I’ll come right out and admit it: It was one of the more sullen car rides I’ve been a party to.
It wasn’t just Bradley, although if sullen was a pot-luck nobody could say he hadn’t brought his share. No, it was coming from me, too, and my contribution to the feast was lavish.
I didn’t know who I was madder at, Colby and George, for putting me in this situation, or Bradley, for being Bradley.
I glanced at him, trying to be surreptitious. He was driving with an air of irritated detachment, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. If he’d had a moustache, it would have been quivering with poorly-concealed anger. I was disappointed at that, actually — I mean, his lack of a moustache. It didn’t make sense; except for the absence of facial hair, he was every inch the Perfect Cop. I took it quite personally, his ’stache-lessness. A moustache would have annoyed me, sure, but at least it would have been a simple, direct, external thing to be annoyed about. A lightning rod. Unlike all the other, less visible fault lines of tension that we were dealing with.
Of course, while this was going through my head, he caught me looking at him.
“Something on your mind?”
I shrugged, and went with the elegant simplicity of a lie. “Just running through how I want to handle it when we get to Jackson’s place.”
“Ah,” he said. Non-committal, yeah, but welcome as a step or two up from outright contempt.
He lapsed back into silence, and I wasn’t feeling any too chatty myself. Bradley, to be fair, was clearly making an effort. So was I, and as a result the truce was holding, for now. But we were facing one another across a conversational Salisbury Plain, and it would be much, much too easy for another battle to break out. And deliberate provocation versus snake-based misunderstanding wouldn’t matter at that point.
So, rather than trying to deal with the issue of Bradley’s tragically naked upper lip, I looked out the window and watched the city roll by as we drew ever closer to the home address of Glenn Jackson.
