Flat Out

The property room at the 14th Precinct smelled like dust, old cardboard, and the particular desperation of a filing system that had been abandoned sometime around 2007 and replaced with a different filing system that was also, in its own way, abandoned. Neil Downe didn’t mind. He’d worked in worse. He’d worked in a Burnt-out basement in Garfield Heights that had active raccoons. He could handle a little dust.

He pulled the first crate toward him across the metal shelf, the contents rattling with the sound of seized paperwork and broken dreams. The manifests from Vasik’s auto body shop. Three months of evidence gathering, two warrants, one raid that had gone sideways when Kowalski tripped over a carburetor and discharged his weapon into the ceiling. Standard Tuesday, really.

Neil flipped through the first manifest. Vehicle registrations. A 2014 Dodge Charger registered to a name he didn’t recognize. A 2009 Honda Civic with a lien on it. A Chevy Suburban that had been reported stolen in three different jurisdictions, each report filed with slightly different VIN numbers, which was either clerical error or a very specific kind of optimism.

He set the manifest aside and reached for the second crate, wedged behind a stack of impound forms and what appeared to be a decorative traffic cone someone had confiscated from a traffic stop and never returned. His knuckles hit something flat and rigid behind the crate. He pulled harder. The crate slid free, and behind it, wedged between two file boxes with the careful disregard of someone who had run out of shelf space and decided physics would sort it out, was a life-sized cardboard standee.

She stood about five-seven in printed dimensions, shoulder-length blonde hair rendered in the kind of airbrushed shading that suggested a graphic designer had been given a budget of eleven dollars and a weekend. Dramatic eye shadow. A stance that communicated the following: she was a woman of action, she had seen things, and she was prepared to see more of them. The movie title across the bottom read DANGER EXPOSURE, and beneath that, in smaller font: Sarah Mason is operative caught between agency and enemy in explosive thriller. The film’s release year was printed in the corner. 2011. Direct-to-video. The kind of movie that got made because someone had a tax write-off and a cousin who owned a camera.

Neil grabbed the standee by its cardboard shoulders and hauled it out from behind the crates. The base was scuffed, one corner bent inward where it had been knocked against something. He set it upright on the property room floor, the standee leaning at a two-degree angle because the base was warped. He straightened it. It leaned again. He let it lean.

“Hell of a place to end up,” Neil said to the standee, because Neil Downe had never met an inanimate object he didn’t talk to. He’d once had a fifteen-minute conversation with a parking meter, and the parking meter had come away from the exchange having learned something about itself.

He turned back to the second crate and popped the lid. More manifests. This one had shipping invoices stapled to the front, the names on them handwritten in a cramped, aggressive script that belonged to someone who had opinions about cursive. He scanned the first page. Parts orders. Brake pads, alternators, a suspicious quantity of high-grade catalytic converters that had been listed as “assorted exhaust components,” which was technically accurate the way calling a bank robbery an “unauthorized withdrawal” was technically accurate.

“You’re going to want the third crate.”

Neil didn’t flinch. He didn’t turn around fast, either. He turned around at the speed of a man who had heard voices in empty rooms before and had decided long ago that flinching was for people who hadn’t been shot at by a man in a clown mask during a hostage negotiation in 2019.

The cardboard standee was looking at him. Its painted eyes, which he was quite certain had been looking at a point somewhere to his left when he’d set it down, were now looking directly at him. Its printed mouth, which had been closed, was open. Not wide. Just enough.

“Third crate,” the standee said again. The voice was clear, confident, the kind of voice that belonged to someone who had practiced sounding sure of themselves until the practice became indistinguishable from the real thing. “The one with the blue lid. Vasik kept the real invoices separate from the cover manifests. He’s not smart, but he’s organized, which is a combination that gets people further than it should.”

Neil looked at the standee. The standee looked at Neil. The property room’s fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with the indifference of lighting that had seen too much and cared too little.

“Who are you?” Neil said.

“Sarah Mason.” The standee’s printed expression didn’t change, because it was printed, but the voice carried a weight that suggested the words had been said before, many times, to people who hadn’t listened. “Freelance operative. I was displayed at Vasik’s auto body shop for four months, propped against the back wall of the office. I heard everything.”

Neil rubbed his jaw. The stubble there made a sound like sandpaper on concrete. “You’re a cardboard cutout.”

“I’m a cardboard cutout, yes.”

“From a movie.”

“Danger Exposure, 2011, direct-to-video, seventy-eight minutes, rated R for violence and brief language. It earned eleven dollars at the box office, and that was because someone bought a ticket by mistake thinking it was something else.” The standee paused. “I’m aware of what I am.”

Neil looked at the third crate. Blue lid. He walked over, picked it up, and set it on the shelf. He popped the lid. Inside, stapled together in neat quarterly bundles, were shipping invoices with names, dates, and vehicle registration numbers that did not match the cover manifests. He flipped through the first bundle. Three names he recognized from the department’s CI list. Two he didn’t. One that made him stop.

