Chapter 11

Cruz

II.

When she awoke she found herself slumped over on her right side against the door of the car, her head resting against something plump and soft and a bit scratchy. She opened her right eye to a slit and saw it was a red wool blanket; the same one she'd seen lying amidst the litter of books and empty cans in the back seat. He'd rolled it up and tucked it in between her head and the door as a pillow.

The car's engine wasn't running, the radio was off; they were still. Noble was still with her; she felt him shift his weight in the driver's seat and heard him utter a low, shaky sigh. She could put an easy picture with it: Noble drawing his hands wearily down over his face, the tired martyr of a crazy woman's lost cause. The man on the Great Writer's Adventure, and what a grueling Adventure it was. Noble was back with her, real and true, no doubt about it. He'd rolled up a blanket and made a pillow for her. He was trying to help her. He'd hurt her, he'd tried to yank her arm off -

(no no that never happened did it? did it? it didn't, did it? did it?)

but now he was trying to help her, and that was good because now he could help her with the -

(painthirst)

water bottle again.

"Five hours," he said finally. His voice was low and thoughtful, but with that same shaky edge it had just before he left her alone in the car. "I was gone five hours. That was about how long I thought I'd be away, right?"

Cruz said nothing.

"Had to shoot me some pool with the Ig-ster," he went on. "Lost a hundred-and-eighty bucks." He paused. "Aren't you gonna ask me how it went?"

Cruz murmured something. It was unlikely Noble understood her; she had no idea what she'd tried to say.

"I'll fill you in on the details later," he said remotely. "It's a bit on the ... uh ... complicated side."

Another pause. Another sigh.

"I could hear you a block away," he said after a moment. "You know that? I came out of the bar, and I started to cross the street, and I could hear you ... Jesus, Cruz, I can't even call what you were doing freaking out. I don't even know what to call it. It was ... I've never ... I mean, I've seen people go on bad trips before, I saw one once where this guy ... he took it into his head to cut his own toes off with an electric kitchen knife. He got through three of them before the knife jammed up and he clued in to what he was doing and ... God, I thought that was the worst thing I'd ever seen, and I've seen a lot worse since then, but that just now ... that was bloodcurdling. My editor would kill me if I ever used that word in a book, but that's all I've got. Bloodcurdling. You sure have a knack for setting precedence, Cruz."

"Just shut -"

up and drive, she muttered ... and realized a moment later that her voice had died halfway through, the statement finishing itself in her head. She couldn't speak. Her jaw felt like it was packed in cement, her tongue had been chewed into mulch, and she had screamed her voice away.

"You pissed yourself, did you know that?" Noble said. His tone had switched to a loud, gruff bark - the tone of a man who is deeply shaken and trying to hide it. "Big tough cop pissed in her pants. I'll bet you didn't even realize it."

Cruz didn't bother to reply.

To be perfectly truthful, however, he was right: she didn't.

"And you know what really burns me? I'm never gonna see one red cent of compensation. You've made a complete fucking mess of my car, and I damn well ought to bill you for it. And I can't. Now I've gotta deal with piss on the seat as well as blood all over the dash. Fucking stinks in here. And you didn't exactly smell like a rosegarden to start with."

"Drive," she croaked. It took almost thirty seconds of concentration and gathering of will to make that one word.

"Drive?" Noble said. He sounded nonplussed, maybe a bit amused, and still very jittery. "Drive where? We're already here, Cruz. You were zonked out through the whole ride. Thank God." He tapped her kneecap to get her attention, staying prudently clear of her shoulder. "Look yonder. There's the place I told you about. Our hidey-hole. Number two-twenty-five."

Cruz let her blanket-pillow fall to the floor and lifted her head; that she was able to do this at all was vaguely encouraging. She knew he'd done some serious damage when he squeezed her shoulder - ripped a few sutures, most likely - and she knew she'd done some serious damage herself. She hurt all over and there was still that perpetual buzz in her head ... but she could move ... and she could think. A little, anyway.

