A Moment of Clarity

by Cipher44

Chap. 13 UP: After being betrayed by Noble, Cruz is faced with the cold hard truth of her crusade, and what she has become

15. Chapter 9: Cruz

Well, it's been quite a while since the last update, I know. Circumstances over the spring and summer seemed to conspire to keep me away from my computer and from working on this story - all the recent work has been done almost entirely over the past couple of weeks. But as of now - hopefully - things will go more smoothly and updates will be more frequent. I need to get this thing done; for myself, but also because the reviews have been so kind and I feel I owe you all a proper resolution.

I have to apologize again, though - another reason for the long delay is because I've re-edited the first eight chapters. I went back to fix some mistakes and ended up doing some fairly significant surgery, and what I came out with was A Moment of Clarity, Draft 2. I added a few new scenes, clarified details, and inserted a lot of new Cruz-related stuff in Chapters 3, 5 and 7. More theory on how her relationship with Lettie worked, and deeper detail all around. Though it's still the same alternate-universe story rooted in Season Four, I added some references and character cameos from Season Five and Six just to keep things fresh.

I sorta feel like a bastard, making everybody go back and re-read everything, but a lot of this stuff begged to be shoe-horned in, especially all the little details we've learned about Cruz in the meantime - the thing about the "rat" J.D. Hart and her old partner killing himself seemed to fit really well with what's happening here.

Detail, detail, detail. I'm obsessed with it :)

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Chapter 9

Cruz

I.

It was twenty minutes after ten in the morning, the downpour was still relentless, the air was cool and crisp, and Maritza Cruz was being violently sick.

She stood doubled over with her good hand pressed to her stomach like a performer taking a low bow, shuddering through a series of deep, wrenching heaves that seemed to start right from her heels. She had no clear idea of where she was or how she might have ended up here; at the moment most of her conscious mind was lost in a white, flickering haze of agony. Because this wasn't just being sick, oh no - it was nothing as simple, nothing as mildly distasteful as being sick; this was being torn apart. Physically torn apart. Her guts churned and she felt as if all the blood in her body was being forced up into her head under about six hundred pounds of pressure, and yet all of that was still purely secondary, not the problem but only a symptom of it; her shoulder was where the action was, her goddam fucking son-of-a-bitching shoulder, that new center of her being. The pain was on a new and altogether different level, pain that was trying to drown the world, and yet even as she felt herself starting to black out the vomiting just went on and on - she had been grabbed by some titanic, merciless, unimaginably strong hand that was wringing her out like a washcloth.

And then it subsided. It subsided and her stomach settled and the world began to piece itself back together in disjointed patches. She saw that she was in an alley. A narrow alley. There was a rain-streaked concrete wall in front of her. She could hear music coming in faint from some nearby building - gangsta-rap, by the sound - a low, arrhythmic thud-thud-THUD-thud that kept time with the pounding in her head with uncanny precision. The rain drummed a steady rasp on the pavement and on her head and shoulders, and under that she could hear the faster and feverish sound of water dripping onto metal, a garbage can lid maybe, tink-tink-tink-tink. And she could hear a car somewhere in the middle of the whole mess, its engine idling a few feet off to her left.

That would be Noble's car. Aaron Noble. Right. He was standing somewhere behind her, pulling nervous lookout duty.

They'd been on their way to meet his contact. His new biker contact, the mysterious Rene Marchand - the guy everybody apparently called Iggy, because apparently he looked like Iggy Pop. They'd been on their way to meet with Iggy (for Noble to meet with Iggy; she would stay in the car) when the nausea had come up on her with zero warning and no room for argument, and Noble had pulled them over with maybe three seconds to spare.

And to his credit, he'd reacted fast.

Good boy. Good ol' reliable writer-boy.

Cruz slumped against the wall in front of her and let out a long, shivering breath, giving her half-delirious thanks to God (or whatever powers-that-be) that she had tied her hair back before the fun started. And praying to those same powers-that-be that it was over.

She had never experienced anything remotely like that in her entire life. Never. And she never wanted to again.

"Did anyone ever tell you what a marvelous traveling companion you are, Cruz?" Noble asked from behind her. He somehow managed to sound jolly, frantic, contemptuous and utterly indifferent at the same time. "Literally a new surprise around every corner!"

"Shut up!" she gasped.

Then another wave of nausea hit her like a punch in the belly, and over she went again.

She would have expected it to be a little easier this time, a little less intense, but it wasn't. If anything, it was worse. The pain was monstrous. The pain was impossible. That enormous hand was squeezing her again and she couldn't breathe, she couldn't breathe and she couldn't move and the pain was impossible. She had the vague impression that Noble was still talking to her, still making his insipid smartass observations, but the words had gone furry and distant. The whole world seemed to be slipping into a dirty gray fog.

She was going to die here. Right now, right here in this alley, she was going to die, and through the haze it occurred to her how ironic that was - how fitting, really - because to die thrashing and puking in an alley was supposed to have been Lettie's karma.

And then somehow it was over again and she was through it, perfectly alive and still standing upright.

Cruz stared blindly down at the ground, down into the mess she'd made, at the rain that was already diluting it, washing it away, hardly able to believe that she could have come through such an ordeal not once but twice. Her legs were weak and rubbery and her stomach was an acrid little knot and her entire body had become a glassy sunburst of pain ... but she was still here all the same. Still here and still breathing the air, and if anything things seemed clearer now, her senses oddly heightened. She could hear the low mutter of Noble's car, gangsta-rap from some nearby window (she was even able to recognize the song - it was Guerillas in Tha Mist by Da Lench Mob, a favorite of Lettie's back in the day), the white-noise hiss of the rain, all with that terrible radiant clarity. She felt the drops pelting the back of her head, running down her cheeks, down the back of her neck, and it brought Lettie back yet again - Lettie on the ski slopes that day three years ago, putting snow down her back and laughing.

You have to stop now, Maritza. You have to bring this to an end.

The Voice of Doubt again. Still with her. The voice of her father. Jaime Cruz's voice as she imagined it would sound, as she imagined he would be if he could see her now, and she supposed that was why now, whenever she imagined she heard him, it sounded like he was weeping. Because he never would have wanted her to come to this, would he? Surely not. Absolutely not.

But she couldn't stop. There was absolutely no question of making a conscious decision to stop, any more than Lettie could have just thrown her dope out the window any old time and gone cold turkey. She was lost in this now, this was her addiction. For Lettie it had been crystal meth and for Maritza it was the drive to go on, go on, go on, even though she was coming apart at the seams. All of her complacent little reasons were gone now, all the self-important, self-indulgent bluster about not letting Schaeffer win, about taking Buford out as some kind of ideological victory over her enemies. She had discarded them all, shucked them like dead skin, and now there was only Lettie, Lettie was dead but Lettie still held all of her, she couldn't stop, she had failed her and this was atonement and she could never stop.

There was this or there was nothing.

Cruz began to cry. She couldn't actually spare the energy to cry but she managed well enough all the same; there didn't seem to be anything else to do, and just lately it seemed to come so much more easily to her.

Then her stomach gave another watery heave, and she braced herself for another onslaught. This one would finish her. She was sure of it. This one would sweep her away.

She willed it to sweep her away.

But no onslaught came. She retched loudly but didn't produce much more than a few brownish strings of bile; most of this morning's meager breakfast was now being washed into the gutter. Said breakfast had consisted of two dry pancakes and a bottle of water - about all she thought she could handle - bought about an hour ago from a small mom 'n pop restaurant called, of all things, Olympic Gold.

Breakfast courtesy of her gracious host.

Cruz looked woozily up at him.

Noble watched her indifferently, his hands in his pockets. He had that look on his face again, one part pity and three parts disgust, and Cruz was suddenly struck by the exquisite strangeness of this state of affairs; she was in an alley, puking her guts out in the pouring rain in front of a celebrated, semi-famous journalist. A man who hosted book signings in fancy stores, a man who did TV interviews and appeared on panel discussion shows like Politically Incorrect. A man who probably made more from royalties on his shitty books than she would have seen in a year on the job.

Behind him, a teenager in a bulky black trenchcoat passed the alley. His eyes lit on Noble's idling Mercedes, then flicked to Noble himself, then finally moved on to Cruz. There was a momentary and almost imperceptible flash of suspicion, enough to allow Cruz to see the scene through his eyes - a scraggly woman standing over a puddle of puke, next to a sinister-looking middle-aged man in a battered denim jacket. In an alley. It sounded like the build-up to a bad punchline.

Noble suddenly stepped in front of Cruz, arms spread like a cop shooing away gawkers - nothing to see here, folks. His back was to her, but she could hear the broad smile in his tone when he spoke. "My lady here has a bun in her oven," Noble said to the kid. "The morning sickness hits her particularly hard. Do you mind?"

The kid's expression didn't change, but it was clear he had already decided that Noble and Cruz (and any buns she might have in her oven) weren't his business.

" 'gratulations," he muttered, and moved on without looking back.

Noble turned to Cruz and favored her with a sloppy, sarcastic grin that was very clear in its meaning: see how quick I am on the draw? Under any other circumstances, it would have been laughable.

And this, she had learned, was typical Noble. His take on this mad partnership had turned out to be something of a surprise. They'd been together for a little over twelve hours now, and though she had already given him a small amount of meth from her supply ("grease for the wheel" as he called it), controlling him with drugs hardly even seemed necessary - he had become quickly and smoothly immersed in the Great Writer's Adventure. They hadn't been out of the Bridgeview's parking lot more than five minutes before Noble brought the car to a halt and demanded to hear an exact, detailed outline of her plan. Granted, part of that was probably simple concern for himself and his own safety (he was in the hands of someone he probably thought of as a desperate criminal, after all) but there had been an almost boyish curiosity underneath the discomfort.

