Author's Quick Little Note: Like the Cruz chapters, this one has received a fairly serious overhaul since it was first posted - originally I wrote an entire scene where Faith returns to the Five-Five, goes into the locker room, and finds her friends ready to welcome her back. Then, for some reason, I wussed out and cut the whole thing, shortening it into a three- or four-paragraph explanation of what happened. I still don't know why I did that - I suppose it's because I (like poor ol' Cruz in this story) occasionally suffer from a Voice of Doubt.
Also note that Monroe is still just Officer Monroe in this timeline.
I.
Chapter 6
Faith
There were three and Faith Yokas knew them intimately; their names and the circumstances around each. She kept them in a locked compartment, a secret place in her mind she rarely allowed herself to open. Part of that was an odd kind of respect; once closed, a casket's lid should not be lifted again, and that was only natural. But in a certain sense it was also because she hated them. She hated them for backing her into such a miserable corner, these selfish, cowardly people, these people who mired themselves in shit up to their necks and then couldn't face the consequences, and so put her into the position of executioner. It wasn't just the worst part of the job; it was the dirtiest, the most shameful. You weren't supposed to look at it that way, but she did nonetheless. And she knew she always would.
Because they always looked so harmless afterwards, didn't they? So pathetic. Didn't matter if they'd just been shooting at you with a MAC-10 or holding you hostage in a botched bank robbery. When it was over it was always just somebody's son (or daughter, she reminded herself darkly) lying there, somebody whose sins probably amounted to no more than a few bad decisions, a few mistakes ... and now here they were, they'd ended up dead for it. They had themselves to blame, true, but it didn't mean she could sit back and deny her own responsibility. Everything, every moment, every last second in their entire lifetime, the sum of all they ever were, erased in a split second. By her.
This time it was different. Worse, somehow, even though Cruz was still alive. Faith had gone over and over it in her mind, trying to focus in on exactly what her line of thinking had been just before firing that shot. She'd called it her moment of clarity, but it didn't seem so clear to her now. She turned it this way and that and just kept coming around to the same uneasy conclusion; that she had simply chosen to resolve an explosive situation by taking the easiest, deadliest way out. She'd decided in a nanosecond that Cruz was not only an immediate threat - certifiably insane, in fact - but a more general kind of menace as well. Too dangerous to be a cop, to be allowed to wield that power. Too slippery, too good at worming her way out of the grim little messes she created while she left others to drown in them. Someone like that had to be stopped, didn't they? Sure they did. Stopped by any means necessary.
For the greater good.
Kind of sounded a bit like something Cruz herself might say, didn't it?
Well, you know what they say - you always become the thing you hate. Right? To destroy thy enemy you must become thy enemy. Right? Maybe that's the great irony here. Shooting Cruz has turned you into Cruz. Wouldn't that be funny?
No. Absolutely not funny. And the thought did nothing to change her resolve. Her administrative leave was over, she was fully cleared of any wrongdoing, and as such she was fully entitled to be back at work. She would work out her doubts on her own time; right now, the best thing to do - the best therapy - would be to throw herself right back into it. It was essential that she do this, essential to her peace of mind. Essential to her recovery.
Backing off was not an option now anyway - she had her gear packed and stowed, and Fred was driving her to the Five-Five. She was committed.
The first night home had been very bad. By that time she'd been physically sick, throwing up at regular intervals and crying in between, hopelessly unable to get the smell of cordite out of her nose, to get that awful, gummy feeling of Cruz's blood off her hands. She'd cried and cried as Fred held her, trying to comfort but patient with her because sometimes that terrible, desperate shame would abruptly turn to rage, and she would scream and beat his chest with her fists. It had swung back and forth, back and forth, endlessly, over and -
- I tried to kill her -
(She brought it on herself)
- I'm a murderer -
(She's still alive)
- But now I know I'm capable of murder -
(The stupid bitch never should have been there)
- I tried to kill her for no good reason -
(She had a gun, goddammit)
- She was bluffing, I should have known she was bluffing, she was all hot air anyway -
(No, she sure as hell was not
and over. Second guessing herself, wondering if what she did was right, wondering if there might not have been another way out. Not unfamiliar territory by any stretch, but ...
... but sometimes she got scared. And that was something that had started long before she'd even met Maritza Cruz. It scared her whenever she reminded herself that she had once left a gangbanger on enemy turf, knowing he'd be mercilessly beaten, tortured, probably murdered. It scared her how, a little over a year ago, it had been almost an entire day before she realized she'd killed a man in a shootout. She could lie awake for hours thinking about those things, wondering what the job she'd loved for almost a decade - a job that had been so good to her - might be turning her into, wondering what she had become.
