The first time I saw a wig on the beach

“I don’t know if there’s any sight quite so joyful,” Baggett said in a dreamy sort of voice, passing me the hash joint he’d just rolled, then leaning on the boardwalk railing, “as a bird so absolutely determined to eat a piece of paper that once had a fish pie wrapped up in it. I mean, there’s chasing your ambitions, and then there’s this.”

The gull in question was currently shrugging its entire body in a violent upward motion, trying to get down the piece of pie wrapper peeking out of its gullet. I took a pull on the joint as the bird brought up the entire wrapper in one motion, leaving it lying on the rocky beach, then seemed to consider its next move. After a moment it attacked the wrapper from a corner, gulping it back down with astonishing speed.

“See?” Baggett said, taking the joint from me. “Relentless.” He took a long drag. “Hard not to appreciate that kind of idiotic fervor.”

“Can they die from that?” I asked, more curious than bothered by the prospect, and detachedly aware that this attitude was a bit fucked up.

“Can they die at all?” he asked. “I mean, this is all gulls do, right? Today’s fish pie wrapper is tomorrow’s pork pie wrapper. If we take this one away they just try to eat another one later.”

“That’s oddly comforting,” I observed, taking the joint back from him when he offered, then pointed at a peculiar, sickly-looking clump of something on the beach that looked like matted fur tangled up with seaweed. “What is that?” I asked before inhaling and holding it in the smoke.

Baggett squinted at the place I indicated. “A wig,” he concluded after a moment.

“How does something like a wig wind up here?” I asked on an exhale. “Aren't those kind of expensive?”

He took the joint back from me. “Probably a tussle amongst the working girls who wait out here for the sailors, and one of them was too drunk at the time to realize she was missing it.”

“Huh.” I stared at the limp bunch of abandoned hair with a sort of fascinated revulsion.

“Ah, Bersk,” Baggett said, with a vast nostalgia that suggested he was feeling the same magnanimous, sprawlingly pleasant mellowness I was. “I remember the first time I saw a wig on the beach,” he told me, in a humorously wistful tone that made me laugh.

We leaned there on the railing, shoulders close together, elbows propped and chins resting on our hands, while we watched the gull bring up and chug down the same paper wrapper another four times. Finally the bird gave up, left the wrapper lying on the beach, and went in search of more a more tractable meal. “Good luck!” I called when it spotted the wig and lurched eagerly in that direction, which made Baggett laugh so hard he about choked.

“I have to say,” he said when he recovered, “between that thing at Lamb’s three years ago and all the rumor mill shit about you two being a pair of up-your-own-asses holier-than-thou baby geniuses, I genuinely thought you would be absolutely insufferable to work with.”

“Did you have a point somewhere in there?”

“Oh. Just that I didn’t expect you to be a fucking delight.” Some of the joking had gone from Baggett’s tone. “Let alone the kind of scrappy, unhesitatingly dirty-fighting bitch an unlikeable prick like me most needs on his side.”

“You are pretty unlikeable when you make up your mind to be,” I agreed, and he cast me a quick, amused glance. “Kind of like me that way.”

“If you weren’t already partnered up,” Baggett said, then left off as two more gulls arrived and stood there in greedy contemplation of the first gull’s prize. We both watched as the original finder decided a change of venue was in order to best protect its treasure, and began awkwardly dragging the heavy, bedraggled mass of sodden hair down the beach. The other two trailed after it, evidently trying to decide whether an altercation was warranted to part the wig from its current owner.

“Were you just about to say that if Curry wasn’t standing in your way you’d have designs on me for your partner?”

“More or less.” He began to giggle at basically nothing.

“That’s a ridiculous turnaround. You’re so fucking high right now it’s not even funny,” I told him.

Baggett affected a prissy little shrug. “It’s a bit funny. Catch up, bitch.” He put the joint in my hand, and I took two big drags to catch up, and while I held my breath we stood there in pleasant silence, staring out over the harbor at distant ship lanterns and listening to the far-off sounds of dock workers down at the piers.

“If Curry beats me home he’ll worry,” I said when I exhaled. “I should start moving that direction. Walk with me?” I handed him back the joint.

“Sure.” He took it, pinching the stub between thumb and forefinger. “Give me a minute and a half and I’ll be done.”

“You know,” I said as he killed the last of the joint, “we don’t have to be partners to fight mean for each other when it’s needed. I figured that's what being on SCD was all about.”

Baggett’s expression shifted to something unreadable for just a second, and for a second I thought he about to tell me something important—maybe his Lydell thing. But just as I made up my mind that I would tell him mine if he shared his own, he seemed to change his mind. “I thought that, too, before I started with the unit.” He shoved off the railing in a languidly fluid sort of motion and started down the boardwalk back to the street.

