Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: This story contains conjecture as to the possible outcome of the S7 finale. If you do not wish to be spoiled, read no further. Written for the Brasslove Summer '07 Vacation Ficathon.
Jim Brass touched down in Aruba on Thursday afternoon with two suitcases and the burdens of a very long summer. He had taken a shower before he had gone to the airport this morning, but he still felt grit on his skin and Vegas sand in his eyes and throat. It was on the soles of his shoes, too, he suspected, a part of himself that he would leave behind when he left this island five days from now with suntan lotion on his skin and rum on his breath.
That's me, he thought as he plodded from the narrow gate to the crowded baggage claim, his carry-on over his shoulder and held closely to his side. I'm the Sandman, spreading Vegas wherever I go. People have a funny habit of sleeping forever when I come around, stretched out on hotel room floors with the remote in one cold hand or rising from the bathtub like some rancid souffle. They sleep for me, and Doc Robbins tucks them in with a steel nip and a Y-stitch like Father Christmas. How festive.
He grimaced as he approached the lazily undulating serpent of the baggage carousel. Such cheerful thoughts were what had finally convinced him he needed a vacation. Dark humor had always been a part of him, part of the job, but lately the tart sweetness of his gallows humor had deepened and soured, grown caustic in his veins. It had sharpened his tongue and darkened his eyes and deepened the lines around his eyes and mouth. It had also, he had noticed with grim dismay, thinned what was left of his hair. He was being pickled by his own bitterness, whittled to nothing from the inside out.
It happened to everyone who took this job sooner or later. Copper and tin were toxins, after all, and you were bound to be poisoned by them after thirty years of wearing them on your chest in the shape of a shield or a star. The bitter, alkaloid tang had crept onto his tongue by the end of his first year on the beat, and he'd covered it with the chalky taste of Tums and the soothing burn of booze. The booze had been too good at its job, so good that it'd nearly cost him his, but he'd managed to climb out of the bottle just in time. Not before the rice paper-thin veneer of his marriage had run and his daughter that wasn't had hated his guts, but hey, there had still been the comforting kiss of cold copper over his heart and the smoke and sunflower scent of gun oil in his nose. And it had been enough. It had had to be, because without it, there had been only the memories of postage-stamp glue and foreign prick on his sheets and Ellie slamming the door of his shabby bachelor's apartment for the last time at fifteen, angry as a wounded child and too grown-up in her miniskirt and pink lipstick.
It was, he'd noted dully, the same shade he and the uniforms so often found on the lips of dead hookers and the limp, cold cocks of dead johns. That thought had been enough to send him leaping from the wagon for the first time in five years, and he'd drunk until he stank of it. It'd been one of the few times he hadn't been able to taste copper on his tongue or smell it in his nose. It was also the thought that convinced him to ignore his friendship with the infamous Bill and keep a bottle of cheap scotch in the bottommost drawer of his desk at the stationhouse.
He wasn't sure which was worse-feeling the rot creep into your own bones, or watching it steal over the faces of everyone else. It was a slow progression and pleasurable in the doing, until one day, you were old and alone and used up on some barstool, trying to swap war stories with some fresh-faced kid who didn't want to know what he was getting himself into, not when it was all new cotton and hard steel and badge bunnies waiting to play Bambi and Thumper back at their place because they were a licensed Rambo.
It was happening to all of them now. The cops were used to it, accepted it as the hereditary disease that came with their profession, but it was a new experience for the CSIs, who'd built themselves a castle of glass and steel and preformed plastic and sanitized the dirt and blood from their kingdom until even the messiest murder-suicide was reduced to a series of baggies and a set of glossy eight by tens, the latter clearly labeled just in case a future jury couldn't tell that Victim Number One had had his head blown off by a sawed-off shotgun. They'd hidden in their snug cubicles, secure in the auspices of modern technology and the inexhaustible knowledge of Gil Grissom.
But Gil had been the first to crack, he thought as he reached for his brown, leather suitcase, which sagged and bulged much like the skin on his face and bullet-pocked belly. Most of the guys at the precinct thought that it was Natalie Davis who had upended Grissom's throne and broken his crown, but they suffered from coffee cup myopia. The fall of Gil Grissom had begun years before, when bone deposits had begun to stopper his ears like God's fleshless fingers. Pride goeth before a fall, as the old saying went, and despite his gilded modesty, Gil had that in spades. Pride enough that he almost let his team and lab swing rather than admit that his hearing was going, going, and would soon be gone.
