1
John had to pause on the fourth floor landing, willing his leaden muscles to hold it together for just a few more minutes of effort before they gave up completely.
In his ears, he could still hear the echo of voices, a thousand panicked phone calls, a thousand personal disasters, all asking, pleading, demanding he help them.
It had been a busy shift.
Steadying himself on the railing, John forced himself up the final flight of steps.
Inside, Alan was on the couch, his racing game blaring out of the tinny television speakers propped up on the rickety table in the corner. As the cars squealed and the virtual spectators squealed, John winced. “Turn that down, Alan.”
Alan didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “Good evening to you too,” Alan said sarcastically. “Two seconds between arrival and bawling me out, that must be a record.”
John ignored him, too tired to argue. “Where’s Grandma?”
“Napping,” Alan replied, cursing and jolting himself almost off the couch as he tried to make his avatar on screen respond fast enough. “Hogging the bedroom.”
John shook his head – how she could sleep in this noise, he had no idea. As expected, she was sitting up in bed, reading. “Hey Grandma, how you feeling?”
She looked a little pale, rheumy around the eyes. “Storm’s a-comin’, Johnny,” she said, laying her book on her lap.
“How bad’s the pain?"he asked, already mentally running through his checklist.
She waved him off. "You’re worse than Gordon. You’ve off duty, relax, put your feet up, I’ll cook.”
John caught her in time to stop her tumbling off the edge of the bed as the pain hit, and eased her back to sitting. “We need to get you a new hip,” he murmured, mostly to himself.
She waved him off, lips thin with pain. “Don’t waste money on things that don’t keep,” she chided.
John stroked her hair off her temples. “I’ve got dinner, you rest up.
He managed to keep the reassuring smile on his face until he closed her door behind him.
In the short hallway, between the room Alan and Grandma shared and the one he and Virgil and Scott managed to rotate through, the sound of the game was head-thumpingly loud. "Alan,” John snapped. “Turn that off and do your homework.”
No response.
John stalked through the open door into the tiny sitting room off the kitchenette. The game on the TV was repeating its title screen music. The couch was empty, the front door open.
John slumped against the door frame and massaged his temples for a moment before he pulled his phone out of his pocket. He still had a few texts left for this month. Alan’s gone, again he texted the group.
He couldn’t leave Grandma alone. And if Alan didn’t want to be found, he wouldn’t be found.
John turned on the stove, began boiling water. They had some pasta in the cupboard, a tin of tuna. And grandma had been losing weight, she needed to eat.
The front door opened as he dumped the last of the pasta into the boiling pot. “In here,” he called out.
These days, Virgil was convinced the smell of smoke clung to him constantly.
He knew it wasn’t true. He’d taken a shower at the station before leaving, his clothes had been tucked away in his locker the entire shift. There was no reason he should still be able to smell it.
But he did.
Every step was a battle, one that was harder that day than most. He’d been pulled aside by the chief near the end of his shift and informed that his schedule had been switched around, he was being forced to take the next week off. Paid vacation, the chief had been quick to add, but time off nonetheless.
“You’re burning out, kid,” the chief had said. *“You can’t keep taking on those extra hours. This a job where you can’t afford to not be at your best. Now, you’ve got eleven days of vacation days all together. I won’t make you take all of them, but you’re not going to be on the schedule for the next seven. Get some rest, go hang out with some buddies. Get your mind out of the station. It’s for your own good.” *
Virgil had tried to explain to him that he volunteered for those extra hours because they needed that money. The time-and-a-half overtime rate was worth every bit of exhaustion he had to fight through if it meant they could afford to pay rent or eat. All of them took on extra hours. He could handle it. The chief had seemed sympathetic, but hadn’t changed his mind.
So Virgil was sent home. It was a school night, so theoretically Alan should be home, but he wasn’t counting on that. Grandma would of course be there. He couldn’t remember if any of his brothers were off.
His phone went off as he walked towards the door of their apartment building and he pulled it off, noting as he did so that the crack on the screen had somehow gotten worse, and grimaced.
Alan’s gone, again.
Virgil looked up and scanned around him, trying to see if he could spot Alan anywhere in the crowd. He doubted he would, because Alan was very good at disappearing, but he still had to make sure.
He found nothing, unsurprisingly, and tried not to groan as he entered the building and walked up the stairs. Stairs. He hated stairs. He hated elevators more (and specifically having to free people from them). But still. Stairs.
He unlocked the front door and heard John call from the kitchen. “In here!”
John sounded just as tired as Virgil felt, if not more so. He was standing at the stove, making pasta, and looked up when Virgil walked in.
“Hey,” Virgil said.