“Tell me about the conversations,” he said, still reading.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“I can do everything.” The standee shifted, or seemed to shift, the lean in its base correcting by a degree. “Vasik ran the shop as a front. You know that already. The legitimate business was maybe thirty percent of the revenue. The rest came through the back. Vehicles brought in for repair, stripped for parts, the parts sold to buyers who paid cash. The VINs were ground off in the garage bay, the shells transported to a lot on the east side. He ran the operation with three associates. One was a man named Darby, heavy, tattooed, drove a black pickup. The other two I only heard, never saw. Vasik referred to them as the brothers, but I don’t think they were actually related.”

Neil pulled a chair from the corner of the property room, the metal legs scraping the floor, and sat down across from the standee with the posture of a man conducting an interview. He had his notebook out. He was writing.

“Vasik ever mention a buyer named Kreso?” Neil asked.

“Kreso, yeah. Serbian, thick accent, came in twice a week, always parked behind the building. He and Vasik would talk in the office with the door closed, but the walls were thin. Cardboard, you know.” A beat. “I know cardboard.”

“What did they talk about?”

“Shipments. Kreso wanted specific vehicles. Luxury brands, mostly. He had buyers lined up before the cars even came in. Vasik would source them, Kreso would move them. There was a warehouse involved, but they only said the location once, and I only caught part of it.”

Neil leaned forward. “Which part?”

“Hardesty. Industrial park on Hardesty. Unit number was something with a seven.”

Neil wrote this down. Underlined it twice, which was his personal system for this is probably real. He looked at the standee. Sarah Mason. Printed blonde hair, dramatic eye shadow, a jawline sharp enough to use as a straightedge. The base was warped and the corners were bent and she stood at a two-degree angle and she had just given him more actionable intelligence in five minutes than his department’s CI network had produced in six weeks.

“You want to help with this,” Neil said. He didn’t phrase it as a question.

“I was displayed against a wall for four months listening to a man run a chop shop. I know his schedule, his associates, his buyers, and the name of the lot on the east side. What I don’t know is what happens next, because I’m cardboard and no one asks cardboard what happens next.”

Neil closed his notebook and put it in his jacket pocket. He stood. His knees popped, which they had been doing since 2015 and which he continued to interpret as a sign of ruggedness rather than the early stages of joint deterioration. He picked up the standee under one arm, the cardboard rigid against his ribs, and walked out of the property room.

The bullpen was half-empty at this hour. Desk lamps threw pools of yellow light across cluttered surfaces. Two detectives were on the phone, one was asleep in his chair with the practiced ease of a man who had trained his body to sit upright while unconscious. Gary Huang sat at his desk near the windows, eating a salad with the resigned energy of a man who had been told by his doctor to eat more salads and had decided to punish the salad for it.

Gary looked up when Neil walked past carrying a cardboard standee under his arm. He watched Neil cross the bullpen. He watched Neil set the standee down in the empty chair at the desk opposite his own, the one that had belonged to Neil’s partner before the medical leave, the one that still had a coffee mug in the drawer that no one had emptied. Gary chewed his salad. He swallowed.

“Neil.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a cardboard cutout.”

“Sarah Mason, freelance operative.” Neil sat at his desk and pulled the third crate toward him. “She’s got intel on Vasik. Four months of direct observation. She knows his buyer list, his schedule, and a warehouse on Hardesty.”

Gary put his fork down. He looked at the standee. He looked at Neil. He looked at the standee again. He picked his fork back up and resumed eating his salad with the careful attention of a man who had decided that if he focused hard enough on the lettuce, the rest of the room would resolve into something that made sense.

“Your partner is on medical leave,” Gary said.

“My partner is on medical leave,” Neil confirmed.

“Your badge situation is—”

“Fluid.”

“Your badge situation is fluid, and your new partner is a piece of cardboard from a movie that—”

“Danger Exposure, 2011. And she’s got better intel than Kowalski ever gave me.”

“Kowalski is a chronic liar with a gambling problem.”

“Exactly.”

Gary stared at Neil for a long moment. His salad was getting warm, which was a thing that happened to salads that nobody talked about. He took a bite of a tomato. Chewed it. Swallowed it. He looked at the standee, which sat in the chair with the rigid posture of someone who had been printed that way and had no choice in the matter, its printed eyes staring forward at a fixed point somewhere in the middle distance that communicated resolve, determination, and the specific kind of blankness that came from being a flat surface with ink on it.

“Neil, you cannot make a cardboard standee your partner on an active investigation.”

“Gary, I need a partner. She needs a purpose. The department needs results. This is what they call a win-win-win.”

“They don’t call that. Nobody calls that.”

Neil was already flipping through the third crate’s invoices, his pen moving across his notebook in the shorthand he’d developed over twenty-five years that was legible to no one, including Neil himself on later review. He paused on a name. Circled it. Held the invoice up to the standee.

