Fathers
Kat Allison
Once the bar-closing rush was over, Ida's didn't draw much business. You might get the graveyard shift grabbing some dinner, the early shift looking for coffee, maybe a drunk throwing down a gutbomb to soak up the alcohol before staggering on home.
Hardly ever trouble, but still and all, every time Welsh heard the door open he cranked his head around to check things out, because -- hey, once a cop, always a cop, right? And a cop doesn't like surprises.
He wasn't really surprised that night when he heard the door squeak open, around a quarter to four, and turned to see Vecchio, slapping the wet heavy snow off his coat, stamping his feet. Vecchio'd taken to showing up here in the small hours sometimes, when a case had gone sour or one of the uniforms had screwed up again, and sometimes they'd talk shop and sometimes they'd just sit and drink their coffee. Welsh watched as Vecchio went to the counter, traded a joke with Rico, got his cup poured, and brought it over to the booth, settling in across from him.
"Hey, Lieu." Vecchio pulled some napkins from the dispenser and swabbed the wet snow-melt off his bald spot, which these days included pretty much his whole head.
Welsh had the sense somehow that shoptalk wasn't on the menu tonight, but he really didn't want to talk about the other stuff, so instead he said, "Still snowing out there, huh?"
"Like a bastard." Vecchio wadded up the napkins and used them to wipe a sticky spot off the linoleum. "Seven inches by morning is what I heard."
"Swell." He sighed, rubbing his eyes.
"Hey, maybe the scum'll decide to take the day off, stay home and read a good book or something." Vecchio poured cream into his cup until the coffee was a pale beige, then sipped, grimaced, set it back down. "We could use the down time."
"You get your down time when you die, Detective." He'd meant it as a joke, more or less, but it came out sounding more portentous than he'd intended, something that'd open a door he'd just as soon keep closed.
And sure enough, Vecchio let out a breath and said, "I stopped by the hospital."
"No need for you to do that, I bet Wilson's still there, on the case." He gave Vecchio a belligerent look. "You got your job to do in the morning, you should get some sleep."
Vecchio ignored him. "He seems about the same, I dunno. Still doing that--the breathing, whaddaya call it--"
"Cheyne-Stokes."
"Yeah." Vecchio quirked a corner of his mouth, not really smiling. "Frannie, she calls it chain-stroke breathing, now I can't get that out my head."
He jerked his head up. "Frannie's not still there, is she?"
"She and your brother seem to've really hit it off, they're sitting out in the lounge talking a blue streak."
"Ah, hell." He banged a hand on the table. "This ain't her family and it's not her problem, she oughta be home with the kids."
"They're at Ma's." Vecchio took another sip of coffee, glanced up at Welsh under his brows. "Isabella sends her love to Uncle Harding."
"Ah, hell," he said again, but softer.
"Hey, you don't wanna be an uncle, then quit buying her every toy in the goddamn world."
To keep himself from smiling, Welsh huffed out an exasperated sigh, and sat back, holding his cup. He let some time pass, the slow thick time of four o'clock in the morning, and finally he said, "You know, you'd think the very least the guy could do would be to have the--the decency to kick off fast and not hang around screwing up everyone else's life." He paused. "Of course, in that case he could've kicked off maybe thirty years ago. And that would've been fine with me."
Vecchio gave him that look you never saw on the guy in the old days, the sharp serious look with some steel behind it, the one that he'd only had since he came back. "Yeah, but you know something? It could've been fast, and it could've been a lotta years ago, just like with mine, and it wouldn't make a hell of a lot of difference." He tapped a finger against his bald skull. "Those guys--they got a way of hanging around anyway. I'm telling you."
Welsh pushed a hand through his hair, and then--it was something he wouldn't have ever said to the guy in the old days, to the old Vecchio, but he found himself saying, "Fraser told me one time ... I asked him what to do if there's someone you can't forgive, no matter how hard you try. And he said you just keep trying."
"Yeah, well." Vecchio leaned on his elbows, took a sip of coffee. "Isn't that exactly what you'd expect Fraser to say?"
No arguing with that, except he still felt argumentative. "And so, yeah, I know, I ought to be there at the hospital. Problem is--I can't stand to be around the son of a bitch. I don't have a goddamn thing to say to him, never did." He lifted his cup and stared into the oily residue at the bottom. "But Fraser, he'd be right there, doing the right thing. Saying the right stuff."
"Except that Fraser isn't there." Vecchio leaned forward, looking straight at him. "And you know what, he wasn't there when his dad got aced, and for all the killers-of-my-father stuff, I never got the feeling that he had a damn thing to say to his dad when he was around." He leaned back. "No more than you or me to either one of ours."
Welsh had no reply to that, and instead, after a minute, he turned and squinted toward the windows, watching the snow swirl in the streetlight. "Shame he's not here, at least he'd like the weather." He turned back. "You hear from him lately?"
