My eyes are greenish—or at least I was assuming they were, because that’s what people told me, and apparently I was iffy on that color—and my hair was dark brown, lightening if I spent time in the sun.
But I’d grown up in the Midwest, and there were places we’d gone to live where how Mike looked got him into trouble. Or rather, trouble found him. He and I made frequent trips down to principals’ offices, our knuckles bloodied and our faces bruised because somebody called Mike a name.
I’d learned to deflect a lot of that, and moving out to California definitely pushed much of that back into the far distant past because we were no longer different.
Watson brought that all back.
There were a lot of things I could say to him, a lot of things my mind actively reached for, sharpening the words so I could fling them into his face and maybe cut him down to the bone. At another time I might have even wanted to punch his face. Okay, I still wanted to punch his face, but the need wasn’t as strong as it would’ve been when I was in my twenties.
Instead I said to Bobby, with a sarcastic grin plastered across my face, “So I guess he does know you.”
“Shit, I do know him,” Bobby muttered under his breath, ducking his head to give me a hard look, then glancing back up at the man chuckling at us. “You were out of Rampart, right, Watson?”
Bobby was in the same headspace I was, caught between wanting to turn Watson’s nose into a squished meatball and us needing to get any information we could out of him. People tended to not want to answer questions after getting their faces punched in, so both of us silently agreed to swallow our pride and outraged decency to push forward.
I stepped back, mostly to take Watson out of punching range and also to let Bobby lead. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know Watson wasn’t going to appreciate me asking him any questions, and his resistance to O’Byrne made a hell of a lot more sense now that we added racist bigot to the equation on top of old-school cop. I stood there pondering if racist bigot was actually redundant when I heard Watson offering us a couple of beers.
That’s when I also noticed I’d been left standing outside in the hall while the two of them had gone into the condo. The tiny furry scarf masquerading as a dog stared up at me from its place at my feet, its face comically screwed up with a mixture of concern and apprehension, probably wondering why the door was open and I hadn’t sought the safety of its home. Dogs get like that. Or at least some do. Honey didn’t like to go outside unless one of us was within line of sight. It could have been because she’d been on the street for several years and wanted to make sure she always had access to a place with food and air-conditioning, but I liked to think she just wanted to make sure she could always see the people who loved her.
Mind you, she had an unrequited love affair with Neko, so Jae and I were quite aware where we stood in the rankings of her affections—right below bacon and the cat.
“Close the door behind you,” Watson called out. “Muncie doesn’t like the people next door on the other side. If he catches one whiff of that shit they call food when their door opens, he’ll be inside of their house before you could even blink.”
“Got it,” I replied, stepping over the dog I assumed was Muncie. I thought to myself perhaps Muncie didn’t hate them as much as Watson thought he did and was possibly looking for a new place to live. This assumption was partially validated when I closed the door and Muncie sighed with a resignation only previously heard by Chicago Cubs fans for decades before their epic win; then the dog toddled off toward the living room.
I followed the dog.
The beer Bobby handed me was cold and in a can, its sides announcing it’d been made by the pure waters of the Rocky Mountains. I’d been to Denver. I hadn’t noticed its tap water as being something especially drinkable, but perhaps the beer factory faucet they used had a filter on. Knowing Watson would notice if I didn’t at least drink half of it, I popped the