And wondering what she would become. Down the road. There was always that to think on, as well.
The fact that she had shot Cruz scared her. The fact that she couldn't remember exactly why terrified her. And the fact that she'd followed Bosco so easily scared her, because no matter what she'd gone into that hotel room believing, in the end it had nothing to do with saving an innocent man from jail; in the end, she'd simply allowed her judgement to be clouded by some sentimental memory of the way things used to be between them. The temptation to just forget everything that had been said, overlook the rift that had yawned opened between them, and be partners again. She had been seduced by one -
(Why me, Bosco? Why is it always me?)
(Because you're the only one. Faith, I don't have anyone else)
cute little exchange of words that had ended with Bosco all but throwing himself at her feet. That was all it took, that one pathetic, self-pitying little retort ... and the secret gratification of knowing she had been right all along. She'd let him dangle a bit first, pretended not to be interested, and oh, that had been fun, hadn't it? To watch him squirm like that. You bet. She could still remember it, standing there outside the Five-Five between the squad cars, Bosco pale and haggard and edgy, as if he'd somehow caught that bitch's disease in a peculiar physical sense and it was slowly killing him. She was looking at the archetype of the man who had thrown in with the devil, a man who was discovering what it felt like when that came around to bite you hard on the ass, just like it always does. Well, the poor bastard had to learn his lesson at some point, didn't he?
So why the hell didn't she just stand back and let him?
And brothers and sisters, what really scared her was that she couldn't even tell her husband these things. She'd expected it all to come pouring out, all of it. She'd wanted it to. She'd wanted to just come clean and tell him that it was all her fault, that she had taken on Bosco's problem, that she had fired first, that Cruz hadn't actually made a threatening move. She'd lied to everyone else about it, so she was damned if she would lie to him.
And in the end she'd lied anyway. Through her tears and near-hysteria she had lied, throwing all the responsibility on Cruz. Cruz and Bosco, even though she had made her own decisions every step of the way.
Things had gone quiet between her and Fred after that. Not tense exactly, but skirting the edge, because something was still clearly wrong and Fred knew it. And yet she still kept it all to herself - the doubt, the guilt, the dim, inarticulate horror at what she'd done. Fred respected her silence, gave her plenty of space, but she knew that he could see that she was still holding something back.
But she couldn't do it. For some damned reason, she couldn't tell him what was wrong.
In many ways, she didn't even know herself.
She forced herself out of this uneasy reflection as she sensed the truck slowing down, taking the last corner before they hit the precinct. Still turned away from Fred, she closed her eyes and started counting backwards from one hundred, concentrating on the sound of the rain as it hammered its idiot drumbeat on the roof, the hypnotic ruck-ruck-ruck of the windshield wipers. Trying to calm herself, trying to get past it all, lock it all away as she'd locked away the names of those she'd killed. It was finished, it couldn't be changed, and the only thing to do was move on.
That simple, right?
Fred pulled the truck over to the curb.
Then she heard him say, almost conversationally: "Oh shit."
Faith opened her eyes, looked out, and felt herself go rigid with shock.
The media had landed. A small group of bedraggled reporters had hemmed in the Five-Five, along with a couple of news-vans sporting various decals. Channel One. Channel Five. Channel This and Channel That. There was a guy with a TV camera on his shoulder not too far from where Fred had parked, aiming it at a well-dressed young woman who stood importantly in front of the precinct, yammering into a microphone and holding an umbrella unsteadily with her other hand. The whole ridiculous mess was being kept at arms' length by a few unlucky token cops (guys currently on Lieutenant Swersky's shit list, Faith guessed dimly) who looked wet and tired and ready to start macing people.
Fred put the truck in park. She could already sense him looking at her, working out what, if anything, he should say, trying to guess what she would want to do, how she'd want to proceed.
She didn't know. God, she'd never even expected this.
Option One: get out and go in. Be pretty hairy, wouldn't it? But she could go in low and quick, head down, shoulders hunched, pretend she was protecting herself from the rain and just rhino-charge her way through the fuckers. Maybe screaming no comment!'s over her shoulder all the way.
Very dignified.
Option Two: tell Fred to swing the truck around and take her home. Now that sounded like a much smarter move. Sounded reasonable. She could go back inside, put her gear in a corner somewhere and then go and sit on the couch, maybe with a bucket of Ben & Jerry's in her lap and a big old spoon to go with it. Watch some TV (but not the news, oh hell no). Greet the kids when they came home from school, maybe plop 'em down on the couch next to her so they could all watch the Simpsons together.