Cruz had been more than happy to indulge it. She simply insisted that it would go down like almost any other sting: Noble would meet with Buford, probably in a Disciples-owned business or warehouse or some such appropriately shady place. He would get his interview; Cruz would take up an ambush position outside. When the meeting broke and Buford came out, Cruz would zero in on him and open fire. Just like any other sting ... except she would have no backup, and a roughly one-hundred-percent chance of being mowed down by Buford's boys. Or maybe even by Buford himself.

The question of how farfetched this plan was didn't seem to occur to Noble. It did, however, occur to Cruz. It occurred to her a lot, and she supposed there was some irony in that. Noble was purely along for the ride. He didn't give a shit what happened to her after the dust settled; all he asked was that she wait until he was clear before she started any trouble. Beyond that, he was very complacent about the whole thing. Very agreeable. Cruz gave him a little meth - Noble said thanks with a smile. She demanded he hand over the .45 automatic he was carrying - Noble handed it over with minimal grumbling. He was so relaxed, in fact, that at one point he even put his head back and slept away a good five hours.

Such was life with her faithful pet writer.

But Cruz was getting more and more uneasy. She kept telling herself that this was exactly what she wanted - after all, Noble docile and cooperative was better than Noble ill-tempered and difficult. But this almost eager willingness to play her game made her edgy. He was like the timid draftee who gets shoved out onto the battlefield and immediately discovers a latent - and murderous - taste for war. She could never let her guard down around him, not for a second, no matter how agreeable he seemed. She had wanted to sleep, she had needed to sleep, and yet she hadn't dared, not even when he dropped off himself. Her physical state was getting worse by the hour, and she had to be careful not to allow him to see it, to not give him any ideas or openings. He was still an addict, and she was holding an easy supply of his drug hostage; that was what you might call some very volatile math. She was weak and sick and badly hurt - he was strong and healthy and could overpower her easily if the mood struck him, gun or no gun.

But he won't have to do that, her father's voice whispered. Why would he, when all he has to do is wait? You're dying, Maritza. You have to see this for what it is now. You have to see that this can never be what you wanted it to be. Never. You have to stop. You are dying

Cruz closed her eyes and grimly drowned the voice out. She was getting good at it.

She had her good arm braced against the wall in front of her, and it was weakening. Weakening, trembling, and threatening to give. They had to get moving again, and fast, but she was still too petrified of setting off another chain-reaction of pain, something which could possibly lead to another puking fit. The music had stopped but there was still the beat of the rain and that thick pounding in her head; that small kernel of pain behind her eye had now grown into a heavy, hot steel ball bearing that was now rolling back and forth between her temples.

And there was a sound, as well. A sound, not in her ears but right in her head. A drilling, discordant buzz, like a beehive in the center of her mind.

And pain. Pain everywhere.

She sensed Noble shuffling behind her. "Cruz ..."

My addiction, she thought hollowly. This is my addiction.

Cruz mentally drew herself together, something that was getting harder and harder to do. Something that made her think - absurdly - of patching and re-patching a moth-eaten quilt until it was worn down to bare threads. She spat, swiped the back of her hand across her mouth, and nodded.

Then she started to straighten up, trying to make the movement look easy and fluid, and just barely managed not to cry out.

No weakness. She could show no weakness in front of him.

"Cruz," he repeated. "Look, you'd better - "

"Car," she croaked shortly. Then she swung around in a jerky about-face and lurched past him towards the Mercedes. Noble had to skitter aside to avoid being bowled over. She tottered over to the car, lowered herself delicately into the passenger seat, and exhaled.

Good as it was to be off her feet again, the atmosphere inside Noble's car was not a whole lot more comfortable than standing out in the rain. The Mercedes was not a rental; it was Noble's personal property, kept in storage when he was out of town. According to him he'd taken many a cross-country road trip in the old gal, and Cruz could believe it. The car had begun life as a top-of-the-line luxury sedan, but those days were past now. The upholstery was cracked and peeling and cratered with cigarette burns. The stereo had been torn out and amateurishly replaced with a ratty tape deck that might have been new when Reagan was in the White House. The interior smelled like a college dorm room; tobacco, old farts, aftershave and feet. And Noble apparently didn't go anywhere unprepared to meet his fans, because there were about ten copies of his bestseller, Blue Line Fever, strewn about the back seat amidst a litter of soft drink cans, road maps, a snow brush, and an old blanket that was probably responsible for about half the smell.

No wonder she'd gotten sick.

Cruz watched her gracious host as he jogged nimbly around the front of the car, feeling another of those sallow flashes of jealousy at how easily he moved. Her nose began to run then, thick and warm and sudden. She wiped it on the back of her hand and was not at all surprised to see a bright smear of blood. Then the dam burst and suddenly it was gushing, running over her upper lip and trickling into her mouth, slick and loathsome. She wiped it away again and tipped her head back just as Noble dropped into the driver's seat next to her. The car rocked. Cruz winced.

"Well, that was fun," he said cheerfully, throwing the car into gear and putting them back on the street. "I just love the smell of projectile vomit in the morning. Give me a little more warning next time you're gonna do something like that."

"Fuck you," she murmured. It came out high and nasal and absurd; she was trying to pinch the bridge of her nose and stem the flow with her hand at the same time. Blood gushed freely down her hand, her wrist, her forearm. She snorted blood, choked on it, and coughed reflexively, spraying the dashboard with a fine red mist.

Noble made a high, revolted cawing sound. "Jesus, you're disgusting!" he cried, producing a crumpled Kleenex pack from his jacket and thrusting it at her. Then he started rummaging absently through the armrest compartment, which was brimming with audio cassettes. "Like I said, Two-Bags - you're a real pleasure to travel with."

Two-Bags.

Oh, that name. That hateful goddam street-name.

"You call me that one more time," she snapped, clutching a wadded-up ball of Kleenex to her nose, "and I'm gonna put a bullet in your kneecap and leave you screaming. I'm well past caring here, Noble."

"Well, fuck you too," he said promptly, retrieving the cassette he wanted (by feel alone, apparently) and sticking it in the tape deck. "You do realize I could have just driven away and left you there, right? I could have just ditched your ass right there, and maybe I should have."

"Maybe you should have," she agreed absently, but she wasn't listening to him anymore. She was squirming listlessly in the seat, trying to adjust to a reasonably comfortable position. Trouble was, there wasn't one. The pain was no longer just confined to her shoulder; it had spread through the rest of her body like fire. Throwing up the way she had - that was what had done it. The strain of it, that terrible feeling of being twisted like a wet rag. Her ribs hurt. Her stomach hurt. Her eyes hurt. Everything hurt. And there was no way to sit or slouch that could make it more bearable. After ten seconds in quiet, miserable frustration she gave up, closed her eyes, and put her head back against the headrest, her chin tilted up. Her nose was still bleeding freely - she was already on her second clump of tissues.

"You know that stupid gun of yours was hanging out of your coat the whole time?" Noble said. His tone was becoming more and more that of a shrewish, nagging wife. "That kid back there saw it. I'm sure he did. He's probably calling the cops right now."

On the word now Noble gave the Play button on the tape deck a vicious jab. Nothing happened. He twiddled a few buttons, but the deck still didn't seem to want to work. He cursed under his breath and then added, "Where the hell did you get that thing, anyway? Gangbanger's yard sale?"

"Let it go, Noble," she said wearily, but this time she thought the point was a fair one. Taking the machine-pistol instead of her off-duty gun had been a mistake. Not only had it turned out to be ridiculously cumbersome after all, it occurred to her now that she had never bothered to clean or maintain it. So far as she knew it had never even been fired - at least not in the last four years - and a Tec-9 wasn't exactly the kind of thing you took with you to a police firing range. She supposed it was possible that when the time came to fire it, the damn thing might simply explode in her hand. And then where would she be? A useless meat-rag for a left arm and a stump for the right. The gun was a piece of street-trash and she was unfamiliar with it. So why had she taken it?

Well, that was simple, really - she hadn't been thinking clearly. Just as she wasn't thinking clearly now.

It was, in fact, getting hard to think clearly. And getting harder all the time.

Noble, who was already quite good (too good) at reading her, seemed to pick up on this train of thought. "You're dying on your feet, you know," he said conversationally, eyes never leaving the road. "Do you realize that?"

Cruz looked over at him uneasily but said nothing.

He caught her eye and favored her with something that wasn't quite a smile. "Tell me this, Cruz: what do you think is holding that shoulder of yours together? Hmm? A couple of temporary surgical pins and a prayer, probably. I can see how swollen it is even through your coat. I don't know how you can stand it - you must feel like an overstuffed sausage. And how have you dealt with it so far? You haven't, as far as I've seen. Do you change the dressing? Do you clean the wound? Do you even know how? You're looking at infection, Cruz. Or let's all say the big G-word together now, kids - gangrene. That is, if you're not there already."

He snorted a laugh. "But I'm getting way ahead of myself, aren't I? Infected or not, you're still not gonna last another week like this. After watching what happened back there, I wouldn't even give you another day. And if - when - it does get infected you're gonna be in some seriously deep shit. A squirt of Solarcaine and a band-aid ain't gonna fix you."

Cruz offered nothing in reply to this little monologue. She merely settled her head back against the seat again and ignored him, the picture of cool apathy. But inside she was scared. Badly scared. Noble - to this point her faithful pet writer - was at last starting to throw the tough questions her way, and she realized how utterly ridiculous it was to think she could keep her physical weakness a guarded secret. He could see it - you'd have to be blind not to. He'd seen it right from the beginning.

But he wasn't really telling her anything new - she was already in seriously deep shit and she knew it. Her left arm was a piece of meat that just happened to be connected to her body; there was very little feeling below the elbow now, and the fingers were no longer taking orders at all. If she tried to make a fist they offered only the barest hint of a twitch. If she tried to wiggle them there was nothing.

