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It only takes a month after wrapping up the case in Martinaise for Harry to make the bold transition from alcoholic to functioning alcoholic – which, all things considered, is an improvement by anyone’s standards. He shows up to work hungover but never drunk; works tirelessly on cases, if only to deserve a stop at the liquor store on the way home. He’s still under Jean’s scrutiny but, since Kim transferred to Precinct 41 and was formally reassigned as Harry’s partner, he’s been blessed with the silent patience of someone who regards progress as progress, as long as the job gets done.
Perhaps because they’re now officially partners, or because Kim Kitsuragi is a kind man and Harry’s car is still wrecked in the thawing sea ice of a poor fishing village, they travel to work together in the Coupris Kineema in the mornings. Harry has become accustomed to being outside at 8am because, though Kim will wait, time is clearly important to him – he has only ever arrived late once, and that was at 8:03 and accompanied by an apology and an explanation that he’d been caught up in the traffic of the car accident that they were supposed to be investigating that day.
This is why, when Harry wakes with a dry mouth and heavy legs, he does not give in to the impulse to roll over and fall back asleep. He heaves himself out of bed and stumbles blearily to the bathroom, gulping directly from the sink tap and staring at himself in the mirror. His face is blotchy and swollen, but he’s alive and – with a hot shower and the gritty grind of his toothbrush – presentable enough. Even his clothes are clean.
See? Functioning.
It’s 7:55 when he leaves the apartment, just in time to smoke a cigarette and replace the dry thirst in his mouth with something simultaneously wet and ashy, clumping at the back of his throat. He spits the phlegm onto the ground as Kim’s car carefully rounds the corner, stubbing out his cigarette under his shoe whilst the car pulls to a measured stop in front of him.
Kim leans over to open the door from the inside. “Good morning, Detective,” he says.
“Another fine day for detecting, Detective,” Harry smiles, wishing he’d brushed his teeth twice this morning and quickly closing his lips.
They’ve mainly been investigating drug crimes – the sort of thing where someone overdoses from a poorly-cut batch, or a small-time dealer gets in over his head and winds up shot dead by someone with only slightly more influence. Nothing that gets to the roots of it – to the doorsteps of the pharmaceutical companies or the boardrooms where decisions around addiction and demand are made – but enough to keep the do-gooders feeling like they’re making a difference. Yesterday, a young girl no older than 14 was dead with a needle in her arm; tomorrow, a mother will lose her entire family to either death or incarceration.
Today, Harry walks onto the scene and sees Cuno’s dead body.
God – of course it isn’t actually Cuno, not out here in Jamrock, but the similarities are striking. Same hair, same scrawny build, same stupid clothes. Surrounded by the same signs of speed usage and drinking, but very clearly dead from a shot to the head. Point blank, execution style.
Though Harry hasn’t even had a moment to catch his breath, and his legs feel like they’re about to give way, his brain provides a helpful visual reconstruction of what could have happened:
First, not-Cuno must have gotten in over his head. Maybe he couldn’t pay a debt, or maybe he was outright idiotic and stole from a dealer. Either way, he owed someone something. This someone must have come to collect. Whacked out on the very same drugs, not-Cuno would have been unable to fight back. He must have been pushed up against the tree – maybe his attacker whispered a message from The Boss – and then, gun to the head, gun to the middle of the fucking head, someone blasted Cuno’s fucking brains out.
“Keep it together,” Kim puts a hand on his shoulder.
So Harry does – he keeps it together through the field autopsy, when Kim takes a photograph that shows that this kid has much bigger ears and shorter limbs than Cuno, and then through the preliminary investigation which turns up nothing except a paper prescription bag, all the way back to the Precinct where he writes up his notes with a shaking hand. Mentally, he’s already at the liquor store, picking his poison to drown out the fact that this is his every day.
At 5pm, people begin to filter out of the station. Harry is never the first to leave, but he moves towards the door much quicker than usual today. If he’s fast enough, he’ll be able to bypass Kim’s obligatory offer to drive him home and make it in time to catch the 5:15 bus, which stops past the good liquor store – the one that closes at 6pm – where he can get a bottle of gin and some of the nice cigarettes with the long filters.
As he grabs his coat, he feels the Lieutenant’s presence behind him, and he prepares his usual excuse – that he thinks better on the bus, watching the world and all its people go by.
“Absolutely not,” Kim says before Harry even gets the words out. “I insist.”
Even having gotten to know him better over the past few months, Harry still cannot resist Kim’s authoritative eyebrow raise, and he knows better than to push the subject. An alcoholic would get defensive and storm out, making it an argument or – even more malicious – Kim’s fault. An alcoholic would think of nothing except the gin and the good liquor store, at any cost.
A functioning alcoholic would smile, accept the ride, and walk to the convenience store down the road later on.
So, he gets into the Coupris Kineema, leaning back in the passenger seat as he usually does. Kim starts the car and pulls away in silence, effectively trapping Harry inside as he finally begins to speak.