“Kreso. This the buyer you were telling me about?”

The standee’s voice came from somewhere in the region of its printed torso, clear and level. “Twice a week, parked behind the building, accent you could cut with a knife. That’s him.”

Neil tapped the invoice. “Gary. Gary, look at this.”

Gary did not look up from his salad. “I’m not looking at it, Neil.”

“Gary.”

Gary looked up. Neil held the invoice next to the standee, one in each hand, his face wearing the expression of a man who had found the missing piece of a puzzle and was unconcerned that the piece was made of cardboard. Gary set his fork down again. He rubbed his eyes with both hands, pressing his palms into them until he saw the particular kind of darkness that comes from pressing your palms into your eyes.

“How is she talking, Neil?”

“I don’t concern myself with the how, Gary. I concern myself with the what. The what is: she was there, she heard things, and those things are corroborated by the invoices in this crate. That’s more than I got from six weeks of CI work.”

“Because your CIs are all liars and one of them is literally a raccoon.”

“The raccoon has been reliable on three separate occasions, and I will not apologize for that.”

Gary pulled his hands away from his eyes. He looked at the standee again. The standee looked back, or maintained the illusion of looking back, which at this point in the evening was enough. Gary had been Neil’s desk neighbor for four years. He had watched Neil tase a man in a mascot costume. He had watched Neil fall through a ceiling during a raid and land on a suspect, effecting an arrest that the department had quietly commended and publicly reprimanded. He had watched Neil eat an entire rotisserie chicken during a stakeout and then run down a fleeing suspect three minutes later. He had stopped being surprised by Neil Downe. What surprised him now, sitting at his desk with his warm salad and his tired eyes, was himself. He was surprised by himself. Surprised that he was still here. Surprised that he hadn’t transferred. Surprised that some part of him, some small and unexplainable part, was looking at the cardboard standee sitting in the chair across from Neil’s desk and thinking: sure, why not.

“Hardesty industrial park,” Neil said, writing. “Unit number with a seven. Gary, you know that area?”

“I know that area.”

“Good. Tomorrow. Me and Sarah. We check it out.”

Gary picked up his salad. He took a bite. He chewed. He looked at Neil, then at the standee, then at the ceiling, then at his salad again. He put the fork down.

“Neil, if you get killed because your partner is made of corrugated paper, I will not attend your funeral.”

“You’ll attend my funeral, Gary.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. You’ll give the eulogy. You’ll cry.”

“I won’t cry.”

“You’ll cry, and in the eulogy you’ll mention the raccoon CI, and it will be the most memorable part of the service.”

Gary opened his mouth, then closed it. He picked up his phone, looked at the screen, and set it back down. He stood, took his salad, and walked toward the break room. He stopped at the door and turned back.

“Don’t do what you’re about to do.”

Neil was already on his feet, gathering the invoices, his notebook, and the standee, which he tucked under his arm with the ease of a man who had carried stranger things. He crossed the bullpen toward the exit, passing two detectives who didn’t look up, and one who looked up, saw Neil carrying a cardboard woman under his arm, and went back to his phone without comment.

“Neil.” Gary’s voice from the break room doorway. “I said don’t.”

“I heard you, Gary.”

Neil pushed through the precinct’s front door with his shoulder, the night air hitting him with the mild surprise of a city that hadn’t expected him to leave and wasn’t sure it wanted him to. He walked to his Camry in the parking lot, opened the back door, and set the standee across the back seat, where it lay flat with its printed eyes staring at the headliner.

“Tomorrow,” Neil said, starting the engine. “Hardesty. We move on the warehouse.”

“Understood,” the standee said from the back seat, its voice slightly muffled by the seat belt that had fallen across its printed face.

Neil pulled out of the parking lot and drove. The Camry’s headlights cut through the dark, the radio playing a classic rock station at low volume, and in the back seat, Sarah Mason lay flat and rigid and stared at the ceiling of a car that smelled like coffee and gun oil, and she waited for what came next, because what came next was the only thing a cardboard standee with opinions had ever been able to count on.

Gary, alone in the precinct, stood at the break room window and watched the Camry’s taillights shrink down the street. He ate his salad. He did not cry. He thought about the raccoon CI and almost laughed, and then didn’t, and then did, a short exhale through his nose that fogged the window. He wiped the fog away with his sleeve and went back to his desk, where the invoices Neil had left behind sat in a neat pile, and the empty chair across from Neil’s desk still held the impression of something that had been there, and the bullpen was quiet, and Gary Huang sat down and finished his salad and did not think about what tomorrow would bring, because he already knew.

The Camry’s passenger seat had three adjustment settings, and none of them accounted for a human-shaped piece of printed cardboard approximately five feet seven inches tall and roughly a quarter inch deep. Neil tried sliding the seat back. He tried tilting the seat down. He tried removing the headrest, which clattered into the footwell and sat there like a plastic mushroom.

