Chapter 2
Bosco
I.
He found her in the women's washroom on the first floor, not far from the ER. She was washing her hands. Again.
"Get out," she snapped without looking up.
Bosco let the door hiss shut behind him and didn't move. He had no intention of allowing her to hide from him any longer - from him, and from everything else. The questions were flying (she had, of course, left him to deal with them) and so far he had been able to use the general confusion to his advantage to sidestep them. It wasn't easy, though. It was, in fact, almost impossible, and each minute they refused to talk dug them both in deeper. A few things would need to be straightened out between them, and straightened out fast. If anything, Faith should be the one chasing after him. He was only trying to help her here. Maybe even protect her.
Hell, he probably shouldn't even be doing that much.
Lies breed lies.
Yeah, and so they do. His Ma had been fond of that one. His Ma, who'd always trotted out her usual, almost absentminded excuses whenever Pop came home feeling mean and she appeared the next morning with bruises on her cheeks and neck. Or a puffy eye. Or if she happened to be hobbling along with one hand pressed delicately to the small of her back, as if someone had, oh, say, boxed her a few good ones in the kidneys. I tripped and fell on my way to the store. I was changing a lightbulb and I lost my balance and cracked myself a good 'un on the coffee table. And when she wasn't feeling very creative, she just fell back on the tried-and-true standby; Can you believe it - I walked into a door!
Lies breed lies.
Not much credibility behind that little piece of motherly advice. Looking back over the last eight months or so, Bosco supposed it hadn't made much of an impression on him.
Across from him, Faith paused in her washing just long enough to squeeze out a fresh - and ridiculously huge - helping of soap from the dispenser next to the sink.
Bosco stood just inside the door of the washroom and kept quiet, watching Faith go back to work on her hands, waiting to see if she would speak first. He didn't think she would; she looked pretty involved, one woman struggling with what she obviously thought should be a two-woman job. She'd washed up like this at least twice already. The first time had been in the hotel room, when the paramedics had arrived and relieved her of Cruz. She'd disappeared into the bathroom, leaving him to stammer his way through an explanation while she cleaned herself up. He supposed he could understand and forgive her that much - she had been in a mess at the time, blood and puke from head to toe. She'd been in a mess because he had left her to the mess, he'd left her to tend to Cruz all by her lonesome, and that was something he still didn't feel particularly bad about. As far as he was concerned, she'd earned the privilege.
But it seemed he had given her a bit of a complex. She'd gotten herself relatively decent in Noble's bathroom, and then she'd washed up again here at Mercy, just after they'd arrived. Now here she was, at it again. Obsessively. Her hair, tied in a neat ponytail at the beginning of the night, had come loose and was now hanging in straggly, uneven ropes. It made her look pathetic. Childlike. Waifish, even. Bosco wondered idly (and a bit sulkily) if this might be conscious and intentional on her part; here she was, just a poor little girl who got tired of being pushed around and punched out the schoolyard bully.
Oh, and now she feels bad. Aw.
Technically speaking, they shouldn't even be here at the hospital - they should be back at the Five-Five getting their asses chewed off. But he'd insisted on following the ambulance straight to Mercy, under the pretense of frantic concern for Cruz. The real reason, of course, had been to give both of them a breather, a chance to dip under the radar and think things through ... and maybe allow him to get a few answers of his own. Again, he'd taken the initiative. For her. To help her.
But coming to Mercy had only made it easier for Faith to hide from him, and he had lost what very little patience with her he'd had to start with. This might have started out as his mess - he would readily admit that - but it was now Faith's mess. He'd help her get out of it as best he could, but that was still one thing she was going to have to be clear on - it was her mess now.
Over by the sink, Faith drew another heaping handful of soap.
He waited - he'd already decided that he could wait all night. The only sound in the washroom was the running water. That, and scrub scrub scrub.
"Keep that up and you're gonna be polishing bone," he said mildly.
The feeble little joke died as soon as it hit the air, so he went silent again. After a moment she finally finished up and then looked at her hands, which were now a raw, fishbelly white.
"It's still under my fingernails," she said softly, and began to cry. She gripped the edges of the sink and leaned forward, her whole body trembling with fierce, soundless sobs. Bosco took a tentative step forward and she immediately put a warning hand up.
"Don't," she rasped. "Don't come near me, Bosco. Leave me alone."
"Faith -"
"I can't look at you."
He shrugged testily and stepped back, catching a noseful of some sweet, antiseptic smell; the handsoap she was using. The handsoap she was overusing. It was flowery and pleasant, and it made him want to puke.
Because right now, Bosco thought humorlessly, that is the smell of the shit hitting the fan.