I had attributed what felt like a lack of general camaraderie this week to the fact that Baggett didn’t like me whatsoever and was making next to no effort to disguise that fact, but it occurred to me now that it did rather seem like Chakrabarti and Battenfeld held themselves a bit apart. “Is it just that they’re so much older?” I asked as I caught up to him.

Baggett shrugged. “That, probably, and the fact half their unit got murdered and then they solved exactly fuckall respective to that. Plus, you met Lamb. The man was certifiably jolly. It’s hard not to imagine that he and Ladd made up the whole personality of SCD. I think losing them about gutted the others and now they’re just waiting out the clock till they can collect their pensions and get the fuck out. It’s a good thing I trained with Lamb and Ladd for a year during my detective courses, because Barty and Battenfeld certainly don’t have any fucking interest in mentoring fledgling homicide detectives.”

“That sounds… like a lonely, shitty, disappointing way to spend the last three years,” I said after a moment.

He laughed. “You can imagine how much I was looking forward to being awkwardly sandwiched between two indifferent veterans who no longer give a fuck about the job, and the baby geniuses who apparently will either have to be trained by me, or nobody. And none of it helped, obviously, by what a naturally disagreeable cunt I am.”

“That time at Lamb’s, you said something to Lydell about you were married. Are you still?”

“Yeah. Some-fucking-how.” Baggett flashed me a faintly rueful look I wasn’t sure how to take.

“Then you can’t be that much of a cunt,” I pointed out anyway.

“Wrong. If you met Yergen you’d see right away what terrible fucking taste he has in people.” Baggett pretended to pause in consideration. “Come to think, he’d probably really like you.”

I grinned so he would see that I approved of this joke. “On the one hand—I mean, obviously Yergen sounds perfectly fucking awful,” I said, which made Baggett return my stupid grin. “On the other—what would assholes like you and me do without these people like him and Curry, determined to see the good in others?”

“Nonstop puppy kicking,” came his unhesitating reply, which set me laughing so hard that this time I was the one to **** on my own throat. We stopped in the street so Baggett could thump me hard on the back.

“It’s up to us,” I said in a more serious tone, when I had my wind back. “We have to usher in a new era for SCD unit. Make it ours. How it ought to be.”

“Huzzah. A bright new best-friendsy wave of detectives who don’t all have nineteen-fucking-syllable names impossible for any member of the public to remember,” Baggett agreed.

“Oh, this is awkward. We should really clarify a couple things,” I said, stumbling a little. Baggett caught and steadied me. “Thanks,” I said, kicking at the stone that tripped me. “You are very welcome—encouraged, even—to make me your best friend, but in the interest of fair disclosure, it’s only right before committing to anything that you know that the contract I signed with Curry says he has to stay my best friend. Legal reasons, you get it. You’re eligible to contract with me for the role of very good friend, or second best friend, or other best friend. I’ll allow you to make a case instead for very dear friend, or very close friend, if you prefer one of those.”

“Noted,” he replied, with exaggerated understatement.

By the time we were done snorting and laughing about this, had finished debating the merits of very good friend versus other best friend, and reached mutual accord that Baggett was now my very good friend and I likewise to him—we were back in the fourth ward. “Hey, I’m flying pretty high right now so I’m going along with this impulse I have, to tell you something that isn’t jokey bullshit,” I said to him when we’d almost got to Nan’s. “Thanks for turning up when you did, and playing along like we hadn’t been sniping at each other all week. Seriously. I think my stupid fucking mouth would have got me in real trouble, maybe patched-up-by-the-Rooks or even recall kind of trouble, if you hadn’t stepped in and given him one too many things to think about.”

“Like I want to have to explain to the captain later how I let half our brand new detectives get kicked to **** under a high table at Chesty’s,” he said. “And I mean, fuck’s sake, Bersk,” he added with feigned disgust. “You can’t act so pathetically grateful to everybody who shows you a shred of decency. It’s embarrassing.” He smiled at me, a real smile that almost looked a little strange since I wasn’t used to seeing anything on his face that wasn’t some variation on sardonic, smug, or smirking.

When we got to the kitchen stoop Baggett stuck his hand out to me. “Tonight was good. Maybe we’ll be all right, after all.”

I gave it a shake. “Every night with a very good friend is good. And Curry won’t let it not be all right. He’s very invested in us making nice.”

We said goodnight, and on impulse, I hugged Baggett, which he didn’t seem to hate, then let myself in and peeked into the front room to look at the grandfather clock. Almost three.