Chapter 5 Continued
III.
She found her apartment just as she'd left it, and there was never any reason to believe otherwise. The police hadn't been here at all.
She got the door closed behind her, wove a staggering, drunken path across the room, and collapsed into the first chair she came to. Her head was pounding, her tongue was throbbing, her shoulder was molten fire, and the only emotion left in her was a curdled mix of rage, misery, self-hatred, self-pity, and desperate confusion. The room spun crazily around her, and she was trembling so badly that it felt as if at any moment she would simply fly apart.
And through it all, her mind was screeching the same pointless idiot litany over and over; how had this happened, how had she gotten here, how could things change so quickly, so completely? At the beginning of the week (a bad week) she had been Sergeant Maritza Cruz, Anti-Crime, badge number 02334. Aaron Noble had been securely wedged under her thumb. She had been on the path to avenging Lettie and ridding the world of Rick Buford forever. Boscorelli had been both her star and her safety net. Everything had been under control.
Under control? a voice sneered somewhere from the deepening mire of delirium - not her father this time but rather something she thought might be the last remnant of the Anti-Crime Sergeant. Are you serious? Noble was a pigheaded junkie who almost blew a sting by snorting meth along with the suspects. Then he goes and shoots one of them and makes a complete balls-up of everything you'd worked so hard to set in motion. And Boscorelli ... the whole time Boscorelli was growing himself a nice little conscience, wasn't he? And you never saw any of it. It was all coming apart at the seams long before Yokas put that bullet in you, long before you ever set foot in that hotel room, and you never fucking saw any of it coming.
"Stop it," she croaked aloud, and the voice in her head immediately went silent. What shut it up was mostly shock - shock at the strangled little moan that she heard issue from her own throat. She had to keep it together. She was losing her grip. She had to focus.
Focus.
Focus.
Her heart was running wild again, and the room was still spinning. Cruz leaned forward in the chair and clutched herself around her middle with her good arm, squeezing her eyes closed. That took care of the dizziness, but she couldn't get a handle on the shivering - just couldn't. She couldn't get warm. Her teeth clacked in her head, audibly and almost ridiculously; a child's pantomime of extreme fear. And the thudding between her temples had taken on a jagged, grating quality, like someone hitting a sack full of sheet metal with an iron bar.
Focus.
It's over, her Papa said soothingly, and she could almost feel him stroking her hair as he said it, the way he would when she was very small, always starting at the crown and running his fingers through it all the way down to where it stopped at her shoulder blades. It's all over. You hit the wall. You said you'd keep going until you hit the wall. And here you are.
No. Focus.
This is how it ends, Maritza. This is where you finish up.
No. No. This was not where she was going to finish up, oh no sir, not curled up dead of exhaustion or exposure on the floor of her own apartment, it was not going to end like that, not after everything she'd gone through today, not after everything she'd ever fucking gone through. Not after Boscorelli and Yokas and Schaeffer and what they'd done to her. Not after Richard Buford, not after he'd slithered through her fingers when she'd been so close to him, not while he was still walking around a free man.
Here we are. Buford again. Always Buford. Always back to Buford.
Yes. Back to Buford.
Cruz brought his face into sharp focus in her mind. She had never actually seen Richard Buford's face - she had gotten only a brief glimpse of an indistinct sillouette through the window of his car - but she could see his face all the same. In her mind Buford had become a kind of amalgam built out of the people associated with him - a touch of Willie Griffin, a heavy dose of Aaron Noble, and a generous helping of Gary "Animal" Barnes, the dealer who sold Lettie her last hit and the man who blew up the meth lab where Lettie died. When it came right down to it, Barnes was probably a lot more responsible for Lettie's death than Buford, but that hardly mattered to Cruz. Barnes was nothing. Barnes was just an appendage - Buford was the source. You could almost say Buford was Barnes - he was Barnes and he was every other Disciple and he was every other drug dealer she'd ever locked up or would ever lock up.
Buford was her purpose now. Barnes didn't matter. Schaeffer didn't matter. Yokas and Boscorelli didn't matter. There was only Buford, she hadn't forgotten him, and she wasn't about to, either. Why else had she done this, why else had she pushed herself so far and so hard? Escape didn't matter to her. Merely being free didn't matter to her. Why should it? What did she have left? Nothing. Absolutely fuck-all nothing. Nada, to use her hereditary tongue. She had no intention of trying to hide, of trying to go underground like a character in a bad spy movie. No new identities or plastic surgery or any of that kind of dreck. No slinking away in defeat. There were loose ends that needed tying up, and she was the one who had to see it through.
Focus.
Still holding herself around her midsection, Cruz began to rock gently in the chair, back and forth, forcing her breathing into a slow, even rhythm. The only sound in the apartment was the soft patter of rain against the window. Her mind seized on it, concentrating on that sound and that alone, clearing her mind. She rocked, forward, backward, in time with each breath.
Focus, yes. She would focus. She would savor the pain. She would keep savoring the pain. She would wrap her legs around the pain and she would fuck it. Cruz smiled at this crude little metaphor and snorted soft, huffing laughter ... then quickly admonished herself to keep her mind clear. To keep it focused. That was always what she'd told Boscorelli, wasn't it? Focus, Bosco. That was what she always told any partner or underling whenever they started getting all jittery and weak-sister on her. Focus. Cut through the chaff and make yourself see what was really important.
