Title:A Moment of Clarity

Author: Cipher44

Revision: 4/9/05

Primary Email: Third Watch

Rating: R. (Violence, profanity and mature themes).

Summary: Since the story is still technically a W.I.P., I'll wait until it's done to add a summary.

Spoilers: Season Three: The Long Guns. Season Four: The Chosen Few, Crime and Punishment 1 & 2, Collateral Damage 1 & 2, 10-13, Everybody Lies, In Confidence ,Closing in, The Price of Nobility. Season Five: Fury, Family Ties 1 & 2, Purgatory, Spanking the Monkey, Monsters; through to mid-Season Six.

Thanks: BIG THANKS to all who have reviewed up till now! You've kept me going (although I admit the going has often been slow)! Also, many thanks go out to the folks at the Fanfiction Medical and Law Yahoo mailing lists, for all their help with the police procedure and medical stuff. I tried to keep everything realistic, but I've taken a few creative liberties here and there. Just little ones ;)

Disclaimer: With the exception of Detective Brent Schaeffer (who, FYI, would probably be played by Ron Perlman, if the part needed to be cast) and a few other minor background faces here and there, none of the characters are mine. But you knew that already, didn't ya? Just having a bit of fun here, no harm intended :)

Notes - Revision 12/17/04

This story began life over a year ago, as a guess at how the Season Four hotel room shooting might turn out, and it ended up growing into something else entirely. So basically it's an Alternate Universe story that uses the Price of Nobility as a springboard, and though it switches between three perspectives (Bosco, Faith and Cruz), it ended up with a heavy Cruz focus, going deeper into the nature of her relationship with her sister, why she felt the leader of a biker gang could somehow be directly responsible for her overdose, and how Lettie tied in to her choice of career - all stuff that was only briefly touched on or glossed over in the show (while Bosco got to milk the angst-thing for all it was worth when his brother died).

Even though this story kicks off from the end of Season Four as an AU timeline, there are still plenty of references and material from Seasons Five and Six, plus cameos from a few newer characters. Keeps the story relatively fresh, and besides - I had to get Jelly in there somewhere :)

One last note: the dialogue from the end of The Price of Nobility (up until Faith flips the gun and the shots are heard) is reproduced here exactly as it is spoken in the episode. Needless to say, no plagiarism was intended with this - it was just to set the scene for the rest of the story.

Now, at long last, I'll shut up and let you get to the story ;)

A Moment of Clarity

by Cipher44

Part I

Chapter 1

Faith

I.

Faith Yokas left the Fifty-Fifth Precinct at two minutes to eight riding on a lie.

It was only a little lie, very white, and could arouse no suspicion; she simply told the Lieutenant that she was taking off to get something to eat. In its own little way it was cunning. She had been working five tedious hours behind the desk and so she was fully entitled to a meal period. She even put a little extra polish on it, asking Swersky if he'd like her to bring something back for him. A tasty treat of some variety, perhaps. Swersky said no, that was all right, his wife had packed him a diet meal because his blood sugar had been through the roof just lately. This was delivered with the absent disdain of a man who still loves his sweets but is nevertheless resigned to the frailties of his age. He did not ask Faith where she was going or what she would be eating, and for that she was glad. Friendly banter could have been easily shuffled through with another lie, but Faith did not want to lie to Swersky again. Not even another little white one to get him off her back. It was a matter of simple principle.

And besides, the first one was apt to get her into enough trouble.

But Swersky didn't ask a thing. Swersky, in fact, barely even looked up; he'd bought the lie easily, and there was never any reason to believe he wouldn't. Faith signed out a radio and a squad car and walked out the door without a second look back, knowing that by tomorrow morning she could well be sitting in a holding cell in the very same building.

There was a part of her that wondered if this sudden and complete surrender of all good sense might mark the onset (and a spectacular onset) of some strange kind of mid-life crisis. She'd never really given the idea that she could even have a mid-life crisis much thought before now - to her the concept was vague and somewhat silly, confined to the stereotype of the middle-aged man trying to reconnect to his youth with a cherry-red Ferrari and a call-girl on each arm. It was a cliche, a bad cliche, and as such hard to take seriously. Mid-life Crisis. Fodder for hack cartoonists, and besides which there was that troubling - and insulting - mid part in there. Mid-life.

Faith didn't feel very mid just yet.