More frightening, however, was that the hand had actually started to change color. Her complexion was bad to start with, of course, but the hand and forearm had gone a sick and deeply unsettling shade of gray. For a while she had tried to tell herself that this was a trick of the light, but she didn't think it was. Her pulse in that arm was weak, barely there, and the hand was cold to the touch. Bad circulation. She had been moving around for almost twenty-four hours now, up on her feet and doing things no-one in her condition was ever supposed to do. God only knew what kind of damage she had been doing to herself - was still doing to herself. A couple of temporary surgical pins and a prayer - that about summed it up, she supposed, and she could imagine those pins coming loose and shifting around, tearing new channels in flesh that should be left to heal in peace. She wished bitterly that she'd paid more attention to what the doctors had told her.

And the bandage was a separate problem altogether. Last night while Noble was relieving himself she had checked the dressing as best she could, and found the thing was now little more than a sweaty, bloody, cheesy-smelling rag. Infection was a distinct possibility. Infection was a distinct inevitability, really, and she was becoming more and more certain that if she ever came out of this thing alive, they would probably have to take the arm off at the shoulder.

Doesn't matter, she thought defiantly. Doesn't matter if the goddamned thing turns black and falls off on its own. I'm not stopping.

"We're gonna have to start facing the cold hard realities here," Noble was saying. "I don't know how this thing with Iggy's gonna go. Here I am, calling him up at seven in the morning and asking if he wants to get together for a beer, and we weren't supposed to meet until next Wednesday. That's a bad risk with somebody like him, Cruz. He's a wildman. A pure wildman. Just as paranoid as Buford, and he'd turn on me just as quick and easy as Willie did. So I repeat: setting up this meeting with Buford could take a few days ... or it could take a month."

"You just keep on doing your job, Noble," she said tightly. "You let me worry about me."

"Oh, believe me, it's not that I care about you. It's just that if you go into septic shock or some damned thing, I'd rather not be anywhere out in the open when it happens. Like what happened just now." He hissed under his breath and added, mostly to himself: "That kid saw the gun. I know he did. Why'd you have to get out of the car, Cruz? Why the fuck couldn't you just lean out the door and let fly?"

"We need to find somewhere to go, Noble," she snapped, ignoring him. "How many times have I told you that? We need somewhere to hide."

"Where?" he cried, taking his hands off the wheel and waving them wildly. "Where do we go, Cruz? Back to the Bridgeview? You can't go anywhere - don't you get that? Nowhere where there's gonna be people, anyway, and this is fucking New York, for Christ's sake! Bad enough you're a wanted felon, you also happen to look like something that crawled out of the Tales From the Crypt special effects department - that's what's really gonna attract attention." He snorted. "I'm just afraid I'm gonna have to do a goddam battlefield amputation. And they look at you funny if you go into a hardware store to buy a hacksaw and five hundred rolls of paper towels."

"I'll be fine."

"No, you won't. And besides which, I don't see you putting any hideout ideas on the table. You're not much help, Two-Bags."

"So just ditch me then," she said. "Take me back to Mercy. Or take me to the Five-Five and leave me on the doorstep. They'd love that, Noble. I was never very popular to start with, and now the whole precinct's gonna be getting bad press because of me. They'd probably lynch me, string me up from the nearest streetlight. I know you'd love to see that. So go ahead. Right now. Drop me right here. I won't try to stop you."

She waited for the car to slow down.

She wasn't surprised when it did not.

"Oh, I think I'll stick around," Noble said. It was almost a sigh, a resigned sigh, his anger suddenly evaporating. Cruz didn't think it had been all that sincere to start with - all of his complaining was mostly just bluster. He muttered another curse at the tape deck, then karate-chopped it with the edge of his hand. The deck emitted a high, mechanical voop! Then Back in Black by AC/DC began to blare from the car's speakers. "For now, anyway. But I want you to tell me one thing before we go any further, Cruz."

"What?"

"I want you to tell me why. You haven't really leveled with me yet. Why is this so important to you? Why is it so important to take out this one guy?"

She looked over at him coolly, a tiny fraction of the Anti-Crime Sergeant showing through in her expression. "That subject's off-limits, Aaron," she said, mock-sweet. "I thought I made that clear last night."

"You're in my car," Noble said patiently. "You hijacked my life. Hell, you hijacked my life long before yesterday. You remember the woman I had in my room the day you and your pal Boscorelli came to see me? Kim Zambrano." He made a hissing sound through his teeth that Cruz guessed was meant to indicate just how hot this Kim Zambrano was. "Very nice young lady. Very well put-together, too, I might add. She's a paramedic. With the Fifty-Fifth, come to think of it. Maybe you know her."

"No."

"Well, she broke up with me. We were getting a nice little thing going, but after the shooting she heard I was mixed up in your shit, and so she dumped me. Made quite a scene, too. Right in the Bridgeview lobby."

"That's a damn shame," Cruz said dryly, and put her head back again. If Noble was going to start moaning about his love life, then she was most definitely opting out of the conversation. Her nose seemed to have stopped bleeding; at the moment that was more worthy of her interest. Let him ramble. At least he'd let the question about Buford drop.

"Plus," Noble plowed on, raising a scholarly finger. "You've given me about twenty opportunities to throw you out on your pretty little keister, and I haven't taken any of them. What happened back there was a golden opportunity to leave you in the dust. So you owe me a simple explanation."

No. No, he wasn't going to let it drop, was he?

"You wouldn't understand," she said in a small, tired voice. She was starting to think she could really see that steel ball bearing, rolling drunkenly from one side of her skull to the other.

"Try me," Noble snorted. "I mean, I understand it's about your kid sister, but Rick Buford didn't even know Letitia, did he? You know what I'm saying, Cruz? The guy had no connection with her whatsoever. So why him? Help me out here."

"Go to hell."

"I'm a writer, remember? I want to know these things. I have to know these things. Now - why Buford?"

"He killed her," she said softly, part of her wondering why she was answering him at all. Mostly to shut him up, she supposed. Also because it was true. "He killed Lettie."

"Oh, goddammit, Cruz!" Noble cried with a sudden, biting anger that startled her. "He didn't kill Lettie! Neither did Geronimo or Chico or Animal or any of those other dipshits she hung around with! You know who killed Lettie? Lettie killed Lettie. I know the official cause of death was listed as overdose - I have my sources. Died in a meth lab while the whole place went up like a torch. You were there, from what I heard. Am I right?"

Cruz opened her mouth to reply ... and then closed it sharply. She had been getting ready to answer him, and was mildly horrified to realize that in a weird way she wanted to answer him, to put him right on a few details. Wasn't that something? Noble was the literary equivalent of the tabloid photographer who takes eager snapshots of car accidents, and yet he was a cagey bastard all the same, too good at making you forget yourself.

She had been there when Lettie died, yes. She could tell him that, but she wasn't going to. In its own twisted way what had happened that day had become almost sacred to her. The way Lettie had looked, sitting in the back of the Anti-Crime RMP, still strung out and twitching and making those oddly childlike pinching gestures with her fingers. The way she had looked in the clothes she (Maritza) had given her to wear out of the hospital, swimming in them when they should have been a snug fit. That moment was sacred to her, because in that moment the junkie who had so disgusted (and frightened, let's be honest) her in the hospital disappeared. For a few seconds the scrawny freak in the back of the car was gone and it was only her sister sitting there, just her little sister, looking small and beaten and cornered.

She could tell Noble that, but she wasn't going to. She could also tell him that Lettie had apologized to her. If she remembered nothing else, she remembered that, because it was the last coherent thing she ever heard her sister say. I'm sorry, 'Ritza. Spoken with a low and almost reflective kind of horror, as if she had just woken up from some long nightmare that nevertheless turned out to be real. Her hair lank and greasy, her neck and hands pockmarked with sores, her face bloodless and waxy, and once she had been so beautiful. All the narc-anon meetings, the stints in rehab, all the tearful promises to clean up, and always back in the same place again, always here, always down in the same hole.

She had apologized.

And then she had bolted from the car and made a run for the house.

She had apologized because she knew she wouldn't be able to help herself.

"Buford killed her!" Cruz screamed suddenly in a high, quavering voice. Pain exploded in her shoulder, her head, everywhere, but she was, for the moment, beyond it. "The shit that he makes, the shit that he sells KILLED HER! Do you get that? Don't you get that?"

Noble nodded calmly. If the outburst had rattled him in any way, it didn't show. "Same old story, in other words," he said. "The slogan of the New Millennium - It's Everybody's Fault But Mine. 'The fast food restaurants made me fat, the tobacco companies gave me cancer, the video games made me shoot up my school.' Somebody trips over their shoelace and the next day they sue Nike. Spill hot coffee on yourself and WHAM! See ya in court, Starbucks." He laughed. "You just can't accept the fact that Letitia made her own mistakes, can you? It really is that simple, isn't it? You can't just turn around and say she fucked up her own life, oh well, too bad, that's the way the cards fell."

"Do you want to know how she died?" Cruz spat. "Do you want to know exactly how she died for your fucking book? Because I'll tell you - she went into that meth lab and she found herself a nice little drift of that shit and she stuck her face right down in it and she just inhaled. Because that was all she knew, Noble, that was all she fucking kne-"

Her throat closed suddenly, cutting the last word neatly in half. Tears cut fresh tracks through the thin grease of sweat and rainwater on her face. She had lived that day over and over again in her mind, awake and asleep, she had memorized every detail though it had all played out like a disjointed fever-dream at the time. First the chance-meeting with Lettie in the hospital. Then a blundering, half-blind rampage across the neighborhood looking for the dealer responsible for selling her the meth that had put her there. And then the meth lab itself. Kneeling in the basement, the house creaking ominously as the fire ate it away, nose and mouth and lungs burning with the fumes, Lettie breathing rapid and shallow in her arms, Bosco stumbling around the basement yelling into his radio, 10-13, 10-13, over and over, officers need assistance, the lab worker going into labor, something about barrels of ammonia in the storage room. A lot going on all at once, to be sure.