Sarah stood in the parking garage next to the open door, her rigid form catching the fluorescent light at an angle that made her left eye disappear into a band of corrugated shadow.

“You could fold me,” she said.

“I’m not folding you.”

“It’s practical. Fold at the waist, I fit right in. I’ve been folded before. Department stores do it all the time. I spent three weeks in a flat-pack between a sunglasses display and a clearance bin at a Target in Burbank, and I came out fine.”

“You came out with a crease across your forehead.”

“That crease gave me character.” Sarah’s printed mouth did not move. The voice came from somewhere behind her rigid smile, or from the air around her, or from the part of Neil’s brain that had accepted all of this with the same grace he accepted bullet wounds and divorce papers. “Look, either fold me or let me ride in the trunk. I’m not picky. I’ve been in trunks before. A Camry trunk is spacious compared to the back of a Honda Civic at the Burbank Target.”

Neil stared at her. She stared back, which she couldn’t help, because her eyes were printed open and aimed at a fixed point roughly four inches above his head. He picked her up with both hands, one on each side of her torso, and angled her into the passenger seat sideways, leaning her against the door panel and the center console at the same time. Her rigid back pressed flat against the window. Her printed legs extended across the seat at an awkward diagonal, her flat feet hanging over the edge of the upholstery.

“That works,” she said. “I can see the road. Sort of. I can see the roof liner, which is stained, by the way. You should get that looked at.”

Neil closed her door, walked around to the driver’s side, and got in. He pulled the seized manifests from the evidence bag on his lap and spread them across the dashboard. Three pages of vehicle registration numbers, buyer names, and dates, all handwritten in the cramped, frustrated script of a man who hated paperwork and resented having to do it. Vasik’s auto body shop had been a front for moving stolen vehicles, and the manifests tracked every transaction for the past eight months.

Sarah leaned toward the dashboard as far as her rigid posture allowed, which meant tilting at roughly a fifteen-degree angle. Her printed eyebrows, bold and angular, drew together in a way that suggested concentration, though the expression never changed, because it couldn’t.

“Park the car first,” she said. “I can’t read upside down, and you’re about to back into a support column.”

Neil put the car in reverse and pulled out of the garage. The manifests rustled in the draft from the open window. He drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand pinning the pages to the dashboard, and Sarah provided navigation by reading street signs upside down from her reclined position and shouting corrections half a block too late.

“Mercer! That was Mercer! You missed it.”

“I see it.”

“You drove past it.”

“I see it from here. We’re approaching from the east. Tactical advantage.”

“You missed the turn, Neil.”

The first registration number led to a body shop on Greer Avenue that had been shuttered for three months. Neil parked in front of the roll-down gate and killed the engine. A man on the sidewalk across the street lit a cigarette, and the flame from his lighter caught the edge of a gust that carried it through the Camry’s open window, and the corner of Sarah’s printed shoulder curled and browned and began to smoke.

Neil slapped the ember out with his palm. The smell of charred cardboard filled the cabin. Sarah’s printed expression, locked in its rigid heroic stare, did not change, but her voice went very quiet.

“Close the window.”

He closed the window. He looked at the singed corner of her shoulder, a blackened triangle roughly the size of a postage stamp, and felt something in his chest that he did not have a word for and would not have used if he did.

“That’s going to leave a mark,” she said.

“It’s a mark.”

“I know what a mark is. I’m saying it’s going to leave one on me. Permanently. I don’t heal, Neil. I burn, or I tear, or I get wet and warp, and none of those things grow back. That’s the deal. That’s the deal with being what I am.”

Neil put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. The man with the cigarette watched them go, and Neil watched him in the rearview mirror, and the man turned and walked into a laundromat and was gone.

They hit four more addresses from the manifests. Two were empty lots. One was a tire shop where a teenager with lube on his hands said he’d never heard of anyone named Vasik and maintained that position even after Neil showed his badge, which was technically still under review by Internal Affairs and which Neil showed anyway because the badge was a state of mind. The fourth was a used car lot on Fifth Street where a heavy man in a golf shirt looked at the registration number Neil showed him and said it belonged to a vehicle he’d sold six weeks ago to a guy named Delacroix who paid in cash and loaded the car onto a flatbed truck and drove it south toward the docks.

Neil wrote Delacroix on the back of the manifest and circled it twice. Sarah, propped against the Camry’s passenger window at a tilt that made her look like she was reclining in a dentist’s chair, said the name three times, each time slower.

“Delacroix. Delacroix. Delacroix.” She straightened as much as she could, which meant rotating about ten degrees from her lean. “I know that name. He came to the shop. Twice a week, sometimes three times. Always parked behind the building. I know because I was propped against the wall facing the back lot, and I could hear his truck. Diesel engine. Loud. He’d leave it running while he went inside, and I could hear the engine through the wall the whole time he talked to Vasik.”

