Surgeon – Chapter Thirty-Four

NOT EDITED

Chapter Thirty-Four

5:00 PM; LOS ANGELES, THE ROGER ROOM

Bo didn’t have to look up to place the footsteps approaching his booth. “Did you stalk me here, or does this just happen to be your lunchtime booze run?”

“I didn’t stalk you, but I… did come here for you,” Jamal said. “May I have a seat?”

“How’d you know I was here if not for stalking?”

“Eyes and ears all over the country, Bo.”

“Right,” Bo whispered. He gestured to the other side of the booth before wrapping his hand around his long-since-warm beer bottle again. Jamal cleared his throat as he sat down across from him. “So… to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Though I generally wish Franklin had kept his mouth shut, he was right to do what he did. And he’s been right for years. Right that… you don’t deserve the way I treat you. That the universe doesn’t determine which way to push you based upon how much I make you hate yourself.” 

“I’m not sure what you want me to say,” Bo said after a moment.

“I’m not sure, either.” Jamal rubbed a hand along one side of his jaw, dark eyes focused on the bartender. When his gaze finally dragged back to Bo’s face, his expression was softer than Bo had seen it in years. “There are unfortunately two sides to the twisted coin in my mind. Would you like to hear them?”

Bo offered a shrug before taking a sip of his less-than-appealing beer. “Sure.”

“On one hand, just about every child I have taken under my wing has betrayed me, is a killer, was a killer, wants to be a killer, or runs away with a killer. On the other hand, most everyone I’ve ever loved is dead, dying, or hates every aspect of my being. I wanted to push you away from both sides of the coin. I couldn’t have you… dying. I couldn’t have you turning to homicide, either. I thought I could handle you hating me, but I couldn’t handle the other possibilities. I was trying to push you away, but you kept coming back. And I… I unfortunately couldn’t stop myself from letting you come back. It doesn’t justify how I’ve treated you. It doesn’t make up for it. It doesn’t erase it. But Franklin is right. You deserve the why. You deserve to know it isn’t you, it’s me. You did nothing wrong to deserve it. You aren’t worthless. You aren’t trash. You aren’t gum beneath my shoe. You are Bo fucking Austen, and you have not deserved a single iota of the shit I or the rest of the world have ever thrown at you.” Jamal held his hands out for a moment, almost gesturing to the invisible pile of shit he had dumped before Bo. “That’s it. That’s all I wanted.”

“Kathy running away with Dallas… That’s what triggered it? The… the drinking, I mean.”

“That’s why I relapsed, yes.”

“You were an alcoholic before that?”

“Mm. Recovering, I suppose. Once you fall on it to cope once, it’s hard not to be tempted by it to cope again.”

“Why…?” Bo blew out a harsh breath. “I know you raised her. I know she was a daughter to you. I know you loved her. But why? Why did her leaving cause all of this? I-I mean, if I had run away, would you have taken it out on her?”

“You wouldn’t have run away,” Jamal said after a moment. “Katherine knew that if she had come to me when she found out about Dallas, I would have helped her. Helped him. She knew that, and she chose to flee. She chose to pack up her family, my family, and flee with a serial killer.” Jamal grabbed Bo’s bottle cap from the table, staring at it as he flipped it between his fingers. “You… you would have come to me if you had found out about Dallas before she did. You would have gotten Dallas help, like you did with that Vivian woman you helped way back when. You and Katherine are so fundamentally different that I can’t even begin to imagine a world where I could honestly answer that question.”

If nothing else, Jamal was probably right. One of the very first cases Bo had worked, when he had discovered the killer had been instructed to kill by the voices in her head, voices she had been battling her whole life, he had forced her to take him hostage at knifepoint until it was guaranteed that she would get psychological help instead of county jail and then prison. Had it been an intelligent thing to do? No. Had it worked? Yes. If Dallas had confided in Bo instead of Kathy, he would have done the same, and Jamal would have gotten Dallas help instead of prison.

Jamal stopped toying with the bottle cap only long enough to set Bo’s ID on the table and slide it over to the blonde. “If you don’t want to be at the LAPD anymore, I understand, and I support you in that decision. But if you do, your office and your badge will always be waiting for you. I’ll spend my days in one of the other stations if I’m the only true problem, if everything else can be overcome. I can move Detective Decker to the West Department, and then you’ll have two detectives you like in the same building.”

“I… It isn’t a matter of who I like or don’t like, or who likes me or hates me. It’s that I’ve spent the last thirty years living in a brain in a body in a world that doesn’t want me in it. The way I feel, the way I think? I-it isn’t compatible with… with life anymore. A-and for a long time, getting to work forensics was enough to keep me going because it gave me something I truly love doing, but it hasn’t been enough in a very long time.”

Jamal cleared his throat. “I… am aware that you were considering ending your life while you were in Clinstone. I had hoped having a solved case under your belt would… improve your worldview in some sense.”

