So Chapter 10 is here - we're finally into the double digits! It's a little on the long side, but we're drawing very close to the the final hours of the story's events. It goes to Chapter 14 - 11 will be fairly long, 12 will be medium-length, 13 will probably be very short, and 14 I'm still not too sure about. But at least there aren't any big overhauls this time ;)
Chapter 10
Bosco
I.
Karen Tuttle had the largest breasts Maurice Boscorelli had ever seen.
That, however, wasn't what made them special. Size alone could not have impressed him. Maurice (Bosco to his friends, Bos to his close friends and only to his close friends) had already seen a respectable number of them in his admittedly tender sixteen years - big and small, firm and doughy, draped and (on one or two very lucky occasions) undraped. But Karen's were a step above the rest, not because of their sheer size but because of their shape. They appeared to be perfect globes. Perfect. And the hook was, they were natural. A few years later, when the creative use of silicone would become more commonplace, Bosco would see women who sported similar endowments to Karen's ... and in almost every instance they would prove to have been purchased for obscene amounts of money. Karen's came straight off Mother Nature's own assembly line, one-hundred-percent warm flesh and blood. That fact had mesmerized Bosco again and again; all natural, no sag, round as grapefruits and twice as big, coming together in a cleavage so perfect it almost looked as if it had been drawn on.
There was, however, a sizable problem (pun enthusiastically intended), at least from Bosco's point of view: Karen was a dweeb. A carefully camouflaged dweeb, but a dweeb was a dweeb and there was no getting around it. She was a sort of walking contradiction, an anomaly in the strict social caste-system of high school. On the one hand, she was magazine-cover-hot, popular, pretty and the object of desire of every boy in the school over the age of twelve. On the other hand, she was a consummate bookworm, a wet blanket at parties (when she could be coaxed into going at all), and she harbored an almost pathological fear of alcohol. And the name Tuttle didn't exactly help matters - to Bosco it sounded like what you'd call an abnormal growth on an embarrassing part of the body.
In addition to all of that, Karen seemed oblivious to her appearance and the effect it had on most of the male gender. Where Maritza Cruz had learned to use her looks as both a tool and a weapon by age fourteen, Karen seemed to have no idea she even had looks. Her posture was best described as a colorless slouch, she dressed dumpily, and she responded to compliments (crude and tasteful alike) with a confused rabbit-in-the-headlights look. At the end of the day, what you had in Karen Tuttle was a geek trapped in a cheerleader's body, and under normal circumstances somebody like that would have flown far below Maurice Boscorelli's radar.
The range of normal circumstances, however, did not encompass things like the big pair of guns she was packing. Bosco, who proudly claimed to have lost his virginity at a ridiculously young age (the exact number hovered somewhere between eleven and fourteen, depending on his mood), had come to see himself as a sort of connoisseur of the female form. Not just a red-blooded heterosexual male but a kind of girl-enthusiast, if you will. And he very much wanted to get a detailed scientific study done on Karen Tuttle's God-given natural assets. A peek would go over well, at the very least. A squeeze would be better. A taste ... well, only naive boys dare to dream.
Bosco dated her for six grueling weeks through the eleventh grade. Working only from his own preconceptions about how female human beings should behave, Bosco found Karen almost unbearably high-maintenance. The girl should have been proud of what God had given her, she should have been generous with it while it was still young and fresh, and yet trying to get anywhere with her was like picking a locked safe. You had to do things with her. Romantic things. You had to talk to her. Talk with her. About real-world stuff, like politics and religion and nuclear war and nuclear power and the state of the economy and where they would all go and what they would do after high school. You could sit and cuddle with her while discussing these things ... but you always had to keep your hands at a prudent distance from any interesting places.
If Karen wasn't in the mood to talk shop, what you did then was watch TV with her. Karen's favorite shows were all British sitcoms, which she called "britcoms" long before it was fashionable to do so. Though Bosco found the term suicidally nerdy, he put up with it, just as he put up with having to watch the shows themselves. It was even a bit of a relief whenever some quality britcom time rolled around - he found he could put up with the shows more easily than he could a lot of the other romantic and political crap, and he had to admit that some of them weren't even half bad. The raunchier ones, anyway. The ones with a lot of sexual innuendo and butt-pinching. The ones with lots of cleavage. Benny Hill chasing half-naked women around at warp-speed. Bosco liked that one.
Karen's favorite, however, was more of the pratfalls-and-slapstick stripe, a show from the seventies called Fawlty Towers. It was about a small hotel in the English countryside run by a dysfunctional husband-and-wife team, Basil and Sybil Fawlty. Basil, played by Monty Python's John Cleese, was an irritable, neurotic stringbean who insulted his customers, routinely abused a hapless little Spanish waiter named Manuel, and could almost always be found at the beginning of a chain-reaction of absurd misunderstandings and coincidences, mishaps that usually resulted in Basil getting his proper comeuppance at the end of the show. His wife Sybil, who at first glance seemed to be a gossipy airhead, usually just had to sit back and watch Basil hang himself, after which she'd calmly move in and pick up the pieces.
It was the that ancient sitcom (britcom, Karen's dry, cultured voice immediately corrected in his head) that Bosco thought of when he first stepped through the front doors of the Bridgeview Hotel.
