I know I've said this before, but the wait between now and the next update won't be as long - I think I can say it truthfully this time ;) The story's nearly finished now - this chapter, another about the same length, a very short chapter after that, and the epilogue. Plus, before I put the epilogue up I'll probably do a final overall edit, but it won't be the major overhaul I did back in December '04 - it'll just be to give the story a final trim and add some lingering details learned about Cruz just before the show went off the air, such as her sister's involvement in Santeria. Beyond that, we're nearly done ...
So let's get on with it.
Chapter 12
Bosco
A standoff, seen from the circling bird's-eye view of a news chopper:
Aaron Noble's car (one of Aaron Noble's cars; he owns at least six, including a restored 1926 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost he probably paid through the nose for and probably wouldn't dare actually drive anyway) sits alone and isolated right in the middle of what should be a busy intersection and isn't. There are no other cars on the street. No people in sight, either. The police have erected roadblocks and cleared away the rubberneckers. This is a serious situation. Serious as in grave.
The scene revolves slowly as the helicopter tracks in lazy circles. Certain eagle-eyed viewers might have already noted - as the reporters soon will - that there actually appears to be the vague suggestion of activity in the car. Heads and hands can be seen bobbing erratically around inside. As if, say, a heated argument might be taking place between the individual in the passenger seat (perp) and the individual in the driver's seat (hostage).
Though barely visible, the individual in the passenger seat (perp) appears to have a fall of long, dark hair.
Certain other eagle-eyed viewers - say, those who have had professional experience in similar matters - know that while everybody wants a peaceful outcome, this doesn't look like the sort of situation that has "peaceful" written anywhere on it or near it. A fully tooled-up ESU team, brandishing MP5 sub machineguns and riot shields, will probably be holding position somewhere off camera, waiting for the Green Light. Likewise the sharpshooters who may be taking up position, or may be in position already. The Green Light will come if things look like they're going to go nuclear and the risks of action outweigh the risks of inaction. This is a bad situation, remember. Bad. The occupant in the passenger seat (perp) is known to police (in a manner of speaking!), but not known for keeping a cool head, and now he's -
(or perhaps it's she's)
- been cornered. In a car, no less. And a vehicle complicates matters in a way a simple house-standoff would not. The occupant in the passenger seat (perp) could order the occupant in the driver's seat (hostage) to do something unwise, such as try to move the car, or something purely insane, such as ram one of the roadblocks or try to run down a uniformed officer. Complicating matters further: said occupant in the driver's seat (hostage) happens to be somebody a bit on the famous side. A popular, liberal-minded crime writer and a respected journalist, to be exact. Nobody wants to see the expensively educated brain responsible for all those stimulating books (not to mention those stimulating book sales) painting the inside of his own car's windows. Certainly not on national television; if viewers would care to direct their eyes to the lower left, they will notice the distinctive "CNN" logo tucked away down in the corner.
It's Live TV at its most intense, and it's possible that hours have already passed. The mood is one of extreme tension; everyone knows that this can't go on much longer. That it can't be allowed to go on much longer. Even the reporters - both the anonymous grunts in the news chopper and the big household-name generals back in the newsroom - are mostly silent, holding their collective breath, probably saving their smart remarks for when things look like they're coming to a head.
And suddenly, it happens with no warning - things come to a head!
Down on the ground, the driver's side door of the car flies open. A figure - male, by the look of him - emerges and bolts across the intersection; he appears middle-aged but he moves with the preternatural speed of a man who expects to have to outrun a volley of bullets at any given moment.
He disappears behind one of the roadblocks and out of sight, presumably absorbed into the protective network of police officers. Whether his escape was opportunistic or if his captor just let him go ... who knows?
And who cares? Not ESU, that's for sure: with the hostage safe, the team immediately moves in, approaching the passenger side of the car in tight, cautious formation, shields and weapons raised.
Another surprise: now the passenger door opens. A second figure emerges. Only instead of following the other's example by trying to run, this figure goes the opposite route, boldly approaching the ESU team at what appears to be an almost leisurely pace. This individual is unmistakably female, and she does indeed appear to have a fall of long, dark hair.
The camera's operator seems a bit startled - the picture jiggles slightly - but he keeps filming, and the reporters are really cawing and jabbering now. Not one word of it is worth transcribing; the real question is not what they're saying but rather why they're getting so worked up.
The figure is holding a gun. That's why they're so worked up.
The figure is the perp, and the perp is Maritza Cruz, the former Anti-Crime Sergeant out of the NYPD's Fifty-Fifth Precinct. She is holding what looks like a handgun, and she's aiming it right at the ESU team. She has not fired a shot, and there are certain members of the audience who know that she almost certainly won't. Whatever else might be wrong with her, Cruz is not and never was a cop-killer. Make no mistake about that.
