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“I like the red one.”

Really, Dani’s only got herself to blame.

“The medium sized red one, not the small red one. Although maybe red’s a bad color for me. People might think I bought the couch to match my hair. I don’t want to be the kind of guy that buys a couch to match his hair.”

---

She can see, clearly now, all the small steps that built towards this moment. This afternoon. Crews’ car is ticketed, impounded, and lost in the shuffle. Dani doesn’t bother to get pissed about too much, but she gets pissed about this. Because he’s a cop. You don’t impound a cop’s car. You don’t lose anyone’s car. You search it, stick it in an evidence locker, and tell them it’s lost.

It’s the third time in a week that Crews comes in late, and he looks so damn serene about the whole thing. He sits down across from Dani, smiles, and goes to work on a fruit cup.

Dani can’t take it. She reaches across their desks and grabs the cup, leaving Charlie with a grape on a fork.

“I could have bought you one,” Charlie says, making figure eights in the air with his lone piece of fruit.

“You’re letting them play you,” Dani replies. This isn’t the time or place to have this conversation, but if they don’t have it now, they aren’t having it ever.

Charlie shrugs, and his face goes passive in a way that Dani’s never believed in. “They said if it’s not found in six to eight weeks the department will reimburse me.”

Six to eight weeks. Long enough for the thing to be stripped and searched and wired. Lips pursed, Dani doesn’t say a word of it out loud but knows he’s listening. When the department does stuff like this, the guy’s always listening.

“So get a new car while you wait.”

“I like my car.”

Dani thinks he meant to sound Zen, but there’s a roughness there that Crews almost looks ashamed of.

So Dani offers to cart Charlie around on her way to and from work, even though they both know his neighborhood is forty minutes out of her way.

---

“Maybe the blue one. The blue one’s bouncy. I like bouncy. At least I think I like bouncy.”

---

Dani makes him pay for gas so that he knows she’s not doing this as a favor. She’s doing this because the fuckers took Karen away (“Let me tell you how this is going to go.” Dani’s stomach dropped out, and both women knew there was no coming back from this) and the hell if they’re taking Crews, too. He’s annoying and his taste in music is crap, but she’s not about to waste her time breaking in a new partner.

---

“Dani, what are your thoughts on bouncy?”

---

Two weeks into chauffer duty, Dani’s car breaks down as she’s dropping Charlie off for the night. Which shouldn’t be a huge deal – all Dani needs is a jump, and she’s got the cables. But the accountant’s the one with a car and he’s out somewhere, probably hiding from coyotes or lost in a solar farm.

“He’ll find his way home. I leave food out.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but Charlie’s shoulders are hunched the same way they get when Dani and his old lawyer are in the same room. There’s a tension Charlie’s building up in his head that doesn’t actually exist. And that’s fine for the work day, which is always weird anyway. But right now Dani’s off duty and her ride’s busted, so she shakes her head and gets out of the car, walking towards the house.

…which has no furniture. None. But for some reason has a slide projector.

Dani turns around, not bothering to hide the fact that she thinks this is strange. Charlie knows damn well that she thinks he’s weird. This is just the latest in a series.

“Do you actually live here?”

Charlie’s about to answer, when his phone rings. He holds up a finger and answers it. The voice on the other end of the line is loud and nervous, and Dani can make out the phrases “coyotes”, “magpies”, “country music festival”, and “I think I might be a legal Canadian.”

Charlie nods along, and when he hangs up he looks just a bit confused.

“Is there a Canadian mob? Ted thinks they’re after him.”

“Is there a-” Dani cuts herself off. Nope. Not something she wants to get into. “You didn’t answer my question.”

She can see Crews hesitating, which is normally not a good thing. He looks down at his phone and then up at Dani.

And there’s a smile.

“Yeah. I actually live here.”

---

A couple days later, Charlie asks Dani if she’ll take him to look at furniture. Dani’s just about the worst person to ask. Her apartment came furnished, and she’s never in her life bought anything more substantial than a futon. But if he’s asking her that means the accountant is probably busy, and the idea of Crews living in a giant mansion without furniture is just full on creepy. So furniture shopping they go.

And if Dani has to test out one more couch, she’s going to kill someone.

“Reese.” Bounce. “Reese.” Bounce. “Reese.” Boun-

Dani darts an arm out and clamps it down on Charlie’s shoulder. “You are going to make me carsick. Couch sick. Something.”

Charlie nods, and makes a note. On the notebook that Dani has been informed is his official furniture-buying-notebook. “Right. Reese gets couch sick. No bouncy couches.”

Dani doesn’t know what to say in regards to the fact that she’s a factor in Charlie’s furniture purchases, so she goes to get a cup of coffee. It’s complimentary, which means it’s lukewarm and in a styrofoam cup. The cup is staticky, and when Dani takes a sip her upper lip gets shocked.

