Chapter 5 Continued

II.

The cab ride was bad.

She had no money, of course. She would have to go into her apartment, get money to pay the cabbie, and come back out. That meant time, effort, and more pain. But that wasn't what was bothering her at the moment. A new, much more troubling question had occurred to her, just after she'd gotten into the taxi.

Would her apartment still be there?

Or, to put it somewhat less dramatically, would the police have been there? Would they perhaps be there right now? If IAB had been gunning for her, if it was as big as Schaeffer said it was, then surely they would have gotten a warrant for her apartment.

If they searched her apartment, she was finished for sure. There was a lot for them to find there. A lot.

Cruz put her head back against the seat, pulling the hospital robe more tightly around herself. The new questions just kept piling up, one on top of the other, and she was sick of dealing with each new problem as it presented itself. And yet there was almost a sense (and it was bittersweet, she had to admit) that the problems would take care of themselves; after leaving the hospital she had walked, and walked, and walked, every step of the way convinced that the next step would be the last. Had to be the last. A woman shuffling along in a cream-colored hospital bathrobe and slippers, barely able to stay upright ... even in New York that was hard to ignore. Someone would take notice and become suspicious. At any moment someone would shout, the rookie cop would grab her from behind, someone would stop her and ask what was wrong. Something. Something to bring on the end, and then at last she would be able to lie down and sleep.

But she made it out of Mercy's parking lot and onto the street without meeting any resistance. By the time the rain started up she'd made it to the end of the block. No-one grabbed her. No-one shouted stop that woman. No-one took any notice of her at all. And yet her luck seemed to have run out all the same, because she had been unable to find a cab. By then she'd decided that flagging down a taxi probably was the only logical conclusion to her fuzzy little escape plan ... but when the time came to put it into action there wasn't a taxi in sight. In New York. On a normal day you couldn't look around without seeing at least two, and the Mercy area certainly should have been crawling with them ... and yet Cruz still hadn't been able to see even one of those distinctive canary-yellow paint-jobs. Anywhere.

In a way, she'd been relieved.

And then a cab had found her.

It was as if it had been sent by God. The taxi had pulled up short at the curb next to her with an alarming squeal of brakes and peeling rubber, the driver honking the horn at her in a jaunty little shave-and-a-haircut rhythm. He'd just finished offloading a passenger at the hospital's rear entrance. On his way out, he'd caught sight of her, and decided that if anyone looked like they were in life-and-death need of a ride, it was her.

Her knight in shining yellow armor.

Now here she was, on her way home. On her way home and safe from the rain, which was now beating steadily against the windows and the roof of the car. The problems really did seem to be solving themselves, and it had all become so surreal now that part of her was almost tempted to believe it really was a dream, that she was still in her bed at Mercy, grinning in her sleep as she lived her impossible escape in her head. At the same time she was coming to believe that whatever had allowed her to get this far - luck, divine intervention, her will to survive, perhaps all three - could not be allowed to go to waste. She would keep going until someone or something stopped her. If Schaeffer's rats were at her apartment, then they were there and that was her fortune.

After all - whatever happened, happened.

Her serenity had returned, it seemed. Or maybe it was just exhaustion.

"Ain't this just a shit of a day?" the cabbie said mildly.

Cruz winced and made no reply. He was her savior and she thanked God for him (at least, she thought she did), but she was in no mood for New York Cabbie small-talk.

"Supposed to get this weather all week," he continued. "Ain't that a bitch."

"Mmm-hmm."

"You really don't look so good," he said after a moment. "Don't sound so good, either. You sure you should be out of the hospital? Looks to me like you could use another couple of days. If you don't mind my saying."

"It's cool."

"Didn't have nobody to come pick you up?" Cruz looked up and saw him smiling in the rearview mirror. Her knight in shining yellow armor was fiftyish, heavyset, and looked like a hipster grandfather going for the ZZ Top look and not quite pulling it off. He had a thick silver-white beard that went halfway down his chest, and he was wearing a pair of slick wraparound sunglasses that probably cut his vision by about fifty percent in this weather. A baseball cap was perched ridiculously high on his head. "Pretty gal like you has gotta have a boyfriend at least, right?"

