Chapter 12 Continued

II.

Even in the best of times, Bosco had never really thought of himself as Gold Shield material.

Not that it ever bothered him - he was more or less happy where he was, and when he did try to advance himself he was always careful to move towards something that would only augment what he already had, as opposed to lifting him out of it altogether. ESU, Anti-Crime ... these things weren't so much moving up as they were moving sideways, places where he would have gained a broader understanding of the job while staying true to his roots. And if he failed (which he had, in both instances, spectacularly), so what? There was no shame in where he'd started from, and in another life - one in which there was no Cruz, no hotel room bloodbath, no IAB investigation - Bosco might simply have stuck with being beat cop to the end of his career. To him, ambition did not translate to how many digits were written on your paycheck by the time you retired, or what kind of badge you had to put on your mantle to impress your grandkids with. It was whether or not you could do the same job for twenty-five years, still enjoy it, and still be damn good at it by the time you hung it up for good.

And besides, looking at some of the guys on the homicide squad - neckless butterballs with permanent nicknames like Doughboy and Jelly - the rank had never held much appeal for him anyway. No excitement there. No rush. No thrill of the chase.

Such was the case when Bosco spent the following four hours pursuing his wild goose chase through the biker underworld. There were no thrills. No danger. No adrenaline rush.

He was recognized. Several times. Boscorelli the mouthy cop, walking right into the lion's den, alone, unarmed, and without backup, like he was just asking for trouble. But no trouble came. He wasn't threatened in any way, in part, he supposed, because word had not yet spread that he was no longer Boscorelli the mouthy cop - he was Boscorelli the broken ex-cop. Also, once it became clear that he was on a fact-finding mission and had no interest in stirring up trouble for the Disciples, he was treated with a kind of half-simpering, half-contemptuous respect. At Peggy's Hole, a shitty dive in Queens, he was even offered a beer, on the house.

Which he declined. Let it be said, if only for the record.

Bosco spoke with sullen bartenders. He spoke with ominous, tattooed bouncers. He spoke with surly bar patrons. He played it straight, played it cool, tossing out a few carefully measured insults (a jagoff here, a jagoff there) in between questions that sounded okay in his head and became surrealistic absurdities when asked aloud, I.E. "Have you seen any famous writers lately?"

Nobody had. No one knew anything about Aaron Noble or his whereabouts.

That didn't come as much of a surprise.

What did come as a surprise was that nobody seemed to care. Dropping the writer's name generated absolutely no interest among gentlemen of the Disciple persuasion, something Bosco found rather curious. Just before The Shooting Noble had been in bad shape, detoxing because he was on the run from the Disciples and hence cut off from his meth supply - he'd been a dead man walking and nobody had wanted to touch him. Bosco had counted on Noble's name to grab some attention and give him that much-needed common ground; the complete indifference he was met with discouraged him.

At three-thirty Bosco left the Dirty Rabbit, a strip club in the Bronx, tired and thoroughly demoralized, believing himself to be no further ahead than when he'd started and pretty much ready to throw the whole thing over.

And like so much else in his recent life - Stevie Nunez getting caught against all odds, Noble bringing Cruz to the bar just before The Shooting and blowing Faith's covert operation out of the water, finding Cruz's photograph on the ground outside the Bridgeview - it was a case of pure coincidence, providence, serendipity, for better or for worse.

It was a case of Fate's Geometry.

Bosco had just settled behind the wheel of his car when Aaron Noble came out of the Dirty Rabbit.

The writer did not seem to be aware of him. Bosco, for his part, hadn't been aware of Noble either, even though he'd spent about twenty minutes in the bar asking around for him. And yet there he was - Noble came out and down the three shallow steps to the street without looking around, and as he did Bosco could not help feeling ridiculously vindicated, his earlier sense of pointlessness switching effortlessly to a sense of completely justifiable pride; pride in himself and his own resourcefulness, pride in his own intuitive thinking which, it seemed, was intact after all. Pride in his skill as a cop, which was all he ever was ... pride that was followed immediately by a surprisingly bitter regret that he would never again have an opportunity to use that talent for good, bitterness towards Schaeffer (and yes, towards Faith, even now) feelings that were all mixed together with that queasy tilting sensation, that sense of having been nudged towards a predetermined destiny.

A predetermined destiny that, deep, deep down, he wanted no part of.

Seven Disciple's hangouts. Seven. And he'd found Noble on his third try.

It was pretty clear what he had to do: he had to exit his car, approach Noble, and start asking him some serious questions, point-blank.

