Thanks as always for the reviews ... and to address iggy's specifically: by all means, don't sweat it - constructive criticism doesn't bother me. I realize the little Karen Tuttle backstory in Chapter 10 is a bit irrelevant to the overall plot - I just wanted to do a little teenage flashback for Bosco (kind of counterpart to the one Cruz got in Chapter 3) as a springboard for the rest of the chapter, and because I felt I was ignoring him and Faith while going too deep into Cruz - sort of threw off the balance a bit. And also, I wanted something a bit more lighthearted in what's otherwise been a pretty dark ride ... one that's only gonna get darker from here on in.
But you're right in that one massive chapter is hard to wade through on one long, unbroken page. Calling each new update a "chapter" might have been misleading, because they're often several smaller chapters strung together, and I should have kept that in mind when posting. It's a holdover from the original concept of this story, which was to alternate characters smoothly between chapters ... but as I got closer to the climax it started to become clear that the original concept just wasn't working anymore - character sequences tend to run long at this stage.
With that in mind, I've re-structured the story a bit, separating the chapters into their proper sub-sections to make navigation and bookmarking a bit easier. That being said, this chapter is a two-parter, but it's the last of the biggies - I've decided to finish the story in five shorter chapters rather than three longer ones - seems to read better that way anyway.
Now, on a different note ... I'm not a big fan of warnings in fanfiction - character deaths and such - but there is some stuff in this chapter that is definitely not for the squeamish. The upgrade to the "R" rating was made mostly because of this chapter and Chapter 13, both of which wrap up Cruz's part in the story and take her mental and physical breakdown to their logical conclusion. It might not bother anybody at all, but then again it might, so I thought it best to mention it. If you're like me and you snack while you read, you might want to leave the chips in the pantry and the Cokes in the fridge on this one ;)
I'm also not a fan of my own rambling Author's Notes, so I will now shut up :)
Chapter 11
Cruz
I.
The sling came off first - even before her jacket - because it was the easiest article of her clothing to remove. She'd taken it off and put it back on once already, so she knew how it worked. It was a slick little gadget, a humble little breakthrough in modern medicine in and of itself (much more humble than the prosthetic shoulder-joint she'd never gotten a chance to experience, and probably never would), all interlacing straps and buckles and a contoured, padded sleeve for the arm to rest in. The days of strategically folding and tying sheets around your neck were long over - somebody in the R&D department had finally figured out that knot-tying is not looked highly upon by the one-handed. You could just unhook the adjustable strap - almost like a bra - and voila: off it came.
Cruz managed to do that much by herself, using her right hand.
Her jacket came next. That actually ended up being a bit trickier. She hadn't bothered putting the useless left arm through the sleeve (getting tangled up in her shirt had been enough of a nightmare, thank you very kindly) but sliding the sleeve off her right arm still hurt like a mad motherfucker - the coat was still sopping wet and stuck to her skin, and as a result it had to be peeled off.
Couldn't be done, not with one hand. She'd had to ask Noble to help her.
Her shirt was the hardest. The worst. She'd swollen up. Which was to say, the shoulder had swollen up. She had a soupy, ridiculous half-memory of Noble telling her she looked like an overstuffed sausage, and she had to concede: that was about how she felt. She'd nearly gone out of her mind just trying to get the damned shirt on - getting it off nearly did her in. Part of it was because they were stupid in the way they tackled the problem (he was stupid, anyway); they tried right away to get the shirt off the normal way - over her head, arms raised.
Oh, how she had screamed.
In the end Noble had been forced to cut it off her with a pair of scissors he'd produced from somewhere - it was the only way, and as a result one of her favorite shirts (the black tank-top that had always done such a magnificent job of showing off her cleavage) was now just so many meaningless strips of cloth on the floor. She had cried over it. She cried over everything now, it seemed. That was funny in its own way, part of the overall framework of irony that her life now seemed to be built on. Here you had Maritza Cruz, known in some quarters as Two-Bags Cruz, known in others as That Crazy Bitch, known everywhere as the ball-breaking, take-no-shit Sarge, Anti-Crime personified ... and she was crying over the scraps of her favorite shirt.
But no matter. They would have to find her something else anyway, something more accommodating. Something loose and billowy. Noble would have to find her a shirt somewhere. Noble was her nursemaid now. Her personal assistant. Her live-in healthcare companion. That really was what it had all come down to, her grotesque little prediction had come to pass and she was smack in the pilot episode of The Odd Couple From Hell, so would someone please cue theme music. They were at his safehouse now, the promised safehouse, and everything was going to be all right because she had the famed and acclaimed Aaron Noble looking after her - he would bring her chicken soup and help her take care of herself and hold her hair while she puked, and all he asked in return was for her to strip her tenderest, most secret (and most sacred) thoughts bare and let him pick at them, poke at them, and eventually translate the sum of her wasted life into a new bestseller for the masses.
They had not, as yet, discussed royalties and percentages.
Cruz didn't think they would be getting around to it anytime in the near future.
But back to the matter at hand. Sling and jacket and shirt were gone. They had progressed as far as her bandage, which had long ago lost its properties of adherence and was now sticking to her only by her own blood and sweat. At the moment she was naked from the waist up - she hadn't bothered with a bra - but she wasn't too worried about Noble getting all hot under the collar; she could still remember the pallid, shivering, sunken-eyed mess that she'd seen in her bedroom mirror, and she imagined she looked even less enticing now. Which was a moot point, because the man just wasn't attracted to her. Noble saw her as more of living biographical study, personal whipping-girl, and talking pet. He had Maritza Two-Bags Cruz in a glass box - so to speak - and she was completely at his mercy. That alone seemed to be enough to get him off.
She had no way to defend herself if he did decide to get randy, though; her Tec-9 was gone. He had taken it from her and set it aside somewhere - she did not even remember how or when - and now she couldn't see it. Likewise the .45 automatic she'd liberated from him earlier - she could only assume that it was back in his coat where Noble no doubt felt it belonged. So that left her disarmed, half-naked, almost paralyzed with pain, and completely helpless. She was living in the very definition of nightmare.
(because it is it is)
"You ready?" Noble asked from somewhere above, startling her, making her cringe. Her eyes were closed and his voice seemed painfully loud in her ears ... loud, and yet at the same time distorted and somehow wet, as if it was gurgling up to her through about six feet of water.
"Cruz? Answer quick or I'm just gonna go right ahead and do this thing."
She thought about the question for another heartbeat (was she ready? She guessed she was), then nodded an affirmative, that funny little childlike nod she was using all the time now - chin goes up, chin goes down, three times fast.
She was ready.
"Please be careful," she murmured.
And there was something else funny - the dry, scratchy rasp that issued from her throat whenever she spoke. And the fat, slurry quality of the words themselves. She'd been biting her tongue again. Biting it, creating new pain to try to fight the old pain.
As for conversation, please be careful was about all she had left. When Noble was helping her undress she had tried to think of some tough, snappy, Sergeant Cruz-ish way to tell him to watch himself - you hurt me any more than necessary and I'll shoot out your kneecaps, and if you cop a feel I'll kick your balls out through your asshole. Something like that.
And what came out was only that humble and yet urgent little phrase:
Please be careful.
Because it just hurt too much now. It hurt too much now to even pretend to be a hardcase. Those days were over.
It seemed the Sarge was finally dead.