Part of it was the overall presentation of the building and the decor inside, but mostly it was because of the proprietors. Not only were they a husband-and-wife team in the Basil-and-Sybil tradition, they also happened to be of British extraction. Bosco met them before he actually met them; when he walked through the hotel's front doors he found himself in a small foyer, where the first thing to hit the eye was a large framed photograph of the Bridgeview's owner/operators. Under the photo was a little gold plaque that introduced them as Tom and Iris Hendrickson, originally of Sheffield, England, later of London, England, later of Chicago, Illinois, and finally of New York, New York.
Iris and Tom, however, bore little resemblance to their fictional counterparts. Tom looked nothing like John Cleese; he appeared to be short and stout, with a broad, jowly face overtopped by a thick unibrow, a wide, liver-lipped grin, and greasy-looking black hair swept over a prominent bald spot in one of the worst comb-overs Bosco had ever seen. Iris was the taller of the two, and if you wanted to compare her to an actress Bosco would have said she looked more like Sigourney Weaver than anyone; slim, raven-haired, strikingly pretty with piercing dark eyes and an impossibly even, impossibly white smile. In the picture she was standing beside her husband with a companionable arm slung around his shoulder, towering an easy five or six inches above him.
The idea behind the photo and its accompanying plaque was simple and obvious: when you entered the Bridgeview, you knew right away who you would be dealing with - a standard-issue Pleasant, Nonthreatening English Couple.
After getting an eyeful of Iris and Tom you would then turn right, go through another set of double doors, and you'd find yourself in the lobby. And that was where the nostalgia really hit home; the place had a certain undefinable English charm that made Bosco think back to his high school days, Karen Tuttle, Karen Tuttle's improbably perfect pair of ta-tas, and that show she used to make him watch with her. That show he'd watched with her willingly, all the time believing that by doing these things with her - talking politics, being romantic, laughing at her lame jokes and at all the right places in her favorite shows - he would eventually reach the Promised Land that was hiding under her dumpy, unflattering sweaters.
And he did. It took six weeks to do it, but he got there. The six week "relationship" had peaked with two very hot-and-heavy makeout sessions, which included two magnificent feels: one through her sweater and - oh rapture! - one underneath.
And after the second, Karen had promptly broken up with him.
Because she'd known. All along Karen had known what Bosco's real game was; in the end she'd turned out to be a lot less naive than he'd thought she was. When he cornered her in the hall the next day (not feeling quite as slick as he did six weeks before) and asked her why, her answer was simple, mildly stated, and profoundly mind-boggling to a sixteen-year-old boy who considered himself a stud from God's top shelf: she had grown tired of him.
She had grown tired of him.
Karen explained that she had liked him at first, truly, genuinely liked him, but she had gotten sick of him. She was sick of his cocky, swaggering attitude. Of his constant pawings and lewd suggestions and inept attempts to undress her. Of the insulting, patronizing, ass-kissing crap he would spew whenever they talked politics or sat down to watch TV together. These were her exact words, too, spoken in her cool, matter-of-fact classroom voice, as if she was reciting equations from her algebra book. She was tired of him laughing like a jackass at her jokes and her favorite shows. She was tired of him nodding and agreeing soberly when the subject turned to the Cold War and the prospect of the whole world becoming a radioactive cinder by the end of the decade. Karen Tuttle had put honest effort into the relationship, she'd liked him, trusted him, and she had simply gotten tired of his ignorance.
And in the end, she'd discovered that she could live without him just fine. No tears required.
And what did that make her, Bosco thought now, but just another link in a long chain of women whose patience he had stretched and eventually snapped? Just one link in a long, long chain of failures, the end of which he'd reached a little over an hour ago with Faith Yokas.
Six weeks it had taken Karen. As opposed to nearly a decade in Faith's case. Not too bad on the whole; that was the all-time record, right there, and Faith held it. They'd never been lovers, of course (it might have happened if Fred hadn't been in the picture, although Bosco kind of doubted it), so maybe that had something to do with the unusual length of time Faith had stuck by him. She'd bitched and moaned and nattered at him for years about his many, many, many faults (not the least of which was how shabbily he treated her gender), but she'd always been there for him ... probably because she'd never gotten close enough to him to see just how much of a complete fuck-up he really was.
Bosco gritted his teeth as he pushed through the double doors into the Bridgeview's lobby. Fuck-up? He'd never thought of it in such blunt terms before, but okay, sure, that's what he was - a fuck-up. Of course that's what he was. He'd screwed up and he knew he had to acknowledge that. And he knew that he had every reason in the world to feel guilty.
It was just that he was getting a bit uneasy about how that guilt seemed to be manifesting itself. He was ashamed of himself, and yet he was ashamed of allowing himself to be so ashamed ... which in turn made him more ashamed. That was the paradox, or vicious circle, or whatever you wanted to call it, and it added up to the perfect recipe for self-pity. For little acts of childish, willful indulgence, like yesterday's spur-of-the-moment stopover at the bar - oh look at how low I've sunk, woe is me. He was already running damage-control on that one, telling himself that the binge was just a one-time thing, just something he'd needed to get out of his system ... and yet it seemed to be getting easier and easier to backslide into that kind of thinking, didn't it? Whipping Boy Bosco.Bosco the big disappointment, Bosco the loser. Just like Pop. Just like little bro. Not only could Faith look down her nose at him, not only could John-Sully-Sullivan look down his big shiny drunk's nose at him, now Mikey could get in on some of the action, too. And if Mikey the coked-up failure can spit on you, you know you've screwed up BAD.
