The Survivor

They lapse into silence crossing over the Williamsburg Bridge. Kelly doesn't take in the view—too familiar to find it worth anything more than a glance—but something about the water always draws her eye. The way the city doesn't match, not like trees or sand would. Concrete and glass, pushed all the way up to the waterline, and only stopping there because nobody will sign off on the insurance for building skyscrapers on a pontoon. Not yet, anyway.

From this far away, the water looks like it could almost be clean.

The car slows, and Kelly looks ahead to where the traffic is thickening up. "What the hell am I going to talk to these guys about, Hernandez?" she asks. "It's not like there's anything we can learn from them, unless we plan on standing outside the precinct telling people how to get to Broadway."

"Maybe there's something they can learn from you," Hernandez says.

"I said it already, they don't have the time, the resources, the support—" Kelly stops talking as her brain stops reacting to what her partner has said and catches on to what he meant. For half a minute there she had almost taken the job seriously, like she was meant to find out about how other cops worked, look at it objectively through the lens of her own experience, and use it to make recommendations for improving her own precinct. That she was meant to be doing something useful, aside from serving as a cautionary tale.

Hernandez is grinning as he drives.

"Shut the fuck up," Kelly says.

"Look, I know it's shit, you know it's shit, and everyone that doesn't know or hasn't been told already will smell it before you're even in the door. Just treat it as a working tour of the city's worst coffee spots."

Kelly bites her tongue before she says something that she might regret later. Hernandez is trying his best, working all the angles to keep her spirits up. It's not his fault that every single one of them makes her want to scream and smash his head into the driver's-side window.

"You can drop me off at the J train," she says. "You don't have to drive all the way."

"It's fine," he says. "I'll drive you."

She said it with the intention of letting him off the hook, saving him from having to tolerate her self-inflicted bad mood, but he doesn't sound like he's relieved in the slightest. Instead, he sounds pissed.

"You following up on something after?" she asks. "When did we have that meeting with Vice booked? Was that today?"

Hernandez gives her a look. "Captain gave it to Nicholson."

"Nicholson?" Kelly tries to picture the guy trying to get through a meeting with Vice without saying something that will at best get him written up or—at worst—escorted to the nearest bathroom stall to have the number of teeth in his mouth adjusted. "But that's our case."

"Was our case," Hernandez says.

Kelly closes her eyes. "Fuck," she says. Wallowing in her own self-pity, she hasn't even thought that maybe there would be collateral damage. He isn't driving her just out of a sense of solidarity: he has nowhere else to be. "I'm sorry, Hernandez."

"It's fine," he says.

It obviously isn't.

Kelly pinches the bridge of her nose and forces herself not to audibly sigh. It wasn't supposed to be like this. None of it was. They both spent months building up their contact lists across Vice, Missing Persons, and Criminal Enterprise, pushing for cases and pulling down the kind of high-profile arrests that would see their names landing on the call sheet for the next Major Case Squad task force. Working with Hernandez, both of them feeding off of the other's ambition, her career had started to gain ground in a way she'd almost given up hoping for.

And then, at a medal presentation at One Police Plaza, one of the chiefs had come up behind Kelly and put his hand on her ass. She could have filed a sexual harassment complaint, and it would have been a coin toss as to whether that sealed or destroyed her career. What she did instead was grab him by his jacket sleeve and shiny dress uniform belt before executing a textbook hip throw that put him through an entire table of complimentary sparkling white wine. He broke three ribs and had to have surgery to remove the shattered stem of a wineglass from where it had been driven into his left buttock, an inch shy of going straight up his asshole. And while there were witnesses who testified that he had assaulted her first, and her union rep had gone to the wall for her, that moment of impulsive action was enough to kill both her and Hernandez's careers stone-dead.

"This is you." Hernandez eases the car out of the flow of traffic and pulls over. They have made better time than Kelly expected. He has cut across Manhattan with ease while she chewed over the past like she could do anything to change it.

"Thanks," Kelly says. She takes a deep breath. Olive branches aren't her thing, but Hernandez deserves some kind of effort on her part.

"And just so you—"

"Jesus Christ," Hernandez says, cutting her off. "Get a load of the welcome party."