“Hey,” John nodded. “See Alan on your way in?”
“No,” Virgil said. “I looked, but, well—”
Alan’s difficult.
John exhaled slowly. “Yeah.”
“Scott’s gonna be pissed,” Virgil said, leaning against the wall. “How’s Grandma?”
He already knew the answer. She was in pain, sick, and losing weight. Gordon worked as a paramedic at the same station Virgil worked at, and he’d stopped by Virgil’s truck before he was officially on shift and expressed his worries to him. In his own irritated, sarcastic way. In short, she needed more care than they were currently able to give her with their own busy schedules and Alan’s tendency to vanish at any given moment. Gordon’s frustration with their youngest brother echoed Scott’s temper and Virgil knew it was going to come to head sometime soon.
Secretly, he hoped he wasn’t there. Scott and Gordon against each other were bad enough. The two of them against Alan was going to be deafening.
“The usual,” John sighed. “She won’t say anything, but the pain’s getting worse.”
“Gordon said something similar.” Though with much more profanity.
“She’s still losing weight,"John continued, stirring the pasta. "I don’t know what we’re going to do for food until next week. Alan’s got school lunch and we have a little bit left in savings, but we need that. And Grandma shouldn’t be left alone, but I don’t know how we’re going to make that work, either.”
“Actually, about that,” Virgil said, and John looked at him warily. “Chief took me off rotation for the next week. Paid time off. I tried to argue, but he all but kicked me out of the station.”
He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his tone. He knew the chief was trying to look out for him, but they were barely getting by. This was going to make things harder in the long run and Virgil knew they were going to feel it sooner rather than later.
Alan’s gone, again.
He must have stared at his phone for a little too long, because there’d been a soft chuckle from the driver’s seat, before the comment, “More grief on the home front?”
“The home front is grief in every dimension. Up, down, front, back and sideways,” Scott answered, and snapped his phone closed, dropped it into the breast pocket of his dark blue uniform. He permitted himself a single slow breath, exhaling hard, before he snuffed out the flare of anger at his baby brother. Nothing he could do about it, in the middle of his shift. If he remembered right, John’s off, and if Virgil isn’t yet, he should be soon. Gordon’s working the night shift, the same as Scott is, but he’ll be more likely to let his frustration show than the eldest is. Scott pities anyone who expects patience out of Gordon tonight.
“Bad deal, sir. Sorry.”
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it. Gimme another ten minutes and we’ll get back to work.”
“Yessir. I’m just letting my manicure dry.”
In spite of everything, on the home front or otherwise, that gets a laugh out of him. “Right.”
He’d be alone, if she weren’t a rookie, and still in training. And she wouldn’t know enough to have asked the question, if Scott weren’t fond of her. If they hadn’t gone to get a beer after her first shift under his supervision, because he remembers his own first days on the force, and remembers swearing up and down that he’d never be such a bastard as the man who’d trained him.
So, in a roundabout way, even though he’s only really known her a few weeks, he’s made a friend. And he’s glad that she’s here.
And they’re in between calls, him and Kayo, and he’s halfway through typing up the report for the domestic disturbance they’ve just broken up. His brain’s still caught in the modality of needing to translate an internal stream of frustrated profanity into polished, situationally appropriate language. They’re on the other side of the city, parked in an empty lot, and if Alan’s only just taken off, there’s no way he’s going to cross his older brother’s path.
Not that he would anyway. Short of a concerted effort to find him, when Alan takes off, it’s usually just a matter of waiting for him to come home. Anything else wastes time and resources and energy. He’s not usually gone for longer than a few hours. No longer than a night, at the worst, and those are nights he usually crashes at a friends place. It’s not that he doesn’t worry about Alan. Scott worries plenty about Alan, when Alan takes off, but the balance of probability is that Alan will be fine.
It’s the way his absence ripples through the rest of the family, because now John won’t sleep. He’ll be up all night waiting by the door, agonizing over whether or not he should try and call someone who probably won’t answer, if he’s brought his phone at all. Now Virgil will go wandering off after the youngest, peering down back alleys and sticking his head in the doors of arcades and corner stores, or approaching little knots of hooded figures, hoping one of them might be Alan. And Gordon, if Gordon gets the news, will be in a fit of black temper and distraction, when his job demands that he remain detached, impersonal, and focused.
And the worst is the way Scott has to wonder when Alan stopped caring, about the way he makes his family feel. When he stopped caring that his actions have consequences, and stopped being able to tell that his brothers are doing their best, and even if they’re failing, that they hope it counts for something.
But for now there’s nothing he can do about it, except to keep an ear on the scanner, and hope that no one picks his kid brother up tonight.