Which can only mean that she's aiming a gun at a heavily armed ESU team with absolutely no intention of using it. The ESU guys don't know that, of course, and Maritza Cruz knows they can't know that, but they don't know that she knows that they don't know that (whew!), and that's exactly what she's counting on. She wants them to think that she's going to try to kill them, try to shoot her way out of the stalemate or take a few of 'em down with her, and the result is exactly what one might expect.
What follows will be edited in later broadcasts for purposes of taste and simple human decency.
There is a series of flat, completely undramatic pop-pop-pops. Puffs of what appear to be smoke appear on the female figure in front of them. She jerks spastically; her clothes seem to ripple and jump as well, as if she's being struck by something or multiple somethings, in multiple places. The figure collapses, the pistol falling out of her hand. The chopper continues to circle. Blood begins to spread around the perp on the ground as the ESU team moves in to secure her. Doesn't matter that she probably has about fifteen rounds in her and will certainly be very, very dead; gotta makes sure she stays that way. Gotta assume she's still a threat. Gotta cuff the corpse. Procedure.
Aaron Noble is safe. So's his car, for what that's worth. And the perp is down.
And so concludes Mad-Dog Cruz's Last Stand (televised Live and Unedited for the last time ever). We hope you enjoyed the show.
Of course the details were all wrong. It was another of his little internal film strips and it was perhaps the most vivid yet, because it was not derived from memory this time; this one was a Maurice Boscorelli Original. But there were a lot of blank spots, gaps that his mind had to fill in with placeholders, and some of them - like the car - were actually quite ridiculous. In this theoretical version of events, Noble's car was the Silver Ghost, and Cruz appeared healthy when she emerged from the passenger side; her left arm appeared undamaged and she was dressed in the same clothes she'd been wearing the night Faith shot her.
None of which mattered. The entire scenario was still too lifelike, too three-dimensional, writing itself into being in a way that was spontaneous and completely involuntary, the product of a new and morbid kind of creativity Bosco never would have guessed himself capable of. It was exactly as Brian O'Malley had described it: imagery diluted from everything he'd witnessed or been party to in the course of his career, along with what he'd watched passively, as a member of this brave new world of televised car chases and hostage standoffs and police shootouts. Live and Unedited for public consumption.
Mad-Dog Cruz's Last Stand. Right?
Yeah, stick with that one. It was one of those bad jokes that should have sounded ridiculous and somehow didn't. Probably because it just connected too well to that image of Cruz standing in the middle of a street with a gun, making sure all eyes were on her, daring them to do it.
This isn't gonna be like that, though. No. It won't go down like that. It won't
No, no, no, it couldn't happen, could it? Sure, just keep believing that. And then look at Exhibit A, Glen Hobart. Hobart in his chair in his sweatpants and his wifebeater undershirt. And then ol' Boscorelli comes in to arrest him and starts jawing at him: come on, Glen, let's just take a ride down to the station, just us two guys, just us two buddies, trying to make the whole thing sound like a drive to the beach, too fucking stupid to see that the man in front of him had finally broken.
And then they're on the roof.
And then Bosco's own sidearm is used as the catalyst for the same kind of situation. Suicide by Cop.
No. This time it's different.
Oooh, such conviction in that thought! Such confidence! How was it so different? If Hobart could do it, then Cruz certainly could. Hobart had had to be given that one last little nudge to send him over the edge. Cruz had probably been halfway there already, waving her gun and threatening Faith and yelling about how cops had to do what cops had to do. And that was before Schaeffer entered the picture and showed her the full scope of her situation. Cruz was just one of those people who had self-destruction written all over them.
And by the way, what would she have done? Hmm? That was still a good question - a tired oldie but still a goodie. What would Cruz really have done that night if Faith had refused to hand over Noble's gun? Bosco had called it bluff and bluster. Cruz being Cruz. And like a good many other things, he wasn't so certain about it now.
And at this point, what did she have left? Why, nothing. If Schaeffer really did have as much on her as he said he did, then she had nothing to go back to, nothing to lose. Two suspects shot in cold blood ... that was bad business. Bosco still didn't want to believe Schaeffer could really connect her to two murders, but he didn't think the rat son of a bitch had lied just to impress him.
Cruz was going to die. They would find her, and when they did she'd do something to intentionally force their hand, and they would kill her. It might not look anything like his little mind-movie, but it would still be on his head. It would be Hobart all over again. Hobart had needed that one last little push, and Bosco had been the one who gave it to him. Glen had been on the verge, and Bosco had walked right into his apartment and handed the man his method.