Vecchio went still, and said, "I got an e-mail from Kowalski, if you can figure that. Said they're thinking about switching Fraser to desk duty in Whitehorse. His back's giving him trouble pretty much all the time now." His voice was quiet, gravelly. "Said they might do surgery or something. I dunno."
"Ah, damn. I'm sorry to hear that."
Vecchio made a waving-away gesture and grimaced. "Might be nothing, you know how Kowalski gets all worked up."
"Yeah, well." There was nothing really to say, but the silence felt too heavy. "One thing for sure, we're none of us gettin' any younger."
"That's the truth."
Welsh nodded, trying without success to picture Fraser spending his days shuffling paper, riding a desk, just like him. He missed the guy, in some ways, and some ways he didn't. Things for sure had been quieter since Hurricane Fraser had finally blown out of town. Hurricane--or lightning, maybe, a big red Lightning Bolt of Justice, crackling through his station house, leaving havoc. And Kowalski too, the crash of thunder that always followed right after him, rattling everything up even more.
But they'd gone off to play Admiral Peary and build snowmen, and he'd stayed behind his desk, and they'd all gotten older. And somehow, he didn't know when, somewhere in there, he realized, Vecchio of all people had turned into a kind of rock in the endless river of incompetence that swirled around him. The guy he could hand off the redballs to, and bitch about the job to, and trust to show up at four in the morning and not say anything stupid.
Vecchio raised his cup, waving it toward the counter, and Rico shuffled around with the pot and gave them a refill. After he'd left, Welsh wanted to say something to Vecchio, something like thanks, but instead all he said was, "Frannie shouldn't still be there."
Vecchio shrugged. "Family." He was busy whitening his coffee again. "You don't have a problem with Wilson sitting there all night."
"Wilson, the hell with him, he's retired, he's got no place to go in the morning."
Vecchio took a sip. "Man, this has got to be the worst coffee in the city." He set his cup down, tapped the brim with his fingertips, making no sound. "You ever think about that? Retiring?"
"Who, me? What the hell would I do if I retired? Nah, I figure I'll keel over at my desk someday, and they can just haul me straight down to Mort." It was his standard comeback, and as always he went on, "Besides, who the hell would I turn the division over to, I got nobody there but clowns and--" Then he stopped. Stopped, and looked up at Vecchio, who was giving him a straight solid look back.
Yeah. But he wasn't ready for this, not yet, and when Vecchio took a breath, Welsh was set to cut him off, shaddup, forget it about it, how 'bout those Bears? But all Vecchio said was, "You know, when my pop died--heart attack, he went just like that, boom--" He smacked his palms lightly together. "We were coming back from the hospital, me and Ma, and she was crying, and then--I'll never forget, we were sitting at a stoplight on Elston right by Leona's, and I was--I mean, I was feeling like free at last, free at last!, and then she turned to me and said, 'You're the man of the family now, Raimundo. You have to take care of us.'" He quirked a brow at Welsh. "First and only time I ever thought to myself, 'Pop, come on back!'"
Welsh snorted a little huff of surprised laughter, and Vecchio laughed with him. "Yeah. But I got used to it." He was looking down at the table, smiling, but you could see he was looking backwards, back over a lot of years. "Guess I didn't screw it up completely."
"Guess not. I'd say you did OK, on the whole." Welsh considered, nodded, a nod of benediction, and then stretched his neck, his shoulders, feeling them loosen up a little, some weight rolling off them. Maybe Vecchio'd learned that from Fraser, saying something sideways like that, by telling a dopey story.
Vecchio picked up his coffee cup, frowned at it, and set it back down. "C'mon, let's get out of here before the snow gets any worse."
"OK." But he felt strangely directionless, not ready to go back to the hospital, not sure where he should go.
Vecchio slid out of the booth and stood. "Your brother's got it covered at Mercy, I'm gonna head on over to the station and make sure everything's nailed down there, check out Hemming's paperwork on the Jackson case. You should go home and get some sleep."
He couldn't yield to the note of authority in that voice, not yet, not without a tussle. "Detective, at 8 a.m. I expect to be at my desk, doing the job for which the city of Chicago pays me, and--"
"Sure. Tomorrow. Today, get some rest." Vecchio waved away the bills Welsh pulled from his pocket, dropped a five on the table, gave him a grin. "Hey, if Fraser can swallow a desk job, you can take a day off, right?"
He could hear the snow rattling against the window, irregular gusts as the wind blew hard and then soft, slow and then fast, like the rattling breaths of the old man dying a mile away. We're none of us getting any younger, that's what he'd said. Yeah. "Yeah, OK." He shrugged on his coat. "Tell Hemming if he screws up that report--"
"--you'll have his head on a platter, right, Lieu." And as they walked to the door, Welsh could feel something he hadn't ever felt before, Vecchio's arm draped loosely over his shoulder, weighing him down, helping him along.