This should seem like a big moment. Something they should have a talk about, something that Crews shouldn’t jot down in a notebook without a thought.

But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like any other day. Get up, give her crazy partner a ride, drown in paperwork for twelve hours, and pick up a mansion’s worth of furniture on the way home.

His home. Not hers.

That thought, that slip-up, should feel like a big deal too. But Dani’s tired and couch sick and isn’t going to waste her time mulling over a pronoun flub.

Tossing the cup in the trash, she goes back to Crews. He’s moved on to ottomans, and apparently that involves arranging the store’s supply in a straight line and walking across them, one by one, with his arms stretched out.

Dani means to tell Charlie that he looks ridiculous and is about to break his neck. But two proverbs and a rant about kangaroos later, she’s somehow found herself walking right up there with him.

"Never pray for justice, because you might get some."

-Margaret Atwood.

Justice is a concept that Dani has been nurtured on, so far as Jack Reese is capable of nurture.

For years, her understanding of what comprises justice (J-u-s-t-i-c-e, sound it out, there’s a good girl) is muddled. What she sees and what she is told don’t fit.

When Dani sees men and women with her face, with her mother’s face, arrested en mass by people with her father’s face, her father’s smell, her father’s uniform, she is told this is justice.

When she visits a local prison on "Take Your Daughter to Work Day", and sees men that look like pictures of her grandfather, uncles, and cousins, she is told this is justice.

When she asks why those pictures have all been packed away, she is told nothing, and wonders if it has to do with the cells and the bars and the dead look in the men’s eyes.

She wonders if someday justice will come for her. She wonders what form it will take, whose eyes it will have, and what language it will speak.

When Dani shoots her first suspect, she is told this is justice. She is told that people have been saved, that he had a loaded gun, that he’d done things to that little boy.

She is told that this is justice, and for the first time, she thinks she understands what that word means and feels succinct and focused in her understanding.

When Dani is lying in a room that smells of death, waste, excrement, and dope, that focus is gone, and she does not take the time to wonder on the nature of justice. By her second day in that room, she doesn’t think of anything but the smells and the feelings and God, she’s so sick.

Three days later, after Karen’s pulled her out, when she’s sitting on the edge of a couch and her hair’s wet and her nerves are on fire, Dani wonders if this is when justice comes for her, and she waits for it.

Twenty-one months later, and Dani’s still waiting.

1. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book. The movie was horrible. I like a love story that's upfront about what love is.

2. Maria Full of Grace, directed by Joshua Marston. Because I'm not a person to trust with recommendations, and want everyone to see what I see on a weekly basis.

3. The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. It's well written look at cultures meeting, and at how this country affects people in places no one bothers to think about.

4. See Sally Kick Ass, by Fred Vogt. I'm not usually one for instructional self-defense books. I think every woman should learn basic self-defense, but should be taught in an actual classroom, with a trained instructor. But this is a book I tend to give out when I have to go talk at schools, because it includes advice for girls about all kinds of self-defense, not just the physical stuff.

5. Time Bandits, directed by Terry Gilliam. It's funny?

6. A Fish Called Wanda, directed by John Cleese. Same.

7. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, directed by Mike Nichols. See the answer to item one.

8. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi

9. Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

10. Lipstick Jihad, by Azadeh Moaveni

I don't want to get into it. They're all just good books.

There's still glue on my dashboard.

1. The day’s first cup of coffee. Objectively, I get that it’s not about the taste. No way is it about the taste. I always overfill my pot, and it winds up coming out bitter and grainy. Cream and sugar are a waste of time, because they never help, so I just suck it up and drink my homemade sludge. But five minutes after I’m done, the caffeine is going through my system, and I feel like I might be able to get through a day of murders and personal pineapples.

2. Those rare moments where Crews is quiet. Not the crazy, frenzied kind of quiet like I.A.D. was moving in on him. That silence was worse than Crews’ longest rants all put together. No, I’m talking about the mornings where Charlie declares that it’s “Contemplation Day”. Contemplation apparently involves silence, sometimes with low-level humming.

I wonder what exactly Crews is contemplating (the wife dead on a staircase, a man in the trunk of his car, dig a hole, fill it up, or maybe just the price of oranges), but it’s probably best for the both of us that I don’t know.

3. I’d say arresting someone guilty, but these days I wonder about that. He makes me wonder about that.

4. Yeah-

All I’ve got is the three.

“Your father loves you.”

Dani is twelve years old the first time she realizes this might be an excuse, and not a truth. She stands in the kitchen with her mother, while that man sits in the dining room, waiting for dessert. There are times she cannot stand to think of Jack Reese as her father. Not because she’s angry (though she is angry), but because the thought of it makes her ill.