But she supposed all of that was just a fancy way of sidestepping the point - a mid-life crisis (whatever such a thing might be when stripped of its pop-culture wrapping) was all about irresponsibility. Conscious irresponsibility. Sometimes gleefully conscious irresponsibility. Fun for the people immersed up to their eyeballs in it, she supposed ... but pretty pathetic to the objective, casual observer.

Pathetic.

Like a policewoman, for example, Faith thought as she headed for the Melrose Hotel and her possible doom. Respected by her colleagues, clean record, mother of two, sitting up in Holding facing a breaking and entering charge. And I would have thought a mid-life crisis would mean seducing the bag-boy at the A&P. Which wouldn't be much more intelligent or responsible that what I'm doing here. But it'd probably be a lot more fun.

She snorted laughter in spite of herself. That was something else - this nervous humor that kept creeping up on her. It was inappropriate, irritating, and the fact that it was an obvious defense mechanism didn't cut much ice with her. She was becoming more and more afraid that some part of her might really be enjoying the thrill of it all, might even be getting off on it - some giddy, capering little Anti-Faith, the same part of her that had nudged her into offering to bring Swersky something sweet. There was nothing terribly hilarious in any of this. Not one thing. Putting her career and good name on the line for someone she now despised was something that went a tad further than irresponsible. She was coming to believe it was something that skirted the edge of nuts.

Breaking and entering.

Actually, it would probably end up as something more along the lines of gaining entry under false pretenses. Sounded a bit more elegant when you said it that way, didn't it? No actual breaking involved. Plenty of entering, though, and it was the entering part that worried her.

She had only a sketchy idea of why she was doing it, and she supposed that made the whole business that much worse. She had a little grocery list of possible reasons, but they were all pretty vague and didn't hold up well under scrutiny. There was the matter of Maurice Boscorelli, her ex-partner and a man to whom she owed nothing - no reason to be found there. There was the matter of Sergeant Maritza Cruz, head of the elite Anti-Crime plainclothes unit, a woman who could be the ACLU's poster-child for everything wrong with major American police departments and was also, in Faith's humble opinion, a pitiful excuse for a human being ... but there was no reason there, either. She could dismiss Cruz - and Bosco too, for that matter - and die happy never hearing mention of either of them again.

But there was the matter of the gun.

The gun was at the center of it. Her little adventure in burglary amounted to a search and retrieval mission, and the gun was what she was going for. She knew what Bosco had already told her about it, and she had filled in most of the blanks by asking a few discreet questions around the station. Both the gun and the room she would soon be tossing belonged to Aaron Noble, a journalist and author who specialized in writing colorful exposes on police corruption and sympathetic biographies of dangerous criminals. Current rumor had it that he was also addicted to crystal meth. As Faith understood it, Noble had gotten himself into some trouble with the Disciples biker gang and ended up having to kill one of them. Clear-cut self-defense, apparently. Shouldn't have been a problem.

But there was a problem, and the problem came from Cruz. Noble had been acting as a Confidential Informant for her, but since a C.I. can't be involved in any other crime, the biker shooting would have taken him out of the game. Cruz, of course, wouldn't accept that; she had given him back his gun and ordered him to hide it. This had still left her with a dead biker and, true to her nature, Cruz had turned around and pinned the killing on some street kid named Stevie Nunez.

So, as Faith understood it, the gun was the only thing to tie Noble to the shooting, and therefore the only way to haul Nunez's unfortunate ass out of the fire.

Faith knew almost nothing about Nunez beyond his name. At the moment, however, she was sticking to Nunez as her primary reason for breaking into Noble's room. It seemed the most comfortable, not to mention the most honorable and therefore the easiest to rationalize. She didn't like the idea that she was doing this for Bosco. It was true that there was something almost motherly in it, something almost huffy and exasperated - Bosco had made a mess, and she had grimly resigned herself to helping him mop it up. But only because of Nunez. Junkie or biker or whatever he was, he still amounted to an innocent bystander. She was not here because of Bosco ... though to his credit he was finally trying to turn the tables on Cruz, who had been leading him around by the nose (not to mention the dick, her mind added with a little pucker of revulsion) for months. She was not even doing this to thwart Cruz, because that would raise a little hypocrisy issue; Cruz was a liar and as much a criminal as anyone she locked up, a dirty cop who routinely broke the law she was supposed to be defending ...

... and would you look at this - that was exactly what little Faith was doing right now. To destroy thy enemy you must become thy enemy. Wasn't there some little saying that went like that? Faith thought there was. But it didn't make her feel any better.

