Chapter Four

Sonny tore open the curtain as he watched his wife climb back into the hospital bed. "You're up?" He was astonished and relived and would have wrapped her in his arms if he'd been sure such a move was welcome.

"Yeah, I'm up and my brain had a nice bit of down time. Now, get you're ass over here and implement that little plan of yours." She sounded like herself and that made Sonny feel better. She didn't feel like herself though. She was still having trouble getting her mind around what had happened.

"All right," he crawled up on the bed as Wil disappeared to try and not kill Brenda. "Um...I don't know exactly how to say this."

"You think I can help you?" She looked at him ruefully with sarcasm and he smiled. "How about the beginning?"

"Um... ok. Well...I guess the beginning was when I was young. Deke...Deke was a cop. He was a monster and he was dirty." Sonny heard his mother's screams, a closet door slam, he felt the darkness call. "When I was older I knew my mother couldn't leave him. I knew I had to find a way to save her. She'd never forgive me if I killed him...I was ready too. I was ready to burn in hell for eternity to finally get us free of him."

Carly saw on his face what he so often thought made him ugly, that indescribable beauty of having survived the horror. She reached out to touch him but stopped. Who was this man? The one sitting on her bed showing her a demon that terrified him, was he the same man who had made love to her, turned to her in the night to keep the monster at bay?

Sonny's eyes were down, buried in the memories and turned to the blanket. He never saw her hesitation. It was a good thing. It would have made him feel like Deke was right. He was the dirty one.

"But I thought I could out think him. Deke thought I was a dumb, a no good kid. He thought he held the power, that just because he had both sides of the law on his team that he couldn't loose. That he could beat his wife and her son and get away with it." His fists clenched around the blankets and sheet. His jaw flexed and his teeth grinded. "He thought he was invincible, a kind of a god...I wanted to tear him down. See him suffer. Put him in a cage the way he'd put me in one. The way he'd put my mother in one. I wanted to see him powerless."

Carly reached a hand to his. The pull of his grasp on the bedclothes frightened her. The demons of the past were getting too real. She could feel them in the room too. They both needed a little dose of reality. When their skin connected his eyes shot to hers. She felt through them all the fear and pain he'd been unearthing to tell her these things. Saw the slips, the ghosts of images so real they had clouded his vision a moment before.

But what if they were a lie? Could Sonny, who had prized honesty so greatly, be lying? ... he had been lying. She pulled away again when she was sure reality was a presence they both felt.

"The cops in Bensonherst would never believe me if I told them he was beating us." His eyes left their search of her face, deflated in the hope of what miracle they might hold for him this time. They settled again on the bedding. "And if they did they would never arrest him. If they did, his connections would get him out. He was a valuable, dirty cop. They had him benchmarked for chief...imagine who he'd have hurt then." He shivered. The stories about who he was too real.

"So I knew I had to take away his value... or catch him in the act. Somehow prove he was dirty to people who would listen...who would put him away. I started working for Scully. I needed information about Deke. If I could get it, I was a step closer...I got it. Then I had to find out who to take it too. The cops were out... New York looks out for its own, no matter the precinct. Then I heard about some FBI guys nosing around the organization. I knew that Scully had contacts, men, planted there, with the Feds. He'd know if I just waltzed in and gave them Deke. So I went high up. Weaseled my way to a man with power and conviction. I followed him around. Then one day I pulled a gun on him, started to mug him... just to make sure." Sonny laughed at the memory. A good vision clouding reality. "Hensley really kicked my ass for that. But never once did he alluded to his criminal friends in power... I thought he was clean. So I started talking him up. It took some doing, but he wanted my information.

"Then he wanted more." The dilemma he'd fought himself over. The choice he'd been forced to make. The decision that had mandated his life, lead him to the moment where he sat in Carly's hospital bed and told her the truth he'd never said out load before. "He wanted more that just Deke's pittance of a life behind bars. He was a stand-up man, one of the best I've ever known, and he asked me to keep working for Scully. If I did that he could take down men like Deke, take their power.

"I didn't want to at first. Deke was all I cared about. I could still get out. Keep my soul. Then something happened. Deke's value took a nosedive. He was killed in an alley. The bastard never suffered. At that point I was so bitter, so angry...I wanted to tear down the world." Carly watched as his fists nearly tore the thin blanket from the bed they occupied. "I'd thought it was just Deke but when I couldn't vent it at him anymore I turned it to the men like him. Dirty cops, women abusers.