At least for now, a part of her added immediately, a part of her that sounded an awful lot like the Sarge, alive and kickin'. He's gonna help me. He needs me. He'll help me get better. That's the deal - I talk, I become his next book, and he nurses me until I get back on my feet. I'll get better. He's gonna get me some dope. Morphine. Demerol. Something. He'll help me get better and then he'll help me get Buford.
Amen.
And as usual, there was immediate dissent from Papa's camp: You don't really believe that, Maritza. You can't really believe that.
"I'm gonna fucking puke," Noble said casually, bringing her back again. His voice was still strangely wet, soupy, like it was coming from underwater.
Or maybe she was the one underwater, and Noble was talking down to her through it.
She should probably find out which it was. She didn't want to drown.
God, it was getting hard to think straight.
Cruz opened her eyes. She was not underwater. She was in Noble's safehouse, and Noble himself was leaning over her.
His safehouse had turned out to be pretty strange. The room they were in was long, narrow, high-ceilinged, and oddly arcane in its design and decor. The couch she was half-sitting, half-lying on was low to the ground, ornate, and was probably about a hundred years old at a guess. But it was in shameful condition. Shameful. The wooden frame and legs were battered and scuffed, the flower-print upholstery faded and stained and pitted with cigarette burns. She could see a matching chair nearby, and in not much better shape. Claudia Cortez had one just like it in her apartment, but Claudia's was in fine condition. The one Cruz could see was a disgrace.
There was sunlight in here, too. The rain must have finally stopped, because the sun was pouring in across a chestnut-brown hardwood floor from two huge windows, one of which was directly above her. Each was easily fifteen feet high and ate up a lot of wall, and the ceiling itself was at least twenty feet.
(No that's wrong, that's wrong, it wasn't like that before, something's wrong here something's very wrong with all of this)
It was a beautiful place - in spite of the flea-bitten antique couch and chair - so Cruz decided to leave her eyes open for the moment. It was soothing. The sun was soothing. She decided she would look at that, concentrate on that ... because she was not going to look at her shoulder. Certainly not after Noble had removed the bandage. Why, when she'd checked the bandage yesterday -
(?yesterday two days ago two hours days months years?)
she hadn't been able to bring herself to even glance at the wound itself. Just at the ratty dressing, which was ugly enough in itself. She could see it right now, in her peripheral vision - a dirty white thing, stained red with blood and yellowed at the edges with sweat.
"I am gonna fucking puke," Noble repeated, the words spoken around a laughably forlorn sigh. He met her eyes and took a deep breath. "Here we go, Two-Bags. Time to assess the damage."
Noble pinched a corner of the bandage between his thumb and forefinger (with a prissy, nose-wrinkling disdain that should have been funny) and began to pull.
Pain flared across her shoulder. Felt like fire. Needles. Broken glass. Cruz began to scream.
Noble paused. He looked at her pensively for a moment. Then at the bandage. Then back at her again. His lip curled into a thoughtful sneer, as if he didn't quite know how to proceed.
He started to pull at the dressing again. Harder this time.
Cruz began to scream louder.
"Quit being such a big baby," he muttered, and there was something different -
(Schaeffer that's not Noble's voice it's Schaeffer, Schaeffer is here with me that can't be, it can't be right, it can't)
about his voice now, something odd. "I thought you were supposed to be tough, Two-Bags. So start acting like it."
But she kept screaming, she wasn't screaming because she wasn't tough, she was screaming because it was stuck, oh it was stuck, it felt like he was flaying her skin off because the bandage was -
"Stuck," Noble said finally, and stopped pulling. His voice was his own again and not Schaeffer's, but it was tight, guttural, as if he was trying to hold onto his gorge. "It's all stuck to the wound. Jesus, what a mess. What a fucking repugnant mess." He smiled grimly at her, lip still curled up at the corner. He looked like he was doing a bad Elvis impression. "Gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way, my dear."
And before she could even ask him exactly what he meant by old-fashioned way, Noble snatched the dressing off in one lighting-quick yank. He even put a little flourish into it, ta-da, like a magician doing a small but really neat trick.
And there was a sound. She actually heard it make a sound. An obscene sort of shluck!
Cruz howled and squeezed her eyes closed again, not so much from the pain but from the fear of what was underneath the dressing. He didn't even give her a chance to turn her head away.
There was a moment or two of silence. She could feel her heart hammering; it felt like it had taken up new digs somewhere in the vicinity of her throat.
"Now," she heard Noble gurgle, "I think I really am gonna puke."
Still reeling from having the bandage ripped away (shluck!) and panting with the strain of screaming through it all, it was with some surprise that Cruz actually found herself grinning. Because even now she found she still liked it when Noble suffered. And it sure sounded like he was suffering.
Just so long as he didn't puke on her.
"Not ... not very pretty, is ... is it, Noble?" she gasped, out of breath. "That's what ... what your fucking expanding bullets ... that's what they do to people."
"I was actually talking more about this," he said. He held the bandage up in front of her and wiggled it. Through her half-lidded eyes and her delirium, Cruz thought it looked a bit like he was holding up the bloody carcass of a bird. Perhaps a seagull. Tonight's dinner, maybe. She laughed thinly.
Then she opened her eyes -
(focus)
all the way, and saw that it was the dressing, it was just the bandage that had seen better days, gummy with sweat and half-congealed blood ...
... and a spongy-looking yellow-green discharge that turned her heart into a cold lump of ice in her chest.
Noble saw her expression change and nodded. "Infection," he said with a grim I-told-you-so smirk. He looked at the dressing again, his throat working, adam's apple bobbing crazily; apparently he was still trying not to throw up.
Because it smelled, too. It didn't just look bad - it smelled.
"That right there is some nice, juicy pus. You'll be needing more than just painkillers, Cruz. You need antibiotics. I'll have to run down to the pharmacy - "
(?pharmacy?)
" - later on and get you something to keep you in the game."
"In the game," she repeated stupidly. She was terrified, so she closed her eyes again. It seemed like the only thing to do under the circumstances. The buzz in her head was back now. Loud. Too loud. The wasps. The wasps in her head. It seemed to reverberate not only in her ears but all the way down her throat and into her stomach.
"I want you to look at it," Noble said. He almost sounded angry. He also sounded -
(wrong, all wrong, the house is wrong this is ALL wrong)
- like Schaeffer again.
"No," she murmured, but she opened her eyes anyway. She looked at Noble. He was still there, but he'd become fuzzy, indistinct. The sun was shining on him. The sun from the big window behind her.
"Look at it," Noble said irritably, gesturing at her left arm. His voice was sounding more and more like Schaeffer's. "For Christ's sake would you look at the fucking thing? It's disgusting. And you let it get like that. Disgusting."
"Just ... just help me," she whispered. It was all she could think of to say.
"Help you?" Noble cried shrilly. His voice cut through the buzz in her head like a razor blade, stirring the wasps into a frenzy. "Look at what you've done to yourself! You didn't take care of it! LOOK!"
Cruz looked down.
And saw that her left arm was rotting.
Rotting.
The arm had blown up like an innertube and turned a rich, leathery black. Great ragged swatches of skin were peeling off like rolls of old wallpaper; the exposed flesh underneath was a sickish mess of that curdy yellow-green pus. In other words, she was crispy on the outside and chewy chewy chewy on the inside. The hand had fattened up as well; it had blown up and frozen into a gnarled, stiff thing that now looked like the sausage-fingered glove of a cartoon character. Bones poked through the ends of the fingers like misshapen claws.