What he did instead was send his hand into the left front pocket of his jacket. To Cruz's photograph, to that little scrap of frayed and curling paper, which had long since ceased to be something he feared and had instead become a kind of talisman, fending off the fear and uncertainty instead of calling it up fresh. There was nothing to it, really - it was just a picture of a moment shared between Maritza and Letitia Cruz long before he'd met either of them, but its presence in his pocket seemed to deny explanation, its presence was something that just couldn't be true, just couldn't be, but it was true, and its trueness seemed to mean something.

Bosco looked at the snapshot, unaware that his breathing had slowed, that his face had slackened into an expression that was almost like reverence.

He looked at the snapshot and thought: This was taken on a ski trip three years ago.

He looked at Lettie, who was grinning. Grinning like everything was A-okay. Three years, Cruz had said. Three years, all it took to eat her up.

He looked at Cruz, remembered her as she was that night, warm and inviting and pressed so tightly against him, a few scant layers of clothing separating them, her breath hot and sweet in his mouth, her tongue flitting across his teeth.

Bosco looked at the snapshot and surrendered himself once and for all to the notion that he had not found it at all, that the snapshot had, in fact, found him, because it was a jinx, it was luck, it was good old Geometrical, Mathematical Fate, you could always trust in Fate (if not in Faith, HA!) to tie everything together with beautiful precision.

At last Bosco looked up from the photograph, stuffing it back into his pocket.

Noble was gone.

Gone as in gone. He wasn't just clear of the bar; the street ahead was absolutely Noble-free.

Bosco twisted sharply in his seat - with enough force to wrench muscles in his back - and looked behind him.

Nothing. No trace of Aaron Noble in either direction. It was almost as if ...

... well, it was almost as if he'd never been there in the first place.

Faith spoke up in his head, crystal clear and wryly reproving: Oh, he was there. You just let him go. You were too busy sitting here getting all X-Files over that fucking photograph when you should have been out there questioning him.

So much for that Gold Shield, eh, Bos?

Swallowing the lump that was rising in his throat, Bosco got out of the car for a better look round.

The Dirty Rabbit was hidden (and hidden was the right word; Bosco had no doubt that the location was completely on purpose) down a narrow, one-way side street that wasn't much more than an alley; there was width enough to accommodate one car, but Bosco thought four-wheeled vehicles were discouraged around these parts; the Disciples lined their bikes up along the front of the building with the obvious, unspoken assumption that the entire public street belonged to them. Bosco's car was the only one in sight.

Noble might have a car parked around the corner. Or maybe he was travelling on foot. Either way, he should still be visible, either ahead or behind. Hypnotized by Cruz's photograph or not, it still wasn't enough time for Noble to have gotten that far away.

Unless he turned and went back into the bar.

Unless he slipped between the buildings and down an alley.

Unless ...

Unless he just went POOF! And disappeared. Right, genius?

An unpleasant - and obvious - suspicion began to rise in Bosco's mind: it wasn't Noble on the steps a moment ago. He'd seen somebody, of course; it just wasn't Noble. More likely it was just some bar patron who bore enough of a resemblance so that Bosco's eyes - and his overtaxed mind - had played a trick on him.

And speaking of bar patrons, there were three big strapping Disciple-types standing in front of the bar right now, indifferent to the rain but eyeing Bosco's Mustang (which, despite a recently acquired scratch on the driver's side, was still pretty easy on the eyes) with a mixture of suspicion and something like greed.

Bosco barely noticed them. He knew they were there, and he knew that if they weren't trouble for him now they soon would be, but he was still too busy trying to convince himself of what he'd just seen.

He'd been inside the bar. That was the thing; he'd been inside the Dirty Rabbit, had a good look around, and had seen no trace of Noble. The bouncers and the few patrons he'd talked to had all denied seeing him, and the bartender, a scrawny, smirking son of a bitch with needle tracks on his arms, had claimed to have never even heard of Aaron Noble.

Which didn't mean much. Bikers, right? Lowlife jagoffs. They'd lie just for the fun of it. They'd figure out what they thought he wanted to hear and say the opposite.

Still ... did he really just see Noble exit the bar? It was quite a stretch, wasn't it? Too much of a stretch, after everything else. Couldn't have been real.

Bosco's hand started to creep towards his coat pocket again. The photograph was real. The photograph was a thing that shouldn't have been, a thing that was all the same.

The three guys standing outside the Rabbit were talking furtively amongst themselves now, nodding smugly, somehow ominously. Talking about him? Maybe. More likely the target of their attention was his car.