Cruz found the idea that she could appear pretty in her current state mildly amusing. Then, for no reason at all, she thought of Boscorelli. The back-stabbing prick was the closest thing she'd had to a "boyfriend" in the past year, and her only lay in almost as long. That was pathetic as well as funny. "No," she said tightly. "Nobody."

"And they really just gave you that robe to wear outside? That's all? On a day like this?"

"Yeah."

The cabbie whistled. "God-damn! That's the state of the world today, isn't it? The state of healthcare. They don't give a shit about you. Don't give a shit about people. They just cut you loose and tell you not to let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."

Cruz smiled faintly. "Right."

"Me, I had a little accident with a bandsaw, about three years ago," He held up his right hand. The index finger was gone to the second knuckle. "So I know what you're talking about. I tell ya, I sat in the fuckin' ER for two hours, waiting. No word of a lie; two - damned - hours, bleeding like a stuck pig. They just don't give a rat's ass anymore!"

"They don't," Cruz rasped wearily, desperately wishing he'd shut up. There was a hot, rotten ache starting up between her temples. Her tongue, bitten twice and bitten hard, throbbed in time with it.

"So what'd you do?" the cabbie said. "I mean, what were you in for? If you don't mind telling me."

(Give me the damned gun so I can get back to doing my job)

"Broke my shoulder," Cruz murmured, and in her mind she saw it all again: Yokas holding out Noble's pistol, as if she was finally ready to be a good little girl and hand it over ... and then Yokas reverses it, reverses it and then shoots her with it. She'd really done that, hadn't she? Right out of the blue, she'd made the last move Cruz would ever have expected her to make. She would have been less surprised if Bosco had shot her, but it had been Yokas. Yokas, who was always so fucking superior.

And they never even should have been there in that room. Never. That was the hell of it. They'd had no business being in that room, they'd had no right to be in that room. Neither of them. Boscorelli was bad enough, going all bleeding-heart over Nunez, Nunez for Christ's sake, a fucking street skell who would probably finish up an irrelevant John Doe overdose within the next two years ... but then you had Yokas, that high-box bitch Yokas, sticking her nose into business that was none of her concern and way over her head anyway. And when Cruz comes in to try to put a stop to it, when Cruz issues a subordinate officer with a direct order, Yokas responds by trying to murder her.

Yokas had tried to murder her.

It's a common assumption that people don't retain the details of any kind of violent trauma. I remember everything until my car hit the guardrail - that was how the story usually went. It was a defense mechanism. Some prissy little censor in the brain steps in and blocks the experience from repeating on the conscious mind. Cruz thought her censor must have fallen asleep at the switch, however, because the run of her memory went right past the shot itself. She remembered it all: the sledgehammer impact of the bullet, warm blood spattering against the side of her face - her own blood. Then the pain, the disbelief and fury that had set in immediately alongside something new and awful: a raw, animal terror, unlike anything she'd ever felt on the job before. Yokas was trying to kill her. Yokas was not trying to talk her way out of the room, she was not hiding behind Boscorelli or making hollow threats to arrest Noble or Cruz or both. Yokas was trying to kill her.

But that wasn't even half of what had really terrified her. What had terrified her was not having picked up any warning signs beforehand. None whatsoever. Something had happened that she had not been able to anticipate, and the script had been rewritten out from under her. She had misjudged. She had miscalculated.

And she had lost control.

"Doing what?" the cabbie pressed.

Cruz didn't answer him. She squeezed her eyes closed, feeling hot tears slip down her cheeks, and in that moment, listening to the rain battering the roof of the car, she was suddenly overcome by the blackest despair she had ever known. The reality of where she was and what had happened to her - until now acknowledged only in the most detached, matter-of-fact way - suddenly crashed into perspective. It was truly gone. All gone. She hadn't just lost control - it seemed that over the course of the last few months she had lost everything, beginning with Lettie and finishing up here. Lettie was dead, and now most of her own life had been blasted away as well, her career snatched out from under her, its every victory, every achievement erased. Her life was over. Her life.

And what little she had left would be spent crippled.

Oh, God damn you, Yokas. God damn you forever.

"You don't want to tell me, it's okay," the cabbie said mildly. His tone suggested he might like to hear it anyway.