“How long were you back there?”

“Months. Maybe six. Time is different when you can’t move. He always parked behind the building, and he always stayed about forty minutes, and he always left with something in the back of the truck. I couldn’t see what. I faced the wrong way. But I could hear the loading.”

Neil tapped the circled name with his finger. “Delacroix. You’re sure.”

“I’m a cardboard standee, Neil. I don’t forget things. I don’t have enough room in my head for forgetting. Everything that goes in stays, and everything that stays is everything I have.”

The drizzle started on Fifth Street. Fat drops, scattered and slow, the kind that didn’t commit to rain and didn’t bother being mist. Neil felt them on his forearm through the open window and rolled it up. The drops hit the windshield and sat there, not quite heavy enough to run.

Sarah made a sound. It was small and tight, and it came from the same place her voice came from, which Neil still hadn’t located and had stopped trying to. He looked at her. A drop of water had landed on her printed cheekbone and was soaking into the cardboard, darkening the ink, blurring the edge of her dramatic eye shadow into a streak that ran down toward her jaw.

“Neil.”

He pulled over. He shrugged out of his jacket, a brown leather thing with a frayed lining and a gun oil stain on the left cuff, and held it over her head, stretching it across the passenger side like a canopy. The jacket was wide enough to cover her from the hairline down to her printed collar, and he held it there with his left hand while reaching across with his right to close the air vent, which was blowing a thin stream of condensation directly onto her shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“Standard procedure. Protecting a witness from environmental exposure. It’s in the manual.”

“There’s no manual for this.”

“There’s a manual for everything. Department issue. You wouldn’t believe what’s in there. There’s a section on witness protection during seismic events. There’s a section on what to do if your partner is a horse. This is section fourteen, subsection C: environmental mitigation for sensitive materials.”

“I’m not a sensitive material.”

“You’re a witness. You’re sensitive. The rain is an environmental factor. I’m mitigating. Stop talking and let me drive.”

Sarah did not stop talking. “You’re going to crash this car holding a jacket over me with one hand.”

“I’ve driven in worse conditions with less hands.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“I’ve driven in worse conditions with fewer available hands. Better?”

“That’s grammatically correct and logically insane.”

Neil pulled away from the curb with his left arm extended across the cabin, the jacket draped over Sarah like a tent, his right hand on the wheel. He drove three blocks to a diner called Rosario’s, a narrow place wedged between a check-cashing business and a storefront with newspaper taped over its windows. He parked under the awning, which extended far enough to cover the passenger door, and let the jacket drop into Sarah’s lap.

They went inside. Neil carried Sarah under his right arm, her rigid form tucked against his side, her printed feet pointing forward and her flat back against his ribs. The hostess, a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain, looked at Neil and at the standee and back at Neil, and seated them at a corner booth without comment, because Rosario’s had seen worse and would see worse again.

Neil leaned Sarah against the window side of the booth, propping her at a slight angle so she faced the table. He ordered coffee and a club sandwich. Sarah couldn’t eat, but she sat there, or stood there, or existed there in whatever way Sarah Mason existed in a space, and she watched Neil eat with the fixed, heroic stare that was the only expression she had.

“Delacroix parked behind the building,” Sarah said. “He was tall. I think. I could hear his footsteps. Long stride, heavy heels. He’d knock twice on the back door, and Vasik would let him in, and they’d talk in the office, which was on the other side of the wall from where I stood. Propped. Where I was propped.”

“What did they talk about?”

“Shipments. Schedules. Sometimes women, in a way that made the wall feel thin. Sometimes numbers. Vin numbers, I think, not the kind you drink. Delacroix had a laugh. Loud. The kind of laugh that fills a small room and makes the walls closer.”

Neil chewed his sandwich and wrote on a napkin. He wrote Delacroix, docks, twice weekly, diesel truck, behind building. He underlined behind building twice.

“You spent months hearing all that,” he said. “Just standing there.”

“Propped.”

“Propped. Hearing everything, and nobody knowing you were listening.”

“Everyone knew I was there. Nobody thought I was listening. That’s different.” Sarah’s voice went quiet again, the way it had in the car when the cigarette burned her. “I was decoration, Neil. I was a movie display. I had a price tag on my base. Seventeen ninety-nine. Someone peeled it off, but the residue was still there, sticky on the bottom where nobody looked.”

Neil set down his coffee. The cup left a ring on the napkin, partially obscuring the word docks. He looked at Sarah, at her printed face with its smudged eye shadow and its singed shoulder and the water stain drying along her jaw, and he opened his mouth, and what came out was what always came out of Neil Downe when something mattered and he knew it mattered and he had no tool for the knowing.

“You’re not decoration. You’re a consultant. I’m consulting you. That’s a paid position. I’ll fill out the paperwork.”

“There’s no paperwork for this.”

“There’s paperwork for everything. Department issue. Section twenty-two, subsection F: registration of civilian consultants with non-standard physical attributes.”

