The rains had passed and the sky was cloudless. The winds that had beaten off the storm system had come up from the warmer southwest, but it was still cold enough to see your breath.
Michelle worked the oars with a polished motion built up over many years of piloting narrow vessels with barely a foot-deep draft through water. She didn’t have to think about what she was doing. She just had to pull and recoil, pull and recoil, moving in a precise straight line because getting off-course cost precious seconds. Every muscle in her body was engaged at some point, particularly the core and the lower body where a person’s real strength was housed. She would take oblique mass and corded thighs over tank-top beach muscle.
The Potomac was empty of boats except for a police vessel that was slowly chugging its way south toward Memorial Bridge. Michelle was heading the other way, following a route to the old boathouses that hugged the shore near Georgetown.
Perched on the hood of his Lexus, Sean watched his partner methodically make her way back to her starting point. He was glad to see that she had taken his advice and put her shell in the water even if it was cold outside. She was at peace there, he knew, one of the few places she was likely to find it. He only took his gaze off her once, when a mass of gulls started swirling in the air, pivoting, dropping, and then swooping upward.
That was real freedom, thought Sean. Must be nice.
He settled his gaze back on his partner. They had been intimate on one occasion and never again after that. He had thought about the reasons behind this. They were many and varied. The sex had been great. The morning after had been confused, as though they had both been culpable in stepping over a sacred boundary and had nearly ruined a perfectly good partnership by doing so.
She pulled up at the ramp to one of the boathouses painted yellow and green. Sean pushed himself off the Lexus’s hood and came forward to help her. She wore a dark blue one-piece wet suit with booties that allowed free range of motion and protected her against the chill. It revealed not an ounce of fat on her tall body. But it also showcased how thin she was.
Together they tied the shell to the top of her Land Cruiser, and Michelle angled her oars through the truck’s back window. They were long enough to reach into the front seats.
Sean gazed inside her car. It was full of trash, most of which should have been tossed a long time ago.
She noted him staring and said, “Don’t go there. I’ll clean it out at some point.”
“Right. When you can no longer reach the steering wheel?”
“That’s very funny, Sean. And you always claim not to be a morning person.”
Sean snagged two coffees from his car and handed her one. She took a sip.
“You looked good out there,” he said.
“BS I can do without.”
“What do you mean?”
She stretched out her shoulder until she was rewarded with a pop. “I’m slower than I’ve ever been. I couldn’t make a high school team right now.”
“We all get old.”
“Not all of us. Not Tyler’s dad.”
Sean drank his coffee and looked off toward the water. “We’re officially pulling out of Afghanistan. But we still have casualties. Dying for what?”
“You could ask that question in just about every war.”
“I didn’t see the trigger was missing from the Mauser,” he admitted, glancing at her.
“I probably had a better angle than you did. He was on my side of the road. If we’d been in England, you would’ve spotted it instead of me.”
“You still lie really well.”
“Comes in handy in our line of work.”
“I know I said we needed to get back on casework, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe, instead, we should take some of the money and go somewhere.”
Michelle stared at him quizzically. She leaned against the hood of her truck and said, “Why the sudden change in plan?”
“I’m a spontaneous person.”
“Your idea of spontaneity is going with eighty-nine octane over full premium.”
“You never really got any downtime, Michelle. It was hospital, surgeries, rehab. That was hard work. You need a break. We both need a break.”