No, this was all purely for Nunez, some guy she'd never even met and probably never would. This was simply to make sure an innocent man didn't go to jail. No deeper than that, no more complicated than that.

And, she reminded herself, it was important to remember something else: whatever came out of this, it would still change nothing between her and Maurice Boscorelli.

Faith had never expected getting into the room to be a problem, and it wasn't. She used her uniform and a smile and another easy lie or two (oh, they do come easier with practice, don't they? My, yes), and before she knew it she was standing in front of Noble's door with the keycard clutched in her hand. Her employee escort had wanted to take her right to the door, but Faith had rudely snatched the card and left the woman in the elevator. The escort was now watching her from there with a touch of mild disapproval. No doubt lamenting rude cops. Rude New York cops.

If she thinks I'm a bitch, she ought to spend sixty seconds in an elevator with Sergeant Cruz.

Faith waited for the elevator to slide shut and bear the woman away. Then she turned to Noble's door and made a ridiculous little show of knocking. Bosco had promised to lure the writer away from his room on the pretense of a meeting with Cruz, thus giving Faith her opening. Sounded good enough in theory, but it assumed that Noble would agree to the meeting without having to be coerced. All signs pointed to Noble being the obstinate type, so she supposed there was the possibility that he was still here.

But all of that was neither here nor there - she just felt a bit better making a token effort at legal entry.

There was no answer, no shuffling or footsteps or I'm coming's from inside the room. She counted off ten seconds and decided Noble really wasn't here; Bosco had promised to lure him away, and Bosco had done just that.

For the first time in a long time, he'd proven trustworthy.

Which was sort of a pity. Faith didn't have the slightest idea how she would have explained her presence here if Noble had actually answered the door, but on balance she thought having to cook up a half-assed explanation would have been a lot better than what she had to do now.

She didn't hesitate, though - any hesitation at this stage would be disastrous. Heart fluttering, Faith slid the card through the reader next to the doorknob and went right in.

The first thing that struck her about the room was its size. The Melrose was not a cheap place to stay for anyone; Noble was a minor celebrity, and as such had paid for the biggest and the best.

The second thing that hit her was that the place was a hopeless mess. As classy as the room was, the dominate theme here was clutter. The place had a distinct lived-in feel - Noble apparently didn't waste any time making a place his own. Every desk, every endtable, every possible hiding place for a handgun appeared to have been pressed into some kind of use. A darkened laptop sat on a desk littered with papers and coffee cups and candy wrappers. Another table held boxes containing more papers and files and crumpled notes; the boxes looked as if they'd split at the seams if she so much as breathed on them.

She had been anticipating a clean, rather sterile hotel room, a place where she could easily distinguish the places where Noble had tampered from the places he'd left alone. But it appeared he had stuck his nose into everything here.

That meant the gun could be anywhere in this. Anywhere.

The artistic temperament, she thought anxiously as she moved inside. The messy right-brained type who never picks up after himself. Wonderful.

She had time, though. She had plenty of time, so there was no need to get all wound up. She would stick to the plan - get in, get the fucking gun, and get out. And it would all be done with a cool head ... plus an optimistic thought or two to prod her along. There was no safe in the room - that was lucky. It would have been an obvious hiding place, but getting the keycard had been delicate enough, and Faith doubted she could have strong-armed something as sensitive as a safe combination from the hotel staff. (Cruz probably could have, but Faith - burglar or not - was not that far gone yet.) She had a lot of ground to cover, but she didn't think she'd hit any snags. With luck Bosco would keep Noble out all evening.

She had plenty of time. No pressure.

She thought she might even pick up a coffee and a donut or two for Swersky on the way back to the Five-Five. To hell with his diet meal. Better to die happy.

The search was quick and efficient and methodical; she moved from one piece of furniture to the next smoothly, desk to table to the boxes of files and notes and on from there, falling into a natural rhythm, making a mental checklist of the places she'd already looked, pushing aside Bosco and Cruz and Noble and thoughts of spending the next day behind bars in her own precinct, and just doing her job the way she'd always done it.

Eleven minutes later she had completed the living room.

There was no gun.

She moved into the bedroom and started the process over again. Calm and efficient and methodical.

Still no gun.

Getting a bit antsy now (but still calm, still keeping a cool head, you bet) she went into the bathroom, which was surprisingly small and cramped for such a swanky apartment. It took only two minutes to complete a search there.