“It was Cuno, wasn’t it?” He says. There’s no judgement or pity in his voice, but it doesn’t come out like a question, either. “That kid today reminded you of him.”
Harry pauses before answering. “I thought it was Cuno.”
“So did I, briefly. But it isn’t.”
“It’s still a kid, Kim. Who the fuck shoots a kid in the head?”
“That’s what we have to find out.”
A better cop might consider this enough of a purpose to throw himself into, but Harry can’t resist the temptation – once Kim is gone and the mumbled roar of the Kineema is at least four streets away – to see if the point is waiting for him at the end of three bottles of red wine, instead.
He asks Kim if he can hold onto the crime scene photo.
The first bottle is euphoria; water in the desert. The warmth that begins in Harry’s heart travels through his veins until his fingertips tingle, and every muscle in his body remembers how to relax. Beautiful and brief, the weight of the world is lifted. After two and a half large glasses, he becomes a hummingbird, sucking the nectar of the first drunk cigarette through a thin filter and breathing out gentle pools of smoke.
The second bottle chases the feeling. It’s always around this time that the tightrope-walk begins – staying one drink ahead of the headache but not crashing and burning too early. Each sip is important; has a purpose. He wants to feel good again. He wants that first bottle feeling. He doesn’t want to stare at the picture of not-Cuno with a chasm in the middle of his head, wondering what it must feel like in your soul to have your brain matter torn apart. By this point, the room is hazy with smoke.
The third bottle does not kill him. He can recall nothing else.
Still, he wakes at 7:30. And still, he is outside by 8am, but this time, he’s wearing yesterday’s shirt.
“Another fine day for-”
He realises that Kim hasn’t greeted him in his usual manner. Instead, the Lieutenant seems to be fixated on Harry’s collar, provoking an unconscious impulse within Harry’s hands – and the moment he reaches up to smooth out his shirt, he’s given the game away. Just like that, without words, they both know that his drinking is spiralling out of control again.
To Kim’s credit, he doesn’t say anything. He just drives back to the crime scene, where not-Cuno’s dead body has been removed for processing, parking the car half a street away from the cordoned off public park and turning off the engine.
Harry goes to open the passenger door, but Kim stops him. Looks him dead in the eyes. “Can you do this, Officer?”
“Yes,” Harry replies instantly. “It’s not like in Martinaise. I know the job I have to do.”
“Right, but can you do it?”
“I’ve been doing it for decades, Kim.”
“Can you do it?”
Harry looks out of the car window, seeing the crime scene tape blocking off the main entrance to the park. The only others on-scene are the forensics team, who seem to be standing around doing a whole lot of nothing.
“I can do it,” Harry says. “Someone has to.”
With very little in terms of material evidence, Kim suggests that they begin by identifying witnesses and informally questioning them on the streets. It’s a task that will take them away from the park and through the sharp turns of Jamrock, searching for anyone with a connection to the pharmacy labelled on the paper prescription bag that was by the body. Harry can already tell that it’s a wild goose chase – with one pharmacy serving the entire community and rumours of less-than-legal prescriptions being written for those who know where to send the last vestiges of their pathetic paychecks, if this is an operation, it’s a closed one. Even – no, especially – the RCM has limits.
There’s a woman smoking a cigarette outside the pharmacy, leaning against the wall with a bag in her left hand. Kim approaches her, and Harry hangs back a few steps, peering through the one-way glass of the building to try and make out any shapes inside. The door is shut, but there could be a queue inside.
Something tells him there isn’t.
“Good morning, ma’am,” Kim says, taking out his notebook. “My partner and I are from the 41st Precinct, investigating the murder of a young boy. Do you have time for some questions?”
“Questions?” The woman drawls, not quite faking her accent but smoothing it over with thick traces of other places.
“Yes. It’s important to gain a local perspective on crime.” It’s clear that Kim has already clocked what a bad idea it would be to approach this with guns blazing.
“Well, I suppose,” she says. “But I’m not sure I’ll have much of use to you, darling.”
If it were Harry, he would have been distracted by that last word, but Kim makes direct eye contact with a pleasant, unreadable smile as he continues without missing a beat. “Are you aware that there’s been a murder close by?”
“Oh, that? Well, I knew there was some commotion.”
“How so?”
“All of you,” she gestures, with both hands, up and down in Kim and Harry’s direction. “I figured it must be something like murder instead of an accident.”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Right now, we’re trying to piece together the victim’s movements before death.”
“I can’t exactly help you if I don’t know who has been killed, can I?” She says, and Harry detects a hint of pride in her voice.
It makes his nose curl into a snarl. Who the fuck can act so nonchalant about a kid dying? He pulls the crime scene photograph out of his jacket and thrusts it at her. “This kid,” he demands.
Kim lets out a small, near-imperceptible sigh. “I apologise; this is the only photograph we have.”
The woman studies it for a moment. “Poor child,” she says. “But I’m not sure I know him.”
