Specimen Days

"Chilean."

"Good."

Fred nodded again, in Cat's direction. Undercover waiter. Good in a crisis. He went off to get the wine.

What was it with men? Why were they so eager to impersonate someone brave and competent and in the know?

"Simon, baby," Cat said, "you can't say things like that. Not to waiters."

"Got you. Sorry."

"You can't be showing me off to people. Besides, I'm not Foxy Brown. I'm just a grunt, really."

"It's because I'm proud of you."

"I know."

"So. What happened?"

"A kid called in with a bomb threat. That's all."

"And you think it's this kid who blew the guy up?"

"Possibly."

"The kid must have known the guy, right?"

She hesitated. She had to give him something, didn't she? He was her boyfriend. And admit it this was part of what she had to offer him.

"It would seem that way. My guess is, it's a sex thing. Odds are we'll get a missing report from somewhere in the vicinity of Dick Harte's neighborhood, and we'll find that he'd been blowing the perpetrator in the backseat of his BMW."

Cat knew the word "perpetrator" would be exciting to Simon. She'd promised herself to stop acting extra coplike to turn him on. Screwed that one up.

"Right," Simon said. His brows bristled. It would have been nice to peel them gently off his face, hold them in her palm, then put them carefully back again.

"What do you want to eat?" she asked. "I don't know. The tuna, I guess."

Simon was Atkins. High protein, no carbs. And really, consider the results.

"I'm going to have the steak au poivre," she said. "And mashed potatoes."

Momma's had a very hard day. All right?

* * *

They went back to her place that night, and never mind about the mess. She was rattled she realized how much she wanted her own bed. Simon didn't mind her crappy apartment every now and then. He claimed to like it, actually. Although she'd never come out and asked him, it was likely that until he met her he'd never been to East Fifth Street.

She woke up at 3:30. She didn't have to look at the clock. She knew this abrupt and arid consciousness, this jump from deep dreams to a wakefulness that was not so much having slept enough as having suddenly lost the knack for sleep. On the nights it happened, it always happened between 3:30 and 4:00. She had a little something for it in the medicine cabinet, but she'd never even opened the bottle. She seemed to prefer insomnia to simulated sleep. Control thing. Fucked up, really, but what could she do?

Simon breathed steadily beside her. She let herself stare at him as he grimaced over a dream. He was a true classic. Big, broad anchor-man face, vigorous thatch of sable-colored hair beginning to be threaded, here and there, with strands of sterling silver. He could have been fresh off the assembly line of whatever corporation produced the Great American Beauties. The corporation would be somewhere in the Midwest, wouldn't it? And yes, he came from Iowa, didn't he? Great-great-grandson of immigrants who'd escaped New York for the prairie, he'd returned in triumph a hundred or so years later, the exiled prince restored to his true home by way of the Ivy League. Rich and healthy, thirty-three years old. Practically adolescent, in man-years.

Maybe it was time to quit the unit, though if she did it now it would look like she was running away. In fact, she'd been thinking of quitting for some time. You got a little crazy, working the nuts. You listened to every lunatic with the same patience; you reminded yourself over and over that any one of these people might really and truly be about to torch a grade school or blow up a store or kill somebody just because he was well-known. Bartenders must start seeing a world full of drunks; lawyers must see it as largely made up of the vengefully injured. Forensic psychologists got infected by paranoia. You knew, better than the average citizen, that the world contains a sub world, where the residents do as most people do, pay rent and buy groceries, but have a little something extra going on. They receive personal messages from their television sets or are raped nightly by a sitcom star or have discovered that the cracks on the sidewalk between Broadway and Lafayette spell out the names of the aliens who are posing as world leaders.

The most surprising thing about these people, as it turned out, was their dullness. All their human juices flowed in one direction; they cared about nothing, really, beyond their fixations. Anyone's sweet old aunt in Baltimore was more vital and various, even if her life was only watching television and clipping discount coupons out of magazines. You sat in your crummy police department office which resembled nothing so much as a failing mail-order business and listened to them. You logged them in on your five-year-old computer. You hoped none of them would follow through. You hoped, on your worst days (no one liked to talk about this), that one of them would.