It’s not a terribly thick folder she drops on the table, just a handful of freshly printed pages in a crisp blue jacket. Beside it she sets a spiral-bound stenographer’s pad and two ballpoint pens, clack, tack, and last, a short brown paper cup with the tags of a couple of teabags peeping from under its white plastic lid. Scrape as she pulls out a chrome-framed black-cushioned chair, creak as she settles her bulk in it. Her slacks a slickly brown, her half-zip pullover softly grey, her silver hair close-cropped. She opens the jacket, flips back the cover of the stenographer’s pad, takes up a pen, click-lick, click-lick, and squints at the woman across the battered table from her, younger, smaller, downright scrawny, wrists manacled to a bracket welded to the tabletop, arms bared and shoulders, shivering, dressed only in filthy jeans and a grey bralette, her hair-colored hair a matted, tangled curtain dropped before her face.

“Chilly?” says the silver-haired woman. Not even a clink of the cuffs in response.

“Okay!” Another click-lick of the pen. “This is Detective Sally Bauer, Bee Ay You Ee Are, on the Homicide Detail. Date is Friday, twenty-fifth May; time, oh-seven eighteen hours; case number,” and here she checks the first page of the file, “two seven two, four nine eight. We are currently in an interview room in the confines of the Portland Police Bureau, eleven-eleven Southwest Second, on the thirteenth floor.” Turning a page. “State your name for the record.” Looking up. That curtain of hair not even stirred by a breath.

“This strong and silent schtick won’t get you anywhere, okay? We took your prints. You’re in the system? We’ll know who you are in not too much longer. You’re not? Though, I gotta tell you, to look at you, this is not your first rodeo. Folks who, it’s their first time? Never been through this before? Tend to be a little more,” a shrug, “agitated.”

A shiver strong enough to chime the manacles.

“You want a blanket?” Turning another page. “Cup of coffee?” Lifting the lid of the paper cup to hoist and dunk the teabags. Replacing the lid. “Give me a name. That way, when your people call, they can be told where you are, what’s going on. You do have people?”

Removing the lid, setting it upside down on the table, she lifts out the teabags, squeezes them with a wince, drops them on the lid. Licks her thumb clean. “Look, the facts so far, not many of them, but, as-is, they’re not bad for you. Play straight with me, everything checks out, you don’t blow off Recog, you could be out of here by two, three o’clock in the afternoon. Not every day someone comes in with a body can say that.” Turning another page. “Before we get any further in this, were you Mirandized? Because the form is here, but quelle surprise, it’s unsigned.” A heavy sigh. “So, out of an abundance of caution. You. Have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law; you have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?” Shuff as she flicks the page across the table to fetch up by the bracket. “Here,” tugging another pen from a pocket of her pullover, chucking it wobble to land with a limply flop on the page. “Gotta use one of those to sign it.”

Not a twitch from the hands on the other side of the bracket, streaked with dirt about the knuckles, the yet-green smear of a grass stain.

“I get it. Shit happens, in those camps. They aren’t safe. Big guy like that jumps you, in the dark? And maybe, we find out who he is, we find out he was off his meds, or should’ve been on some in the first place. There’s a gun. It goes off. You walk away; he doesn’t. It’s self defense, straight up. Cut and dried. So help me get it over the line. Give me something. Tell me. Is that, how it, went down?”

Sitting back, with a creak, in her chair. Folding her arms. Waiting. Watching, until, click-lack, she leans forward, drags the piece of paper back to her side of the table. Marks an X at the bottom, scrawls the date beside it. Stacks it with the other pages, taps them into a neat bundle, slips them into the jacket. “Oh seven twenty-two,” she says. “My shift ends at eight, which means about nine, nine-thirty, I should be done enough to get out of here, get a Denver omelet in me, get home and sleep for not nearly enough.” Scrape of the chair she pushes back. “So if this is all it’s gonna be?” Getting to her feet, closing the cover of the unused stenographer’s pad. “I’d just as soon be getting that whole process jump-started. So.” Tucking away her pens. “Your only chance of getting back on the street anytime today is about to walk out the door.”

“I did,” says the woman then, and Bauer starts at that, but blinking keeps any surprise off her face, “whatever it was I did.” That head lifting, tilting, matted hair falling away from her face, those thin pale lips, that nose, the mud-colored eyes. “You’re telling me what’s gonna happen because of what I did, it depends on how I talk to you, right here, right now.”

“It tells me what kind of person you are,” she says, “which, yeah, goes a long way toward figuring out what needs to happen.”

“Doesn’t sound much like justice.”