“Not sure?” Harry presses.
“My apologies. I’m sure you require clarity in your line of work. I don’t know him.”
“Thank you,” Kim says. “Do you normally smoke here?”
“I smoke wherever I am, darling.”
“Were you here at all yesterday?”
“Yesterday, yesterday,” the woman thinks. “I might have been. In the morning. Picking up a prescription for my mother, although – no, that was the day before. I’m sure of it.”
“And you didn’t see the kid at all?” Harry questions.
“I’m afraid not. Or, if I did, I’ve forgotten.”
“Then remember,” he insists. “This could have been the last place he visited before someone put a bullet in his skull.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she takes a measured drag from her cigarette. “Most people here come to the pharmacy for something. Without it, we’d all be dying of horrible new diseases. I doubt you’ll narrow your search at all if this is your only lead.”
But Harry presses on, pushing through the pharmacy door whilst Kim thanks the woman on both of their behalf and then jogs to catch up to him.
As he suspected, the interior isn’t bustling with the type of foot traffic you’d expect from the only pharmacy in the area. The cashier behind the counter is polite, but gives similarly vague answers as the woman outside, and Harry is so distracted by something that feels like injustice to notice anything significant for the rest of the day.
Like yesterday, Kim insists on driving Harry home again. And like yesterday, Harry is powerless to refuse.
This time, though, Kim waits until they’ve been driving for ten minutes to speak. “You have to keep yourself together,” he says. “I can see the cracks, Harry. Others can too.”
“It’s just fucking… getting to me a bit, that’s all,” Harry says, staring out the window.
“Because of Cuno?”
“Just-” Harry opens his hands. “-all of it. We’ll find the guy who pulled the trigger and the guy who told him to do it won’t face any repercussions.”
“I’m afraid revolution is outside our jurisdiction.”
“That’s just the thing, Kim. Nobody wants to be the one to build the barricade, but someone has to do it! Otherwise… what the fuck are we doing? What the fuck are we heading towards?”
As if in response, Kim turns the car down a side street. This isn’t the way back to Harry’s apartment. “This is your problem,” he says, both hands gripping the wheel. “You’re always heading towards something, Harry. Terrified of looking back and seeing just how you’ve gotten to where you are.”
“So what? It’s my fault?”
“It shouldn’t matter whose fault it is!” This may be the most emotional Harry has ever seen Kim, and the tension that rises in the car lessens when Kim obviously realises this too, dropping his shoulders from his ears. “Assigning blame doesn’t change things, like you said. We can find the guy who shot the gun but not the man who told him to – okay, maybe that is the way it is. Maybe we are just a cog in a machine and we have no say in the way it turns. How is destroying yourself going to help?”
“It’ll stop the machine from turning.”
“It won’t,” Kim sighs. “They’d replace you before the other cogs even realised they were turning without you. That’s how small we are, in the grand scheme of things. And if you really are so dead set on revolution, then you’d know that they want you addicted and hopeless because it makes you easier to control. But I think we both know that you’ve been doing this to yourself for so long that you’ll assign any justification to self-destruction.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant, for the complete and total assassination of my character and motivations. Is this why you’re kidnapping me?”
“Kidnap- oh, Harry, don’t be so dramatic.”
Kim pulls the car into a storage unit, unlocking the car doors and stepping out. Curious, Harry follows him, watching him take a key out of his pocket and walk up to the unit labelled 19 in large painted letters.
Kim puts the key in the lock and turns around. “You’re the most compliant of all my kidnap victims,” he smiles.
“What can I say? I’m curious.”
Turning the light on, Kim reveals that the storage unit is comprised of four tall shelves, one on each wall, containing a variety of car parts. In the middle, a vehicle in abject disrepair slumps into the concrete.
“This,” Kim says proudly. “Is your car.”
“How the hell did you get it out of the ice?”
“Okay, it’s not your car. That’s still buried. But this is a car that, with patience and persistence, could become yours.”
“I don’t know the first thing about fixing cars, Kim.”
“Luckily for you, I do.”
“So that’s what this is?” Harry suddenly feels defensive. “If you don’t want to give me a ride to work, you don’t have to, you know. I can get the bus.”
Kim sighs. “That’s not what this is about. This is…” He chooses his words carefully. “Daily bread.”
“Daily bread?”
“Yes. Daily bread. Purpose. Something to do outside of work.”
Kim approaches the car, laying a hand on the bonnet. “She won’t be fixed overnight. She needs a complete overhaul, and we might not have all the parts we need. But I’ve been waiting for a reason to make a start on her and I’m certain that this is it.”
“Hanging around with me at work isn’t enough?” Harry cracks a smile.
“Clearly not.” Kim smiles back.