"Football," Cruz said. It was the first thing that popped into her mind and it was ridiculous, but it was an answer and therefore apt to shut him up. She laughed thinly. Her abused and battered tongue now felt like it had swollen to roughly the size of a tennis ball (and had about the same texture), and it was adding a weird furriness to everything she said. It made her sound mildly drunk.

"Football!" the cabbie exclaimed, and chuckled. "Well, that's kinda neat. Women play all kinds of full-contact sports these days. To each their own is what I say. Here were are. Three-twelve, right?"

The car slowed and then settled over to the curb. Cruz opened her eyes and looked out the window, her heart speeding up, the melancholy dissolving instantly as her danger-sense kicked into gear. She would have time to dwell on her fate later. Lots of it. Right now she was home ...

... and everything looked perfectly benign. No police cruisers, nothing that looked like an unmarked car. No activity around her building that might suggest a search was being conducted.

Doesn't mean they weren't already here. Yesterday, maybe.

"That'll be five bucks even," the cabbie said. He turned and smiled at her around the attempted ZZ Top beard, sliding his shades down to the tip his nose in an exaggerated, wry gesture, as if checking her over. His breath was a hot mix of hotdogs and onions. "Guess what? I'm gonna cut you a break, 'cuz you're all banged up with only that shitty robe to keep the rain off you and nobody to call on. In fact, there's an umbrella under the back seat, just behind your legs there. You can have it, if you want. My good deed for the day."

Cruz smiled wanly. "Thanks. I'll have to go inside and get the money."

"Not going anywhere." The cabbie grinned again. "Hey, you be careful playing football from now on, hear?"

Cruz nodded absently and gingerly extracted herself from the back of the cab, ignoring the proffered umbrella. The rain immediately struck her in the face, cold and harsh.

Shivering, hair quickly becoming soaked into damp strings, she hobbled up the front steps of her building and pressed the buzzer for the superintendent's apartment. Here, it seemed, was another problem - she had no keys.

The super was Claudia Cortez, a stooped, wizened little woman of about seventy with very little English. She was a tough little nut, though, stronger than her years and her crooked posture would suggest and easily up to her job; she buzzed around the building with tireless efficiency, janitor, plumber and electrician all rolled into one little pulsing dynamo. Cruz had watched her fling bags of garbage twice her size around like pillows, and she could repair just about any household appliance in the time it would take most handymen to write up the bill.

Cruz also counted her as one of the few people she truly liked and respected; they went to the same church, and occasionally they would have tea together afterwards. Sometimes in her own apartment, but more often in Claudia's; Claudia liked playing hostess to her. It was the cop thing. Having a living, breathing hero eating and sleeping right above your head, a tenant in your own building ... that, as Claudia often reminded her, was not something you took lightly. Cruz responded with just the right amount of surface modesty, but she had no qualms about accepting praise ... even if it was a bit on the exalted side. Why not? Claudia was a woman after her own heart. Hero-worship notwithstanding, they were equals, and during their little get-togethers Cruz knew she could sound much like an old woman herself; their discussions always had the morose, conclusive gloominess that seems to turn up most frequently in the elderly. How the whole world was going to hell head-first, and how they all had front-row seats right here in the neighborhood. Cruz shared stories of her experiences on the job (albeit with a few details prudently edited out), and she knew it was not just simple, vapid politeness when Claudia nodded her head and agreed. Claudia understood. That was what Cruz enjoyed about her company. She had found someone, someone outside the job, who understood.

But Claudia backed up her cynicism with a wry, witty humor that Cruz couldn't touch, and though she saw Cruz as both a hero and a live-in security measure, it didn't stop her from periodically trying to convince her to quit the NYPD, find a nice man with a good job, and start cranking out kids. She was a product of her generation that way, and she didn't want to see Cruz get hurt. And she was a woman of immeasurable kindness and generosity; it was Claudia who had helped make Lettie's funeral arrangements, Claudia who had gone with her to the service (just to swell the number of mourners from a pitiful two to a slightly less pitiful three - the third had been Boscorelli, looking pinched and uncomfortable throughout the entire service), Claudia who had offered a shoulder for her to cry on afterwards.

