Page 6 of Shadow Line
“That’s dramatic.”
“It’s accurate.”
He glanced at me, annoyed, then back at the path. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said.
“Writing,” I said, “not this.”
We started walking, not quite in step, but not separate either. I stayed off his shoulder, close enough to close distance fast if needed, but far enough not to crowd. The bench by the FrogPond had a man dozing under a sleeping bag with a small dog tucked into the curve of his chest.
Wiley looked at them. He said nothing. He’d written about that bench. I’d read the piece.
“How long since you slept?” I asked.
“Define sleep.”
“The thing where your eyes close and your editor stops bothering you.”
“Then, a while.”
“Your last coffee?”
“Three this morning. Don’t ask about yesterday.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.”
A woman walked past us with a stroller, talking on her phone in Portuguese. A man on the bench across the path looked up over his newspaper while a kid on a scooter cut across the grass. Wiley tracked all of it.
“You always walk the Common in the morning?” I asked.
“When I’m thinking.”
“What are you thinking about?”
He almost smiled. “A bodyguard I can’t shake off my shoulder.”
“I’m not asking you for a label. I’m asking what kind of mood you’re in.”
He considered that for half a block. “Bad,” he said, “but useful.”
“So, it’s a good bad?”
“I didn’t say good. I said useful.”
“Anything can be useful,” I said. “You just have to know what to do with it.”
He looked sideways at me. I thought back to the day we met on the steps of theGlobebuilding two-and-a-half weeks ago. He had a way of looking at a person that I imagined he used withsources: patient, attentive, and never in a rush. It made people tell him things they hadn’t planned to tell anyone.
He was using a watered-down version of it on me now.
“You’re not what I expected,” he said.
“What did you expect?”
“Ex-military, square jaw, and opinions about the Patriots. The kind of guy who calls me sir to create distance.” He glanced at me. “You don’t do any of that.”
“Disappointed?”