High time she started living by her own advice.
She breathed.
Rocked.
Breathed.
Rocked.
They couldn't beat her. They had tried and tried, they had started right from the Academy, but they could never beat her, and they still couldn't.
She breathed.
Five minutes went by. Five minutes became ten. Ten became fifteen. The shivering lessened, then trailed off into nothing. The storm in her head started to gradually subside. And she was starting to warm up.
She opened her eyes and looked around at where she'd ended up.
Home.
She was home. Her eyes traced the lines of the apartment, marking it all, again marvelling at how untouched everything was. She had moved here four years ago, and in the time since she thought she had done a good job of making the place her own; the result was simple and cozy and, in her own secret opinion, tastefully feminine. The furniture was sparse and functional without looking too bleak, the lighting soft and warm and earthy. A faux-fireplace dominated the west corner of the living room, its mantle lined with framed photographs. Next to that was her stereo rig, a decent little setup with a five-disc CD changer. It was here that she spent most of her idle moments; she had about as much interest in television as Claudia, preferring to sit in her low-slung (and deceptively uncomfortable-looking) canvas chair with her headphones on, letting the changer run methodically from one disc to the next, letting the hours melt away and the apartment grow dark around her.
She also had an impressive collection of paintings; they hung on just about every wall, from hall to living room to kitchen. They were mostly cheap dollar-store stuff, perhaps not art, but they were tasteful and unpretentious and she enjoyed them. Most were landscapes. Beaches. She liked beaches. Not the man-made variety, but rather the rough, chaotic edges of natural inlets and coves; waves crashing against rocks at the foot of towering cliffs, with perhaps a sea-bird or two for a sense of scale. Remote places, places where nothing could be seen of human encroachment or human invention. Places where you could go and find not so much as a bottle cap. Cruz knew that most people would see absolutely nothing profound in that, but she did - a dyed-in-the-wool city-girl, she had been fascinated by such scenes since she was a small child.
The photographs on the mantle, however, were slightly less fanciful, and it was hardly surprising that most were of her sister. After Lettie's death Cruz had taken out and framed a number of childhood photos, all carefully selected to reflect only the best times (fictional as they often seemed to her now). Lettie in her First Communion dress; Lettie proudly showing off the gap where her first lost baby-tooth had resided; an adolescent Maritza reading to her from a tattered and much-loved book as the two of them sat on Lettie's bed. The book was probably something by Dr. Seuss; Cat in the Hat or Hop on Pop or maybe Lettie's all-time favorite, Green Eggs 'n Ham. Their father had been adamant that his daughters be fluent in both English and Spanish, but Lettie had been slow to warm to English. Maritza, in a burst of inspiration, had gone to the library and loaded up on the good doctor's works, believing the bubbly sing-song rhythmns and rhymes would spark Lettie's interest in the language. And she had been right - Lettie had devoured the books with her usual rabid enthusiasm.
At first, Cruz's reasons for putting these pictures of happier days on display had been no less than a sullen attempt at self-torture; every time she passed through the room she would have to see them, she would have to see and she would have to remember. The mistakes that were made. The opportunities that were missed. What she might have done differently to set Lettie on a different path. Apparently losing sleep over these things had not been enough for her - she had felt the need to grind some fresh salt into the wounds in her waking hours as well.
But it had backfired, and quite neatly at that - Cruz discovered that she could look at the photos exactly the way one is supposed to see such things, with sadness but also with real pleasure, almost as if she were trying to spite herself and her mawkish need to indulge her own guilt. Because this place was her safety net. She didn't come here to brood - she came here to escape from the job and, to a certain extent, from her own self. Despite a succession of transitory lovers she'd had over the years (and the occassional visit from Claudia), Cruz was at heart a solitary person and her pleasures were solitary, enjoyed in private, almost in secret, as if her identity outside of her work was something to be held close to her chest, protected.
She cooked, using recipes her mother had passed down to her. (Her mother, God rest her, had believed they would be put to good use when Maritza married and settled down to raise a brood.) She was a mediocre chef, but she indulged herself happily and rarely cooked for anyone else. She liked to sing - she was marginally aware that she possessed a remarkable voice - but never did so unless the apartment was empty. Her pleasures were hers and hers alone, and even during the times when she had a man in her bed she could be intensely private; when Bosco had gone snooping through her things looking for Noble's notebook, she had been ready to cut all ties with him right then and there. And she would have, even if none of what followed ever happened.
This was her place.
Now, though, the warm familiarity of the apartment only conflicted with the reality of her situation in a way that felt decidedly bizarre; in a weird way it was like sitting in her own tomb. Her life was over ... and yet here she was, home sweet home. So strange. Such a strange progression. First the street outside the hospital, dragging herself along, expecting to be stopped at any moment. Then the cab. Then here. There had been no thought at all - she'd gotten into the taxi and promptly given the cabbie her address. Cruz supposed it was an instinct as old as humanity itself; when you were hurt, you crawled back home to lick your wounds.
Or die.
Or die, yes.
But that wasn't going to happen. Not yet.
