A Moment of Clarity
by Cipher44

Part II

"I don't deserve this."

- Gene Hackman

Unforgiven

"Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

- Clint Eastwood

Unforgiven

Chapter 7

Cruz

I.

The trip has been paid for out of her own pocket, right down to the brand-new pair of skis she bought for Lettie, who has never set foot on a slope in her entire life. You can rent skis, of course - and maybe that would be a smarter thing to do, what with Lettie being a beginner - but buying new feels right somehow, more in tune with what you might call the spirit of the trip.

This is her awkward, hesitant attempt at bonding with her little sister. She's never been good at stuff like this, but Lettie is seventeen and Maritza is getting desperate because it's ice now - crystal-fucking-meth. Cigarettes when she was twelve, pot when she was fifteen, busted for coke possession the following year, and now ice, the worst of them all. And Lettie doesn't snort it - she smokes it. Maritza, who has read all the literature by now, knows why - it's a better way to get high.

It is also an exceptionally deadly way to get high. Maritza is badly shaken and very scared. She needs to get through to Lettie but she has no idea how; she has so much working against her. There's almost a decade between them, and the fact that she's a cop - a cop who has actually locked up a few of Lettie's lowlife "friends" - doesn't help.

These days, their fights would be better described as balls-out screaming matches, driven along by Lettie's arsenal of shrill, defensive teenage cliches: You don't know me! My friends understand me! I can take care of myself! And so on. This adolescent horseshit makes Maritza want to puke, but fighting only hardens Lettie's resolve and drives her even further away. The elder Cruz sister recognizes this for the vicious circle it is, but she's as helpless against her own temper as Lettie is against hers. Maritza doesn't know what to do, and that makes her even more furious.

So she takes Lettie skiing.

She starts simple, teaching Lettie the ins and outs. The kid's sullen and disagreeable at first; it seems something as whitebread as skiing just isn't street enough for tough little Lettie. Or so she thinks. Before long, she's into it. She's terrible at it - her arms and legs all seem to have different ideas about which direction to go in - but she's into it. Forget trying to be a cop with her, forget the almost painfully patronizing lectures, and you avoid the fights before they start. Just be a big sister again. It sounds like one of those goddam cheesy Partnership for a Drug-Free America commercials, but if it works it works, and to hell with tough love.

Maritza spends most of the day watching Lettie flail gracelessly around the kiddie slopes, feeling better than she has in ages. The sudden lack of tension between them is so abrupt and so extreme that it's almost a physical thing; for the first time in three years - perhaps as many as six - she can breathe easy.

And then, while the two of them are taking their skis off for the day, it happens. Lettie, bent over and fumbling with her boots, suddenly loses her balance and falls flat on her face in the snow.

Quick as a cat she's back up on her feet, her face twisted into the expression her older sister has come to loathe these past few years; instant regression from seventeen to a petulant six. It's ugly and embarrassing and maddening all at the same time.

"You tripped me!"

Maritza sighs wearily. "No, I didn't." And she didn't, either - how could she have tripped Lettie when they'd both been standing perfectly still? Stupid.

"You fucking TRIPPED me!" Lettie shrieks, and then launches herself at her sister. She's a tiny girl (currently tipping the scales at a proud one hundred-and-six, and she'll get a lot lighter in the next few years) but she's pissed and Maritza isn't expecting it. Lettie hits her with a full-on flying tackle.

The wind is driven from Maritza's lungs, and as they go down in a tangle she is hit with the bleak - though not terribly surprising - realization that nothing has really changed at all. Lettie's the same as she ever was, hot-tempered and defensive and resentful, looking for something, anything to pick a fight over.

Maritza wonders if she'll have to hurt her. Physically hurt her. She thinks maybe she will. And it won't be self-defense, either. She thinks it might just be time to throw down the gloves and, at last, try to beat some sense into her.

Then Maritza gasps and goes rigid with shock as Lettie scoops a heaping handful of snow down the back of her parka. Lettie is laughing now - cackling that demented cackle she's practiced since she was about five - but there doesn't seem to be any real animosity behind it, and a moment later Maritza gets another icy shot of snow down her back.

It's been a long time since Lettie cut the shit and lightened up. So long, in fact, that Maritza didn't even recognize a play-fight when she saw it coming.

And suddenly they're both laughing and wrestling and trying to snow each other like a couple of kids, until finally they both lie panting and red-faced in the snow, staring up at the sky. This isn't the way things really are between them at all - not anymore, not ever again - but right now Maritza is ready to lose herself in the illusion. She realizes she's grinning helplessly, sloppily. Melting snow trickles over her neck, down her back. In the euphoria of the moment she can really believe that Lettie is going to be okay, that things are going to turn around, and of course this is it, right here, this is the last time she will ever see her sister vital and healthy.