To Maritza Cruz it had all been distant, disconnected, unimportant, happening to somebody else. There was only Lettie. The house was burning down around them and the air was turning to poison and there were enough chemicals in that storage room to put them all on the fucking moon, and all Maritza could think about was walking Lettie home from school when they were kids. That was the thought that she kept coming back to, the one random memory she plucked out of the twenty-one years of Lettie's life. Walking her home from school. How in the winter she always had to lift Lettie up so she could slap down the icicles that formed along the top of the schoolyard fence. Just one of those stupid, pointless things little kids get it into their heads to do. And the girl would never be satisfied with just a few, oh no - it had to be every single one of them. Lettie doing her civic duty, removing those unsightly icicles, and Maritza remembered how much it used to get on her nerves, because it was so tiresome and if they didn't get home before four-thirty Papa would yell at them.

And then Lettie died ... and it was so easy. It was so right, so right that after all the pain and humiliation and the indignities she had suffered she could just slip away in her sister's arms. Things like that didn't happen in the real world, and Maritza had been around death in her career enough to know that it was rarely a quick and clean affair, but here they were all the same. Lettie took one of those uneven, shallow little breaths, let it out, and then just didn't take another one. Maritza felt it happen, she felt it and yet she felt nothing, just a blunt and stupid kind of emptiness. Twenty-one years had just ended in one moment of absolute clarity, and Maritza was numb.

She had been planning on taking Lettie home. That was how it was supposed to go. Maritza would put away the bad guys and then take Lettie home, give her a hot meal, a place to shower, a place to sleep. And then they would see if they could start sorting through things again, and maybe this time Lettie would finally get some real help. And it would be for keeps this time. This time it would stick. All narc-anon meetings would be attended. All twelve steps of the program would be taken. All promises would be kept. All things would work out in the end. Amen. Why not? Why couldn't that have worked, why couldn't it have ended that way? If Lettie could die painlessly while Maritza held her and rocked her and talked to her, then why couldn't it have ended like that?

It hadn't, though, and instead of taking Lettie home Maritza had gone back to her apartment alone, where she lit candles and dug up a bunch of old photographs for lack of anything else to do. Here - a picture of her and Lettie on the ski trip. Here - Lettie in her First Communion dress. Here - a fourteen-year-old Maritza reading Dr. Seuss to a five-year-old Lettie on Maritza's bed, the two of them curled up in the blankets. Here - Lettie proudly showing off a lost baby-tooth. All the proper happy-family cliches. Cruz sat alone in her apartment, her Christmas lights still up even though it was February, the candles burning, flipping halfheartedly through her pictures. She remembered she had showered three times to try to get the stink - real or imagined - of the chemicals off her skin. She would shower and then she would return to the photos, back and forth like that. Knowing that she would eventually have to go to bed and go to sleep and meet up with whatever dreams awaited her there. And when Bosco came over to check on her she had taken him to bed with her, not really because she wanted to and not really because he saved her life that day but because she needed to, she needed someone, to be close to someone. To not be alone. And maybe having that would keep the dreams away.

It hadn't.

"You don't know," Cruz whispered hoarsely. "You don't know how hard she tried, Noble ... she tried so hard, she hated it and she wanted to get clean ..."

Oh, why are you doing this? Why have you let him draw you into this? Why are you justifying yourself to this piece of shit?

The answer came back immediately, and it came back hard: He has no RIGHT! No RIGHT! How dare he question me? How dare this son of a bitch, this dope addict son of a bitch question me?

She had to stop, though, she had to calm down. She was breathing very hard now, and though she was still drenched from the rain and she was still cold right through to her bones, she could still feel the perspiration rolling down her cheeks. The ball bearing in her skull rolled sickeningly. Back and forth, back and forth. Thunk, thunk.

But her mouth just kept going.

"She tried so hard to beat it," she repeated, crying openly now and not caring. "And those bastards were always there, they were always waiting to pull her right back in."

"So it was everybody's fault but hers," Noble said complacently, shaking his head. "You're a piece of work, Cruz. You surely are a piece of work. You're a book, you know that? I could probably get a thousand pages out of you alone."

Cruz opened her mouth to reply.

Then her breath caught as something in her mind -

(I'm a writer, remember? I want to know these things. I have to know these things)

clicked neatly into place.

That was it. Oh, that was it, right there, wasn't it? He was a cagey bastard, she'd thought that only a moment ago - cagey and able to push emotional buttons with almost as much skill as any cop worth his or her salt, and that had been it all along, the reason he had been so into this from the beginning. He had her. He had her under his thumb, exactly the same way she had had him only a week ago, and he could do whatever he pleased with her. She wasn't wearing the badge around her neck anymore, so Mr. Noble was holding all the cards. Only he didn't want to overpower her and take the crystal meth she was carrying. No, he wanted to run her through a few hoops, find out what made her tick - front-line research into the mind of an obsessed cop on a suicide mission.

Right on, that other interior voice - the Anti-Crime Sergeant - agreed grimly. Richard Buford isn't the Great Writer's Adventure, honey - you are.

If that were true, then this interview was now officially terminated.

She looked thoughtfully down at the clump of bloody tissues that she had only just realized she was still clutching. Her nose had stopped bleeding several minutes ago, and she supposed she should be thankful that the shameful outburst Noble had provoked hadn't started it up again.

Her forearm and hand were crusted with blood, though. She cleaned herself up as best she could, then threw the wad of Kleenex into the back seat, where it added to the overall jumble of blankets and books and empty pop cans. If Noble noticed this little act of blatant littering, he gave no sign. His eyes were on the road again, and it seemed he was no longer interested in her, or in pressing his case for personal responsibility. She hoped it stayed that way. He was supposed to meet Iggy before noon, at a Disciples hangout across the city. It was now almost ten-fifty, and the traffic and the endless rain made the going slow. Let him concentrate on that.

For her part, Cruz discovered that she was extremely thirsty. Allowing yourself to be suckered into throwing a screaming, crying tantrum tended to do that to you. Her bottle of water was tucked into one of the drink holders under the dash, and it still looked to have a few mouthfuls left in it.

Of course, the sleazy, manipulating cabron next to her had been the one who'd bought it for her. She supposed he got off on seeing how badly she needed something he'd provided for her out of his own pocket.

Thirst, however, took priority over pride.

Cruz leaned forward and reached for the bottle.

And found she couldn't do it. The pain was too bad. But that wasn't even the main thing - it was as much the fear of pain that kept her from moving. It was like a very old and very dangerous dog - you walked lightly around it, lest you wake it up and have it take a swatch out of your hide.

I'm gonna have to get him to do it, she thought wretchedly. God help me, I'm gonna have to ask him to get it for me.

No. Absolutely, unequivocally no. She leaned forward again, slowly this time, slow enough to look ridiculous, a woman doing her little impression of some slow-moving animal - hey kids, this is how a three-toed sloth looks. Her hand was shaking badly now, and she missed twice before her fingers finally closed around the neck of the plastic bottle.

She became aware that Noble was watching this little operation from the corner of his eye. And he wasn't bothering to hide the fact that he was getting a big kick out of it.

"Oh yeah," he chuckled softly. "I can see you're real tough, Cruz. I'm sitting here next to a big ol' action hero."

"I'm not doing this," she said quietly, sitting back and taking a sip from her hard-earned bottle. "I'm not giving you any more."

She half-expected him to ask her what she meant by that, play it innocent, but he didn't. "You told me last night that I could - and I quote - 'put whatever spin on you I wanted.' Well, I need to know more about you. There's a good chance I'll be writing your obituary." He laughed. "So to speak."

"You have your goddam notebook on me, right? Stick with that and leave me alone."

"The cops have it. You know that. Besides, it needed some padding. So pad away."

"Fuck. You. Noble," she snapped, biting off each word.

He nodded soberly at this, as if he expected no less from her - it was just mouthy ol' Maritza Cruz, after all - and was perfectly willing to take it in stride.

Then, with deliberate drama, he leaned forward and cranked up the tape-deck's volume.

Back in Black became a screaming din.

Cruz bucked in her seat like a fish. Her water bottle slipped from her hand and rolled under the seat, spilling what little was left in it as it went. The ball bearing in her head did not just roll now; it lurched, hammering at her temples, and it did feel like a truly physical thing, ready to pound its way through her skull and drop right into Noble's lap. The drone behind it - that steady beehive drone - swelled to a high, keening howl. The interior of the car swayed and tilted crazily. Her stomach clenched and then folded over on itself.

She squeezed her eyes shut and put her shaking hand to her temple, almost whimpering: "Please ..."

"If you won't talk to me, then I guess it's gotta be AC/DC," Noble shouted over the music. "I can't abide crushing, uncomfortable silences. I need something in the air. I should also warn you that I've been known to sing along. I'm told I do a pretty mean Brian Johnson."

"What do you want from me?" Cruz moaned, head reeling. "What?"

There was a pause. Then, mercifully, the volume of the song went down.

"Well, let's start small," she heard him say. His voice seemed to come from very far off. "Tell me where your people are from."

Cruz opened her eyes and looked at him mistrustfully. The question was so bizarre and so far out of left-field that for a moment she believed something in her brain had shorted out, some neural misfire brought on by the trauma she was being subjected to. "What ...? My what ...? My people?"

Noble nodded. "You know - your family. Your roots. What part of Latin America does Family Cruz hail from?"

"My mother was Puerto Rican," she said cautiously, wondering what new horror this could be leading into. "My father's family was from Colombia."

"Ah, Colombia!" Noble exclaimed grandly, stirring up another small typhoon in her head and making her wince. "Beautiful country! So long as you know the right places to go, anyway."

"Wouldn't know," she said faintly. "Never been there."

"How many people in your family? You, your mother, your father, Lettie. Anybody else? No other siblings?"

"No."

"None? No brothers? No other sisters?"

"There were twenty-five of us. All crammed into the same one-bedroom apartment. Typical Latino family. That what you want to hear?"

Noble reached menacingly for the volume knob.

Cruz saw it and cringed miserably. "All right!" she cried, and a mostly subconscious part of her marveled at how pathetic she had become. Jump through those hoops, Maritza. Dance on those strings. "All right, goddammit! It was just me and Lettie and my father. All right?"