With obvious expertise, Kim walks Harry through the immediately diagnosable faults with the car. For starters, she’s missing both her engine and battery, and her interior has been thoroughly picked clean of anything valuable, leaving her riddled with empty wounds where a radio or mileometer would be. Her paint is scratched, presumably from minor crashes or general damage at the scrapyard. Her windows are smashed, and one of her doors has such a large dent by the handle that it won’t close fully.
If she were Harry’s car, he’d probably leave her running with the unit door closed and let her pass away peacefully. But Kim’s hands are all over her, pointing out her every flaw like a surgeon determined to save her life.
Harry still drinks in the evening, but by the time Kim drops him home after spending an hour writing down a meticulous plan of action in the storage unit, he only buys two bottles, knowing that he’ll be asleep long before the third gets opened.
The first rocks him like a baby in his mother’s arms. Tells him what a good job he did, gets him excited about fixing up the car with Kim. Spending time with Kim. It tells him that he’s cool and suave, that he’s going to impress Kim with how easily he takes to car maintenance.
The second reminds him that not-Cuno is in the morgue, the cold infecting his body through the bullet wound in his head. Picked clean of anything valuable.
The next day, the investigation leads Harry and Kim back through the town, their main goal being to discover the identity of the victim and work from there. Though he still has his suspicions around the pharmacy, Harry can’t deny that Kim’s new direction is yielding a lot more success.
They learn that the boy is called Benny, and that he’s not known around town the way that Cuno is known. He’s got no prior history of antisocial behaviour, consistently shows up to school, and most people they speak to have never even heard of him. The few that have seem to express a similar sentiment – poor kid, being set up for failure by his speed-addicted father.
A short visit to the father’s apartment confirms this general idea. He’s distraught over the loss of his son, weeping and shaking with a bottle in his hand, surrounded by the destruction of his own – and his child’s – life. Harry’s empathy clues him in to the suspicion that this is genuine grief – which doesn’t rule out the possibility of the father committing the crime but does shed a reasonable amount of doubt on the theory.
Kim is obviously more uncomfortable with the pathetic weeping of a broken man than Harry is, so Harry does most of the talking.
“My boy…” The man sobs, over and over.
It conjures mental images of Dora, who never got far enough into her pregnancy to show. But Harry knows, he just knows, that he’s seeing her in his mind with his son. Both gone.
“I’m sorry,” he says, as Kim puts a hand on the man’s shoulder and echoes the sentiment. “We’ll do everything we can to find out who did this.”
“It’s no use… My boy…”
“I know it’s difficult, but could you tell us if you know of anyone who could have done this? Any reason?” Harry asks.
“Any… reason?” The tears stop, stunned. “To kill… my boy? My lovely boy? Who could have wanted to kill him?”
“Yes,” Kim says. “Who could? Even if you don’t think it’s relevant, you might have information that can find the answer. Please, help us help you.”
“There’s nothing,” the man laments. “My boy is gone.”
Harry’s attention is pulled to the window, through which he watches a motorbike drop off a package. He centres and sharpens his vision, successfully spotting the pharmacy logo, before the bike drives away.
He brings this up to Kim later on, back at the storage unit. They’ve been working on stripping the car of broken parts, using handheld tools and a lot of silent patience. Once Harry has found his rhythm removing the bolts that Kim points at, he begins to talk.
“I think the pharmacy is making drug deliveries,” he says.
“Likely thing for a pharmacy to do, yes.”
“Illegal drugs.”
“Again,” Kim hands him a larger wrench and indicates that he needs to unscrew four corner bolts. “This is not new information.”
Harry takes the wrench and huffs, slamming the tool around as he purposely uses it with heavy hands. “They’re involved in the kid’s death.”
“I suspect they’re involved in everything that goes on around here.”
“So that’s it?”
“Harry,” Kim takes the tool from him; his hands are warm. “What is your job?”
“To find the son-of-a-bitch who killed that kid.”
“Right.”
“You don’t understand! I’m certain that the kid was killed because his father couldn’t pay some kind of debt.”
“So instead of the victim being the one in debt to some drug cartel, his father was. Does that change anything?”
“It…” Harry stops.
In the pause, Kim entrusts the wrench back to his hands. “Gently this time, please.”
As Harry begins to carefully unscrew the bolts once more, he lets Kim continue talking.
“It would be nice if we could wrap up every case with a happy ending. If we could solve poverty, addiction, unfair distributions of power and resources. But no person alone can save the world.”
“Some say Dolores Dei could,” Harry comments.
“The Mesque state would disagree. And so, I’m sure, would you.”
“What do we do then?”
“Like I said, Harry,” Kim smiles. “Daily bread.”
As the days pass, the investigation clears up significantly. It’s looking more and more likely that the kid was killed to collect on a minimum six-month debt owed by his father to the pharmacy. Harry’s grand ideals that it could be something larger – that he could somehow figure out how to save Cuno from the fate of his own father through this, or singlehandedly take on the big companies orchestrating everything from the safety of their top-floor buildings – fall away and are quickly replaced by grounded collaboration with forensics teams.