In the end Maritza washes her hands of Lettie and walks away. In the end it hurts too much to do anything else. Of course she can't admit this, to herself or to anyone - she tells herself that it's only because Lettie is a big girl now, that she makes her own decisions and must deal with the consequences accordingly. But Maritza is a cop and she knows bullshit when it's being shoveled in her face - even when it's herself doing the shoveling. Underneath it all she knows that she's weak, that it's her own weakness, her own fear, her own unwillingness to face the inevitable crash that makes her turn her back. It's easier to cut Lettie off, as if that could somehow absolve her of her responsibility. She walks away from Lettie and tells herself it has to be this way, for both of them it has to be this way, and still she knows that she has left her sister to those bastard parasites who feed on her and exploit her and abuse her. Maritza hates herself all the same, she knows that Lettie will die alone and that it will, in part, be her fault.

And when Lettie comes back into her life for the last time, when God or Fate or pure, idiot chance allows Lettie to actually die in her older sister's arms, Maritza Cruz knows that any peace of mind she can take from that is far more than she deserves.

The passage over from sleep to consciousness came in two stages, starting in a kind of slow, climactic rise and ending in a swift and brutal drop into the waking world; if Cruz had been in any shape to care about formulating metaphors, she might have thought of biking up a steep hill in tenth gear, gasping and panting with effort ... then hitting the unexpected peak and plummeting helplessly down the other side like a torpedo.

It was a confusing business, too, because she awoke into pouring rain, and for several seconds believed that she was still on the ski slope. Water poured down the back of her neck in little rivulets, but it wasn't melting snow. She was freezing through and through, as well - an even nastier kind of bone-deep chill than the one she'd felt after the taxi had deposited her in front of her apartment building. Coldness and wetness - this had to be the ski slope. Had to be. She was lying on the slopes and Lettie was lying somewhere beside her, and at any moment the girl would get her second wind and start stuffing snow down her back or in her face again. For a few short seconds, this logic fit.

That was the slow, climactic rise.

The fast and brutal drop into consciousness started when she felt what was under her ass (which had gone to sleep - both cheeks were numb and tingling). She was sitting - slouched in an awkward sprawl, really - on a hard public bench. Hard, wet wood. So it wasn't the ski slope. And Lettie wasn't beside her. That was because Lettie was dead. Dead and over three months in her grave, to be precise, and Maritza ought to know that by now because she had watched them plant Lettie with her own eyes.

No more snow-fights for Lettie.

She came awake the rest of the way in a sharp, reflexive jolt that almost tumbled her off the bench and startled an odd, gurgling cry of pain out of her in the bargain. Her head had been lolling off to the side and her neck had gone terribly stiff; the pain of this sudden, jarring movement tried to mix with the pain from her shoulder, couldn't compete, and was swallowed by it.

Groaning softly, Cruz waited for it to taper off a bit and then tried to straighten up. There was a very distinct pop from her neck and another brief flare of pain, again quickly snuffed out under the wound's now-constant background howl. She became aware of something wet and stringy and unpleasant draped over her eyes and the bridge of her nose, tickling at the corner of her mouth. Her garbled mind immediately and outlandishly insisted that she had, at some point, been covered in seaweed. Two heartbeats later she realized that it was her own hair. She raked it back with her fingers, a habitual post-shower motion that sprayed a fine mist of droplets behind her, a gesture that might once have looked rather sexy and was now only blunt and feeble and exasperated.

And her mouth was full of something. Something. Something awful, something that was thick and sticky and foul.

Cruz spat and produced a jellylike wad of half-congealed blood. The bites on her tongue must have split open. That, or she had bitten it again. She found she didn't care much one way or the other. Her head was throbbing too badly to sweat the small stuff, a sunken knot of dull, nauseating pain above and just slightly to the left of the bridge of her nose. She deliberately turned her face up into the rain, gasping as the icy water pelted her face and slipped between her lips, mind flashing on the ski slope again as the last rotten scraps of the dream dissolved around her.

She had fallen asleep. That was bad. Worse was that she'd somehow managed it while sitting in a backwrenching sprawl on an uncomfortable public bench in the middle of a teeming downpour.

On the heels of that realization came another, one notch above horrifying:

Jesus Christ, I've missed him.

Cruz looked up sharply, momentarily forgetting the pain and stiffness, horribly sure that she had, she had missed him, she had slipped under at exactly the wrong time and let Aaron Noble get away on her.

She hadn't missed him, though. His battered Mercedes was still in the parking lot across the street.

Cruz sat back and exhaled. Fate had forgiven her. With a few recent (and rather drastic) exceptions, Fate usually did. But it was still a bad slip. A very bad slip. Almost lost the whole fucking show right there.

But Christ, she hurt. She hurt, and how easy was it to keep yourself alert and on your toes when you were hurting like this all the time?

