Cooper tried to think back. “Almost ten years ago. I was fresh out of training at Glynco and didn’t even have a home office yet. Martin was working solo, and I think he just needed someone else to take some driving shifts, and a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed rookie would do. He was a good guy. I hope I didn’t annoy him too much.”
“It’s a shame he didn’t see what kind of person you are,” Keith said.
I’m not the person you think I am.
“Keith, chill out,” Gretchen snapped.
She probably just didn’t think a prisoner needed to be reminded every two seconds that, yep, he was still a prisoner and nobody liked him very much, but Cooper appreciated her defense of him all the same.
It gave him the guts to continue talking to her like this was even a halfway normal situation.
“I was so earnest when I first joined up,” Cooper continued. “
I was practically a Boy Scout. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day, all brown-bagged like I was going to school. Shoes always polished. So eager to get in on everything that I was tripping everyone else up all the time. You ever see one of those videos where a puppy tries to run across a kitchen floor and winds up skittering and just sliding?”
Gretchen laughed, and the sound was so unexpectedly musical that Cooper immediately wanted to hear it again. “That was you, huh?”
“That was me. Just losing control and slip-sliding around like I was on ice. Martin was the best thing that could have happened to me. He had a steady hand with the rookies, I guess.”
“He still does,” Gretchen said. She cleared her throat. “He said you were good.”
It made a pang shoot through his heart. “At the job, I’m guessing,” he said lightly. “Not that I was a good person.”
No one was going to take a stand on that one. Not these days.
“That’s a hard thing to judge, especially in someone you haven’t seen in years.”
Maybe. Although he knew if someone asked him right now, he’d have zero hesitation in saying Martin Powell was a good person: steady, funny, fair, and dogged. Exactly the right mentor for a kid Marshal still so overwhelmed by his good luck in landing his dream job that he’d had trouble staying focused on the gritty, unglamorous slog that the work sometimes demanded.
Martin had helped make him the Marshal he had eventually become, and despite everything that had happened, Cooper still believed that he had been, however briefly, someone worth becoming.
So he would say that Martin was a good guy, that he couldn’t have changed enough, not even in ten years, to be anything else. But it was easy for him to say that. After all, nobody had shown up with damning evidence to connect Martin with a murder and the biggest sin a Marshal could commit.
If it was Martin in the center of this frame, would Cooper still be singing the same tune? Would he trust his one-time judgment over a mountain of apparently concrete proof?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t blame Martin for not believing in him, that was for sure. It was just good to know that whatever Martin had said about him had been nice enough to cause Gretchen to reflexively see him as a colleague instead of a threat or a faceless prisoner.
He would say that Gretchen was a good person, too. He’d stake his life on that, and he hadn’t even known her for a full hour yet.
If he took a deep breath, he could still catch that mountain air scent coming off her skin.
And he shouldn’t. He couldn’t afford to get distracted.
He forced himself to focus just on the conversation, not on the rapidly unwieldy attraction he felt towards her.
“Well, give Martin whatever of my regards you think he’ll accept,” Cooper said. “I’m glad he made chief.”
“Are we really going to have a conversation with him?” Keith said. Apparently he thought that if he kept his voice down, either Cooper wouldn’t hear him or Gretchen wouldn’t get annoyed at him for continuing to poke at her choices.
“It’s a long trip to spend sitting in silence,” Gretchen said. “And you vetoed Moby Dick.”
“He’s a murderer. He’s a traitor.”
There was something strangely antique about Keith’s choice of words, and for some reason, they struck Cooper more deeply than “killer” or “prisoner” would have. It was like Keith was implying that Cooper had lost his honor, and that that loss was somehow contagious—that if Gretchen spoke to him for too long, dishonor and shame would leach into her, like contamination into groundwater, and she would be spoiled forever.
She can’t be. She’s herself, and she’s as true as steel.
It was like a distant echo inside him somewhere. He hadn’t heard the actual words being spoken, only them bouncing off something close to his heart.