It feels largely hopeless – to be searching for a small contract killer and nothing further. It’s like going into battle against a mythical hydra but going home after cutting off one head.
Each night is accompanied by an average of two bottles now, given that he’s spending at least three hours after work at the storage unit with Kim. These moments – the ones that he’s certain Kim orchestrated to keep him from falling out of functionality and back into plain-old alcoholism – are the ones that punctuate the heaviness of his life with something different; something to look forward to.
Like now, as he’s sifting through a box of control arms that Kim has apparently been collecting for ten years, holding out pieces of metal as Kim shakes his head and says, “Too large,” or “Not that one,” over and over.
“Are you even sure you have one in the right size?” Harry asks after a while.
“Possibly; possibly not. If I do, I can show you how to install it. If not, we’ll make a note to find one as soon as possible and move on to replacing the oil pan.”
“Surely there’s a more efficient way to do this?”
“Oh, there definitely is. But it would cost a lot more to buy parts as and when you need them, and it would be significantly less satisfying.”
Harry holds up one of the last control arms in the box and Kim’s eyes light up. “That one!” He says, barely containing his joy.
He crosses the unit and takes out a pair of jack stands, like he’s done this a thousand times before. Taking off his jacket, Kim reveals his arms for – Harry realises – the first time since they met.
Could this moment be orchestrated for his pleasure, too? And if so, does Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi know that he’s essentially whoring himself out to keep Harry from drinking?
Does he know that it’s working?
“Yes, I know,” Kim says, and Harry immediately feels his body flood with the heart-dropping anxiety of realising the attractive man you’re currently lusting over is also a mind reader. But then Kim carries on talking and says – “Get your laughter out now.”
Laughter?
Then, Harry realises that, on Kim’s bicep, there’s a tattoo. It doesn’t take him long to work out that it’s a crudely poked pinball machine, and his brain helpfully supplies the most reasonable answer.
“Too deep undercover to say no?” He asks.
“Exactly.”
“Eh, I’ve seen worse,” Harry shrugs, and Kim visibly relaxes. “Besides, it’s cool to commit to something for a greater cause.”
“I don’t think a shitty pinball tattoo that got infected twice can constitute a metaphor for destroying yourself in pursuit of revolution.”
“You read far too much into what I say, Kim.”
“You give far too much away, Harry.”
Kim goes back to hoisting up the car and suspending it safely at a height that they can both fit underneath. He positions two wheeled creepers side by side, motioning for Harry to take one – which he does without grace, flopping down into a seated position and then slamming his head back so he’s lying on the creeper, looking up at the ceiling of the unit. Kim joins him, lowering his body down carefully.
“Ready?” He asks.
“It’s not going to fall, is it?”
“No – it shouldn’t. It’s perfectly safe. Mechanics do this every day.”
“I’m not a mechanic.”
“Is this really the one risk you’re not going to take?”
“Fair point,” Harry says, grabbing onto the bottom of the car and propelling himself backwards until he’s underneath the vehicle. There, Kim shows him how to install the control arm, his hands over Harry’s, guiding him with the kind of direction that truly allows him to say that he participated in the reconstruction of the car’s undercarriage.
When they’re done, it feels like he’s done a considerable workout. His heart is racing, and there’s something swelling in his chest that feels like both pride and shame. For the first time, he can see the car coming together; he wants to see this through to the end.
Also for the first time, he buys only one bottle of wine. Yes, he drinks it all, but then he goes to bed and remembers doing so upon waking.
And then it comes to pass that forensics pinpoint the culprit as a patsy – someone purposely cut from any strings that could tie him back to the larger drug epidemic sweeping Jamrock. Harry and Kim, following orders, arrest a man with prior petty convictions, nailing him for a murder that he probably didn’t care one way or the other about committing as long as he got paid. Another man bears a life sentence for the scheme that will have already replaced him. Probably out of fear, he doesn’t talk.
And the case is closed there.
It’s a Friday, so leaving the Precinct with all the leads tied up means getting the weekend off before being assigned to something new on Monday – no doubt something as meaningless and traumatic as always. Awash with the lake-ice of despair, Harry makes it all the way to Kim’s car before – with his hand on the door handle – he says:
“I’m sorry, Kim. Not today. I can’t.”
And – turning on his heel before he can see the disappointment in the Lieutenant’s eyes – he heads towards the good liquor store.
Finally, he has a full bottle of gin and the nice cigarettes that taste faintly of clove. Nobody can say he hasn’t tried, but it actually hurts more to be functioning enough to realise that what little power you have is nothing more than a carrot on a stick. Surely it’s more revolutionary to fuck it all and refuse to function?
The first few drinks don’t even bring relief. Instead, they amplify his bitterness, echoing around his cramped apartment in smoke, telling him that his job is working exactly as intended. He’s catching the criminals who are criminals because they’re poor and addicted, putting them away so some other poverty-stricken bastard can take their place, hoping to numb the cold and maybe put a meal on the table. He’s supposed to keep this cycle going, incarcerating the petty criminals who have outlived their usefulness so that they can be replaced with shiny new down-on-their-luck idiots who can keep the machine turning at maximum efficiency.
