Chapter 1: The Aggressive Cabinet
The bell over the door at Dot's has a crack in it, so instead of ringing it sort of coughs. You've been meaning to replace it for three years. You never will. It's the best alarm system on Ferry Street: a cough means a customer, two coughs means a customer who's had a night, and at 4:07 in the morning it means him.
Cough.
"Don't," you say, without looking up from the coffee filters.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to. You had the face."
"You're not even looking at my face."
"I don't have to." You slot the filter in, hit the switch, and turn around. "I can hear it."
Officer Dick Grayson of the Blüdhaven Police Department is standing just inside the door, rain sliding off the shoulders of a brown leather jacket that has clearly been through a war and possibly started one. He's out of uniform. His hair is wet and pushed back with one hand, and he's smiling at you like you're the best thing that's happened to him all night, which is a problem, because his bottom lip is split clean through on the left side and there's a bruise blooming along his jaw the color of a plum left in a hot car.
"Okay," he says. "In my defense."
"Sit."
"I was going to sit anyway."
"Sit faster."
He takes the third stool from the end, the one with the duct tape on the seat, because it's his stool now and has been for six weeks. Marisol, two stools down with her decaf and her crossword, lowers her reading glasses and gives him a long look over the beaded chain.
"Mijo," she says. "Who did you upset?"
"Nobody. I'm very easy to get along with." He folds his hands on the counter like a choirboy. The knuckles of both hands are scraped raw. "There was a cabinet."
You put a mug in front of him and pour. "A cabinet."
"In my kitchen. The door was open. I stood up." He mimes it, standing up into an invisible cabinet door, and winces in a way that has nothing to do with the mime. "Bam."
"Huh," you say. "And then you punched it. Twice. With both hands."
He looks down at his knuckles. He looks back up. "It was a very aggressive cabinet."
Teo snorts through the pass-through window, a sound like a horse sneezing. "Pancakes?" he calls.
"Please. Extra—"
"Extra everything, I know, I'm not new." The grill hisses. Teo has been cooking at Dot's since before you inherited it, back when your Aunt Dot ran the counter in orthopedic shoes and called every customer 'hon,' and he has never once written down an order. He says writing things down is how the universe finds out you care.
You go into the back for the kit.
It's a real kit. That's the thing about Officer Grayson that he hasn't quite figured out yet: he picked the wrong diner. You rode the back of a Blüdhaven ambulance for three years before Dot's heart gave out and left you her lease, her recipes, and a cough-bell you can't bring yourself to fix. You've seen what a cabinet does to a face. A cabinet does a goose egg, high, at the hairline. A cabinet does not split a lip from the outside in, angled down, like a fist coming across from a right-handed man who knew what he was doing.
You come back with the tackle box you painted a red cross on and set it on the counter between his coffee and the sugar.
"You don't have to," he says. He always says this.
"Chin."
He tips his chin up. He always does that too.
Up close he smells like rain and gun oil and, faintly, the cheap mint gum they sell at the bodega on Kane. His eyes are a ridiculous blue. You've decided not to think about his eyes. It's a policy. You snap on gloves and tear open an antiseptic wipe and he hisses before it even touches him.
"Baby," you say.
"I'm a brave and decorated public servant."
"You're a brave and decorated public servant who walked into furniture." You dab the split. It's clean, at least, already closing at the edges, which means it happened maybe two hours ago. Two hours ago Channel 6 was running shaky phone footage of a fight on the roof of the old Desmond cannery: four men, one shape in black moving between them like water poured off a ledge, a streak of blue where its shoulders should be. Teo had turned it up. Marisol had said "Ay, that boy is going to fall," with real affection, like Nightwing was her nephew.
You don't say any of that. You put a butterfly strip on Dick Grayson's lip and say, "Don't smile for an hour."
He smiles immediately. The strip holds. You hate him a little.
"Thank you," he says, and he means it. He always means it. That's the other problem.
Pancakes come up. He eats like he's never seen food, like food is a rumor he's just now confirming. Three pancakes, two eggs over easy, bacon, a side of hash browns he didn't order and Teo gives him anyway, and a glass of chocolate milk he drinks without a shred of shame.
You lean against the back counter and watch him while pretending to watch the coffee.
Six weeks ago he came in with a black eye and said he'd been hit by a softball. In December. Four weeks ago it was a sprained wrist from "rollerblading," and you'd asked where, and he'd said "the park," and you'd said "which park," and he'd said "the big one," and Marisol had laughed so hard she had to go stand outside. Two weeks ago he didn't have an excuse at all; he just sat on his stool very carefully, like his ribs were made of glass, and when you asked he said, "Long night," and looked so tired you let it go and gave him pie.
You know cops in this city. Half the Blüdhaven PD eats at Dot's at some point, and the half that pays is smaller than you'd like. They come in with their eyes on the register. They don't come in with their knuckles split, and they don't say thank you, and they don't tip thirty percent on a nine-dollar check and then try to sneak out before you can give the change back.
"So what do you do," you'd asked him, that first week. "When you're not losing fights with household objects."
"I'm a cop."
"I know you're a cop, you told me you're a cop. I mean, what do you do. For fun."
He'd thought about it, honestly thought, chewing. "I used to be in the circus," he said finally.
"Shut up."
"Trapeze. My whole family. We were the Flying Graysons." He'd said it lightly, the way people say things they've said a thousand times so it doesn't cut on the way out. "I can still do a triple. Not in here, though. Your ceiling's too low."