And Noble was in the middle of this one. Remember that - any way you sliced it, Aaron Noble was in the middle of this. Even after things settled down, even when the talking heads tired of the story, the world would be destined to hear about Mad-Dog Cruz's Last Stand for years to come, because her famous hostage was just the kind of guy who would have to immortalize the whole thing in the printed word. So really, couldn't anyone see just how fucking plausible it all was?
Mad-Dog Cruz.
Jesus Christ, he was actually starting to think of her like that. "Mad-Dog Cruz." All the time now.
Well, why not? It held a certain, catchy kind of charm, didn't it? Maybe they'd sell Mad-Dog merchandise when the whole thing was over. Little Mad-Dog dolls, maybe. Sure! Pull the string in her back and she plays back one of six different pre-recorded phrases, which might include swearing vengeance against Richard Buford, threatening to plant evidence, and spewing fanatical, self-righteous warrior-philosophy, I.E. "Cops Need to Do Whatever it Takes!" And there's more! Not only does she have dramatic Kung Fu Action (right arm only), if you squeeze her, she foams at the mouth! And you don't even want to fucking know what happens when you touch her ... you know ... special area.
Get a grip. Now. Just get a fucking grip.
Oh, but this was such good stuff! Why get a grip?
Because it's useless, that's why! Because this is a bunch of useless bullshit!
And because his chest was tightening up. His chest had been tightening up throughout the whole little filmstrip and now, all at once, he realized he couldn't draw breath at all. And because he didn't have Faith handy to suggest that it might feel like steel straps, he thought of the sensation in more brutal terms; he thought of being shot in the chest. Of being lung-shot, writhing on the ground trying to get his breath and covered in blood because he'd been lung-shot, hearing John Sullivan's voice (from somewhere above, like the voice of God) calmly stating that it wasn't blood at all but only red dye, red dye from one of the bank's explosive anti-theft dye-packs.
He wondered why the hell he would think of that - right now, of all times - even though he knew the answer already. It was because what happened to him that day with the dye-pack was happening again, right now.
It was because, an hour after driving away from the Bridgeview Hotel, he was having a panic attack.
It caught him behind the wheel of his car, and it was only blind luck that traffic was relatively thin - otherwise all of his problems might have been quickly and unceremoniously solved in yet another spectacular crash, a multi-car pileup in the great tradition of the nitrous-packed rolling bomb that killed Alex Taylor.
He felt himself losing it and he knew he had to stop, get off the road ASAP, but his fine motor control was already gone and he overcompensated, twisting the steering wheel sharply to the right. The Mustang veered, skidded on the rain-slick pavement, and came within an ace of jumping the curb. His foot stamped convulsively at the brake pedal, missed twice, then hit on the third try. The car continued to skid, then caught and shuddered to a stop, finishing up canted at a drunken angle by the curb, back end still hanging out into the street.
Someone leaned on the horn and shot around him with an indignant squeal of rubber.
Bosco didn't hear it. He had sagged against the steering column the second he knew he was safe, head down, forehead pressed against the cool leather of the wheel, shaking all over, pulling great ragged breaths down a throat that felt like it had shrunk to a pinhole and into a chest that felt like it was being brutally compressed by some invisible outside force. He tried to remember if it had ever been like this before and couldn't do it. That day the dye-pack blew up in his face - had it been this bad or not as bad or had it been worse? It seemed important to remember, important to measure and categorize it, the way inconsequential and irrational things always seem important in the grip of hysteria.
In the end it didn't matter how bad it was. In the end he didn't give a flying fuck out a high window how bad it was. He'd thought it was a heart attack the last time it happened and maybe this time it really was; his heart seemed to have turned into a spastic lump of jelly that was rubberbanding its way around his chest, like one of those Superballs he and Mikey used to find (and fight over) in their breakfast cereal.
Superballs.
Bosco uttered a high, yattering chuckle. Yeah, he remembered those. Things could be damn near lethal, once you got 'em bouncing. Mikey used to peg the little fuckers right at him, too, lucky he'd never lost an eye, lucky neither of them had lost an eye, they'd take them to the old fort where they used to hide when their Pop was home and things were bad and they'd throw them around -
They're going to kill her. She'll make them do it. She'll push them, just like she pushed Faith that night. That might be the whole point - it might not be Buford at all. Maybe what she really wants are the choppers and the reporters and the ESU team.
No. No more of that. He was thinking about Superballs now. He was sticking with Superballs, because it was something that had nothing to do with now. Focus on that, think about that, Superballs and the old fort and his brother Mikey.