And she could tell herself that sure, I didn't go in today, but there's always tomorrow, right?
Yeah, that would be very healthy, wouldn't it?
Fred was still watching her. She realized she was biting her nails and made herself stop.
Any minute now he's gonna ask me if I'm okay.
"You okay?"
She emitted an odd, snorting little laugh and turned to him, forcing a smile. "Yeah. I'm fine, I just ..."
I just didn't think, that's all. I just didn't kickstart my fucking brain and think about this.
Faith turned back to the window and looked out over it all again, still stunned by what she was seeing and appalled at her own stupidity for not anticipating it. She hadn't watched the news at all over the last few days - hadn't even picked up a newspaper. And yet she'd known that the entire Anti-Crime unit was being dismantled, that almost every cop who'd worked up there was being charged with a crime, and that was big news. Then factor in the shootout in Noble's hotel room, plus Cruz's part in both that and Anti-Crime ...
Jesus, why wouldn't the papers and the major networks be crawling all over it? This was going to be up there with Rodney King, The OJ trial, the LAPD Rampart scandal. One of those little pocket disasters destined to become pop-culture fodder, endlessly raked over in the news and beaten into the ground by late-night comedians.
Faith thought of David Letterman making Sergeant Cruz jokes and just managed to catch another of those funny little burps of laughter in time to stifle it. Good thing, too. Fred was worried about her enough as it was.
"You sure you want to go back in today, babe?" he said at last. "Maybe ... maybe it'd be good to ... you know, take another few days off."
He flinched a bit, just a bit, as if expecting a blow, and Faith felt the first real flash of irritation. She'd been thinking that very thing only a few seconds ago herself, of course, but there had been no risk in that - as long as it stayed inside her own head, she was safe. Now that the suggestion was out in the open air, though, now that it had come from somebody else's mouth, it had a certain enticing logic to it.
After all, just look out there. Look at them all.
What the hell - Fred might be right.
Doesn't matter if he is. I still have to do this. I'm just looking for an excuse not to. That's all. And what's the big deal about the press? What's the worst the vultures can do? Tie me down and make me talk? I'm not accountable to them.
"I have to start somewhere, don't I?" she said shortly. "If I take one more day off, I'll take two. Then three. And on and on like that. I'm not letting this thing scare me away from my job." She looked out at the reporters. At the moment several of them were being shooed away from the firehouse across the street like bothersome insects. A green panel van with an antenna on top had parked right across the firehouse's bay doors. The van was adorned with big, garish decals that proclaimed it to be the newsmobile of NY-BackTalk! (Where We Put You Right!). Jimmy Doherty was trying to make them move, and appeared to be arguing with the cameraman.
Faith swept a hand over it all. "I'm not letting them scare me away, Fred."
Or Cruz. Because that's what this is really about, right? If I keep running and hiding, Cruz scores a victory. And if I keep running and hiding, it looks like I'm guilty of something.
Problem is, maybe I am.
"I'm cleared," she said, more to herself and with more conviction than she actually felt. "I have every right to be here."
She grabbed her duffel bag and all but shoved the door open, hard enough to make the hinges groan and the whole truck rock on its springs. She had it licked - she was going in and that was that. As long as Fred didn't say anything else, she'd be okay. No more badgering. No slipping tempting little suggestions in her ear about calling this off and waiting for another day.
"Faith -" Fred began gingerly.
And here it is! she thought with a sudden, bright anger. I knew it! I knew it was coming! He keeps quiet all week, no pressure, good ol' Fred. The new Fred; patient and calm and open and hopped up to the eyeballs on Jesus. And now, right outside the precinct, he's gonna start. After I lose two nights' worth of sleep preparing myself for this, psyching myself up, never thinking I'd have to walk through this goddam traveling sideshow on top of everything else ...
"Faith?" he repeated.
She wheeled on him. "What?"
Fred only sat watching her, unperturbed.
"C'mere," he said at last, and held out his arm. He was smiling a bit. Probably knew full well that she was locked and loaded and ready to tear him a few new bodily openings. Teasing, in his way; all he wanted to do was wish her luck.
She laughed. Tears - half-shame, half-affection - prickled the corners of her eyes as she leaned back into the truck. He caught her in an awkward kind of one-armed embrace and kissed her forehead.