No.
No, that couldn't be. It couldn't be. It couldn't -
(doesn't matter if it turns black and falls off)
have happened, not so fast, not in such a short time. It was a trick. It had to be some kind of nasty trick, Noble had done something to her while she was passed out, he'd covered her arm with something, smeared on some kind of black jelly or tar or something, or wrapped it in some leathery material. It wasn't real.
It couldn't be real.
Cruz saw her right hand hover out and touch her left forearm. She didn't want to do it but she didn't seem to have any say in the matter at all, and when her fingers brushed the bloated, blackened skin they found it rigid. Numb. Dead.
No trick.
"It needs to come off," Noble said. "We'll have to take it off and throw it away. Throw it away somewhere where it can't hurt you anymore."
Cruz looked up. She was terrified almost to the point of senselessness. All she could say was: "Uh?"
Noble said no more. Instead, he took hold of her left hand - her useless lump of a left hand - and held it. Dead flesh crackled like dry leaves. Her pinky finger snapped off and fell to the floor.
"We're looking at a battlefield amputation here, Two-Bags," Noble said calmly. Down on one knee as he was, holding her decaying hand as he was, he looked for all the world like a suitor about to pop the big question in the best of traditions.
"Noble," she managed shakily, her heart freezing over again as she started to realize what he was about to do. "Oh, no, Noble, no, don't ... don't ... DON'T - !"
Still holding her left hand, Noble stood up and planted his left foot in the center of her chest (when she looked down she saw that she was wearing her black tank-top again ... and that made no sense at all because Noble had cut it off only five minutes ago, she was sure he had cut it off) ...
... and then he grabbed her left wrist with his other hand for a better grip ...
... and then he pulled. He pulled with the carefree zeal of a man in a friendly game of beachfront tug 'o war.
There was a wet squelching sound, like someone pulling their foot out of thick mud. A sense of being pushed back and pulled forward at the same time, of being stretched in two directions at once. The breath was driven from her -
(oh no no that hurts it hurts it HURTS!)
and then, suddenly, there was a horrible, meaty tearing sound, a meaty tearing sensation, and she snapped back -
(like that day that day all those years ago Lettie when Lettie was trying to pull me in to see her fish and she let go and I almost fell)
and then Aaron Noble was standing in front of her, holding her own severed left arm in his hand like a grotesque drumstick.
There was no blood. Scraps of dead flesh hanging in strings and flaps, but no blood.
There were maggots, though. Lots of them. The stump of her newly amputated arm was lively with them, just a-hoppin' and a-boppin' with them, and she could even hear them - they made a moist, gooey sort of sound, like someone stirring a spoon through something thick. Custard, maybe. The flesh around them was decayed and reeking, the bone an ugly little gray nub.
Noble looked at the arm with the clinical eye of a doctor; he seemed to have more or less gotten over his squeamishness. "That's about what I thought," he said sagely, and then threw the grisly thing aside. Cruz watched her own arm land with a thump in one of the sunbeams cast by the window above her -
(wrong the window Noble the sun the chair the couch my arm wrong my arm my arm MY ARM WRONG WRONG THIS IS ALL WRONG)
and she saw that it was moving. Dead and stiff but moving. The fingers (five of them again, explain that) twitched dreamily, as if they felt revitalized by the sun and were enjoying it. A few maggots had come loose and were scattered around it. They appeared to have died. They looked like tiny white pills.
"You'll start feeling better in no time now that it's off," Noble said in that same calm, just-discussing-the-weather voice. The voice of a wise man, a man of the world, a man who knows where he stands and is comfortable with who he is. She realized that Noble was now speaking in Spanish. It made him sound like her father.
"It's my arm," she heard herself sob, reaching out plaintively with the one she still had. "Please put it back on. It's my arm. My arm. Please -"
(doesn't matter if it turns black and falls off)
"- put it back on -"
"You'll feel better with that nasty old thing off you, Cruz."
"- it's mine. Mine. My arm - "
(oh it hurts it hurts it hurts)
"- please put it back on -"
But that arm was never going back on. No way, Jose. As Cruz watched, it began to twist and writhe and flop like a beached fish. It drummed against the hardwood floor and, already swollen with decay, began to expand even more. It began to swell like ... well, like an overstuffed sausage.
Then it burst. The skin split in two dozen places with another of those rubbery -
(shluck!)
tearing sounds. Maggots spilled out by the hundreds. By the thousands -
"AH-HA!" Noble cried triumphantly as she stared at the swirling white carpet; all she could see of her poor arm were a few flaps of decayed skin that looked like burnt paper. "That's the trick, right there!" he shouted at her. His eyes sparkled. He looked positively exalted. "You have to get right to the source of the problem with matters like this! Aren't you happy to be free of it? Aren't you? She hated you, you know! She hated your fucking guts!"
But Cruz didn't hear him. He wasn't making sense anymore but that wasn't what concerned her, what concerned her was getting her arm back, because it was her arm, it belonged to her, and ...
... and then something occurred to her.
She realized that a stump, any stump on any severed limb always has its counterpart stump (a stump begets a stump, you might say); there was still the matter of her shoulder, and she knew in that moment -
"You should start feeling better in a little while with that nasty thing off you."
(WRONG)
that when she looked down at her shoulder she would see the same thing she'd seen on the arm, in the arm, a corrupt and flyblown cave full of maggots, only they would be in her, they would be eating in her, and Noble was watching her he was watching her and none of this was right the safehouse Noble she wasn't in any safehouse she was in Noble's -
- car and none of it was happening, it was all wrong and she was -
- in Noble's car, still in Noble's car and she awoke with sweat pouring down her face and tears spilling down her cheeks and her breath sobbing in and out of her chest. There was no safehouse. No high ceiling. No tall windows spilling yellow, ethereal sunlight across a dark hardwood floor. No Noble and no perverse little bandage removal ceremony. Her arm was still attached to her (for all it was worth), not bloated up or black or splitting open, and -
(oh and this is the BEST part of all)
- there were no maggots.
There was only rain. Rain beating against the roof of the car. Wasps buzzing in her head. Sweat pouring down her face, which was hot and throbbing and felt like it had swollen up -
(like the arm black bloated rotting splitting splitting open)
Cruz shut her eyes and moaned. It was all still right there on the surface of her mind, and every nerve-ending in her body, every senseless instinct was screaming that it was real, that it had happened, that it not only had happened but was still happening, she would look down and see the gaping, worm-ridden hole in the side of her body where her arm used to be -
STOP IT!
Yes. She was still in Noble's car. She could see that. Safe and hidden away. She squinted out through the windshield and could make almost nothing out through the rain; just a blurred suggestion of the abandoned buildings he'd parked them behind, the cratered skin of the parking lot, the dumpster in front of the car. But it was enough to tell her where she was - she was still in Noble's Mercedes, and Noble himself must still be at his meeting. Still shooting pool and talking about all things Buford with his Disciples contact. Iggy. Iggy something.
Iggy something.