“That section doesn’t exist.”

“It exists. I’ve never read it, but it exists. I’ll file it Monday.”

“You won’t file it Monday.”

“I’ll file it Monday, and I’ll put your name on it, and your name will be in the system, and the system doesn’t forget. That’s the one thing the system is good at. It doesn’t forget.”

Sarah was quiet. The diner hummed around them, the coffee machine gurgling, a conversation about lottery numbers at the counter, Rosario herself wiping down a table with a rag that had seen better decades. Sarah’s printed eyes, aimed at their fixed point above Neil’s head, caught the overhead light, and for a moment the light hit the ink in a way that made her eyes look wet, which they weren’t, because they couldn’t be, because they were printed on cardboard.

“I’m afraid of being left somewhere,” she said. “A storage room. A closet. Behind a shelf in a shop that closes. I’ve been left before. You get propped up in a place, and the place stops being a place, and nobody moves you, and the lights go off, and you stand in the dark, and you don’t know how long it’s been because you can’t see a clock. You can’t feel time pass. You just know it’s passing, and you know nobody is coming back.”

Neil picked up his coffee. He put it down. He picked it up again. He drank.

“I’m not going to leave you in a storage room,” he said.

“You say that now.”

“I say that now and I say that later. I don’t leave partners. I’ve had eleven partners. I’ve lost two to retirement, four to transfer, three to nervous breakdowns, one to a raccoon-related incident, and Gary, who is on medical leave but who I consider active and present in spirit. I have never left a partner behind, and I’m not starting with a woman who costs less to feed than my car.”

Sarah said nothing. Neil ate his sandwich. The silence in the booth had a texture to it, dense and uneven, like the air before a storm, which was the last thing he should be thinking about with a cardboard partner.

His phone rang at six forty-seven. The screen read Gary Huang.

“Gary. Tell me you’re coming in.”

“I’m taking three sick days,” Gary said. The connection was bad. Gary’s voice came through in fragments broken by static and the sound of a television playing in the background, some kind of home renovation show, someone arguing about backsplash tile. “Doctor’s orders. Stress-related. I told the doctor about my partner and a cardboard standee and he prescribed rest and fluids and a referral to a psychiatrist, which I am not going to, because I don’t need someone to tell me what I already know.”

“You need anything, you call me.”

“I need you to not do what you’re about to do.”

“What am I about to do?”

“Whatever you’re about to do, Neil. The thing you’ve decided to do. The thing that started when you pulled that standee out of the property room and that will end with you in a hospital or me in an early grave. Don’t do it.”

“You got it.”

“Neil. I’m serious.”

“I hear you, Gary. I hear you loud and clear. Three sick days. Rest. Fluids. I’ll handle things out here.”

A long pause. The television in the background, the tile argument escalating. Gary breathed into the phone the way Gary always breathed, heavy through the nose, the sound of a man carrying weight he didn’t ask for in a career he couldn’t leave.

“Don’t get yourself killed,” Gary said.

“Can’t. I’m one week from retirement.”

“You’ve been one week from retirement for six years.”

“Which means I’m very close. Very close, Gary. It would be a shame to go now.”

Gary hung up. Neil pocketed the phone and looked at Sarah. Sarah looked at the space above his head. The diner hummed. The rain picked up outside, drumming against the window beside Sarah’s propped form, and Neil reached over and adjusted the blinds so the water wouldn’t hit the glass where she leaned.

“Let’s go find Delacroix,” he said.

He picked her up and tucked her under his arm and walked out into the rain.

The warehouse sat at the end of a service road that hadn’t seen a county paver in fifteen years, a long corrugated box of a building with rust streaking down from the roofline and a chain-link fence that someone had cut through and never bothered to fix. Neil parked the Camry across the access road with two wheels in the gravel and left the headlights on because subtlety was something that happened to other people.

Sarah rode in the trunk. She had to. There was no way to fold her into the backseat without creasing her at the midsection, and Neil had explained that creasing her would be a violation of departmental policy, which was a lie he told with the same conviction he told all his lies, which was to say he believed it completely in the moment and forgot it by the next.

He opened the trunk and lifted her out. The rain had stopped twenty minutes ago, but the air still held that wet concrete smell, heavy and mineral. Sarah’s printed surface had gone slightly wavy along the left edge from humidity, and Neil smoothed it flat with his palm the way a man might straighten a collar.

“You good?”

“Operational,” Sarah said. Her voice came from the same place it always came from, which was nowhere Neil could identify. He had stopped trying. “Target is the Delacroix warehouse. We go in fast. We go in loud. We secure the scene.”

“You’ve been watching a lot of movies.”

“I was in a movie, Neil. Direct-to-video. Limited theatrical run in three cities.”

“Three cities is theatrical.”

“Two of them were in the same state.”