And to think - yesterday he had to be drunk to feel this sorry for himself. Today he seemed to be doing just fine sober. It disgusted him. Which in turn confused him. Which disgusted him more. Or something like that. Christ, it was all so complicated. He was not a man accustomed to dealing with feelings, particularly when they seemed to be so densely layered and in a constant state of flux. You had all these odd contradictions and roundabout paradoxes - he was ashamed of being ashamed, guilty of feeling guilty. Part of him wanted to drink, sulk, and wallow; another side of his brain told him to yank the thumb out of his mouth and pull his fucking pants up. Grow up. Suck it up. This was the same voice that had advised him to back off and slink away when he was sitting outside Faith's, working out how to make his entrance. The same voice that said I told you so when she slammed the door in his face, the same voice that then told him to get over it immediately after. Crybaby, crybaby, gonna cry some more, crybaby? Or are you gonna stop whining about being a fuck-up and get on with your life, such as it is?
Faith herself might have called this his macho side. His insensitive side. His Karen-Tuttle-tit-grabbing-side. His oh-so-very Bosco-side. He thought about the day he'd gone to see O'Malley down on the docks - O'Malley as in Brian O'Malley, the ex-cop-turned-psychologist, psychotherapist, something-or-other. Some kind of shrink, anyway. Bosco had been so indifferent (and so defensive) that he barely remembered the experience - just that O'Malley lived on a boat and had casually kicked him out for refusing to give direct answers. And that he'd gone happily. He didn't need shrinks. He didn't need to talk about his feelings or "categorize his emotions" or cry on the shoulder of another man.
I won't be back, he'd said.
To which O'Malley had replied smoothly, without even missing a beat: you're not invited.
And now it was almost as if that arrogance was finally coming around to really bite him on the ass. He'd come through that bad patch - late 2001, early 2002 - the bad patch that had included Hobart and the visit to O'Malley's houseboat, and once he'd come out he'd fallen right back into his old ways and attitudes. He hadn't learned a fucking thing.
And here you are.
Yep. Here he was. No tightness in the chest this time. No panic attacks. No false heart attacks. Just confusion, and heaps and heaps of that tempting, disturbingly comfortable self-pity.
Maybe when he was finished his business at the Bridgeview he ought to look O'Malley up and give therapy another shot. Throw himself on the guy's mercy. Even at this point Bosco didn't like the prospect of it, but thinking about all of this was starting to make his head hurt. Half the time he didn't know how he felt. He just knew that he was at a very dangerous stage in whatever it was he was going through. Jurgens, the Saintly and Sympathetic bartender, had said something to that effect yesterday. O'Malley would probably agree. He was in a bad place, worse than any he'd ever been in before, worse than after 9/11, worse than after Hobart, worse than the moral conundrum with Cruz over Stevie Nunez. That sense of the future just kept right on hitting him, the future he'd laid out for both himself and for others, the weight of what he'd done not only to his own life but to Faith's life, to his mother's life, even to Cruz's life. He'd made Hobart's -
(I ought to just shoot you before you screw up the lives of everybody who loves you)
prediction come true; what he'd done was like throwing a pebble into a lake. He'd made his own choices, but those choices had created ripples. Repercussions. Every now and then it would all hit him full-on, right in the face, the way it did back at Faith's apartment just before she shut the door on him. But most of the time he just couldn't take it all at once like that, one monster dose. There was too much to fit into his head, too much to get a handle on. There was Faith -
(quitting, unemployed, Fred not the most reliable guy in the world, two kids to feed, Charlie, Emily, quitting NYPD, lost her love of the job, oh well, too bad, tried to kill one of her own, driven to murder, that's the way it was and is, blood on her hands, blood on her hands and she couldn't take it, the feel, the look, the SMELL of it, two kids to feed, Charlie and Emily, and no job and Fred isn't the most reliable guy in the world)
Cruz -
(maimed, left arm useless, prison, Riker's Island, Women's Correctional, ex-cop with a long string of arrests thrown into gen-pop, dead-bitch-walking, beaten, tortured, shanked in the back in the shower, throat cut, eyes gouged out, bloody water swirling down the drains Psycho-style, vicious female laughter from above, couldn't defend herself you see, weakened, disabled, useless left arm, oh well, probably wanted to die anyway)
Ma -
(betrayed, heartbroken, one son a failure and a criminal and now the other's exactly the same, after years of being beaten, living in fear, making excuses and telling lies, lies breeding lies, and now one son's a junkie and the other's a failure and a criminal - a fuck-up, say Amen - the son who was the only good thing she had, the only good thing she ever did, the only thing she could really be proud of, the only bright spot in her life, and now she doesn't even have that)
Faith again -
(quitting because of me)
Cruz again -
(die in prison because of me)
Ma again -
(the only good thing in her life gone because of me)
And on and on and on like that, and then back to the start again. The result was total data overload. So it had to stay in the margins, a shapeless, ominous thing only half-glimpsed in his peripheral vision, like some slinking predatory animal that only attacks when its prey has its back turned.
