What have I become?

My sweetest friend

Everyone I know

Goes away in the end

Nine Inch Nails, "Hurt"

Chapter 8 Continued

II.

Charlie Yokas answered the door.

It wasn't Faith, true, but it also wasn't Fred, and Bosco found himself breathing a surprisingly heartfelt sigh of relief. It wasn't so much that he was afraid Fred would beat him up; it was not knowing how to react if the man actually tried. Fred had every right to come out swinging, and Bosco wasn't in a fighting mood.

He looked down at Charlie and attempted a smile.

Then he said, with horribly miscalculated good cheer: "Hey, big guy!"

Charlie only stared up at him as if he'd never clapped eyes on Bosco before in his life. The kid was still in his PJ's (they advertised something called SpongeBob SquarePants, whatever the hell that was), and was holding a soggy-looking piece of toast loose in his right hand. Bosco could hear the shrill, feverish babble of cartoons coming from the living room.

Saturday morning, he thought grimly, and wished bitterly that Emily had answered the door. At least she was old enough to understand some of what was going on. Charlie, on the other hand, was looking at him with the canny suspicion of a kid who has just been offered candy (and maybe a nice ride to the library) by a stranger.

"Hi," Charlie said hesitantly.

The "Hi" was not punctuated with the more usual "Uncle B." Bosco felt an unexpected and rather huffy flash of indignance. He was prepared to accept anger from Fred and from Faith herself, but he had not counted on her turning her whole family against him.

Still, he held onto the big, artificial smile as he pushed on: "Can I ... uh ... can I talk to your mom?"

There was a long pause - one that felt far longer than it probably was - before Charlie said: "Okay."

But the kid made no move to go get her. Charlie just kept staring up at him, his expression hovering on that odd line somewhere between suspicion and fear. And that was stupid, because what did Charlie have to be afraid of? Bosco wasn't the bad guy here.

Right. I'm not the one who shot somebody out of spite. That'd be your mom, kid.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong way to think.

Bosco stiffened as Faith's voice - sounding drowsy and out of sorts - called from somewhere farther back in the apartment. "Charlie? Charlie, is that somebody at the door?"

Charlie made no reply. He was now looking at Bosco with open mistrust.

What the hell was the problem? What the hell was Faith telling this kid?

"Charlie!" Faith snapped, and Bosco could hear muffled footsteps approaching now. Muffled, but coming in quick, ominous little stomps. And her voice had taken on a clipped, waspish quality. "I told you never to answer the door unless - "

She appeared behind Charlie and stopped short when she saw who was standing on her doorstep.

Bosco stayed motionless, allowing nothing to show through on his face, bracing for the reaction. T-minus five and counting.

But the reaction was not as bad as he might have expected. Faith's face cycled through a startlingly quick range of expressions, finally settling on something that looked like plain old exasperation. He breathed another little internal sigh of relief, and he couldn't really say he blamed her - here he was, Maurice Boscorelli, standing in humble supplication in front of her. Again.

"It's only Bosco," Charlie said timidly, and then disappeared back into the apartment, quiet as a ghost..

Not Uncle Bosco. Not Uncle B. Just Bosco.

Faith peered blearily at him. He was conscious of how terrible he looked (three days since he and his razor had parted company, and his face was advertising a catastrophic hangover), but she really didn't look all that much better. If anything, he thought she looked worse. She was wearing a pair of ratty sweatpants and an old T-shirt that hung droopily on her like loose, dead skin. Her eyes were flat and sleepless, her hair wild, and the way Charlie had skittered away from her suggested that she might not be very easy to live with these days. So that was why the kid was all shifty - Mom was on the warpath. Mom was feeling low. Mom, much like Bosco himself, didn't look to have been getting much in the way of sleep just lately.

And there was something else, as well, something odd: her hand was bandaged. Her right hand. And the last two fingers had been set into a splint.

"What the hell do you want?" she said coldly.

Well, that was a good start - at least it implied interest. What the hell do you want? Not Get out of here. No, that wasn't too bad. Not too bad at all.

"Just ... just wanted to talk," he began carefully, and was not surprised to find he couldn't meet her eyes. "Okay?"

Faith clicked her tongue thoughtfully, her upper lip twitching up at the corner in what he thought was a totally unconscious sneer. "You can talk." She pointed over his shoulder and down the hall. "Then you can leave."