Neil propped her against the Camry’s rear quarter panel and pulled his sidearm. He racked the slide for no tactical reason, because the round was already chambered and racking an already-chambered round ejects a perfectly good bullet onto the gravel, which it did. He picked it up, wiped it on his shirt, and pocketed it.

“Breaching plan?” Sarah asked.

“Front door.”

“That’s not a plan. That’s a door.”

“Front door. Fast. That’s two things. That’s a plan.”

He carried her at his side, one arm wrapped around her midsection, her rigid form jutting forward like a shield he hadn’t earned. The warehouse had a single entrance on the east side, a rolling steel door padlocked shut and a personnel door beside it with a handle that had been painted over so many times the lock was more paint than metal.

Neil kicked the personnel door. The frame splintered at the strike plate and the door swung inward and bounced off the interior wall, and Neil stepped through with Sarah raised in front of him the way a breacher would carry a ballistic shield if a ballistic shield had shoulder-length blonde hair and dramatic eye shadow.

The warehouse opened into a single large space, shelves running in rows from floor to the steel rafters, stacked with crates and auto parts and the particular kind of organized mess that meant someone was running inventory in a building that didn’t legally exist. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, half of them dead, the other half flickering in that arrhythmic way that made everything look like a stop-motion animation of itself.

And heat. A wall of it, pushing out from the far end of the building where a industrial furnace sat against the back wall, its exhaust vent running up through the roof. The thing was running, orange light visible through the inspection port, the metal casing ticking and pinging as it cycled. Someone had left it on. Someone had left it running in a warehouse with cardboard and shipping materials stacked twenty feet high.

Sarah felt it before Neil understood it. Her whole body flexed against his grip, the cardboard warping at the edges, and a sound came from her that Neil had never heard before. Something small. Something that didn’t match her theatrical voice or her action-hero delivery. Something scared.

“Neil.”

“I see it.”

“The furnace. Neil, the furnace is——”

“I see it, Sarah.”

He set her down behind a shelving unit, propped her against a pallet of wrapped brake rotors, away from the heat line. Her edges had curled slightly at the corners, the way paper does when you hold it over a toaster. He pressed them flat with both thumbs and held them there.

“Stay here. I’ll deal with the furnace.”

“You can’t turn off a furnace.”

“I’ve turned off furnaces before.”

“When? When have you turned off a furnace?”

“Many times. Furnace situations are common in detective work.”

Sarah stared straight ahead with her printed eyes, and Neil could not read her expression because her expression was fixed in place by a printing press in a factory somewhere, but he knew the look anyway. He had seen it on partners before. On Gary, in the passenger seat, the night they took gunfire through the windshield. On his first partner, Rodriguez, in the moments before Rodriguez decided to transfer to narcotics and stop returning his calls.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

He moved down the aisle. The heat intensified with every step, and by the time he reached the furnace he could feel it on his face, dry and close. The control panel was a row of analog dials, none of them labeled in any language Neil recognized. He turned the largest dial counterclockwise. Nothing happened. He turned it further. The inspection port dimmed from orange to dull red. The ticking slowed. He turned it until it stopped, and the furnace settled into a low groan and then silence, the metal still hot but no longer feeding.

“Neil.”

Sarah’s voice, from two rows over. But it wasn’t the voice he knew. It was louder. Projected. The voice she used when she was being the version of herself that she had been printed to be.

“Neil, we have company.”

He came around the shelf at a jog and found Sarah leaning against the brake rotor pallet at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible for a flat standee. She had tilted herself forward, her entire body pivoting on her base, and she was looking down the main aisle toward the front of the warehouse where two men stood in the broken doorway, silhouettes backlit by the exterior flood.

One of them had a crowbar. The other had a phone in one hand and was reaching behind his back with the other.

“Don’t move,” Neil said, and leveled his sidearm.

The man with the crowbar moved. He came down the aisle fast, feet loud on the concrete, and Neil tracked him and fired once. The round hit a shelving bracket six inches to the man’s left and the ricochet sang off into the dark. The man flinched. Didn’t stop. Neil adjusted and the second round punched through a crate of packaged air filters behind the man and the man still didn’t stop and Neil realized he had forgotten to account for the fact that he had never been a particularly good shot and the warehouse was not a range and the shelves were giving him nothing.

The man with the crowbar reached him. Neil caught the swing on his forearm, which was not the correct way to block a crowbar, and pain went through his arm in a white line from wrist to elbow. He grabbed the man’s jacket with his other hand and pulled him close and headbutted him, which was the correct way to deal with a man at grappling distance, and the man dropped.

The second man came around the end of the shelf with a pistol now, a small one, the kind that fits in an ankle rig. He raised it.

Sarah fell on him.