That was what scared him about therapy - if he couldn't make a clear picture of his own emotional state, maybe there was a sound psychological reason for it. O'Malley had pried and chipped away at him, trying to get him to describe everything, go into sordid detail. The more you won't, the more I want to - that was one thing Bosco remembered him saying. And Bosco didn't want to, he didn't want to close his eyes and purposely call up all that crap again. He was afraid of what he'd see. He'd been afraid then, and he was terrified now.
His Bosco-side seemed to know this, and immediately kicked in whenever he tried to figure things out. His pet defense-mechanism. If Cruz's inner voice spoke in the tones of a kindly father, Bosco's was a kind of angry midget (an "angry little dude," as Vernon Marks had once called him), a surly little bastard that heckled and made fun, told him he was being an ass. Told him to stop acting like an old menopausal woman. And told him to stop trying to categorize his emotions like some afternoon talkshow fruit.
At the moment, however, he thought he could categorize at least one emotion, and it was one he was pretty sure he was entitled to: grief.
After all, consider this: Faith Yokas had booted him off her doorstep just a little over sixty minutes ago, and he knew that this time it was for keeps. Because he knew Faith. To fall back on a tired point, he'd known her the better part of a decade, and she couldn't have fooled him on her best day. A few years less and he might - might - have been able to lie to himself and say that she was just screwing with him, that she was still reeling from what she'd done to Cruz and so she had decided to play some kind of nasty little head-game in an attempt to get back at him. Her own little brand of self-pity, her version of the gleefully deliberate drinking jag. He shows up at her door and she jumps right down his throat, happy to have another opportunity to lay into him. What's today, kids? Why, it's Punish Bosco Some More Day!
That wasn't Faith. Even so, there was still no doubt in his mind that her little speech had been rehearsed. It's all different now, I need to start over, I hope something good comes out of this for you, farewell, goodbye, don't let the door hit you on the ass - all of that smacked of the pre-meditated. Faith didn't play head-games - couldn't have played head-games even if she'd wanted to, by the look of her. What he'd witnessed this morning had some serious thought thrown behind it. Faith really was quitting the NYPD - no question. Faith really was kicking him out of her life for good - no question. False hope was no longer an option here, and Bosco knew it.
And he could grieve for that, couldn't he? For those ten years, if nothing else?
He could, and he was. He'd left her apartment on the verge of tears. There was no point trying to deny that. Who was there to deny it to but himself? His macho-side? His Bosco-side, a.k.a. the angry little midget? Did he really give a damn if some lowbrowed part of his own psyche made fun of him, insisted that he was a self-pitying pussy? Not really. He'd crossed back to his Mustang in the rain, slid behind the wheel, and cried silently there for about five minutes.
And what got him started wasn't even the little thrashing he'd taken at Faith's door. It was the lunch breaks. The 10-63's with Faith beside him, maybe fries and burgers coffees between them, shooting the shit about ... what? Well, anything, really. The latest domestic adventures in the Yokas household. Emily and Charlie's little growing pains. Bosco's latest adventures in female conquest. Little jabs at - or exasperated arguments over - each other's shortcomings (always maintaining safe boundaries, though, always within the limits of good taste and never as ugly as it got near the end). Or maybe broader philosophical debate: the War on Drugs, terrorism, the state of this brave new Twenty-First Century world. New York cop cynicism. Deep Thought in Five-Five David amidst the greasy french-fry bags and paper cups.
That was gone now along with everything else, and he could grieve for it, and he did. There was nobody to see him, so it was okay.
He got it out of his system and drove away. The only trouble was, he had no idea where he was supposed to go. Not in the philosophical sense, but in the plain-jane literal sense, as in: which direction should I point the nose of my car in now? He had all the rest of a rainy Saturday stretched out in front of him, and no ideas on how he might fill in the time. So what to do? Where to go?
The first and most obvious idea was to go back to the bar. Not his Ma's bar this time, of course, but another. He'd already shit in that nest, so it was time to go find a new one. One where there would be no Ma and no Vinnie Jurgens and none of that delicious irony. He could booze himself up, surrender himself to it willingly ... and this time, guiltlessly.
Or he could go back to his apartment. He could get drunk there just as easily, with the added bonus that he could flip on the TV and keep up with developments as they happened. Watch the story unfold on the small screen. Watch ol' Wolf Blitzer speculate on Maritza Cruz's motivations. Watch Mallory, the humble-yet-unapologetic NYPD spokesman, smooth over both the Anti-Crime mess and Cruz's escape. Watch panel discussions on police corruption, which would become the hot-button topic for about a week before being buried under the Next Big Story. And he could listen to his own name as it was spoken by any number of news anchors, from the obscure on up to the famous.
Or he really could go looking for Brian O'Malley. He didn't think he seriously would ... but there really wasn't anything stopping him from at least giving it a shot, was there?
