What have I become?

My sweetest friend

Everyone I know

Goes away in the end

Nine Inch Nails, "Hurt"

Chapter 8

Bosco

I.

It's easy to stand around in a hospital washroom and get all philosophical, telling yourself that you're doing the right thing, that it needs to end, that you'll feel better if you own up. Pretty little banalities like that, all part of life's great lessons as taught by mothers and fathers the world over. Own up, you're told, and you will be infinitely better off. You will sleep soundly at night and, more importantly, you will gain the respect of your peers with your courage and conviction. And - of course - everything will be okay in the end.

And of course there is that short-lived period of self-satisfaction, something that cleverly disguises itself as relief. Initially, it feels good to come clean; it's like coming out the other side of a dark, stinking tunnel, wondering just how the hell you got in there in the first place. Then ... ah, then you get down to the business of tallying up the results, and that's when it hits you that you've stepped out of that tunnel and into a wasteland.

First, the job you love, the job you were damned good at for almost twelve years, has been unceremoniously yanked out from under your feet. You have been neatly re-classified, flicked from one side of the law to the other with sickening ease; again with no pomp, ceremony or fanfare. You might see at least a token stretch in prison - where, being a cop, you will be put into protective custody, your only source of conversation coming from other crooked cops and maybe a pedophile or two. And protective custody isn't always protective, of course - if somebody wants you bad enough (and they're connected to the right people), you might well wake up some morning with your throat cut.

Even if you manage to deal with all of that, you still haven't touched on the worst of it. That's when you look around and realize that the people you cared about, everyone you respected, have all abandoned you with that same dizzying speed.

Abandoned you ... or been driven away by you. It's all a matter of perspective.

After posting his bail, Bosco's mother invited him to stay with her as long as necessary. Hell, as long as he wanted. Come back home to Ma and all will be right with the world again. It didn't matter what they were saying about him, Rose Boscorelli claimed, nor did it matter that he was now effectively unemployed. Rose was tough, her son was tough, and together they'd get through this thing. A mother's love knows no limits, right?

And yet every minute he spent with her he could see that it was all an act. It was a pretty good one, but it was an act nonetheless, a strained cover for how deeply heartbroken she really was. After all, Maurice had always been Rose's good boy. Maurice was the cop, the hero, the polar opposite of his brother the cokehead, the loser, the spectacular waste of skin and space. Not that Rose didn't love Michael, but Maurice had always been the one trying to help people, always sticking up for the underdog. Maurice had taken that and made something real out of it. Maurice was the one who had made good.

He left late the next morning, giving her a quick peck on the cheek and offering little in the way of explanation. He didn't have the energy to confront her, and he sure as hell couldn't stay there, not with that disappointment always hiding under every smile, behind every gesture. It enraged him as much as it hurt him, because it wasn't like his Ma to be that way. Jesus Christ, why did she have to pretend like that? Why couldn't she just come right out with it, yell and scream and tell him how fucking worthless he turned out to be after all? It was so much worse this way, and Bosco wondered with a kind of sick fear if maybe she knew it.

And so that was how the drinking started. Instead of just going home to his own apartment, he stopped at a bar - the same bar where his Ma worked, as it happened. Delicious irony. Delicious irony borne on a wave of pure spur-of-the-moment impulse; the idea of demolishing a few beers (or a few dozen) seemed natural, almost liberating, a kind of worthy experiment in blatant, conscious self-pity. This, after all, was just what you were supposed to do when you hit rock-bottom, wasn't it? Go directly to alcoholic. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And being a drunken loser was already in his blood, so why the fuck not? Ma drank, Pop drank, Mikey drank (at least until he started tickling his nosehairs with something a little more acerbic), so why not Maurice? Maurice, after all, had made a complete balls-up of his life. If that didn't make him a true Boscorelli, maybe this would.

So Maurice went in, and willingly surrendered himself right into the perfect cliche.

He ended up spending most of the day there, holding up his end of a few halfhearted, senseless conversations with some of the other regulars (most of whom were already intermediate alcoholics themselves), not neglecting to get nicely smashed himself. And he enjoyed it more than he would have guessed. He shot a few games of pool by himself, until his coordination deteriorated to the point where he was forced to switch to the video slot machine in the corner. When he tired of its charm, he went on to lose a few rounds on the battered old Street Fighter II machine that sat next to it.