Almost losing his carefully-ordered world of swabs and test tubes had started the precarious wobble that would lead to his spectacular fall, and Paul Millander and The Blue paint killer had tilted him to the edge of the abyss. Grissom had always prided himself as a chess player and a consummate reader of the truths buried behind people's eyes, but those two had thoroughly outwitted him, danced around him in a capering game of riddles and misdirection, ended it only when they'd wearied of it. They'd made him look the fool, and worse yet, they'd made him feel it. He could still remember him on the floor on the precinct bathroom, performing CPR, blowing air and willing life back into a man just so the state of Nevada could take it again under more sterile conditions. His face had been flushed with exertion, and his eyes had been manic with the thought of his beloved science's victory denied. He remembered how the tendons and veins had stood out in his neck and arms as he'd worked, had temporarily rendered him a god in cheap glasses as he'd tried to reclaim what was his.
He also remembered that he'd had to tell Gil to give it up twice before he'd relented, and then he'd gotten up off the dirty bathroom floor and gone back into the confessional of the interrogation room to find the revelation that would have foretold the disaster. He must've found it, too, because he'd been in there a long time, and when he'd finally emerged, he'd been solemn and quiet and locked in his own internal dance. Brass had watched him shut himself inside the sanctuary of his office, and then he'd gone back to writing the stiff's paperwork.
And then there had been Nick and Greg, of course. Grissom considered his team sacrosanct, untouchable by the criminals who paid his bills in the blood of unsuspecting citizens, and when Nick had ended up buried in a plexiglass coffin and Greg had landed in a hospital bed with violence tattooed on his face in black and blue and the outline of size ten Keds on his chest, Grissom had viewed it as a personal affront and personal failure.
Nick was his utility man, the forgotten child who worked quietly and carried the victims in his heart like unshed tears until the case was closed. Nick was the one just as likely to be seen carrying a box of tissues or a cup of coffee for a victim as he was to be holding a field kit. Nick was his conscience, and until their good friend Walter Gordon had sealed him inside a plastic tomb, Gil had taken him for granted, a lab and life fixture that would always be there because he had to be.
And Greg… Well, he wasn't sure where Greg Sanders fit in the jumbled emotional rubric of This is Your Life, Gil Grissom. He was the youngest, he supposed, the fledgling CSI who had more enthusiasm than common sense. It was Grissom who had vetted Sanders' request to be in the field, and that alone had added to his formidable burden of guilt when word had come done that Greg had gotten the shit kicked out of him by a roving gang of thugs.
"I'm sorry, Greg," Grissom had said, and in that moment, standing beside his rookie's bed, he'd looked every bit of his fifty years and then some.
The rot's overtaking Greg faster than the rest, he thought as he weaved through the irritable throngs of tourists with cellphones, straw hats, and screaming, sticky-faced kids who already smelled like synthetic coconut. Before Greg hit the streets, he was a happy-go-lucky kid who loved loud music and dreamed of ladies in latex. He used to shove colored Sharpies up his nose and make bras out of paper from the copy machine, and legend has it that he once put on a showgirl outfit and sashayed into the hall. He was the life of the party, a reminder that there was more to life than the sad, sorry end of it. You'd never admit it in a million years, but you were glad to see Greg spinning merrily on his hamster's wheel, chasing the next big break on his own time and in his own eccentric rhythm. It meant that not everything had gone to shit. Not everyone.
The sand was crumbling beneath Grissom's castle long before Natalie Davis and her lunatic artwork in the desert. He's just been good at hiding the cracks behind a wall of credentials and clinical detachment, playing deaf to the world around him when it gets too ugly to stand. You had booze; he's got beakers and lab results and Discovery Channel on Friday nights. A fact a day keeps the world away.
Except it didn't. Not really. Good old Natalie still got inside his protective bubble and took Sara away for her unscheduled date with a dirtnap. And when that happened, wasn't it funny how all the rules went out the window? He handled evidence and took it personally, and when the search chopper radioed that it had found a wreck in the desert, Gil Grissom raced the Devil on the cracking Vegas asphalt. You sat in the passenger seat and clutched the hot leather and wondered if you'd survived a gunshot just do die on the highway in a smear of blood and scorched rubber.
An image arose in his mind of Gil's hands as they had scooped fistfuls of sand from around Sara's face, dirty and raw and trembling with purpose. Dirty for perhaps the first time in their lives. It hadn't mattered; Sara was dead, had been for hours. The milky eyes and the cloud of blowflies had testified to that, but for once, Gil hadn't given a damn about the truth the flies had had to tell. He'd had eyes only for his butterfly, strewn carelessly on the burning sand by someone who hadn't cared for her as he had, hadn't cherished her.
