Jarvis Street Chapter 8
James wasn’t surprised when five o’clock rolled around and he wasn’t ready to wrap up the day shift. But he was working overnight, so it didn’t matter much anyway. He put the last few details into the schedule, then brought it out and tacked it to the bulletin board in the living room.
Once that was taken care of, he ducked into the gray bedroom, relieved to find it empty. He wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, but he desperately needed a little time alone to untangle what had happened.
Okay, that wasn’t Robin, right? He’d tried his best to go through the safety precautions that each team took, digging back into the orientation guide for the details. All the locks, paranormal and earthly, were still in place at all the entrances. So it wasn’t a spirit getting in. Clearly, it was James going insane.
Unless it wasn’t. Unless he’d done something that could give Robin the strength to come back and get revenge. Could he do that? He couldn’t, right?
First, a couple minutes of silence. Then he’d take another round of readings in the house before he tackled the other readings that Amelia and Gabriella had brought back from the school.
They’d arrived back about an hour after James had seen Robin’s gruesome corpse in the bathroom mirror. Amelia had been professional about the trip, but James could recognize the current of frustration underneath. He couldn’t blame her, but he wanted to tell everybody to just get over it already. He had, why couldn’t they? After all, wasn’t he the one that had been blamed for what he hadn’t done?
But even as he tried to convince himself of that, he knew that wasn’t true. Robin had manipulated all of them, but he’d tricked Gabriella into turning against the team. Even if she hadn’t seen it that way, that was what had happened. And he knew it wasn’t only his place to have feelings on that.
He sat down on the bed and stared blankly down at the floor. If anyone walked in right now, they’d probably think he was dying, but James couldn’t bring himself to care what anyone thought right now. If he laid down, he was going to fall asleep and not wake up until tomorrow morning. With his luck, it would be with six missed phone calls about the apocalypse.
After a few minutes of trying not to think of anything at all, James blinked and shook his head. Right. That was as much of a break as he was going to get. But at least he’d finished the schedule, so now he could move on to getting more things off his plate.
He still needed to go over the budget with Bradley, didn’t he? Christ, maybe they had some kind of answer key to those abbreviations buried in the piles of old books they had. Bradley’s printout of the budget would help, but it wouldn’t keep James from fucking up inputting everything with all the codes and abbreviations he still didn’t understand.
He walked out of the room and saw Bradley standing in the living room, reading the schedule on the board. “Hey,” he called over. “When are you in tomorrow? Let’s meet in the morning to go over the budget for next month.”
“Eight,” Bradley replied, still looking at the board. “Listen, McManus, I thought it was still in the notes on the scheduling software, but I can’t work Thursdays.”
Bradley sounded so reasonable, but James felt something spark behind his eye. Making the schedule had felt like putting together a jigsaw puzzle as someone was eating the pieces in front of him. And he wasn’t doing it again.
“Is there any way you can?” he asked, trying to keep his frustration out of his voice. “I’m sorry, it’s just… I can’t do this again. I’ve been trying for three days to get that schedule to work and I don’t know how to-”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
He blurted out the question knowing full well that it went against privacy regulations. And judging from the uncomfortable look on Bradley’s face, it wasn’t something he felt like discussing.
“Look, I’m sorry, but no,” James said. “You’re scheduled. Please find a way to make it work.”
He expected Bradley to yell at him. Or come back with some snarky comment. Just something, anything, that would spark the fight that James suddenly realized he was itching for. Maybe a good yelling match with Bradley would help cool off some of the anger that was burning inside of him right now.
But Bradley didn’t do any of that. Instead, he just nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, whatever.”
The fire went out as quickly as it arrived. “Brad, I-”
“It’s fine,” Bradley said. “Goodnight.”
And before James could say anything else, Bradley hurried out of the building, leaving James standing there alone in the living room, wondering where everything had gone wrong.
***
The overnight shift was uneventful. James tried not to let what had happened with Bradley bother him too much as he tried to focus on his work. It sucked, but sometimes the captain had to be the bad guy. And not even in a “murdering team members” kind of way. But in a hardass, “sorry that’s the way it is,” kind of way. James would have taken the Thursday shift, but he was already working Wednesday and Friday doubles nearly every week and there probably wasn’t a way to swap things around again, even if he’d had the stomach to try.
As soon as Amelia arrived at seven, James and Madelyn left for the morning. He was off until five, when he’d be coming back in for another night shift that would blend into a day shift the next day. Honestly, what was he doing even renting a room in his apartment anymore? He was spending more and more nights at headquarters anyway.
He walked into the apartment just as Graham was getting ready to leave for work. “James, you look like hell,” Graham greeted him as he tightened his tie.
“Good, because that’s what I feel like.”
“Look,” Graham said, “I know you’ve got a weird-ass job, but try not to kill yourself for it.”
Graham had an uncomfortably piercing gaze when he wanted to. James smiled, hoping it looked normal. “I’m fine,” he insisted. “It’s just the promotion, I need to get settled in.”
“Yeah, of course,” Graham said, adjusting his shirt collar. “I get it. Hey, I’ll grab some beers on the way home if you just want to chill or something.”
James cringed. “I’m working at five.”
Graham shook his head. “Goddamn, you must love this job,” he said.
“Honestly, most of the time, yeah,” James said as he went to his cabinet and grabbed a box of cereal.
He went to the fridge, pulled out some milk, and gave it a cautious sniff. Once he was pretty sure it wouldn’t kill him, he made a bowl of cereal while Graham threw together a bagged lunch.
James finished his cereal and set the empty bowl on the counter. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “If the house burns down, I really don’t care.”
“I’m heading out in a few, so it’s not really my problem anyway,” Graham said.
“Oh? Saturday classes?”
“No, I have a meeting over with some donors at Cleary House. So I’m just going to run in and block my ears until the meeting starts.”
James laughed. “More ghosts?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
With that, Graham got up and went to get his car keys. James laughed, shook his head, and started walking toward his bedroom.