She had to resume the chase, pick up right where she'd left off. Right where she'd been cut off. The bitch Yokas and the back-stabbing cabron Boscorelli and the rat-bastard Schaeffer had put her in this place, but they were no longer what was important. The chase was important. Going after Buford. And that was exactly what she was going to do. Rick Buford was still a dead man walking.
Cruz waited for her father to offer an opinion on the matter. But Papa, it seemed, was staying quiet on this one. Because it could be done. And the reason it could be done was simple: for all that had changed in the past week, there was one thing that remained constant - that famed and acclaimed wordsmith, Aaron Noble. Aaron Noble, who was quite possibly one of about ten people in the entire country who knew where Buford was. Or at least knew how to find him.
Long shot, yes. Very long shot. But if she had any reasonable hope left of picking up Buford's trail, it would be through the writer. She believed it could be done. Theoretically. If what Schaeffer had said was true - and it probably was - Noble would be out of jail, and he would probably still be in the city. They'd want him to stick around, and Noble would be more than happy to oblige, if only for the pleasure of testifying against her. He'd be in New York, and Cruz had made it a point to learn everything about him, including his favorite haunts and habits. So theoretically, she could find him. And theoretically, she could force him to lead her to Buford.
At this the Voice of Doubt spoke up.
You're talking nonsense again, Maritza. This is all nonsense. Buford's in the wind. He spent years dodging the FBI; the idea of a one-armed woman with a grudge tracking him down is beyond the ridiculous - to think in such a way is lunacy. He's gone, out of your reach forever. Probably back in Los Angeles or even further away. And Noble ... Noble would be no help to you anyway - the Disciples want him dead.
That was true, but Noble wouldn't stay on the outs with Buford's boys. His new book was supposed to have an entire chapter on Buford, and Noble wasn't the type to let a tasty journalistic morsel like that go to waste. He would weasel his way back into their good graces to save his goddam book. She was sure of it.
Gathering herself, Cruz tried to stand up. It took two tries before she succeeded, but once she was up on her feet she found she was much steadier now than she'd been when she came in. Smiling, she tottered into her bedroom.
Again there wasn't a hair out of place, and again she was struck by that eerie sense of disassociation, of walking through the empty and defunct museum of her own life. A tomb, yes, that was definitely the vibe here. One of those archaeological digs you sometimes read about where everything was frozen in one eternal moment by some unthinkable catastrophe. The New York Yankees T-shirt she had worn to bed the last night she slept here was still draped over the top of the clothes hamper in the corner. The bed itself had been left unmade, the sheets twisted and kicked around, as if her last night here was unsettled and fitful. Which, of course, it was.
It occurred to her now that Boscorelli had never noticed her insomnia. Or if he had, he had never shown any interest in learning the reasons behind it. Not exactly a communicative and sensitive man of the Twenty-First Century, was Maurice Boscorelli. Not surprising. Not that she cared. For Boscorelli it had been all about the fucking, and in the end that was about all he'd turned out to be good for. There might even be some trace of him still on the sheets - the bed had not been changed since he'd last shared it with her.
Cruz gave it a wide berth.
In the living room the run of her thoughts had taken an undeniable turn for the sentimental; she would never again cook here, never again sit in the low canvas chair with the headphones feeding her a constant and random stream of music, never again take tea with Claudia in her kitchen. Never do this, never do that, blah blah blah, oh how sad. Once in her bedroom, though, Cruz came back to herself, and she could think only of what was hidden here, all those dark little souvenirs of her past, her legacy, tucked away and waiting to be uncovered by the police. Boscorelli had missed it all when he'd gone snooping through the apartment, but Boscorelli had been in a hurry and focused only on Noble's notebook.
When the cops came, they'd open the place up throat-to-gizzard. And they'd find everything.
There was the dope - that alone could put her away for a good many years. It was hidden away in the closet, buried deep in an old Nike shoebox under a pile of old clothes. Just another tool of the trade. That was how she'd always viewed it - just a tool, no different than a gun or nightstick or handcuffs. But more civilized. More subtle. It was the ultimate velvet glove - in one little dimebag you had the power to intimidate and frighten, with no need for violence or even the threat of violence. You waved the drugs under the nose of an uncooperative skell and then made a few innocent comments about how much time a possession charge might land them. It was a harmless and very effective technique, and a friendly little reminder of exactly who was in charge.
Because she never bluffed. And word got around fast.
There were also certain rare occasions where she would use the drugs more directly, as a bribe or as a reward, and that created a need for variety in her selection. Hence the shoebox. Some of the stash had been very carefully stolen from the Five-Five's evidence lockers, but most of it had been acquired right out on the streets - ecstacy, cocaine, crack, heroin, pot ... and of course that perennial favorite of junkie crime writers everywhere, crystal meth. Two-Bags' Traveling Pharmacy - a little something for every taste.
Schaeffer, she reflected grimly, was probably going to cream his skivvies over it. For reasons Cruz couldn't even begin to guess at (or care about), the detective seemed to harbor a very personal hatred for her, and while he may have taken down her entire team, she was definitely his prize goose. She would always be the center of attention; Schaeffer, who was not at all like the IAB goons she was accustomed to, would make sure of it. He would go where the microphones were and he would sensationalize her, much in the way Noble sensationalized his subject matter. See Cruz! See what she was, the way she worked, the things she did - trampling all over people's civil rights, handing out drugs like candy to keep her informants in line ... and with her own sister an addict. Tsk tsk.