He'd gotten on his hands and knees for her just like he'd gotten on them for a dying murderer in the stationhouse bathroom, and he'd dug with desperate reverence, ass in the air and nose close enough to the crown of her head to smell the futility of his pursuit. But he'd refused to give up, had murmured platitudes and gulped sand and shimmering air in return for strangled gasps. He'd told Sara of the milkglass eyes and soured honey that it would be all right while sand scoured his hands and covered his knees.
For his part, Brass had stood back and let Gil bury himself along with her. All the lies he kept on hand for grieving victims had turned to dust in his throat, and anyway, Gil would have seen through them. Grief had made him stubborn, not stupid. It was Warrick who had coaxed him away with his soft voice and warm, firm grip.
"We got her, Gris," he'd said softly. "Let us help her now."
Warrick had led Gil back to the SUV, and Nick had covered Sara with his windbreaker. He'd been crying without sound, and sand had clung to his tear tracks as if the desert were trying to claim him, too. In that moment, he doubted Nick would have minded. He'd smoothed the windbreaker over the indistinct hump of Sara's head, wiped his streaming eyes with the back of one hand, and gone in search of his kit. Greg had stood beside the SUV in which Grissom sat, eyes fixed on Nick's windbreaker as it snapped in the wind. No one had spoken. There had been no sound at all except for Nick opening his field kit with a clack like shaken dice. The noise had sent shivers up his spine, and he hadn't been the least bit surprised when Greg had darted behind the SUV and vomited into scrub brush that rose from the shifting sand like unearthed fingers.
Later, he would think that the efficient click of Nick's field kit was the beginning of the end, the unobtrusive shattering of the illusion that had kept them all so tightly bound. They had left the scene in separate vehicles, Warrick with Grissom and Nick with Greg and Sara with Dave and Doc Robbins, the belle of the ball in her little black dress. He'd brought up the rear in his department sedan, the siren wailing the loss of a fallen officer, and when the country station he'd been listening to had played a twanging dirge for lost love and warm beer, he'd punched the OFF button so hard that it had broken, the dismayed pucker of a toothless mouth.
Doc Robbins had listed Sara's COD as drowning, and in the shuttered, blind-drawn privacy of his office, Brass had laughed at the bitter, terrible irony of it and downed a shot of scotch to numb the bewilderment that bubbled in his chest like croup. They had buried Sara in the hard New England soil of Boston and returned to Nevada and the job, but Grissom had left most of himself behind, and Greg, too, had lost something to the flinty ground. Or maybe he'd taken it into himself. He was harder now, and duller, old in the eyes and around a mouth that had forgotten how to smile. They were going through the motions, they all were, and the effort of pretending had proven twice as exhausting as living.
It was Sara that had convinced him to take the vacation he'd been putting off for twenty years, or rather, it was her absence that had done it. He'd gotten tired of seeing her in the negative spaces where she'd once been, reflected in the glass surfaces of the tables and in the shadows that had fallen over everyone's eyes. More than once, he'd thought he'd seen her, head bowed over a lab report or dark eyes gazing at him from the threshold of Grissom's office. When he'd thought he heard her discussing a preliminary tox screen with Wendy, he'd known it was time, and he'd put in the paperwork the next morning.
He'd always thought he'd be sharing this trip when he finally made it. With Janet as a second honeymoon or a retirement gift to her for standing beside him for all these years. Or maybe with Ellie as a graduation gift-high school, or even better, college. But Janet had packed her bags and run rather than live as a mistress to her own husband, and Ellie had run from the both, desperate to escape the bitterness and unspoken accusations that had blanketed everything in her world like soot. Or sand.
So here he was, another middle-aged schlub looking for a little sun to warm his bones. He'd thought Aruba would be different, sand and surf and salt on the air, and maybe it was outside, but inside the airport, it was déjà vu. Pasty tourists looking to kiss the sun, carrying bags and kids and wrinkles like battle wounds. He passed a pair of newlyweds playing tonsil hockey, and the thought struck him that he'd never left Vegas at all. He'd just sat in coach for four hours while the plane circled McCarran International, promising him yet another dream that was never coming true. When he opened the door and stepped into the street, he'd find himself surrounded by the gaudy, cheap splendor of the Strip, knee-deep in families and pensioners too blinded by the lights to notice the seedy rot on the dead showgirl's skin.