"And you were all very close?"

"Yes! Yes, now please just - "

"I know you were close with Letitia," Noble said calmly. "Obviously you were. What about dad? Was he an okay sort of guy? There was never any abuse, was there? Verbal? Physical? Sexual? Did he ever hurt Lettie? Is that why you were so protective of her?"

"Oh, you son of a bitch, Noble ..."

Noble's hand darted forward with an alarming, oily speed and gave the volume knob on the tape deck a vicious twist to the right. Cruz wailed and tried to cover her ears, but with only one hand available for the job she didn't do so well. Back in Black had ended and now Brian Johnson was singing the chorus to Highway to Hell in his rusty chainsaw voice. Cruz wondered in a distracted, muddy sort of way if this was hell, and immediately decided that it was. Yokas had shot straight and true after all. That was it. Had to be it. Yokas had shot straight and true, the dumdum bullet had blown her heart out and this was hell, and guess what - it was not her father's gigantic barbecue pit after all. It was something more terrible in its strangeness, a kind of rolling talkshow where the punishment for not answering a question was an earsplitting dose of classic metal. Satan's music itself.

It was bone-rattlingly loud. And he wasn't turning it down this time.

He's gonna kill me. He's gonna kill me oh God he's gonna kill me he's gonna kill me with AC/DC after all I've been through it's gonna be death by heavy metal -

Abruptly, the music died away to a murmur. Cruz slumped back in her seat. She was breathing in quick, shallow gasps - she had been screaming the whole time.

"Name-calling is uncalled for," Noble said primly, and for the first time Cruz wondered if he might actually be high. Surely he must be high. He was a coward, he'd always been a coward, but right now he was acting like he was invincible, like he wasn't sitting next to a woman with a gun, a woman who had virtually no reason to live and absolutely nothing to lose. This wasn't the Noble she remembered from the last two weeks at all. This was more like being in a car with ... well, it was more like being in a car with Detective Schaeffer. Noble had suddenly grown balls, and for that he must have had some kind of pharmaceutical help.

The trouble was, she hadn't seen him take a snort even once since she'd hooked up with him. He'd gone to the bathroom twice, and he'd left her alone to make his call to Iggy ... but he'd left his drugs in the car on all of those occasions. Noble claimed to have had a good toot last night before leaving the Bridgeview, and wanted to save the stuff she'd given him - the top-notch stuff she'd given him - for later. She supposed he could still have snuck some in somewhere, but she didn't think he had.

So there was only one other conclusion - underneath it all, Aaron Noble was not at all the man she'd thought he was. She'd misread him. Misjudged him.

You got sloppy, her father's voice intoned sadly. Again.

"Name-calling is uncalled for," Noble repeated. "It's not nice, and for your future reference I'm declaring it against the rules of this interview. It was just a question, Cruz. No need to get all bent out of shape over a little question. So your father never abused you two gals, okay. But he must've been strict. You grew up Catholic, right? Who was your priest, again? Estrada, wasn't it? Like the actor. Eric Estrada." Noble paused thoughtfully and said, mostly to himself, "Or is Eric Estrada a singer? I can never remember."

"How did you know all that?" Cruz said breathlessly.

"From Lettie." Noble looked over at her with a wide-eyed innocence that was completely bogus. "Oh, that's right - I interviewed her. Didn't I mention that?"

Cruz looked back at him, thunderstruck. "No," she said hoarsely.

"Oh yeah. All that stuff I wrote about her in my notebook? Most of that came straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Not easy to get anything straight out of her, mind you. A suspicious little girl, was your sister. Thought I was a cop. At least until I gave her a little something to get her to open up to me."

Cruz went rigid. The ball bearing seemed to suddenly drop out of her skull and land heavily in the pit of her stomach. "You what?" she rasped.

"I said I had to give her something to get her to talk to me," Noble said coolly. "She was a bit rude until she had a reward dangling in front of her. Tell me, Cruz, was she always that surly, or did she only get that way when she hit her terrible teens?"

"You gave her drugs," Cruz breathed. Her tone was dreamy, almost reflective. She could feel that familiar, tenebrous rage descending over her mind like curtain, flipping little mental switches as it went, shutting out rational thought. It also erased most of her pain and discomfort in a warm wash of adrenaline, and that made her all the more willing to surrender to it. Her right hand crept down to her side where the Tec-9 rested against her hip, almost of its own volition. "You son of a bitch. Oh, you filthy son of a bitch."

"Oh, come on now, Cruz. What do you think you're doing with me? Feeding my own little problem for your own ends, that's what. I have a problem - I admit that. Lettie had a problem, too, and she accepted me when she saw that we both had the same monkey riding our backs. I already told your pal Bosco that I have to become part of the world I'm writing about for my books to work properly. Lettie and I got nicely toasted together and had a grand old chat. About you, mostly."

"I'm going to kill you, Noble," Cruz said thickly. Her voice was shaking, enough so that the words were barely intelligible. "Right now."

Noble ignored her and kept driving along placidly.

Under her coat, her hand kneaded the dimpled polymer grip of the Tec-9.

But she did nothing.

And he knew she would do nothing. He knew he could keep this up, keep tormenting her, get a new rise out of her every minute, and all because she was not quite ready to give up on Rick Buford just yet. Noble had her addiction pegged.

"It was a long time ago, Cruz," he sighed. "Year and a half, at least. And I'll tell you again - nobody put a gun to Lettie's head. She was nineteen, and she did it all by her very own self. Besides, don't you want to know what she had to say?"

Cruz made no reply. Her hand had left her coat; the anger was already fading, mostly because she simply didn't have the energy to maintain it. She was beaten. She was as good as handcuffed. Her body wasn't the only thing that was sick and weak, it seemed - the deterioration went right through her, body, mind and spirit.

Old girl just ain't what she used to be, the Anti-Crime Sergeant who lived in her crumbling mind said sadly.

"I'll take your silence as a yes," Noble said. "Let's see, what did Lettie say ... well, she told me about your lives growing up. Some of it, anyway. How your dad was really into the whole strict Catholic values and discipline thing. How he used to use his belt on you - "

"He never!" Cruz shouted, rising to him again. "I mean ... I mean he did, he did use the belt, but only once or twice!" She licked her lips feverishly, aware of how lame that sounded. How daffy. "In fifteen years, he used it maybe once on me and twice on Lettie! And never hard enough to leave a mark! Never!"

" - but mostly she told me about you," Noble rolled on, ignoring her. Then he glanced wryly at her, a small, unpleasant smile playing on his lips. "Jesus, Cruz, that kid hated you like poison, did you know that? Like poison. I don't know what you think you had with her, but Lettie hated your fucking guts. Said you were a traitor, that you sold out to the Man and started locking up everybody in your 'hood just to make yourself feel bigger and better. Said you did it all out of spite, and really you were just an insecure, loudmouthed bitch who liked to think she knew what was best for everybody else."

Cruz smiled thinly. Now this, this was obvious bait. Bait to get another rise out of her. But she wasn't going to take it this time, and he could crank up the rock concert all he wanted. He was trying to torment her, get a few good licks in, but this new tactic was a pretty amateurish way to go about it.

"You're not telling me a goddamn thing I don't already know, Noble," she said. "Lettie was a child. In her mind she was always a child. And a child never knows what's best for her, does she? A child lashes out at the people who try to protect her. A child doesn't understand that it's all for her own good. Does she, Noble?"

He shrugged. "I'm not trying to start a fight with you, Cruz. I'm only telling you what she told me. And in a way I have to agree. I mean, did you really think you were helping your 'hood? Exactly what do you think the War on Drugs is really all about, anyway? It's not about winning, because it can never be won. It's not about helping people, because you don't help people by stacking them up in prisons. I'll tell you what it's about - it's about pure politics. It's about maintaining the status quo. It's about sweeping the poor out of the streets and out of the way. It's about getting rid of the minorities - it's fucking racist, in other words." He shrugged. "But why waste the old Bleeding-Heart Liberal sermon on you, right? You've probably heard it all before."

"Heard it," she said. "Ignored it."

Noble laughed. "That's about what I figured. But tell me this - how many people did you arrest for drug possession in a week? Just possession. Hmm? Five? Ten? Twenty? Shake 'em down and find a bit of pot or meth or crack and send them off to jail. You think that's the way to help people? Or here's one - how many people did you plant drugs on so you could get them on a possession charge? How many did you threaten to plant drugs on to get them under your thumb?"

"I did good, Noble," she said. "You'll never make me say otherwise. Never. I did good. I did so much good. I go out there, I try to help my community, and what happens? They want to lock me up for it. That's your story, Noble. You put that in your goddamn book."

"You did good? You did good for your community? You and your crew had that community terrorized, Cruz!"

"Correction: we had the skells terrorized."

"You really think that, don't you?" he said, shaking his head. "Even now, you really believe that. Okay, let's take it up a notch - new line of questioning. Tell me: how many people have you killed in the line?"

"No."

Noble clapped a dramatic hand over his heart. "No?" he cried, voice rising in mock-horror. "No? Not a wise answer, Cruz. If AC/DC isn't loud enough for you, I also have a more modern selection of audio medicine. Nine Inch Nails, maybe. Makes AC/DC sound like a boys' choir. Now - how many?"

"Seven."

Noble whistled. "Wow. Not that I'm surprised - always did have you figured for a killing machine. So who's Leo Gaines and how does he factor in?"

Cruz jerked as if stung, eyes widening.

Leo Gaines.

Oh, now, she could not have heard that right. Her brain really was shorting out and playing evil little tricks on her, because she did not just hear Noble utter that name. The name of one of the two men she had killed ... killed in what she knew most people would call cold blood. One of the men she had executed.

An execution that no-one could possibly know about.

