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Micki’s phone ringing woke her up and she resolutely refused to open her eyes to answer it. She felt her way across her nightstand and hoped she was tapping the right area of the screen. “‘Lo?” she answered before a big yawn forced its way out.
“Morning, Ramirez. Sleep well?”
“I was sleeping well,” she muttered. “Then some jackass called and woke me up.”
“Is that any way to speak to your captain?”
“No, but you’re not my captain anymore so….”
Larry James’ laugh boomed from the other end of the line, which did not help Micki’s headache but it did make her smile. “So, what’s up? Why are you calling me at the unreasonable hour of-” she rolled over and peeked at the clock on her nightstand “-8 in the morning?”
“Well, about that…. Maybe you should have a cup of coffee first.”
Well that was concerning. Micki knit her brow and slowly got out of bed. “I’ll start the french press,” she said, speaking a lot clearer now that the sleep had been shocked out of her system. “What’s going on?” she asked, padding into the next room.
“Well…. It’s about Walker. He came back to work this week and…. I’m not sure he’s ready.”
“What makes you think that? He did all the therapy, didn’t he?” That was a step in the right direction as far as she was concerned.
“He did, yes. And I’m glad for that. But Cassie and I have noticed things… I’m just not sure the therapy did what it was supposed to do. He keeps insisting that he’s fine and he’s 100% and all that but he’s just…. He’s not.”
“Okay…. Can you give me an example?”
“Well, we were all on a stakeout the other night. Trying to catch serial horse thieves. Cassie and Trey and I got into a debate about whether or not what the horse thieves were doing was wrong. You know, the morality of breaking the rules for the sake of the greater good. Anyway, I said that regardless of their intentions, there were legitimate channels they could go through to reach their goal but they were choosing to take the criminal route and we should treat them as such. Then Cordell said something weird….”
Micki started up the machine while she waited out James’ silence. “What did he say?”
“It’s not what he said so much as how he said it,” he clarified. “What he said was that sometimes you have to ignore the legitimate channels if ‘ground conditions suggest a different approach’. It’s hard to explain but it’s like he was reading out of a military field manual or something. And he had this far off look in his eyes….”
Micki hummed and watched the coffee drip out. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound like him at all.” It did sound a lot like something she would’ve heard during her time in service though. “Maybe…. Maybe this is something from his time in the Marines? I looked into that ringleader, Sean. He was a Marine too before he went all terrorist. Maybe he said or did something to Cordell that triggered something he’d repressed…..”
“There’s a thought,” James mused. “But what do we do about it? I doubt I can just tell him to take more time off work.”
Micki snorted. “Yeah, that’s definitely not happening. But… Keep an eye on him. If something he buried 20 years ago is coming back up, there may be more on the way. You’ll need to play it by ear. Maybe tell him to keep going to that therapy. It’s covered by the health insurance, right?”
“Yeah, up to a certain number of appointments…. I’ll talk to him about it. And….”
“And….?”
“Maybe you can talk to him too? He’ll listen to you.”
Micki shook her head and sipped her fresh coffee. “We talking about the same Walker? I don’t remember him listening to me that often.”
James chuckled. “Yeah, yeah, it’s worth a shot. I’ll talk to Perez about this too. Maybe if we corner him from all angles, he’ll listen.”
It was worth a shot. “Yeah, alright. I’ll talk to him later and report back.”
“Does that mean I’m your captain again?”
“You’ll always be my captain. But I’ll be more respectful if you call after noon.”
“Yeah, yeah….”
—------------------
Cassie was a great partner. She was reliable, trustworthy, and she wasn’t afraid to call him out on his bullshit. Sure, her taste in tv shows was questionable and she had a habit of sticking her nose where it wasn’t necessarily wanted but, at the end of the day, he trusted her with his life. He even trusted her with some of his secrets. She was one of the few people in his life that he felt he could talk to without judgment. He really appreciated that about her.
But he was also afraid of worrying her. That’s why he kept telling her that he was fine, for the most part, mentally. Because he didn’t want her to think that she needed to watch out for him, that she couldn’t trust him. That was why he didn’t tell her that he just left the flag in front of the picture of Cooper and left without saying a word to Mrs. Cooper. Because he didn’t want her to think that he was letting his guilt consume him.
But there was one person that he wasn’t afraid to be honest with. “Hey, Flor….”
“Hey, Beau. Long time no talk.”
“Yeah, I guess it has been.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier but-”
“I get it. You’d just gotten back home and you were dealing with a lot. I’m just glad you’re safe.”
Cordell couldn’t help but smile. Though it had been months since they’d worked together, she still knew him so well. “Yeah, me too.”
“So. What did you want to talk about?” she asked.
He sighed. “I…. I lied to my partner today. And I’m not sure what to do about it.”
“Okay…. What did you lie about?”
He didn’t feel like diving into the whole story with her. It’s not that he didn’t trust her with it but he had a feeling she would pick up on some deeply buried meaning that he wasn’t up to exploring right then. So he gave her the spark notes. “I…. I’ve had this…thing. It belonged to someone I knew in the Marines. They, uh,.... They died in action. And she said that I should take it to the family, so I did. And…. I just sort of dropped it off at the house without talking to the family. But I told her that I did talk to the family.”
“Huh. Interesting…. You were willing to share some dark secret with her but you were too afraid to tell her you weren’t ready to handle it.”
And that was exactly why he hadn’t called her yet. She was just too good at this. “Micki-”
“I’m not shaming you for it, Lord knows I would’ve done the same, but we need to at least acknowledge it.”
“Okay, it’s been acknowledged. So what do I do about it?”
“Cordell…. You can’t do that to her. She’s your partner. She needs to know that she can trust you. How can she trust you to have her back in the field if you can’t even tell her what’s going on in your head?”
“But if I tell her what’s going on in my head, she’ll think I can’t go into the field and-”
“Can you?”
“What?”
“Can you go into the field or not?” she asked, a frustrated edge tingeing her voice.
“Of course I can! I’m perfectly capable of it. I did all the PT and the therapy. I’m fine. I mean, I’m not perfect. There’s room for improvement. But I’m fine.”
“Well, then you’d have no reason to lie to her, right?”
“Oh, sure, because telling her I was too afraid to talk to an 80 year-old woman would convince her that I was fine,” he snapped back. “What do you want me to do, MIcki? Tell her all the shit that’s going on in my head and convince her that I shouldn’t even have my badge?!”
Micki went quiet and Cordell felt another drop of shame fall on top of the lump of it that had taken semi-permanent residence in his stomach. “Micki, I-”
“Cordell, you are a smart man and a capable ranger. But you’re also stubborn as hell. Cassie is also a smart and capable ranger. She knows that you’re not perfect and she doesn’t need you to tell her there’s something wrong for her to know it. If you want her to trust that you’re fine, you need to be able to trust her to know when you’re not.”
She hung up on him before he could ask what that meant.