Author's Note: Last Chapter! Thanks to all of you who have read, reviewed, followed & faved!
Three months later.
"Gentlemen, the opening bid for the next item is fifty thousand."
Jane, Korsak and Frost moved swift and silent down the hallway of the warehouse, guns drawn. The lone guard outside the elevator was stretched out on the floor, courtesy of Frost's sweet right cross, but they were all in the mood for violence.
Jane edged to the door, risking a quick peep through the curtain, but every eye in the room was turned to the girl who stood on the raised dais in the center: Leah Babic. The laughing girl who had posed in the photos with her sister had been replaced with a broken, fearful child who stood with shoulders hunched and head down. Helpless.
Helpless. Jane felt the throb of her pulse in her temples. She knew that feeling, courtesy of Hoyt, had been given a hellish refresher course by that sick fuck, Dominic two weeks ago, but she was not helpless now, by God. The weight of the gun in her hand felt like justice.
"Do I hear fifty thousand for this unspoiled virgin?" Leah cringed when Chris Harris – Cutthroat – touched her arm to turn her for better display, but she knew better than to pull away. She was defeated, resigned to her fate.
"Fifty," a stocky, bearded bastard grunted with no more emotion than if he'd been buying a car at an auction...or a broodmare.
A satisfied smile touched Harris' lying lips. "We have fifty, do I hear fifty-two? Fifty-two, now do I hear fifty-five?"
Enough. They'd heard more than enough. A quick nod from Jane and Frost hit the button on his radio that would brink Monroe and his team in like a pack of wolves. "Boston Police!" she shouted as the three of them burst through the door, guns leveled. "Nobody move!" Most of them, finding themselves suddenly demoted from predator to prey, did as they were told, eyes flickering in panicked calculation as they tried to come up with a way to spin the situation that wouldn't land them in jail or on the front page of tomorrow's paper.
Harris, however, grabbed Leah and yanked her from the dais, holding her in front of him, a wicked looking knife appearing in his right hand and hovering next to the girl's throat. The affable demeanor of a man running an altruistic enterprise was gone; his lips were curled into a a snarl of pure hate. "Come any closer and I cut this whore!"
"Like you cut her sister, Anja?" Rizzoli kept the pistol leveled, eyes calculating distance, trajectory. There were some perps she could find a measure of empathy for: the guy who'd started robbing banks as payback for a foreclosure; the fucked-up kid who'd started killing as a way to deal with his own father's murder of his mother. This piece of shit, though...there was no empathy, not even the temptation to try to establish a connection. There was only the relentless standoff as she waited for the shot to present itself.
Behind her, she heard the commotion as the human trafficking unit burst in to support Frost and Korsak, shouts of "Up against the wall!" and "Hands where I can see them!", but her own eyes and gun never wavered, waiting for the opening that she knew would come.
"Let me go!" Leah struggled in his grip. "Shut up!" he shouted, tightening his hold, well aware that killing her meant the loss of his one bargaining chip. She'd seen it time and again, from beginning to end, wondered what kind of fucking, egocentric sociopath could ever think that it would end differently for them.
"Shut...up!" he roared as Leah continued to kick and thrash, and now her head flung to the side, giving Jane the opening that she needed, the action unfolding in the space between heartbeats.
One.
Her aim was already on target, and there was no hesitation. She squeezed the trigger, her grip controlling the recoil, and the slug took him in the center of his throat.
Two.
The hand holding the knife dropped away like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The brutal grip on Leah also lessened, and she pulled away with a scream.
Three.
The next two shots were textbook: center of mass as he swayed on his feet, sending him sprawling back onto the floor, the knife falling from lifeless fingers.
She kicked the knife away, bent down to confirm the absence of a pulse, then moved to Leah, pulling the sobbing girl into a protective embrace. "It's all right," she murmured, and though she knew that some things would never be all right again, she knew that healing could begin to take place. She was proof of that. "It's all right. Let's get you out of here." She passed Leah off to Frost and stood, her mind processing the last few seconds. The last few weeks.
"I don't get too many happy endings in this job," Detective Monroe commented as he approached her, "so thank you."
Happy endings? One sister dead, another scarred for life. "How many more are out there?" she asked him, wondering what kind of a man could do a job that felt like bailing out the ocean with a teacup.
Instead of answering, he nodded toward the cluster of women who huddled together against a wall, expressions reflecting varying degrees of shock, fear, disbelief. "You see those women? You've just given them their lives back."