How does he know? she thought, her mind-voice high and panicky. How does he know all of this? How can he? How can he know so fucking much

"You talked in your sleep last night, you know," Noble said, sensing her shock and answering the unspoken question. "Didn't understand most of it, but I caught some pretty lucid bits here and there. Mostly the Lettie-related stuff - you're really obsessed with that little twerp, aren't you? Something about a rosary. 'You keep it, you take it, it's yours. Give it to your kids.' That's what you said. Something you gave to her as a gift, I'm guessing?"

"Yeah," Cruz said, but she was barely paying attention - he had lost her at you talked in your sleep. She had absolutely no memory of sleeping. Absolutely none. She did remember Noble sleeping (and he snored like a buzzsaw) and she remembered telling herself that she couldn't risk sleeping even while he was out, because he couldn't be trusted, he was dangerous -

"Something else about icicles," Noble broke in. "A few names here and there. I jotted them down and memorized them. Let's see ... I heard Johnny ... Ramon ... Claudia ... Bosco ... At one point you said 'fuckin' heart, fuckin' heart, I'm gonna kill him' three or four times in a row. What's that mean? Did somebody break your poor little fuckin' heart, Cruz?"

"Hart," she said in a very small voice. She felt as if she might be getting ready to be sick again. "Hart spelled H-A-R-T." She paused, and then added, "And yeah, I'd like to kill him."

"But you said you really did kill Leo Gaines. You said something like, 'yeah, I shot Leo Gaines.' Who was he? Your first kill?"

Cruz swallowed hard. "No," she said slowly. "No, he wasn't my first kill."

"So who was he?"

"That," she said grimly, "is a long story, Noble."

He gestured at the street in front of them. "We've got a ways to go yet, my dear girl. Plenty of time, too. Lots of time for bonding over long stories. Start talking. Start talking or you-know-what happens."

"I could kill you!" she bit out suddenly, with more strength than she would have imagined possible. "Don't you see that? I could kill us both, right now!"

"But you won't," he said calmly. "So start talking. I've got a hunch this one's gonna be good."

"You are a son of a bitch, Noble," she said through the middle of a wild, humorless chuckle. "A petty limp-dicked son of a bitch. You know that?"

"The potty-mouth insults are getting old, Cruz. Kindergarten was a long time ago, so stop embarrassing yourself and start talking. Tell me all about this Leo Gaines."

"He was a C.I.," she said wearily. "About two years ago." She paused. There was an audible click as she swallowed another lump in her throat. She had done a lot of thinking about Gaines, particularly over the last forty-eight hours or so, but talking about him out loud could still make her uneasy. "Skinny guy. About six-five. Looked like some kind of walking public service announcement against inbreeding. The few teeth he still had were all green and crooked, and the breath on that guy ..." She laughed. "Dios Mio ... that fucking dog-breath of his ..."

"Is that why you shot him?" Noble muttered under his breath.

"He was useful enough," she continued, ignoring him, and she discovered something strange - uncomfortable as it was to talk about this, there was something in her mind that was cycling up, running faster and faster, seizing on the story of Leonard Mitchell Gaines. Because she could tell Noble this story. This particular story. There was no Lettie in it.

You weren't gonna give anything else up to him, though. You weren't gonna put on any more shows for him.

True, but anything she could keep him occupied with - anything that wouldn't roll back around to her sister - was perfectly fine with her.

"He was in it for the thrill, I think," she went on. "He liked playing both sides. Kind of like you." She smiled. "He could never make it, you know. He was a loser. Low in the pecking order and always would be. But he thought he had brains. Thought he could get to the top. And that, that's what screwed him."

She paused, shooting a covert glance at Noble out of one half-lidded eye.

He made a hurrying gesture with his hand. "Keep going."

She had him hooked, all right. Oh yeah. Storytime, chill'un. Gather 'round and Mother Maritza will spin you a yarn.

Cruz took another breath and plunged on. It was easy, she was discovering - she could just close her eyes and let her voice settle into a murmuring drone, and there was another advantage, as well: when she concentrated on talking, it kept the pain at bay. A little bit, anyway. "He witnessed a shooting. Pure bad luck. He was with me and my partner one night, we were taking him home and then ... then we hear an alarm, people screaming, and we see this guy come running out of a convenience store with a gun. We chased him in the RMP with Gaines still in the back seat. We cornered the perp, and North - he was my partner at the time - "

"Glenn North," Noble said instantly. "Big, hatchet-faced guy. Long-time veteran and one of your Anti-Crime gorillas. I've heard of him."

"North shot the guy. The robber, I mean. Thing was, the guy was trying to surrender. Had his hands up. North, though ... North shot him anyway. This guy, this robber, he'd killed the clerk in the store. An old man. An old man who cooperated, never made any trouble -"

"And so North decided to be judge, jury and executioner," Noble finished disgustedly. "Typical."

Cruz paid no attention to this. Noble wanted her to tell him stories and he was finally getting it, uncut and with no commercial breaks. Let him stuff his moralizing up his ass. "Gaines saw the whole thing. And what does he do? He starts running his mouth, trying to use it as leverage. Over us."

Noble shook his head. "Oh. Oh, man. I see where this is going. Gaines saw North shoot a guy in cold blood. So you did the same thing to Gaines."

Cruz hesitated. Noble had just guessed the rest of the story right on ... and yet at the same time he hadn't. It hadn't gone down like that. At least, not exactly like that. It was true that she had taken Gaines to an abandoned lot, where she had threatened him with her little unregistered .25 automatic. But she had never gone out there intending to kill him. It had been a bluff. One that she had fully expected to work.

But it hadn't worked. Gaines wouldn't take the hint. He was too proud, too full of himself to be properly scared. He thought he was smart, thought he could merrily roll right over everybody in his path, including the cops who were using him as an informant. So standing in that vacant lot in the middle of the night, they had ended up stuck in a stalemate - Gaines wouldn't back down and neither would she. Again, it was a case of her making a catastrophic error in character judgement. She had always been so proud of how easily and quickly she could pin down a man's (or a woman's) personality ... and yet Gaines had been another in a long line of examples of how those instincts had failed her.

She could have let him go. She should have let him go and then found some other way to deal with him. It would have been easy to threaten him right back - she could spread the word on the street that he was a snitch and see how long it took for him to turn up in a landfill. She could even stand back and call his bluff - after all, the police probably wouldn't listen to a gangly, swaggering hillbilly with a cocaine habit and a list of priors that went back almost to his childhood. Gaines was the only civilian witness to the shooting. The guy North had killed had raised his hands in surrender, true, but he'd also had a gun in his jacket. There was no way to prove it wasn't self-defense. It would be Leo Gaines' word against theirs.

But Gaines had the misfortune to pull his shit at a very bad time in Cruz's life. By then the situation with Lettie was bad and moving rapidly towards worse (Lettie was in this story after all, it seemed) - Maritza had caught her hooking only a week before, and for the third time ... after many tearful promises that she'd never, ever sell her body on the streets again, Maritza had her solemn word on their mother and father's souls. A month before that, Lettie had gotten the shit kicked out of her by about six frat boys after they hired her to do a gang-bang for an amateur porn video. The price was sixty dollars. The title of this charming piece of filmmaking was Crack Whores of New York, Vol. 2. Lettie had come out of it with three broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder. And no money. They never paid her. Not surprisingly, that was what had pissed Lettie off the most. Broken ribs or not, dislocated shoulder or not, she'd been all locked and loaded to go back there and cut 'em all. Gonna go back and cut their fuckin' balls off, that was how she'd put it, her accent thickening to the point where it descended into parody, like a racist Hollywood burlesque of a tough Latina streetwalker ... even though both she and Maritza had been raised to speak better.

But nothing ever came of it. No cutting of balls or of anything else. And no charges, either, no jail time for any of them, not even the beefy jagoff who had delivered the kick that broke Lettie's ribs. Cruz and her team had caught up with the aspiring filmmakers at the apartment of the movie's director and mastermind, a kid named Robbie Holland. She broke a beer bottle and, while North held him down, she showed Holland a piece of jagged glass and told him she was going to scoop out his eyes. When she lightly ran the edge of the shard across his cheek, he promptly shit his pants. And that was the only satisfaction she ever got - despite the depraved violence of the movie, Lettie was eighteen, she had gone into it voluntarily, and the little college boys all had powerful daddies with powerful lawyers. They were, after all, America's Future. And what was Lettie?

Why, merely a Crack Whore of New York.

And while all of that was bad enough, Cruz had also just come through the mess that J.D. Hart's treachery had sparked; the investigation and the retribution that followed, the chaotic whirlwind of reprimands, the transfers and suspensions, and of course Johnny Hoyle's suicide and subsequent funeral. Cruz herself had come out of it more or less unscathed, but she'd come out more pissed at the system than ever and feeling mean as hell.

Gaines had known about the money scandal, and he made the very lethal mistake of taunting her with it. If she thought the trouble Hart caused over stolen money was bad, Gaines said, what did she think would happen when the cops heard about North's little mishap? And if the cops wouldn't listen, Gaines promised to make them listen. He'd go to the press, he'd call the ACLU, he'd raise the fucking roof. And then the whole thing might start all over again. Only this time it would be murder, not money. Would North eat the barrel of his nine-millimeter the way Johnny had? Why, he probably would.

And the worst of it was, Cruz could see how it just might happen. She didn't really think anything could come of it in the long run, but to have to endure another investigation so soon after the other one ... that alone would be very bad. There was too much negative attention focused on her already, and she was getting a reputation. A bad one. It began to dawn on her that this scrawny little prick might really be able to create a serious problem. And even if he couldn't, how could he threaten her like this? It was unthinkable - Gaines's life was in her hands in every conceivable way. She could do anything to him. Anything. Put him in the joint or put him in the ground. But she had protected him. She had even rewarded him by feeding his coke habit on the sly. And this was what she got for it.