“Your father loves you,” her mother repeats, reaching into the freezer and pulling out a carton of Breyer's Neapolitan. “This is why he does those things.”

While her mother scoops the ice cream into hand-painted ceramic bowls, Dani stares at the pan of Ranginak resting on the stovetop. Hot, angry tears are forcing their way through the back of her eyes.

“No use crying,” her mother says, though not unkindly. “He’s right. This neighborhood isn’t safe for ethnic children.”

Her mother doesn’t stumble over the words “ethnic children” like she once did.

Dani says nothing, still staring at the evening’s intended dessert. She and her mother spent all afternoon making them, and the kitchen still smells of dates and cinnamon.

“You know, Dani,” her mother had whispered in Farsi, not four hours ago. “Things like this make me proud.”

She smiled at Dani in a way she rarely got to smile. Her hands were covered in sesame seeds and powdered sugar, and when she reached out to touch Dani’s cheek, the mess got all over her.

Dani hadn’t minded.

Now Dani’s mother stands, unsmiling, spooning factory-made ice cream into a bowl, while that man waits to be served. He’s turned on the television, and Dani can hear a rerun of MASH. The speakers are turned up loud enough that he can hear it from the living room, and Dani finds the sound jarring. She knows her mother does too, but won’t say anything.

“Dani.” Her mother has finished getting the ice cream into bowls, and puts them on a serving tray. “Please bring these into the dining room.”

Trying not to look so angry – for her benefit, not for his – Dani does as she’s asked.
When she leaves the kitchen, she can hear her mother dumping the ranginak into the trashcan, and then rinsing out the dish.

Her father sits at the head of the table, and lights from the television cast shadows across his face.
There are days, growing in number, where Dani hates her father. Today is one of those days.

She suspects that tomorrow will be no different.

My car still smells like horse.

So, I'm in this program. I'm in a lot of programs. Programs to help me stay clean, programs where I'm supposed to talk about staying clean, programs where I'm supposed to hang around and hear other people chat about trying to stay clean.

I'm not much of a talker, so I'm not really racking up the participation points. My shrink (department issued) thinks that maybe I should embrace the fact that I'm not a whiny, chatty addict (my words, not hers - I'm an addict, sure, but one who knows when to shut it), and write things down instead.

Without further ado.

Then Things About Dani Reese

1. I hate shopping. I hate malls. I hate shopping in malls. There's noise, kids with sticky hands, and food courts that stink like fried meat. But the alternative is shopping in boutiques, and try that on a cop's budget. So when I shop, I rush in to the back entrance of Sears, or whichever department store is having a sale, grab whatever shirts and pants are in my size and cut high enough that I can wear them to work, and pay without trying them on. The whole thing's over in twenty minutes. It's twenty minutes too long.

2. If I called my father, I could afford to shop in boutiques. But that would involve calling my father. I'll take the kids with the sticky hands and the scratchy cotton/poly blends. Any day.

3. I never dreamed about being married. When I was a kid, and my friends wanted to play-act a wedding, I always volunteered to be the witness. After awhile, I was forbidden from being said witness, because I never held my peace. I would always insist that the groom was either cheating on the bride, or that the bride was an unregistered alien and the marriage was for immigration purposes.

4. I realize now that this was transference (shrink's words). I was always hoping that my father was cheating, so that my mother would leave him. He never was, and she never did. Barring that, I at least hoped it was a marriage of convenience, so that I could understand why my mother would give up everything she ever was for one pathetic, ugly man.

5. When I realized my mother truly loved my father, I had to run to the bathroom, because I got sick.

6. I get sick more than I'd like, but I don't call off of work. Ever.

7. My partner is insane, likely certifiably so.

8. My partner is a better person than I could ever hope to be.

9. I am a recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict. Except there's no real recovering from either of those, so I'm just a junkie who's temporarily got enough sense not to get a hit.

10. I might be a sexoholic too, but I don't want to know what those support groups are like.

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Det. Dani Reese

2025

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TM 222: Sleeping on the couch.
Theatrical Muse #221
084. TEN movies/books you'd recommend and why.
for sixwordstories
For thetenspot: Ten things that make your day better!
theatrical_muse prompt #218: "Write about a lie your parents told
for sixwordstories
Intro Prompt for thetenspot

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Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

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Page generated Jun. 10th, 2025 09:54 pm

All I needed was a moment.

That's Zen, isn't it, Crews?

Recent Entries

TM 222: Sleeping on the couch.

Theatrical Muse #221

084. TEN movies/books you'd recommend and why.

for sixwordstories

For thetenspot: Ten things that make your day better!

theatrical_muse prompt #218: "Write about a lie your parents told