard whispered. With a sigh, he set down something metallic. Probably a wrench. "Thanks for tracing the call, that time."

White fingers kneaded into the couch in place of Kimble's shoulder.

"Any time, Richard. Any time."

Why do all hospitals smell like cheap wine that's been spilled in a men's bathroom?

This wasn't strictly a rule, of course. But Gerard traversed the halls of Chicago Memorial's upper, quieter floors and wondered what was in the chemicals they used. What corners it lurked in, eyeing visitors and flinging repugnance upon them.

I've been awake too long.

This made much more sense than his first conclusion.

A door at the end of the hall was ajar and Sam glided inside without knocking. A blonde woman, her hair grown out since the gang had last interviewed her, adjusted the sleeve of her white lab coat to fiddle with a microscope's dials. Fleshy plants made the small lab office feel larger than it was.

"Doctor Wahlund, you probably don't know me." He considered flashing his badge and thought better of it. She couldn't see him anyway. "But I'm a…friend of Richard's."

To her credit, she didn't jump. Good ears, then.

"Samuel Gerard." Kathy sat back from her squint at microbes, stool in a slight spin. At his wide eyes, she coloured a little. "I followed the news during Richard's hunt for his wife's killer. Closely."

One eyebrow quirked up but that was all the comment Sam offered. A basket of chocolate bars and imported coffee sat cellophane wrapped on her desk with a green cardstock note tucked behind some lemon squares.

Kathy followed his eyes. "I haven't had a chance to pop down and see Richard yet. Didn't want to overwhelm him on his first week back."

Gerard nodded but it was an absent gesture. He fiddled with the knobs on an unplugged centrifuge.

Kathy watched him, hands folded, smile creeping upwards on her face.

"I want to thank you for having Richard in for Christmas dinner," she said. "My husband and I were away in December and worried about him. Him being alone this first year…"

With a shrug, Gerard finally faced her. "It was the least I could offer. Richard's a good man who's been manipulated by bad people."

"You're a good man too."

And Sam would have laughed in the face of it all if Kathy hadn't said it with such murmured conviction, like she was simply listing a periodic element, and her eyes hadn't burned into him with something calculating now. He was acutely aware of her probably sky high IQ.

"You want to tell me why you came here at two in the afternoon on a Thursday, to see me instead of Richard?"

Their gazes locked. Kathy didn't even flinch and Gerard looked away first.

"This isn't right," he said.

"What isn't?"

"All of…" Sam flailed a hand but Kathy leaned back, arms crossed, and he thought maybe she understood anyway.

"Deputy Gerard, do you know how many buddies Richard had, before Helen's death?"

Mouth dry, Sam shook his head.

"Dozens." Kathy grinned. It was void of humour. "Dozens and dozens. Richard could make friends wherever he went."

"And now?" asked Gerard.

Kathy spread her arms, a ring master in an empty grandstand. "As many as are in this room. We're all present and accounted for."

Gerard closed his eyes and regretted asking.

"No family? In-laws?"

The doctor barked a laugh and this time Sam knew better than to ask. He paced to the window and back once, listening to the PA call for attending OR surgeons. He wondered if one of them was Richard. He wondered who got Charles Nichols' job. He wondered if he could justify throttling Richard's father in law.

The woman's caramel smooth tone pulled him out of his musings of how to bury bodies without them being found. "It's scary, isn't it?"

"What?" Gerard's voice came out like a dog's hoarse warning snarl. Weak yet stubborn.

"It's why you're here," said the pathologist. "It's why you haven't slept properly. Don't try to deny it. I used to be a GP."

Sam exhaled and landed heavily in a neighbouring chair. He realized he was sweating. Small consolation—but so was Kathy. "He trusts me."

"He trusted you to find his wife's murderer and keep him safe during the trial. Nothing new there."

"Why would he trust a man who almost shot him?" Sam insisted. "I'm not anyone's first choice for a friend."

"Exactly." This time Kathy's mellow expression was more genuine. "He's loyal to a fault, Gerard. It's probably what took him so long to suspect Charles in the first place. You gave him possibly the one thing no one else has. What no one else can."

Gerard raised both brows in question.

Kathy's grip, when it captured his forearm, proved warm and indestructible. "Someone who understands. Someone who knows the whole story, who witnessed his sufferings. You're there for him. The question is…"

She stood and smiled, offering him her hand, and Gerard saw why Richard respected this cowboy of a woman so much. He returned the firm grip.

"…Are you going to let him do the same for you?"

Cosmic irony.

This had been his undergrad theater professor's favourite term. He used it for the express purpose of ticking off the one student who didn't want to be there, who'd taken said drama class purely for one arts elective he was short of to graduate.

Now, however, Samuel Gerard glanced at himself in the hallway mirror and thought maybe his professor had been onto something.

"Cosmic irony is the state of unknown things, they say. Really, it is things that are so familiar to us that they appear unknown. Ha!"

Ha, indeed.

"This is stupid," Extremely Dignified US Marshal Gerard declared. He picked up his cellphone and dialled a number without looking at the keypad. Clanking car parts met his ear. "How did I get a date to this thing and not you?"

It was a testament to the frequency of these evening calls that Richard didn't say a word, didn't even have to ask who was on the other end. "Word in the staff lounge is that Kathy was quite impressed by you."

"Impressed?"

"It's a compliment," said Richard. And Gerard could practically see that unique hand roll Kimble did when explaining something. Probably with a wrench or stethoscope in hand. "She doesn't respect people so easily. She only met you once and she has your back. Take it, Gerard."

