The Survivor

"Pale is in, I hear." He peels out from the curb and merges into traffic without signaling, the unmistakable aura of cop coming off of a gray import with two hundred thousand miles on the clock doing the work for him.

"I won't hold my breath," she says.

"You should. Lie down while you do it, maybe you'll get lucky and someone will try CPR."

"It's all fun and games until they zap you with a defibrillator."

Hernandez frowns out the side window at something Kelly doesn't see. He reaches for the radio but checks himself and accelerates to close the gap that's opened up between them and the car in front. "People pay good money for that."

"What was that about?"

"Nothing," Hernandez says. "Just kids. I swear I'm getting jumpy in my old age."

"You feel threatened by their youth," Kelly says. "They've got something you can't ever get back, and that scares the shit out of you."

He frowns again. "Aren't you, like, eight years older than me?"

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that." She keeps her tone light, but the jab still finds its mark. Kelly presses her fingers into her palms, not making fists, never anything so obvious, and stretches them out again, feeling the tension build in the tendons, then drain as she relaxes them. If it is meant to make her feel better, it doesn't work.

Eight years extra to climb the same height up the ladder, and only one bad day to fuck it all up.

"Where am I dropping you?"

"Cortlandt."

Hernandez puffs his cheeks out. "In this traffic? I'll drop you on the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge, you can hop the J train or something."

"Hernandez," Kelly says, "I am booked in for a full day of following the mole people around on the subway. I refuse to spend a second longer underground than I absolutely have to."

"What is this gig, anyway? Some kind of PR stunt, or something?"

"Something like that."

"Must be nice, getting to go around getting your picture taken instead of doing real police work."

It isn't a PR stunt. As much as Hernandez is trying to put a shine on it, there's no way in hell he can polish it up to resemble anything other than what it is: shit duty.

Someone at the commissioner's office dreamed it up, just for her. Cross-precinct interdepartmental procedure and communications liaison. They might as well have printed her off a badge that read fuckup.

Someone turns up at your precinct with enough words in their job title to fill half a paperback, you know that something has gone wrong in their career. Detective is one word, and everyone who hears it knows exactly what it means. Patrolman. Sergeant. Captain. No one is going to read any of those and need a ten-minute presentation to explain what the hell they are meant to be doing there. Kelly sometimes finds herself trying to parse meaning from it—cross-precinct interdepartmental procedure and communications liaison—before remembering that it doesn't mean anything beyond her serving out her penance. A forced pilgrimage from one precinct to the next, to be paraded in front of every single serving police officer as a warning that this, too, could happen to you.

Still, it could have been worse. She could have ended up back in uniform.

She could have been fired.

"The subway has its own cops now?"

Kelly clears her throat, trying to cover the fact that Hernandez has been talking to himself while she was busy fuming. "Always has," she says. "NCOs, or neighborhood coordination officers. They're the contact point between the Transit Authority, the NYPD, and the public. Responsible for helping maintain a safe and positive atmosphere on one of the largest and busiest public transport networks in the world."

Hernandez grins at her. "Look at you, doing your homework."

"Just like to know who's going to be pissing in my Frosted Flakes before I have to take a bite, that's all."

"And what are they like, really?"

Kelly has done her homework on that, too. "Fucked is what they are," she says. "The city wants the trains to run, period. No stops, no delays, no issues. If a guy falls under the train or gets knifed on the platform, the first question they ask is how many minutes it's going to hold up service."

"Jesus," Hernandez says. "If you want to off someone, I guess do it on the subway."

"Yeah, and then you and I get to work on our migraines watching the security camera footage over and over."

"That's the truth right there."