He pushed open the door, and his heart thudded painfully inside his chest because for a moment, he thought his dark premonition had come true. He emerged not into a landscape of gently swaying palm and coconut trees, but onto a drab, grey streetcorner bordered by blacktop, and, farther still, by scrubland and cactus. Then the breeze stirred, and he smelled salt and lime and a deep, rich tang like smoked meat.
"Great," he grunted. "I traded Vegas for a floating Arizona. Yippee Kay-ay-yay."
The bright yellow splash of a cab attracted his gaze, and he trudged toward it, feet plodding heavily over the squashed remains of cigarette butts and the brown carapaces of discarded beadies. The figure in the driver's seat stirred, and the driver emerged with a white-toothed, genial grin. His teeth were bright against the darkness of his smooth skin, and they reminded Brass of the Cheshire Cat from the Alice in Wonderland books Ellie had loved as a kid. The association unnerved him, and he switched the sagging, creaking handle of his suitcase from one hand to the other to free up his gun hand. It was a useless gesture since his gun was in its lockbox back in Vegas, but it was also a helpless one, and he opened and closed his searching fingers to mask it.
"Your bags, sir?" the driver asked quietly, and reached for the suitcase.
"Nah, I got it," he said. "Not much to carry."
"You won't be staying long, then?" The driver tugged the stunted brim of his newsboy cap low over his eyes and hurried to open the rear door.
"Not long enough," Brass answered, and clambered into the cab. He set the suitcase beside him and let the strap of the shoulder bag slip from his arm to puddle on the worn vinyl like a discarded leash.
"A lifetime isn't long enough in Aruba," the driver answered, and the door closed on his laughter like the deadly, cutting fall of an axe blade.
Off with his head, Brass thought, and grimaced.
The cabbie's head was very much intact when he climbed into the driver's seat, however, and Brass watched him as his slender, dainty hands busied themselves with adjusting the rearview mirror and brushing imaginary dust from the front seat. He was young, twenty-five if he was a day, and the collar of his shirt with threadbare but clean and starched, and Brass was sure that if he were to lean forward and sniff his neck under the pretense of giving his destination, he'd smell soap and Burma Shave.
The cabbie turned the key in the ignition, and the engine rumbled to life with a phlegmatic purr. He flipped a switch on the dashboard, and the interior filled with the scent of clove, old newsprint, and spearmint gum, the olfactory ghosts of previous lives that had spent a moment inside this iron-gutted ferry. It was comforting, New Jersey back in the days when his balls had ached more than his bones and heart, and he settled into his seat with the airy squelch of shifting upholstery.
The cabbie turned in his seat, one arm across the headrest. "Where can I take you?" That strange, disembodied smile again.
"La Risa del Alma Hotel."
"Ah, one of our most beautiful hotels." Ringing and expansive, the practiced sales pitch of a man who spent his life selling his island to earn his keep.
Brass had heard the same speech in Vegas and Atlantic City, polished and toned until even savvy high rollers succumbed to the siren song beneath the words and tossed fortunes onto a rolling ocean of green. He knew how it would go from here: the guy would extol the virtues of his paradise home, offer them up like a smiling, earnest pimp. He'd tell him every hotel was the nicest on this patch of earth thrust up from the sea, and that every restaurant served the finest cuisine and freshest fish, and even though he'd know that it was the oldest line in the book, he'd fall for it anyway and gladly tip the man for his disillusionment. He'd buy it. And then he'd cling to it while he tried to ignore the damp rot on the ceiling of his hotel room or shit his brains out in the cramped bathroom, staring blearily at the tacky, clear plastic shower curtain while clams exacted their revenge on his innards. Because if he didn't, all he'd have to show for this vacation would be tan lines and wasted money.
"It's too bad you weren't here before God swept his bridge away," the driver was saying. "La Risa had a beautiful view. It's still beautiful," he added hastily, and in his mind's eye Brass could see him arguing with the manager of La Risa about the tourist dollars he'd chased away with his big mouth.
Hey, at least it's Aruba. The worst he can get for his indiscretion is a whack on the head or a fist in the mouth. In Vegas, he'd wind up with his brains dripping into the lining of his trunk and dollar bills crammed into his mouth or maybe up his ass. A friendly reminder from the unofficial board of tourism to always but your best foot forward.