"I'll be okay," she said, and then broke away quickly before she could do something really stupid, like start blubbering. She slammed the door and started towards the Five-Five, her chest tightening, eyes darting between the building and the little press camp out front, looking for an opening. Would they even know who she was? Probably not. So far as she knew, no actual names or faces had been released. But that didn't mean they wouldn't land on her and start nattering.
Nothing says you have to go through them, stupid. The precinct has more than one door, after all.
The idea provoked an immediate, intense disgust that blew all of her apprehension away in a heartbeat. Slinking in through a side door was not the way she was going to start her first shift back. She would walk right the hell through them and use the front door. It was her right.
She had nothing - nothing - to be ashamed of, and it was her right.
Bad as that first night at home was, she could still remember it. She supposed it was because home - home with Fred and the kids - was at least familiar. Safe.
But Faith had little sense of exactly what went on in the three or four hours immediately following the shooting. Snapshots mostly, momentary stopovers in the run of her memories that seemed to stand out a little clearer, but there was really nothing solid in between to string them together.
She had a sketchy idea of the actual journey from hotel to hospital. Bosco handled the driving, of course, using the marked RMP Faith had driven to the hotel in. Noble had gone along for the ride, in cuffs and mostly by default - he'd been Bosco's prisoner, and in a peculiar sense he had also been Bosco's prize, won back (at a very high price) from Cruz. Though he was far into withdrawal by that point and all but chewing his fingertips off, Noble had wisely kept his mouth shut and stayed still throughout the trip. The atmosphere in the car was icy and complicated, combustible, maybe even more so than in the hotel room just before everything went to hell. Not a word passed between Faith and Bosco on that trip, the silence broken only by the car's siren and that of the ambulance carrying Cruz, which they kept in their sights the whole way over.
She remembered repeatedly washing her hands - once in Noble's room and several more times at Mercy. Three times, she thought, maybe four altogether, though she was no longer quite sure and didn't much care to know anyway. She only knew that she must have washed them hard, because her palms itched and stung for two days after. She remembered scrubbing with the distracted, automated desperation of the lifelong obsessive-compulsive, and she found it mildly surprising that she wasn't an obsessive-compulsive handwasher now as a result. Thank God for the small mercies.
She remembered the very last glimpse she had gotten of Cruz. Cruz, who had tried to strong-arm her way into getting what she wanted (something she'd been doing for most of her career and quite probably most of her life) and nearly ended up dead for her trouble. Cruz, who had made it halfway to consciousness in the hotel room and began to twist and snap like a snake when the paramedics started to move her. Twist and snap and scream. At one point in her thrashing she had somehow gotten her good hand around a hypodermic and came very close to stabbing one of her attending paramedics in the eye. She hadn't succeeded, so you could look at it a certain way and laugh - even badly injured and semi-conscious and three baby steps away from dead, Maritza Cruz was still apt to bite you if you let your guard down. By the time Faith saw her at Mercy, however, the Sergeant had been sedated and was being shipped off to the OR, leaving the cut-up ruins of her clothes in a bloody clump on the floor of one of the trauma rooms.
She remembered meeting up with Davis and Sully, along with about half the firefighters from the precinct and Alex Taylor's mother. She remembered Davis telling her about the accident, the explosion in which Taylor had died and Lieutenant Johnson had been cataclysmically burned, Sully adding that it had been the result of a car chase - an unauthorized car chase - that had gone down earlier that afternoon. An unauthorized car chase pursued by Anti-Crime officers. By the Anti-Crime sergeant.
Faith remembered how the connection had made her feel sick all over again.
She remembered the fight with Bosco in the washroom - the gist of it, anyway - and the less said -
(Who are you trying to convince? Because it sounds to me like you're trying to convince yourself
about that the better.
And she remembered enough to acknowledge that not all of what happened at Mercy was necessarily bad. Faith remembered a paramedic (the one who had almost gotten the needle in the eye) coming over to her as she sat in a semi-daze on a waiting room chair. This was much later, after most of the uproar over both catastrophes had died down. Faith was waiting to be checked over when the medic suddenly knelt in front of her and introduced herself as Holly Levine. Then she offered Faith an apple. An apple, if you could believe it. Levine and her partner had been called in from another precinct to attend to the Melrose shooting; everyone in the Five-Five's jurisdiction had been busy with the ten-car pileup that Cruz (and Bosco, don't ever forget his part in it) had caused that afternoon. Levine was youngish, blonde, with round, expressive eyes and a kind of dreamily maternal manner Faith associated with New Agers and flaky self-help obsessives.