"I worked for Hensley."

It was a visible weight off and then on his shoulders. A switching of burdens, of crosses to bare.

"He was the only one who knew my real identity. A few of his superiors were the only ones who knew I was there at all. Hensley was the only Fed I saw. Until... until my 18th birthday." He could vote but never had. He'd been a man long before that American benchmark.

"I took some time from Scully... said there was a girl...I'd gotten her in trouble...she had tried to take care of it without telling me. She was sick...I'd be back." A story he'd barrowed from a slum mate at Public School #84. "Then...I went to training. I became a real agent. It was a bit of a crash course and I'd known the basics from the street anyway. But the training made me more than just a fink, it made me more than just a source. It made me one of the men I'd begun to see as heroes. They fought a loosing battle but the ones who were true—men like Hensley—had such faith that in the end they'd win. I'd never been a part of something like that. Something good. Something I could be proud of."

Carly could hear it in his voice. The pride, the stature. He didn't realize it but he sat taller when he talked about it. When he said the name Hensley.

"Being a part of it had kept me from sinking into the bitterness and the wrath over Deke, over Mike. Over what happened to my mother." He shivered thinking of all the pain, Adella's pain, he'd never known.

"And that's pretty much how it went for a long time. As I got older, better at my job, I saw Hensley less and less. Got deeper and deeper undercover. Before Hensley retired—not that I thought he'd ever let them put him out to pasture—he brought in Wil. This green kid. Younger than me, skinnier, and a lot less starch than I was used too." There was a reminiscent scoff to his words.

"At first I couldn't stand him. Some punk kid I was going to have to report too... Like I didn't know what I was doing? He grew on me though. Then Hensley was gone." His voice cracked and Carly wondered if it was just the old man's retirement or had more taken him from the man she could tell adored him like a son to a father. "I'd lost my base, the stick I sort of measured every one against...especially myself." I got lost in the power for a while. I made some really dumb moves. I lost my faith, not just in God but the job.

"Wil got me back on track. Showed me I could work the organization and not be a bad ass. And there was Lilly, Stone and Brenda and Robin and Jason..." The memories flooded in with the names. The visions. The near miracles and misses. "I could care but not betray the truth to my associates. It settled the balance I needed but only for a while. I wanted out. I wanted to give Brenda that fucking picket fence." He growled, the white stake striking out at him.

"I'd forgotten what I was. My purpose, my job was to know the underworld inside out, to use that knowledge to protect, serve, all that stuff Taggert always moaned about." The irony was not lost on either of them. "If I left there was no one to replace me. How could I protect the people I'd let myself care about? And Brenda? I couldn't take her into that world. She'd proven time and again she couldn't do it. She wanted a safe life. A fucking picket fence. I couldn't have both.

"I chose.

"I threw myself into my work, into the guilt of not being able to be two things at once. It was what I thought I'd mastered. Being the bad guy but really the good guy. Even as a good guy I'd hurt the people I cared about." Sonny remembered the time on the island, the war inside, the darkness whispering that he was dirty just as he always had been and the goodness in him was a lie. "Wil told me I had to come back. I had to face my fear."

"So I did.

"And things moved merrily along," he said with much pain and irony. Then I was faced with the decision again. That fucking picket fence. Only it didn't look like a fence. Just a baby. Our baby," he took her hand instinctively and she questioned trusting his obvious pain, "and I didn't think. By the time I slowed down to think I was up to my ass. By the time I'd thought enough to save you and Michael ...I was six feet under and you were shoving me at the freakin' picket fence and the altar." i Several altars /i , they both thought. "But you were different.... You weren't Brenda. You weren't afraid of the bad man. You didn't know I was just pretending to be the bad man. You saw enough good in me to love him too. You were strong enough to accept the life that had killed Lilly, shattered Brenda, numbed me. Somehow you had enough strength left the hold me up too. So I let myself keep you. I let myself keep lying. You'd taken me on, assumed the choices I'd made as part of yourself.

"Only I lied about the choice.

"When it was time to come clean ...I don't know I was afraid you wouldn't like the clean me as much as the messy me." He said it ironically and smiled but her face looked like stone when he finally raised his eyes to look at her since he'd spoken about Deke.

"Carly?" He was worried she'd gone back into her catatonic state. She squeezed the hand he'd used to hold hers when he spoke of their first child.

"I'm sorry. But ...I can't do this."