"That's the only thing stopping you?"
"Well. And the pie case."
You had not known then that you were in trouble. You know now. You've known since roughly the second week, when he came in on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday and you realized you'd been keeping the third stool from the end clear, wiping it down twice, glancing at the door at 4:06 like a dog waiting for a car.
Now he pushes the plate back and sighs like a man who has made peace with God.
"Same time tomorrow?" Marisol asks him, filling in seven-across.
"If she'll have me."
"She'll have you," Marisol says, before you can say anything. "Look at her face."
"My face is fine," you say. "My face is busy."
"Her face," Teo says through the window, "has been looking at that door since four."
"Teo, I will cut your hours."
"You can't. Nobody else will work this shift. I'm the only one crazy enough." He crosses himself with the spatula and goes back to scraping the grill.
Dick laughs, then winces, then touches the butterfly strip with one careful finger. When he looks at you, the laugh is still there in the corners of his eyes, but there's something else under it, something steady and assessing that you've seen before on other people. On paramedics. On the good cops, the three or four you'd trust with your keys. It's a look that's counting exits.
"Hey," he says, quieter. "Anybody been giving you trouble? Here, I mean."
"Why?"
"No reason." He turns the coffee mug a quarter turn on the counter. "There's been some talk. Guys going door to door on Ferry. Asking for money."
"Is this you being a cop?"
"It's me being a guy who likes your pancakes and wants them to keep existing."
"Teo makes the pancakes."
"I'm aware, I love Teo, I would die for Teo," he says, and Teo grunts approvingly. "Has anybody come by?"
You think about the man in the grey overcoat who came in last Thursday, ordered tea and didn't drink it, and left a business card on the counter with nothing on it but a phone number and the words NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION. You think about Mr. Albescu at the hardware store, who has started closing at six, and the nail salon on the corner with plywood where its window used to be.
You think about the fact that if you tell a Blüdhaven cop, any Blüdhaven cop, there's a reasonable chance he goes straight back to the station and tells somebody's cousin, and the next window that breaks is yours.
"Nope," you say. "Quiet as a church."
He holds your eyes a beat too long. He knows. You know he knows. He's a terrible liar, and it turns out, standing there behind your own counter, so are you.
"Okay," he says. He puts a twenty under his mug. "Thanks for the patch job, doc."
"I'm not a doctor."
"Thanks for the patch job, person-who-is-better-at-this-than-most-doctors-I've-met."
"That's long."
"I'll workshop it." He stands, carefully, favoring the left side, and the cough-bell coughs him out into the rain. Through the window you watch him flip up the collar of that terrible jacket and walk off toward Kane Street, not toward the bus stop, not toward the precinct, but toward the river and the dark cannery blocks where nobody walks at 4:40 in the morning unless they're looking for something.
"That boy," Marisol says, "lies like a rug."
"Mm."
"You like him."
"I like his tips."
"You gave him his change back."
You did. It's in your apron. You'll put it back under his mug tomorrow and he'll put it back under the sugar dispenser and the two of you will keep doing this until the end of time or one of you dies, probably him, probably falling off something.
At 5:15, the bell coughs again.
It's not a regular. You know it's not a regular before you look up, because the regulars all come in wet and fast and grateful, and this man comes in slow and dry under a black umbrella that another man holds for him and then folds and shakes out on your doormat like he owns it. Grey overcoat. Wire-rimmed glasses. Knuckles scarred white. The man who ordered tea.
Behind him are two others who don't bother to take their hands out of their pockets.
Teo goes quiet at the grill. Marisol puts down her pen.
"Good morning," says the man in the grey overcoat, very politely, and sits on the third stool from the end, right on the duct tape. "I believe you have my card."
You've got the coffee pot in one hand. You're aware, the way you were aware on the ambulance, of every object within reach. The pot. The pie server. The phone under the register, which is useless, because you'd only be calling the people he probably already pays.
"I think I threw it out," you say.
"That's all right." He smiles with his mouth closed. "I have more. Mr. Pruitt. Lyle, if you like. I represent the interests of this street, and this street, I'm sorry to tell you, has been feeling very unprotected lately." He glances at the window, at the rain, at the dark. "Things fall off buildings in this city. You'd be amazed."
"Like your boss's guys did tonight, off the cannery?"
It's out before you can stop it. One of the men by the door shifts his weight. Pruitt's smile doesn't move at all, which is somehow worse.
"Five hundred a week," he says gently, "starting next Thursday. That's the friend price, because I enjoyed the tea." He stands. He lays a fresh card on the counter, next to the twenty Dick Grayson left under his mug, and then, almost absently, he slides the twenty into his own coat pocket. "For the inconvenience."
The bell coughs them out.
For a full minute nobody in Dot's says anything. The grill ticks. The coffee maker gurgles its last.
Then Teo says, very quietly, "Boss," and points with the spatula, up and out, through the big front window.
Across Ferry Street, on the lip of the roof above the shuttered laundromat, someone is crouched against the rain. Just a shape. Just a darker piece of the dark, perfectly still, the way nothing alive is still. And then a passing truck throws its headlights up the brick, and for half a second you see it: a line of blue, sharp as a cut, running across a pair of shoulders that you swear, you absolutely swear, are sitting just a little bit carefully on the left side.