What was the name again? Sounded French. Mar ... Marchi ... something like that. She couldn't remember, and it didn't matter anyway. She couldn't think. She couldn't think through the wasps, couldn't think around the steel ball in her skull, which had grown to fill her entire head and was now pulsing behind her face, her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, even in her fucking teeth. She could feel it in her teeth and even in the hole where that one molar -
(what were you, some kind of an Affirmative-Action hire?)
was still missing. Pain. Pain everywhere. That was all there was, ever had been, ever would be. Here in the car or in some bizarre high-ceilinged room in her head, the constant in both places was pain. She'd tried to escape it into sleep, and it had simply found her and dragged her back.
It had felt so real. God, so real. Even when he started to -
(stop it)
even when he started to pull -
(STOP IT!)
Right, right, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. She was thirsty again. Thirsty, but there was nobody here to help her drink. Besides which, she had no idea where Noble had put the fucking water bottle. And she could barely move. She was terrified of moving.
Nevertheless, she moved. She had to. She leaned down and groped blindly for the water bottle Noble had held to her lips a few minutes -
(?minutes hours days months years?)
ago.
Thick, heavy pressure welled up across the bridge of her nose, cheeks, forehead. Pain in the shoulder, her chest, neck, legs, take your pick. But it was here somewhere, that little bottle, the one with Adidas stamped on the side; he'd taken it and set it down somewhere, she remembered seeing him put it down somewhere nearby, under the dash, near the pedals ...
She might have found it if she'd been able to persist, keep up her strength, keep her will strong -
(focus!)
but she was suddenly overcome and her muscles gave out and she slumped back in her seat again, eyes closing, head spinning, wasps buzzing.
The arm.
The arm all black and putrefying. Like rotten fruit.
God, so real.
(stop it)
But it had felt real, she'd really thought they were there, she'd jumped the gun and put herself in the safehouse with Noble, and it had felt so real. And the arm ... black and bloated and shiny, she'd been called out to stinkers before, suicides and heart attacks discovered days or even weeks after death, and that was what it had looked like, that was what it had smelled like, flesh puffed up and gassy and stinking -
(stop it!)
How long before it really happened, though? That was the question. How long before she looked down and saw it really was turning bla -
STOP IT!
Yes. Yes, she had to stop it. Shouldn't think about it.
He'll fix me up, she thought instead, and felt a bit better. This had become her little mantra now, an odd little prayer of a sort. Means by which to focus. He's gonna get me something for the pain. Something to help patch me up. We'll hide out, lay low. I'll start to heal up. Get back on my feet. This is just the hump, just a little rough patch - I get over this hump and I'll be fine. Everything's gonna be fine.
Well, of course it would! Everything would turn out rosy, everything always did for Maritza Cruz, it was like a law of nature, just a law of nature, everything always turned out all right for her.
Even this.
Yes, even this.
But right now she hurt. She was rotting when she thought about it, she was rotten right through with pain that wasn't just confined to her shoulder anymore, pain that had escaped from her shoulder and now it was everywhere, in her limbs, in her chest, in her guts, in her head, face, cheeks, eyes. She wanted to cry with it. She wanted to but she wasn't going to let herself do that anymore because she was -
(thought you were supposed to be tough, Two-Bags)
tough. Still tough. She would fight it. For Lettie, she would fight it. She would -
(you're supposed to be tough?)
savor the pain even though she wanted to cry with it, scream with it, the way she had screamed that night -
(What were you, some kind of an Affirmative-Action hire?)
in the alley, savor it even though her head was throbbing, buzzing, the steel ball had grown and there was -
- pain across the bridge of her nose, her cheek, her mouth, her lips mashed against her teeth and she was falling backwards, her gun flying out of her hand, and then she heard him -
(you're supposed to be tough?)
and she felt a hand wrap itself around her ankle and start to drag her back into the alley.
He hadn't run away. He'd just hidden himself somewhere in the shadows and waited for her to let her guard down. When she obliged him, he attacked her. Later she would learn that he'd done it with a two-by-four. Nailed her right in the face with it. She would be taken to Mercy when this was all over, and there Dr. Fields would tell her that it was a pure miracle she still had all her front teeth and her nose wasn't squashed all over her face. Dr. Fields, the nice ER doc who would later go on to convince Detective Schaeffer not to cuff her to her bed when the big son of a bitch came for her.
But none of that had happened yet. At the moment all Maritza Cruz knew was that she was being murdered. All she knew was that she'd made a mistake, let her guard down, and now this guy had her. She had no gun and no backup and he had her, and she had the idea that he was going to take his sweet time putting an end to her. And over what? Furs. Stolen furs. She was going to die over the pelts of dead animals. This guy was supposed to have been an easy takedown, the kind of thief who was just supposed to drop and roll over when cornered. The kind of guy who'd rather run than fight, the kind of guy who'd never dream of whacking a cop in the face with a plank, risking his life and turning a property crime into a violent assault on a police officer.
But this guy now ... it seemed like she'd found herself a sadistic fucking psycho in this guy. Was that why she was screaming for help at the top of her lungs as he dragged her along the ground? Was it because her gun was long lost somewhere in the dark and a sadistic fucking psycho had her where nobody could see them, and if she was lucky he'd kill her, and if she wasn't lucky he'd rape her and then kill her? Or was she screaming just because it was all going to end over something as inconsequential - as absurd - as stolen furs? Was that the real reason she was screaming for help while this nameless son of a bitch beat on her and dragged her along by her leg, like a caveman dragging a woman around by the hair in one of those old cartoons?
Or was it something else? Might she be screaming because of something else -
(I'm sorry, 'Ritza)
- entirely?
Interesting question.
And here was another: why did she stop screaming when his fist crashed across her mouth? Because the blow stunned her? Because everything went white and hot, leaden pain again bloomed in her jaw and her cheek and her head and knocked her momentarily senseless? Because the punch sent a tooth hurtling out of her mouth, trailing a streamer of blood behind it like the tail of a little comet?
Or was it because she -
(You're supposed to be tough?)
could hear sirens and she knew help was on the way?
Couldn't be the sirens, because the sirens didn't matter. Hell, she wasn't even sure they were real. She'd just taken two powerful blows to the head, so the prospect of being saved in the nick of time might just be her own rattled senses messing with her. She'd probably be dead by the time help arrived anyway, because the psycho got her up against the wall and breathed that -
(What were you, some kind of an Affirmative-Action hire?)
memorable little phrase into her face, and he was choking her now. Had a lead pipe across her throat. Cool metal against her skin. She could feel the subtle texture of it, down to the little flakes of rust that ran along its length. He was bigger than her, stronger than her, leaning his weight into it. She could feel her own windpipe being crushed. Wasn't that something? She couldn't have screamed now even if she wanted to.
And she didn't want to. Scream, that was. Not anymore. There was a man hurting her, killing her right in the here and now, and yet she wasn't thinking about that in quite the right fashion; her brain didn't seem to be sounding the proper alarm bells or triggering the right survival responses. She wasn't thinking about this quite right - not now, with a metal bar crushing her windpipe, and not a moment ago, when he was dragging her along the ground and she could feel the pavement grating under her and shards of broken glass poking her and cutting her through her clothes. She didn't know what she was thinking, it was so hard -
- to think, and she was -
(rain battering the roof Noble's car still in Noble's car pain pain it hurts oh God it hurts make it stop hurting)
and she was -
- at Mercy hospital, and she almost cried out when she saw her.