Or he could dismiss all of those ideas and go back the other way, back to his mother's place. He could try for a second chance. Bear with her, tolerate the half-hidden anger and disappointment in the hope that she might eventually come through it.
In the end, none of these options held very much appeal.
And that was when another possible course of action opened up before him, one he'd never thought of before, one that seemed perversely obvious in a forehead-smacking, why-didn't-I-think-of-that sort of way. It was a course of action that Cruz, had she known anything of what he was doing or thinking, could have identified with.
He still had his off-duty gun. Bosco supposed it would have to be re-christened his personal gun now, but he wasn't about to split hairs with himself - a gun was a gun, in this case the little Smith & Wesson automatic he'd worn in the ankle holster. He still had it. And he had plenty of ammunition for it, too. Eighty rounds or thereabouts, at last count.
In the end, though, he'd only need one. One was usually all it took. In the mouth, of course. Through the sinuses, behind the gums, look out brain, here it comes!
Of course this was just a thought, one that Bosco knew would come to nothing. The idea of him - of Maurice Louis Boscorelli - committing suicide was pure bullshit. He'd never do it. Never. He might get drunk, and he might go and make a ridiculous, maudlin spectacle of himself in front of the woman who used to be his best friend, but all of that was still a pretty far cry from putting an end to himself with his ex-backup pistol. Wasn't any way to solve anything. And it didn't solve anything. Not one damned thing.
He'd never kill himself. You could stake your life on that.
But he was confused, wasn't he? His emotional state was all over the map, and he was smack in the middle of what Vinnie Jurgens had called a "dangerous time." Eating his Smith & Wesson was only one idea among many - and an idea is only an idea, after all - but he wasn't completely sure it would stay that way. The fact that he'd even thought of suicide scared the piss out of him, and he was worried that if he stayed immobile too long, if he let himself stagnate in a bar or back in his apartment, the idea of simply ending himself might just keep rolling around in his head. Might start picking up steam. Might start to snowball, getting bigger and bigger until it started to look a bit more ... well ...
More plausible.
So he'd left Faith's and headed back in the general direction of his apartment in a kind of aimless, zigzagging line. For an hour he drove around, thinking. He sat at red lights, thinking. He circled the streets he used to patrol, thinking. He couldn't think about Faith or what she'd said or what she was going to do, couldn't think about himself or what he was going to do. So he began to think about Cruz. Cruz and the Great Mercy Prison-Break of '03. He thought about Faith's crazy tale - Swersky coming to her apartment with an offer to post a car outside the building, as a kind of anti-Cruz precaution. Because they thought Cruz was on the prowl. They thought she might have gotten her hands (or hand, anyway) on a gun, and was now on some kind of quest to hunt down anyone who had participated in her destruction.
Swersky was overreacting - that was what Bosco had started off believing. Because it was stupid, wasn't it? Considering the strain Cruz would have had to put herself under just to stand up, it seemed far more likely she would simply wear herself down and collapse. She'd drop, someone would (hopefully) find her, call 9-1-1, and that would be that. Back to Mercy she'd go, this time in restraints. Cruz scouring the streets for revenge, on the other hand, hunting down her enemies one-by-one like a maniac in a cheap horror flick ... that was ridiculous. Bosco had listened to Mr. Mouthpiece say much the same thing on the news yesterday evening. Cruz was a seriously wounded woman and she needed to be in a hospital. She needed morphine or Demerol or whatever they shot you full of these days to keep you settled. And she needed operations - surgically speaking, her shoulder was still a work-in-progress. She needed care.
Bosco, however, was starting to wonder.
Cruz had escaped from Mercy. Unlikely as that seemed, it was still fact - apparently she'd slipped away right under the noses of both the hospital staff and her police guard. Now take that one small step further: wasn't it possible that she might be able to last on the outside? Bosco was beginning to think maybe it was. After all, just look at how she'd acted in Noble's hotel room: her arm practically blown off, blood pouring out of her in a torrent ... and yet the pain and shock and trauma Bosco would have expected to come with such a horrific wound seemed minimal, almost nonexistent. Oh God, I've been shot, please help me would have been anyone else's reaction, assuming they were in any shape to talk at all. But with Maritza Cruz you had something more along the lines of: Get out of my way so I can kill the bitch who did this to me. Her first thought was not of her own safety or survival. Her first thought - her first instinct - was to strike out. Superhuman was the word Schaeffer had used, and while Bosco thought that might be stretching it just a bit, there was certainly no doubt in his mind that she was remarkably strong.
Physically strong, anyway. As for mentally, he still couldn't even venture a guess at what might be going through her mind right now. Whatever her mental state had been before the shooting (blinded by grief and rage and her own stubborn nature, certainly, but not outright crazy, which was the theory Faith probably still clung to like a drowning woman), something in her head had obviously come loose in the meantime. She might have the willpower necessary to stay on her feet, but that didn't mean she was thinking clearly.
Quite the opposite.
To Bosco, the whole thing was starting to sound uncomfortably familiar.