Faith recalled actually thinking that, too, as Levine knelt in front of her - New Agers and flaky self-help obsessives, word for word. She had felt sick shame wash over her almost immediately, as if she'd said it right to Levine's face. Because Levine was only trying to be kind. And she had been kind, even though Faith had been in a pretty frightening state. Though she'd cleaned her hands (oh, they were so clean they fucking hurt) by then, she'd still been wearing her ruined uniform, covered in so much drying blood and puke that it was stiffening up into a kind of shell. She had looked like an ax-murderer after a fine day on the job, and the smell coming off her had been absolutely rank, and yet none of that had stopped Levine from offering her a shoulder to lean on.
And an apple.
Faith had accepted it for politeness' sake, but afterwards she had lost track of it somewhere along the way. She hadn't felt much like eating at the time.
Or since, come to that.
What Faith remembered the most clearly out of the whole night, though, was Lieutenant Swersky's reaction.
Initially, it was worse than she would have imagined. The timing was bad, for a start; he'd arrived at Mercy just in time to see Cruz being taken to surgery looking like something scraped from the underside of a truck. At the same time he found himself up to his neck in the aftermath of the other business; Davis and Sully and their little tale, the guys from the firehouse waiting for news on Johnson (along with Johnson's wife and children, who by that time were right there with them), and perhaps worst of all, Taylor's mother. For Swersky it had been like walking through a minefield of bad news.
His mood didn't even approach anger - it transcended it. Swersky shot right past anger and rage and whatever might lie beyond, and went purely berserk. Once he'd been briefed on the day's events, from the accident on up to exactly how Cruz had come to be in such a state, he'd calmly gathered all of the participants from the hotel party together in one of the waiting rooms, and then proceeded to verbally skin each of them alive. On a case-by-case basis.
Not surprisingly, he'd started with Bosco, a principle actor in everything that had gone down that day. Two separate and seemingly unrelated fiascos, and you had Maurice Boscorelli smack in the middle of both. The fur had flown, and Faith half-remembered watching it with her mouth hanging open and her eyes goggling out of her head like a little kid. He yelled. He screamed. He swore. When it came to profanity Swersky tended to stick to the common vernacular, although he rarely dropped the F-bomb unless he was most severely pissed at something. That night at Mercy hospital, however, the Lieutenant had attained a level of obscenity that was almost poetic. While unloading on Bosco he had invoked fuck at least nine times, and each time it sounded as crisp and incisive as a gunshot. When words failed him, he just kept right on going, diving even further into a goody bag of gutter words Faith had never heard the man use before. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Even whoremaster, which Faith thought of as a more backwoods-small-town colloquialism than something you'd hear in New York, New York. Like Faith herself, Swersky seemed to have lost whatever grudging respect he'd once had for Bosco, and as a result he was merciless. The day's tally was a dead and mutilated paramedic, a monstrously burned firefighter, and a badly maimed police sergeant. And Bosco shared the blame in all three. Faith had never seen the Lieu so upset, and she remembered worrying in a distracted sort of way about his heart.
After promising Bosco that he would be delivering pizzas for a living by the end of the week, Swersky then turned his attention to Aaron Noble. The writer, drenched in sweat and climbing the walls, promptly clammed up. He refused to answer even the most innocuous questions without a lawyer present, and claimed to have seen nothing. Who shot who first? Why, I didn't see it, sir. Nossir, absolutely not. Had my eyes shut the whole time. That Cruz is one scary gal.
This mulishness had provoked Swersky into another tirade somehow even more awe-inspiring than the first.
Eventually it was Faith's turn, and by the time the Lieutenant worked his way around to her, he should have cooled off a bit. He hadn't. Here, after all, was the woman who had sauntered away from her post at eight o'clock to take a meal period, and by quarter to nine had somehow managed to shoot a fellow police officer. All things considered, Swersky had probably saved the best for last.
If he had, though, he never got the chance to use it. That was because the moment Swersky fixed eyes on her, Faith went completely bonkers. She wasn't trying to make a play for sympathy by going all girly-girl - it just happened, and she didn't even know it was going to happen until it did. She broke down right there in front of everybody, crying quite literally like a baby, trying to speak through big, whooping sobs that kept knocking her words all over the place. Looking at the crack-glaze of blood and vomit on her uniform, Swersky put the rest together for himself; Cruz had lost it, and Faith had had to respond with lethal force.
Except that was a lie. It was a lie but Swersky had swallowed it as truth almost without question, just as neatly and easily as he'd bought the little going out to scratch up something to eat bit that opened the whole can of worms in the first place.