He nodded, his throat suddenly very dry. She had opened the door now, both literally and figuratively. He could talk - she would listen. They were down to it now. And suddenly everything seemed to be a distraction, an invitation to stall for more time; he could hear nothing but the fuzzy chatter of Charlie's cartoons, and he was keenly aware of the smell around him - that unmistakable, unnameable apartment-building-hallway smell. A dry, not entirely unpleasant mix of last night's dinners, lingering perfume, cologne, deodorant, and cigarette smoke. A people smell, the smell of closely-packed strangers.

His eyes again found her right hand. Her right hand, with its snazzy little bandage/splint combination. "What ..." His voice caught and he swallowed. "Uh ... what'd you ...what'd you do?"

For a moment Faith only looked at him, clearly debating whether or not to indulge him with an answer. Then she slowly brought the hand up to eye-level and considered it blandly, as if the injury belonged to someone else and held no real interest for her.

Then she lowered it and offered Bosco a sunken, humorless smile. "I had another of my famous moments of clarity," she said. Then the smile disappeared abruptly, as if a switch had been flipped. "Talk if you're gonna talk, Bosco. Do it fast. I'm tired. My head hurts. I need to take a piss. So get on with it."

Bosco swallowed. "I've been ... I've been doing a lot of thinking, you know?" He stopped, cringing a bit at the sound of his own voice, and at the words themselves. It all sounded steady and very sensible when he rehearsed it in his head, but out in the air it just sounded forced, delivered in a slimy little mumble. "Uh ... doing a lot of thinking about ... y'know ... about the way things went down, and - "

"So you really had nothing to do with what happened yesterday?"

Bosco blinked, thrown off track. It took him a moment to realize she was talking about Cruz. Cruz and her little Houdini act.

"No," he said, curbing another flare of annoyance. His train of thought was very fragile right now, and interrupting somebody while they were talking was rude even if they were stammering it all out, like a child reciting a poem to a bored and hostile class. "No. No, I didn't."

Faith nodded, either missing the edge in his tone or choosing to ignore it. "I kept telling myself you'd never do anything that stupid, but I wasn't sure."

Bosco kept his expression carefully neutral. He didn't come here to discuss Cruz with her. He sure as hell didn't come here for a repeat performance of that humiliating little interrogation he'd suffered from Ty and Sully last night. Faith was watching him, and he could no longer read what was going on there; she had gone blank, impassive - exactly like Ty and Sully. That mindless, petulant anger was nipping at the back of his mind again, trying to come back on him. He was trying to be civil about this, wasn't he? Didn't that count for anything?

Stay cool. So she started things off by sticking a pin in you. Cry me a fuckin' river. You deserve it.

"Well, you can be sure," he said tightly. "I'm finished with her. I thought we were clear on that."

"Yeah, well, she might not be finished with you."

"What?"

Faith sighed angrily. "Didn't anybody talk to you about this, Bosco?"

"I had a visit from Ty and Sully last night," he said slowly, resigning himself to the fact that the subject was open and there didn't seem to be anything he could do about it. "They ... uh ... they wanted to know where I was all day."

"And where were you?"

He shifted uneasily. Telling her he'd spent an entire day in a bar wasn't apt to help him out much here. His eyes flicked over her shoulder; behind her, Charlie passed silently on his way from the kitchen to the living room, now carrying a bowl of cereal. He glanced nervously at Bosco as he went by; again there was no smile, no real recognition. Then he was gone.

Faith was watching him, still with that odd, disconcerting lack of expression. The initial hostility she'd greeted him with seemed to have suddenly drained away.

Oh, why not just tell her the truth? Tell her just to see what she does with it.

But Faith had apparently decided he wasn't going to answer and saved him the trouble. "I had a visitor last night, too," she said. "Swersky came by. In person. He wanted to post an RMP outside the building."

"What? Why?"

She looked at him levelly. "They found guns in Cruz's apartment, Bosco. Her off-duty weapon, plus two unregistered handguns and a couple of boxes of ammunition." She uttered a short, anxious chuckle. "They think there might have been more. She made it all the way home, you know. After she got out of Mercy. They think that she's probably armed right now ... you know, wherever she is. Seems they think she might try to come after me."