It won’t be long before Cuno gets caught up in something like that, Harry thinks. For all his talk, he’s still just a kid, and with a waste-of-space father like the one he’s got, it’s not like he’ll be getting any good direction in his life anytime soon. Maybe looking out for Cunoesse is his daily bread, but she’s even more of a time bomb than he is, and once she’s gone, Harry’s instincts and experience tell him that Cuno will look for meaning in something else. He’s not special; he’s just a stupid, loudmouthed kid wanting to feel cool because he thinks that will make him important.
Suddenly, Harry feels trapped in the small apartment. It’s like he’s suffocating on the lingering cigarette smoke, maybe having a heart attack, maybe crying about the child he never got to raise. All he knows is that he needs to get out of here.
He brings the half-finished bottle and the pack of cigarettes with him, stumbling out of the front door.
Honestly, he’s not sure how he gets to the storage unit. He certainly wasn’t walking with any purpose, and it feels like only five minutes have passed, but the bottle is now three-quarters empty and he’s standing outside the locked door, realising that – without a key – he’s made the journey for nothing.
Unless… surely Kim wouldn’t mind. Well – he would, but he’d forgive him.
Harry smashes the padlock and hauls up the shutters.
Inside, the car is the same as they left it yesterday. The undercarriage has been repaired, and they’re midway through refitting the interior, which they have all the parts for except a radio – which Kim says is not a necessity, though he’d like one anyway. The temptation to smash it all up overwhelms him, but he stops himself, both because he doesn’t want to hurl his bottle and waste the remainder of his gin, and because he doesn’t want to hurt Kim’s feelings. But the car doesn’t mean anything anymore, not now the illusion has fallen away. It’s just a big lump of nothing – it doesn’t need to be fixed, but Kim wants to fix it because he wants to feel like he’s doing something important.
Apparently, everyone wants to feel important.
He sits down, leaning against the car, swigging directly from the bottle. He lights a cigarette, his head fitting perfectly in the dent on the door. He has no grand delusions of importance anymore. He knows exactly where he fits into the world.
“Harry?”
It’s Kim, standing in the doorway of the storage unit, backlit by starlight and wearing a much larger, warmer jacket than usual. Having no strength to move, Harry lifts the bottle in greeting, and Kim walks towards him.
Jean would have taken the glass bottle and smashed it against the car, possibly close enough to Harry’s face to leave a cut.
Kim sits on the floor next to Harry and gently takes the packet of cigarettes out of his left hand, putting one into his mouth before returning the deck to its place.
“Do you have a light?” He asks.
Harry stares at Kim.
Then, he takes the lighter from his pocket and lights the end of Kim’s cigarette.
“Sorry for breaking the lock,” he says.
Kim shrugs. “It’s only a padlock. They’re not expensive.”
“It’s the principle of it.”
“We’re past that. I suspected you’d be here.”
“How come?” Harry asks.
“Because I wanted to come here, too.”
“I didn’t.”
“And yet you ended up here,” Kim takes a long drag from his cigarette. “Does that interest you?”
“A little bit,” Harry admits, now that he thinks about it.
“Do you want to know what I think?” Kim asks.
“Always.”
“I think you know, deep down, that you don’t want to die. You want to do something. But you can’t, so you feel powerless. Am I correct?”
“So what if you are? If I’m powerless, then I can’t do anything. So it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters a lot,” Kim continues. “It’s the act of wanting that’s important. It means you’ve got drive. You have to channel that into something.”
Taking a comical swig from the bottle, Harry says, “I am.”
“Something besides numbing it all. Your only options aren’t saving the world or killing yourself.”
“What else is there?”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Harry? Daily bread. You just have to show up for something.”
“Is that why I couldn’t smash the car up like I wanted to?”
Kim seems genuinely shocked – not that Harry has the capacity for destruction, but that anyone could want to inflict such damage onto a car. He lays a hand on the metal body, almost soothing it.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” he says. And, hearing the relief in his voice, Harry is glad too.
They sit in silence for a moment – Kim savouring his cigarette, Harry lighting one off the end of another.
Harry stares at the storage unit around him. There’s a whole lifetime in here – decades of collecting, compiling boxes of parts that may never get used, holding onto things because it’s better to have them and not need them, than need them and not have them. This is more than a hobby for Kim – it’s a passion. It really is daily bread to him; he must find such importance in it.
It still feels like an alien concept to Harry, but he feels as though he understands Kim a little better, at least.
What he doesn’t expect, though, is for Kim to reach down and grasp his hand.
“I’m going to tell you something,” Kim says.
Harry just nods.
“That partner I told you about – Eyes. He was a functioning alcoholic. So functioning. The best in the Precinct at his job, but people still used to joke that you could smell him a mile off because of the peppermints he was always sucking. They knew. He’d offer me one every time he took the packet out of his pocket, like he had an endless supply in there.”