She remembered how the rage had come on her the way it always did, like a blanket drifting over her mind, pulling those little mental shutters closed as it went, reducing thought to colors and images and undiluted emotion. She thought of Johnny Hoyle, sitting on his couch with half his head gone and his brains spread across the wall behind him. He'd turned his stereo up to full blast to cover the shot, and that was how they'd found him - a neighbor had complained about the deafening sound of Lenny Kravitz's Are You Gonna Go My Way playing on Repeat. She thought of Lettie, beaten and molested and sexually humiliated for the amusement of a bunch of all-American white college boys and how nothing, nothing ever came of it.

And she thought of Leonard Mitchell Gaines himself. After everything else, Gaines comes along and starts making his demands, his threats, his taunts. Because he knows how the world works, and he knows she knows. They both know the system. The system that protects the worst of society and pisses on the good. She knows.

Gaines pushed her into it. That was the bottom line. He pushed her, he threatened her, he taunted her, and when she finally lost control it was just like that day in June all those years ago, when she punched out Cameron Wilcox for making Lettie cry. Gaines started to walk away from her and so she raised her illegal gun (bluff or no bluff, it was still loaded) and shot him in the back of the head. Gaines is there ... and then he isn't. As easy as that. He'd left her with no choice.

Cruz told Aaron Noble all of this, omitting nothing. And somehow, though she'd vowed not to stray from the subject of Gaines, the whole story of Johnny Hoyle made it in there as well; how J.D. Hart (fuckin' Hart, Noble claimed she had said in her sleep, and she believed him) had screwed them all over and walked away clean. She told him about the porno movie Lettie had gotten herself into with that Holland asshole, and how Holland had shit in his pants when she held the glass shard in front of his eye. She even told him the whole story of Cam, Lettie and her goldfish and that punch, that serious right cross that could perhaps be said to have started it all; the punch heard 'round the world.

She told him everything.

And when she'd finished, all Noble could offer was, "Christ," in a small, breathy voice. Then, after a moment, in the same tone: "Glad to get all that off your chest, are you?"

"It was what you wanted, right?" she said with a lopsided grin. Her tone was sweet, but there was an underlying tremor that might have been anger, or fear, or shock that it all could have fallen out of her so easily, or all three. She was cold all through her and shivering badly, but it was no longer just because of her worsening physical state. "You wanted it, and you got it. You raped it all out of me. So - was it good for you, Noble? Did it get you off?"

"Yeah," he said hollowly. "Yeah, whatever, but ... but that Gaines guy, that's what I'm stuck on ... you really just lost it and blew him away. You really did."

Cruz was mildly amused to note that this was not phrased as a question. "You're sitting next to a cold-blooded killer, Noble," she said grimly. "Is that starting to sink in yet?"

"So ... so how come they never caught you? I mean after you killed him. What did you do with the body? "

"Dumped it. Rolled it into the river. Probably could have just left him right where he was, but dumping him seemed smarter."

"And nobody ever thought to make the connection?"

She offered a weak, dismissive little wave with her right hand. "Assumed to be a standard case of gangland retribution. He had a lot of enemies. And no family."

"Nobody to make waves and demand answers."

"Right."

Noble raked a hand back through his hair and sighed. "Whoo-boy. I repeat what I said earlier - you are an entire book in and of yourself, Cruz."

She smiled faintly. "Maybe I am."

"Maybe after I'm done with Iggy we ought to make a run by your church. See if Padre Estrada's home. I don't know how seriously you still take your Catholicism, but you should definitely be thinking about getting right with your God."

"Maybe I should."

"And you did it all for her, didn't you?" he said, shaking his head. He seemed to be talking almost to himself now. "All for Lettie. From punching some kid out because he was mean to her, on up to threatening to cut some guy's eyes out for her, on up to killing for her. Everything was always for Lettie."

Cruz thought of the second execution, the one Noble didn't seem to know about - apparently she hadn't done any sleeptalking about Michael Alvarez. That one had been different. That one had been ... worse, and it had grown directly out of the first - if she hadn't killed Gaines, she never would have shot Alvarez. And Lettie ... Lettie had factored into Alvarez's death as well, hadn't she? Oh yes - and in a much bigger way, too. Lettie factored into everything. Noble was right, but again he really wasn't telling her anything new: Lettie was the hub from which every other spoke of her life seemed to have grown. The girl had driven almost everything she'd ever done.

And even now, with Letitia Cruz three months under the ground and rotting, it was still going on.

Next to her, Noble uttered what sounded like a rueful laugh. "I'm starting to believe you can do it."

"Do what?"

"Kill Rick Buford. I think you've really got a shot, Cruz. Even if he's got his best crew with him - which he will - and even if they're armed to the fucking teeth - which they will be - I'm starting to think you can do it. You're an obsessive, Cruz, and you've done what all obsessives do - you've taken one core idea and built a fortress of sweet little lies around it. Buford killed Lettie, because she was a meth addict and he's a top dog in the meth trade. Kill him and everything is brought into balance, the universe rights itself, and everybody lives happily ever after. With that kind of thought process, it's no wonder you think you're the fucking Terminator. And you know what the funniest part is?"

"Tell me. Please."

"The funniest part is how much Letitia actually resented you. How much she hated you. You wanna know something else she told me when we talked? She said that you spent your whole life trying to tell her how to live her life, and then when she really needed you, you weren't there for her."

Cruz choked out a scornful laugh. "Nice try, Noble. She never would have said anything like that. She was too convinced she didn't need me. She thought she was indestructible."

He shrugged. "She did say it, though. She gave me some jumbled-up story about a ski trip - you took her skiing, and everything was great. Something about a play-fight on the slopes, and after you even had some guy take your picture with her - she told me she liked that. Said it felt like you respected her again. And then afterwards you just kind of stopped. She didn't hear from you anymore. Guess you got tired of picking her up and cleaning her off, huh?"

Cruz, though, was not hearing him anymore.

He knew about the trip.

Oh, Jesus, he knew about the trip.

Because I talked about it, she thought wildly. I must have talked about it in my sleep, that sleep I don't even remember taking. More sleep-talk, and he just picked it out like he picked out Gaines.

But the photograph. The photograph ... and the play-fight on the slopes ... and the fact that she had started to tune Lettie out after the ski trip ... there was just too much detail there. Too much detail for him to have gotten it out of any mumbling she'd done in her sleep.

So how could he know?

How else but by having talked to her? the Anti-Crime Sergeant in her head said gently. But the how of it isn't the point. What matters is that it proves what you already knew, Maritza - you abandoned her, and she knew you'd abandoned her. Oh, you can piss and moan about how you could have done more, and how this pain you're in now is your penance, but that's all just self-indulgent shit and you know it. You could always admit that you failed, you could always put yourself up on the fucking cross and play the martyr, but you could never admit that Lettie knew it. But she did. She felt it. She felt you leave, and no matter how bad she was, no matter how much she resisted you, she still needed you. You gave up on her, and so she gave up on herself.

"No," Cruz murmured weakly. The buzz in the center of her head was back and it was rising again, the steady idiot drone of a hundred-thousand angry yellowjackets in high summer. It was a confused, panicky sound. "I tried. I tried - "

(something about a play-fight on the slopes)

" - to help her - "

(and after you even had some guy take your picture with her)

"- I tried but - "

(she told me she liked that. Said it felt like you respected her again)

"- but she would never let me."

But by the end she wasn't even speaking anymore. Her lips were still moving but she had lost her voice.

"You got sick of picking her up and cleaning her off and so you decided it would feel better to just stick to shooting people and locking people up," Noble said smugly. "Easier that way, right? Convenient. You can tell yourself it's all for her but you don't have to actually face her, and when she died it got even easier, because then you didn't - "

"SHUT UP!" Cruz shrieked suddenly, using almost all of her remaining strength to produce a howl so loud it could almost have drowned out Noble's music, even at top volume. "SHUT UP OR I'LL KILL YOU, I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU NOBLE RIGHT NOW, YOU JUST SEE IF I DON'T!"

Noble fell silent. The hole that his voice left in the air was immediately filled by the mechanized, rubbery sound of the wipers as they cut double arcs of transparency in the windshield that were almost instantly closed again by the downpour; the sound of the rain itself as it battered against the roof; and Cruz's breathing, which had gone wheezy and strange.

She was limp in her seat now, dazed and only semi-conscious. Some dim part of her doubted that Noble would be stupid enough to try to kickstart the conversation back into gear now, but if he was, she wasn't likely to hear it anyway. The steel ball thudded merrily around in her head. The wasps continued to buzz and squirm and burrow right down into the tender meat of her brain. Her heart hammered in her chest, her pulse a thick beat that rang in her ears and made her eyes throb in their sockets. Big, elaborately shaped splotches of oblivion bloomed and danced and receded in front of her vision.

Through them she saw her sister. She saw Lettie on the ski slope. Lettie bent double and trying to get her ski-boots off. Pretending to overbalance and fall. Attacking her, stuffing snow down her back, how they'd rolled and wrestled and then at last lay side-by-side, looking up at the sky together, an early-evening sky bloated with clouds that filtered the sun into a preternatural spectacle, red shot through with swirls of gold, as if the air up there was on fire, as if the air was on fire and her sister was dead and she could feel all twenty-one years as they came crashing to an end right there in the closed circle formed by her arms, all twenty-one years ending in one breath, one breath that she felt whisper out against her face, one breath that was not renewed by another, and there was nothing she could do, nothing she could ever have done, and all because she had gotten tired, so tired, tired of picking her up and cleaning her off, and what could she have done anyway? What?

What could she have done?

(I'm sorry, 'Ritza)

Lettie, sitting in the back of the Anti-Crime RMP. Exhausted. Beaten. Consumed.

Already consumed.

"God help me," Cruz whispered in Spanish, almost inaudible under thin, silent sobs that shuddered through her whole body, the way the vomiting had less than thirty minutes before. "Oh, God, please help me. Please."

---

II.

AC/DC was history and Noble's tape-deck was now belting out something a bit more modern: Red Rover by Big Sugar.

Johnny had liked that one, as she remembered. It was a rock song but it had a spicy, reggae kind of flavor to it. Johnny had always liked stuff like that - anything that could meld two or more styles and still come out sounding clean and polished.