Cruz blinked water out of her eyes and looked down, her gaze catching on a small square of white standing out against the dark slate of the sidewalk. It was the photograph. The photograph had slipped out of her hand when she went under and had come to rest on the ground between her feet.

It was the only picture she'd taken on that ski trip, and the only existing photo of both Cruz sisters together as grown women. Lettie had still been a year shy of her age of majority, of course (and she never really grew all the way up anyway), but the adult terminology still fit. Because in the picture you could see a hint of the woman she might have been - hard-livin', trash-talkin' gangsta-bitch was nowhere in sight. She was on the left, grinning sunnily at the camera, as if all was well with the world and there wasn't a single reason to believe that would ever change. Maritza was on the right, but she was wearing only the barest hint of a smile; apparently she did not share the same level of enthusiasm as her sister. It didn't look forced, exactly, but there was something distinctly measured about it - just enough smile so as not to ruin the picture.

Cruz kept trying to remember exactly what she might have been thinking in that moment and couldn't do it. The photo had been a spontaneous thing, she remembered that much, because her camera had gathered dust at the bottom of a tote-bag until they were just getting ready to leave. She'd cornered a resort employee at the last minute and asked him to take a shot of her and Lettie together. So it had been her idea all the way - she remembered grabbing Lettie by the elbow and lining her up for the shot while the employee figured out her cheap Nikon. He was a crater-faced canteen attendant, flustered and tongue-tied at being approached by this hot little snow-bunny with the dark eyes, and he'd tripped all over himself to please her. He sighted them with the camera and, perhaps losing his nerve to say something witty, simply cried a lame "smile big now!"

Lettie had followed the order and offered up a toothy one ... but Maritza had not. Maritza had turned her lips into something that probably felt okay at the time but ended up looking pallid and humorless and ironic on film - something just a bit too Sergeant Cruz for comfort. It was as if, at the precise second when the shutter clicked and the flashbulb went off, this slightly younger version of herself had suddenly fallen off the high. The high that both of them had ridden the whole weekend, the high that had started when Lettie jammed a handful of snow down her parka. Bullshit. All bullshit. Cruz the Elder knew it - Cruz the Younger would very soon. They would arrive back home and it would all start again, Lettie fucking up and Maritza following along behind her picking up the pieces, grimly ignoring the abuse the miserable little twat would pour back on her by way of thanks. You can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the et cetera, et cetera, blah blah blah.

Cruz picked the photo up daintily by the corner and shook it off. Until recently it had resided safely in its frame on the mantle in her living room. Now naked and defenseless, it had accumulated a fair amount of wear and tear. But it was tough, and even after this trip into the gutter it was still salvageable and still very recognizable - what you had here was one fuck of a quality print. Props to the good people at Kodak.

She laid the photo aside on the bench and looked around. The picture was at least partially to blame for the slip; she'd been looking at it, focusing on it just for something to focus on, perhaps citing it as a firm reminder that her reasons for putting herself through this torture were still quite sound. And at some point she'd simply been bushwhacked by her own exhausted brain. Consciousness had melted into unconsciousness and that fucking ski trip had followed her down, weaving itself right back into that same old tired thread of guilt and shame and stupid grief.

But it was dark out here. She recalled it being dusky when she first sat down here, and now it was dark. So how long had she been out?

She looked at the watch she'd taken from her bedside table that afternoon and saw that it was twenty-two minutes after nine.

Then, still looking at her outstretched hand, she turned it palm-down and held it there.

There was a very noticeable tremble.

Just the cold, she thought numbly. That's all. I'm soaked and I'm freezing.

The cold, yes. That, coupled with the fact that her right arm was now pulling double duty. Only natural that the muscles would start to feel a little wobbly, the same way her legs had felt a bit unsteady after she pulled herself out of her hospital bed. But she'd still been able to stand and walk, hadn't she? Sure had. It'd been no problem then, and it was no problem now.

Cruz curled her fingers into a fist, tightening up the muscles and tendons in her arm, trying to get it under control.

She couldn't do it. And flexing only made the tremble more pronounced.

This was stupid. This was fucking stupid. It should be easy, no effort required, and yet it was sapping her strength. Sapping her. She could feel it, and a moment later she had to give in and relax.

Okay, just a bit of shakiness in the limbs. Nothing to get all worked up about.

And yet she went back at it almost immediately, willing the goddam hand to steady up, feeling a kind of drowsy, half-conscious fear slip over her, fear that she could really have lost this much physical self-control in such a short time. She held the hand up in front of her like a dog favoring a sore paw, squinting at it, unaware that her tongue had crept out of the corner of her mouth in a small child's display of intense concentration, trying to hold it steady, willing it steady.

Couldn't be done.