Kim seems to be recalling the memory fondly, but his breath is uneven; slightly shaky.
“He died. Took a bullet that was meant for me in a shootout not unlike the one you and I faced in Martinaise. And after that, I thought there might be something at the bottom of a bottle; some sort of last wisdom he could pass along to me. I told myself I was putting myself in his shoes, that it was okay while I was on bereavement leave – expected, even. But truth be told, Harry, I just felt guilty. I felt guilty that it was him and not me, and I wanted to get rid of that feeling.”
“I didn’t know…”
“It didn’t last. I never really liked alcohol in the first place. It messes up my stomach for days afterwards, and I quickly realised that the mornings weren’t worth the temporary relief at night. After my two weeks’ leave finished, I went back to the 57th and never told a soul.”
“Kim, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s in the past. But what I’m saying is that I can understand.” Finally, he loosens his grip on Harry’s hand and lets go. “And, if I’m being completely selfish, I don’t want to lose you like I lost him.”
“I survived a bullet once before.”
“You won’t survive this,” Kim gestures sadly to the almost-empty bottle.
It’s an almost-empty gesture, too, but Harry upturns the bottle and pours the last shot onto the ground. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll go home.”
“I’ll drive you.”
When someone else is driving you around, you’re putting your life in their hands.
It’s comforting, being in the passenger seat of Kim’s car.
The seat vibrates with a low hum, and with so few cars on the road at this hour, the speed of the Kineema remains consistent. Kim is a highly skilled driver – one hand on the wheel, the other on the clutch, his elbow resting against the window and his back straight. Harry likes looking at him as they pass the mercury-vapour lamps illuminating the street, watching the green light dance against Kim’s face, speckling him with the fluidity of water in summer.
When they pull up outside Harry’s apartment, the confidence gained through the gin has worn off, leaving him still drunk, but hyper-aware of how the alcohol is hindering him. He stumbles out of the car, grasping onto the door for stability as Kim quickly crosses to his side of the vehicle and hoists Harry’s arm around his shoulder.
It doesn’t pass Harry by that Kim pats the car with his free hand, the way you would apologise to a dog after standing on its paw.
But no matter how many points Kim loses in the cool department for babying his Kineema, nothing compares to the deep cringe that shudders through Harry when he opens the door to his apartment. It’s too late to tell Kim to go away, and he can’t muster up any reasonable explanation for the state of the place. It’s just obvious. Obvious that this is the house of an alcoholic who has forgotten how to function.
At some point, he must have knocked over the ashtray without realising, because the floor is littered with cigarette butts and there are burn marks on his best armchair, like someone – some drunk, careless idiot – had been stubbing cigarettes out directly onto the upholstery. There are wine stains on the walls; fat, red droplets that have congealed and stuck there. It’s obvious that he hasn’t been keeping up with his laundry, because the basket has overflowed and some of the clothes are scattered so far away that it looks like they’ve been thrown there from the other side of the room. In the kitchen, the surfaces are barely visible through containers of cold food – some open and mouldy, some closed and translucent with condensation.
“I’m sorry,” Harry says.
“I’ve seen worse,” Kim replies.
“Yeah, at crime scenes.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Kim insists, stepping fully into the apartment and guiding Harry towards the armchair. He bends down and begins to pick up the cigarette butts, putting them back into the ashtray.
“You don’t have to do that,” Harry slurs, but the chair is too comfortable and his body is too heavy for him to make a move and physically stop Kim from tidying up a mess that doesn’t belong to him.
“I know,” Kim replies. “But maybe it does bother me a little on your behalf. Please, let me do this for you.”
“At least pour yourself a drink,” Harry bitterly gestures at the empty bottles on the floor. It feels like a bad dream, having Kim in his apartment like this.
The shame is too much to bear, so his body does the only thing it knows how to do – it sleeps, and forgets.
When Harry wakes, the sun is streaming through the curtains, which are open for the first time in over a week. The light pierces his eyes like lychees, wet and ready to pop, as he instinctively raises his hands to cover his face, pressing his fingertips in and dragging his palms as though he’s trying to peel back yesterday’s skin. He’s hungover as hell; itchy and hot all over but still clammy from hours of sweating through his clothes. And he’s warm, too, warmer than it usually gets in the apartment where he can’t afford to put the heating on more than once every few days. This, he realises, is because the blanket from his bedroom has been dragged out and placed over him, presumably by…
Oh, God. Kim. He’d brought him home – Harry remembers that much. He also remembers the story about Eyes, which feels so important that his memory had to solidify around it, providing a half-finished puzzle of last night’s events that centre around Kim’s hand in his, honesty between men, and a feeling that he isn’t done with life yet.