She saw that they were no longer nestled behind the dumpster; they now appeared to be in a little suburb comprised of simple, shoeboxy single-story houses, a suburb that looked vaguely familiar to her although there was nothing terribly fetching about it, nothing that stood out. The houses were, for the most part, ill-kept dumps. Two-twenty-five itself was an outright derelict, its windows boarded up, no visible For Sale sign on the lawn.

She wondered if there were any fifteen-foot windows or antique couches inside, and -

(we're looking at a battlefield amputation here, Two-Bags)

shuddered.

"It's funny how things come around, isn't it?" Noble said.

Cruz turned her head very slowly to look at him; one might almost have expected to hear a rusty screeeee sound coming from the tendons in her neck.

The writer was smiling at her, but it wasn't an easy smile, and it didn't touch his eyes. From what she could see (and that wasn't much) Noble looked a little on the pasty side himself. He was chewing his lower lip, his watery eyes wide and hectic.

"I say that," he continued, "because you've been to this neighborhood before. And since you don't look too capable of puzzling it out for yourself, I'll tell you - we are now only two blocks away from a certain burned-out house. A certain burned-out meth lab you may have had acquaintance with in the not-too-distant past."

Cruz looked at him a moment longer. She had nothing to say to that, nothing at all, nor did she have a response for anything else he might throw at her. She put her head down again and closed her eyes.

There was a long period in which Noble didn't speak. Cruz felt herself slipping again and forced herself to -

(focus)

stay awake. She could keep her eyes closed, but she had to stay awake. She had to.

She didn't want to see the head again. Lettie's head. Lettie's eyes.

God, no.

"Listen to that," Noble said.

"What?" she rasped.

"Just listen."

Cruz listened. Rain on the roof of the car. The eternal buzzing in her head. That was it.

No, that wasn't it. There was something else. A scratchy sound, uneven, unpleasant. Her own breathing. Each intake was a labored wheeze - each expiration was undershot with a little squeak of pain.

"You hear it, don't you?" Noble said.

Cruz nodded.

"I had a car once ... about twenty-some years ago, this was. A '63 Jaguar I bought second-hand, dirt-cheap. A lemon. It ran okay for about two months and then it started making this sound. A bad sound. Kind of like the sound you're making right now, Cruz. The moral of the story: two weeks later that big red Jag was in automotive heaven."

"Go," Cruz said. It was all she would offer by way of reply. All she could offer.

"Go," Noble repeated wearily. "Go to hell? Go fishing? Go to Timbuktu? Go pee again? Stop me when I'm getting warm here, Two-Bags."

"Inside." She gestured out the window at number two-twenty-five. "There."

Noble didn't budge. "Did you think about what I said, Cruz? About hell, and what hell is overflowing with?"

"Just. Go. Noble."

"No," he said. "I want you to look at something first. I want you to - "

(I want you to look at it the arm black bloated ROTTING)

"- look in the mirror."

Cruz sensed him reaching up, heard the little click as he turned the rearview mirror towards her.

A black idea rose up and she fastened onto it with terrible certainty: when she looked up, she would see the same thing she saw in the dream, only instead of her arm rotting it would be her face, her face would be puffed up, her eyes two white milky things like poached eggs, lips peeling back from her teeth ... that made sense because her face felt swollen, hot, throbbing -

Cruz's eyes snapped open.

She had to see, she had to make sure that wasn't true.

It wasn't. She was not rotting. But what she was wasn't much better. Her complexion had now deepened to match the unnatural gray of her starving left hand, her lips and nostrils dark with a crust of dried blood. She licked her tongue out to try to clean some of it away and then hastily put it away again; her stomach did an ominous roll at the sight of the red, raw, chewed-up thing that appeared between her lips. Her hair, tied back in a ponytail, was coming unraveled; strands were pasted to her cheeks with sweat in a way that made her think, uneasily, of long, thin cracks in her skin. A large red blotch had appeared in the white of her right eye, just below the iris, the result of a burst blood vessel. And her left cheek was already growing a nice dark bruise from where Noble had hit her.