Cruz stared at it, gritting her teeth, fear turning to hot, petulant anger at this physical betrayal. Her own weakness disgusted her. It disgusted her because it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that she could have been hurt in this way, that she could have been crippled in this way, and it was that one simple and mostly unremarkable truth that kept hitting her; she was crippled. Not disabled. Not physically challenged. Crippled. Fucking down-and-dirty crippled. She kept being smacked rudely in the face by her new limitations, and the discovery process was still ongoing. She kept trying to do things, working off twenty-nine years' worth of thoughtless, ingrained reflex ... only to be stopped dead in her tracks by some unforseen and usually humiliating obstacle. It was like trying to navigate a maze where all the walls were made of plexiglass. Everything had to be worked around the wound, and everything had to be done entirely with one hand. Nothing, nothing was simple anymore.

Example: getting dressed. Generally speaking, most human beings can master this skill by age three. For Cruz, however, putting on her clothes that afternoon had very quickly degenerated into an unpleasant little black comedy. She had chosen a sleeveless tank-top as the easiest-looking piece of clothing to insert her newly warped body into, and had put it on very carefully. She had promptly gotten stuck, her bad arm caught half in and half out of the armhole of the shirt. It went downhill from there. Every movement, every attempt to try to wriggle one way or the other had resulted in a double shotgun blast of pain - one through her shoulder and one through the center of her head, which was now singing a more or less constant duet with the wound. She had wriggled and twisted and yet she had remained utterly stuck.

Stuck. Stuck while getting dressed.

She'd started to cry miserably. But even as she cried she kept right at it, twisting this way and that, grimly working through the pain. Her mind had turned back to the first few days in the hospital, when she had been dreading the inevitable visit from the physiotherapist. This hypothetical person probably would have turned out to be either a perky little sexpot or some hunky athletic type who might eventually start putting the moves on her. Girl talk or hospital romance. Maddening either way. She had pictured the therapist shouting caring-but-stern fluff at her while she broke in her new plastic-fantastic shoulder joint. She would have hated that, she knew she would have, but ironically enough she was now having to play the part herself. She had to drive herself, push mercilessly. Force it! Work it! Mind over matter! Willpower conquers all! Maintain focus! Insert motivational slogan here!

Eventually she had gotten unstuck and finished.

But it had taken her twenty minutes.

And now her goddam hand wouldn't stop trembling.

She was weakening, and there was really no use trying to kid herself about it. Eight hours had passed since the great escape from Angel of Mercy hospital, and she could feel herself deteriorating. Falling asleep right out in the elements was only the latest symptom of the larger problem.

And again, why paint pretty colors over the truth? She hadn't "fallen asleep." She had "passed out." She was charging merrily towards total physical exhaustion, and if she didn't soon find a place to bed down and rest properly, she would be looking at total physical collapse. The pain was getting steadily worse, and she wasn't holding to any illusions about how much longer she could stand against that, either. She knew very well what she was doing here; she was pushing herself to the absolute limits of what the human body was capable of enduring, fueled only by that desperate, undiluted rage. And that couldn't hold her forever.

It might hold her long enough, though. She was moving fast, and so far she'd made more progress than she would have dared hope for. She had wasted no time beginning her search for Aaron Noble, starting immediately after leaving her apartment that afternoon. She had been saddled with the knowledge that she had all of New York standing between her and him, but she had gamely fallen back into cop-mode and followed her instincts, using his last known whereabouts as her jumping-off point. His last known whereabouts, the place where all of this had started and the place where she had -

(been crippled)

come within an ace of losing her life: the Melrose Hotel. She had called the Melrose from a payphone, and asked if Mr. Noble was still a guest there.

The receptionist's mechanically polite voice had chilled several degrees at the mention of the name. It seemed that Mr. Noble was not only no longer staying at the Melrose, he was no longer welcome at the Melrose. The hotel didn't approve of rowdy, destructive parties - it was even less tolerant when it came to hosting police shootings in your room. Noble was out on his ass, and wouldn't be coming back.

This was the answer Cruz had been expecting, and it posed a difficult question - how the hell would she find him now? She'd just exhausted her only lead, so where was the next jumping-off point going to come from?

The receptionist had handed it right to her; Noble had actually left a forwarding address. He was now staying at the Bridgeview Hotel. Cruz knew the Bridgeview in passing; it was considerably smaller and more subtle than the Melrose - quaint, old-fashioned, and out-of-the-way.

The receptionist asked Cruz if she would be needing the Bridgeview's number.

Cruz said no, that was okay, she was gonna head over there in person.

Then, riding high on this latest stroke of good luck, she found herself having to suppress the morbidly playful urge to ask the woman if the carpets in Noble's room were Scotch-Guarded ... and if so, had the cleaning staff managed to get all the blood out yet?