She didn't. Of course she didn't. Bosco was on one side of her and Ty Davis on the other, and she was in a crowded ER. Nothing could be allowed to come through in her expression or her body language, and nothing did. She made the save. Nothing came through when she turned and saw Lettie through the door of one of the trauma rooms, thrashing and snapping and hissing and cursing through that stupid phony accent of hers and looking like something out of the fucking Exorcist. Nothing came through when she actually went in and stood at the foot of her sister's bed, when she got close enough to smell the shitty, pissy reek of her, to see the ashy color of her skin, the open sores, the charcoal smeared on her face. The fact that she probably wouldn't have made a hundred pounds soaking wet and holding a bowling ball.
Nothing came through in Maritza Cruz's face or body language but a subdued and rather dignified anger. She didn't explode - she just sort of smoldered. She remained the Sarge. She was the Sarge all over. Her face, the set of her shoulders, the look in her eyes. She snapped off a few terse comments at Lettie, first in Spanish and then in English, and her voice came out sounding just fine - authoritative, softly furious, carrying the promise of later retribution. There was no tremble and it didn't catch in her throat. Good, very good. Everything about her was perfectly Sarge.
Inside she was cold. Inside she was terrified. Terrified of what she was seeing in front of her, terrified that she -
(gave up on her)
could have missed what was happening, and now -
(so she gave up on herself)
things had gotten this bad. Lettie had been slipping further and further downhill for a while now, Maritza knew that even though she hadn't spoken to her sister in a long time -
(and underneath it all she knows that it was just her own weakness, her own fear, her own unwillingness to face the inevitable crash that made her turn her back)
but now Lettie had actually crashed. She'd overdosed before but never like this, it had never been this bad. She'd never looked this bad before.
Hell, she'd never smelled this bad before, and Maritza wanted to go around the bed, shove Fields and the nurses aside, grab the stupid little twat by the shoulders and shake her until her neck snapped and her fucking head rolled right off her fucking shoulders, she wanted to scream at her, get right down into her face and scream at her. Because when she couldn't identify the source of her own terror, Maritza Cruz responded by becoming enraged. And wasn't that understandable? It was, wasn't it? She was enraged at her stupid little ignorant trash-talking twat of a sister but there was something else underneath that, something so black and alien and horrible that she couldn't even look at it or acknowledge its existence, but she knew it was there, she -
(can never take it back, never never, too late, damage is done, spilled milk, no second chances, no going back, failed her, let her slip, abandoned her I'm sorry sorry never meant to never meant to hit her to hurt her)
wanted to throw her head back and scream, she wanted to tear the place apart around her, smash the trauma room and everything in it to rags and splinters, smash everything, knock the trays flying and shatter the IV's and overturn the bed with the stupid little twat still in it, pull her gun and shoot up whatever was left, shoot anybody who tried to stop her or restrain her. And Lettie would look up at her, she would reach up to her, because that was what Lettie always used to do when anything went wrong and she needed 'Ritza to make it all better - she would reach up, arms outstretched, wanting to be held. She always wanted to be held, and Maritza used to do just that, she used to hold her ... but now she'd just kick Lettie all over the room. Corner to corner, end to end.
And then good old 'Ritza might just put her own gun to her own temple and make Lettie watch her blow her own brains out, and maybe then she'd see. Maybe she would see what it was like to watch somebody you loved waste themselves.
And of course she doesn't do any of those things, what she does is stand there and be Sergeant Cruz, cold and professional, she can't scream and maybe that's why -
- she screams while the nameless psycho is dragging her along by her leg, maybe she knows she's going to die and now it doesn't matter anymore, she can scream all she wants, she can scream and kick and thrash all she wants, because she's being dragged to her death and the central thought in her mind is her sister, the way her sister looked that day she wanted to scream and scream and scream and rip the place to pieces.
And when the lead bar is across her throat and she can feel the flakes of rust on its surface biting into her skin, when she can feel her windpipe being crushed, it's possible that she decides this is right, that this is the way it ends, it ends over furs, stolen furs and not the war on drugs (oh, so sorry - that should read: the War on Drugs, capital W, capital D), because what does it matter now anyway?
Does that sound a bit cornball? Does it have a touch of the schmaltz about it? Maybe so, but the fact remains: when the world starts to turn black, Maritza Cruz accepts it.
And then all of a sudden the pressure's off, the lead pipe is gone, Cruz is down on her knees coughing and choking and the guy's moaning on the ground with a bullet in his shoulder.
Yokas. Yokas has just saved her life. It's too early in the game for that to be very ironic; Aaron Noble and the Melrose bloodbath are still three months in the future. But even now Cruz doesn't like the snotnosed, holier-than-thou bitch, and she'd been ready, she'd been ready, she'd decided that this was how it was going to be: Sergeant Maritza Cruz, twenty-nine years of age, choked to death in an alley after a sting goes sour. Police funeral, twenty-one gun salute, planted by the State of New York. Mourned by no one, missed by few. No family, no friends, colleagues who at best tolerated her and at worst despised her outright. A few scattered acquaintances, that was all: Boscorelli (who barely knew her), Ramon Valenzuela (who had grown away from her), and Claudia Cortez (who only thought she knew her). Pretty short fucking list. People who would spare her a thought (maybe a prayer, in Claudia's case) and move on with their lives in short order.
And she could deal with that. She'd been ready to meet the end of her miserable, empty, futile fucking life (indeed, she'd just reached the conclusion that her fucking life was miserable, empty and futile) and then Yokas saved it and condemned her to get up and do it all over again the next morning. And the morning after that. And the morning after that. Get up alone, eat breakfast alone, go to work alone, come home to her empty apartment alone, eat dinner alone, go to bed alone, repeat step one.
And all the time knowing that she'd let her go. That she'd let her sister go.
Maybe that was why she went up to Yokas afterwards and unloaded on her instead of thanking her. Only while her mouth was running (this is Anti-Crime, this is the way we do things on the streets, don't you dare start trouble over shit that doesn't concern you, blah blah blah) in her mind she was back in that trauma room at Mercy, smashing the place up, kicking Lettie around the floor, in her head she was still -
- in -
- Noble's car.
Noble's car and the rain was still coming down and the wasps were still buzzing in her head. Two things that had fused into one; the buzz in the center of her mind and that muffled, vaguely metallic ratta-tat-tat of the rain on the roof of Noble's Mercedes. They just sort of fit together.
And pain. She was still in Noble's car and she kept slipping off, slipping down, slipping up, slipping into sleep, unconsciousness, semi-consciousness, something. She was dizzy so it was hard to tell, hard to make the proper metaphor for it. She just sort of kept ... slipping around, leave it at that. And the first thing she sensed when she managed to attain a reasonable degree of lucid thought was not the rain on the roof or the sloppy man-smell of Noble's car or even the buzz in her head; the first thing she always sensed was pain.
And thirst. Two more things that had fused into one: pain and thirst. You might want to call it something like pain/thirst. Or why not just go the distance and squash the two together and say painthirst, because that did have a bit of a ring to it.
There, now - she had just coined a new term. The former Sergeant Maritza Cruz, with only a high school diploma and not a day of higher education to her name, and she'd just invented a new English word. Painthirst. Now she'd have to start working on the Spanish equivalent. Because this was something new, she'd been thirsty before but thirsty wasn't what this was. The existing terminology - English or Spanish - could not do the experience any kind of justice. There was being thirsty and there was thirst. This was thirst. This was dying-in-the-desert thirst. This was painthirst. Thirst that bordered on agony. Thirst that bordered on insanity.