He banished the vivid image of a dead cabbie from his mind and surveyed the city through grease-streaked windows as the cab pulled onto the narrow street. The buildings across from the small airport were tiny, dingy stores crammed with t-shirts, colorful scarves marketed toward rich, white women who wanted to soothe their consciences by "going native," and assorted handcrafts. He thought he saw a doll fashioned of straw and cane husks in one cluttered storefront, and travelers straggled to the doors of the assorted shops, drawn by the lure of authentic junk that would be stuffed into suitcases, happily paraded before bored friends who'd feign polite admiration, and then tossed into the attic, where it would lie forgotten until the estate sale, when Junior auctioned off his parents' treasured mementos for five hundred bucks and the chance to experience ecstasy with Mr. Brownstone or a high-priced hooker in a red cocktail gown.
Here and there, native Arubans threaded skillfully through the white-faced throngs, as stark and striking as black catgut against bloodless surgical scars. Women pushed bicycles fitted with wire baskets through the crowd and slipped down narrow, dirty alleys to the shops and places not meant for American faces, places that smelled of raw meat and fresh hay and hot wax. Children appeared and disappeared like silverfish, quick and fleeting as they darted between legs and beneath arms and marked their trail with shrieks of laughter and cries for attention. Men in light business suits strode toward unknown destinations, and the occasional car lumbered past the cab; it was almost always either a Cadilac or a VW Bug, American capitalism and German engineering. There was something Freudian in that, and if Gil were here, he'd be able to put his finger on it.
Except Gil's not here. In fact, he's not anywhere anymore. He drifts through the labs because they're the only place he knows, but his eyes are vacant, looking into the past rather than the future. He's searching for Sara, and you suspect he's found her. Maybe he's found her back at that lacquered cherry box she sleeps in now, eyes sewn shut with discreet mortician's thread and hands folded over her cotton-stuffed belly. Or maybe he found her somewhere better, preserved in amber and memory at the breakfast nook of his ranch house, hair tousled from sleep and desperate movements in the night. And maybe the second possibility is worse because it reminds him that it was forever lost. No more Sara at the breakfast nook because Sara hangs her hat in the hard, Boston dirt now.
Whatever he sees and wherever he goes, he's drifting further and further from where he walks and talks. He moves and speaks in stop-motion, a Japanese horror flick with a shit dub job, and you wonder how long it'll be before he doesn't come back at all, before Conrad Ecklie finds his resignation letter taped to the door of his office like a white flag of surrender. Conrad will jig in the hallways until he realizes what that means, and then he'll piss and moan because Gil isn't there to blame when the shit starts to fly. Gil was the heart of the lab before his own stuttered to a stop inside his chest, still is, and nothing can survive without its heart.
The streets uncoiled under the wheels of the cab, and he rocked with the rhythm of turning rubber. People passed in bright flashes of color, birds of paradise that wore human faces. He didn't examine the faces too closely; if he did, he'd see them splashed with red and brain-matter grey or doughy and white as parchment paper. Or he'd see the faces of those already dead, victims he'd bagged and tagged in an earlier life. Like Paul Millander or the Blue Paint Killer. Maybe they'd died and returned to a tropical necropolis where they sipped drinks that tasted of salted formaldehyde, and watched the sun sink into an ocean of blood.
So much for leaving the bad juju in Vegas, he thought wryly, and let his head loll against the sun-warmed glass of the window.
The flashes of color reminded him of Ellie when she was little. She'd had a tiny one-piece bathing suit, and she'd spent the weltering Jersey summers pruning and waterlogged in a kiddie pool in their small, weedy backyard. It'd been hot pink, thank God, not siren red(not like the phone whose receiver had been dangling from the bedside table like a limp cock when he'd so rudely interrupted her delivery by the U.S. Postal Service).
"Lookit me, Daddy! Lookit me," she'd shrieked, and spread her laughter like drops of rain. She'd reminded him of a living mother-in-law's kiss, pink and wrinkled and damp when she sloshed out of the pool and twined around his legs with chubby, dripping arms and cronish, wrinkled hands. She'd always leave small, muddy footprints on his pants or bare legs, and he used to wonder why she couldn't be more careful. Now he only wondered why he'd had his head so far up his ass for the years that mattered.