Instead, Cruz had thanked the receptionist and hung up.

So a new question had appeared on the big board: why was Noble so open about his whereabouts? It wasn't the way you'd expect a man running from a pissed-off biker gang to behave, was it? Nobody in their right mind took the Disciples lightly; these were the sort of guys who were known to gun down judges in broad daylight. If they really wanted Noble dead, then Noble would probably be dead. It all served to strengthen her theory: Noble had found some way to get back on good terms with them. Either that or ...

... or Noble was never in as much danger as he'd wanted her to believe.

Didn't matter. All water under the bridge. What was important was that she had found him, and a lot faster and easier than she would have expected.

The plan from there had been straightforward enough; go to the Bridgeview, wait for Noble to appear, and ambush him. In the most innocent sense of the word ambush, of course. He probably wasn't going to be very happy to see her, and she was trying to keep a low profile. The element of surprise seemed smart, and she would wait until after dark.

Ah, but what then? How would she make Noble do what she wanted him to do? She didn't really think threatening him would get her anywhere - she had nothing to threaten him with - and it was ludicrous to think he would ever help her voluntarily.

Wasn't it?

Whatever mistakes she might have made in the recent past, Cruz was still an expert manipulator and always had been; she never would have gotten as far as she had otherwise. She was as wily in an interrogation room as she was on the streets, and she was a frighteningly quick and accurate judge of character. Look at Boscorelli - she may have misjudged him, but only because Yokas had complicated matters. If not for Yokas, Cruz would have had him curbed like a dog. There's always a way in, after all, and it's usually surprisingly simple - with Bosco it was sex. Sex and power. Run around and terrorize criminals with him by day, bump uglies with him at night, and there you had it - tame as a kitten. Her only mistake with him had been in getting complacent and missing the Yokas variable.

Noble was a bit more complex. It would be easy to assume that the way into him was drugs. It wasn't. Drugs would help, of course, but Noble's meth addiction was incidental - there was another way she thought she could pull Noble's strings, something that was more essential to his nature. It was, to fall back on an old cliche, the Ace up her sleeve. But she would have to wait until the time came to see if it would work.

And waiting is, as the song goes, the hardest part. The problem with her plan was that it had left her with several hours to kill before nightfall and nowhere to kill them. She had no vehicle, and driving a car was probably beyond her capabilities now anyway. She couldn't go back home and she had nowhere else to hide. She was cut off from everything and everyone, left completely to her own devices.

So she had been reduced to what basically amounted to the life of a bag lady. A fugitive bag lady. Stay low, avoid attention, and most of all, watch out for the cops. It was almost funny. The Hunter Becomes the Hunted - sounded like a perfectly cornball title for one of Noble's books. But she had worked undercover plenty of times, and she knew how to make herself inconspicuous. The role she usually played was hooker, but at the moment bag lady suited the circumstances; she looked terrible, and did whatever she could to make herself look even worse. She'd put in the time on benches like the one she was sitting on now, slouched apathetically in her heavy coat with the hood up and her hair hanging in her eyes.

Just another derelict here, folks. Pay no mind, pay no mind.

Around five o'clock she had taken a calculated risk by riding a bus across the city to the Bridgeview. She wasn't keen on the idea of using public transit (and had no desire whatsoever to get into another cab), but trying to walk there would have literally killed her. Again, though - she was inconspicuous. Invisible. Just another derelict. She'd arrived without incident at the Bridgeview and took up her position across the street, her bench affording her a good view of the building.

The Bridgeview hotel was not located anywhere near a body of water, nor did it feature the view of any kind of bridge. The pretty name, it seemed, was just a pretty name. It was very small and had a stylized, rustic look that was designed to appeal to simpler tastes. A country bed-and-breakfast in the middle of the big city - how cute. The parking lot was on the west side, equally undersized and understated, with perhaps a grand total of fifteen parking spaces altogether.

Her heart had skipped when she saw Noble's black Mercedes there, one of only five cars in the lot, parked second from the end on the leftmost row.

He was here.

Jesus, it was amazing, wasn't it? How far she was getting, and in such a short time! More than she'd ever dared hope, and she was beginning to suspect it was that as much as anything else that was keeping her together. And if she could keep it together just a little while longer, she could really pull this thing off.

Not necessarily true, she admonished herself lightly. I'm not really any further ahead than I was at Mercy. We still have to see how our writer friend reacts to the situation. He's the biggest variable now. If things don't work out with him, I'm pretty much screwed.

There wasn't much conviction behind this, however - the Voice of Doubt had gone on vacation, and arguments for caution weren't quite as convincing when they didn't come wearing her father's skin.Besides, Noble should be coming out any time now, so she'd have her answers soon enough. And he would be out - of that she was sure. She knew he liked hitting the bars almost every night, usually a swanky place called the Crimson Lion, and she doubted his recent troubles had dampened his love of the nightlife. All part of The Psychology of Noble 101. Ambushing him there had occurred to her as a possible strategy, but might have proven too dangerous. Too exposed. Better to sit here and wait.