The volume was tuned to a low murmur, and for that she was thankful. She would also soon be rid of Aaron Noble for what she hoped would be a good couple of hours.

For that she was also very thankful.

She had left it all behind now. She had left Lettie behind her, and all that Noble had said about her. There was no choice in the matter. She was too exhausted, to drained to think about that or about anything else; it was all just too much, too much weight to bear up under, and now the run of her thoughts had been forced back into the simple primary colors of physiological need. And at the moment, that meant the need to sleep. She just hoped there would be no dreams.

The biker hangout where Noble was supposed to meet his pal Iggy was a strip-joint called the Dirty Rabbit, and it was located deep in one of the worst neighborhoods of the Bronx. To Cruz's relief Noble was not stupid enough to drive them right up to the front door; about a block before they reached the Rabbit, he pulled them off the street and into a fairly sizable parking lot. The surface of this lot (which Cruz absently thought might have actually been a combination courtyard and park to service the local kids, judging by the eroded and almost invisible lines of a basketball court) was a blasted ruin, weeds growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. It was nestled in the L-shaped crook created by two adjacent buildings, both as long-abandoned and ill-maintained as the lot itself.

Noble put the car deep into the shadow of one of the buildings, nudging it as far as he could behind a dumpster that didn't look to have moved in about thirty years.

"With my luck the way it is," he muttered, "today will be the day the Sanitation Department comes to pick it up." He looked over at his dying companion and grunted. "They'd mistake you for garbage, too, I imagine."

"The insults are getting old," Cruz murmured. "Kindergarten was a long time ago."

"Touche," Noble said dryly. Then he clapped his hands briskly, making her wince. "Okay, here's the deal. You ought to be safe enough from prying eyes here. If you need to puke again, you could probably just lean out the door and let 'er rip. Which is what you should have done the first time." He paused, taking a deep breath. Cruz thought it sounded like he might, at very long last, actually be scared. Of Iggy, she imagined, not her. And of the Disciples. He might have pulled the wool over their eyes once, but he wouldn't be as lucky a second time and he knew it. So he was getting scared.

Good.

He shifted in his seat. There was a snick! and the engine cut off. Red Rover was choked in mid-verse. "I'm gonna be quite a while in there. You realize that?"

Cruz nodded slowly. She realized that. She realized it and she hoped he would take as long as he wanted. She was looking forward to it.

"I mean, I can't just walk in there and say, 'hey man, where's Buford?'" he continued, and now she could definitely hear the nervous tremor in his voice. "Right? Gotta take it slow. Slow and easy. Play beer buddy with him, talk bikes and cars and chicks. They've got pool tables here, too, so he'll want to play me and take some of my money. You're looking at four, maybe even five hours sitting here alone."

Cruz nodded again. Five hours sounded perfect, and she was getting impatient for him to just for fuck's sake go. She needed to sleep. She needed to sleep so badly. She was terribly thirsty again, too - her throat prickled and her tongue tasted like an old sock - but sleep came first.

She was interested to see if she would wake up. She thought it might be a surprise if she did.

Noble still wasn't moving. She thought he might be staring at her.

She opened her eyes and looked around at him.

Yes, indeedy - Noble was watching her. Rather shrewdly, she thought.

"I'd like my gun back," Noble said. "I'm gonna need it."

She uttered a rusty croak that just barely qualified as a laugh. "Seems to me I had this same conversation with you once before, Noble. Seems to me it didn't end so well."

"Yeah, yeah, deja vu, whatever. I don't like going near these guys unarmed."

"That's rough. You should take some judo lessons."

Noble fell silent and didn't press the point. But he was still watching her. Watching her with that unsettling, calculating intensity.

And what he did next was the last thing she would ever have expected him to do. The absolute last thing, short of actually leaning over and soul-kissing her.

He reached behind the seat and, from somewhere under the mess of blankets and unsold books, produced a fresh bottle of water. Then he popped the cap off with his thumb and held it up to her lips.

Cruz looked up at him, again utterly thunderstruck. She was also mildly surprised to find herself flushing with embarrassment. The bottle was different than the one he'd bought for her earlier - this one was a plastic flask with Adidas stenciled on it, the kind of flask she used to take with her when she went jogging. Under the cap was a nozzle, one those little pop-up valves like the kind you get on bottles of dish detergent. At the moment it made her think of the nipple on a baby's bottle ... and here Noble was, trying to get her to drink from it. She felt a fresh surge of heat in her cheeks, the same species of sour humiliation she'd felt back in the hospital.

But she drank. She drank greedily, putting her shaky right hand on the bottle to at least lend herself the illusion that he wasn't holding it up for her. Her lips worked, and she tried hard not to look too much like she was suckling. This was not an act of kindness, she knew; this was another way to break her. Another way to demoralize her, dehumanize her, strip away her dignity. She had forced this man to run like a rat in a maze (in what now seemed another lifetime altogether), and now he was getting some payback.

And just when the water was starting to do its work and she was beginning to feel a bit better, Noble pulled it back sharply. She snatched at it, but he was too fast for her.

"I'm not trying to be mean, now," he said with prissy sarcasm. "But you'll puke again if you keep up like that. Take a breath and let it settle."

Cruz glared at him, and again a shadow of the woman she had been only a week ago passed over her face - for a moment Noble was once again looking at the narrow-eyed, sneering, withering Sergeant Cruz glare so many had come to fear.

Then it faded.

She took a deep breath and let the water settle.

"More?"

She nodded miserably, three quick little downward strokes of her chin that felt somehow childish. Noble returned the bottle to her lips. "I have a place we can go when I'm finished here," he murmured as she drank. "A house. Buddy of mine owns the deed. I've been thinking it over, and it seems like our best bet. It's empty, no furniture, but I guess we'll manage somehow. It's like I said - I can't take you back to the Bridgeview and we can't just drive around in this heap forever. Guess we're out of options."

Still drinking from the nozzle of the bottle and still feeling that dizzy, flushy humiliation, Cruz was suddenly struck by a mental image that was surreal and yet somehow oddly plausible; hiding out in some dump while Aaron Noble played nursemaid to her. Make a sick little sitcom, wouldn't it? The Odd Couple from Hell. On this week's episode, Noble helps Maritza change her bandage. Noble helps Maritza clean her wound and keep it free of infection. Noble brings Maritza hot chicken soup. Noble holds Maritza's hair while she pukes. Noble helps Maritza dress and undress and bathe, all with the clinical disinterest of a doctor.

He took the bottle away again. She made no attempt to get it back this time.

"You're sick," he said.

"So I've been told."

"I mean you're sick sick, on top of your little war-wound. I don't think it's all that bad now, but you're probably looking at pneumonia. Didn't your mother ever teach you to wear your raincoat when you go out to play, Cruz?"

Get yourself to bed, Claudia's voice echoed in her mind, stooped little Claudia Cortez standing in the hall of her apartment building. Get a hot water bottle in there with you. You'll catch your death if you stand here like this much longer.

"It really hurts, doesn't it?" Noble said quietly after a moment.

She raised her eyes again. He was still studying her, but he wasn't mocking her, she realized; there was even something in his tone that was approaching tenderness. Cruz didn't want any such thing as tenderness from him, not from this man ... but it broke her nonetheless. "Yes," she whispered.

She began to cry softly.

It came so easily now. So easily.

"I can get you something for the pain after we leave here," she heard him say. "You don't want to use meth" - a sour chuckle - "Not the world's best painkiller. Besides which, all the meth's spoken for. But I know some people who deal strictly in prescription drugs. Safe people. Safer than the Disciples, for sure. We can get you something with a little more bite than extra-strength Tylenol. Something of a morphine-based nature."

"I'm not buying this," she rasped.

Noble cocked his head - not because he didn't know what she meant but because he couldn't even hear her. "What?"

"Why, Noble? Why are you doing this? I told you everything ... everything I could ... so why?"

He smiled thinly. "I'm not falling for you, if that's what you're thinking. You're a killer and you're a criminal and you ought to spend the rest of your life breaking rocks and having broom-handles shoved up your nethers by big butch mamas. But I'm not done with you just yet, Two-Bags. I'm still intrigued here. Still curious. What I'm the most curious about is just how far you're willing to go with this thing. That's what I want to see, Cruz. I want to see just how far you are prepared to take your obsession. I wasn't kidding when I said I could get a book out of you. I think I really can.

"And you have to understand something else," he continued as he opened the door and got out of the car. "I've been in worse places than this. You think this is the first hairy situation I've ever been in, Cruz? I was getting into and out of hairy situations back when you were still crawling around pissing in your drawers." He smiled coldly. "Keep my gun, if it makes you feel better. Just remember that I'm the only way you're ever gonna get this thing done. This thing you feel you need to do in order to die happy."

He started to turn away. Then, abruptly, he leaned back into the car.

"I had this buddy I used to talk to about certain things - matters of philosophy. Matters of religion. Why-are-we-here-where-are-we-going type stuff. Anyhow, one day he and I were talking about religious fanaticism. You know - how people can always believe that God is on their side no matter what. No matter what they do, no matter who they slaughter, no matter what their agenda is - even genocide - they always think Right is on their side. A week after we had that discussion, the planes hit the towers and the towers fell. My buddy's wife was in one of them. You know what he said to me at her funeral?"

Cruz looked up dazedly. A thin little rill of water trickled from the corner of her mouth. She was slipping out into the stratosphere again; only about one word in every ten Noble said was getting through.

"He said to me: 'Hell is overflowing with the righteous.'" Noble straightened up. "You might want to think on that one a little bit, Cruz."

With that he slammed the door and was gone into the rain. Cruz watched him cross the crumbling asphalt of the parking lot (basketball court, playground, whatever the fuck it had been) and disappear around a corner.

Then she put her head back and almost immediately she was slipping, slipping, the world dropping out from under her as she fell into a sleep so deep it was almost coma.

But there were dreams.