Oh, and the good citizens of New York would be horrified! John Q. Public would never understand the necessity of the methods she'd used, the essential rightness of them. John Q. never did. John Q. wanted everything to be clean and aboveboard and comfortably ordered, and if you tried to explain that the world just isn't like that, John Q. covered his ears and refused to listen. Schaeffer would capitalize on that, villify her, make her into the monster, paint her as the out-of-control vigilante cop. He might even suggest that she dipped into her own supply.
That thought shocked her in a way she would not have expected. Somehow, the idea that people would think she used the dope was worse than the trouble she'd be in if it was found. Vigilante cop with a drug habit - that's how it would read. An affront to all that she fought for. All that she stood for.
Oh, give the martyr act a rest, Maritza. Since when do you care what people think of you? None of it matters anymore. None of it. You're finished however this turns out, so quit posturing.
But it did matter. It mattered because she had fought, she had fought it the way it was supposed to be fought, like a war, goddam it, and it was a war. It was. It was a war and she was - she still was - a soldier. In war you paid lip-service to the rules (rules made by sheltered bureaucrats with no conception of how the world really worked) and then you went right ahead and did what needed to be done. It was one of the simple, savage truths of the human experience that nobody ever wanted to face.
Like Gaines and Alvarez.
Cruz smiled uneasily to herself. Like Gaines and Alvarez, yes. Like the guns. If Friend Schaeffer saw the cache of illegal narcotics as a sweet moral victory, then the guns would probably give him a fucking coronary (and that, at least, was a happy thought, wasn't it?). Cruz had kept them after their dirty work was done, and she still had them. Two handguns, a snub-nosed .32 revolver and a .25 automatic. Both kept in the oak chest at the foot of her bed. Neither had serial numbers, but it was not the illegality of the guns that made them dangerous to her. It was how they'd been used.
Gaines and Alvarez. Had a kind of ring to it, didn't it? Gaines n' Alvarez. Like a singing duo or a pair of comedians. You could almost say the three words fast, as a singular name; the two men hadn't even known each other and yet they were inseperable now, now and forever, a single unit in Maritza Cruz's mind - Gaines-and-Alvarez. In a perverse way she supposed each of the two guns could bear the name of the man whose life it had taken. Gaines was the .25. Early 2001, that had been. Alvarez was the .32 ... that had been in mid-2002. Over a year apart, you had two men who didn't even know each other, never even met, both shot in the back of the head by the same cop.
Executed by the same cop.
Executed.
She had taken no pleasure in what she'd done, but she harbored no regret, either. It was necessary. In both cases, killing had been the only option left open to her. Though the circumstances in each case had differed greatly, Gaines and Alvarez had both become dangerous to her - to her, and in the case of Gaines, to members of her team. Killing had been the only option. She was still convinced of that. Again - it was war, and in war you did things you weren't proud of ... but you weren't ashamed of them, either. In the big picture Gaines and Alvarez were nothing, neither man worth the paper his death certificate was printed on. People get ground up in the machinery whether they deserve it or not. Like Stevie Nunez. Like Noble. Like Willie G. Hell, like the dead paramedic and the torched firefighter. Like her fucking sister.
How could she explain these things to people? How could she make them listen, make them see?
The answer was simple: she couldn't. And she knew it. She'd always known it.
And she could see it now, she could see exactly how it was going to be. She could see the trial. There would be a heavy theme of irony- she would be paraded around in a prison coverall like any of the dozens of jagoffs she'd put away herself. Cruz the murderer, Cruz the drug dealer (and possible addict), Cruz who sent innocents to prison, who doctored reports and fabricated or coerced confessions, Cruz who planted evidence and helped cover up acts of corruption committed by other cops.
And through it all she would be surrounded by lawyers. Defense attorneys. People she despised almost as much as those they defended - and she would be depending on them. Defense attorneys whispering advice in her ear - don't say this, don't say that. Keep your mouth shut about things like "the Nature of War" and "Greater Good" and "Collateral Damage" and make it look like you're full of remorse, even if you aren't. Especially if you aren't. Play the court, the judge, the jury. Remind them of all the good - the genuine good - you did as a cop, the commendations and the medals and the meritorious promotion to sergeant. Play up your Catholicism - say you've re-connected with God, and say it was getting shot that did the trick. Bring rosary beads to court and pick at them (doing the best you can with one hand, of course, haha) and murmur prayers under your breath ... but for God's sake, keep it subtle. Cry frequently, but don't ham it up- no honking into handkerchiefs and no hair-pulling fits. Say you're sorry with humble dignity.
Not that any of that would matter. They would convict her. Sentence her. Send her to Riker's, where she would almost certainly be murdered. Might take weeks, months, even years to happen, but it would happen; Cruz didn't kid herself that prison was any different for female cops than it was for the guys, and she had a lot of enemies in Women's Correctional. Women she'd put there herself, relatives of men she'd put away, relatives of men she'd shot. They'd all be after her, and when it came it would come in some perfectly hokey prison-movie way - a homemade shiv driven into her kidneys or her guts or maybe drawn across her throat; a sheet tied around her neck for that old standby, the faked suicide; or just a good ol' fashioned beat-down, her skull caved in with the nearest handy blunt object. And that, she knew, was the optimistic outlook. More likely it would be a long, agonizing and humiliating affair - the lovely ladies of Riker's did not shy away from torture. Sexual assault and/or mutilation, cutting, burning, and even the pulling of fingernails were all things Cruz had heard tales of. Hokey prison-movie stuff ... but it did happen. And it would happen.