He couldn't understand it, couldn't get his head around it at all, just couldn't make the connection between the Faith Yokas he'd known for almost ten years and what he had watched her do less than an hour before. The situation had been tense, yes, maybe even dangerous, yes, but for it to come to that ...
"Why'd you do it, Faith?" he asked softly, and he didn't like the small, helpless way it came out, more a plea than a question.
She was silent a long time, her head down, unraveling hair hanging in her eyes, still holding the edges of the sink for support. He had just decided she wasn't going to answer when she said, in almost a whisper, "I told you. I believed that Cruz was an immediate physical threat. I believed she would shoot me if I didn't hand over Noble's gun."
"Then maybe you should have handed it over!" he bit out, knowing it was the wrong thing to say and at the same time not really caring. "We'd have figured something else out!"
Faith swung around angrily. "You seem pretty damned confused, Bosco! You come to me, you tell me that you're in a bad place, you ask for my help, beg me for it. And like an idiot, I give it to you. And it puts me in a position where I have to use deadly force against another cop. Now all of a sudden it's like you're on her side again. So not only do I have to wipe up your shit, I have to remind you of why you dragged me into this in the first place!"
Bosco looked away, mouth twisting into a sneer. She was right. Of course she was right. But they were past all of that now - this was where they were now, Faith had shot Cruz and whatever he had done, whatever kind of trouble he'd gotten himself into, it still couldn't touch this. If Cruz had actually made a dangerous move, if she'd actually aimed the gun at Faith, then okay, sure, fire away ... but she hadn't. He would have shot her himself if she had, but she hadn't. And she wouldn't have, either. Cruz had been bluffing, trying to throw a scare into Faith. He'd believed that at the time, and he still believed it now. Intimidation was Cruz's style - it was the sum of her whole technique as a cop, really - and Faith should have known that. He'd drawn his own weapon with the same idea - a warning and nothing more, a way to out-bluff her. Cruz would have backed down eventually.
He'd had everything under control.
And then Faith had gone and turned it all upside-down. He couldn't figure it out, and he sure as hell couldn't forgive her for it. This was over the line, this was in an entirely new realm of -
"Alex Taylor is dead."
Bosco looked up sharply, startled out of the rat-run of his thoughts. "What?"
Faith grinned at him, a broken, malignant and mirthless grin he didn't much care for. It looked a little like the kind of grin that would have been more at home on Cruz.
"Alex. Is. Dead," she repeated, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully, as if talking to a halfwit. "Where the hell have you been the last half an hour? Don't you know what's been going on? Didn't you run into Davis yet?"
Bosco shook his head numbly.
Faith snorted. "You will. He should still be here. Told me everything. He brought her mother in earlier. It was that goddam car, Bosco, the one you and that crazy bitch were chasing this afternoon. It exploded. It was full of nitrous oxide, and it exploded. Taylor was up on top trying to help an elderly couple in one of the other cars when it blew. Davis said that it cut her pretty much right in half. And Johnson from the firehouse is up in the burn unit. He might lose his right eye. That is, if he makes it at all."
Faith's grin dissolved into a grimace of pained fury. "How does all of that strike you, Bosco? Hmm? Would you say it was worth it? You didn't even catch that guy, so would you say it was worth Taylor getting blown clear of her own legs?" Faith's voice had been rising steadily, and now, suddenly, she was screaming. "IT FUCKING CUT HER IN HALF, BOSCO! SO I'M ASKING YOU, WAS IT WORTH IT?"
He shifted uncomfortably, dimly aware that half the hospital could probably hear her, his overtaxed, exhausted brain trying to absorb what she'd just told him. He wondered if she was lying, perhaps trying to guilt him further. Yes, that made sense - that was what she was doing here, wasn't it? Trying to guilt him. Trying to turn things around on him. It wasn't enough that he'd already admitted that he was wrong - Faith had to shove his nose right down in it, make him into the bad guy, despite the fact that she was the one who had tried to kill Cruz in cold blood. She had to be lying.
But of course he knew she wasn't.
Alex Taylor. God. He tried to call up an image of her; short, blonde, bright blue eyes, a pretty, somewhat cherubic face. Rated about an eight-out-of-ten on the Maurice Boscorelli screwability scale. Not a close friend by any stretch, but an acquaintance, a colleague, a familiar face in the day-to-day background of his job.
So she was dead. Okay, very sad. Nasty way to go. And Lieutenant Johnson, that was bad, too. But what was Faith implying here - that it was in some way his fault? That it was Cruz's fault?
Of course she's implying that, idiot. Because it is your fault. And Cruz's.