Bosco digested that. So that was the general assumption; they figured Cruz was trying to turn this thing into a Charles Bronson movie, that she was out to get the people who hurt her. Stupid as the idea sounded, he supposed it made a certain amount of sense. Why else would she do something so desperate, so futile? Why, revenge, of course - it was what she lived for. And by now she was probably far enough beyond rational thought to actually believe she had a chance of succeeding. In her mind she could be gunning for any of them - Faith, Schaeffer, Noble ... perhaps Chris Reyes, assuming Cruz knew the truth about her. Even Swersky, come to that.

And, of course, she could be after him. If Ty and Sully had known about this last night, they had neglected to mention it to him.

There's no RMP out there, he thought, wondering vaguely if Faith might be making it all up. No unmarked car. I'd have seen it. I'm sure I'd have seen it.

Eerily, Faith seemed to pick up on the thought. "I told Swersky not to bother," she said, and laughed wearily. "I ... I don't think she's a threat to anybody anymore. Even if she is ... I can take care of my own family, right? I'm not gonna sit here and let a couple of cops with better things to do sit around and babysit me."

She actually seemed to try to inject a kind of sardonic humor into the last sentence. She didn't quite pull it off, and for the first time Bosco noticed something else about her - not only did she look pale and unrested, she actually seemed to look thinner somehow. Nobody could lose that much weight in a few days, he knew that, but there it was. Her face wasn't what you'd call gaunt, but there was something different, something that seemed to have ... diminished.

"I just want this to be over," she said softly, and there was the barest hint of a tremor in her voice. "Can't you understand that?"

The swell of anger was much more powerful this time, much tougher to get a handle on. Thoughts of Cruz and her guns and her supposed revenge fantasies broke under the weight of that one maddening little word; over. Faith wanted it over. That was pretty strange, because the way he saw it, it was already over for her. Faith's life was still more or less the same as it had been a week ago. Faith still had something to make of her future. Faith wasn't being dragged through the papers. The closest they ever got to her was when they described what went down in the hotel room, whereupon they would simply say Cruz was "shot by police." This was the extent of Faith Yokas's identity in the entire matter: Shot by Police.

According to Schaeffer, Bosco had gotten off lightly. It occurred to him now that the IAB detective had things a bit confused. Faith was the only one getting off lightly here.

"What did you want to talk to me about, Bosco?"

He looked up at her, deliberately taking in the pallid face, the slouched posture, the bandaged hand, the baggy sweatpants (there was what looked like a spot of mustard near the knee), the old T-shirt. Written across the front of the shirt in big, bold red letters was the legend, "Me Boss, You Not." Fred had probably bought that for her. Fred, or maybe Emily. It was the kind of novelty you're supposed to buy your loved one to poke light fun at their foibles. Me Boss, You Not. Cute.

She's not getting off lightly. Nobody got off lightly in this. Christ, look at her. This is ripping her apart, and a good chunk of that is your fault. So drop the drama-queen bullshit. Take a page from the book of Vinnie the Saintly and Sympathetic Bartender and cool your jets.

"I wanted to apologize, that's all," he said, back on top of things and relieved to finally hear some real sincerity in his own voice. "Everything I said, all the stuff about you ... and Emily ... you know, in the locker room that night ... and ... that stuff I said in the washroom that night at Mercy. I was wrong. About everything. You ... you didn't do anything wrong in that hotel room and ... and I'm okay with it now ... Cruz put your back up against the wall, and I understand -"

Now you're babbling.

Bosco shut his mouth. He was, however, more or less satisfied. As artless as it was, it was out and he felt it had gotten the point across.

Faith, though, was still unreadable.

"That's it?" she said.

Bosco nodded mutely.

"So ... you're okay with it?" she said distantly. She was staring at a point somewhere above his right shoulder now, staring through him. "You're ... 'okay' with it."

"Yeah," he said doubtfully, feeling the short hairs starting to stand up and prickle on the back of his neck. He could smell a fight coming out of this. Another fight, another argument, maybe another screaming onslaught of the Mercy-washroom caliber. He'd struck a nerve, though he was damned if he knew what it was. "I just mean that I wasn't ... I wasn't fair to you -"

"You're here to give me your approval. Is that it?"