Sally snorts. “Sister, all anybody ever can do is work the problem in front of them. Justice has to sort itself out in the wash. You said, it’s mine. What were you talking about?”

Those flat eyes look away.

“It’s the only thing in Dunbar’s report that you said, to anybody. First on the scene, that’s what you said to him: it’s mine. What did you mean? What’s yours?” A moment, a blink. “The gun?”

That head lowers, hair falling strands and hanks a curtain once again. Sally looks away, a grimace of chagrin. “All right,” she says. “Fine,” she says, and heads for the door. “The interview is over.” Knocks loudly, twice. “Someone will be along to take you back down to Holding, in a bit.” Somewhere without a bolt’s undone, a knob is turned. “I’ll see you again in a couple of days, I’m sure.”

Head down, hood lowered, a grey-green mantle about his shoulders, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his running shoes once blue that take relentlessly one step after another, he makes his way down the block, across the street, down the next, past trim little bungalows in unassuming colors, and parked on the street before them bantamweight SUVs and beefy hatchbacks, many with ski racks or bicycle racks or ærodynamic carryalls fixed to their roofs. The sidewalk ahead’s blocked by thrown-together panels of chain-link to fence off a construction site, hung about with signs that say Apartments Coming September, Crutchfield Evans, Anaphenics, No Parking This Space. He steps into the narrow walkway protected from the street by Jersey barricades in orange and white, down to the corner, across the next intersection, without looking up or back.

Past the construction, more estate cars and bungalows, but also minivans and older sedans, and here and there houses more recently built, flatter, the windows of them duller, yards meaner, and what trees they have are yet too small to settle down behind. Music wafts his way, echoing chime of piano chords over a crisply languid beat. Up ahead, across the street, a half-dozen or so young men, boys, talking and laughing, shoving, mac ’n’ cheese an a snotty nose, Motel 6, lame trappin an some shoddy hoes, somebody blows a cloud of smoke, somebody twirls away, dropping in a complicated tuck and stretch to a clap and a slap and an ah-ha, oh yeah. His shoulders hunch even higher to carry him on past, deliberately refusing to wince as the laughter redoubles, rising, joining, becoming a ragged revving chorus on the beat, unh-huh, unh-huh, ha-ha! and very much without looking like he’s looking up or around he eyes the street behind him. A delivery tricycle’s trundling up, big yellow box over the back two wheels behind the saddle, This trike eats hunger for breakfast, says the slogan on the side of it, Ask our rider about B-shares, the cyclist pedaling furiously, bright green helmet and a blue rainshell, “Go on!” one of the young men shouts, and “Fuck yeah, motorvate!” another, and “I think I can I think I can” over a couple of chorused chugga-chuggas that all dissolves in general hilarity. The cyclist’s left hand lifts, bent at an angle, and the trike wheels into a right turn.

Head down, he keeps on.

A block or so later he darts across the street to the corner, the cross street here narrow, a low rise closely lined with smaller houses, cars and trucks parked heel-by-nose down either side. He heads down the slender single lane that’s left between them, past here and there a tell-tale yellow envelope of a parking ticket tucked under the wipers, and pasted on a windshield there a faded green label, Tow Warning, it says, PBOT. One door, two doors, three doors down, and he comes to a stop, there in the middle of the street, his narrow cheekbones hunched much like his shoulders.

The house is small, pale green, the front of it mostly a shallow gable swooping to shelter a front door the color of cinnamon, and pushing up from the little porch before it to waddle down those concrete steps a portly brindle pit bull.

He squeezes sidelong between bumpers, around the blue garbage bin on the curb to kneel there, on the sidewalk, at the edge of the yard. “Goose?” he says, putting out his hand, and the dog’s tail wags hard enough to unbalance its mincingly hastening. “How’d you get to be so old?” The dog leans into his proffered hand, tongue-lollingly beaming at the scritches.

“You know him?”

He takes a moment, and a breath, before looking up. “He’s just a good dog.”

She’s small, the woman on the porch, small enough her upswept bun of honey-silver hair seems too ponderous for the rest of her, draped in a shapeless purple sweater. “About the only person,” she says, “Gustav ever tolerated that from,” scratching her chin, “was my boy.” Folding up her arms.

His scritching’s shifted to stroking, a couple of pats. “That so.”

“Christian,” she says. And then, “Beaumont. My son, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him. Such a beautiful boy. You know him?”

A careful shrug, without exactly nodding, or shaking his head. “Did, ah,” he says, eyes on the dog gazing blissfully up at him, “did something happen?”