Cruz suddenly felt ashamed. Just by being here, she was getting Claudia involved in her mess.

And what was she going to think? There was another question. What was Claudia going to think when the whole story came out in the wash?

Maybe it already has.

Cruz felt her stomach tighten. It was a distinct possibility, wasn't it? The Melrose shootout would have made the news. Anti-Crime's takedown, on the other hand ... she supposed that depended on how quick on the draw the Department's PR people were. They'd do their damndest to keep a lid on as much of it as possible, but there was the Schaeffer factor to consider. From the way he'd treated her in the hospital - the snide little jokes, the sarcastic remarks, his assertion that she should have been flash-fried instead of the firefighter - the detective struck her as a man who ached for the spotlight. She wouldn't put it past him to leak the story himself. He'd probably see it as a necessary evil, bad publicity to force changes in policy. He was too much like Noble that way.

She thought of the cabbie. The cabbie with the waterfall of funky-grandpa beard hanging from his face, tipping his shades down low on his nose and peering over them, as if to get a better look at the overall package (such as it was). But maybe it wasn't her rack he was looking at. Maybe he was just playing it cool, confirming to himself that yes, he did indeed have one slightly battered, thoroughly exhausted, and now very famous ex-cop in the back seat of his cab. He might call the police as soon as he left. Might be doing it right now, at that.

Cruz cast an uneasy glance over her shoulder. Through the rain the cab wasn't much more than a yellow blur, and she couldn't make out even the vaguest hint of the man behind the wheel. He was still down there, waiting for his five bucks ... but what was he doing down there?

And how was Claudia going to react? If she'd seen something, if she'd heard something, how would she react?

There wasn't much to do about it now - the buzzer was on its second ring. Halfway through the third there was a click.

Then Claudia's voice, in polite, clipped Spanish: "Yes? Who is it?"

Cruz croaked her name into the intercom, leaning her good shoulder against the door and closing her eyes against her headache, which seemed to be worsening incrementally by the second. She added, in Spanish: "I'm sorry, I don't have my key."

No reply. Just another click as Claudia hung up the phone.

Cruz was left waiting in the rain, nonplussed. Was she coming to let her in or not? Had they been cut off? Some fault in the intercom?

Or was Claudia already back on the horn? This time with the cops. Get her a dispatcher who could speak Spanish and she'd be off to the races - Hello, police? About that corrupt sergeant ... yes, the one on the news ... well, she's a tenant in my building ... and it seems she just showed up at my door.

Would Claudia do that? Would she really?

Cruz didn't know.

Twenty seconds rolled by. Felt more like sixty. Cruz rocked from one foot to the other as the rain hammered at her. She was about to reach for the buzzer again when she heard a door open somewhere inside. There was a sound that might have been approaching footsteps and then there was Claudia, her face floating uncertainly behind the little safety-meshed window in the door. But she wasn't making any move to open up; apparently she wasn't quite sure if the woman on the other end of the intercom really was who she said she was. Cruz could see her squinting distrustfully out through the rain, and it was another heartbeat or two of standing in the downpour before recognition finally flashed.

Recognition that quickly turned to shock.

"Maritza!" Claudia exclaimed, throwing the door open and beckoning the soaked, bedraggled and shivering Cruz into the hall. "My God, what happened to you?"

"That is a very long story," Cruz said faintly, again responding in Spanish, the language feeling strangely alien and unfamiliar in her mouth. She shuffled past Claudia and into the hall, a little surprised at how enormously grateful she felt just to be out of the rain again. It was warm in here. Warm and familiar. The super's apartment was located just inside and to the left of the little foyer that served as the building's lobby; Cruz could hear the reedy, hopelessly dated theme-music of The Price is Right, that immortal staple of daytime viewing, coming from inside.

Claudia had just been sitting down to lunch, then. Claudia had gotten out of bed this morning expecting a routine day, start to finish, no more and no less. She had not expected Maritza Cruz to come dragging up to her door looking like six kinds of death.

Cruz heard the doors close behind her and turned.

The initial shock seemed to have worn off - the little woman was now looking at her with an expression that was close to outright horror.

"Maritza?" Claudia repeated softly. Her eyes were as big as saucers. "Are you hurt? You look hurt ... my God ..."