By late afternoon Vinnie Jurgens was literally wringing his hands with worry. Vinnie was the bartender, a burly, thuggish-looking guy with a shaved head, a snake tattoo above his right ear, and the disposition of a ninety-eight-pound high school principal. He knew Bosco in passing through Rose, knew he was a cop (or used to be), and was quite obviously distressed about what he was witnessing here, sure that it was uncharacteristic and possibly even dangerous behavior. He served Bosco his drinks with a kind of wordless unease until about four o'clock, when he came over to the arcade game and asked Bosco to leave. Politely. Timidly.

Bosco's reply was simple and to the point: "Fuck off."

Vinnie was bigger than him. Stronger than him. It would not have been difficult for Vinnie to forcibly eject Bosco from the premises; Vinnie generally pulled double duty as the bar's bouncer. It was, however, a mostly ceremonial post. He was scary-looking enough so that ninety-nine percent of the time, troublemakers took one look at him and left without having to be asked. Bosco, however, knew the guy was a Milquetoast.

"Look, man," Vinnie said after a moment's consideration, and Bosco could almost hear the clicks and clacks of gears realigning themselves in the man's head as he downshifted into his more natural role as Vinnie the Saintly and Sympathetic Bartender - we're both men of the world, I'm on your side, I can see where you're coming from, et cetera. "Rosie's a great gal. I love her like a sister, and that's the God's honest truth. I know she's had it rough ... I know your dad ..." Here Vinnie uttered and odd little chuckle. It sounded like the engine of a very small car - a VW bug, perhaps - chugging its last chug. "I know he wasn't always such a great guy, right? And your brother, he's had a lot of trouble ..."

"Is this an offer to write my fucking biography?" Bosco asked mildly. He found he wasn't angry; he didn't even bother to look around at Vinnie. He was enthralled by the game's screen, watching owlishly as a monstrous, hairy cartoon Russian beat the tar out of his monstrous, flabby cartoon Sumo wrestler. "Because I should warn you that I'm not big on authors at the moment. You could say that a man of that profession recently pissed all over me."

"What I'm saying is, maybe you should cool your jets a bit. You know?" Vinnie gestured surreptitiously at a few of the other barflies. "These guys, man ... worst part of this job is seeing the downward spiral in progress, if you take my meaning. The change. Not what these guys can become, but how they get there. You dig me? Sometimes I want to set up a time-lapse camera behind the bar and see what it really looks like. Maybe make a few of them sit down and watch the tape afterwards. Bitch of it is, it starts innocent. A guy comes in for a few beers in the evening. Needs to get away. His wife left him, caught her screwing around, maybe she caught him screwing around, whatever. Then suddenly he's in every evening. Okay, no harm in that, everybody needs a place to go, right? Where everybody knows your name, and you're always glad you came, to quote the old tune. But then he's here during the day as well. Suddenly you realize the guy has no - "

"Sixty-second sociology," Bosco broke in. Still easy and mild. Still not looking up from the game. "Learn this and more at your local community college. Just ask for the bartending course."

Vinnie ran a hand over his bald pate and sighed. "I don't know what's been going on with you, and I'm not gonna pry - "

"Good."

"- but I can see what's happening here, man. I can see you just went through some very bad shit - a major life-change, man - and that's a sticky time. Believe me, I know from experience. Your mom, now - she knows, too. Probably your brother could testify to it, as well. I'm just here to tell you that, you know ... it gets better. It really does."

On the game-screen, the monstrous cartoon Russian had been replaced with a grinning cartoon Rastafarian. The Rasta had just soundly annihilated Bosco's Sumo wrestler. Bosco slapped the control panel decisively and, at last, swung on Vinnie. "Listen. I've still got money. I'm still thirsty. I'm not causing any trouble. And I don't remember paying for the psyche evaluation-slash-motivational speech. So get back behind your bar and leave me the fuck alone. You've got customers waiting on you."

Third time was a charm - Vinnie at last gave up and went away. Bosco continued to drink and Vinnie continued to serve him, although the bartender had gone back to his previous state of bemused, mute distress. Bosco didn't know why the guy was so squirmy. His business was his business, and he was quite frankly having a blast at it. It could even be said to be interesting. He liked beer as a rule, and he was getting to sample a whole range of different brands as he went along. Coors. Miller. Labatt. Molson. Heineken. It was a feast for the tongue, man ... kind of like Cruz. Bosco burst out laughing at that even though it wasn't very funny. Vinnie gave him a morose, worried look but said nothing.