Presently, Swersky appeared to be right back where she'd left him that night. When she last walked out of this building he'd been sitting behind the main desk, leafing through what she thought might have been a newspaper (or possibly a fishing magazine - she saw those scattered around the desk from time to time). It had been a slow night, and Swersky had taken the opportunity to catch up on some reading.
He was reading now, too, flipping through what looked like a report with one hand and sipping delicately at a cup of steaming coffee with the other. As she drew nearer Faith could see a small litter of stir-sticks, empty sweetener packets, and an open lunch-sized carton of cream on the desk nearby.
Faith guessed that his diet had gone by the boards, at least for today.
And that might have had something to do with what he was looking at; whatever the paper in his hand was, it didn't appear to be light reading. Swersky's frown deepened visibly as he scanned down the page, mouthing words softly and inaudibly as he read, pausing occasionally to shake his head and grunt something under his breath. He was almost scowling when he caught her in his peripheral vision and looked up.
The scowl disappeared instantly under a broad, warm smile. "Hey, Faith!"
She nodded and returned what felt like a reasonable approximation of his smile, but said nothing. Swersky went back to his report, the accompanying frown reappearing almost at once.
Simple as that. Just looked up and said hi, then back to his business.
This was good. This was a good way to start things off, no doubt about that. But she had never really expected anything but a warm welcome from Swersky; with Bosco and Cruz shouldering all the blame, the water between them was clear again. That was good, but this was still only the front desk. It was the locker room she was worried about. It was the others she was worried about. Cruz was not well-liked around the Five-Five and never had been, but she was still a cop and that could still count for a lot. And while Faith was not in any way responsible for bringing down all those other Anti-Crime cops, it could certainly look that way, couldn't it? Sure it could. Faith Yokas could make a handy little scapegoat for those looking to brand somebody a rat, couldn't she?
She did this! they'd all say. She brought all this negative attention down on our heads!
All this nasty press.
All this bad karma
I'm getting silly again here, she thought. And that's good, too. A good sign. I think it is, anyway.
It was. Of course it was. If she could turn her fear - her irrational fear - into a joke, then wasn't that a good coping mechanism? Absolutely it was. You called that whistling in the dark. Or, to use a more colorful phrase her mother had coined (or claimed she had, anyway), Faith was dancin' past the graveyard. Because it was all nonsense - all of this worry over her place in the NYPD. Her place in the NYPD hadn't changed.
So why, then, did there seem to be a series of steel belts drawing themselves around her torso, constricting her ribcage and making it hard to breathe? Because that was exactly what was happening to her right now, and she could really feel those suckers, too - it wasn't just some fancy metaphorical way to describe her nervousness. Faith could feel them very clearly against her skin, could even articulate physical detail; she imagined flexible but very tough straps woven out of some kind of heavy-gauge metal fiber, one looped above her breasts, one below, and one wrapped around her stomach. And all of them cinched tight.
She thought that people who suffered panic attacks often reported such symptoms as warning signs of an impending episode. Yes, she thought she might have read that somewhere. Feelings of being pressured. Compressed. Squeezed. And you couldn't shake them, no matter what you told yourself.
She'd never had a panic attack before in her life (unless popping a valve at Mercy counted) but she thought she'd probably know one if she felt it coming on.
Panic attack. Imagine having one of those babies, right here in the middle of the precinct.
Faith mentally slapped herself as she started for the locker room. She had to stop this. She was letting it get away from her and she had to stop it.
"You're gonna be late," Swersky said as she passed the desk. She stiffened for a moment, searching his tone for something accusatory, then inwardly swatted herself again. When she turned she found him still smiling, though it had taken on a bit of a harried edge. He held up the paper he was reading and waved it. "But then, so am I. I'm supposed to read this by the end of the day."
"What is it?"
Swersky shook his head and threw the report on the desk. Then he drew his hands down over his face and sighed, an expression of such perfect exhaustion that Faith hauled off and gave herself another crisp internal smack upside the head. She was being selfish as well as needlessly paranoid. The events of the past week went far beyond her and her own struggles with her apprehension and guilt, and it was as hard on Swersky as it was on anybody.
More so, my dear. He's the one in the hot seat here. So for the last time, shut up and quit whining.
"That's my homework," Swersky said. "Love letter from the Monster. Nothing I want to talk about."
"The Monster?"