She no longer had any choice in the matter: she had to go looking for the water bottle again, and this time she had to find it.
And so she started the little dance again, leaning down in her seat, biting her tongue against the pain (the poor little thing was almost chewed into hamburger now; a little chunk about the size of a pea had already come off and gone slip-sliding down her throat; soon she wouldn't be able to speak at all) her good hand skittering blindly around the floor of the car like some pale, cave-dwelling insect. It was down there somewhere, the little plastic flask with Adidas on the side and (if God willed it; if God existed) a little bit of water left in it. After all, this was a car we were talking about here. Not an SUV, not a big fucking Winnabago - she was in a car. Not a whole lot of floorspace in here. So how far could the goddam thing have gone?
Pretty far, apparently; she was looking, but she wasn't finding. Tears poured down her cheeks. The wasps buzzed in her head. Her face throbbed. A steady, unconscious little stream of whimpering cries issued from her mouth, some of which almost made speech. Her lips moved, occasionally forming words or something reasonably close, but mostly it was just a low, monotonous kind of gibbering that went along with a dizzying, fragmented -
(ski slope snow down the back cold wet) (you fucking TRIPPED me!) (Yokas shot me Yokas-bitch shot me) (Give me the damn gun so I can get back to doing my job) (I'm sorry, 'Ritza) (never meant to hit her oh sorry I'm sorry the wiggling it was the wiggling fingers)
rat-run of images that spooled across her mind. She chewed obsessively at her tongue. Blood kept filling her mouth; she swallowed it over and over with a kind of feverish, absent-minded annoyance, the way a woman might repeatedly brush a wayward strand of hair out of her eyes.
Her hand closed around something plastic. Cylindrical.
The bottle.
She fished it up. The whimpering rose in pitch and peaked in a funny little croak of triumph. She held the bottle over her head for a moment and shook it like an athlete waving a trophy, grinning savagely, her teeth streaked with blood. Faith Yokas might have found this grin rather familiar; it was kissing-cousin to the one Cruz had worn just after being shot. It made her look like a cannibal.
In a sense she was. It had gotten so bad now that she was literally eating her own tongue.
That water, though ... it was still gonna taste sooo good, tongue or no tongue, it would taste so good and for a moment it would erase the pain altogether, she was convinced it would, because the pain and the thirst were one now. Painthirst, remember? One connected to the other. If one was quenched, the other would be, too - at least temporarily. That was the working theory, anyway.
She spun the cap off -
with her thumb and turned the bottle upside down over her mouth.
It was empty.
Cruz brought it back down to eye-level and looked at it with stupid surprise.
Empty.
And she should have known that. It was lighter than it should have been and there was no liquid sloshing around inside - clues which all pointed to a diagnosis of empty. It was also the wrong bottle altogether. Wrong shape, wrong color, wrong everything. It was not the one Noble had helped her drink from; it was the one he'd bought to go with her sad little breakfast. The same one that later rolled under the seat when he started torturing her with the tape deck, spilling its contents. The cap on this one was a screw-top; the cap on the one Noble had held to her lips was a pop-up valve. The label on this one said Aquafina (Pure Refreshment!); the one Noble had fed her from had the Adidas name stenciled on it.
She'd fought for - and won - an empty plastic bottle.
But there's water everywhere! Water outside right now, falling from the sky in buckets. All you've gotta do is roll down the window and hold the bottle out!
Which was sort of like saying she could just tap her heels together three times and all of this would be over, she'd be home in her bed and this would all turn out to have been a bad dream. She could no more find the strength to roll down the window, hold the bottle out, and let it fill than she could wish herself away from all of this, wish herself back into a warm bed and a body that was still healthy and intact.
Water water everywhere and not a fucking drop to drink. Ha ha.
Cruz threw the bottle at the windshield. It bounced back, hit her square in the face, then rebounded over onto the driver's seat. She uttered a wild, involuntary laugh in spite of herself, then began to cry. She sagged over in the seat and cried until she started to slip again, and this time she let herself slip because if she did she could at least forget the -
(painthirst)
the sound of the rain, she might forget -
(Lettie always wants to be held always puts her arms up)
the wasps in her head and things began to dim and she let herself be swept -
(the icicles she'll reach up she always reaches up wants to be held wants to knock them down) (hit her I'm sorry I'm sorry) (fire air's thick can't breathe can't) (I felt her go) (let go of my hand almost fell) (Papa bought me fish!) (She died a little while ago)
into the flow, she let herself slip and she didn't care if she saw Lettie, she always saw Lettie anyway, Lettie now and forever, Lettie with her arms up she -
(always puts -
- her arms -
- up to be held.
Lettie sitting splay-legged on the ground with her arms up, locked in classic please-hold-me-'Ritza position. Arms up, fingers wiggling.
And that's what gets Maritza, that's what makes her strike her sister in anger for the first and only time in her life - the fingers. The wiggling fingers. It isn't the fact that the girl is wearing this stupid pink frilly tank-top/shorts ensemble with a fluffy teddy bear on the chest (the fluff's real, too - white, downy stuff glued over the picture; the shorts have a smaller version on the left hip). It's the fact that the girl is eighteen years old and she's got her hair in pigtails and she's dressed like an eight-year-old trying to dress like a hooker, and she's holding her arms up to her sister and wiggling her fingers. It's fucking grotesque. Sick parody of the toddler who used to walk up to her and stick her pudgy arms in the air. Pick me up, 'Ritza.
And the thing is, this shouldn't even be happening. She cut Lettie off a year ago (not long after a certain ski trip on which a certain photograph had been snapped) but the two still have the occassional run-in. And there is always that bizarre, eerie sense of predestination in these meetings, of Fate with a capital F, because New York's a big city and yet every now and then the Cruz sisters can still collide, just as they will collide in that hospital room at Angel of Mercy after the final crash. Maritza tried to turn her back, but some grim, pitiless God is saying no, sorry, she's your burden, now and forever, you made your promise, you put your name to your verbal contract, and so here she is.
Here she is, holding her arms up, wiggling her fingers.
And that's what does it. The wiggling fingers are what makes Maritza - already buzzing on adrenaline, the red curtain already hanging over her mind - punch her sister in the face. She's been tempted in the past, God knows she's been tempted before and she never succumbed, and she'll be tempted again and she won't succumb -
(she will remain perfectly Sarge
but in this moment she hits her, it's Cam Wilcox all over again, only this time it's her sister's face on the business end of her fist. Her sister's blood on her knuckles.
And that same sense of how quickly things can go sour. How easily.
Here are the facts: less than ten minutes ago Maritza Cruz and Johnny Hoyle were sitting in an unmarked RMP on a meal break. And there, right in front of them, is this skinny little hooker in a pink tank and shorts getting into a car to do some bi'nez. And did the happy couple even have the decency to drive away? Nope - they just got right down to the bi'nez right there; Maritza and Johnny saw two heads bobbing around (hammering out a price) and then suddenly there was only one head bobbing around, because the one belonging to the pink-clad businessgirl in the passenger seat had dropped out of sight.
A moment later the car began to rock.