Bosco finally left at seven that evening. By then he was already coming down off the high and entering what was almost certainly his first trip into alcoholic remorse country - he was getting the complete tour, no doubt about that. He remembered little of Vinnie's soft-spoken warning (besides a few pissy little phrases like "life-change" and "it gets better") but he was coming to most of the same conclusions all by himself. What he was doing was pathetic. Shameful. Maudlin. Dangerous, even. He at least missed Ma before she came in for her shift, but that didn't matter much because word would soon get back to her through Vinnie: her son had kicked off a brand-new career as a professional lush, and he was showing aptitude for the job. Mondo aptitude. Rose would find that interesting. What do you know, folks - the son has at last become the father, so can we get a hallelujah? She might even feel bad, maybe regret treating him in the stupid, contradictory way that she had, welcoming him with one hand and pushing him aside with the other. Or she might shrug and say good riddance. Bosco found he didn't really care one way or the other; her opinion of him was probably already as low as it was going to get.

His opinion of himself, however, could still go a lot lower. This he found out in short order. When he finally stumbled his way home, he found Ty Davis and John Sullivan waiting for him.

It just had to be Ty and Sully, didn't it? Of the dozens of cops it could have been, and it ends up being that classic team of Five-Five Charlie. More of that delicious irony. Not so long ago, it had been Bosco (and Ty as well, for that matter) trying to dry Sully out. Nothing but contempt for the man who hides at the bottom of a bottle, be it alcohol or pills - so had gone the philosophy of Maurice Boscorelli. And whoops! Now it's Sully looking at him, staring at him and making no effort whatsoever to conceal his disgust. There it was again - the looking-glass effect. Suddenly you're on the other side of the fence with no idea how you got there.

So there they stood, Bosco unshaven and half-plastered and soaked like a drowned rat, Ty and Sully stiff and businesslike in their police-issue rainslickers. They told him what had happened that afternoon. They told him that Cruz had apparently gotten up and walked out of the hospital - possibly under her own power - and now nobody knew where she was. They told him that certain people ("certain people" being a cute, indirect way of saying "Detective Schaeffer") were harboring the idea that Bosco might be helping her.

Next came the logical question; where had he been all day?

No sympathy, no joking around, no sense of easy camaraderie. Just honest-to-God suspicion; they believed it. Or at least, they believed it was possible that he would help Cruz, that he would actually go to that hospital and give her a shoulder to lean on, as if his life wasn't already screwed up enough (and as if he owed the woman any such thing). They looked at him with that kind of detached, alien curiosity, the way you'd look at any anonymous skell. It was truly a bad dream, right to the last detail it was a bad dream, one of those fucking Twilight Zone episodes where everybody and everything inexplicably changes overnight, and the people you know are suddenly treating you like a stranger. Or a pariah.

In the end it wasn't hard to convince them that he had nothing to do with Cruz's escape - it was pretty obvious where he'd spent the day and what he'd been doing there. He was too hammered and too confused to be anybody's personal getaway driver. He sent them away and then went inside, where he immediately turned on the TV.

It took less than five minutes to find a pretty anchorwoman on a local station to lay the whole thing down for him.

"A bizarre twist today in the NYPD's unfolding 'Anti-Crime' scandal," the pretty anchor said gravely. "Maritza Cruz, formerly the sergeant in charge of the elite anti-gang unit, disappeared today from Angel of Mercy Hospital, where she was being held under police guard. Cruz was shot by police earlier this week, following an altercation in the hotel room of journalist and best-selling author Aaron Noble, the details of which are still unknown ..."

While the anchor went on to speculate on what those details might be, a black-and-white file photo of Cruz appeared on the screen.

The picture looked like it had been taken in the aftermath of some kind of shootout; Cruz was in the foreground, eyes blazing, face screwed into an obligingly evil sneer, her cheek and forehead streaked with blood. Her blood, or somebody else's? Bosco couldn't tell, but it called up a very distinct impression of war paint. She was glaring at something off-camera, her mouth half-open, as if she was just getting ready to yell at somebody. In the background there appeared to be two bodies lying in the street, both covered with sheets. Bloody sheets.