Gordon shouldn’t have his phone on him at all, but he’d caught a bleeder early in the evening, and in a lull between calls, his supervisor had jerked her thumb at the lockers and told him to clean himself up. He only glanced at his phone to check the time.
Alan’s gone, again.
It’s the again that sets Gordon teeth into a snarl.
When had Alan’s runaway act become routine? Gordon yanked off his blood-stained top, swapped it out for a fresh uniform, his mind racing as he tugged aggressively at buttons and hooks.
This had to stop; life sucked, there was no denying that, and since Dad’s vanishing act, it had started sucking hard. But either they were all in together, or they weren’t going to make it. They needed to be able to trust each other.
Alan just needed to grow up.
Out in the main room, Gordon heard the phone ring, the shrill bell summoning them for another call.
Gordon slammed his locker door, hard enough to distort the cheap tin, and stalked off to his wagon.
***
Car crashes are crime scenes.
Not a lot of people knew that. But until the cause of the accident had been determined, a car crash was treated as secured until it was released by an officer.
When there were survivors, the police and the paramedics worked together, to save lives as best they could. But by the time Gordon nosed his ambulance through the ring of rubberneckers, his lights flashing off their faces, he knew it was too late.
There was an urgency when the victims were still breathing that melted away when they died.
Gordon pulled up next to the squad car, nodding at the dark-haired rookie leaning against the back bumper. “Kayo, right?”
“That’s me. You’re Tracy’s kid brother, right?” she said with an easy smile.
“Not a kid anymore. Anyone called it?”
Up close, even in the gloom, Gordon could see she was paler than usual. “There’s only one, a driver. His head was, umm?"she made a slicing gesture at neck level.
Gordon set his aching jaw. "Injuries incompatible with life.”
She blinked. “What?”
Gordon hoisted out his field kit; he knew he wouldn’t need it, but the fatality still needed to be officially called. “That’s what we call it, until the coroner report makes it official. ‘Injuries incompatible with life’.”
Kayo exhaled, hard and long. “Got it. Do you need me to?”
Gordon took pity on her; she was a rookie, and a decapitation was bad even for experienced officers. “Keep the bystanders off my ride, wouldya?” he asked with an easy grin, not waiting for a reply before he was striding towards the wreck.
Scott was in the thick of it, issuing orders, choreographing the various services who buzzed around the scene. “Hey, Scott,” Gordon greeted him, already snapping on thick latex gloves.
“Evening,” Scott nodded a greeting. “No rush,” he added thickly.
“So I heard.” He dropped his bag between his boots as he took up post next to Scott. Together, they watched the fire crew work to jam in the hydraulic jack enough to force the door open. The shattered windscreen caught and threw the red light back with a rich, oily sheen that Gordon knew presaged bad things inside. “Did you see John’s text?”
Even over the noise of the scene, Gordon heard Scott inhale through his nose.
“I guess we should be grateful he waited for John to get home, rather than bailing and leaving grandma alone,” Gordon probed carefully, watching Scott’s reaction out of the corner of his eye.
“I guess,” Scott agreed noncommittally. “He’s a good kid.”
Gordon snorted. “He’s a teenager, pissed off, and now fully aware he’s starting everything six feet behind everyone else.”
Finally, Scott looked over at him. “You were pretty pissed off at his age too, as I recall, but I don’t remember you running away all the time.”
Gordon shrugged, testing the fit of his gloves with steepled fingers. “I’m not Alan.”
“You’re not mad?”
Gordon laughed, stifling it quickly, mindful of the solemnity of the scene before them. “I’m fucking furious, and if I catch that kid, I’m putting a bell on him.” He thought for a moment. “Or maybe a leash.” His gloved hands rolled into fists, and he shook them out. “Alan needs to know that—as much as it sucks—he can’t keep taking it out on us. Especially not on Grandma.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Scott promised.
Before them, the car ripped open with a tearing of metal. Gordon waited for the sound to die. “Will he listen to you?”
“Worth a try.”
Gordon shouldered his heavy bag once more. “Except we’ve tried that, Scotty. He needs to know—what he’s doing?” Gordon paused, his mind already steeling itself for what was to come, but managed to find the thread of the end of the thought, “it’s incompatible,” he finished, the word tasting heavy on his tongue. “We can’t hold it together if he’s hell-bent on pulling us apart.”
“He’s a good kid,” Scott repeated.
Gordon snorted and turned to the wreckage, nodding at the fire chief’s beckoning wave. “Good kids can still wreck it. Just saying.” Without waiting for Scott to try and answer, Gordon clambered over the crumpled wreckage of car and bridge support, and went to confirm the end of a life.
Rent Day Blues 