"No," he said, knowing in that moment that it was finished, that nothing was going to come of this, nothing at all. "No, Faith, I ... all I wanted to say was ... y'know, I'm sorr-"

"You know I almost got as far as Roll Call?" she overrode him suddenly. She was still looking off over his shoulder, her tone soft and thoughtful, as if she were talking to herself. "That's how close I was, Bosco. Full uniform, gun on my hip, on my way to Roll Call. That's how close I came. God only knows how I would have acted if I'd actually made it out there."

"I don't know what you - "

"Everything's changed, Bosco," she said, and at last she met his eyes. "All of it. Everything's different now. I tried pretending it wasn't, but it is, and that's why I'm leaving."

"Leaving," he repeated numbly, not quite able to make it a question.

"The job. I'm quitting."

Bosco swallowed the lump that had risen in his throat. He remembered something he'd said to Schaeffer. Something he'd all but screamed at Schaeffer as the detective had taunted him in that quiet, subtle way of his - shit, I was gonna quit anyway! How easily that had come, saying he would have quit with or without an IAB investigation. And it had been a pile of shit, of course - just his own stupid little variation on one of the oldest and sulkiest lines in the book; you can't fire me - I quit! Given the choice, he never would have quit. And discovering that Faith was doing it voluntarily -

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

because of something he had started, something he had done, sparked a new and almost suicidal shame.

He smiled crookedly. "Faith, you can't - "

"I can't?" she broke in, but her tone was still mild, still almost serene. "I can't? I can't what? Can't quit? Can't let Cruz win? Can't let her drive me away from my job? Been there, Bosco. I've been over it all, again and again, and none of it matters anymore. I need to start over." She shrugged. "So that's what I'm doing."

He tried to think of something to say to that and was not surprised to find that he had nothing left. His throat had locked tight; a cold hand seemed to have wrapped stealthily around his insides and was squeezing out a slow, sickening rhythm. The filmstrip was running again, not just Hobart this time but all of it; the fight in the locker room, the bloodbath in the hotel room, the washroom at the hospital, Schaeffer bringing down the ax, staying with Ma and seeing the way she always looked at him when she thought his back was turned, going into that bar and drinking himself into a sulky, self-pitying stupor while some milksop bartender lectured down to him, standing in the rain being interrogated by two men who used to be his friends ...

And now he was here. Now he'd come here like this, nothing else to do in his life but try for some petty kind of absolution so he could sleep a little easier.

And she knew it, too, he thought suddenly. Faith knew I was coming. She's been sitting here waiting for me, knowing I'd be back here sooner or later. She had this all ready in advance. Planning her side of it the same way I planned mine.

"You know," she murmured. "I look at you now ... I see you now, and I think to myself, this is what it took to get through to him. You know? This is what it took to smarten you up. I've been listening to the news, and the way they talk about this thing ... They're gonna drag you down, Bosco. You'll be right there next to the rest of them. The worst of them. You don't deserve that, and I'm sorry for it. I don't know ... something good might come out of it for you in the long run. I'd like to think so."

She pulled in a long, deep breath, something that only added to the sense that this was a planned speech, planned and often-rehearsed in her head, probably in those leaden, sleepless hours after she went to bed. There was no fight left in her, none of the bitterness he'd left her with that night in the hospital. And why should there be? While he was spinning his fucking wheels and obsessing about making things right, Faith had moved on. It didn't look like sleep came very easily to her, but she had moved on all the same. He was Maurice Boscorelli, the other half of Five-Five David, and pitifully enough, that was where a lot of him still was. He was a part of something that Faith had already discarded, and for the first time his future, bleak and empty as it was, seemed to take on a new, diamond-edged reality for him. It was one thing to look ahead in terms of years and not be able to see anything; he found now that he couldn't even see himself in a week.

So here we are. You did it just like you planned - went in quick and dirty. Now it's done. So what's the verdict, pal? Did you "make things right?"

Do things feel any more right to you than they did yesterday?

Faith glanced back into the apartment. "Fred'll be up soon," she said. She paused - almost for effect, he thought - and then drove the point home with no subtlety whatsoever: "So ... you'd better go now."

Bosco nodded. "I'm sorry," he said hoarsely, believing this to be the worst moment of his life, knowing nothing of the horror he would witness by the end of the day. "I just wanted you to know that. That's all."

"I know it. I know you are, Bosco." She started to close the door. "I am, too."