Free Acquainted With the Night by Erica Abbott

walked down the hall to the master bedroom. Her service weapon, a Glock semiautomatic, went locked into a small safe built into the closet. She tossed her blouse into the hamper, carefully hung up her slacks and then unstrapped her backup gun from her ankle. The Smith and Wesson revolver was a short-barreled hammerless thirty-eight caliber. She put the smaller gun, still holstered, in the drawer of the bedside table on her side. Loaded, it weighed just about a pound, and she was always happy to get it off her leg.
    Alex slept only on her side of the bed. Both the phone and the alarm clock were on her side. CJ’s side held only a lamp, and a volume of Robert Frost poetry, the book she’d been halfway through rereading when she left. Alex sometimes wondered if the cleaning service was curious about why they kept having to shift the same book to dust twice a month.
    She hadn’t gotten rid of anything, given away CJ’s extensive shoe collection or moved her clothes out of the closet. Sometimes, when she was really hurting, she could go into the closet and put her face in one of CJ’s jackets and catch the faintest breath of her scent clinging to the clothes. It had taken her weeks before she had been able to wash the sheets on their bed.
    Alex pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt, then went back out into the kitchen to search for something to eat. There wasn’t much, but she found a container of leftover pasta salad that would do. She was never very hungry anymore, but she ate whenever she remembered to do so.
    She finished the food, rinsed out the container and put everything in the dishwasher. She didn’t have to run it very often anymore, not like when CJ was cooking. Alex often complained to her partner that she could use half the pans in the kitchen to make a simple omelet. Alex wished that she had to clean up after CJ now.
    She lay on the couch and picked up a book, but nothing caught her attention. She closed her eyes, exhausted but not sleepy.
    When the phone rang, she jerked up, the book falling to the floor with a thud. The caller ID surprised her.
    “Hi, Vivien,” she said. “Have you heard something?”
    She’d only talked to Vivien about once a month since that first frantic week, when everyone CJ knew was exchanging what seemed like constant phone calls, text messages and emails. Now every conversation Alex had with Vivien, or for that matter with Rod Chavez or anyone else, began with the same words, and Vivien gave the same answer as always.
    “Nothing.” Vivien sighed. “How are you doing?”
    “About the same,” Alex answered honestly. “How are you?”
    She tried to remember that she wasn’t the only person CJ had left behind, that she didn’t have exclusive rights to missing her. Vivien had suffered, in a different way, almost as much as Alex had herself.
    This time Vivien hesitated over the question. After a moment, she said, “I have kind of a weird request. Could we go out sometime, like dinner or maybe lunch this weekend? I’d really like to talk to you.”
    “Of course,” Alex said automatically. She and Vivien had never been as close as CJ might have liked—best friend and wife were too different for that. But Alex liked Vivien, in moderate doses, and she knew how much CJ loved Viv. She felt as if she’d gotten custody of Vivien somehow.
    “Good,” Vivien sounded relieved, as if she’d been afraid Alex might refuse the invitation. “I need a friendly ear. Well, some advice, actually.”
    “Is this about CJ?” Alex had to ask.
    “Not at all. Though I have to tell you that if she were here, she’d be the one I’d be asking.”
    Alex wasn’t sure how to take this news. “So, what, I’m pinch-hitting for her?”
    “Sort of. Not exactly, I just…oh, fuck, Alex. I just don’t know who else to talk to. About this. And you’re the only other person I know who would really understand.”
    Really confused now, Alex asked, “Are you having trouble with the law,