"Schaeffer. That's what they call him in IAB circles, apparently - The Monster. Because he's such a big ugly fucker. Among other things. That" - Swersky stabbed a finger at the report as if it were a large and very poisonous snake - "is a lot of his typical bullshit, including a list of changes that he wants made around here. Goes on for about three pages. He writes just like he talks, did you know that? Sarcastic fuck." His shoulders sagged suddenly. He shook his head and waved a weary hand at the air. "Look at me, unloading on you the second you come through the door. Shit. But this is getting to me, Faith. It really is. I've got Schaeffer to contend with, and I've got One Police Plaza coming down on my ass because we should have been keeping this Anti-Crime thing as low-key as possible. But somebody leaked the story. It's all out on the wire - all of it. What am I supposed to do about that?" He nodded towards the door. "Didn't have any trouble getting through that fucking monkey farm out front, did you?"
Faith studied him doubtfully. Swersky had just said "fuck" three times in less than a minute. That didn't even touch his little Mercy Speech, but it was still a personal record for him, she was sure. He was a bit pissed all right. Stressed out and pissed off.
Answering his question, she just said, "Nah, no trouble." And that was the truth - she'd gotten into the building without having to fend off a single microphone. In fact, as far as she had been able to see the reporters hadn't noticed her at all, one perfectly nondescript woman skittering through their midst with her gear slung over her shoulder. The press had had no idea that the instigator - yes, the very eye of the storm herself - was walking right through them. And Faith was not so overwrought that she couldn't take a certain playful glee in that. Oh, how they'd love to get their hands on her! And yet they never would! Didn't even know who she was! Let them fumble around in the dark. Monkey farm, indeed.
She thought she just might be feeling those steel straps starting to loosen a bit - just the tiniest bit. Whatever else might be going on, whatever was going on outside, it was still business as usual in here. Swersky was in the hot seat, yes, and he was pissed off. But that was what they paid him the big bucks for, wasn't it? The Lieutenant money.
"Good," Swersky said. He jabbed a friendly finger at her. "But if you get any trouble from them, you tell me. Right? If you get any trouble, if you see anybody getting hassled, anything at all, you tell me right away. The second those bottom-feeders start interfering with the smooth operation of this precinct, heads are gonna fucking roll. Things are running funky enough around here as it is."
"Absolutely," Faith agreed brightly. Then she added, just for fun: "Some news van was blocking the bucket boys in when I got here."
This was not meant as a genuine complaint; it was mostly just her nerves running away with her mouth, making inane conversation to reinforce that sense of how humdrum and normal it was here. Talking out of her ass, in other words. But the moment it was out Swersky's eyes lit up, and Faith realized with something like dismay that he was not just a bit pissed - he was still on the warpath. He wanted an excuse to go out there and send them all scattering. He wanted to hear those fucking heads a-rolling. And here she was, standing here blurting out random trash.
"They're blocking the firehouse?" he said, eyes narrowed. "Were they still there when you came in?"
"No," she said hastily, her gaze flicking up over Swersky's shoulder as something behind him caught her eye. "No, Doherty was out there and ... uh ... I think he ran them off ... I don't know if they ..."
Faith trailed off, peering past the main desk and watching as two men - middle-aged, expensively dressed, and utterly devoid of any human facial expression - made their way carefully down the stairs from the upper landing. In its troubled state her mind immediately and inexplicably christened them Huey and Louey. Huey and Louey were moving slowly because they were both carrying heavy and awkward burdens. Their footsteps were jerky and hesitant, probing each step as they went in an almost comically synchronized little dance. The first was carrying a ridiculously overstacked pile of manila file folders. The second was carrying a computer tower with its accompanying keyboard and mouse balanced precariously on top; the cords from each peripheral whisked and flapped along the floor behind him, just waiting to trip somebody up. Or for someone to step on them and send the whole mess flying.
There was nothing particularly unusual or threatening about them - they could easily have been a pair of lawyers, perhaps even homicide detectives with an unusual flair for vanity, but Faith knew on sight that they were neither. They looked like cops but they also looked somehow wrong here, just plain out of their natural habitat, and she needed neither the expensive suits nor their stern Joe Friday expressions to tell her they were Internal Affairs.
Two IAB cops. Carrying away bits of equipment and records.
Bits of Anti-Crime, she thought coldly. I am, at this very moment, looking at what's left of Maritza Cruz's Anti-Crime unit. One little part of it, anyway. They're stripping the place down to the bare wires.
God, what the hell was going on up there?
And it didn't stop with Huey and Louey. Focused entirely on Swersky to this point, Faith hadn't really made much of an effort to actually pivot her neck around to see what else might have changed. And something had changed, all right. The precinct was different. Colder. Emptier. Quieter. Almost as quiet as it had been the night she'd snuck out to the Melrose.