"I gave them a chance." Nothing more, nothing less, and it was entirely possible that some of them were already too damaged to take advantage of that chance.
"It's more than they had before," Monroe replied, his dark eyes watching her in a way that she'd seldom encountered. Most men saw her as either a woman or a cop; rarely as both, as though the two couldn't possibly coexist in the same person. "You take what victories you can." He hesitated, glanced around to be sure no one was nearby. "Would you like to have dinner sometime? Or just a drink?"
"I'd like that," she surprised herself by saying. "Just...give me a couple of days to process, all right?" She hadn't heard from Casey in weeks; she'd thought he might have called after the mess with Dominick, but -
Monroe nodded. "I'll call you," he promised, his eyes holding hers in a way that she knew meant that he'd follow through.
"Sounds good," she replied, giving him a crooked grin as she added, "Now, what do you say we clean up the shit?" she asked, gesturing at the fine, upstanding citizens who were lined up around the walls, still trying to come up with plausible sounding reasons for them to have been present at a slave auction.
His answering grin was wolfish. "My pleasure."
"You did good work today."
Jane turned her head, meeting Maura's eyes for the first time that evening. "Yeah?"
"Yes." Her friend's voice was firm, the warm approval in her eyes undiluted by any hint of censure or judgment, and Jane felt the last of the apprehension in her chest dissipate. She'd killed a man today, and regardless of the circumstance, she'd worried about how Maura might perceive it. "Harris lured innocent young women with the hope of a better life and sold them into slavery. He killed Anja because she tried to escape; he would have killed Leah for revenge. You saved her. You saved the rest of those girls. They have a chance now."
"You helped," Jane told her. "If you hadn't figured out the significance of that brand, been able to speak Serbian, we might never have realized that Harris was Cutthroat."
Maura nodded, looking suddenly shy. "I became a medical examiner to be a voice for the dead, to give them a chance of justice. It's rare when those voices lead to justice for the living, as well."
"Well, this time it did," Jane told her, lifting the bottle and refilling both their glasses. They were both drinking pinot noir, because Frankie and Frost had demolished her beer helping her new neighbor move in...before she'd gotten busted for dealing drugs. Which was why she and Maura were sprawled on her bare mattress in her living room. The new mattress was the final touch in the remodeling of her bedroom, because no way in hell could she sleep in the same damn room that that sick fuck Dominic had so slavishly recreated in the prison he'd held her in. New furniture, new curtains, new pictures, new by-God bed, and if Frankie and Frost weren't here to help her move it tomorrow, she'd damn well move it herself. Maura had been great about letting her stay at her place, but this was Jane's apartment, damn it, and she wasn't going to let some delusional nut job drive her out.
She took a healthy swallow of her wine. "I killed a man." Police terms were so sterile: 'Neutralized the threat', 'Discharged a weapon', 'Suspect dead on arrival'. "I shot him," she said flatly, refusing to sugar-coat it. "Three times."
"You did what you had to do." Maura settled to the mattress beside her, reaching out to slide her hand into Jane's.
"I know that," she replied. She'd gone over the customary endless replays in her head, come up with no other way the scenario could have gone down. "Do you?" Every cop she'd spoken to agreed that it was a clean shoot, but it wasn't their opinion that mattered.
"Yes." No hesitation, no impatience. Maura knew why she needed that reassurance, and she gave it unstintingly, the pressure of her hand underscoring her words. "You did the right thing today. You always do the right thing, no matter what it costs you, and that is what defines true courage." She wasn't just speaking of the events of today, and they both knew it.
Jane nodded, feeling the tightness in her throat. She was no hero, damn it, but for her best friend, she would always do her damnedest to be one. "Think you can help me get this mattress into my bedroom tomorrow?"
"As long as it's tomorrow and not tonight." Maura set her nearly empty glass on the floor and let her head droop onto the mattress, her eyes already drifting closed.
"Definitely," Jane mumbled, feeling the last of the day's adrenaline being borne away on wine and relief. This was safety, this was peace, and she let her mind go, fading toward sleep with Maura's hand in hers.
Two weeks later.
"Get your hands off of her!" Frost shouted
"Maura, you okay?" Jane's eyes swept the loft.
"What are you doing?" the surprised bafflement in the doctor's eyes shifted to terror when Rockmond hauled her back against him and put a knife to her throat.
Shit, shit, shit.
