Chapter 2: Excuses, Ranked
Over the next six days, Officer Grayson offers the following explanations, which you write on the back of a guest check and tape to the side of the register so Teo can rank them.
Friday: a stiff neck. "Slept funny." (Teo: 4/10. Plausible. Boring.)
Saturday: a scrape down his whole right forearm, like he'd skidded along concrete. "Bike." You ask what kind of bike. He says "the kind with wheels." (Teo: 6/10. Points for commitment.)
Sunday: nothing visible, but he sits down like a man made of breadsticks and when you put your hand flat on his back in passing, just to steady yourself around the stool, he goes white to the lips. "Moved a couch." You ask whose couch. He says "a friend's." You ask which friend. He says "Jason," and then looks briefly like he regrets having a friend named Jason, or possibly having any friends at all. (Teo: 7/10. Felt true in a weird way.)
Monday: he brings the dog.
The dog is a mutt the color of toast with one ear up and one ear down and three legs, and she comes through the cough-bell on a red leash like she's been invited to a gala. Health code says she can't be in here. You look at her. She looks at you. Her whole back end wags so hard she nearly tips over, being short a leg in the stabilizing department.
"This is Haley," Dick says. "She's why I have a scratch on my neck. She was dreaming and she kicked."
"That's a real dog."
"Yes."
"That's a real excuse."
"I have them sometimes," he says, wounded.
Teo comes all the way out of the kitchen for the first time in recorded history to give Haley a strip of bacon and tell her she's beautiful in Spanish. Marisol takes about forty pictures. Haley falls asleep on Dick's boots under the counter, snoring, and he eats his pancakes one-handed so he can keep the other hand down by her ears, and you stand at the coffee station with the pot going cold in your hand and think, you are in so much trouble, you are in so, so much trouble.
(Teo: 10/10. Scratch the list. The dog wins.)
Tuesday he doesn't have an injury at all, and somehow that's the night he asks.
"Why'd you quit?" He's turning his mug again. It's a thing he does with his hands when they don't have anything to hold; you've noticed he can't keep them still. Drumming, spinning a sugar packet across his knuckles like a coin, balancing a spoon on the rim of his mug and catching it the instant before it falls without even looking. "The ambulance. You're good. You're really good. Why'd you stop?"
You could say Aunt Dot. It's true. She died on a Tuesday, in the booth by the window, between the lunch rush and the dinner rush, and left you the diner in a will written on the back of a placemat. You could say the hours. You could say the pay, which in Blüdhaven was a punchline.
"Third year," you say instead, "we got a call to a warehouse fire on the east docks. Two guys inside. We got there before the fire department. We always got there before the fire department, they were slow on that side of the river, everybody knew why." You wipe a spot on the counter that's already clean. "One of the guys was a night watchman. The other guy was the one who'd set the fire, for insurance, for whoever owned the building. And when the cops showed up, they put the watchman in the back of the cruiser and they let the other guy walk. I watched them shake his hand."
Dick's mug has stopped moving.
"I put an oxygen mask on a guy who got paid to burn a man alive," you say. "And then I went home and couldn't think of a single reason to go back. So." You shrug. "Pancakes. Pancakes don't do that to you."
He's quiet for a long moment. Down at the end of the counter Marisol has the decency to pretend to sleep.
"I'm sorry," he says.
"You didn't do it."
"I wear the same badge."
"Yeah," you say. "That's sort of my whole point, Officer."
You don't mean it to land as hard as it does. He takes it without flinching, though, which you didn't expect. He takes it like he's heard it before and agrees with it and is trying to do something about it, and it occurs to you, not for the first time, that the bruises might have nothing to do with criminals at all. That a cop in Blüdhaven who doesn't take the envelope might get walked into a lot of cabinets.
"That's why you didn't tell me about the guy in the overcoat," he says.
You freeze with the rag in your hand.
"Pruitt," he says. "Lyle Pruitt. Collects for a guy who collects for a guy. He's been up and down Ferry for a month. He was in here Thursday, after I left." His jaw is tight. "Marisol told me."
"Marisol," you say, to the far end of the counter.
"I'm asleep," says Marisol.
"It's five hundred a week," you say. "Starting this Thursday. I'm not paying."
"Good."
"Good? You're supposed to tell me to pay. You're supposed to tell me to be careful and file a report so it can get lost in some drawer."
"File it if you want. I'll walk it in myself." He leans forward. "But I'm not going to tell you to pay a guy like that. He doesn't stop at five hundred. Nobody like him has ever stopped at five hundred." Then, softer, so softly you have to lean in too: "What time does he come?"
"Why?"
"Because I'd like to be here."
"No."
"I'll just eat pancakes. Very loudly. In a menacing way."
"No," you say again, and you're surprised by how hard it comes out. "If a cop is sitting at my counter when Pruitt walks in, either he pays off the cop, or the cop ends up in the river. I don't like either of those for you. Okay? I'd rather keep my regular."
He looks at you for a long time. That counting-exits look. Then something warmer comes up through it like light through water, and he says, "You'd rather keep your regular," like he's turning the words over to see what's on the bottom.