Over the years she had always been very aware of the dangerous game she played, walking a tightrope between what was legal and what was illegal ... which, coincidentally, was often the same line between what was legal and what was right. Cruz supposed she had what Noble called Blue Line Fever. She'd always known that what she was into was serious business, that the things she did were technically criminal offenses, and that disgrace followed by prison was always a very possible outcome. But that knowledge had been safely tucked away on a shelf in her mind, acknowledged and then immediately dismissed; she had known that it would never happen, that she would always be one step ahead in the game. She had known it, the same way you can know that planes crash and yet still know that you can keep getting on board and arrive safely at your destination, every single time, no fuss and no muss.
And yet planes do crash, don't they? Planes crash and sometimes one mistake is all it takes to hang yourself. Cruz supposed she should have known that. After all, she had watched it happen before.
She had watched it happen to Johnny.
Cruz shook her head. Now it was all coming back up on her, wasn't it? Sure, why not, toss a stick of TNT into the lake and lets just see how many corpses we can get to float up to the surface. First Gaines and Alvarez and the guns (only the guns were Gaines and Alvarez - the idea of naming them after their victims really seemed to stick with her), and now Johnny. Johnny Hoyle. How long had it been since she'd last thought about Johnny? How long had it been since she had last allowed herself to think about him? And here was the kicker - why hadn't she thought of him before now? Johnny had been here, right here, backed into the very same corner she now found herself in. Only Johnny had gone that extra step and killed himself rather than face the disgrace and humiliation of prison.
She hadn't forgotten him. And she sure as hell hadn't forgotten the name of that fucking punk rookie who started the whole thing. Hart. J.D. Hart. Johnny and a few other cops in their circle had been pocketing drug money, and Hart had taken it upon himself to sell them all out. IAB pounced on it, and with their typical pigheaded zeal, they'd viewed it as the crime of the century. By the time they were finished Cruz had lost her entire team and Hart had sauntered away from the Department without ever seeing the inside of a jail cell. Johnny, meanwhile, plopped down on his couch in front of his TV with his Glock in his hand, and turned his stereo up to an ear-splitting volume to cover the gunshot.
She was closer to Johnny now than she'd ever been when he was alive. And she had been close to him, closer than she'd ever been with any other partner, maybe even any other man, even Ramon Valenzuela. Johnny had been a lean, handsome guy with a kind of easy nonchalance that never came across as cocky; with him you never got any of that tiresome adolescent chest-beating she was so used to seeing in her male colleagues (Bosco, to fall back on an old example). He was a clown, though, witty in his own way but often teetering on the brink of irritating, and one of his worst habits was what Cruz had come to call the Drum Solos. Johnny had been a compulsive finger-tapper, always hammering out intricate little rhythms with his fingertips, using just about anything he happened to be near as an instrument - the steering wheel of a car, his desk, parts of his own body. His favorite musician and all-time hero was Lenny Kravitz; Johnny would often claim (half-seriously) that Kravitz channeled the spirit of Jimi Hendrix. Cruz remembered what it could be like sitting in an RMP with him, on stakeout or just on a 10-63, listening to him finger-tap Are You Gonna Go My Way on his thighs while he sang along under his breath. Usually while she kept telling him to fucking stop it before she got a baseball bat and played her own Drum Solo on his head.
But she had come to respect him, admire him (though secretly - admiration was always something she played very close to her chest), and it was not much of a surprise when they ended up in bed together. It was not unusual for her to take her male partners home with her, although mostly (and there was no point dressing this up) it was just to scratch the occassional itch; sex was the same as playing a friendly game of tennis after a hard day's work. Johnny, though ... something else had happened with Johnny. Something else entirely. He had treated her differently. He had treated her differently because Johnny had viewed her differently. To him she was never Two-Bags Cruz or Sergeant Cruz (or That Crazy Bitch, as she was known in some circles) - she was always just 'Ritza. 'Ritza, his partner and his buddy and his equal. She didn't think he had ever actually loved her, but ... but she had loved him. No point dressing that up, either. She thought she had, yes. A little, anyway.
And they destroyed him. They destroyed him over money. Johnny had been a good cop, he'd had a superb arrest record and numerous citations, he had saved her life not once but twice, in two separate gun battles, and yet they destroyed him over money. It was always the same, wasn't it? The good are thrown to the wolves while rats like J.D. Hart walk away with a slap on the wrist and a pat on the back.
Her father chose that moment to break in, again sounding as he always did, as he always had: so cool, so reasonable, so maddeningly sensible. Cruz was starting to honestly wonder if this unwelcome visitor in her head was a sign that she was cracking up (or perhaps already had cracked up - which made a lot more sense, when you thought about it) because she could hear the conversations from both sides now, as clearly as if they were happening. She even found herself sketching out the scene that would go with it in her mind's eye - 'Ritza and Papa, standing in front of the window in the living room of their old apartment, bathed in late-afternoon sunshine as they had a civil - but passionate - argument.