Panic tried to boil up, but Jane locked it down, keeping her gun leveled at Rockmond, fighting the need to obliterate that face with a hail of bullets. The knife was too close; trigger the wrong reflex, and Maura would die with him, her life's blood pouring onto the floor from a severed jugular or carotid.
No.
"See those pedestals?" Rockmond dragged Maura through his 'studio' as Jane, Vince and Barry fanned wider, each trying to find a clear shot without setting up a crossfire. "You were going to be my latest creation. I was going to honor you, like I did my mother, who gave me life."
His mother: the prostitute who abused him. At another time, Jane might have felt a degree of sympathy, but he'd made his choices, killed again and again, and now it was Maura he was threatening.
"You must think you're really smart." He'd emerged from the studio, sidestepping, always keeping Maura in front of him.
"No." Jane shook her head. "Just lucky. You're much smarter." Tell the bastard what he wanted to hear, pray for the opening.
"Damn right!" he bragged. "Not even the genius Dr. Isles could keep up with me!"
"Please!" Maura sobbed, tears in her eyes.
"Begging?" Rockmond smirked. "Keep begging." His eyes lifted to Jane's, a satisfied smile touching his lips. "I like it when they beg."
Two more sidesteps, and Jane realized her mistake too late. He was standing right in front of the open elevator shaft they'd seen on the way up. Three stories straight down. She knew sick bastards like Rockmond, like Hoyt. They might give themselves up if it suited their purposes, but they would never, ever release a chosen victim. If they didn't act, Maura was going to die: by his knife or in the fall.
"Korsak, Harris, put your guns away!" she barked, hoping like hell that Frost would understand. He was the only one fast enough to make this plan work.
"Done, Jane," Barry spoke up as he and Vince holstered their weapons, and she knew that the message had been received. She had a shot: the same shot she'd taken at Chris Harris, but the open shaft behind Rockmond was the wild card. Someone would have to pull Maura from his grasp before he could drag her over. Frost had accepted the challenge; he knew as well as she did that this endgame had only two possible outcomes, neither of which included Rockmond's survival.
"You found my mother's hand?" Rockmond demanded, inching backward a bit.
Jane nodded. "Yeah." She lowered her own gun, but did not holster it.
"You understand why I had to take both of them, right?" His eyes pleaded with her for understanding. She gave it to him, calling on years of empathizing with perps, luring out confessions with false sympathy: sure, you needed the money; sure, the bitch was asking for it, dressing like that, teasing you that way. Whatever was needed to get them to open up and spill the pustulence of their true thoughts out into the record. "So she couldn't hurt you any more." She should have drowned you at birth, you piece of shit.
He kept babbling his justifications, kept edging toward the shaft, but Jane's eyes remained fixed on his hand, on the distance between the knife's edge and Maura's neck, on the distance between his feet and the edge of the shaft, saw with hellish clarity the point of no return, the moment of decision. No amount of reasoning was going to keep him from killing Maura as his final act of defiance and control.
"Now!" she shouted, and Frost was in motion even as her gun came up, front and rear sights aligning with the center of Rockmond's forehead, her finger squeezing the trigger at the same instant. He jerked, the knife hand falling away as the back of his head blew out from the bullet's exit, his other arm tightening convulsively on Maura as he started to pitch backward, but Frost was there, grabbing her arm and yanking her away, leaving Rockmond to tumble into the abyss alone.
Jane stood frozen, gun extended, her mind replaying every way those last seconds could have gone wrong: Maura shot, Maura cut, Maura dragged into the shaft with the bastard. Her hands started to shake.
"Easy, Rizzoli." Korsak was there, hands gently pressuring her to lower the gun, taking it from nerveless fingers. She could hear Maura sobbing as she made her way to the open shaft, looked down to the bloody ruin of Dennis Rockmond's body, alone at the bottom. There had been no hesitation; there was no guilt.
She turned away, caught Maura as she stumbled forward, held her tight, murmuring reassurances.
Judge, jury and executioner.
She could live with that.
A.N. - I was going to stop with 'Cuts Like A Knife', but the events at the end of 'Melt My Heart To Stone' were entirely too similar, the shot that Jane was faced with was almost identical. IMO, they botched Rockmond's behavior at the end; I don't believe that he would have released Maura after having already made the decision to kill her. And I'm not implying that Jane is going to become some kind of killing machine, but rather she is once again accepting the risks and responsibilities that are inherent in the job, including killing a perp when the situation requires it.