Right, exactly - Mikey. Like her sister, right? Like Lettie Cruz. So much alike, you and 'Ritza, both of you with screw-ups for siblings, and now both of you screw-ups. There's a bond there. A link. You saw it. And now it just keeps coming back on you, doesn't it?
So what are you waiting for? Go ahead.
Go ahead and take another peek.
Wheezing now, Bosco began to grope the left front pocket of his jacket, as if there was something in there that his life depended on ... which, the voice in his head was now insisting, there was. After some useless, ridiculous flailing he managed to control his hand long enough to retrieve a tattered piece of paper, which he brought out and held up to eye-level.
Letitia Cruz on the left. Grinning.
Maritza on the right. Not grinning. Just that funny little smirk, the one that didn't touch her eyes and showed none of her teeth, as if she knew she should be smiling for the camera but didn't quite know what she was supposed to be smiling about.
The photograph really was real, and looking at it was like taking a bizarre kind of Communion. He would examine it four more times before the day was out, and each time he would send his hand into his jacket convinced that it would come up empty, that he would find nothing but a few little blue twists of pocket-lint, maybe a few loose coins ... but no photograph.
Then his fingers would touch it and confirm that yes, there was a photograph in his pocket, whereupon he would become convinced that it wasn't the photograph, that once he drew it out and looked at it, it would show some entirely different scene. Somebody's lost baby picture, perhaps. Maybe a tourist's shot of the Empire State Building (or perhaps the pretty little Bridgeview Hotel), dropped in the haste to flag down a cab.
In other words, Bosco remained convinced that he was crazy and the damn thing was some kind of hallucination.
But then he would look at the picture and he would see that it was real, and he would hear Cruz's voice in his head, he would hear her say this was taken on a ski trip three years ago and he would see her in his mind's eye the way she was that night. In her bathrobe, hair damp and hanging limp in her eyes, skin stippled with moisture. Grieving, but charged with a reluctant (and probably desperate) kind of sexuality.
Bosco stuffed the snapshot back into his pocket, discovered that he could breathe again, and began gulping air.
Okay. He was okay now. No problem. Considering everything he'd gone through, he'd probably been overdue for an anxiety attack, and compared to the some of the low points he'd hit in the last forty-eight hours or so, a little breathing difficulty was pretty tame. And now it was done and out of the way. Call it a token thing.
But he could still feel it. He'd been feeling it ever since he'd left that goddam hotel - that driving sense of responsibility, enormous, undeniable. And all if it held in that one little scrap of paper in his pocket.
He'd never held any belief in supernatural destiny. For all the thought he'd poured into questions of Fate over the past couple of days, the basic core of his worldview was still pretty much intact; most of his philosophizing had come out of despair, self-pity, and alcohol. But finding that photograph ... he was not so set in his ways that he could just look past something like that, call it coincidence, and deny that finding the thing where and when he did fit the circumstances perfectly, that it was something that just felt too much like a kick in the ass. Fate was not mystical - Fate was geometrical. Fate traced neatly intersecting lines, lines drawn with impeccable timing and precision. Fate was mathematically exact, like those awful, brain-scrambling math problems from elementary school - if Jimmy's train leaves his station at 3:00 PM traveling at eighty miles an hour, and Janey's train leaves her station at 4:00 traveling at thirty miles an hour, what time will the fiery crash happen?
The scratch on the side of his car led to the laughing fit. The laughing fit led to sitting down on the bench. And sitting down on the bench led him almost directly to Cruz. Call it Fate's Geometry.
As if (and he did hate how this sounded) that snapshot on the street was meant to be found.
As if (God help us all!) he was supposed to save Cruz.
Right, he thought numbly, still shaking, still a bit queasy. I'd just duck into a phonebooth, but goddammit, wouldn't ya know - it looks like I left my blue tights at home.
And that was the right way to look at it. Make it into a joke. It was nothing but a false sense of responsibility brought on by a simple coincidence -
(yeah, that's right, you heard me - just a simple coincidence, no more than that, so stick the philosophizing up your ass, Confucius)
- one he tried to deny by deliberately wasting time. He'd left the Bridgeview at about 10:40 and had been on the move for just a little under an hour now - time which, to the best of his recollection, had been spent running; running from himself, running from thoughts of Cruz, running in the same punch-drunk circles he'd found himself in after he'd left Faith's. Tracing brainless patterns through and around his little corner of the city, seeing the same buildings, the same streetcorners, the same traffic lights, again and again. Interspersed with some feeble attempts at routine. He stopped once for gas - even though the tank was three-quarters full - bought a Mr. Big bar while he paid for it, and when the girl behind the counter flirted with him, he did his best to flirt back. As if everything was normal. As if it was just another day.