“You knew?” Bo asked, his brow furrowed. “Jesus, Jamal. Please tell me you didn’t buy out the damn bartender in Clinstone to tattle on me.”

Jamal shook his head. “I haven’t bought out anyone in Clinstone. There’s nothing in Minnesota that I… meddle in, buying out bartenders included. No, I followed you to the bar instead of heading to my hotel room for the night. I was in the parking lot when the bartender told the Mason kid about what you had said inside. I was… I was worried about you, but I knew my distance was likely to be better than my presence. For quite some time now, I believe that’s been the case for you. And I understand why. But I can’t…” He cleared his throat again. “Your life is worth living, Bo. You deserve to live long enough to find your happy ending.”

“I don’t believe that there is one, Jamal.”

“I-I can move you to Iowa. Back in Ellepath. You liked that little station there, didn’t you? The people were okay?”

Bo snorted. “They’ve already had the misfortune of their lab tech murdering people and their school bus driver murdering kids. They don’t need me to be another stain on their town.”

“Stain? Bo, any town that you work in is a town that is undeniably lucky and honored to have you protecting them. You are not a stain on any town.”

“I should’ve known,” Bo whispered.

“Should’ve known… what?”

“That Dallas was Hangman. I-I should’ve known. I worked with him day in and day out for years. I lived with him. Drank with him. Shared late night secrets by the campfire with him. I should’ve known. I should have figured it out long before Kathy did. M-maybe I knew, deep down. Maybe I knew and hid it to keep him out of prison. And that? That makes me a stain on any town I will ever walk into, Jamal.”

Jamal shifted, cleared his throat. “When Dallas was a teenager, his father was murdered. I’m sure you know that?”

“I do.”

“I worked said murder. By the end of it, I was pretty sure Dallas was the one who did it. Father was an abusive piece of shit, Dallas was finally fed up with it, and… beat the everloving shit out of him. I can’t say the man didn’t deserve it, and it’s why I let the case go cold. But despite believing he was capable of murdering his own father as a teen, I hired him without question when he applied to the LAPD. Promoted him to detective, to homicide. I gave him my blessing to marry Katherine. Congratulated him for becoming a father. You didn’t know Dallas was capable of murder, but I did.” Jamal waved a hand between them. “If you want to call one of us a stain on Los Angeles, on any town or state or station, it is not you, Bo. It’s me. It’s Katherine. We knew, and we enabled. You are not at fault for my mistakes or hers or Dallas’s.”

Bo stared at him for so long that even Jamal became uncomfortable. “You hired someone you believed to be a murderer and partnered them with me?”

“Well, he had… been with the station for a while before that. He had a partner before you.”

“A partner who died.”

“Yes,” Jamal said after a moment. “Dallas didn’t kill his partner, if that’s what you’re insinuating. He was shot and killed during a stakeout on a crack den. It… destroyed Dallas. Admittedly, at the time, I was worried it would take him back to a darker part of himself. I figured that if anyone would protect him, save him, it would be.” He gestured to Bo with the bottle cap between his first two fingers. “You had a bit of a track record for that.”

“Defending one woman who killed one person because she lost a lifelong battle to the dark voices in her head is different than defending and protecting a serial killer who murdered his father.”

“His abusive, piece of shit father who got what was coming to him.”

Bo drew in a long breath, closing his eyes for a moment. “I love Dallas. There is… no world in which I recover from that.”

“Oh,” Jamal whispered. “That’s why you don’t care that Katherine is sick.”

“No. I care, just not in the way you expect me to. I care because I know what it will do to Dallas if she dies. I care because I know what it’ll do to you. But I don’t care about Kathy for Kathy. She’s an abuser too, whether you recognize that or not. She did everything she could to cut Dallas off from the people he cared about and the people who cared about him time and time again, and when she found out he was Hangman, she finally found a way to get what she wanted. She convinced him to pack up his life and run away to a place where he would only have her. No one else. My work, whether it be in L.A. or Clinstone or Iowa or Timbuktu. It’s permanently contaminated by Kathy’s… disease. She lives in my mind, telling me what I can and can’t do. Telling me how I can and can’t live. There is no recovery from how deeply her poison is embedded in every fold of my mind. I can’t… do this anymore. I’m not a genius. I’m not an analyst. I’m not a scientist. I’m hardly even a living person anymore.” Bo slid his LAPD ID back across the table. “I can’t, Jamal.”

“I fear you won’t be able to survive without this job, Bo.”

“I can’t survive with it, either. There’s no win in any choice of this situation. Every option is a loss. So I’m… I’m going to choose this one, and whatever happens to me because of it? That isn’t your problem.”

“Bo,” Jamal said as the blonde slid out of the booth. “I’ll put you in therapy. I’ll put you in any station in any part of the world you want. Let me help you.”

“I’m not your problem,” Bo repeated. “Goodnight, Mister Pitman.”

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