"Shut up and eat."
He shuts up and eats. But he doesn't say yes.
Thursday, 4:07, the bell doesn't cough.
You notice at 4:08. By 4:15 you've wiped the third stool from the end four times. Teo keeps the grill hot anyway, a little circle of batter-ready griddle by the window, and doesn't say anything about it, which is how you know he's worried too.
At 4:52 the bell coughs and your heart does something stupid and it's a night nurse from St. Adalbert's wanting a coffee to go.
At 5:15 exactly, it's Pruitt.
He has the umbrella man again, and two more besides, younger and bigger, and this time nobody bothers with politeness. One of the young ones flips the sign on the door to CLOSED. You didn't know that sign still worked. Dot's hasn't been closed since 1974.
"Five hundred," Pruitt says. He doesn't sit.
"I'm good, thanks."
He sighs, the sigh of a man who's been asked to do a tiresome thing by someone who should have known better, and nods at the bigger one, who picks up a napkin dispenser off the counter and throws it through the pie case.
The glass goes everywhere. So does a lemon meringue.
"Hey," you say, and you have no idea what your face is doing but Pruitt actually takes half a step back. "That was Teo's meringue. He does that from scratch."
"Boss," Teo says from the kitchen doorway, low, with his biggest cast iron in one hand. "Get behind me."
"Teo, no."
The big one reaches over the counter for your register. And the kitchen's back door, the steel one that opens on the alley and sticks in wet weather and that you have to hit with your hip, slams open so hard it bounces off the wall.
He doesn't come in so much as arrive.
You've seen him on the news twenty times, a blur on bad phone footage, and none of it prepared you for how fast he is in a room this small. He goes over the pass-through counter in a single flat vault without touching it, takes the big one off his feet with both heels, and is already turning before he hits the floor. Two short sticks in his hands, black, whirling. The umbrella man swings and Nightwing simply isn't there, he's on the counter, he's behind the man, he's tapping him once, twice, behind the knee and then the ear with a sound like somebody knocking on a melon, and the umbrella man folds up and lies down.
"Not the stools," you hear yourself shouting, which is insane. "Not the third one!"
He actually glances at you. You'd swear he grins.
The fourth guy pulls a knife. It's a short ugly thing, a box cutter really, and he's scared, which makes him sloppy, which makes him dangerous. Nightwing moves to put himself between the blade and the kitchen doorway where Teo is still standing with the skillet, and he's a quarter second slow because of it. The cutter opens a line across his left forearm, right through the suit. You see the blood bead up black-red in the light.
Then the knife is on the floor and the guy is face down on top of it, and Lyle Pruitt is gone, the cough-bell still shuddering behind him, and it's over. It took maybe nine seconds.
The diner is very quiet. A meringue slides slowly down the inside of the broken pie case.
Nightwing stands in the middle of the wreckage with his chest heaving, one hand clamped over his forearm, blood running between his fingers. The mask is black and smooth, white lenses where the eyes should be. He opens his mouth like he's going to say something heroic and gravelly.
"Back room," you say. "Now."
"I'm fine."
"You're dripping on my floor. Back room. Teo, zip-tie these idiots to something and call—" You stop. You don't know who to call.
"I've got a guy," Nightwing says, lower, rougher than his normal voice. Not normal. You don't know his normal voice. You've never heard Nightwing talk in your life. "At the Fifth. Honest. He'll come."
"Then call your guy. Back room."
He goes. Maybe it's the tone. Maybe nobody's ever ordered him around in a diner before.
The back room at Dot's is a storage closet with delusions. There's a desk, a filing cabinet full of thirty years of receipts, and a folding chair. You sit him in the chair and drag the desk lamp around and pull your real kit, the one from your ambulance days with the good suture strips, off the top shelf.
"It's not deep," he says.
"I'll decide what's deep." You peel the torn sleeve back from the cut. He's right. It's long but shallow, a clean line, no tendon. Steri-strips and a wrap. You've done a hundred of these. Your hands are steady and your heart is going like a rabbit's.
You clean it. He hisses through his teeth exactly the way he always does, before the wipe even touches him.
You go very still.
Then you look up, past the arm, past the bulk of the black-and-blue suit that fits like it was painted on him, up to the face under the mask. The lamp is harsh and close. The jaw is strong and stubbled, with a bruise along the right side that's gone yellow-green at the edges, about seven days old. Like it got made last Thursday. Like a cabinet made it. And on the bottom lip, on the left side, there's a split, angled down, almost healed, the faint pink track of a butterfly strip you put on it yourself.
He hasn't noticed you noticing. He's watching the door, counting exits.
You finish the strips. You wrap the arm. Then, because you have to know, because your whole body needs to know, you pick up a fresh wipe and say the word you've said at your counter every morning for six weeks.
"Chin."
And Nightwing, Blüdhaven's terror of the rooftops, tips his chin up for you without even thinking about it.
You press the wipe to a nick under his jaw. You keep your voice perfectly level.
"Hold still, Officer."