Slipping under the wire...

[katallison.livejournal.com]

This is late, but Ces hasn't shut the gate yet on the last challenge, so...

It's also over the word limit, and churned out at speed, and wildly under-edited. And doesn't have a title. But I was in the mood for some Welsh, and since nobody else was bringin' me the Welsh-love, I figured I'd roll my own. Just a little snippet of hypothetical Welsh and RayK backstory.



"No, I'm tellin' you, you wanna know something? This Jordan kid, he's gonna be huge, fifty bucks, this fifty bucks right here says he's a starter by the end of the year, you know what I'm sayin'? Huge!"

Welsh could see that tweed-hat guy was getting wound up, thumping his hand on the bar, and christ but he hated guys who, get a few drinks in 'em and they get wound up about stupid shit like basketball and start in on the bar-thumping. Guys in tweed hats, guys who came tooling in from the 'burbs to get drunk and pick up hookers and score blow and fuck up his city.

The bartender was shaking his head, not even looking up from his glass-polishing. "Yeah, Terry, ain't you the genius who kept tellin' me that fuckin' Quintin Dailey was gonna be the second coming? Shaddup and let me listen to the game, OK?"

Welsh tuned them out, the voices and the TV and the noise from some asshole playing Ms. Pac-Man over by the can. He picked up his glass, drained it, set it carefully down on the bar, pushed it back toward the rail. When the bartender drifted down his way, he gave Welsh a long narrow-eyed look, then shrugged and poured him another refill, and Welsh pushed the whole stack of bills toward him, let the man sort out a few singles and put them in the till. He wasn't up to figuring it out himself.

He sat, sipping his drink, feeling the inside of his head slowly get thicker and slower and duller. After a while, Ms. Pac-Man fell silent; the TV got shut off after the Bulls got the snot beat out of them once again; and about two minutes before Welsh was going to have to go down and bounce his skull off the bar the tweed-hat guy finally drank up and left, snarling "Losers! Buncha fucking losers!" And after that everything was quiet, just the gleaming bottles and the silent bartender, just Welsh and few other hunch-shouldered guys getting blitzed in peace. Him and the rest of the losers.

Just when he was trying, without much success, to get his brain squared away with the concept of gathering up the last of his cash and trying to get a cab--and that was going to be a bitch, getting a cab this time of night, with the fucking snow, and maybe he should just have another drink instead ... just then, there was a movement at his shoulder, some kind of disturbance that registered vaguely on the fuzzy edges of his awareness, the creak of a leather jacket and the creak of the barstool next to his.

And--he couldn't fucking believe it, in clear violation of all the basic laws of man and bar, some prick had to sit down right next to him, even though there were plenty of empty seats all along the bar, and all of a sudden that just pissed him off so bad, it was just the last final intolerable transgression of the basic god-damned norms of human decency that made us different at least once in a fucking while from the fucking animals --

He swung his head around, with effort, to at least get a look at the asshole whom he was about to pop in the ribs with an elbow--and then he halted his arm in mid-swing, let it drop back to his side.

"Kowalski? The hell 're you doing here?"

"Hey." The kid sat bent over, not looking at him, elbows resting on the bar. "Rudy, uh--he said maybe you'd be here."

"He did, huh?" The rage was still lurching around in him. "And so what goddam business is it of yours if I am?"

Kowalski rubbed his hands together, as if to warm them; Welsh saw that they were reddened with cold, and somehow that angered him even more. "What, you don't have any gloves? What the fuck is your problem?"

"Lost 'em." Kowalski shrugged, shot him a look, a smile that was both apologetic and ingratiating. The look of a little kid who'd screwed up, and it just--it made him want to wrap an arm around the guy and shake him hard until he'd shaken some sense into him, it made him want to start yelling about you dumbfuck, you gotta take care of yourself, you gotta use your brain, keep your eyes open, keep your guard up.

Instead he waved violently to the bartender, yelled "Hey, you wanna quit diddling the glassware and get my friend here a drink?" And with the other hand he gripped Kowalski's shoulder, hard, and said, "What'll you have, kid? My round."

"Uh ... beer, I guess. Leinie's."

"Pisswater," Welsh muttered, and he gave the shoulder a final hard squeeze and let it go. "Oughta learn to drink like a man, kid."

The bartender pulled the beer, giving Kowalski a hard look, and Welsh knew, he wasn't so drunk he couldn't tell that if the kid had been here on his own he'd have been carded--and god knows he couldn't blame the bartender for that, never mind the leather jacket and the badge and the hours spent on the beat, Kowalski still looked like he should've been down at the soda fountain with Betty and Veronica, instead of sitting here having a beer, instead of wandering out in the middle of the night chasing down a drunk middle-aged loser.

That reminded him, vaguely, that there was a question he'd asked and hadn't got answered, and while he might be a loser he was still enough of a cop to not put up with unanswered questions, so after a minute he said, "What're you doing here anyway? Should be home in bed, kid." Which reminded him of something else, and he took a nice long swallow of Beam, felt it burn its way down his throat. "With your wife."

Kowalski winced a little at that, sipped at his beer, wiped his mouth. "Yeah. Uh." He tapped his fingers on his glass. "I, uh, I heard. About Walker."

"You heard." Welsh rubbed his eyes, then his forehead, then pushed his hands back through his hair in a violent motion without any coordination. "You heard about our friend Walker. About how he--walked." And he dropped a hand down on the bar, walked his two fingers across the wood with a little mincing mock-gait, then suddenly slammed his whole palm down, watching the kid jump at the noise.

"I'm sorry." The kid shifted, hunching in on himself, into his jacket.