"Just wanted you to see," he said, and there was something in his voice now that made her uneasy, even through the exhaustion and semi-delirium. "Just wanted you to see exactly what you've done to yourself, Cruz." He tapped his watch. "The time is now 4:15 PM, on the button. What time did you say you snuck out of Mercy yesterday? Around noon-ish, right? So you've been out in the world for about twenty-eight hours now. And this is what you've done to yourself. What do you think you'll look like in another twenty-eight? Or do you even expect to survive that long?"

"House."

He snorted. "You were actually a beautiful woman before this all started, you know. It's hard for me to admit that, what with you being such a sad, contemptible sack of shit, but I'm not blind. A beautiful woman with an ugly, ugly mind. Now everything matches up. The outside's just as ugly as the inside."

"House, Noble. Now."

Another long pause. Yet another sigh.

"It'll be over soon, Cruz," he said softly. "Just little further now."

Tenderness again. Tenderness from him, from Noble. Tenderness and comfort. She thought of him feeding her water from the bottle like a baby, thought of the future: those half-sickening, half-comical images of Noble helping her bathe, Noble spoon-feeding her soft food. Open wide, here comes the airplane, into the hangar! She thought of these things, thought of how low she'd fallen, and she found that there was still shame, that even now she could still feel shame, writhing in the middle of the pain like ...

... well, like maggots writhing in a rotten wound, right?

"Inside," she whispered. "Shut up ... and go."

Noble yanked the doorhandle up hard enough to produce a metallic squeal of protest somewhere inside the mechanism. "Righty-o, Sarge," he sighed, and started to get out of the car. Then he paused and turned to her. "Uh ... can you even walk?"

Cruz nodded. Her new trademark nod. Chin goes up, chin goes down. Three times fast.

"You sure about that?"

She did her little nod again. And that, apparently, was good enough for him; Noble all but popped out of the car, skip-jogged around the front, and started up the front path of two-twenty-five, a house that was only two blocks from the burnt-out ruins of the meth-lab where Letitia Cruz had died. If, that was, she could believe anything Noble said.

She found she did. She did believe him. Because it was as he said, wasn't it? It was exactly as he said: things come around.

Cruz put her hand on the doorhandle and shifted in her seat.

Pain sawed through her body, the center of her head. She bit habitually into her tongue; another little chunk came off, this one about the size of a dime. This time she managed to spit it out in a stream of blood that struck the dashboard and splattered against what was already there. More mess for Noble to clean up. If somebody walked by, if somebody looked in the window and saw the blood on the dash, they'd call the cops for sure.

She should probably call him back and tell him that.

And another thing: she hadn't asked him for water. She needed water before she could get up and walk.

Oh, let's just be honest here: she didn't want to have to get up and walk at all.

And yet she had to. She had no choice. Noble obviously wasn't going to help her; he wouldn't even open the door for her. She had nobody to rely on but herself.

She had to keep going.

She had to move.

Instead, Cruz lowered her head and put her remaining hand over her eyes, in pain from head to toe, top to bottom, her shoulder full of jagged glass, that dull, liquid pain pulsing behind her nose and eyes and forehead, her tongue raw and slick and bleeding down the back of her throat, the taste in her mouth foul beyond description.

How could she move in all of that? How could she be expected to bear up under all of that? How?

And the wasps. Oh, God, the wasps in her head.

Five minutes. To be free of this just for five minutes. She would give anything. Anything at all.

Even Buford? a little voice in her head asked immediately. It was grim, without irony, without identity. Would you throw in the towel and give this all up?

She squeezed her eyes shut and uttered a single, helpless dry-sob, kneading her forehead, pulling at it, as if trying physically to reach in and draw all of it out of her head, everything, all of it, pull it all out and throw it away, but she couldn't because it was all she had, it was all she had left. She was walking a tightrope over an abyss - there was this or there was nothing, just the plunge into whatever lay below, prison or a pine box. Richard Buford was walking around a free man, Richard Buford was breathing the air and living free, and her sister was dead because of him, and her own life was gone, everything she'd done was undone, and if she stopped now then Buford would win. She would be handing over what was left of her life to him.