Blearily opening his eyes fully, Harry sees that his apartment is the cleanest it’s been in weeks. The old food has been removed from his kitchen and the surfaces have been wiped down, there are no empty bottles or cigarette buts strewn around, and the laundry – though still unwashed – has been separated so that the most presentable clothes are folded to the side. There’s a glass of water on the table next to his armchair.
He gulps it down.
The relief is beautiful, but lasts only as long as he is actively drinking. The moment the glass is empty, Harry feels the overwhelming hangover thirst again, and stumbles to the kitchen, taking one of the freshly washed glasses from the draining board. He can see his distorted reflection in the polished tap, stretched out and indistinguishable but not completely covered by rust and dirt.
Kim Kitsuragi is a kind, kind man.
Harry feels very guilty that he, so far, has not been.
He knows where he has to go, and makes him presentable enough to do so, taking advantage of the organised laundry to choose a salvageable shirt and a pair of lounge pants. He cleans himself up, tries to remove the stench of alcohol seeping through his pores, and leaves the house with his hair still wet.
Though he’s still definitely over the limit, he’s sober enough that the walk to the storage unit takes an observable 45 minutes. When he arrives, he sees that the shutters are open and remembers smashing the padlock, suddenly overcome with the horrible feeling that someone has broken in and stolen all of his and Kim’s hard work overnight.
But the car is still in the storage unit, accompanied by Kim, who is silently hunched over the bonnet.
“Hello,” Harry says.
When Kim turns, he is smiling. “Another fine day, don’t you think?”
“I’ve had worse,” Harry smiles back. “Thank you for last night.”
“Well isn’t that a nice change?” Kim beckons for Harry to join him in front of the car. “Hearing you say thank you instead of sorry.”
“That too.”
“Don’t ruin it.”
“Are you surprised I showed up?” Harry asks.
“Not in the slightest,” Kim says, proudly.
He stays at the storage unit practically all weekend, and returns with Kim after work on Monday, working on the car until all the shops have closed. He goes to bed sober and sleeps poorly, waking from nightmares but refusing to reach for a bottle. Instead of heading to the convenience store, he wanders around town, looking for parts in pawn shops and electronics stalls, speaking to people selling goods from their vehicles. When he finally finds a working radio in the correct size, he gets a brief feeling in his chest comparable only to that first bottle euphoria, which fades quicker than he can put a name to it, but is undeniable nonetheless.
He takes directions from Kim willingly, recognising his expertise and patience. He learns things and then, even stranger, retains them. Kim quizzes him on things he’s been taught and Harry actually tries to say the right thing. When he brings the radio to the unit, they high-five like schoolboys. He offers suggestions, most of which Kim says are ‘impossible but very cool, Detective’, and asks questions that help refine his new ideas. When the time comes to respray the paint, Kim takes Harry to the hardware store and lets him choose the colour – bright orange, not like the apricot of bad memories but the blazing sunrise of a new dawn.
And he doesn’t drink. It isn’t easy. But it’s not impossible.
Finally, after a month and a half of consistent work, the car is finished. She’s got a full tank of gas and a fancy new engine that Kim boasts can almost match the power of his Kineema, and she’s all Harry’s. He receives the keys from Kim like an award.
“Shall we?” Kim motions with his head towards the car.
“This’ll be the first time I’ve driven you anywhere. Are you sure you trust me?”
“With my life, Harry.”
With an honour like that on his shoulders, how can Harry not drive carefully? How can he not check the mirrors twice, pull out of the unit slowly, slow to a stop before the lights go red?
He knows where he’s driving to, and Kim doesn’t ask.
Martinaise approaches with a swell in the wind and salt in the air. Harry rolls the window down and breathes the transition in, returning better and wiser to a place that has so much yet to teach him. He parks the car outside the Whirling-in-Rags, in the same place that Kim kept his Kineema when they worked their first case together months ago, and hopes as he exits the car that he won’t be too late.
Not too late to save Cuno. Just to see him.
Thankfully, he hears Cuno before he even sees him, yelling something unintelligible (but clearly the same word over and over), punctuated by cheering. Kim follows close behind as Harry takes the path up to the hanging tree, where he sees that Cuno is no longer accompanied by Cunoesse.
But he isn’t alone.
He’s throwing a ball for a street dog, holding out his palm with some kind of treat every time the dog drops the ball at his feet. Keeping his distance, Harry approaches the now-fixed fence, shielding himself behind the panels as Cuno says ‘fetch!’ and ‘good boy!’. There’s a genuine smile on the boy’s face, and he looks younger – which is to say, closer to his actual age. His hair is a little bit longer and his clothes fit him better.
When the dog refuses to drop the ball, Cuno kneels down and looks it in the eye, muttering something that Harry can’t make out. The dog offers a paw, and then a sit, before finally hurling itself – tail wagging – right at Cuno, knocking him over and play-jumping onto his legs and back. Cuno laughs loudly and the dog barks right back at him.
Harry turns to Kim and whispers, “I get it now.”
Kim nods. “Daily bread,” he smiles.