Until now he had been busy comparing himself to Glen Hobart, believing that he was treading in the sharpshooter's footsteps when the more obvious parallel was right in front of him: both Glen Hobart and Maritza Cruz had been backed against the fence, and both had responded by going section-eight in spectacular fashion. The only difference was in the approach. Hobart had intentionally forced an ESU sniperto kill him - an ESU sniper like himself - possibly to make some kind of twisted point. The basic nature of his job was killing with a high-powered rifle, shooting from the shadows, shooting from the back, never seeing his target's eyes nor allowing them to see his. He was, in effect, an exterminator of human beings, the guy they called out to do the dirty deed when every other avenue had been exhausted. Hobart had subsequently chosen the most appropriate means by which to die - a man of his own skill and trade. Hobart had chosen Suicide by Irony. Possibly even in the hope that his death would haunt and perhaps someday destroy the life of the unfortunate cop behind the rifle. In twenty years maybe it'll be that poor bastard up on the roof. The cycle, after all, has to continue.
It was possible that Cruz was doing something similar, committing an elaborate and very dramatic kind of suicide in an attempt to make some weird moral statement. I'm Sergeant Cruz, and I stood up for what I believed in right to the bitter end! Something like that.
Ultimately, however, Bosco didn't know. Hobart he could understand - Cruz he could not. With Cruz he could only theorize. When he traced the progression of his entire relationship with her, what he found was that he didn't really know a goddam thing about her, and he never had. He'd never had any appreciable success in figuring her out, and it seemed he still couldn't.
And that was part of the reason he couldn't drop it. He had to keep running the whole thing over and over in his head, from the moment he met Cruz right up to the moment where her strength gave out and she keeled over in Noble's room. Trying to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, where it went wrong, and most importantly, why it went wrong. Not so much with Cruz but with himself. The woman had made a complete fool out of him, made a criminal out of him, made a scapegoat out of him, blinded him, and even at this late stage his ego just didn't seem to want to deal with that.
He knew that it had started out as a purely physical attraction - nothing unusual there. Blame it on the black miniskirt and belly-baring top she'd been wearing the first time he clapped eyes on her. He could remember that so clearly: Cruz coming in for her midnight shift, reeking of some cheap (but very enticing) perfume and practically popping out of that sweet little outfit. And he'd literally smacked right into her. You had Cruz coming up the stairs and Bosco, exhausted after a hard first day working Anti-Crime, on his way down. Cruz coming up, not watching where she was going, squawking away at somebody on her cellphone ... and then, predictably enough, she rudely orders him to clear a path when he almost knocks her sprawling.
Ah, the love was already in the air, wasn't it?
Something was, at any rate. Even though he was bone-tired at the time, he remembered how he just had to stay to get a better look at this leggy, busty newcomer. Getting ready to go undercover, by the look of her. A vice sting. Catch a few johns with that low-cut top and the butt-hugging miniskirt that seemed to magically disappear when she bent over. There was a thong somewhere under there, as well - Cruz apparently found it uncomfortable, and she'd let the whole world know about it. A "postage-stamp's worth of polyester up her ass" was the exact phrase she'd used. Bosco had never forgotten that one. So perfectly crude. So perfectly Cruz.
That was when he knew he'd be staying on with Anti-Crime. For sure.
It wasn't just Cruz, of course - he still liked Anti-Crime for that tight sense of camaraderie and the in-the-trenches feel of the job - but it was mostly Cruz. So in a way it had been like Karen Tuttle all over again, in that he'd been intensely attracted to a woman he couldn't get anywhere near. In the beginning Cruz seemed to see him almost as a liability, just some stupid asshole looking to prove the size of his balls in a job he knew nothing about, a fool she was stuck babysitting until he lost interest and went back to Uniform. She was almost impossible to impress, ordering him around like a dog, snapping at everything he said and scoffing at every idea he put forward. Being treated in such a way - especially by a woman - should have bothered him, but it didn't. If anything, her arrogance (and her inaccessibility) just excited him. It challenged him. He was willing to take her orders, learn from her, and earn her respect. He wanted to be Anti-Crime. If I am blind, Teacher, then help me see. In that way it was also a bit like Glen Hobart all over again - Bosco eagerly picking up new tactics and techniques from an old pro.
Only this time the "old pro" also happened to be one seriously fine-looking woman. And the techniques she taught included blackmail, creatively tweaking reports, outright lying where necessary, and the fabrication of evidence. And none of that had bothered him, because sometimes you had to bend (or break) the rules to do what was right - that was central to the Sergeant Cruz philosophy. Bosco didn't need a bitchy Anti-Crime cop to point out what he knew already, but Cruz at least validated it. He and the Sarge were on the same page when it came to deciding the lesser of two evils: making up a Dying Declaration, or letting a vicious child-killing gangster like Vernon Marks walk away clean.
Faith Yokas, on the other hand ... well, Faith didn't always understand, did she? Bosco had admired Cruz's conviction, and he'd taken it as a liberating change from Faith's often rigid (and often naive) codes of conduct. Not once did it occur to him that it might actually be a warning sign - by the time they'd put Vernon Marks away, he was thoroughly immersed in the Maritza Cruz Experience. The partnership was entirely professional, of course, but in many ways what they had was almost better than sex. It was a kind of living romantic adventure, romance of a sort Bosco could really understand and get behind: fighting crime in some of New York's worst neighborhoods with his beautiful warrior-woman at his side.