The photo was followed by a short snippet of an NYPD spokesman. The spokesman, whose name was Mallory, defended the department's reputation and reminded everyone (for perhaps the twentieth time since the whole thing began) that the corrupt Anti-Crime team was the exception, not the rule. He also assured the public that even though she was still at large, Cruz was not considered dangerous. In fact, she was probably very weak and would be quickly recaptured when her injuries forced her to seek treatment. In other words, the "escape" amounted to a whole lot of nothin'.

Bosco found the obvious contradiction bitterly funny. Whatever this NYPD mouthpiece might say, Cruz sure looked dangerous in the photograph; a fierce, half-crazed Amazon. He believed that he finally understood what people meant by the phrase trial by media. They might as well draw little devil-horns on her in Magic Marker and be done with it.

And it wasn't just the local New York stations getting off on the story; it went right up to the dreaded C-double-N. Wolf Blitzer himself was taking a break from Iraq to do a special feature on police corruption in America, as demonstrated by the Fifty-Fifth's Anti-Crime unit. Wolf promised to ask the tough questions, questions such as:

Had people grown too tolerant of the anything-goes vigilante mentality?

Did the NYPD turn a blind eye to Cruz's tactics?

Had the "Blue Wall of Silence" finally crumbled?

How far had this Sergeant Cruz gone?

Did it include murder?

Most importantly, how did this poor girl from the barrio go from idealistic rookie to criminal with a badge in the first place?

Bosco wasn't awfully interested in the answers to any of those questions. As it turned out, he had his own small part in the story. The media had their collective eye fixed mainly on Cruz, of course, but every now and then they would trot out the names of everybody else, apparently just for kicks. No pictures (not yet, anyway), but lots of names: Dade, North, Yoshimura, Marino, Vargas, Payne, Gognitti, and - hold on to your whitey-tighties - none other than Maurice Louis Boscorelli, Rose's good boy. Most of the others were looking at far more serious charges than he was, and yet there he was all the same, lumped right in with the rest of them. Trial by media, guilt by association, call it whatever you want. Once they decide to hang you, you might as well bring the rope to the party yourself.

And now they had a tasty new morsel to chew on - Mad-Dog Cruz escapes! Story at eleven!

Bosco couldn't figure out where she thought she could go or what she was trying to achieve, and nobody was offering up any theories. She had nowhere to hide, no living relatives and very few friends who could (or would) help her. Her face was well-circulated in the news, and he didn't doubt that she was in terrible shape; when somebody gets shot in the movies, they wince, they grunt, and then they keep right on running, shooting, wisecracking, and screwing. In real life, the human body is rarely so accommodating. Mallory was right - Cruz was as good as caught. Bosco felt truly sorry for her, and he now believed that she must be delusional at the very least. She had to be, if this was what she'd been reduced to.

He switched off the TV around eight o'clock and went to bed. But despite being drunk and exhausted, he didn't sleep for a long time. Around the time Cruz was accosting Aaron Noble outside the Bridgeview hotel, Bosco was lying awake in his bed, thinking about his life, his future (or lack thereof), his job, his friends, his mother, Ty, Sully, Vinnie Jurgens the Saintly and Sympathetic Bartender, and - drum roll, please - Faith Yokas. Of these thoughts, Faith dominated. This did not surprise him. It always came back around to her, and he'd long since given up trying to figure out why. It was a weird kind of infatuation, that was all, one that had nothing to do with love or lust or even friendship, one that always led him back to her.

And lying there in the dark, it occurred to him that there was a pattern, a pattern of behavior, of repetition. He'd spent almost eight months under Cruz's thumb, eight months that saw him pushing Faith further and further away from him, talking down to her, regurgitating Cruz's self-righteous bullshit at her. So unapologetic, so arrogant, so sure of himself.

Then it had all fallen apart, and back to Faith he'd crawled. Nobody else to go to, nobody he could trust as much as he could trust her. Begging for help, pissing away his pride and his dignity to admit he was wrong. And when Faith had taken things to the extreme in Noble's hotel room, he'd responded by turning on her again, only this time instead of arrogance it was an almost prissy, indignant shock, as if she'd decided to start working the pole at a strip-club. Oh, how could she? Oh, how dare she?

He couldn't figure that out now. He guessed it might have been no more than a simple, childish need to look down his nose at her, to feel superior to her again. To be back on the moral high ground. Which was ridiculous, because whatever way you wanted to look at it, it was all on his head, and it had been from the beginning. And now things were wrong between them again.

And somehow, irrational as it was, that was the worst part of the whole miserable train wreck.