“He was always running off,” she says. “But he always came back. A wild boy, but not that wild. A few days, a week, at most.” He’s stopped stroking, but Gustav’s tail still wags. “Been gone all winter, though. Eight months, now, this time. He sure has taken a shine to you.”

He looks up again, blinking once, twice, to meet those pale grey eyes like water, like ice, faintly stern, vaguely suspicious. “I’m sure,” he says, and swallows, and starts again, “I’m sure, wherever he is, your son, he’s, he’s doing fine, just fine.”

“That so,” she says. “Well. I think, now, maybe, you best be about your business.”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, getting to his feet. The pit bull gathers himself for a single baritone bark. “Gustav!” she chides.

“It’s okay, Goose,” he says. “You stay. You be a good boy.”

She comes down a step or two, eyeing him as he heads past the garbage bin, away on down the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. Gustav still there at the edge of the yard, tail flagging, musters up one more bark. “Gustav,” she calls, still watching. “Get on back here.”

He sits up of a sudden, in that big round bed in the middle of the room, legs tangled in linens crisply striped with indigo. Leans forward, head in his hands, hands the heels of them rub at his eyes, shift as he sits up, slide down his cheeks, the faint rasp of yesterday’s stubble, lifting to push back what’s left of his hair.

He swings down his feet from the edge of the bed, bare feet that nestle in white shag carpet. Elbows on knees, bare knees, his head hung low. Up and standing then, all at once, stepping away from the bed toward the sweeping wall of glass. The sun is somewhere behind this room, blazing with daylight the city below, houses and low buildings across the bright river, traffic busy lined and crossed in a grid half-swallowed by green unruly overgrowth, and along this bank the towers of downtown deceptively sharp, brittle façades that shuffle themselves until it’s difficult to pick out the shape entire of this brick ziggurat, that slit-windowed tower, and so many panes of cool rain-colored glass, and only the one lone tower of pinkly amber granite behind them all defiantly itself, windows of it struck to copper by the light.

Turning away.

The bed, in the middle of the room, striped sheets rucked and crumpled there, and the pillows where his head had lain, more pillows stacked beside them neatly, and the crease and drape of the sheets there undisturbed. Two small nightstands, one to either side, the tops of them both bare, and an empty stretch of thick white carpet, and the wall behind, a palely neutral blue that’s almost white, the door there, left ajar, the shadowed hall beyond.

That hall jogs round a corner past a couple of closed doors to open out into an empty kitchen, unlit, dim haven from the dazzle of more white shag beyond, another wall of glass too bright. He leans a hand against the bare kitchen island and watches the big man move through all that daylight, stepping into a long low lunge of a stretch, twisting his torso the one way, the other, as he lifts both his arms out and up to the height of those thickset shoulders, muscles rolling and sliding along his broad bare back as he quite slowly supinates the one hand, pronates the other, looking away off to that side, and then just as slowly turns them about as his head twists to look the other way. Lowering his hands, then, straightening to his considerable height, iron-colored hair close-cropped, mustaches lush and long, gathered to either side of his close-lipped mouth by rough-hewn beads of pewter, and only a pair of snug white briefs about his hips. They share a look for one long wordless moment, and then those mustaches spread in a simple, guileless smile. “You remember,” says the big man.

“I remember last night,” he says, “astonishing enough. I remember,” trailing off. He doesn’t pull his hand away when it’s taken gently in that larger, rougher hand. “I don’t know what happened to my clothes,” he says.

“Ah,” he says, still smiling. “They’re being found, retrieved, and seen to.”

“Found,” he says, looking away. “Is there any coffee?”

“There can be,” he says, “and we have the makings of simple omelets, if you’d like,” but he doesn’t let go, and he doesn’t pull away. They stand there, hands clasped, on either side of the corner of the island.

“I remember last night, and the carnival,” he says, “and I remember you swore. You swore you’d keep me safe.”

“And here you are,” he says, “and you are safe.”

“I remember forgetting you,” he says, looking up again, looking back to him again, until he looks down, away, those weighted mustaches swaying. “I remember,” he says, “how much I forgot,” blinking rapidly as he looks back up to him, but he doesn’t pull his hand away, he squeezes instead, and closes his eyes, and tips down his head. Lets him turn that hand over, lets a thickly grey-furred thumb stroke the back of it gently, once, twice.

“Well,” he says then, thickly. “I’ll have to make certain that never happens again.” And he lifts that hand, to press a kiss to the back of it. To squeeze it with his own, another kiss parting his lips about the knuckles, a step to the side as he steps to the side, the corner no longer between them, pressing close, arms folded hands clasped between them as their lips meet in a kiss.