So was it supposed to be their fault that Richard Buford had modified that monster of a car with nitrous? Was it their fault that Buford had abandoned it in the middle of the street and caused the accident in the first place?
You didn't call the chase off. And why not? Why, Cruz, of course! Who else? Cruz and her drive, Cruz and her personal vendettas, Cruz and her fanaticism. And you were right there next to her, feeding it, feeding off it. You almost ran over a kid, for Christ's sake, and you barely even remembered it until later. Much later.
Faith shook her head and leaned against the sink again. "You know what, Bosco? I can see that I'm still wasting my time on you. So leave. Get out."
He turned to do just that, and then paused when he realized that he'd actually come in here for a reason - and that reason still hadn't been addressed. He turned back to her and said, hesitantly, "I have to know what you want me to say."
"What?"
"I've been dodging the questions so far. Trying to give the impression ... I don't know, I've been trying to act like the whole thing was a big misunderstanding and I'm as confused as everybody else. But it isn't going over well, Faith. We're gonna have to tell them something and it's gonna have to be consistent. I'm with you, though God knows I shouldn't be. I need to know what our story is gonna be, what you want me to say."
"Just tell the truth, Bosco," she said with tired bitterness. "Think for a minute - you remember 'truth,' right?"
(Lies breed lies, Maurice)
"You fired on Cruz first," he said shortly. "You want me to tell them that?"
Faith pressed her face into her palms and moaned. "Oh God, Bosco! How many different ways do I have to say it? Cruz had drawn her weapon. Cruz was waving her weapon around in a threatening manner. I knew what she was gonna do. I had what you might call a moment of clarity, and I defended myself." She looked up at him. "I was going to get in her way. And she wasn't about to let that happen."
He studied her for a moment, astounded as much by what he was seeing as he was by the crap coming out of her mouth. Her face was pale but for two spots of high color in her cheeks. Her eyes darted furtively around the washroom, never quite meeting up with his. She had washed her face and her hands (several times, and from the way she was now twiddling her thumbs he suspected she was already itching to do it again), but her uniform had a date with the incinerator - it was a stinking horror-show mess. And there was the hair. The Amazing Disappearing Ponytail. She looked crazed, witchlike, and he realized that she was scaring him, that this woman in front of him was so alien from the Faith he knew that she was really and truly scaring him.
And being scared just pissed him off even more.
"So Cruz would have shot you with me and Noble both standing right there?" he sneered. "I suppose next you'll be saying she would have shot all three of us."
"She was absolutely gone, Bosco. Her eyes ... there wasn't anything rational going on there at all. She was going to shoot me if I didn't hand over the gun, and maybe even if I did. I don't care whether you believe that or not. I know it."
"Listen to me," he said calmly. "I once watched Cruz put a gun to a guy's crotch to scare him away from her sister. Right? My gun. She took my gun and jammed it right up in there, and I'll tell you, she sure looked like she meant business. The poor bastard on the floor thought so, too. Now think hard, Faith - do you actually think she would have blown that guy's nuts off?"
Faith shook her head. "I know I did what I had to do," she said, with a haughty, phony-sounding righteousness that made him want to slap her. "That's it."
"Who are you trying to convince?" he said, and grinned wickedly. He jabbed a finger at her chest. "Because it sounds to me like you're trying to convince yourself."
Faith's head rocked back as if he'd physically struck her. "You son of a bitch," she breathed. "You son of a bitch, you think I was trying to murder her? You think I just decided to ... to execute her because I didn't like her? Is that it?" She studied him for a moment, then said, very softly, "God, that is what you think. My God."
He opened his mouth to say something - he didn't quite know what - but Faith cut him off. "Never mind," she said, her shoulders slumped. "Just forget it. Think whatever you want, I don't care. What's your story gonna be?"
"I'll back you up," he said bitterly. "I already said I'd back you up. Cruz was an immediate threat. Cruz raised her weapon and pointed it at you. You used Noble's gun because it was quicker than using your own." He glared at her. "Okay?"
"Close enough. What about Noble?"
"Nothing's changed. He's going down."
Faith nodded wearily. "And what about Cruz?"
"What?"
"Are you gonna turn over on her?"
Ah, now there was a loaded question. If he blew the whistle on Cruz, it would destroy her. He thought he might be able to live with that. It also might destroy him. That, needless to say, was a bit tougher to live with. But worst of all, it would mean that every case Cruz had ever gotten a conviction on - cases she'd worked on with him and God only knew how many before - would be brought into question. Gangbangers and drug dealers and various assorted jagoffs who didn't have the right to breathe the same air as everyone else could - would - be let loose.