But there was still no gun.

Faith went back into the living room and stood perplexed. She had made good time, but she had hit all of the usual predictable hiding places and there was no gun to be found. And there was something else, a very nasty little possibility that she tried to push down, only to have it pry its way to the top of her mind anyway; the more she thought about it, the more she was sure Noble must have taken the gun with him. Why shouldn't he take it with him? Why leave it here just because Cruz told him to?

Faith looked around helplessly, sweeping a slightly shaky hand back through her hair. Her nerves were getting the better of her, her heart thudding heavily in her chest. Cold, anxious sweat prickled its way down the center of her spine. There was no going back, no undoing what she'd done; the room was now a picture-perfect burglary. She had tossed the place for nothing, she would be found out, she would lose her job, she would be charged and disgraced. And Cruz ... Cruz would probably get one hell of a kick out of that, seeing holier-than-thou Faith Yokas go down in such a cornball and stupidly pointless way ... and then she would go right ahead with what she was doing to Nunez without a second thought.

But worst of all would be the first family visit. Fred and Emily and Charlie, all looking through the bars at her with identical expressions of shellshocked disappointment. Emily's reaction would be particularly interesting. Kind of hard for a teenage girl to take all those responsibility lectures seriously when dear old mom is sitting in the tank. And then Charlie, God, he was only eleven, what would he think -

Cut this weak-sister crap, now! The damned gun is here, it has to be! I'm not gonna panic. I will not panic. I will look again. But think. Think for a minute first.

Faith paused. Closed her eyes. Took a long, slow breath, and then opened them again. She looked around the room again, allowing her eyes to skip gracefully from one object to the next, absorbing it all, checking to see if she'd missed something, not rushing through it, taking it slow and deliberate. Calm and methodical, that was the order of the day here, the running theme. She spun in place like a human surveillance camera, twirling on her heel in a way that would have been comical had anyone been in the room to see her.

Her eyes landed on the couch.

The couch cushions. Where did kids hide their dirty magazines and other shameful little vices? Under their mattresses, usually ... but Noble's mattress was clean (well, clean in the sense that there was no gun under it; Faith didn't think Noble suffered any lonely nights) and couch cushions were a mattress' closest relative, weren't they? And from everything she'd heard about him, Aaron Noble didn't amount to much more than a sneaky kid himself.

Of course she didn't really expect the gun to be concealed in such a stupid, flimsy place - he had taken it with him, she was sure - but she'd overlooked the cushions the first time, and it was something else to try.

She went over and started by removing the little pillows from each end, one of which was heavier than the other and made a dull metallic thunk when she set it down on the coffee table.

Faith almost froze up, and for a few agonizing seconds was unable to turn around and check the source of the sound. She was not quite ready to believe that she had actually heard that sound at all, that she had found what she'd come for and could now, at last, get the hell out of the mess she'd somehow gotten herself into. She didn't quite trust herself to be that lucky.

Then she was unzipping the pillow, fumbling a bit (she would tear it open with her teeth if necessary) and there it was. She drew it out, mercifully remembering to pick it up with a handkerchief.

It was an old automatic, a battered German Walther that looked like it might be more at home in a war museum. She stared down at it, her face slack even though the sense of relief was so sweet and so palpable that it made her thoughts run silly; the feeling was absurdly like getting let out of school on a snow day. She reminded herself that she might still face some trouble over this down the road, but putting Cruz on the chopping block for wrongful arrest might be worth it. Because if Cruz went down for that, more might follow - Faith was betting the woman had more than a few skeletons in her closet, just begging to have the light cast on them. And now that Faith was actually holding the gun in her hand, she was discovering just how much she would enjoy seeing that: Maritza Cruz, standing in a courtroom wearing an orange jumpsuit from Women's Correctional. Very stylish. It's definitely you, kid. Add handcuffs to the ensemble and you had a fashion statement Faith could really get behind.

And best of all, she could leave now. Hand in Noble's keycard and go straight back to the Five-Five.

No, she corrected herself immediately, still riding that dizzy, lightheaded wave of relief. No, I've got one stop to make on the way back; I'm gonna pick up a big box of donuts for Swersky. For both of us. Every last one a chocolate-glaze. I am, after all, on a meal period.

The voice came from behind her then, soft and almost conversational in tone, its rich, purring quality unmistakable:

"One day we're gonna settle our business."