Of course he never would have put it in such deliriously moronic terms, but it described the basic situation: when he was with Cruz, he drew a kind of satisfaction from the job that he never got with Faith. Never. There was just that one missing element; if only there could be something more, something physical. Then everything would be right with the world.
But Cruz was always just Cruz, just the Anti-Crime Sergeant (i.e. his boss) and Bosco was just getting ready to give up hope when Lettie came into the picture.
And God bless the little dope-fiend! What an exciting development that had been - Cruz had a kid sister who just happened to be a junkie! And he, Maurice Boscorelli, had a kid brother who just happened to be of a very similar stripe! At last he and Cruz had something in common, a chance to bond over something a little deeper than a questionable report or made-up confession. Lettie had changed the entire dynamic of their relationship without even knowing it.
And think of the possibilities! He could offer Cruz advice. Compare notes with her. Swap tales of rehab and relapse with her. He could be there for her. Empathize with her. He knew that Cruz, being Cruz, might resist these efforts at first - and she had - but Bosco thought she'd come around eventually. He could just chip away at her, prove to her that he knew the score. That much really was true, at least - he knew it hurt. Of course it did! It hurt to see somebody you loved chewing themselves to pieces!
He'd been all locked and loaded to exploit the situation, even after Lettie was dead and he'd found Cruz slouched at the end of that deserted hallway at Mercy. And why not? There she was, sitting there on the windowsill, staring into space, her face haggard and smudged with grime from the day's festivities. No Anti-Crime Sergeant in sight. Just one very tired, very dirty, very shaken-up woman, a woman who'd just lost the last of her family in as brutal and pointless a way as you could want. When would he ever see Maritza Cruz like this again, so open and so vulnerable? When would he ever have a better chance to move in on her?
In the end his better nature had won out, and he'd turned to leave her to her grief in peace. It was Cruz who asked him to stay with her, and he did, and as he listened to her talk about her sister and the life they'd had (the elder trying to protect the younger from the world and from herself, knowing it was futile, trying anyway) he inevitably started to think about his own brother. Lettie had overdosed - Bosco had always harbored a secret fear that Mikey might do the same thing at any time. Someday he'd get the phone call, the "we're sorry to inform you" call, the one that always seems to come in the dead of night. What would he do then? More to the point, what would Ma do? How would he ever tell her?
As he listened to Cruz talk about her sister, it began to dawn on him that he ought to feel like a right son of a bitch - a realization that, ironically, came to him sounding a lot like Faith's voice in his ear. Faith telling him that he must be one miserable, hard-up son of a bitch to want to use this woman's hurt as a way to get into her pants. Especially when it was a hurt they both shared.
And right there, for the first time, he saw the potential for something real with Cruz. Not just a little after-hours bump 'n grind, but something real. If he played his cards right. If he was smart.
The problem was, he hadn't been smart. He'd sat down next to her on that windowsill for all the wrong reasons, and that was why he'd ended up at her apartment later that night: he'd wanted to make a fresh and honest attempt at offering his sympathies.
He did not go over there in the hopes of getting laid. He was quite sure of that.
But of course he did get laid, and though Cruz tried to brush it off as a one-night stand, it wasn't long before it was a regular thing.
And nothing changed. Their relationship had all the hallmarks of a real relationship: he'd slept with her (in bed she was exactly as she was on the job: do this, do that, you're not doing that right, do it this way ... and he'd loved every second of it), he'd showered with her, eaten breakfast and dinner with her, and yet she had always remained a mystery to him. She'd always kept herself at arms' length, always made sure she was just a little bit inaccessible, and in that way she was nothing like any woman he'd ever been with - including the infamously two-faced Karen Tuttle. Cruz rarely wanted to snuggle up and be held after sex, and she never wanted to talk. Those were things Bosco usually found quite annoying ... and yet he missed them when they weren't there. It confused him when they weren't there. Cruz didn't want to be romanced. She had no taste for pillow-talk. After the act was done she just did what men are often accused of - she rolled over and that was that, conversation over. Wham-bam-thankya-man.
In the end the best Bosco could come up with was that it started as a physical attraction, moved on to self-righteous pride, became a messed-up sort of comfort thing, and then went downhill from there. In the first few weeks after Lettie's death Cruz had slept badly; tough as she was, she'd still needed to have some human contact in the face of all that she'd lost. But by the time they reached the Noble/Nunez mess she'd come through her grief, and suddenly it was all about control. She'd used him all along, first as a kind of teddy-bear (albeit one with a penis), then as a sort of boneheaded henchman, the guy who did all the dirty work and functioned as her safety net. Using sex to control him in both instances. Sign this report, Bosco. Do me on the couch, Bosco. Back me up on this lie, Bosco. Doggy-style now, Bosco. Say it was all Stevie's fault, Bosco.
Say Stevie killed that biker like a good boy.