So what did Maritza and Johnny do? They were Anti-Crime, and what they were witnessing was, technically speaking, a crime. But they were also working a grueling midnight shift and they'd just started a meal period; Johnny had just unwrapped a big sloppy burger and Maritza had just taken the first bite of a ham sandwich, and maybe a whore giving a lil' head right in front of them wasn't really worth the effort and the paperwork and the ruined lunch.
On the other hand, it was the sort of floor-show that kind of killed the appetite anyway, wasn't it?
Johnny called it: the hooker had her dirty duty to perform, but they were paid public servants and as such they had theirs. Cruz re-wrapped her once-bitten ham sandwich and Johnny did the same with his burger. They went in, and of course it ended up being none other than Letitia Cruz, the one and only, Lettie in her pigtails and stupid kindergarten outfit. Her latest trade secret. She was eighteen, but small enough and skinny enough (and cute enough; she had another year before she hit full-bore junkie) to pass for much younger, and she used the Lolita act as part of her appeal. She catered to the perverts, the sick fucks who fantasized about their daughters but didn't quite have the guts to do anything about it. The nice, upstanding family men who snuck out at night and went to the "seedy side of town" (Lettie and Maritza's neighborhood, in other words) to look for a safe release.
And Lettie had nabbed herself a juicy one tonight; her client was a nice-looking guy of about forty-five. Black. Balding. Wearing a knitted sweater stretched over a generous potbelly. Glasses set in neat, slender frames. Dear ol' Dad, driving a sleek, bottle-green sedan and looking like the rabbit caught in the headlights.
Maritza was on him before he knew what was happening. She holstered her gun, mainly because she wanted to use her fists; the rage had come on her, the red curtain had fallen over her mind and she wanted to kill him, but she wanted it to be a bare-knuckle job. In a sense, this too was Cameron Wilcox all over again.
She landed three blows before either the pervert, Lettie, or Johnny could even register what was going on, let alone react. The first was a glancing punch across the pervert's face that knocked off his glasses but did almost no damage. The second broke his nose. The third sank into his fat gut and drove the wind out of him. Cruz would later claim self-defense (Dear ol' Dad panicked and attacked her; she defended herself) and Johnny will back her up on it. Good ol' Johnny Hoyle, who always treated her like an equal and a friend, who will end up eating his own pistol over a couple of piddly dollars because of a rookie named J.D. Hart. Johnny actually stood back and let Maritza beat on the guy; it was Lettie who jumped on her and tried to stop her, Lettie who clawed at her, screaming and crying and begging in English and Spanish for Maritza not to hurt him,as if the man was something to her.
The scene was surreal. Maritza looked like a bulldog ripping into a piece of meat; Lettie looked like some yappy little purse-puppy, hopping around them in her frilly little outfit, barking helplessly, perhaps trying to nab a bite for herself.
It was only when Maritza started to slam Dear ol' Dad's head against the hood of his car that Johnny stepped in, pinned her arms behind her, and pulled her away. Dear ol' Dad sagged against his 50K sedan, sliding down the side and smearing a bloody handprint along the door as he went. He now had a broken nose, two cracked ribs, both eyes were swollen shut, and his scalp was split open in two places. Plus assorted bruises and lacerations. His face was a horror-show.
But he was conscious. Muttering. Crying. Cursing. To Maritza it sounded like the usual shit. Something about suing your asses. Something about taking your badges. Something about police brutality.
Maritza broke free and started kicking him.
She managed to land a couple of good ones before being pulled away again. Only this time it wasn't Johnny who saved her from elevating an assault to a murder charge; it was Lettie who yanked her around, displaying a physical strength Maritza would not have credited her with.
And guts. Lettie had to have guts to touch her like that right now, because she surely must have known that she was next on the shit-list. Lettie was in for a pounding of her own, and yet Lettie was still screaming at her, and Maritza was screaming back at her. Some of it's Spanish and some of it's English and very little of it makes any sense because they were screaming over top of each other, the same old no-you-can't-yes-I-can screaming match, but the Cruz sisters are old hands and they can always find six million new ways to say the same things.
Johnny had become irrelevant. Likewise Lettie's newly tenderized client. Another RMP had appeared on the scene, and the two new boys were getting off on the spectacle. Maritza could sense them, two fat vets who had assessed the situation and promptly taken up spectator positions next to their car, settling back to watch the two hotblooded Latin ladies rip into each other - it's better than Jerry Springer and the admission's free.
She couldn't see them, but she could sense them nudging each other. Laughing. Probably hoping for her to yell something like wha-EVA! or oh no you DI'ENT! and start pulling Lettie's hair.
But that didn't happen. Because when things get too hot Letitia Cruz just curls up into a ball and plays dead. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Lettie had picked the oldest and most reliable fallback position from her bag of tricks: she started to cry, and she held her arms out to be hugged. Poor me, this position says. Poor little me, I can't help myself -
(I'm sorry, 'Ritza)
so take pity on me.
And Maritza didn't want to touch the kid, didn't want Lettie anywhere near her because there was something whitish and slimy-looking smeared all over Lettie's lips and cheeks and chin; apparently Dear ol' Dad had gotten his money's worth after all. Maritza planted her hands in the center of Lettie's chest and shoved her back on her ass, ripping her disgusting little girl's shirt down the center to reveal two sour, flat little breast-things and a ribcage that stood out in harsh, painful relief. Get yourself a set of sticks and you could play the girl's chest like a xylophone.
And Lettie just sits there on the ground, face screwed up, eyes running, arms up with the fingers wiggling, and that's why Maritza hits her, it's not the shirt or the fluffy bear on the shirt or the pigtails or the semen on her face, it's the wiggling fingers, she hits her because she doesn't know what else to do -
- but scream, scream because it -
(hurts oh please God please make it stop make it stop hurting oh please please make it stop hurting please please please)
- let me wake up in -
- Noble's car. In Noble's car. Rain on the roof, pain and thirst and wasps in her head, and Noble would be back soon and she awoke with the terrible, irrefutable certainty that he would bring the police with him. The police, and Schaeffer -
(it should be you Cruz, you up there in the burn unit with half your skin baked off)
would be with them. Noble knew everything now, she'd told him everything, everything except Alvarez, but he would have figured that out for himself, he and Schaeffer together. They were in cahoots, those two, Noble would bring Schaeffer and the police because she'd murdered Gaines and gotten away with it and she'd murdered Alvarez and gotten away with it, when she -
- took Michael Alvarez out in the same lot where she'd shot Gaines. She put him down on his knees and put the .32 revolver to his head. She was crying. Crying and barely able to see. It was rage, the red curtain had fallen over her, but it was choked and helpless and turned in on itself, because she was about to kill this man, a man who had a hand in destroying her sister's life, but at the same time she knew he wasn't that man - this was a different man. Alvarez wasn't the gangbanger who'd help put her sister on the road to junkie three-and-a-half years ago. This Alvarez had been shot in a drive-by, had some kind of Great Revelation, and pledged to go straight.
And Maritza believed him, she knew he was trying to do right, that he was honest and clean and had the potential to make a life for himself. He was going to school and doing well at it, he was surprisingly well-spoken and claimed to be interested in dentistry. Dentistry, if you could dig it. He volunteered to be a C.I. for Anti-Crime because that was just the kind of guy he was now. He'd been a gangbanger and a drug dealer and now he was a walking, talking happy ending.