Johnny Hoyle got sloppy, Papa says, and he is as he was when she was very young - a short, perpetually well-dressed man with a jowly bulldog face, hair still black but beginning to thin at the crown. You talk of him now like he was a saint. He wasn't, Maritza. No more of a saint than you, certainly. He got sloppy and he did stupid things because he thought he was untouchable. And you did stupid things for the same reason. Stupid things like killing those two men. Stupid things like trusting Noble, like pinning that murder on Nunez and then trying to stick to it even when it all started to unravel. Like going into that hotel room and waving a gun at Yokas. You should have backed down, regrouped, waited for another opportunity. But you didn't. You had to have blood for Letitia, you could see nothing beyond Letitia, and that made you sloppy. And this time it nearly got you killed.
In fact, with the way things turned out, it might have been better if it had.
No, 'Ritza answers firmly, only in this little fantasy it's not nine-year-old 'Ritza but twenty-nine-year-old 'Ritza, an adult Sergeant Cruz complete with badge around her neck, standing there shuffling her feet, looking humble and speaking in low, respectful tones (and wouldn't her colleagues at the Five-Five find this tame, soft-spoken Cruz an interesting specimen!). No, it was out of my hands, Papa. I was blindsided. I had it all under control, I covered my a - my tracks, and I was blindsided. Twice. They hit me from two directions at once. Head on by Yokas and Boscorelli. Broadside by Schaeffer.
Papa only nods sadly and waves a hand, as if he'd expected this line of logic. Yes, Maritza. By all means, blame everyone else. Blame Boscorelli - who you misjudged about as badly as you ever misjudged anybody in your life. Blame Yokas - who you underestimated about as badly as you ever underestimated anybody in your life. And as for Schaeffer - weren't you expecting him? After what happened to Johnny, weren't you always expecting some rat-squad detective with visions of glory to come gunning for you? Just a matter of time - wasn't that always in the back of your mind? Schaeffer probably even knows about Gaines and Alvarez. Knows or suspects. He's just the type who would see the two deaths and start jumping to wild conclusions.
And what do you know - those wild conclusions will ultimately prove to be true.
Cruz raked her fingers back through her hair and laughed softly at this little scene, though it really wasn't very funny. Arguing with a dead man. Being chastised and lectured to by a dead man. Only it was really herself doing the chastising and lecturing; she had been blindsided and she knew it, but she had allowed herself to be blindsided. She'd allowed them all to get the better of her, Bosco and Yokas and Noble and Schaeffer. Schaeffer especially - and after she'd watched IAB chew Johnny Hoyle to pieces over a few missing dollars. Fool me once, shame on you ... fool me twice, shame on me. Hadn't she said that very thing to Noble at some point? She thought she had.
But Schaeffer must have had help all the same, some way to get his foot in the door. Probably had another rat like Hart up his sleeve, and that most likely meant someone inside Anti-Crime. That was hard to believe - they'd been a tight group - but it was the only explanation. The question was who. Not Dade, that was for sure. Not North. Yoshi ... she had always felt something was a bit off about Yoshi - he always seemed a little standoffish, a little unsure of himself ... but she still didn't figure him for a rat. Reyes ... not likely. Vargas, perhaps, he was new ... or even ...
... or even ...
Cruz's thoughts trailed off, disappearing into a cold pit of dawning horror. Her eyes, which to this point had been roving aimlessly all over her bedroom, had landed on the clock-radio next to her bed.
She had begun this little enterprise at twelve noon, give or take. It had taken her at least twenty minutes to get clear of the hospital - again, give or take. Then another five before her knight in shining yellow armor pulled up to the curb and picked her up, and another ten minutes to get home. Add to that a five minute conversation with Claudia - still give or take. Then another twenty minutes to reach her apartment and pull her battered and exhausted body back from the edge.
Give or take.
The time was now 1:27 P.M.
And she was standing here. Standing here in her room getting lost in her own head. They could already be out looking for her and she had frozen up, letting herself be overwhelmed by all this grim bullshit about humiliating trials and X number of brutal ways to die in prison and dead friends and dead enemies and all the people responsible for her destruction. She had lost her focus. Again.
Maybe it would have been better if Yokas had killed her outright, if this was how fucking useless she was now.
Pulse quickening again, Cruz hurried over to the closet. She hitched the hospital robe up at her knees, knelt like a woman preparing to offer up a prayer, and started to to excavate the shoebox containing her stash from the pile of discarded clothes she'd buried it under. She did this with absolutely no finesse; old shirts, tank-tops, shorts, a black miniskirt (practically nonexistent and incredibly uncomfortable, it was the same skirt she'd been wearing the day she first met Maurice Boscorelli), and bits and pieces of underwear went flying over her shoulder as if cast from a small tornado. She reached the box, tore the lid off, and swept up all of the crystal meth in one deft stroke.
If -
(when)
she found Aaron Noble, he would have to be fed to keep him under control.
She looked at what was left (which was quite a lot, even considering the relatively small size of the box) and it struck her that there was absolutely nothing to stop her from flushing it all down the toilet. If she was so worried about Schaeffer pegging her as a dope-fiend, why not send it all priority-mail to the New York sewage system?
Come to that, what was stopping her from pulling out the two guns (Gaines 'n Alvarez) and taking them with her, perhaps disposing of them at some point along the way?