"And maybe, just maybe, 'cause you got kind of a, what we might call sort of an inside track, maybe you even heard just how it came to pass that that putrid little piece of shit walked." He shoved his face up close toward Kowalski's. "Maybe you heard that some hotshot young lawyer down in the State's Attorney's office didn't like the evidence we got, it wasn't to her taste." Then he leaned back, tipping his head, miming an elaborate parody of deep thought. "Some blue-flamer in a suit, name of--what was it, lemme think--" He tapped his fingers on his chin, and then abruptly swung back at the kid, levelling a finger at him. "Name of Stella Kowalski, was that it? Yeah, I think maybe it was."

Kowalski's head dropped lower; forearms still resting on the bar, he lifted a hand, palm toward Welsh, a defense, an apology. It didn't mollify him; maybe he was being unfair, but fuck fair.

"That was a good bust. Clean. We had him lined up and ready to go, we had a mailing label slapped on his ass labeled "Joliet," and now--" He poked the kid in the shoulder, which immediately felt like a stupid thing to do, but it was either that or hit him, and hitting him'd be even stupider. "And now he's out there walkin' around, getting ready to put a bullet in the skull of another fucking twelve-year-old who just happened to be picking up a gallon of milk for his mom at the wrong fucking time."

"Yeah." Soft voice, with rough edges in it that the beer hadn't smoothed out at all, roughness that didn't go with the just-a-kid face. "Yeah. We--uh, we talked about it. Her and me. Kind of--high-volume talking, y'know?"

Welsh nodded, and after a moment Kowalski straightened up, blew out a breath, and pivoted his stool around to face him.

"She was just--I'm not trying to defend her here or anything, it's not 'cause this is Stella, it's just--she was trying to do her job is all. She kept saying the judge would've thrown it out anyway. And I guess she oughta know what she's talking about there."

"Right. Sure." He knew he should let it go, but the liquor kept his mouth moving. "Hell, I'm just a dumb cop from Cicero, right? I don't got a thousand-dollar suit and a high-priced law degree. I don't know shit. All I know is--the next time that asshole shoots someone, I'll be out there picking up the pieces. Again."

"I know."

"And afterwards? I'm not gonna--" Shut it, moron, he told himself, but he just couldn't. "I'm not gonna be going home and banging the high-priced blonde piece of ass that fucked my case, not like some guys." And at that, one sentence too late, he finally shut it, and sat watching Kowalski, who'd tightened up all over, mouth set and eyes narrowed, sat and waited for the kid to punch him or get up and walk out and leave him in peace. Whichever.

What Kowalski finally did, instead, was to unclamp his jaw and say, "C'mon. Lemme drive you home."

"Huh?" He blinked, trying to clear his head. "Screw that. I got nothing to go home to. You just head on back to your wife, kid."

Kowalski drained his beer, slid off the stool. "I said, come on. You can't stay here all night."

Welsh didn't move, staring down into his empty glass. "You trying to do me a favor here? Gettin' some brown on your nose? Forget it."

"Nah." The kid blew out a laugh, shoved his hands in his pockets. "Nah, I was just hoping--maybe you could do me kind of a favor too. Maybe I could crash on your sofa tonight." Welsh swung around to stare at him. "'Cause I don't got the cash for a hotel just now."

He stared at him a minute longer, and he could see now the dark smudges under Kowalski's eyes, the beat-down way he was holding his shoulders. Finally he stood, with effort, shoving his stool back with a screech.

He fumbled his cash together, pushing away Kowalski when he tried to reach over and help, and he shoved an uncounted wad of bills onto the rail for the bartender, who watched him, unmoving. He made his way to the coat rack and pulled down his shabby tweed, shrugged it on. As he fumbled with the buttons, Kowalski came up beside him, and he abruptly turned, staggering a little, and gripped the lapel of Kowalski's jacket in a hard fist.

"Listen. Kid. Lemme tell you one thing. Remember this. There's two kinds of people in this world. There's the good guys, and then there's the assholes." He shook the jacket a little, for emphasis. "People'll try to complicate that up, but it's not complicated. Good guys. Assholes. And what you gotta do is, you gotta pick your side, and stick to it." Kowalski was staring back at him, with those big pale eyes. "You made your pick when you put on that badge, and from now on, it doesn't matter who you like, who you don't like, who you're married to, what you feel like. You stick to it, all the way. You got that?"

He wasn't even sure that he was saying what he was trying to say, the words weren't coming right for him, but Kowalski just nodded once, and said, "Yeah, Sergeant. I got it." And then, when Welsh dropped his hand, Kowalski went on, "That's, uh, that's pretty much why I need to find a couch tonight. Y'know?" And he gave Welsh just a little bit of that cocky-kid grin, the one that warmed him up and pissed him off, and Welsh couldn't help grinning back a little, and then to make up for that he smacked the kid on the arm and said, "Well, fuck, are we getting out of here or what? How many blocks we gotta walk to that piece of shit you're driving?"

When they pushed the door open and stepped outside, the snow was falling and swirling so hard it made him dizzy for a moment, and he stopped to take a steadying breath of cold air, clean air without the stink of beer and sweat and a million dead cigarettes. It was still and peaceful and white, white everywhere, glittering like a dream, pure as some childhood storybook, with all the grime and trash and rust buried away. Next to him, Kowalski stared up at the sky, the snowflakes catching in his hair, melting on his face, and Welsh heard him muttering, "Just imagine--if it could be like this all the time, y'know? Wouldn't that be something?"

And that was just the kind of thing a kid would say, so Welsh shot back, "Yeah, in your dreams. And if it was--hell, there'd be no place for us then, right? C'mon, let's go."

But just as Kowalski started moving, Welsh stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Hey. As long as you're driving--here, take these." He pulled his gloves out of his pockets, pushed them into Kowalski's hands, over his protests. "Now. Let's move 'em out." And they set off down the street, the snow swirling silently around and past them.