Elaine’s tongue is stuck, too, I thought.
“Have you had your incident debriefing?” Matt asked Dana. I gasped, inaudibly, I hoped. He’d run in, guns blazing, so to speak, and addressed what was on all our minds.
Dana shook her head. Her long, straight hair was wet, as if from a swim or a shower, with no attempt at styling. “Not yet.” A weak voice, but on the way to opening up.
“You know, I’ve been there, as you can imagine.” Matt’s face was as serious as I’d ever seen it, as if he’d just been through a life-changing experience. He reached back into his pants pocket. “I made some notes. Might be useful to you.”
Dana looked at him, focused now. “Yeah?”
Matt patted his pockets. Front, back. Nothing. He clicked his tongue. “I guess I left them in the car. Want to walk out with me to get them?”
Dana pushed herself off the couch. “Yeah, sure.” She glanced at Elaine and me. We nodded back. Permission granted.
Matt stood and followed Dana out the front door. I heard their footsteps on the old wooden stairs and started at the loud bark of a nearby dog.
A moment later, Elaine jumped up. “They don’t have the keys,” she said.
I shook my head. “I don’t think they need them.”
Elaine went to the kitchen, leaving me with my thoughts about Sergeant Matt Gennaro, the man I was engaged to. I was proud of the way Matt presented himself to Dana, but something gnawed at me. I wondered how long you had to be with someone before you’d seen all his potential and knew all his secrets. Was Dana hearing something I’d never heard? Or was this just Matt and Dana, ES worker to ES worker, engaged in shop talk?
Matt didn’t tell me much about being in the line of fire. I could only imagine how frightening it would be to confront violence as part of your everyday work life. Had he witnessed the death of a fellow police officer? A partner, as Dana had? A criminal? I was aware of some of the crises in Matt’s life. His wife of ten years died of heart disease, and he was still dealing with his own prostate cancer. What else was there? I chided myself for not being more alert.
Elaine’s return and the smell of the espresso she brought distracted me from further uneducated psychological analysis.
“It’ll be great if Matt can help Dana,” Elaine said. “We should have thought of that in the first place.”
I nodded and smiled, as if I’d done something good by bringing Matt to California just when it needed him.
When Matt and Dana returned, we decided there was time for one more round of coffee. “Then we need to let Dana get some rest,” Elaine said.
It was my turn in the kitchen, and I volunteered to freshen the mugs. No one mentioned Matt’s “notes,” and the atmosphere had become significantly more cheerful.
“You’ve done a nice job with the place,” Elaine said. She did a similar “nice job” of sounding sincere, considering she’d recently invested a month’s pay in a new carpet because the color was maybe ten wavelengths off from matching her new couch.
We all looked around, as if to verify Elaine’s judgment. It was clear that her evaluation didn’t include the pots and pans stacked on chairs and window ledges, nor the unopened cartons scattered through the common area.
A laptop computer and its peripherals occupied most of the dining room table. The cord was looped over the backs of chairs and along the floor until it disappeared into one of the bedrooms, to an AC outlet, I assumed. The living room had a badly scratched bookcase stuffed with paperbacks, and stacks of CDs (the equivalent of my old crate of LPs, I told myself ) were strewn around a stereo system. Two sleek, contemporary-style bicycles were propped against the wall outside one of the bedrooms.
If we’d been playing a game from a puzzle book—find the object that doesn’t fit—I’d have chosen the expensive brown leather briefcase, standing in a corner next to a Whole Earth canvas tote bag full of recyclable cans and bottles. The case was the attache style, thin and rectangular, with a gold spinning combination lock at the top.
“It belongs to the guy,” Dana said when she caught me staring at the briefcase. “The guy Tanisha and I took to the trauma center last night—a gunshot vic. He had a briefcase plus a duffel bag.”
“So the person who shot Tanisha probably just got sweaty gym clothes,” Elaine said, sadness in her voice.
Dana nodded, twisting a long strand of brown hair in her fingers. “We usually make two trips into the hospital, the first one with the patient, of course, and then we go back to the ambulance, and one of us changes the paper on the gurney and cleans up whatever”—I tried not to picture “whatever” from an ambulance patient—“while the other makes a run inside with the patient’s belongings. But this guy had a lot of stuff, so Tanisha said she’d run in with the big duffel bag while I checked around the back of the ambulance for anything that might have spilled, and”—Dana’s voice cracked—“and then I’d take this briefcase and whatever else I found, like his wallet was on the floor, and some cards fell out and I wanted to make sure I got them all. And … I was sort of reading them, because it looked like there were a dozen IDs, all different. The same face. An Indian, I’m pretty sure. But different names. A lot of what looked like lab badges. I’ve seen a few of those. Now I’m thinking, if I weren’t so nosy, if it hadn’t taken me so long …”