Except that was late in the evening, she thought uneasily. This is three in the afternoon. The place ought to be hopping.
But it wasn't.
So it seemed things were not quite as normal and humdrum as she'd first thought. Things were quite the opposite of normal and humdrum, and now that she'd seen it Faith found it impossible to unsee it. She looked around, and she could see other cops going about their business ... cops who were silent and stony-faced and obviously very tightly wound, moving about in quick, deliberate strides. They had the air of men and women who wanted to do whatever they were here to do and then get back out on the streets as fast as possible. Back outside and away from here. Faith saw one older, haggard-looking uniformed cop stop long enough to mutter something to Huey and Louey as they passed, something Faith very much doubted was a friendly howdy-do. The two detectives, however, didn't even seem to notice him.
If they were anything like Schaeffer, Faith doubted they would have cared anyway.
Schaeffer. The Monster. Now there was something else to worry about - Schaeffer was probably lurking around here somewhere, and she was in no mood to deal with him. She had no idea why that should be, because she really didn't have anything against the man; he'd cleared her, after all, and seemingly with very little deliberation. He was dedicated to his work and he was dedicated to bringing Cruz and her band of merry men to justice. Admirable guy. But while she respected him for that much, Monster suited him down to the ground, because there was something undeniably scary about him. He was not a man who played favorites or harbored any loyalties, and he liked his job too damned much. He'd send her up the river without batting an eyelash, if she gave him a reason.
More than that, however, Faith just didn't feel much like dealing with anybody who could function as a reminder of the last couple of days. As a reminder of Cruz. Cruz was the past. Best to keep her there, along with anything remotely connected to her.
"- are they moving or not?"
Faith started.
Swersky. Swersky was talking to her.
She broke away from watching the IAB suits and shook the dust out of her head. "I'm sorry, what?"
"You were saying something about Jimmy Doherty running off a bunch of reporters. Then you said 'I don't know if they...' Don't know if they what?"
Faith tried on a hangdog, aw-shucks smile. It felt much less sincere this time, and she thought the belts around her chest and belly might be tightening up again after all. "Nothing. It's fine, Jimmy handled it. Look, I'm late so I'd better ... you know ..." She waved lamely in the direction of the locker room.
"Right. Roll Call's gonna be a little late today, though." Swersky paused. Then he smiled again and tipped his coffee mug towards her. "It is good to see you back, Faith."
"Thanks," she said, and she meant it, but she'd already started off at a healthy trot. She had done a complete about-face in her thinking; she was now itching to reach the locker room and the relative safety it offered. The more she looked around, the more she saw how truly tense it was here. How forbidding it was here. And it was scaring her. It was scaring her because it was the Five-Five and yet it wasn't the Five-Five; the building was right, but the air inside it was all wrong. It was unknown territory. This was ridiculous, of course, irrational, but like everything else she was feeling at the moment, the idea didn't come from a part of her brain that had anything to do with rationality. It came from the other side, the part that harbored that twittery little fight-or-flight response, the voice that kept telling her to turn and run. There was danger here, it insisted. Just look around - there were reporters waving microphones. IAB goons carting away evidence like ants marching away from a picnic basket.
And there was the possibility of Schaeffer.
Lions and tigers and bears, she thought, and smiled brokenly to herself. Oh my.
"Oh, and I've got you riding with Monroe today!" Swersky called after her.
Faith fired an absent wave over her shoulder but didn't break stride. Monroe - that was good, fine, whatever. She liked Monroe. She trusted Monroe. But right now she needed to get to the locker room.
She sped up the pace a bit. She was probably starting to look a lot like a woman suffering a full bladder, bouncing lightly and urgently along the hall, looking for a washroom where she could offload. Probably looked pretty silly.
Faith didn't care. Nobody was paying any attention to her anyway, and she wanted to keep it that way.
This is stupid. You are being very stupid. You're making a fool of yourself. You're making a fool of yourself in front of yourself, if no-one else. You're gonna look back on this later and want to stick your head in an oven.
Maybe so. But she couldn't help it. She had to get some walls around her. Hide between the lockers.
No, not hide - hide was all wrong. She needed to take a breather. She was ready to be back - it was just that seeing those IAB detectives walking away with pieces of Cruz's gear had thrown her a bit. That, and seeing how tense things were around here. And the media circus outside. A little wonkiness was perfectly understandable, as long as she remained in control of herself. Which she was.
Faith didn't exactly hit the locker room at a dead run, but it was close.
End of Part I