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Don Cragen lingers by the grave as the other mourners finally take their leave. He’s oddly pleased by the turnout; the Mayor and Commissioner, Jack McCoy and Mike Cutter, and Alex all there to pay their final respects. Even Sergeant Tucker had sent a wreath. The media’s there in drove.
Kathy still looks shell-shocked and Don’s glad to see the kids all rally around her. He wonders how much the smallest one, Eli, understands about what has happened. He’s concerned that Dickie thinks he understands too much. Don overheard the girls all warn Dickie to tone it down about how he would join the force now and go after the scum who did this. “Mom doesn’t need to hear that right now.” That had been Maureen. Don had always thought she was the one most like her father and feels vindicated in that by the way Dickie subsides after another moment, just because of the hard look Maureen gives him.
Elliot might not mind if Dickie joined the force but he wouldn’t like that a desire for vengeance drove the decision. There wasn’t anything to avenge, for one thing. Not the way Dickie thought.
This is the knowledge that keeps Don by the grave long after the last car has pulled away. He has the place to himself now, no one around except the gravediggers who wait to finish their work. If any ghosts linger about, Don remains unaware of them. Well, except for the one that emanates from this gaping grave, and that makes no sense. The living can’t haunt you, right? Except that Don knows they can, they do. They shiver through every minute you spend second-guessing; through all the things you didn’t say or do and never will say or do again.
He stoops to pick up a handful of rich, damp earth, and lets it sift through his fingers to coffin down below. Scattered with earth and flowers now, that casket had been draped with a flag earlier. The quiet, solemn ceremony as that flag had been folded and presented to Kathy had struck Don as the most poignant moment of all; the thing that made everything real.
Which makes no sense because Don knows that coffin down there in the ground is empty. Not for the reasons everyone believes, that it was impossible to recover the body after the plane went down in the Everglades. Don hates himself a little for being the one to suggest that and hopes that Marge can forgive him. The desecration of her memory, of how she died, was in a good cause; to keep Kathy and the kids, Olivia and Fin and Munch all safe from reprisals. That might count for something.
He’s surprised Munch hasn’t sniffed out the conspiracy but takes some reassurance from that, too. Or maybe John has figured everything out but deems this a secret worth keeping. They can never talk about it, so Don will never know.
Don shivers and sighs, his breath turned to mist on the cold autumn air. Shoulders hunched against the cold, he looks at the plain, straight to the point headstone—an apt final symbol for the man who’s life it marks.
Elliot Stabler
1964 – 2011
Husband
Father
Hero
Elliot would grumble and grouch about that inscription but the kids had wanted it. Don thinks that it’s right.
He glances at the sky, the clouds ready to move in and unload rain or snow. Time to go, he decides and puts his captain’s hat on.
Moved by a strange impulse—There’s no one in that grave.—Don stands straight at attention and salutes. Because, yes, the grave is empty but it wasn’t all a lie. Elliot Stabler is dead. Wherever he is now, whoever he is now, he can never come back to this life.
As the first icy drops of rain begin to fall, Don Cragen makes his way out of the cemetery. His footsteps rustle through fallen, dead leaves. Behind him, he hears the sound of shovels at work.
No choice at all, really. He told himself it might not be forever. Reminded himself that Alex had been able to leave the program and come home. Even that feeble glimmer of hope was crushed out right about the instant he had found himself on the run with his U.S. Marshal escort. Someone had been bought off, someone had squealed, and Elliot and U.S. Marshal Eddie Drake ran for their lives.
So much for Plan A.
This was Plan B, managing a beachfront restaurant in Honolulu that his partner had dubbed It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere. “Yes, Stabler, you are now in possession of my deepest, darkest secret. I am a Parrot Head.”
Plan A had been to deposit Elliot in Appledale, Wisconsin, population 8,702, as an accountant named Wayne Carter. It would have been a quiet, isolated life, with no one to talk to and never a second where he could relax his guard.
There are days he finds himself really longing for Plan A.