Bosco pivoted on his heel and looked around again. This was stupid - it was Noble, dammit, no question about it. Bosco had spent enough time with the whiny bastard to know him on sight.

If it really was Noble, he was looking pretty relaxed, wasn't he? For a hostage, I mean.

Yes, and that raised another staggeringly obvious question - if Cruz really had taken Noble prisoner, and then sent him to sniff out some of his old biker connections, why the hell wouldn't he run the second he was out of her range? Unless she was blackmailing him with something exceedingly nasty (though Bosco still couldn't imagine what that could be), the writer had no reason whatsoever not to run away from her. What would be stopping him from hitting the first payphone he came to and calling the cops?

Or here was a funny one: what if - for reasons Bosco wouldn't even hazard a guess at - Noble was helping Cruz voluntarily? Bosco knew that at one point in his checkered career Noble had put in some time as a war correspondent; maybe Noble would see Cruz's crusade as just another brand of war adventure.

Bosco abandoned this idea almost immediately. It wasn't just shaky - it bordered on the moronic. Noble hated Cruz. She'd arrested him, strong-armed him into becoming a C.I., exposed his meth addiction for all to see, and used it to beat him into submission. She'd stolen his notes, ruined his work, and put him on the wrong side of a dangerous biker gang. She'd dominated him. Humiliated him. And she'd had her badge behind her the whole time.

Now, from Noble's point of view, she was just a lone nut-job with a gun. And Bosco knew that if he were in the writer's shoes, he'd be itching for some payback. Helping her would be the last thing on his mind.

Why, if he were Noble, he'd want to turn the tables. He'd want to make Cruz hurt a little bit. He'd want to squeeze her the way she squeezed him.

Bosco swallowed another lump in his throat as something new hit him: what if it was a hostage situation, but one that had neatly and ironically reversed itself. Cruz comes to Bridgeview. Tries to take Noble by force. Shows him a gun or tries to blackmail him. But instead of rolling over like a good doggy, Noble grabs her. Noble disarms her. And, remembering what it felt like to have her hand squeezing his nuts, this sudden reversal of fortune goes straight to his head. He orders her into the car - we're gonna take a nice ride in the country, Sergeant Two-Bags ...

No. No, surely not. Noble wouldn't risk his ass in an opportunistic reverse-kidnapping, would he? He shouldn't have to. Cruz was, to quote the papers, ON THE RUN. Turning her in to the proper authorities would mean big-time publicity, big-time book deals, and probably legions of brand-spanking-new fans. Needless to say, that was better than prison. Which was where he'd end up if he hurt her deliberately.

"What the fuck is going on here?" Bosco muttered helplessly.

What the fuck was going on here was probably this: nothing. Nothing was going on here. This still might have absolutely nothing to do with Cruz. So what if Noble was here at the Dirty Rabbit? Why did that automatically mean that she was involved somehow? Maybe his theories were all wrong. Maybe Cruz, after dropping her photograph outside the hotel, had simply wandered away. Maybe Noble was here on unrelated personal business, trying to repair his Disciple connections and salvage his new book.

Maybe he just liked strippers.

It was probably all over by now. Cruz was probably already caught.

You mean, Cruz is probably already dead

The horror-factory in his head promptly illustrated this thought with an image, a kind of strange, animated crime-scene photograph cobbled together from bits and pieces of Hobart and Cruz. The level of detail in this picture was as chillingly graphic as always, so much so that Bosco - despite having seen a lot worse on the job - started to feel the first real threads of doubt about his own mental health.

This time he saw her lying face-down on Hobart's rooftop. She was wearing the black miniskirt and middy top from the day of their first meeting. She was also wearing a ragged, gaping hole in the side of her head from a high-caliber rifle bullet. There was a spreading pool of blood and an oatmeal-like splash of brain matter in a gaudy starburst pattern around her head. One of her shiny black heels had come off and was lying next to her. Her hair - the places not matted with blood and brains, that was - rippled in the wind.

Bosco pushed it out of his mind, reminding himself that such pictures were silly - almost tacky, really - painted as they were in garish comic-book technicolor.

That did not, however, dilute their power over him. This wasn't a game. This wasn't a comic book. Every instinct in him was screaming that he'd seen Noble come out of that bar a moment ago, and that his presence had something to do with Cruz.