She had been leaning against the pallet. She had been leaning and then she was not leaning and she was falling, her entire rigid body tipping forward like a felled tree, her flat printed form descending with the full weight of cardboard and mounting board and the earnest commitment of someone who had one move and had decided to use it. She hit the man across the shoulders and the back of his neck and he staggered and his pistol went sideways and the round hit the concrete floor and fragmented into nothing. He went down under her, Sarah draped across his back, and the man’s arms flailed and his legs kicked and he couldn’t get out from under a life-sized cardboard standee and the look on his face when Neil stepped over and cuffed him was the look of a man whose story no one would ever believe.

“Target down,” Sarah said. She was still lying on top of him. “Area secure.”

Neil zip-tied the first man’s wrists behind his back and then the second man’s, pulling the second set around Sarah’s edge to reach. She stayed in position, pinning the man with her body, and the man had stopped struggling and was lying very still with his face pressed against the concrete and a cardboard woman on his back.

“You can get up now,” Neil told her.

“I’m holding him.”

“He’s cuffed.”

“I’m holding him until backup arrives.”

“There’s no backup.”

“I’m holding him until backup arrives.”

Neil sat down on the warehouse floor. His forearm throbbed where the crowbar had caught him and he could feel the swelling already starting, the skin going tight over the bone. He wrapped it with a strip of packing tape from one of the crates, pulling it tight enough that his fingers went slightly numb, which he had been told was not the correct way to treat a contusion but which had worked every previous time.

He called it in. Dispatch took the address and the description and the fact that he had two suspects restrained and one of them had been subdued by a promotional display item, and dispatch did not ask a follow-up question about the promotional display item, which Neil attributed to professional courtesy.

He sat against the shelving unit. Sarah was still on top of the second suspect, who had gone limp with resignation. The furnace ticked in the background, cooling. The fluorescent lights buzzed. Somewhere outside, a truck passed on the highway, its tires hissing on wet asphalt.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Neil said.

“Do what?”

“Fall on him.”

“It’s my primary capability.”

“Sarah.”

“What?”

Neil looked at her. She lay across the suspect’s back at an angle, her printed face turned toward the ceiling, her dramatic eye shadow catching the flicker of the remaining fluorescent tubes. One corner of her base had cracked when she landed. A thin line ran up from the bottom edge, through the printed texture of her jacket, stopping below her shoulder. She hadn’t mentioned it.

“You’re the best partner I’ve ever had,” Neil said.

He said it the way he said everything, which was flat and certain and without any apparent understanding that the words were extraordinary or strange or that they were being spoken to a piece of corrugated board with a photograph printed on it. He said it the way a man says something he means, and the gap between sincerity and absurdity was a gap Neil Downe had never recognized in his life and was not about to start recognizing now.

Sarah didn’t answer for a long time. The suspect under her breathed in slow, defeated pulls. The furnace clicked and settled. The warehouse smelled like hot metal and packing dust and the particular staleness of a building that had been closed up with the heat running.

“Rodriguez was better,” Sarah said. “Gary’s better.”

“Rodriguez transferred. Gary’s on sick leave.”

“Gary’s on sick leave because of you.”

“Which makes him unavailable. Which makes you the best available partner. That’s how rankings work, Sarah. It’s mathematical.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Maybe. But I’m an idiot with a cuffed suspect and a contained furnace and a partner who took down an armed man by falling on him.”

Sarah lay there. The crack in her base hadn’t gotten worse. Neil noted it and filed it away in the part of his brain that handled things he would deal with later, which was a large part of his brain and had been for twenty-five years.

He pulled out his phone to check the time. The screen lit up. A notification sat in the notification bar, a text from a number that wasn’t in his contacts. He opened it.

A photograph. Taken from behind, slightly above eye level, the angle of someone seated at a table across the aisle. A diner. The diner, the one with the rain and the blinds and the coffee Neil hadn’t paid for. In the photograph, Sarah stood propped against the window, her silhouette sharp against the wet glass, her blonde hair printed in clear detail, the blinds adjusted so the rain wouldn’t hit the glass where she leaned.

Below the photograph, a message in plain text:

SHE IS NOT REAL AND NEITHER ARE YOU

Neil stared at the screen. The warehouse hummed. The suspects breathed. Sarah lay across the second man’s back, motionless, her printed face turned upward, and the crack in her base was a thin dark line against the white of the mounting board.

He read the message again. Then a third time. The words sat in his head the way furniture sits in a room, solid and occupying space and refusing to be moved by any amount of staring. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand who had taken the photograph or from where or how they had known to look, and he didn’t understand what the message meant or who it was for.

His hand moved to his holster. The grip of his sidearm was warm from his body heat and worn smooth from years of the same motion, the same reach, the same instinct that bypassed every higher function and went straight to muscle. He didn’t draw. He held the grip and kept holding it and looked at the photograph on his phone and then looked at Sarah lying across the floor and the words on the screen sat in the room with him and refused to leave.

“Neil?” Sarah said. “Who’s texting you?”

He closed the message. Pocketed the phone. His hand stayed on his holster.

“Nobody,” he said. “Wrong number.”