The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(9)
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it,” he had answered.
4
Everything changes, Kovac thought to himself as he drove home through a cold, bleak rain, but he absolutely didn’t like it. His mood matched the weather. He hated this time of year, this bitter season of raw cold and gray skies, knifing winds, and days that grew shorter and shorter. The year was old and dying like the few remaining leaves on the trees. It made him feel empty and alone. And he felt it most coming home to his nondescript box of a house in his tired, nondescript neighborhood.
This night, he didn’t even have the energy to hate his next-door neighbor’s lunatic mishmash Christmas decorations, which already cluttered his yard: plywood cutout snowmen and tin soldiers crowding around a nativity scene; an army of Santas mounting an attack on the house. At least the cranky old bastard wouldn’t light it all up until the day after Thanksgiving.
It occurred to Kovac that he was probably also considered a cranky old bastard by most of the neighbors. He didn’t fraternize. It was tough for him to relate to civilians, and vice versa. What did he have to talk about? Death, depravity, autopsy results, potential suspects who shit in trash cans for fear of having to speak to him.
He wasn’t exactly party material, unless the party was full of cops swapping war stories and engaging in gallows humor. Like a more-than-average number of his peers, he had two failed marriages to his credit, but the neighborhood ladies of reasonable age shied away from him because of his general attitude. He had been assured he wasn’t scaring them off with his looks, even though his hair was more gray than brown and his face was a slightly asymmetrical road map of his life. He had character, like a beat-up old alley cat. Liska advertised him as a “poor man’s Harrison Ford,” whatever the hell that meant.
Anyway, he had pretty much abandoned the relationship idea as a self-fulfilling prophecy of wary anticipation, disappointment, and ongoing bitterness.
Feeling sorry for himself, he fell into his recliner and turned on the television. The Travel Channel was showing something left over from Halloween—A Killer’s Tour of London, a guided tour of gruesome historical murder sites with costumed reenactments of the crimes. Further proof that people were just plain nuts, he thought glumly.
“Chin up, Kojak,” Liska had said to him tonight as they left the bar, giving him an elbow in the side and a cheeky, if forced, grin. “Maybe you’ll get a good juicy double homicide tomorrow. That’ll cheer you up.”
If that was the best thing he had to look forward to, what the hell did that say about his life?
*
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET and dark at last after the chaos of the boys coming home. And when she thought “boys,” Nikki included her ex-husband. In many ways, Speed Hatcher had never matured past seventeen. When he spent time with Kyle and R.J., he didn’t play the role of father as much as big brother. He wanted to be friends with them. He wanted to be the good guy, never the authoritarian, never the disciplinarian, never the one to soothe hurts or sort out problems. He wanted to clown and show off and be one of the guys. That was Speed: an overgrown boy living out the badass fantasy.
Kyle was long since over it. Her quiet, serious, sensitive boy tolerated his father, but he hadn’t fallen for Speed’s best-buddy bullshit for years. He had long been more mature than his dad in most ways. R.J., two years younger, had always been more little boy to Kyle’s little man. Now, as a teenager, he was beginning to see who his father really was, but he made a conscious decision to pretend otherwise.
When they came home from these outings it was always the same: Speed, too exuberant, too loud, trying too hard to sell himself. Kyle, too quiet, with an underlying current of anger. R.J., mirroring his father’s behavior, but lacking the same bravado, confused and agitated by his feelings. And Nikki, simmering and ready to snap at her ex, wanting to protect her sons from the emotional damage he did with all good intentions.
At least she had invested in therapy, so she understood her shortcomings, even if she did continue to make the same mistakes again and again. At least she knew why.
“What do you want from me, Nikki?” Speed said with the usual exasperation as they had their usual argument after the boys had gone upstairs to bed. “It’s always the same bullshit with you! You rag on me for not spending enough time with them, then you rag on me when I do!”
What she wanted was for him to become an entirely different person inside the Speed suit. That wish was no more realistic now than it had been during their marriage. The reckless bad boy with the sexy grin had caught her eye when they were both in patrol uniforms, but what made him a hot, exciting lover lost its charm in the long term. Much as she hated to admit it, she had been one of those stupid girls who believed that men would change for them.
“It’s nearly midnight and the boys are just getting to bed,” she said. She sat back against her desk in her tiny home office and crossed her arms. “It’s a school night, Speed. I asked you to have them back by ten.”
He shrugged this off. He stood in front of her with his hands jammed at his waist. His square jaw was set, his blue eyes narrowed and glinting like steel. He was shaving his head these days. The sharply carved mustache and goatee had been dyed dark. The shoved-up sleeves of his University of Minnesota T-shirt revealed the lower half of an inked mural on his left arm: the archangel Michael vanquishing Satan.