Nothing's stopping you. But why bother? Your career is over. Physically over - you're a gimp now and you'll never work in the field again. Which is a moot point, because Schaeffer has your number. Even without the guns or the drugs, he still has you and the rest of the crew by the balls.
Cruz looked down at the shoebox full of dope for another heartbeat.
Then, before she was even aware of what she was about to do, she turned and flung it across the room.
Again there seemed to be a small tornado localized in her bedroom, this time made up of pills and bottles and little plastic baggies. They went skittering across the floor, the bed (and the oak chest at its foot, with good ol' Gaines and Alvarez stowed deep inside), the dresser on the opposite side of the room. She heard a few of the pills - loose ecstacy tabs, mostly - go down the air duct near the door with a series of tiny, insectile little chittering sounds.
There: drugs everywhere. Save the bastards the trouble of looking.
She only hoped Schaeffer came here personally, and she only hoped he recognized this as the hearty Maritza Cruz fuck you it was meant to be.
With that out of her system she returned her attention to the closet, once again all business. She looked up at the top shelf - nearly seven feet off the floor - nodded tersely to herself, and reached up with her good arm to get what she needed next.
She could not stifle the cry this time; probably couldn't have stifled it even by biting her tongue - the black wave of agony that came out of her shoulder was enough to squeeze a long, thin wail of pain out of her.
She backed off from the closet a pace or two, breathing hard, uttering a long stream of obscenities under her breath, half-English, half-Spanish and only half-intelligible. Tears of pain and a bitter, impotent frustration streamed down her cheeks.
She kept forgetting. Goddammit, she really kept forgetting just how completely fucked up she really was. In a weird way she supposed that was good; it meant she was doing a good job of sitting on the pain. But it also meant she had to be more careful, more conscious of what she was doing. She had to remember her limits. She had to remember that she had limits.
Cruz went back to the closet and reached up again, this time with the slow, deliberate care of the badly arthritic. The strain still hurt her terribly, and after fruitlessly slapping her hand around the shelf for what seemed like forever she thought she wasn't going to be able get what she wanted anyway.
Then, at last, her hand closed around the handle of a small, battered suitcase. She brought it down (nearly rapping herself a good one on the head with it in the process) and popped the clasps, which she'd never bothered to lock.
Inside was another illegal gun. This one packed quite a bit more wallop than the other two - it was a Tec-9 machine-pistol, a gangbanger favorite second only to the MAC-10. Cruz had taken it off a fifteen-year-old gangsta wannabe about four years ago, in what had been a case of outright idealism on her part - the kid had been holding onto it for some of his older "friends." The real gangstas, in other words. Cruz had arrested them all, bypassing and dismissing the kid entirely; arresting him would have been a waste of her time and a waste of his life. The gun itself was never a factor in the arrests - she'd nailed all the homeboys on drug charges, and the Tec-9 had somehow gotten lost in the equation. And somehow, it had ended up tucked away in her apartment instead of the evidence locker.
She had an off-duty gun, of course - a licensed and legal SIG/SAUER nine-millimeter - but she felt the Tec-9 was more practical for her; it had a magazine capacity of thirty rounds, compared to the SIG's fourteen. That meant less chance of having to reload in a firefight. She had been trained how to reload a gun one-handed at the Academy, but it wasn't an easy trick even when you were in showroom condition. And concealability wouldn't be a problem - the Tec-9 wasn't much more than a slightly oversized handgun, and it had a frayed strap so that it could be carried over the shoulder like the submachine-gun it essentially was. It would be perfectly at home hidden under a coat.
And if all of that didn't sound logical enough, there was no denying that there was something comforting in it, in its size and weight and feel. Cruz didn't know why she'd kept it - she hadn't known then, and she didn't know now. If she were more of a romantic she might be tempted to believe that it was premonition, destiny, the knowledge that someday she would need it. Maybe, maybe not. In the end it didn't matter. If everything worked out right (and so far, everything pretty much had), it would be the instrument of Richard Buford's death.
There were three fully-loaded magazines in the case along with the gun. Cruz gathered them up and set them aside with Noble's drugs.
Moving quickly now, casting another glance at the clock (which read a very unnerving 1:39 - getting that damned suitcase down had been a tricky business), she got together an outfit - underwear, cargo pants, a plain, sleeveless tank-top, and a bulky jacket that would both conceal the gun and keep her relatively dry. She managed to bundle the whole package under her good arm, then turned and headed for the bathroom.
And for the first time Cruz caught her reflection - her complete head-to-toe reflection - in the full-length mirror on her bedroom door.
Her heart lurched in her chest.
The first muddled thought that made it through the wall of shock was that the thing looking out at her from the mirror was Lettie, that she was seeing another vivid little mind-movie like her conversation with Papa. Only that had been a fantasy, a conscious fantasy contained entirely in her own head. This thing was staring her in the face. Cruz may have been simply visualizing her father, but was now actually be seeing her dead sister; Lettie had gone Papa one better and come back to haunt her in the flesh.