Sam stole one last look at his bewildered, boy-on-the-first-day-of-school body language and went out to his car. It started after the second turn. "I am. Why do you think I'm escorting her to this vamoscol—"

"Vascular," Richard corrected, quiet.

"Whatever. Why else would I have accepted her Sadie Hawkins proposal?"

"I can fix that ignition hiccup you've got." The doctor's voice had perked up. This irritated Gerard to no end.

Besides, he knew the exact name of the medical term for this event and Richard knew that he knew.

"Richard. Don't ignore my—" Gerard pulled the phone away from his ear. Something like pride sparked amusement in his eyes. "He hung up on me. That's a first."

Several neighbourhoods later, and a golden glow spilled onto the street from a bungalow with attached garage, like a giant advent candle. It even flickered when someone's shadow passed in front of it.

Sam eased into the tiny bungalow driveway. Phone tucked into his tuxedo pocket, he sauntered through the open garage door and passed a hunched over figure, seated on a low stool in front of the wheel wells of a vintage Model T. The house's side door was propped ajar by an old shoe; Gerard hopped the steps into the kitchen.

"Breaking and entering," Richard muttered without looking up.

Pausing, Gerard leaned back and flicked off the mechanic bulb. Maybe it would turn off the doctor's mind too—Gerard didn't miss the purple bags under his eyes. They matched the ones in Sam's mirror.

"Harassing a civil servant," Richard added.

"Civil servant? You're a doctor."

"Right. A doctor is a civil servant."

Gerard's eyes widened. He scrambled to remember if he'd learned this in his now ancient academy days. Then he smiled and swatted the door frame. "Almost had me there, Doc. If we were in Canada, maybe then you'd be right…"

Richard reached up, twisting the light back on. Grease stains were revealed along the faded denim button up.

"Disobeying a real civil servant," Gerard sing-songed.

"Police brutality for annoying me with this conversation."

"Grand theft auto for stealing that poor thing from the scrapyard."

"It's a classic." Kimble's nose scrunched and released. "I'm going to refurbish it."

"Why?" It wasn't even a cynical question. Figuring out why Richard wanted to remodel a truck from the 1910s was like figuring out the purpose behind the Antikythera device. Figuring Richard himself out would just plain never happen.

Best to be humble and ask, really.

Richard finally made eye contact. He looked just as baffled. "To drive it. Why else?"

Sam shook his head with a snort. Tapping the door frame with his knuckles, he disappeared inside. The house was dark, only the oven light on. Still, he navigated rooms with the ease of someone who catalogues surroundings for a living. He'd only been here three times. That was sufficient.

When he came back down the steps, Kimble leaned against the truck while wiping grease off his hands. Gerard waited until the man was clean and put down the cloth. The fact his friend was on his feet made it so much more satisfying to fling the plastic tuxedo bag in his face.

With Richard a few inches shorter than Sam, the bag landed flip flopped right over his head. He froze.

Sam regretted the rash action for three point two seconds until Kimble—slowly—pulled the bag down so it sat in his arms and not hooked over his skull, revealing lowered brows and a cement line to his mouth. His hair stuck up in wild tufts.

At last. Some emotion that's not sorrow or anxiety.

This was progressing better than Gerard hoped.

"I'm not going." Only Kimble's default gentle decorum kept his voice from being a growl. "I have the right to sit this one out. Helen…Helen died during a party like this. Because I was away from home."

Sam's features smoothed instantly. "I know. And I'm not making you go. Nobody has the right to push you: not me, not coworkers, not my kids. No one, you hear? I just thought being surrounded by familiar faces might do you better than sitting alone in a cold garage."

Kimble didn't appear to move at all, but the plastic crinkled noisily, his fingers hidden in the material.

"Did you ever think that maybe we worry about you being alone at home?"

The doctor looked up at that. He shook his head.

Sam ducked his face with another snort. "Well, Poole worries about you, anyway. Loudly. In my office."

Richard smiled too. Both imagined the short woman's determination to badger everyone in her immediate vicinity to be cared for.

"Richard," Sam whispered, "There's no one here to get hurt in your absence. You're not coming home to blood or broken furniture or intruders. Not this time. Not ever again, if I can help it."

Richard's eyes were somewhere to his right—the memory side of eye movement, Sam knew. That was alright. Gerard could wait him out, could satisfy himself with Kimble's skating jaw, a metal detector sliding back and forth along this personal desert.

Richard blew through the circle of his lips. "It's not being held at the…the hotel again this year?"

Gerard knew the doctor had received an invitation, that he knew the answer to this question. Sam answered the man anyway. "Nope. It's at the golf club, outside the city. It couldn't be further from last year's venue."

Kimble nodded. "Good. That's good."

And then they were left standing there, tuxedo clad marshal feeling like an idiot and a surgeon who'd stopped twitching out of sheer exhaustion. A night out was just what he needed. It was a Friday. No surgeries.

"Are you on call?" Sam asked.

Richard shook his head. "I asked not to be put on the list. Not yet anyway. After…"

Sam nodded so Kimble didn't have to finish that thought. He glanced at his watch. "Well, campers. I have a date to pick up and a smart-guy party to mingle at in less than forty five minutes. I was promised steak by Kathy, so that should make the evening worthwhile, if nothing else."

Richard smiled, one hand on his hip now. "You enjoy yourself, Deputy."

"You too, Doctor."

The vascular surgeon who cut people's arteries open for a living sat down in front of his stubborn wheel wells with a goodbye wave to the man who shot open people's arteries for a living.

Cosmic irony.

Gerard drove away and wondered when—or if—the writhing knot in his chest would go away.