"No ... yes." Cruz shook her head to clear it. It didn't work. Just made things feel worse. "I just ... I just got out of the hospital ..."

"What's wrong with your arm?" The old woman stepped forward and reached for her. "Why do you stand like that? Maritza, please tell me what happ - "

"I'm all right," Cruz cut her off, flinching away from the touch. "It's just ... I ... I don't have my keys ..."

"I'll get you mine," Claudia said immediately, and retreated into her apartment. Cruz stood in the doorway, brushing her dripping hair out of her eyes and trying to control the shivering. She was freezing, and that was no surprise considering she was one thin bathrobe and a soaked hospital gown away from naked, but it seemed to have deepened into a heavy, unsettling cold that went all the way to the center of her body. She was shivering like a wet puppy and she couldn't stop. And her head still hurt. Her head still hurt, her tongue still hurt, and now her shoulder was coming alive again - the pain seemed to come and go in long, sweeping arcs.

"You can get it back to me whenever you feel up to it," the old woman said when she reappeared with the key. Then she paused. Horror seemed to have become a stout kind of worry; Claudia was now eyeing her with the shrewd concern of a mother. "It was that job of yours."

It wasn't a question. It was, in fact, almost an accusation. Cruz only nodded, turning the key over in her hand, staring down at it without seeing it. There was still the heady sense that all of this was make-believe, just some morphine-induced dream enjoyed from the comfortable prison of her hospital bed.

"Oh, Maritza, I wish you'd quit that job! I know you mean well, and I thank you for what you do, but I worry about you so much! Please, come in for some tea."

"No," Cruz said hastily. She seemed unable to raise her head to meet Claudia's eyes, her gaze still rooted to the key. "No, really, thank you anyway, but I really need to get upstairs and lie down. It's ... it's been a bad week." She blinked at that, then uttered an odd, barking little laugh. Bad week. Came from the same place as telling the cabbie she'd broken her shoulder playing football. As good a way as any to describe the complete ruin of your life. Bad week.

"Of course," Claudia said, still giving her the long-suffering mom look. Then, before Cruz had time to react, her hand came out and snagged a swatch of bathrobe. She pinched the flimsy and sopping wet material between her thumb and forefinger and shook it gently. "Look at this," the old woman said disdainfully. "Look. This is how they send you out into the world, is it?" She let go of the robe, shaking her head, and now it almost looked like she was going to cry. "I'm so sorry, Maritza. You deserve so much better than this."

Claudia moved forward abruptly, arms open, ready to embrace.

Cruz shrank away. "No ... please ... I can't ..." Her voice had become thick and clotted, and it was no longer just because of her tongue - she was very near tears now herself. For herself, and for this innocent kindness. Claudia didn't know. Claudia had no idea that she was standing here next to a fugitive. Beyond her daily half-hour visits with Bob Barker, Cruz didn't think the little woman watched much television anyway. Too depressing. Even the professional cynics have to take a break once in a while.

She wondered if Claudia would still treat her like this if she knew. If she knew the truth. Cruz wanted to say something to her, but she was afraid to. She knew that in all likelihood she would never see Claudia Cortez again and she wanted to say something, she wanted to tell Claudia that she never meant for her to be touched by this, hurt by it, that she thanked her for all the afternoons they'd spent together, that she thanked her for helping her with Lettie's funeral, for helping her through what came after, that she was the closest thing she had in her life to a friend and that she never meant for her to be hurt by this.

But all she could manage was: "My shoulder ... it's my shoulder ... I hurt my shoulder ... "

Claudia nodded and stepped back, looking a bit sheepish. "Oh! Oh, of course, I'm sorry ... If there's anything I can do to help ..."

The cab.

"My taxi's waiting outside," Cruz said, wanting only to be away from here, wanting none of this to have ever happened, wanting none of it to be happening. "He wants five dollars. I'll pay you back if you could ..."

"Absolutely!" Claudia said immediately. "Now get yourself to bed, get a hot water bottle in there with you - you'll catch your death if you stand here like this much longer. And please, Maritza, think about what I said, eh?"

The old woman smiled innocently. "No job is worth this kind of pain."