Cruz took one stumbling step backwards, the bundle of clothes slithering out from under her arm to the floor. Her knees struck the edge of her bed and buckled, and she sat down hard. The illusion was gone in less than a second, but the resemblance to the way Lettie had been that last day in the hospital remained and it was undeniable - ropey hair hanging in her eyes, face cadaverous, eyes sunken and furtive and empty. Her lips (those full, pouty lips both she and Lettie had been blessed with, and of which Maritza had always been secretly vain) were a deep, unnatural red. Part of that was in contrast to her pallor, but part of it was blood - there was dried blood from her bitten tongue still crusted at the edges of her mouth.
Impulsively, she bared her teeth in a grimace.
The effect was immediate and grotesque - a three-day-old corpse left out in the sun.
The next thought that came was surreal, absurd: How could that cabbie have made a crack about her looking pretty? Was he just very polite? Blind? Perverted? Was he a necrophiliac, maybe? She had a better understanding of Claudia's reaction, at least - horror.
But there was something worse than what had happened to her face, and that was what had happened to her body (that slinky, curvy body, something else she had always been so secretly proud of). She seemed to have actually changed shape - her posture had taken on an oddly pinched, lopsided slant. Because of the shoulder.
The shoulder. The fucking shoulder.
Cruz stood up suddenly and moved closer to the mirror, peering owlishly at herself. Then she untied the hospital robe and shucked it. She took the sling off, gently lowering the arm and laying it at her side. The weight of it added an extra layer of pain to the whole experience, but she barely noticed it - she was now deeply, morbidly fascinated by what she was seeing, what she had become. The hospital johnny came last; she ripped it down the center with a vicious, childish contempt. Then she stood naked in front of the mirror, naked but for the dressing, which was now peppered with little red blood-spots.
She realized she wanted to take the bandage off.
She needed to see it. She needed to see exactly what that bitch had done to her.
It's a professional job. If you take it off, you'll never get it back on properly.
Cruz thought it over, and was not surprised to find that she didn't care.
The dressing came off with almost alarming ease. She tossed it aside, and then stood looking at the horror underneath for almost three full minutes.
The prevailing thought in her mind during that time was raw meat. Raw, bloody meat. But beyond the angry roadmap of sutures and broken, discolored flesh there was again that ominous sense of disproportion: she had not only been wounded but actually disfigured. That entire part of her body had taken on a shape that was just entirely wrong; she was listing over to the right, the left shoulder (or rather, the misshapen mass of bone and flesh that now made up the junction between torso and arm, you couldn't rightly call it a shoulder) bunched up and swollen, and Christ, she was almost a hunchback. She was bleeding, as well - all the moving around wasn't doing her any good.
A dumdum round. Trust Noble to load his pistol with those fucking monstrosities.
And yet it still could have been worse. She had a vague memory of a doctor explaining the mechanics of the wound to her not long after she'd first awoken. Something about the bullet hitting on an angle, plowing up and out when it could easily have gone the other way, tumbled, perhaps hit her lung. She could even have lost the arm entirely. The doctor, as she recalled, had actually told her she'd gotten off lucky. Yokas was either a spectacularly bad shot or Noble's gun had been a piece of shit. Or both.
In her eight years with the Department Cruz had witnessed dozens of examples of the human body's terrible fragility; she had seen car accidents - one in particular where the victim's belly had been torn open and his guts strewn across the asphalt to cook in the hot sun. She'd seen gang-shootings with bloody head-wounds and even partial amputations; once she'd seen a shotgun suicide where the head had been gone above the lower jaw. And, of course, she had shot two men in the head at close range, to say nothing of the people she'd killed lawfully, in the line of duty. Bloody, every single one of them. Bloody, dirty, unpleasant.
But she had dealt with it. In one way or another, she had always dealt with it.
Seeing her own body violated, mutilated in such a way was, of course, an entirely different matter.
Cruz sat down heavily on the edge of her bed again, her stomach curdling, shriveling in on itself. Through the window she could hear the vague shouts and hollers of kids on the street outside. Yelling, splashing, playing in the rain. Oblivious to her. Oblivious and living only for the moment, their futures stretched ahead of them, for better or worse. She laughed suddenly, unconsciously; it was the same odd, mirthless bark she'd uttered in front of Claudia after the comment about having a bad week. The hopelessness, the despair was trying to get in again, get the upper hand. She was losing her focus and she was hearing the Voice of Doubt again, or maybe she should rename it the Voice of Reason, her father's voice, calm and rational and so seductive in its simple truth.
How could she do this? How could she really believe this could ever work? She was nothing now. Nothing. Everything that she was had been taken from her.
Cruz picked up the Tec-9. Hefted it, felt its weight.
That comforting weight.
It would be easy. So easy. Just stick the gun in her ear and pull the trigger. That was what Johnny had done when the wolves were at his door, and she'd hated him for it, oh, she'd hated him, such weakness, such infantile weakness, she remembered thinking him so much better than that. But she could see now, she could see why he'd done it, she was exactly where Johnny had been, in that precise place, perhaps even in the middle of that precise moment, and she suspected she could do it. She knew she could do it. If nothing else, it would certainly leave a nice, juicy surprise for them when they got here, wouldn't it?
Wouldn't it?
After a moment, she put the gun down and pulled in a long, ragged breath. She wasn't there just yet. Focus - Noble first. From there, Buford, assuming she stayed lucky, as lucky as she'd been so far. Then ...
Then maybe she'd start thinking about the gun.