As if he wasn't scared out of his mind. Because she was still there, wasn't she? No matter where he went, she was always there. And not just in his pocket, either - she literally seemed to be everywhere.
Fifteen minutes ago, while stopped at one of those traffic lights, Bosco happened to cast an idle glance to his right. He regretted it instantly. There was a Times newspaper box standing on the corner, displaying the Saturday edition, hot off the presses. The headline read: ON THE RUN? COP AT CENTER OF CORRUPTION PROBE MISSING. Underneath was a photograph of Cruz that took up most of the front page. Bosco was wearily dismayed - but not at all surprised - to see that it was the same shot they'd used on the news last night: the black-and-white file photo where she looked like a bloodthirsty savage straight out of the darkest Jungle Primeval. Somehow it looked even worse on newsprint; the half-open sneer on her mouth, the tense, threatening posture, the wild, feral eyes, and the blood on her cheeks and forehead (hers or someone else's, he still couldn't tell), which to Bosco looked more like stripes of war paint than ever.
He'd stared at the picture in a morbid, watching-a-car-accident kind of trance until the light turned green and somebody behind him starting honking, wondering half-seriously if small children cried and clung a little closer to Mommy when they passed the paper box and saw Maritza -
(Mad Dog)
- Cruz snarling back at them. She really did look like a monster.
And then, for some godforsaken reason, Bosco had slipped out of his car (ignoring both the rain and the profanity directed at him from the cars stuck behind him) and bought a copy of the paper. He did not know exactly why he'd done this; the idea of actually reading the article terrified him.
Why, it terrified him almost as much as the photograph in his pocket.
Knowing it was a bad idea, knowing it was probably the worst thing he could do, Bosco withdrew the paper, which he'd stuffed under the passenger seat. He also withdrew his Mr. Big bar and unwrapped it as he fanned the paper out, again trying stupidly for that sense of normal, trying to just be a man readin' his morning paper, just a man eatin' a chocolate bar and readin' his paper as he sat in his illegally parked car in a rainstorm.
He winced again as he looked at the front page, and he had to resist the insane urge to take out his photograph (Cruz's photograph) and hold it up next to the one on the paper.
The article was long - too long for him to be bothered reading in his present state of mind. He skimmed it, eating the chocolate bar as he went, stopping only when words or phrases jumped out at him.
... spokesman Paul Mallory will not specify the exact nature of the charges Cruz faces, but sources close to the NYPD ...
Sources, Bosco thought sourly, taking an almost vicious bite out of the Mr. Big. Five hundred dollars says "sources" translates to "Schaeffer."
Resuming from the same line:
... sources close to the NYPD have hinted that she may be facing felony murder charges in a number of unsolved execution-style killings ...
So it was out. The "hint" would probably be confirmed by tomorrow. Bosco skimmed on, wondering sickly if "a number of" unsolved killings meant that Schaeffer had uncovered more than two.
... despite reports that Cruz may have been responsible for carrying out executions on suspected drug dealers, Mallory insists that she poses no threat to the community ...
Bosco sniffed derisively. Mallory. Poor bastard. PR must be the worst fucking job in the whole Department. Parrotting the same shit to the Press, over and over, day after day.
Bosco kept skimming, but it was starting to become pretty clear that the article was just more of the same. The same lines, the same strained placations from Mallory, the same wild speculations from the press. It wasn't -
... romantic involvement with Aaron Noble ...
Bosco stopped skimming at once. He also stopped chewing, his mouth full of melting chocolate and peanuts as he went back and read the whole line:
... When asked if Cruz had any romantic involvement with Aaron Noble, Mallory refused to comment ...
Bosco almost spewed the mouthful of Mr. Big all over the windshield in front of him. Romantic involvement? Cruz and Noble? Were they fucking insane?
No. No, not insane. Just jumping at shadows. And if they were so off the mark as to think Cruz and Noble had been banging each other, Bosco could only imagine how much else they had wrong.
He swallowed his mouthful of chocolate and re-folded the paper, catching another eyeful of that nasty shot of Cruz with her teeth bared. That was what it was all about, right there - shock value first, truth second. Take a little kernel of rumor and run with it and see where it takes you. He wondered if that picture on the front page had been purposely retouched. Cruz had come equipped with an almost sinister sort of beauty, dark and intense and well-suited to both her personality and her current role as New York's new boogey-woman. But a few discreet little strokes of a PhotoShop airbrush couldn't hurt. Add some dark bags under her eyes, brighten her teeth to enhance the sneer, make the blood/war paint stand out a bit more, and she could look even more ferocious. Maritza becomes Mad-Dog. Lock your doors, turn off your lights, batten down your hatches.