And she hated him for that, for pulling himself up, for not being who she needed him to be, she hated him for not being the punk who used to smack Lettie around, who used to invite his friends over to take her for a spin ("poon-parties," he called these happy occasions), who had her name tattooed on his shoulder. That was what did it - the tattoo. There was always a trigger -
(wiggling fingers)
and this time it was the tattoo. Alvarez was covered in them, of course - his entire body was a four-volume written history of his days as an urban thug, and he often boasted to his police handlers that when he got rich and successful as a dentist (a dentist for Christ's sake, who ever put that idea in his head?), he was going to have all those unpleasant reminders of his past lasered off. Cruz didn't give two shits about his ridiculous plans for the future and cared even less about his tattoos ... until she saw her sister's name among them. She'd never planned to kill him, just like she'd never planned to kill Gaines ... but then she saw the tattoo, Letitia written in flowing, extravagant script across Alvarez's right shoulderblade ...
... and then somehow she was out in the dirt-and-gravel lot with him, Alvarez was crying and she was crying too, and he wasn't anything to her but the skell who'd helped turn Lettie into what she was. Because -
(hell is overflowing with the righteous)
that was who Maritza needed him to be. The guy who'd introduced Lettie to the wonderful world of hard drugs. The guy who'd once taunted her by threatening to cut Lettie's head off and leave it in her bed, like the horse in the Godfather. The guy who'd once gotten Lettie pregnant and then walked her down to the clinic and made sure she went inside ... which she did willingly enough, because it was probably a choice between an abortion or a couple of hard punches to the gut. That was who Michael Alvarez was to Maritza Cruz, right up to the moment when she cocked the hammer. The "Letitia" on his shoulder could have been anybody, but to Maritza Cruz it was her Letitia, and he begged right up to the end and when he saw she was serious he screamed and wailed and called for his mother, and in the end it didn't make any difference and she awoke -
- in Noble's car with a jolt and her face throbbing and her head pounding and the wasps buzzing and she could hear her own voice, she was shaking all over, cold and hot and cold and hot at the same time, there was a deep, inexplicable terror in her and she was expelling one breathless word over and over in time with each convulsion:
"Nnno. Nnno. Nnno. Nnno. Nn - "
She had to stay awake.
She had to stay awake and keep her -
(focus focus focus focus)
eyes -
(!FOCUS!)
open.
Her eyes fell shut almost immediately. There was -
- a weight on her lap now. Something heavy across her thighs.
(water bottle? God I hope so hope so water thirsty painthirst)
No, it couldn't be the water bottle. Too big.
The Tec-9, maybe? Maybe. She'd been doing a lot of thrashing; the gun may have gotten jounced around and ended up in her lap. She supposed she should be thankful it hadn't gone off, blown a hole in her gut, maybe shattered her other arm. Wouldn't that have been funny?
But the gun was still nestled down next to her right hip. This thing in her lap almost felt like a bowling ball. Would Noble have come back and put a bowling ball in her lap? The thought was just ridiculous enough to squeeze something like a shaky little chuckle out of her.
Cruz opened her eyes and looked down.
The head was recognizable as the one which had once belonged to Letitia Cruz, but at the same time it wasn't - it was Lettie's face but it was also that of a monster. The skin was gray and dotted with black, scabrous sores. The eyes were rolled up to the whites. The mouth yawned open, but it was too open, the jaws had been stretched wider than what should have been anatomically possible.
And the nose and upper lip were smeared with something. Not blood. Something grayish-white.
Meth.
Of course meth.
Cruz closed her eyes, squeezed them closed. She did not accept this. She did not accept it because she was awake and this was real. She was in Noble's car. There was rain outside. The empty plastic bottle still lay on the driver's seat where it had fallen after she threw it at the windshield. And she was awake.
She tried to count off ten seconds, made it to six, and then opened her eyes again.
The head was still there.
Heart pounding, Cruz closed her eyes again. This time she counted out loud, counted in the pinched squeak of a small child, "onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten" leaving no pause between each, and then she opened her eyes again and the head was still there.
The eyes rolled down and looked directly into her own. Only they didn't move the way human eyes are supposed to move, which was to say they didn't twitch and flit around; they swung down with an awful, unnatural sluggishness, the movement too smooth, too slow, somehow reptilian. They were not accusatory, sad, happy, angry, anything. They were flat, inhuman things, lusterless, without sense, and Cruz heard the sound before she even realized that she was the one making it (for an awful moment she thought it was coming from the gaping mouth of the head), a high teakettle whine that started deep in her chest and then rose and rose and rose and then she threw her head back and it erupted into a scream, she was screaming, screaming, screaming, and she did not -
- hear the door of the car open, she did not hear the -
- voice say "Oh Jesus Christ" in a tone that was low and urgent and horrified; the words were there but she could make no sense of them. She was beyond sense, beyond herself, beyond anything. The car was gone, the rain was gone, this new voice was irrelevant; there were only the wasps, the wasps and the weight of the head in her lap and the sound she was making, one that could no longer rightly be called screaming - she had progressed to howling. The sound was animal, deeply primitive, a sound that might have rolled across the plains in a time when human beings were just starting to walk upright.
The male voice again: "Awww, fucking hell, Cruz - "
Something made it through the complete mental whiteout, a sensation: a hand grabbing her left thigh, shaking her. The physical touch cracked the wall, and the first small flicker of coherent thought -
(dreaming dreaming the head's a dream, dream within a dream, dream outside a dream)
broke through. There was another person with her now. A sense of an objective world beyond herself, one where no severed Lettie-head was sitting in her lap. There was a part of her conscious mind coming back online now, and it seized on the touch and the voice the way a person lost in the dark will seize on a voice for direction. It was Noble, she was sure. If he just kept talking she would -
Noble punched her in the face.
It wasn't a light punch, either - he was apparently trying to shut her up any way he could, even if it meant knocking her cold. She was getting her grip back on conscious thought, and yet she kept howling, there was a darker and far more powerful part of her brain that kept shrieking at her -
(oh the head the head Lettie's head and the EYES the EYES)
that it was all really real, really real, just like with the arm, the dream about the safehouse and the black and swollen arm -
Noble hit her again. Cruz's working arm lashed out - more out of reflex than spite - and her fist came up hard against something warm and soft. Noble's face.
"OW! Goddammit!"
Good, good, that was good, let him squeal. There was a solid, three-dimensional quality to Noble's voice that wasn't there before. He was real. This time he was real.
But her mouth had run away with her. The functioning part of her mind really wasn't all that significant yet, and motor control was still off-limits. All she could see was the head, the eyes, she could feel the weight of it in her lap, and all she could do was howl.
And that was when Aaron Noble did something absolutely unconscionable. It was the only thing he could do, the only thing he could think of to get this thrashing, howling woman-thing to shut up.
He placed his hand directly on Cruz's wounded shoulder, and he squeezed.
Something broke. She felt it very clearly. There was a muffled, squishy kind of crunch as something inside her shoulder broke, or tore, or popped. The scream caught in her throat and choked off. Her eyelids flew up like window shades, eyes bugging. Her bladder let go in a warm rush. There was one eternal millisecond of blinding, white-hot pain, pain that eclipsed everything that had come before it, blanked her mind, killed away all of the sense she was just starting to get back. The car disappeared again and so did Noble. The head disappeared, the rain dwindled away to a faint murmur, and once again the world turned black.
No dreams this time. No fragmentary swill of memory and nightmare. Just blackness.
And the wasps.