Free Dust To Dust by Tami Hoag

Mary's halo and stuffed it into a garbage bag.
    "Half of them could burn out and it'd still be like living next door to the sun," Kovac said.
    The neighbor stared at him with a mix of offense and apprehension, clutching the garbage bag to his chest. He was a small man of about seventy with a hard-boiled look and small mean eyes. He wore a red plaid bomber cap with the flaps hanging down like hound's ears.
    "Where's your Christmas spirit?" he demanded.-
    "I lost it about the fourth night I didn't get any sleep on account of your fucking lights. Can't you put that shit on a timer?"
    "Shows what you know," the neighbor huffed. "I know you're a lunatic."-
    "You want me to cause a power surge? That's what would happen turning these lights on and off. Power surge. Could black out the whole block."
    "We should be so lucky," Kovac said, and went up the sidewalk and into his house.
    He turned the television on for company, radiated some leftover lasagna, sat on the couch, and picked at dinner. He wondered if Mike Fallon was sitting in front of his big-screen television tonight, trying to eat, trying to temporarily hide from his grief in the ruts of routine.
    During the course of his career in homicide, Kovac had watched a lot of people straddle that awkward line between normalcy and the surreal reality of having violent crime disrupt their lives. He never thought much about it, as a rule. He wasn't a social worker. His Job was to solve the crime and move on. But he thought about it tonight because Mike was a cop. And maybe for a few other reasons.
    Abandoning the lasagna and Dateline, he went to his desk and rummaged around in a drawer, digging out an address book that hadn't seen the light of day in half a decade. His ex-wife was listed under her first name. He dialed the number and waited, then hung up when an answering machine picked up. A man's voice. The second husband.
    What would he have said anyway? I had a dead body today and it reminded me I have a kid.
    No. It reminded him he didn't have anyone.
    He wandered back into the living room with the empty fish tank and Stone Phillips on the TV Too much like old Iron Mike sitting in his massage chair in front of the big screen, alone in the world with nothing but bitter memories and soured hopes. And a dead son.
    Most of the time Kovac believed he was happier without a real life. The job was a safe place. He knew what to expect. He knew who he was. He knew where he fit in. He knew what to do. He'd never been good at any of that without the badge.
    There were worse fates than being a career cop. Most of the time he loved the work, if not the politics that went with it. He was good at it. Not fancy, not flashy. Not in the flamboyant way Ace Wyatt had
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    been, grabbing headlines and sticking out his granite J aw for any passing camera. But good in the way that counted.
    "Stick with what you do best:' he muttered, then turned his back on his dinner, grabbed his coat, and left.
    STEVE PIERCE LIVED in a brick duplex on a drab street too close to the freeway in Lowry Hill. The neighborhood was full of yuppies and artsy types with money to renovate the old brownstones. But this portion had been chopped up into odd little angles when the major traffic arteries of Hennepin and Lyndale had been widened years ago, and it remained fragmented not only physically but psychologically as well.
    Steve Pierce's neighbors had no gaudy Christmas displays draining the Northern States Power supply. Everything was tasteful and moderate. A wreath here. A swag there. As much as Kovac hated his neighbor, he thought he liked this even less. The street had the feel of a place where the inhabitants were not connected in any way, not even by ahimosity.
    He fit right in tonight.
    He sat in his car, parked across and down the street from Pierce's, waiting, thinking. Thinking Andy Fallon probably didn't leave his doors unlocked. Thinking Steve Pierce seemed to know a lot and yet .nothing about