Except they wouldn't call her Mad-Dog. Sooner or later the "Two-Bags" name would make its way to the press, and that would be what they'd christen her. And the feeding frenzy would just go on and on even after it was all over, even after she was dead, and when she died it would be because of him, because of -
Bosco grabbed the steering wheel and squeezed, squeezed hard, until he felt the tendons in his hands starting to seize up. This was just exactly how it worked, wasn't it? This was exactly how it got you. Exactly. Your mind gets to running in circles. And before you know it, you're running in circles.
Just the way O'Malley said.
You've got O'Malley on the brain.
Yes, he did. With good reason. He was pretty much resigned to the fact that he'd be spending a lot of his immediate future on O'Malley's couch.
So what do you think he'd say now? About the photograph, for example? The one in your pocket, that is - not the one on the front page of the Times. What do you think he'd say about your little superhero complex? Assuming you were back on his boat with him and this was a paid therapy session?
Bosco was pretty sure O'Malley would tell him what he already knew - that most of this was really about Hobart. O'Malley would say that Bosco wanted to get to Cruz first because he wanted to redeemhimself for what happened on that rooftop over a year ago, for allowing Glen to get hold of his gun and drag him up there like some dumb fucking rookie in a bad cop movie. O'Malley would probably call it something like "projection," or an "irrational need for absolution." And then O'Malley would tell him that absolution wasn't necessary, because none of it had been Bosco's fault, and to apply Hobart to this situation was unhealthy. Maybe even dangerous.
O'Malley might also suggest that Bosco still cared about Cruz. Which was to say, as a woman. O'Malley might suggest that was why Bosco had initially turned his wrath on Faith; that seeing Cruz hurt had crippled his attempt to break away from her, stirring up old - and dangerous - feelings. O'Malley would say that what he felt about Cruz now was nothing more than a purely male reaction, an exquisitely stupid kind of pity. There is a visceral reaction in seeing a woman you cared about in pain. A violent, simian protectiveness comes over you. You want to go to her and hold her and comfort her. Cruz had had a profound effect on him, professionally, sexually, emotionally. O'Malley would say that he was still feeling the aftershocks.
But O'Malley wasn't here, was he?
The photograph in his pocket, however, was. And what the photograph came down to was grief. What Cruz was doing now was something that went beyond her usual pigheaded drive to win at all costs; if it were anything else, if it were anyone else but Richard Buford, if her sister were still alive and being put through the wringer in a rehab program somewhere, Bosco was convinced Cruz would still be lying in her bed at Mercy, waiting out the time until she was well enough to be transferred to a prison infirmary.
But she wasn't waiting around - her grief had taken her. Her grief was why she'd started sleeping with him, her grief was why she had become obsessed with Noble, her grief was why she'd wanted so badly climb the ladder right to the very top, taking the job of catching Buford entirely on her own shoulders.
Bosco thought that he was, at last, starting to understand her.
The media obviously did not, and it was safe bet that the police didn't either. Bosco supposed he couldn't blame them. He'd spent more time with her over the last eight months than anyone else, both on the job and off, and he'd basically gotten nowhere. All that time spent hoping in vain for a bond to form, all that time spent hoping that the common thread of Lettie and Mikey might bring them closer together. And always she'd kept that barrier between them, always she'd kept him out, kept the relationship impersonal. And that, ironically, was what offered him this sudden insight into her character; she thought she didn't need anybody. It was simple, so simple he'd missed it: she honestly thought she could take the world on all by herself. Which was what she was doing now, no more and no less. For all her efforts at keeping him out, he might be the only person on Earth who truly understood her at this point ... and as deluded as it might sound, that made him the only person qualified to deal with her.
So now you're a profiler. She's your prey and you're smelling her droppings.
Right. Droppings like the photograph. Everything came back to that photograph. If his mind was running in circles, then the photograph was the axis on which it was spinning. It was his focal point. It was a kick in the ass. And Bosco knew it would just keep pressing on him, nagging at him, making the back of his neck prickle, unless he did something about it. Unless he did something with it. It was like the fucking thing was alive, wriggling in his pocket, trying to get him to acknowledge it and all the issues it raised.
Bosco drew it out and looked at it again. And felt the same sensations slip over him - uncertainty, cold unreality, fear, something almost like awe. It was like hitting on some mild but very enticing drug.
He put it away quickly.
Cruz was sick. She was delusional. She believed she was going to find and execute Richard Buford, because she felt a terrific, crushing responsibility to avenge her sister.