This was the same path they would have taken. That was it. If he and Cruz were still on the job, still on the Buford case, places like this would be where Noble would be going, where he would be leading them in his capacity as their Confidential Informant. It was the same path. Bosco had simply picked it up and started following it again, and it had led him right to Noble. See - nothing spooky about it. Just good police work. A simple case of know your quarry. Know his habits, know his friends, know his enemies, hammer together a theory, and go from there. Bosco had simply followed an old trail, and he was certain that Cruz, whatever state she might be in, had done the very same thing. Either through force or through blackmail.

But it was all academic now, wasn't it? He'd blown it and let Noble get away from him. All because of that goddam photograph and the hold it seemed to be gaining over him.

To have come all this way, to have come all this way to find Noble, and then to lose him almost immediately for such a stupid fucking reason.

Bosco turned and walked back to his Mustang, fists clenched at his sides, breath coming quick and hard, not just angry at himself but actually furious and trying to restrain the urge to take it out on the car; kick the fender, kick out a headlight, take a key and run another scratch along the door, shouting some obscenity at the top of his lungs while he did it.

Instead he dropped back into the driver's seat and slammed the door as hard as he could. It helped a little, but not much.

The question that faced him was, what now? He was back to square one once again. Where did he go from here?

The Five-Five, that's where. First you found the photograph. Then you saw Aaron Noble - or someone you thought was Noble - coming out of a biker bar. That's evidence. So do what you should have done in the first place. Go back to the House and talk to Swersky. He'll listen. He won't want to see Cruz hurt any more than you do. Playtime's over, pal.

This thought came in a voice that sounded suspiciously like Glen Hobart's, and it did nothing to put him in a better mood. He still didn't want to go to the Five-Five, but it wasn't just because he was afraid for Cruz; it was a selfish fear of losing control. Bosco couldn't go to the police because in his mind he still was the police. And he was starting to feel entitled to the case.

Even though he'd just let a person of interest disappear right under his nose.

It took two tries before he finally landed the key in the ignition slot, and when he started the car that was when he just gave into it and let the fury carry him off; he gunned the engine roughly and broke away from the curb, tires screaming, peripherally aware that the three bikers had started to approach him, possibly intent on carrying out a carjacking (or maybe they were just a couple of gearheads who wanted to talk cars with him, sure, right, whatever), and they nearly paid for it with their lives; one of them had to hop aside to avoid being run down.

Bosco heard him slam an angry fist down on the trunk of the car as he passed.

He didn't care. He felt a little bit better now. It was in his nature - when he was pissed off, he let as many people know it as possible.

Two blocks later he was sitting at a red light trying to tell himself it didn't matter. He was still seething, still feeling oddly humiliated though he had nobody with him to be humiliated in front of, but he was also starting to feel a little bit relieved. And he was already hard at work trying to convince himself that it wasn't Noble he saw coming out of the bar at all.

Still, he wondered. He wondered about Cruz. He worried about Cruz.

Brakes squealed behind him and pulled him out of his thoughts; the bray of a horn followed. Bosco, who had been honked and sworn at several times that day, glanced in the rearview mirror to see if he was on the receiving end once again.

He wasn't. A silver SUV in the southbound lane had just been cut off by a black sedan. The sedan - a Mercedes - was emerging from a parking lot, apparently trying to cross traffic over into the northbound lane.

A black sedan.

A Mercedes.

These two facts connected themselves in his mind almost immediately, and Bosco felt as if his spine had been dipped in icewater.

Aaron Noble owned a black Mercedes.

You're nuts. You know that? You've really cracked. You're jumping at every shadow. Give it up already.

Bosco ignored this. In the rain it was impossible to make out the shape of the driver - or any passengers he might have - but the car was enough for him. Feeling lightheaded, he waited for the black sedan to put some distance between them, then pulled a graceless three-point turn right in the middle of the street (causing another volley of indignant horn blasts) and began to follow.

Without fully realizing he was doing it, Bosco began to laugh again. Because it was funny. When you thought about it, it really was funny, a comedy of errors in which no amount of fucking up could break the spell; it seemed he just couldn't fail, even if he wanted to, even if he tried his damndest to. His Fate wasn't about to let him go that easily.

It was Noble in the black car. Had to be. Noble owned several vehicles - it had all been in Cruz's notes. One of them was a Silver Ghost, stored in L.A. and never driven. A '69 Vette stored in New Mexico. A gray BMW, the car he'd been driving the day Bosco and Cruz busted him.

And a black Mercedes, stored in New York.

Bosco followed it, squinting through the rain as he tried to get a sense of the driver, his right hand gripping the wheel while his left rubbed the photograph through his jacket, like the charm he was coming to really believe it was.