Buford would win. And that could never be allowed to stand.

Never.

Cruz opened the car door, gasping as the rain washed in and started soaking her all over again.

That was the easy part. Now came the hard part. She'd been off her feet since the puking fit, and that was at least a couple of -

(?hours days months years?)

ago. She put her good hand on the doorframe and helped herself to sit up, then swung her legs out, feet touching down on the pavement.

"Hustle it up, Cruz!" Noble called. He was now standing at the foot of two-twenty-five's front steps. "If you can walk, then walk! I'm not carrying you!"

Cruz somehow managed to get out of the car and up on her feet; she did not know exactly how. It was harder this time, much harder than it had been at Mercy. But she did it.

Several things happened, all of them predictable: her legs shook, her head spun, her stomach swapped places with her heart. She draped her good arm over the open door of the car and hung on - it wasn't a hurricane by any stretch but the storm had definitely upped the ante; the wind hammered at her, driving the rain against her face with enough force to sting.

She did well enough against the elements, but she lost the battle with her stomach. She leaned over and vomited again, a thin, brackish stew of bile and saliva and the blood she'd been swallowing as she chewed away at her tongue. She felt her equilibrium start to list to the right and literally held onto the door for dear life. If she fell, she'd never get up. She knew that.

She closed her eyes and waited for it to pass, turning her face to the rain and opening her mouth, drinking in what she could.

This was hell. She was in hell.

She thought of Lettie on the ski slope. Thought of rolling around in the snow with her, stuffing handfuls of it down each other's backs, squealing and giggling like they were both six years old.

She held the image. Drew strength from it.

Noble was going to fix her up. Get her some dope. Help her get better. And then help her get Buford.

She opened her eyes and slammed the door, using the momentum to push off from the car and get herself moving. She tottered along two-twenty-five's front path, looking like an extra from a zombie movie who'd wandered away from the set in full makeup and still in character. She locked her eyes on Noble. He was her anchor, for better or for worse, the only thing she could see through the downpour, the only thing left in the world the least bit sane. So she kept her eyes on him, and she did not see the motorcycle that was parked in the driveway, just barely visible around the right side of the house.

What she saw was blue fire. The pain and the thirst and the wasps in her head had been joined by something new: a kind of shimmering blue corona around the edges of her vision. Blue fire.

Noble stood waiting patiently for her in the middle of it, getting soaked in the downpour, not minding a bit. Noble, who would help her get to Buford, and she would kill Buford, and Lettie would finally be able to rest, and then it would all be over, it would all be gone. She wouldn't have to see it anymore or think about it anymore. It would all be gone. She wouldn't have to think about the hospital anymore, she wouldn't have to think about the alley, or catching Lettie hooking in her pink kiddie outfit, or that Holland son of a bitch tricking Lettie into doing his gang-bang video and then beating her senseless with his All-American buddies. She wouldn't have to think about all the trips to rehab, the periods of shaky recovery afterwards, the narc-anon meetings and the tearful hugs and all the broken promises, hers and Lettie's both. She wouldn't have to think about Gaines or Alvarez anymore, or Boscorelli or Yokas or Noble or Schaeffer or anybody, any of it.

Because she would have made up for it all. She would have made it right.

Cruz shuffled along the path, legs carrying her inexorably forward though she was exhausted and wet and thirsty and dying on her feet and every step was agony, almost as if she were being propelled by some other hand, some malignant external force that was driving her along for its own sick amusement. Perhaps that same grim and pitiless God that kept throwing her sister back in her face, that kept insisting on reminding her of her obligations.

He's gonna fix me up, she thought again, and even now, even after everything she'd come through, she could still believe this, right through to the core of her psyche. Maybe not in spite of what she'd gone through but because of it. He's gonna fix me up, get me some dope, everything's gonna be fine, everything will turn out okay, just a bad patch, I'll get over it, he'll help me get better and then I'll get Buford.

And she believed it. She believed it all.

Right up to the very end, Maritza Cruz believed it completely.