And now you're starting to feel a terrific, crushing responsibility to save her. Right?
Bosco exhaled. He loosened his grip on the wheel and let his hands fall into his lap.
To answer that question: Yes.
Yes he did.
Worse, he was starting to believe he could really do it.
In that case, you'd better be careful. Sounds like Lettie and Mikey might not be the only thing you and Cruz have in common. You're obviously both suffering serious fucking Messiah complexes.
Bosco smiled tightly. No Messiah complexes here. He was a realist, not a dreamer. Always had been. And nothing had changed.
So, looking at it realistically, he could break his predicament down to three basic options:
One: Do nothing. Listen to the voice of reason and go home. Watch the news. Wait for Cruz to be apprehended by those who were actually being paid to do it. The pro was that he would be able to wash his hands of the whole thing. The con was that, having done that, he would suffer the full weight of the guilt if Cruz came to a bad end.
Two: Take Cruz's photograph to the Five-Five and talk to Lieutenant Swersky. Hand Swersky the picture and his theory: that Cruz might be holding Aaron Noble hostage. After that ... well, he'd just have to stand back and let Swersky do what he would with the information, wouldn't he? Swersky wasn't apt to deputize him on the spot, was he? Which led right back to that first path again; he would end up having to wait for the cops to do their thing, watching the outcome from the sidelines, praying it went smoothly.
And then of course there was ...
Three: Figure out a way to find Cruz on his own. Which would be next to impossible. Not only because he had no real idea of where she might have gone after the Bridgeview, but because it would require a degree of coolheaded thought he knew he probably wasn't capable of.
And yet that was the one he kept coming back to. He could not stand idly by, he could not just sit back and do nothing. He couldn't do it, but he couldn't not do it, and the reasons were equally sound in both cases. Circular thinking. Circular logic.
Of course it could already be over. Ever think of that, genius? If they think Noble and Cruz were "romantically involved," they might already be looking for him. Or you might be totally wrong about Noble. Or she might be caught already. She probably has been caught already.
Very true. But he still had to work from the assumption that it wasn't true, that she was still out there. He had to work with what he knew. The photograph demanded it.
"I have to," he said softly, and hearing himself speak the thought aloud seemed to make it stick.
This was what he had:
He believed that Cruz was trying to assassinate Richard Buford - check. He believed that she had carjacked Aaron Noble and taken him against his will - check. He based this belief on: A). The photograph he'd found across the street from the Bridgeview Hotel, and the emotional significance it held for Cruz, and B). The fact that one of the hotel's owners had heard a heated argument in the parking lot between a man and a woman.
He believed that Cruz was holding the writer hostage, with the intention of forcing him to lead her to Richard Buford.
Next: consider all the variables. Cruz's injury - that was the biggie. She would have certain pressing medical needs, not the least of which was pain management. Bosco imagined her wound would also require regular dressing changes, and would probably need to be washed to prevent infection. The bones in her shoulder hadn't been properly fixed yet - what she had was a patch-job that was supposed to hold her until the real reconstruction could begin. In the early hours after The Shooting (which had, at last, started to capitalize itself in his head) Bosco had heard the words nerve damage thrown around, so he assumed her left arm had reduced or nonexistent function. All of that together meant her movements would probably be severely limited.
Add to that her newfound pseudo-celebrity - she was a marked woman, made even easier to spot by her injury.
Now add the other day-to-day trivialities, stuff like eating, sleeping, bathroom breaks. Hard enough to take care of that stuff when you were stuck with a hostage; harder still when you were nursing a serious and virtually untreated wound. She and Noble would need a place to stay, wouldn't they? Somewhere to lie low.
Which led back to the million-dollar question: why would Aaron Noble, a grown man, allow himself to be kidnapped by a debilitated woman half his size, and then allow her to put him on a leash? He was pushing fifty and he didn't exactly look like he wasted his life in the gym, but he wasn't helpless - he was a burly guy and Cruz wouldn't be much of a physical threat to him, even if she was carrying a gun. So why would he let himself be abducted? Why not just knock her down and make a break for it first chance he got?
For that matter, why the hell wouldn't he just run the other way the second he saw her coming at him in the Bridgeview parking lot?
Possible answer: blackmail. Bosco might have been looking at this all wrong - he'd been looking at it as a hostage situation involving guns and threats. But what if Cruz was blackmailing Noble somehow, pulling the old Two-Bags routine to get him back under her thumb again? A bit more subtle than just sticking a gun in his face.
