She took her gun from her belt and locked it in a desk drawer in a spare bedroom she used as an office. Even if she was only going to be home for a short while, she always took off her weapon and put it in a secured location.
That done, she came into the kitchen and walked through it to a small room at the back of the house, the one they’d fixed up before Lamont went over. Not big, but big enough for a loveseat and a coffee table and a TV. They spent a lot of time in here together. Lamont spent almost all of his time in here.
“Hey, babe,” she said, walking in with the brown takeout bag. She leaned over and kissed her husband on the forehead. He kept staring straight ahead at the adventures of Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer. “You want a beer with dinner?” Lamont said nothing. “A beer it is.”
She set up two TV trays in front of the loveseat, then went into the kitchen. She put the Big Macs on plates and split the large order of fries between them. She squeezed some ketchup out onto Lamont’s plate. She’d never really cared for ketchup on her fries. She just liked them salty.
She put the plates on the trays, then went back into the kitchen. She filled a glass with water from the tap for herself and reached into the fridge for a beer. She returned to the TV room. Lamont had not started his burger or eaten a fry. He always waited for her. He wasn’t much on the “please” and “thank you” thing these days, but he never began a meal until she’d sat down with him.
Rona Wedmore took a bite of the Big Mac. Lamont did the same.
“Every once in a while,” she said, “these just hit the spot. Don’t you think?”
The doctor had said that just because he didn’t have anything to say didn’t mean he didn’t want her to talk to him. She’d gotten used to carrying on these one-sided conversations for several months now. She wished Lamont would get so sick of listening to her blather on about work and the weather and could Barack pull it together for a second term that he’d finally turn and say to her something like “For the love of God, would you please just shut the fuck up?”
How she’d love that.
Lamont dipped a french fry in ketchup and put it into his mouth whole. He watched Kramer whip open the door, slide into Jerry’s apartment.
“I never get tired of that,” Rona said. “It kills me every time.”
When the commercials came on, she told him about her day. “This is the first time I ever had to investigate a cop,” she said. “I’ve got to walk on eggshells on this one. But this guy, there’s something seriously bent about him. Isn’t the slightest bit curious about how his wife died. What the hell do you make of that?”
Lamont ate another fry.
The doctor said he might snap out of it tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe in a year.
Maybe never.
But at least he could be home. He functioned, more or less. Could take a shower, dress himself, slap a sandwich together. She could even phone and he’d check the caller ID and if it was her he’d pick up and she could give him a message. Just so long as she didn’t need him to answer back, she was okay.
Sometimes she just called to say she loved him.
And there’d be silence on the other end of the line.
“I hear ya, babe,” she’d say. “I hear ya.”
As a police detective, she’d seen things. Working in Milford, maybe she didn’t see, with any regularity, the kinds of things cops in L.A. or Miami or New York saw, but she’d seen some things.
But she couldn’t imagine what Lamont had witnessed over there in Iraq. She’d been told by others what it was-about the Iraqi schoolchildren, how they’d blundered into that IED-but she still couldn’t get her head around it.
Guess Lamont couldn’t, either.
When he was finished with his burger and fries, Wedmore took the dishes into the kitchen and put away the TV trays. She returned and sat next to him on the couch.
“I’m gonna have to go out for a bit,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll be long. But I talked to this man today, his wife died in a car accident a few weeks ago, and this guy, and his daughter, you wouldn’t believe the shit they’ve been going through. He thinks there’s something fishy about how his wife got killed. I think there is, too.”
Lamont picked up the remote and started surfing through channels.
“Even though I told him I wasn’t going to do anything with this until tomorrow, I’m going to try to talk to someone tonight. You okay if I head out for a bit?”
Lamont landed on an episode of Star Trek. The original one, with Kirk and Spock.
Wedmore gave him another kiss on the forehead. She put her gun back on her belt, slipped on her jacket, and went out the door.
She drove back over the bridge into Milford, past Riverside Honda, which was still in the process of being rebuilt after that fire, then found her way into Belinda Morton’s neighborhood and parked across the street from the house. She looked at it a moment, then got out. She did a quick scan of the street, something she always did out of practice. Saw a dark Chrysler parked a few houses down.
It was quiet.