"Lookit me, Daddy!" she'd said, but he'd looked infrequently, too enamored of his reflection in the murky bottom of a shot glass. One minute, she'd been a pink, boiled peanut wrapped in a receiving blanket, and the next, she'd been ten and running away on coltish legs. By the time he'd seen her clearly, she'd been fifteen and soured on her old man, and other eyes had begun to notice her, eyes that had wanted to see what lay hidden underneath her increasingly low-cut blouses and short skirts. He'd tried to tell her, to warn her that they were bad men with dirty teeth inside their sweet-talking mouths, but by then, she'd gotten tired of waiting for him to notice or care, and she hadn't been interested in his advice. She'd written him off as a bitter old man who had nothing but stories left to his name and gone down the path into the deep, dark, concrete wood of L.A.
At least, that was the last place she'd been seen, shacked up with some lowlife and getting pierced by pricks and needles, copping the one vice by paying with the other. The last time he'd seen her, she'd been a hazy shadow in his drug-glazed vision, retreating down the warped, brightly-lit tunnel of the hospital hallway. He'd reached for her with two fingers, a hook of flesh and bone fraught with family ties, but she'd been a long time gone, and she hadn't looked back. He'd thought that maybe she'd call when things had settled and his body had strengthened, but the phone had never rung, and after a week, he'd stopped listening for it. After two, he'd unplugged it and told himself that that was why she hadn't called. Sometimes, the lies were easier.
It occurred to him that she might've picked up stakes again. For all he knew, she could be in Aruba. It was too much to hope that she was here on a honeymoon. The flower of her youth had withered in the poisonous shadow of New Jersey fog and the blistering heat of L.A., but maybe she'd come here as a commodity of the skin trade, traded by her dealer for a kilo of smack or for a piece of a lucrative coke and cunt nightclub. An image arose in his mind of Ellie on her knees in some fleabag hotel, sucking the knob of some dough-bellied family man from Peoria who'd left his flat-breasted, horse-faced wife and gangle-jointed kids in a cramped hotel room. Or maybe she had assumed the position in some trash-strewn alley while the rats made nests in the rotting scraps of paper, her ragged underwear bunched around her knees and an Aruban dick buried between her skinny, indifferent legs. He closed his eyes, saw her as a pig-tailed girl in a hot pink bathing suit, and opened them again. Sweat beaded in his sparse hairline and oozed down his cheek, and the raspy, cold breath of the cab's air conditioner caressed his cheek with sharp, bracing fingers.
He searched the fleeting faces of the people moving along the sidewalks, but most of them were dark and unfamiliar, and the white faces were too well-rounded with past meals and warm beds. They were older, too, middle-aged suburbanites strolling through the locals with fanny packs cinched around their doughy hips and leaving their dull lives behind with every step. Ellie was a wraith, all sharp, fleshless angles and hard addictions.
In the distance, he could see the bright, blue spark of the ocean. He thought he'd go to the beach later, let the wind and sun curl around his legs, maybe dig his bare toes into the wet, sucking sand and leave his mark on the shoreline until the lapping waves took it in tribute. He was too battered to attract the notice of the sunbathing women who'd stretch out on towels and chaise lounges and offer their skin to Ra's burning kiss, but there was no harm in looking, and it'd be nice to remember that loveliness didn't always wind up with its head caved in on the dining room floor while Gil and Catherine took pictures like infernal tourists and brains dried on the corner of the toaster.
The cabbie dropped him off at his hotel, a worn but clean bunker of a building painted light pink and topped with thatch that hid more conventional tar and shale roofing. The cabbie was polite and tipped his hat, and when Brass pressed a handful of crumpled florins into his palm, he had a vision of Ellie paying for his services in the only way she could, eyes closed and cheeks hollowed in concentration. She turned her head and smiled at him, teeth white against purple-black skin, and the cabbie, unsuspecting, grinned idiotically at him.
"Thank you," he said, and touched two fingers to the brim of his cap. Brass grunted and hurried inside, fingers clamped around the creaking handle of his suitcase.
The interior of the hotel was small and neat, and the cramped registration desk was manned by a tall, thin woman with high, regal cheekbones. She watched with polite interest as he approached, and she reminded him of a Siamese cat, haughty and too wise by half.
"Can I help you?" she asked, and he noticed that her nails were red and filed to long, lacquered points.
Cat's claws, he thought. "Yes, ma'am. I have a reservation here. Name's Jim Brass. James."
Fingers clacked efficiently on keyboard plastic. "Yes. Four nights?"
"Yes, ma'am." He produced his wallet from his back pocket and withdrew his ID and credit card.
She examined the former and plucked the latter from his hand. When the computer had read the mystical runes embedded in the plastic and divined that he could indeed pay for his lodging, she handed it back. "Wait here."