Trouble was, Bosco couldn't think of anything she might be using as a lever. He knew that Noble had kids and that he was involved in a bitter custody battle for them, but Bosco couldn't see how Cruz could use that against him. The only thing she had on him was his meth addiction, but Noble, by his own admission, no longer cared who knew about that. Making his drug problem public would, according to him, "sell more books." And he was probably right.
Another, simpler possibility: Noble was a coward. He was supposed to be a tough man o' the world, living fast and hard, immersing himself in his work ... but from what Bosco had seen, he didn't carry much to back that up with. He generally carried a gun or two - a rifle in the trunk of his car and a pistol for personal defense - but he might not risk pulling a gun on Cruz. He might not want to risk pissing her off. She was tough and unpredictable as a rule - throw wounded and desperate into the bargain and she'd be about as forgiving as a nest of vipers. If Mr. Writer-Boy made an aggressive move and she actually managed to fend him off, he'd be in serious trouble. Right?
Maybe. It still sounded a bit shaky.
But it was better than nothing. So let's just assume that's the way it went down: say it's a hostage situation with Cruz as the aggressor, using a gun or blackmail or whatever, and say Noble is too scared to try anything. He's in the front seat taking orders; Cruz is in the back seat giving them. A lot of those orders might not be making any sense; she is, after all, wounded and desperate. Her personal vendetta against Richard Buford is still there, burned into her mind, and that's all she thinks about. Forget about finding a place to hide, forget about all the practical problems she has facing her, forget all about logic; Cruz is impatient to get on with the mission. She never did have any patience for shitting around, did she? Some might say she was downright childish - when Maritza wants something, she wants it NOW!
(Give me the damn gun so I can get back to doing my job!)
Right, exactly. And now she's racing the clock. She'd want Noble to get on the Buford case right away.
And how would Noble (always assuming he's too frightened to disobey or disagree with her) do that? How could Noble possibly hand Buford to her now?
His contacts. That was how. All of his Disciple connections.
But there was a big problem with that: all of Noble's Disciple buddies had turned on him. They'd discovered that he was working for the cops and they'd tried to kill him. That was part of what had started all of this in the first place.
And you think that would matter to Cruz? At this point, do you really think she'd care about something like that? You think she'd be all full of motherly concern for Noble's safety?
Nope, of course not. She wouldn't give a rat's ass about Noble's safety. She'd make him stick his neck out for her in the most lethal sense of the term. She'd make him track down one of his old contacts and throw himself on their mercy, and if he got himself killed, well ...
... well, she really didn't have that much to lose in the first place, did she?
So who would it be? Who would she send him looking for? His ol' pal Willie G. was dead, and most of Willie's cronies were in prison. So who would Noble go to?
Bosco remembered plenty of names being tossed around during the course of the Buford investigation. And at the moment he couldn't remember a single one of them. Not one.
Cruz, of course, had obsessively memorized all of them. She'd researched the backgrounds of every one of Noble's underworld contacts, scoured every detail relating to his involvement with the Disciples, keeping track of it all with reams and reams of handwritten notes. That seemed to be a big recurring theme throughout the whole investigation - notes. Noble had had his now-infamous notepads, but Cruz had kept her own set of books on him. Pages and pages of material, all lettered in Cruz's neat (but infuriatingly small, impossibly close-set) print.
Oh, to have access to those notes right now.
Why? You don't need 'em. You don't need the names. What, are you gonna run all over New York tracking down every jagoff Noble might have hung out with at some point? It'd take a week.
Right.
Not that it meant he was licked. Oh, hell no. He could hit the bars. The biker joints. Ask around a bit. Bosco could remember at least seven bars scattered around the boroughs that he and Cruz had scrutinized as known Disciple hangouts. Places Aaron Noble had been known to frequent in his spare time. Places with names like Peggy's Hole and The Dirty Rabbit. If Cruz did have him on a leash, if she was blackmailing him somehow, she would send him to root out some of his old connections. Someone who could potentially lead them to Buford.
So there it was. There was his jumping-off point.
It'd be dangerous, though - he wasn't carrying a weapon and he didn't have the badge to protect him. If they wanted to drag him out back and administer some crowbar-assisted surgery -
- then it would just mean your day ended up more interesting than you thought. Live dangerously. Feel the adrenaline. Go hit the biker joints.
And there was something else to think about: those boys might be just as anxious to get their hands on Noble as he was. Might be some common ground there.
So - no time like the present. Bosco looked at his watch.
It was 11:46 PM.
It was 11:46 PM and Aaron Noble was meeting with his friend Iggy Marchand at the Dirty Rabbit, while Cruz, hidden away in his car, was twisting in the grip of fever dream.
Continued in Chapter 12-ii