The dashboard clock read 8:52 AM when Bosco pulled into a vacant parking space across from Faith's building - a bit early in the morning to be paying an unexpected (and almost certainly unwanted) house call. It was also Saturday, so the kids would probably be here; he didn't think he'd be comfortable saying what he had to say in front of them - Charlie in particular. And there was also the Fred factor to consider. Bosco had neither seen nor spoken to Fred Yokas since before the hotel room, but he thought he could make an accurate guess as to how Fred saw the situation; Bosco had put his wife into a position where she could have been killed, maimed, or thrown in jail. Safe bet the man would want to kill him on sight.

This idea had seemed perfectly rational last night, hadn't it? Of course it had, because ideas like this always seem rational when you're drunk. You get thinking that it will be easy, that everything will just kind of fall back into place, and everybody will end up hugging and making up because that's just how these things are supposed to go.

But being here now, for real, ready to make the actual attempt to talk to Faith ... it was a little like being back in that washroom at Mercy again. Things are okay as long as you're someplace safe and far from the action; the reality you face later is quite a bit harder to swallow.

There were the practical considerations - considerations such as confused kids and pissed-off husbands - but there was also an unshakable sense of the past and how bad things had really gotten. Those things kept coming back on him, a dirty little mental scrapbook of the past few months that his mind kept waving in his face. Mostly he kept coming back to that night in the locker room, the night he and Faith had agreed to split up. It was just after the fiasco over that money from the armored car, and somehow an argument - one of many - about the ethics of lying had turned into something else, something far more explosive, and he'd found himself dragging things into it he had no business touching. Stuff about her ability as a mother. Her reliability as a mother, and as a wife. Her relationship with Emily and Charlie. Her relationship with Fred. And it had really worked, too, hadn't it? He'd really gotten to her. Sure had. He'd exposed the tenderest emotional nerve and then sank his teeth right into it.

And he'd called her a murderer. Right to her face, he'd all but accused her of trying to execute Cruz. The shame of that was bad enough; what was worse was that a part of him - a part he kept trying to silence - still believed it might be true.

So why the hell was he here, anyway? Daylight has a way of putting things into perspective, and when you came right down to it, this was actually pretty pathetic. Like dropping into his Ma's bar, it was another act of wretched, self-pitying desperation. And to what end? What was the expected result?

I'm trying to make things right, he thought defiantly at himself, unaware that in less than twenty-four hours he would hear this same sentiment expressed by someone else, and under much bloodier circumstances. That's all. Just trying to make things right.

And what the hell does that mean? another voice spoke up immediately. "Making things right." That's not a reason - that's chick-flick horseshit. Who are you now, Doctor-Fucking-Phil? You know what you do? You put this car in gear right now and you drive home. Or go back to the damned bar and pick up where you left off yesterday. Anything. Just leave this, just leave her alone. Let sleeping dogs lie, for Christ's sake.

But he couldn't do that, much as he might want to. Thinking about patterns of behavior last night had unearthed another memory, one that - on the surface - had nothing to do with where he was now. This memory had narrowed itself into a kind of three or four-second loop, like a grotesque little filmstrip. And in this four-second filmstrip, Bosco was back in the squalid, stifling-hot apartment of Glen Hobart, face-down on the floor and able to see nothing but the flickering screen of Hobart's TV. The ESU sharpshooter himself was standing above him, clad only in boxers and a dirty undershirt, holding Bosco's own gun in his hand.

From the floor, Bosco: Come on, Glen, we can work this out.

From above, Hobart: Work what out? My crappy life? And you want to be like me ...

... I ought to just shoot you before you screw up the lives of everybody who loves you.

Bosco had read absolutely nothing into that statement at the time. Nothing. Just the ravings of your garden-variety Man On The Edge. But now it seemed that Hobart - wife-beater, NRA poster-boy, sniper extraordinaire - had had a gift for prophecy. And Bosco had ended up fulfilling it quite neatly, hadn't he? He had, in Glen's precise terms, screwed up the lives of everybody who loved him, and as pathetic and self-indulgent as it was, he had to do something to fix it. He supposed it was his own miserable answer to that twelve-step program A.A. puts you through, where you go out and apologize to all the people you've hurt. If he recalled correctly, you're not supposed to take no for an answer. You go in quick and dirty, say what you have to say, and then fade into the background again.

That was what he was here to do. That, and nothing more.

He killed the Mustang's engine and went in.