She retreated into an office and emerged with an actual key. She dropped it into his hand, and its weight surprised him. So did the queerly exotic texture of the leather fob in his palm. He tried to recall the last time he'd stayed in a hotel with keys; the seventies, probably, on his honeymoon with Janet in Rockaway Beach. He remembered juggling the keys with a bottle of champagne while he carried her into the room, a hand cupped possessively over her ass. Before Ellie was born, certainly. He hadn't had much occasion to frequent hotel rooms since the chiming of his wedding bells. Too bad Janet hadn't been able to say the same.
"It's room 107. Third door on the left wing. No smoking. The ice machine's over there-" She pointed over his shoulder, and he turned to see the squat, brown bulk of an ice machine lurking behind the artful camouflage of a potted palm. The subterfuge was spoiled, however, by an indecorous, groaning burp from the machine, and a moment later, a hard clot of ice clattered into the tray. "-and there is no room service. There's a good crab shack down the way. Best seafood on the island if you ask me. Rooms'll be cleaned once in the mornings, but my maids aren't your mother, so you'll have to do your own laundry. Who you bring in here is your own business, but if you bring the police down, you're out."
"Then we might have a problem," he said blandly. "My badge is in my luggage."
She blinked at him, and the corners of her mouth curved into a faint smile. A cop on the premises was good for business. "Enjoy your stay, Officer Brass, and call if there are any problems with the room."
"Will do."
The room was as neat as the lobby, a square room whose space was occupied with a double bed and a dresser, on top of which sat a boxy television set that still had rabbit ears. It had cable, though, and as he moved around the room, putting his clothes into drawers and warily eyeing the thick mosquito netting over his bed, he turned it on for background noise. The canned, tinny laugh track of a stale sitcom filled his ears, and he grunted without sparing it a glance. It was Full House or Step By Step or The Cosby Show, and he had no use for shows that perpetuated the lie that everything could be fixed between commercials for Levitra and Pepsodent and term life insurance for those times when getting old turned unexpectedly into stone cold dead. The belief in the instant fix was why so many lovers ended up with head wounds or cement shoes, and why he'd spent so long puckering up to a bottle of gin.
He'd planned to stay in the room and order in, but Miss Siam had scuttled that plan with the revelation that there was no room service, so he decided that he'd wander the island in search of the crab shack when the day grew cooler. It was hot inside the room, not the arid, scouring heat of Vegas, but the gummy, torpid heat of the sweating sea. He ambled to the wall unit mounted beneath the lone window and turned it on. Frigid air blasted him in the solar plexus and puckered the skin beneath his shirt into hard knots of gooseflesh. He sighed, shook himself, and retreated to the bed, where he toed off his loafers and settled against the pillows.
He'd intended only to rest for an hour or two, but when he awoke, the sun was gone. The only light came from the TV, which now served as the stage for a show in which lots of people breathed heavily and cried a great deal. It was in Spanish, he thought, but then again, it could've been Greek or Punjabi or whatever tongue they spoke here on the hard knob of God's spine. He blinked sleep from his eyes and groped for the light on the bedside table. He turned it on and squinted against the sudden brightness, and then he jabbed his finger at the MUTE button to throttle the tearful lament of a buxom maiden whose cleavage heaved in defiance of gravity.
He showered and shaved and traded his slacks for khaki shorts, and then he slipped from the room with keys in hand. In the dark of an unfamiliar landscape, he thought wistfully of his gun, snug in its lockbox in Vegas. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom before he let go of the tarnished brass doorknob and slipped his key into his pocket. Then he set off in the direction of the beach. He could hear music and laughter on the wind, steel drums and the plucking twang of steel strings stretched over splintered wood and corrugated sheet metal. A calypso band, or maybe just locals out singing for their supper.
He walked slowly, hands in his pockets and face turned to the breeze. It was heavy with the smells of salt and coconut oil, margaritas and sunbathers. Most people would've given themselves over to the smells and the fantasies they conjured, but he'd been too many years on the job, and knowledge of what lurked in the shadows kept him alert.
The orange light of a bonfire danced on the beach as he drew near, and people were drawn to its light, sprawled on towels or standing around it with longnecks in their hands. Nearby, a shirtless kid of twenty presided over a charcoal grill, barefoot and wielding tongs with inexpert gusto. He looked up as Brass ambled onto the sand.
"Hey, old dude," he greeted him amiably. "Come to join the party?"
"Didn't know there was one."
"Oh, for sure. Steaks and shrimp on the barbie, you know."
"Is that right?" he said mildly.