That might be too much to live with.
But how many are really guilty? How many are Stevies?
He forced himself to think of Stevie Nunez, of how Cruz had thought nothing - nothing! - of framing the poor little bastard for murder ... and he'd be a fool to think that Nunez was in any way unique. He thought of Noble's notebook, of some of the things he'd seen in there. Some of the things she'd done. Two-Bags Cruz, blackmailing the dealers by using their own drugs against them, cutting corners wherever she saw fit. Making things up as she went along, things like evidence, confessions, dying declarations, rules, whatever. And it was not so much what she did that shocked him, but the recklessness of it. She was always just one small step ahead of the truth, layering lie upon lie upon lie.
And lies, as Bosco well knew, bred lies. Cruz had spent years tempting fate, almost daring it all to fall apart on her.
Tonight it finally had.
"I'm gonna tell them everything," he said at last, the words heavy and acrid in his mouth. "I'm gonna tell them about what she's been doing. Everything. All of it." Faith was looking at him now, and at last there was something approximating surprise on her face. "Yeah, I know what it means, Faith. My ass will be hanging out in the wind right along with hers. It's only right. It's gotta be over, it's gotta end. Right now."
Faith sighed again and looked contemplatively into the mirror above the sink.
"So, what?" she said after a moment, addressing her reflection. "So, I'm supposed to be all impressed now? Impressed at how the little boy finally grew up and decided to take responsibility?"
Bosco threw his hands up angrily. "Oh, fuck it. I don't know what you want me to do, Yokas. Crawl around on my goddam knees, maybe."
Faith only shrugged, indifferent. "Do you know how she's doing?"
"That's where I've been for the last half hour. Trying to find out how bad she is. That's been my big excuse. 'Can't talk now, gotta see how 'Ritza's doin'.'"
"And?"
He shrugged. "Her shoulder's a mess. Pulverized, by the sound of it. Noble's gun was loaded with dumdums." He paused, eyeing her. Then, on impulse, he added: "I heard ... well, I guess at first they thought she might lose the arm. That they might have to amputate."
Faith flinched, something Bosco found rather satisfying. He'd actually heard no such thing. But let her squirm, right? Let her squirm.
Then something came back on him unbidden, as if to punish him for taking pleasure in Faith's guilt and discomfort: the memory of Cruz being hustled away by the paramedics, swimming upstream towards consciousness, muttering and hissing and thrashing, trying to tear off the oxygen mask they'd put on her. And there had been one moment when she'd gotten the mask off and clearly - very clearly - screamed her dead sister's name in a cracked, agonized voice, a kind of primal howl that had been utterly unlike anything he would have ever expected to hear out of Cruz, something that had made him want to curl up in a corner of the hotel room and put his hands over his head.
Her sister. Letitia Cruz, who had been an almost perfect parallel of his own drug addict brother Michael. Letitia Cruz, who as far as Bosco knew had been Maritza Cruz's last living relative, now dead of a lethal methamphetamine overdose.
That had been a big part of what had held him to her, hadn't it? Not the only part, not the main part (there was none), but a big part of it. In a shameful, selfish way he'd been almost ecstatic when he learned that they shared that common experience - a sibling who was a self-destructive failure, a constant ball-and-chain around the ankle and a constant weight on the mind. On the heart. And when Lettie died, he had been there for her. Oh, you bet he had. If you wanted to be really crude about it, you could say that he and Cruz had ended up in bed together over Lettie's dead body, and the sex had only deepened what he had falsely assumed was a bond between them. A bond that would only add to the sense of righteousness he always felt when he was with her, that sense of righteousness he'd never gotten when he was with Faith. Cruz had wanted justice for her sister, she'd wanted revenge, and he'd wanted to help her get it.
But he'd wanted to do it right, and even after having known Cruz for eight months he had been stupid enough to believe that she would actually impose limits on herself, on how far she was willing to go.
He should have put an end to this a long time ago, should have wised up to what Cruz really was. He was still disgusted by what Faith had done, it never should have gone to such an extreme ... but when you came right down to it, it never should have been allowed to get to such an extreme, should it? He could have put an end to it, and yet he had chosen not to. For all the usual Boscorelli reasons, of course; righteous pride, bull-headed stubbornness, misplaced loyalty, and - of course - sex.
Faith put a hand to her stomach and groaned softly. "I'm pretty sure I'm gonna throw up, Bosco. I don't want you here when I do. Get out. For the last time, just get out."
He thought of perhaps a dozen more things he could say, dismissed them all almost immediately, and started for the door. Conversation over. They'd gotten their shit together, and now they were finished here.
In more ways than one, they were finished here.