The embodiment of Plan B walks up to him now and peers over his shoulder. “Will you stop having kittens? We’re good.”
“They were suspicious,” Elliot says. He was looking through the window blinds at the cops down the beach. The short, blond one—Williams—talks into his phone and stares back at the restaurant, like he knows Elliot is there watching him.
“They’re cops. That’s what they do. Or have you forgotten?”
Elliot hasn’t forgotten anything. Sometimes he wishes he could. “They could make us.”
“They won’t make us. Even if they did, they’re the good guys.”
“That’s what you said about your DEA buddy in Houston. The one who ratted us out?”
Eddie sighs and puts a lot of drama into it. “Is there a chance, maybe just the remotest, that you will stop reminding me of that in, say, the next ten, twenty years?”
Ten, twenty years of this, Elliot thinks. He heaves his own sigh. Oh happy day…
“Anyway,” Eddie unscrews the cap on a bottle of beer, “I have a good feeling about these guys.”
“Oh. You have a good feeling. That makes everything peachy then.” Williams and his partner, McGarrett, were heading out now and Elliot stepped back from the window. “I told you there was something suspicious about that waiter.” That’s what had brought McGarrett and Williams to the door. Turned out the waiter they had hired a couple of weeks ago, Akuma Kahale, was on Five-O’s radar as a suspect in a series of drug-related murders.
Eddie takes a long drink of his beer. “You think there’s something suspicious about the kid who delivers our fish order every day.”
Elliot shrugs as he picks up a bar rag and starts to polish. “He takes too long getting out of here.”
“He’s flirting with Rosie.”
“She’s underage.”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “She’s seventeen, he’s nineteen. Even you’re not that uptight.”
“Wanna bet?”
Eddie almost snorts beer through his nose. After he coughs and wipes his mouth, he shoots Elliot a look that’s says he thinks he understands Elliot; that he reads him like a book. Elliot thinks that might even true and isn’t sure how he feels about it. He watches Eddie go over to the window and open the blinds all way to reveal the gorgeous view of Waikiki Beach. Diamond Head looms over them all, and the Pacific stretches away to the horizon, glittering silver under the afternoon sun.
“You know, we could have wound up in Lamehorse Gulch, Montana and this very minute be shoveling three feet of snow of the sidewalk. That’s if they have sidewalks in Lamehorse Gulch. You ever think about that?”
Elliot shrugs. “I think about it.” He thinks about changing seasons and New York at Christmas. How he never got to throw a football around with Eli. The grandkids he’ll never see; who will only know him as a faded, old photograph and stories told around the kitchen table that are barely even true.
Eddie’s watching him and looking far too wise. “Also, can I remind you that I made some sacrifices, too?” He holds up a hand and ticks them off, point by point. “I shaved my mustache. I cut my hair. I bathe frequently. I spend twenty-four hours a day, every day, pretending I’m Preppy McPrepmeister. And do I complain? Do I bitch and moan and go all woe is me?”
“Only about five times a day.” Elliot is finding it strangely hard not to smile.
“Yeah, and that’s down from ten, so suck it up.”
Elliot is dangerously close to losing the battle not to smile. “Yeah, yeah, your life is hell.”
“Well, purgatory maybe.”
Purgatory in paradise. That sounds about right to Elliot.
Steve doesn’t find that prospect nearly as alarming as he thinks he should. “Hey, you’re the one with the thing for the chick with the whip.”
Danny puts his fork down and spreads his hand. “For the last time, it’s not about the whip. It’s the classic scenario, the archetype she represents.”
Steve spoons up some coconut corn chowder. “The archetype? That from your word-of-day calendar?”
Danny ignores him and continues his explanation, gesturing expansively enough that Steve thinks it’s a good thing he put his fork down because he could someone’s eye out like that. “The archetype. The one you want but can’t have. Sam Spade had Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Batman has Catwoman--”
“You have Kamekona.”
Danny stares at him. “Yeah, hysterical.” He leans in closer to make his point. “Wonder Woman’s cool but at the end of the day she’s just Superman in a tiara. There’s nothing on the line with her.”