"Absolutely."
"Say, where'd you get that?" He pointed at the longneck stuffed into the sand between the kid's feet. He was pretty sure the kid wasn't legal, but he was in no mood to hassle him over it. If the kid got plastered and tried to drive, he'd step in, but otherwise, fuck it. The kid was on vacation, and so was he, and his brass was worthless here anyway.
The kid grinned and pointed haphazardly over his shoulder with the tongs. Blood from the cooking meat dripped from the prongs onto his shoulder.
Medium velocity blood spatter, he thought, and blinked.
Brass followed the direction of the wavering tongs and saw a thatched tiki hut monstrosity, brightly lit and decorated with plastic macaws and blinking Christmas lights. He nodded his thanks and lumbered to it, waiting behind a wall of jostling young bodies that reeked of sand and suntan oil. A bronzed blonde girl slithered past him with a careless twist of hip, and she looked so much like Ellie that his mouth went dry. Then she stepped into a pool of yellow light, and he saw that it wasn't. She was too healthy, too full of promise. Her spirit hadn't bled from her pores and the holes she poked in her arms to let the poison out.
"What can I get you?" the bartender asked when it was his turn.
"A Budweiser and a ginger ale if you got one."
The barkeep turned and reached into a bucket of ice from which longnecks jutted like severed heads. He pulled out a Bud, then reached beneath the bar and produced a small, chubby bottle of ginger ale, Jack Sprat and his fat son. The thought made him chuckle as he passed the bartender a pair of crumpled notes.
He turned to rejoin the crowd on the beach and hesitated. What was the point? This was a revel for the young and optimistic, and he was neither. He was old and jaundiced, and if he went back, his dreadful imagination would only paint blood and bruises on their bodies as they danced around the fire. The exposed teeth of a smile or laugh would inevitably become the frozen rictus of a grinning skull. Maybe it would be better if he just took his beer, went back to the hotel, and watched TV until he was too tired to think of dead bodies washing up on the beach with bullet wounds in their guts and seaweed wrapped around them like shrouds.
C'mon, Brass, live a little. You don't want to end up like Grissom, do you? asked a voice. It was unmistakably Sara, and his heart skipped a beat in recognition.
It can't be Sara, the desk sergeant who lived in his mind insisted. She's dead.
This was true; he'd seen her himself, lying underneath that red sports car like a broken doll, but he also knew that it was her.
Grissom waited too long to live, she said, and he saw her sad, gap-toothed smile. He was fifty-two when he took his first breath, and fifty-three when he took his last. He's been holding his breath since I died, drowning in open air. One year of life out of fifty-three are terrible odds, even for Vegas. You got a second chance after that shooting, Jim. Why waste it?
He thought of Grissom, reduced to a distorted shadow behind the frosted-glass door of his office, preserved forever by regret, as much a relic as the fetal pig in his office that floated dreamily in its dead womb of blue formaldehyde. And of Greg, who was thirty going on fifty, a Grissom in training who'd forgotten how to breathe, and, even worse, had forgotten how to savor the taste of life on his tongue.
He headed back to the beach.
"Hey, you're back," said the kid, as though Brass had been gone for days. "How d'you like your steak?"
"Medium-rare."
"Right on. My dad likes his well-done. You might as well just chow on the charcoal, you know?"
Brass blinked at him, amused.
"Where you from, man?" The kid poked a steak with the tongs.
"Vegas."
"No way. I've always wanted to go there. Maybe after college. Hit the casinos to help pay off my student loans."
"You'd be better off selling a kidney."
The kid laughed. "You just gotta have a little faith, my man."
The innocence of that pronouncement inspired a twinge of pity. Oh, kid, the lessons you're gonna learn. "Yeah, maybe," he said. "Call me when the chow's on?"
"Right on."
He wandered away from the grill and the bonfire to the quiet cool of the shoreline. He stopped where the foam lapped his toes and gazed at the horizon, which was lost now to the night. The gentle rush of the waves was soothing, and he slipped out of his sandals and sat down, knees pulled to his chest and unopened beer dangling loosely between them.
"My bonnie lies over the ocean," he sang tunelessly. "My bonnie lies over the sea. My bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh, bring back, bring back, bring back my bonnie to me."
But his bonnie didn't come back. Neither did Ellie or Sara or Grissom or Greg. Just bittersweet memories of them that burned like salt on raw skin. He twisted the cap off his beer, took a long swallow to ease the sting, and waited for the kid to call him back from the sea.