That was what it took. Faith was right - it had to go that far before he wised up. He'd ignored everything Faith had to say on the matter, missed every warning sign, and saw the light only when Cruz tried to frame a man for murder. Cutting corners in matters of protocol was one thing, but that willingness to step on innocent people (and for her own personal agenda, at that) was something else entirely. It came around full circle, right back to his brother; Stevie Nunez could just as easily have been Michael Boscorelli. That he also could have been Lettie never seemed to occur to Cruz. Stevie was somebody's son, perhaps somebody's brother, and Cruz couldn't see that at all. Bosco never could wrap his head around that one: that Cruz never once thought about how she'd feel if some other hellbent cop came along and did the same thing to her goddam meth-snorting sister.
Which had led him to an even colder thought: would Cruz hesitate to do something like that to Mikey, if Bosco wasn't around to stop her? Would she turn Mikey into her little scapegoat?
The answer seemed pretty obvious, didn't it?
So Cruz had turned out to be none of the things he'd thought she was. She'd turned out to be scum. Whaddaya know, Faith was right. Cruz had no qualms about hurting innocent people, and she would have thrown him to the wolves the moment it suited her purpose. So he crawls back to Faith ... big hot 'n heavy cop-on-cop shootout follows ... ol' long, tall and ugly appears, Detective Schaeffer with his bag of happy surprises ... Faith quits ... Cruz escapes ... and so on and so forth, and as far as Bosco could see that brought things neatly up to date. Now here they all were.
Now here he was, honestly worried about Maritza Cruz. Go figure.
Part of it was the guilt - he was at least partly responsible for where she had ended up. And there was also that increasing sense of history wanting to repeat itself - Hobart, Part II. It was getting easier and easier to think back to that day on the rooftop and imagine Cruz lying there instead of Glen, face-down with half her head blown off. He didn't want to see something like that happen again. He didn't want to see it happen to her. No matter what she'd done or what she might have been capable of doing, no matter what she'd done to him, Bosco had never hated her - certainly not in the same way Faith did - and he had no desire to see her hurt herself now. Herself, or anyone else.
And that was why he was going to talk to Aaron Noble.
According to Swersky's whacked-out theory, the writer was a potential target. There were others - Faith being one - who'd hurt Cruz in a far more direct way than Noble had, but Noble was the only person Bosco was comfortable talking to. All the other names on a hypothetical Maritza Cruz hit-list were people he didn't dare approach. Faith's door was closed and bolted forever, and he had no desire to stir up the wasps' nest there again anyway. Brent Schaeffer ... now that was just laughable, wasn't it? There you had a man Bosco never wanted to see again under any circumstances. Ditto Christina Reyes. If Bosco were drowning and one of those two fuckers threw him a life-ring, he'd throw it back at them and hope the rope choked them in the bargain. Besides, he had no idea how to get in touch with either of them anyway, aside from actually going down to IAB headquarters and having them paged ... and walking into the heart of Schaeffer's home turf was not high on his agenda for this rainy Saturday afternoon.
That left Aaron Noble as the only other person directly involved in ending Cruz's career, and the only person out of that little group Bosco could still feel genuinely superior to. So he made a few quick phone-calls, following much the same path Cruz herself had the previous day, starting from the Melrose and tracking Noble here to the Bridgeview.
He might be able to get a fresh perspective on the matter of Cruz's escape. Did Swersky drop by to see Noble? If so, what did he say? What kind of security did he offer? Did he suggest any other theories on what Cruz might be up to? Et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, Bosco was not so deluded that he couldn't see how completely pointless this was. In the end he was basically just dicking around in the shallow end of the pool, playing a kind of half-assed detective game with himself just to keep his morale up and his mind on something else. He really had no idea what he expected to get out of Noble, a worry which didn't amount to squat because the writer probably wouldn't even agree to talk to him. Bosco had no badge, hence no clout. Noble would have every right to brush him off, and being flicked away like a wet booger by such a lowlife was apt to feel pretty embarrassing.
In fact, if Bosco started thinking too hard about what he was doing here, the whole thing started to feel pretty embarrassing. It would be the police, the real police, who would nab Cruz - not some fuck-up of an ex-cop with a guilty conscience. It was possible they'd gotten her already - Bosco hadn't turned on a TV since going to bed last night. And since Charlie's cartoons were the order of the day in Faith's apartment, that meant neither of them had any sense of the latest developments. It could all be over by now, and Bosco was already starting to feel a bit like the little tyke who runs along behind the local beat cop with his day-glo water pistol and his glow-in-the-dark "Official Police Badge." Lil' Bosco wants to help! Lil' Bosco is playing detective! Lil' Bosco wants to prove he's still got the Right Stuff! How cute!
How sad!
He didn't care. He knew it wasn't really about proving he still had what it took, or about playing hero to Cruz before she could start another bloodbath. He wanted to contribute, but he knew he wasn't in a position to do much of anything. And knowing that made it okay. This was strictly for himself. It was about Having Something To Do, something to keep him moving. A rolling stone gathers no moss, and a man with a mission is less likely to get all morose and sulky and start thinking about blowing his own stupid fucking head off.
And he supposed that at the very least, he could have the pleasure of insulting that slimeball writer to his face one last time.
The idea that what he was doing here at the Bridgeview really could lead him directly to Cruz never once crossed his mind.