She just had to keep herself from nodding off (passing out) again.

Cruz reached into her coat and withdrew a small paper bag, one part of a sad, weird little inventory she'd prepared before leaving home. The bag contained six mini sugar donuts, most of them half-stale. She wasn't hungry but she felt she needed to eat something, if only to provide the illusion that she was keeping up her strength. After careful consideration, the donuts - dry and tasteless - had seemed least likely to disagree with her. They were tucked into an inside pocket next to the two extra magazines for the Tec-9; the gun itself was hidden under the coat, on its strap over her right shoulder. Noble's meth was in the opposite pocket.

She had also gathered up a few little personal artifacts, exhibits from the Museum of Maritza Cruz's Life and Times. Stupid, dangerous thing to waste time on (particularly when it now took her upwards of twenty minutes just to put on a shirt) but as she was preparing to leave Cruz had discovered something strange and more than a little surprising: she could not just walk away from her old life without taking some small piece of it with her. Here she was - hard-headed, pragmatic, cold and calculating Maritza Cruz, unable to leave home without a keepsake. But she had this to consider: what was going to happen to all of her possessions once the police had finished coring out her apartment? She had no family, and as for friends ... well, what use would Claudia Cortez have for any of her personal effects? Or Ramon Valenzuela, for that matter ... assuming Ramon even still gave a shit about her when all was said and done. Anything of value would eventually be auctioned off, and the rest ... the rest would probably end up in a landfill.

She couldn't let them have that, not after all that she'd had taken from her. She couldn't let them have everything.

So she had grabbed an item here and there, thoughtlessly and more or less at random. The ski-trip photograph from the mantle in her living room, ripped unceremoniously out of its frame. She still had absolutely no idea why she had chosen it over all the others. Lettie's smile, perhaps - broad and toothy and so very rare in those last three years. The wristwatch she was wearing had been her father's, not terribly expensive but solidly built and still running smoothly. Even with the band cinched as tight as it would go it still hung loose on her wrist, and though it had been sitting untouched in one drawer or another for almost fifteen years, she imagined she could still smell his cologne on it.

And she had the rosary.

She thought the rosary might have been the last item she'd snatched; it had been stowed in an end table in the hallway just inside the door. It had belonged to her paternal grandmother and was very old, the wooden beads dark with age and use. Her father had given it to her as a First Communion gift, and she had later given it to Lettie for her First Communion. Because she had loved her little sister so fiercely - and because their father had impressed upon her how priceless the rosary was - she had considered it the supreme gift.

Lettie had given it back to her later on, though, insisting that an heirloom so valuable should go to the elder sibling. Lettie also insisted that she was never, ever going to have children, and so would have nobody to pass it down to anyway. Maritza took the rosary back, but a year after that she gave it to Lettie again, this time as a birthday gift. It changed hands three or four times after that, becoming a kind of silly little running joke between them in the years before all the jokes, running or otherwise, dried up. But it was still always treated with a deep underlying respect. They were good Catholic girls, after all.

When the paramedics found Lettie after her next-to-last overdose, she had been alone, dying, and lying naked in her own drying shit. Aside from her precious meth and related paraphernalia, she'd had nothing to her name but a red-and-white striped tube top, a pair of black velvet hotpants, a thong that was a size too big for her, and a pair of imitation-leather boots. These had been strewn carelessly about the ratty apartment where she'd been found. She'd also had a purse containing forty-six dollars, some pitiful ID (including a tattered card that identified her as a Mouseketeer), and her grandmother's wooden rosary. The paramedics or the cops (Sullivan and Davis, as Cruz recalled) had gathered the stuff up and brought it to the hospital with her.

Cruz had disposed of Lettie's meth right away - it was only when she checked Lettie out of the hospital that she discovered the other stuff ... which included, of all things, their grandmother's priceless rosary. She had given Lettie back the money, thrown the rest of her junk away (she had brought clothes from her own closet for Lettie to wear outside, and though Maritza herself had a relatively small frame, they had still hung droopy and shapeless on Lettie), and quietly pocketed the beads. Lettie never said a word about it. Cruz doubted she even remembered that she had been carrying the rosary at all.

And yet she had been carrying it. She had been carrying the rosary close to her - and after so many years - but Cruz had found this more puzzling than heartwarming. Did it signify something, some sentimental connection Lettie had with her past? Be nice to think so, wouldn't it? Cruz thought it more likely that Lettie had kept the rosary simply because it was hers, one possession that she could afford to keep and carry, something she couldn't trade for dope and wouldn't be worth stealing. She was convinced that by the end Lettie had been too fried to attach any real emotional significance to it, and the thought of Lettie actually using the beads to pray was somehow grotesque.