Okay, this means war, Steve decides and sets out to detail all the ways Wonder Woman is a lot more than Superman in a tiara, and the really crazy thing is (beyond how they’re having this conversation in the first place) is that he doesn’t even really care about Wonder Woman. He was into Batman and Wolverine when he was a kid; there was a time when he was about eight and wanted to grow up to be a WolverBat. He thinks about telling Danny that even though he would never hear the last of it, because, yeah, that wouldn’t be the worst thing ever.
“..and anyway,” he’s winding it down now, “I never said getting tied up by her was my number one fantasy.”
“I don’t know,” Danny says like he’s giving it some serious thought, “could be hot, babe.”
Steve keeps a smile on his face even though Danny’s words and the way Danny’s looking at him are killing him a little bit on the inside. He wants to tell Danny what his number one fantasy really is, how it involves Danny calling him babe and meaning it a different way.
He’s glad of the distraction when Chris Keller, one of the owners, stops at their table to ask if they’re enjoying their meal. While Danny sends his compliments to the chef and says stopping here to spend some cash is the least they can do after giving Keller and his partner a hard time the other day, Steve notes the faint scars on the man’s right forearm, all that was left of a tattoo and the miniscule detail that had made Danny suspicious. Steve had noted the way the man carried himself and pegged him for ex-military. Background checks had revealed Keller was clean. No military service but no felony convictions, either. And if a guy wanted to get rid of some ink, even Danny’d had to admit that was really nobody’s business. Sometimes you just had a whim and did something, like Keller’s partner, Tobias Beecher, a successful lawyer who had up and walked away from it all one day to start this new life.
Everything didn’t have to be sinister, and the way Steve looked at it, and Danny had had to agree in the end, if having a midlife crisis was against the law, the prisons would be even more overcrowded. You had to admire it really, Steve thinks as his gaze drifts back to Danny, somebody deciding what they wanted and reaching out to grab it.
They say yes to dessert— piña colada bread pudding, served warm with caramel sauce, pineapple and toasted coconut (“Does everything in these islands come with pineapple?” “Babe, it’s pineapple or Spam. Be happy.”), and a scoop of vanilla ice cream and finally settle the bill. When Keller says to come by again and Steven and Danny say they will, it’s like everybody really means it.
Steve doesn’t know if they ever will go back to the restaurant but hey, stranger things have happened. You know, like Danny saying why don’t they work off dessert with a walk along the beach.
Steve has to get this absolutely verbatim straight, though, because the potential contained in that suggestion is kind of mindboggling awesome.
“You want to take a moonlight stroll on the beach? With me?”
Danny’s busy looking everywhere but at him which Steve thinks could really, really mean something. Danny shrugs, waves his hands to encompass the beach, the moon, and everything. “There’s a beach, there’s a moon. It’s just a walk.”
Steve doesn’t think so, though; not just a walk. He would just about bet everything he owns that there will be strolling involved.
As they walk and don’t say anything else because it’s enough to listen to the waves as they roll up onto the sand and then back out again, Steve wonders if Danny’s been saying babe the right way all along only Steve wasn’t hearing it right.
He looks at the number, runs his fingers over each digit and wonders why he still has this badge. He hadn’t kept it, not on purpose. No one had noticed it, though; with everything going on, the badge had stayed hidden until he was going through his coat pockets one day and there it was, like some kind of talisman that linked him back to another life.
Whatever power it once possessed, though, is gone now and it just rests cold and empty in his hand.
Time to lay the ghost to rest, he thinks and pulls his arm back, putting all the strength he has into a throw that sends the badge soaring out over the ocean. There’s no sudden froth of water, an arm thrusting from the deep to grasp the badge and brandish it like some latter day Excalibur. It hits the water with barely a splash and sinks in an instant, gone forevermore.
He looks out across the water for awhile, memories crowding in his mind, letting it all go at last.
When he’s done, Chris Keller turns away from the shore and walks back along the path. For the first time in forever, the light at the end of that path feels like home.