Friday, November 29th, 1:00 PM
Austin's Mustang rolled into Hawkings' driveway with a quiet crunch of winter gravel beneath its new tires.
The car had been red the last time Austin had driven it this far. The new black paint caught the weak November sunlight differently, swallowing the light along the hood and making the body lines look cleaner, sharper.
It suited the car better than the red ever had. The new winter wheels filled the arches with a practical heaviness, and for the first time in weeks Austin had driven somewhere without a company SUV following the habits his promotion had built into his body.
He had noticed himself sitting lower behind the wheel, one hand loose against the steering wheel, the other resting against the door. It felt good. More importantly, it felt like himself.
Hawkings' house sat exactly where Austin remembered it, a two-story place with dark siding, a narrow porch, and the kind of lawn that had stopped being someone's project years ago. There were no decorations for the season, no toys in the yard, no second car angled beside the garage.
A single set of curtains remained open upstairs while everything else was drawn shut. The house had the particular order of a place occupied by one person who had been doing it alone long enough for solitude to become part of the furniture. Hawkings' car was in the driveway.
He's home.
Austin killed the engine and sat there for another few seconds.
He had told himself the drive over was about beer and food. A Friday afternoon. A steak. Six beers. Catching up with an old friend because promotions had a way of turning people into schedules and schedules had a way of becoming excuses.
And he knew better.
He had noticed the distance.
He just hadn't closed it.
Austin grabbed the six-pack from the passenger seat, balanced the takeout container against his forearm, and climbed the porch steps. He knocked twice.
Nothing.
"Yo! Hawkings?"
The house gave him nothing back.
Austin knocked again, harder this time.
"Joe?"
Still nothing.
He shifted the food under his arm and reached for his phone. He had called that morning and the line rang but... No answer. He had then stopped by the station earlier and been told Hawkings had taken the week off. That narrowed the possibilities considerably.
Hawkings wasn't at work. His car was here. He hadn't answered his phone. The house was silent. For a man who had spent most of his adult life as a detective, the absence of an answer from behind a closed door was information by itself.
Austin tried the knob.
The door opened.
He stopped.
Hawkings knew better than to leave his front door unlocked.
The beer and takeout suddenly felt much heavier in his hands.
Austin stepped inside and set both on the entry table.
"Joe?" He called gently, his voice sounded different inside the house.
The silence swallowed it before it reached the stairs.
Austin moved through the hallway, past the kitchen and the dark dining room, calling Hawkings' name again. The house looked lived in. A mug sat beside the sink. Mail rested unopened against the counter. A jacket hung over the back of a chair. Nothing was overturned. Nothing looked immediately wrong.
That was what made it worse.
His training had started talking before his fear could finish forming.
Move faster.
Look.
Where could he be?
Austin reached the bedroom door.
It was partly closed.
He pushed it open.
For half a second, his mind refused to make sense of what his eyes were showing him.
Then everything became horribly clear.
Hawkings was there.
His friend was there, suspended by a rope tied around his neck. His face was wrong. His body was wrong. The room itself seemed wrong around him, the familiar bedroom transformed by the simple fact that Hawkings might not be alive anymore.
Austin's stomach dropped so hard it felt like the floor had disappeared.
He had seen men die.
He had seen bodies opened by things designed to open them. He had worked through gunfire, blood, screaming, smoke, the confusion of combat where the next person might need his hands before the last person had finished dying.
None of that had prepared him for this. There was no enemy here. No battlefield. No incoming fire. Just a bedroom, a friend, and the realization that Austin had been given every ordinary opportunity to call this man and had not taken enough of them.
His hands moved before the thought finished.
The beer was already forgotten.
Austin was back in the kitchen.
He grabbed what he needed, a knife by the kitchen counter before moving through the hallway at a run and returned to the bedroom with his mind reduced to sequence. His hands worked with the old precision, cutting away what needed to be removed, bringing Hawkings down safely, clearing his airway, checking for breath.
Nothing.
Austin's fingers found Hawkings' neck.
For one terrible second, there was nothing.
Then a pulse. Weak but present.
Austin's lungs finally pulled in air.
"Come on."
He lowered himself beside Hawkings and began compressions.
One.
Two.
Three.
His shoulders settled into the rhythm his body remembered even after years away from the field. His palms pressed down. Released. Pressed again. He counted beneath his breath, each number marking another refusal to let his friend disappear.
"Come on, Joe."
His arms burned.
He kept going.
"Come on."
The room narrowed to the sound of Austin's breathing, the rhythm beneath his hands, and the numbers coming out of his mouth.
Then Hawkings jerked.
His body convulsed with a violent gasp.
Austin stopped long enough to let him breathe.
