Larkin disconnected, tucked the phone into his pocket, covered his face with one hand, and began to cry. A few wet sobs, a few strangled gasps, and then he cleared his throat and raised his head. He twisted the rearview mirror and checked his appearance: ash-blond hair parted on the side, clean-shaven, splotches of red in his otherwise pale complexion, and light, light gray eyes. A face poetic in its tragedy, a contemporary psychopomp regulated to a scale of monochrome.

—a crown of dandelions, the crackle of open flames, that first kiss, both of them shaking and tasting like sugar and alcohol and the sepulcher of innocence—

Memories bled like watercolors left in rain. A gradient of daffodil—no, gold—to slate, mud, death.

Larkin dried his cheeks and tugged the silver band off his finger. He slipped it in his trouser pocket, put the sedan into Drive, and pulled into uptown traffic.

Larkin had made the decision to return home and pick up dry shoes before returning to the precinct, which then turned into an entire wardrobe alteration, because red derbies couldn’t replace green oxfords without taking into consideration all other facets of his apparel. Larkin hiked the steps of Precinct 19 on Sixty-Seventh, between Third and Lexington, wearing a dark charcoal suit, black tie, gold and gray and black checkered pocket square, and the aforementioned derbies. It was still raining, but the worst of the storm—thunder and lightning—seemed to be on its way to Jersey.

“Spooky Larkin!”

Larkin stopped and looked to his right at the rolling doors of FDNY’s Ladder 16. The police and fire departments of New York had held grudges toward one another since… probably their founding in the 1800s, and although Larkin had never been a military man, he suspected the rivalry was something akin to Army versus Navy. Whether by design or mistake, their two houses had ended up next door on the Upper East Side, and in the five years he’d been a detective at this precinct, it’d proven to be an… interesting experience.

And while the cops had long ago nicknamed him Grim, about a year into working at this precinct, the FDNY had settled on Spooky Larkin.

Either way, he couldn’t win.

“What.”

A firefighter stood in the driveway between their buildings, some heavy-looking gear in either hand. The rain didn’t seem to concern him. “Heard you knocked a Homicide boy on his ass.”

“Where’d you hear that.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “You know how radio transmissions are.”