So Cruz had liberated and rescued the rosary. She had, in effect, stolen back what had passed between them freely so many times.

And by the end of that same day, Lettie was dead.

There had been a period where Cruz wondered with a kind of bleak humor (and a deeper and wholly serious unease) if there might be some connection, if the rosary had somehow been protecting Lettie. Or if not the rosary itself, then perhaps their long-dead grandmother, through the rosary. Silly, right? Superstition of the purest strain. Right? Superstition better suited to her old-world Colombian grandmother than to a hard-headed Twenty-First century New York cop.

And yet the idea had stuck fast.

Cruz had actually lost most of her faith by adolescence (she had narrowed it down to somewhere between fifteen and sixteen) but she'd kept up with church; she had been a steadfast regular at St. Francis Xavier Parish right up until last week. Father Manuel Estrada was still the Parish priest; he'd been there when she was growing up, and he still knew and remembered her. She went to Mass, and she went to Confession as well, more often than not with Estrada. She went after any major takedown, she went when she killed in the line of duty, and she went whenever she got a taste of her own mortality on the job. Which, in her case, was often.

That part of her life was over now, and even if she had only been paying lip-service to her upbringing, she couldn't deny that it felt strange. She wouldn't be going to Confession anytime in the immediate future ... unless it was with a prison chaplain. Nor would she be attending Mass. Today should have been one of her regular days, in fact, and she found that even now the idea of missing a service made her uneasy. It itched. It itched at her in the same way the idea of a rosary acting as Lettie's magic talisman had itched at her. Religious fear, so deeply ingrained in her that it almost bordered on brainwashing. You had to go to church. Everybody did. If you didn't, you were to consider yourself officially fucked.

Her father would have been quick to agree. Not in such colorful terms, perhaps - he would have been more tasteful and far more succinct: Mortal Sin, 'Ritza, Mortal Sin. Mortal Sin, worthy of proper noun status and always delivered in that slow, dry, somehow sorrowful tone he reserved for matters of religion. You had to go to Mass or you were looking at Mortal Sin. No excuses accepted or even listened to - if you had your arms and legs chopped off, then you gritted your teeth and dragged yourself there by your lips. Because Mortal Sin was as bad as you could get. Like mortal wound, only it was your soul and not your body; think of it as the spiritual head-shot. It was a Mortal Sin not to go to church, and on the rare occasions when she or Lettie skipped or missed Mass, their father had always seemed more heartbroken than angry. He'd taken his old-fashioned Catholicism seriously enough to honestly believe his girls were endangering their immortal souls, and while that had never failed to make her feel guilty, it was also something Cruz had found both mildly comical and a bit sad. But she had loved him to the very end of his life (miserable as it was in those last few years) and could never stand to hurt him. So she'd kept on going to church.

She did remember making an honest attempt to find meaning in it after Lettie's death. In part because of her half-genuine fear that she had killed Lettie by taking her rosary, but mostly because re-evaluating her beliefs seemed called for at the time. At a certain point Mass loses its relevance as a means of actual communication - the words melt into a drone, a mindless background hum of vocal rhythms and patterns designed mostly to soothe and hypnotize. So she began to cut through that, to actually listen to the prayers and the sermons, taking part in the comfortable little rituals with an open mind. Just to see if anything clicked.

It ended up more an act of blind desperation than an effort to reconnect with a faith she wasn't sure she even understood. Just trying to make sense out of senselessness, that's all. Trying to find some way to reconcile that repulsive, stinking, cadaverous thing with the pudgy little girl who had worshiped the ground her big sister walked on, the big sister who had by necessity also become her substitute mother. Trying to connect a ninety-two-pound methamphetamine addict the paramedics had found lying in her own shit with her little sister, her beautiful little sister. Letitia, which means joy.

No sense of higher meaning ever came to her, no great revelation, no underlying promise of redemption.

She wasn't exactly surprised.

Now, though, in this new place she found herself in, all of these long-buried and long-dismissed questions seemed to be boiling up to the surface of her mind again, and that didn't surprise her much, either. A few hours ago she'd sat on her bed with a loaded gun, toying with the idea of just going ahead and blowing her brains out. Follow Johnny Hoyle's example. And she'd been close, so very close, a hair's breadth away from succumbing to it. Moments like that are where your life is supposed to flash before your eyes. Hers had not, and so she supposed all of this reflection - collecting stupid little trinkets, brooding over photographs, raking over religious nostalgia - was her own perverse way of forcing a flash.