Hawkings stared at the ceiling.
His eyes moved slowly across the room, catching the familiar walls, the familiar light, the familiar crack in the ceiling above his bed.
He swallowed painfully. "Heaven looks a lot like my bedroom."
Austin stared at him.
Then he slapped him.
Hawkings' head turned with the impact.
"What the hell were you thinking?"
Hawkings blinked.
His eyes found Austin.
There was still confusion in them. Then recognition. Then something close to embarrassment.
"What are the odds?"
Austin's jaw tightened. "Don't."
"Out of everybody who could've found me," Hawkings continued, voice rough, "it had to be you."
Austin stared at him for another second.
Then he exhaled.
"Yeah."
He helped Hawkings sit up. "I was Kinda hoping it'd be my wife."
"I'm sorry brother."
The bedroom door stayed open.
Neither man went back inside.
***
Twenty minutes later they were sitting on the living room couch with the television off, two beers open on the coffee table and the steak takeout spread between them in cardboard containers. Austin had brought paper plates. Hawkings had apparently decided civilization was still worth participating in.
For a while, they ate.
Neither man mentioned the bedroom.
Then Hawkings looked down at his beer.
"Sydney wants out."
Austin waited. "She's not coming back?"
Hawkings rubbed his thumb against the bottle.
"I went to Grand Marais. Got the papers. Came home. Apparently the house was already quiet, so I figured I could improve on the silence."
Austin gave him a look.
Hawkings took another drink.
"The chief is tied to the Thornes. The mayor is tied to the Riveras. The courts aren't exactly independent from the same network. Every time a person get's murdered by the powers that be, the case somehow finds a reason to become complicated until nobody remembers why it started."
He set the bottle down.
"I've been pulling at the same thread for years. Every time I get close to something useful, I hit an institution that doesn't want the question asked. I've followed evidence as far as the system allows me to follow it. That's the problem. The system decides where the road ends."
Austin chewed slowly. "And Melanie?"
Hawkings looked toward the floor.
"She's in Grand Marais. With her mother."
The words came quieter.
"New school. New friends. Probably already knows where the good pizza is."
A faint smile touched his mouth.
"Whole point of all of this was supposed to be making the world better for her. Now she's somewhere else, and I'm here. And the world is still... Fucked."
Austin leaned forward. "Joe."
Hawkings looked at him. "You're not convincing me otherwise Austin, so don't even start."
"That's not it. What you just was selfish." Austin began
Hawkings said nothing.
"Trying to end yourself like that. That's selfish."
Austin rested his forearms on his knees.
"Sydney leaving doesn't make Melanie stop being your daughter. She's already dealing with her parents separating. You really want to add her father's funeral to that?"
Hawkings' face changed.
It was small.
But Austin saw it.
"No," Hawkings said.
"Exactly!."
Hawkings looked down at his beer.
"I hadn't thought about it like that."
Austin stared at him.
"Aren't you the so called genius detective in the room."
A beat.
"That's honestly embarrassing." Hawkings let out a weak laugh. "But fair."
Austin leaned back.
"And I'm sorry."
Hawkings glanced over.
"The promotion changed things. I didn't keep in touch. And i might not have been the most available person in the world."
Hawkings nodded once.
"'Not the most available' is one way to put it."
Austin smiled.
"I deserved that."
"Probably."
They drank.
The room felt warmer now.
Not because anything had been fixed.
Because they were finally talking.
Austin looked toward the window.
"What are you preparing for out there?" Hawkings asked his expression sharpening.
Austin raised an eyebrow.
"Things could get difficult. we're trying to prevent the country faling into a major conflict"
Hawkings stared at him.
"That's a very diplomatic way of saying World War Three."
"That would be exaggerating the facts."
"I'm not dumb, Austin."
Hawkings leaned forward, elbows resting against his knees.
"This escalation isn't random. That's the part nobody wants to look at because random is comforting. Random means nobody planned it. But the pattern is there. Political destabilizations that should have nothing to do with one another keep appearing with the same structural shape. People in key institutional positions resign or get discredited immediately before escalation events, which conveniently removes resistance before the next move. Communication infrastructure fails at strategic moments, not like ordinary system failures, but like somebody is clearing a path before something passes through it. And the arms race didn't build gradually. It accelerated after specific events that, when you look at them together, look manufactured to produce exactly that response. Somebody keeps pushing pieces onto the board and waiting for everyone else to react. I don't know who yet. But you don't manufacture pressure on this scale without resources. You don't coordinate this many failures without reach. The signature is big enough that I have to consider organizations I would've laughed at five years ago."
Austin watched him.
Hawkings took another drink.
"The Illuminati."