Trial Period

It was the easiest thing in the world to understand how Brick had gotten his nickname. He was tall and blocky, with a high and tight haircut leftover from his military days that only framed his angular cheekbones and broad jaw.

His muscles didn’t balloon out like a bodybuilder’s, but stayed low and solid like they were making up a brick wall. With his scars and stubble, he didn’t look like he’d grown up on milk and sandwiches. He looked like a block from the quarry that’d been jackhammered and sledged and blasted until it was fit for government service. His features like they’d been carved into his beefeater face, his narrow eyes not more than the work of a chisel struck twice.

He looked like what he did—a breaker of things that needed breaking. Cases. Faces. Hearts.

***

Brick Bradley came to with a brain a size too big for his skull and a bladder ten times too small for the amount of piss he had in him. He staggered up from the couch he’d collapsed on, greeting the carpet with the sneakers he’d fallen asleep in, and managed to right himself to a chorus of firecracker pops from his spine, busting out of the awkward position he’d been comatose in.

He successfully stayed on his feet, body swaying, head pounding, and the jagged hiss of the buzzer clamored into his already crowded consciousness. He fumbled one foot in front of the other, dodging pieces of furniture—which he now felt he owned much too much of—until he reached the intercom.

He jabbed his head into the button while unbuckling his belt, working at his fly. This had better be a short conversation; otherwise he was pissing into the potted plant beside the front door. It could use the watering.

Although with the amount of pollution in his system, a piss might count as a mercy killing for the fern. Maybe next time he’d get a cactus.

“Yeah? What do you want?” he shouted into the intercom.

“It’s Jenny. Buzz me up.”

“Aw fuck.” Brick didn’t have it in him to argue with her. Or he had too much urine in him and not enough time to go around in circles, ascertaining what Jennifer wanted before he committed to jack shit with her.

The woman might not’ve been much of a wife, but she had a sixth sense for any and all bullshit that could win an argument. Getting him when he needed a piss—and emphatically did not need the buzzer ringing one more goddamn time—now only seemed like a casual display of her prowess.

He buzzed her up and dragged himself to the bathroom, flipping up the lid and then putting out the fire. Brick shut his eyes and enjoyed the process. He’d taken enough kidney shots over the years to appreciate a nice, clean piss. No blood, no stones, just all that pressure ebbing away until he was empty. All the nutrients absorbed and everything else washed away. There wasn’t much in life you could purify that way. Just fast-forwarding through all the scenes of a porno with clothes and this.

He grew bored with his bladder about halfway drained and patted at his clothes. Only the usual in his pockets; everything accounted for. Phone, keys, gun.

In his backpocket he found a two-month chip from AA. He ran his thumb over the face of it, but there was no interesting texture for his sensitive sense of touch to find, just the glossy enamel feel overlying that weird Deathly Hallows symbol and the trite homily they’d had him repeat over and over again.

Fuck it, he thought, and tossed the chip into the bowl after his dwindling stream of piss. He had issues, but alcohol wasn’t one of them. It was just that when he had shit to do, his body hit a natural balance. Enough beer to unwind, not enough to fuck him up.

It was when he had no brakes, nothing to clench him up when he was having one drink after another, that he ended up too bombed to make the right call.

That was in the past now. His suspension was up and he’d be back on the job, back walking the beat, back breaking cases. His mind attacked those sorts of problems too hard to allow him to bind it with liquor. He’d never make it as a professional drunk.

He didn’t hear the door until Jennifer was already through it and shutting it behind her. She eyed him through the open bathroom door, his cock through his fly, the last few drops dripping out of him.

“Wow. Talk about a greeting,” she said caustically. “What’s next, rose petals on satin sheets?”

“Nothing you haven’t seen before.” Brick shook himself out, tucked himself away. Flushed.

Like that would stop Jennifer’s stream of sarcasm. “Wow. And he flushes, too. Now if you could just remember to put the lid down, there might be hope for you yet.”

He raised his voice over the rush of water from the tap. “You wanted the toilet so bad, you should’ve asked for it in the divorce. You got everything else.”

“I bought everything else. I actually had a job, remember, not minimum wage because I get to play cops and robbers.”

Brick shut the water off and wiped his wet hands on his shirt before carrying himself a painful couple of steps to the bathroom door. He hung himself up on the top of the doorframe with iron-pumping arms rather than try for anything more complicated.

His blood was flowing, his engine was starting to purr now that he’d changed the oil, but the hangover still needed a cup of coffee and something in his belly before he’d be listening to any heavy metal.

Jennifer ran her eyes up and down his strong frame. She looked at the swath of skin where his shirt rode up and his pants were still unbelted, unbuttoned. There was a line of white where a knife wound had closed up, but it was almost lost under his belly hair. And it didn’t spoil the view for her.

The tip of her tongue touched the edge of her teeth. One thing he’d say for Jenny; she knew how to make a guy feel appreciated. And if that appreciation ever made its way around to other portions of his anatomy, their marriage might’ve lasted.

“You look good,” Jenny said, softening, making Brick wonder if he was really so pathetic that he was catching pity from his ex-wife. It was so unbelievable, she might put it in one of her novels. “Less poundage. I’d written you off as one of those reasons they joke about cops eating donuts.”

“You let me keep the Bowflex,” Brick quipped. “I’d be wasting money if I didn’t use it.”

Jenny kicked an empty beer can from at her feet to halfway across the floor. “You drinking again?”

“No, Vic and the boys just took me out to celebrate my suspension being over. I was being sociable.”

“In here? All alone? After the bars closed?”

Brick smiled. With her sounding halfway sympathetic, it was impossible not to remember how that café au lait skin looked under the loose folds of her Burberry coat. “You know me so well.”

He didn’t tell her that he wasn’t alone. He had every case he hadn’t solved, every partner he hadn’t protected keeping him company.

Jenny stooped down to pick up the halved six-pack and the few empties he’d left by the couch. Her loose coat fell open at her throat. Brick saw her full breasts. Whatever she was wearing over them, it was lost in the shadows of her coat.

“Yeah, well, you don’t look like you’re going to throw up anytime soon, so it won’t ruin my mood.”

“I vomit a lot less now that you’ve stopped cooking for me.” Brick watched her drop his empties into the recycling bin, leave his six-pack on the counter. She could’ve put it in the fridge, but he recognized her passive-aggressiveness. Jenny wouldn’t do anything to enable him. In fact, she was so dead-set on not enabling him, she wouldn’t be supportive at all. “What do you want, Jenny?”

Jenny sat down in the easy chair perpendicular to the couch, both of them facing the coffee table that had become the junk drawer of his apartment, bills and newspapers piling up. He kept the apartment serviceably neat; he could see why Jenny had felt driven to tidy up one of the few things out of place. She’d divorced him, but she hadn’t divorced being a woman. In fact, she looked even more womanly than he remembered. Brick guessed that without the loving and honoring and obeying stuff, she’d had plenty of time to hit the gym.

Jenny crossed her legs. The coat opened up—there was nothing on her legs but stockings, and they only made her skin a little darker than it already was. Like she was in the cool shade of some big tree and he could join her, get some relief from the hot sun of her native Mexico.