She had also started thinking about all the people she'd killed. More specifically Gaines and Alvarez, her two executions. There was a certain shame there, of course, but never anything approaching honest, full-bore guilt - even if she went looking for it. Soul-searching produced very little. Sometimes she felt a twinge of remorse over Alvarez, remembering how he'd cried, how he'd begged for his life ... but then she would remind herself of what he'd done, what he was, and it would pass. For Gaines she never felt so much as a twinge. Was that wrong? Knowing what they were, knowing what they'd done, was it wrong to feel that way? Could it really be wrong to feel that way?

Murder was a Mortal Sin, as well.

But what was murder? Killing was a part of war, distasteful but sometimes necessary and certainly not always clean and clear-cut - and by no means did that end with Gaines and Alvarez. Some of her lawful kills had been questionable and she knew it. She had shot Lavonne Jackson in the back, despite being able to see - clearly - that his MAC-10 had run dry. Despite being able to see that Bosco was in the process of coaxing him into a surrender. If she had announced herself and covered Lavonne with another gun, the fat fuck probably would have dropped his empty MAC and given up.

And then the whole tired dance would have to start, wouldn't it? Lavonne in the interrogation room. Lavonne hiding behind a lawyer. Lavonne being stubborn and arrogant and trying to intimidate them with his sharp gangsta wit. Lavonne would have had no trouble making the system - the shitty God-damned fucked-up system - work to his advantage, while Cruz and Bosco would have had to struggle to make it work to theirs.

Easier to kill him.

So she had killed him, and then she had hunkered down next to his corpse and pretended to hear him make a Dying Declaration.

Because that was the way it had to be.

She was not a psychopath. Cruz knew this because she could feel and empathize with others, something which psychopaths were by definition incapable of. But she could also distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, the deserving and the undeserving. After taking a life Cruz would always do the counseling thing, as was Department policy, and she would make all the proper noises about guilt and conflicted remorse, but none of it was real. For her there had never been any conflict or doubt about the act itself. It was the Confessions that were real, and again this presented a contradiction - she didn't really believe in God or Higher Meaning, and yet she drew comfort from the absolution of the Confessional box. Forgive me Father, for I have sinned - that was how you started, and yet she didn't really believe there was any sin in what she did, did she? Mortal or otherwise. If there was a God, she believed He would be on her side. He would forgive her her sins, because He would know that in her heart she was only doing right.

She had, however, kept Gaines and Alvarez to herself and out of the little booth. Far too dangerous to let Father Estrada in on that little secret, even given the sanctity and guaranteed total secrecy of the Confessional. She wondered now what the priest would have made of it. Correction: what he would make of it - the story of her arrest and downfall would reach him eventually, and Gaines and Alvarez would likely end up a part of it. So what then? What would he say? That she was headed straight to hell?

Papa might have. As much as he'd loved her, it was quite possible that her father would proclaim her ready to ride the southbound elevator after she checked out. Her father had never budged on the subject of hell. He'd taught his girls about Heaven, of course - Heaven was sitting at the Right Hand of God. If asked what, precisely, that meant, Papa would claim it was simply like living the best moment of your life over and over again. To a couple of pie-eyed little girls, that sounded nice. But he didn't gloss over the other end of things, and if he scared them, all the better. Papa had subscribed to the classical idea of Hell as a simple, straightforward affair: you burned. You roasted like a big ol' Thanksgiving turkey, forever, without ever being consumed, praying the whole time for a death that would never come.

Perhaps that was true. Perhaps that was what was waiting for her. Hello, Maritza - welcome to the furnace! It really wouldn't surprise her. In fact, it would be perfectly in line with the balance of the world as she saw it. Look at how it had all ended for her - everything she'd ever done, every little bit of good, all of it, was gone. Erased. Every arrest, every conviction ... all unearthed, picked apart, and erased. They should be falling on their goddamned knees and thanking her for all she'd done, and instead they had destroyed her. From that, hell seemed the next logical step.

That was why she had to keep going. Pain was nothing. A shaky hand was nothing. There was no backing off this thing now, no more whatever happens, happens. The odds had never been stacked in favor of any kind of meaningful success, but she had already proven that very day that she was pretty capable in the face of adversity, and now she had that sleazebag writer locked in her sights. She was lucky. She had always been lucky, but she was also cunning and she was strong, and damned if she wasn't really doing this, for better or for worse she was really doing this, and she wasn't going to stop for anything. The closer you get to something, the more you know you want it. The more you know you need it. She needed to kill Richard Buford. For her sister, first and foremost. To decapitate his operation and save countless others like her sister, certainly. But she was also doing this for herself, and she wouldn't waste any energy trying to deny it. It was, quite simply, her only shot at leaving a legacy. Putting the redneck son of a bitch down would at least leave something tangible behind her, some sense of accomplishment, something those bastards wouldn't be able to take away from her.

Whatever happened to her after that - Riker's Island or a pine box - wouldn't matter.