Chapter 13
Cruz
The path leading up to the house was about eleven, perhaps twelve feet long, cracked and overgrown, possibly treacherous. To Maritza Cruz, a woman who would probably be comatose before the sun set and dead by the time it rose, a woman dying of cold and exposure and exhaustion and possibly the first red tendrils of a wound infection, it felt like crossing the Sahara. Albeit in the pouring rain.
Noble, waiting on the porch, watched her until she was about three quarters of the way along. He seemed to be sizing her up, perhaps waiting for her to fall, but then abruptly he swung round, ducked into the house without so much as a look back, and let the flimsy screen door swing shut in her face.
He did not appear to use a key.
Cruz either did not see this or simply did not see it as suspicious. She just kept walking, her head full of wasps and blue fire and that idiot drone, that endless -
(gonna help me get Buford gonna help me get better get me something dope for the pain)
- prayer/chant/whatever-it-was.
The "porch" was little more than an ancient, crooked concrete block with three shallow steps up to the door. Cruz treated each as if it was five feet high, taking them one foot at a time, the same way she'd tackled the staircase at Mercy. But when she went into the house she missed the difference in height between the concrete stoop and the floor inside; her left foot caught on the threshold and she stumbled.
What happened next seemed to happen in extreme slow-motion. She felt her balance shift. She heard a high, choked yip of alarm and realized in a disconnected sort of way that it had come from her own throat. She felt herself falling forwards and knew in that instant that it was over. And there was no fear, no anger, nothing in her but a kind of calm, cold finality.
She flashed on the fur-thief, the fucking psycho -
(What were you, some kind of an Affirmative-Action hire?)
- choking her to death in the alley, an iron pipe across her throat and an almost conscious decision to just give in, give in and let it all go.
She was finished. She would fall and probably shatter like glass when she hit the floor.
Then she caught her balance. Her right hand, flailing, caught hold of something - the knob of the heavy inside door - and she righted herself just in time.
Noble missed this little drama entirely; he was already halfway down the hall and he wasn't slowing.
Cruz shuffled along after him. Though her concentration was almost entirely devoted to putting one foot in front of the other without tripping over them, she caught a peripheral sense of the house Noble had brought them to. It was dark, almost too dark to see with the windows covered, and Noble didn't bother to turn on any lights (the house likely wasn't even on the grid) but she'd been in plenty of places like this and her frame of reference filled in the gaps. Things crunched underfoot; she imagined rat droppings, food wrappers, old hypodermics, fragments of crack pipes (or meth pipes, right?), the leavings of the squatters and drug addicts who'd denned here. It was too dark to get a sense of color scheme but the walls appeared to be a heavy, fecal brown, the paint dried out and flaking in places and outright peeling in others, peeling -
(like the arm, the arm all black rotting ROTTING oh no no no please not again)
- like her arm in the dream. The dreams had blurred together now, coalescing into an indistinct smear of images and sounds, but the run of her thoughts still retained that razor-fine edge of terror, terror that was cold and primal and awful in that it had no clear, defined shape, like a monster glimpsed through frosted glass.
Cruz took another bad step, managed another miraculous save, and kept going.
The hall stretched the length of the house and ended in what appeared to be a dilapidated kitchen; doorways on either side presumably led into the living and dining rooms. Noble had paused halfway up, at the first juncture.
He glanced back at her, nodded slightly (to her or to himself, she neither knew nor cared), then hung a left into what would turn out to be the living room.
Cruz followed. The distance couldn't have been more than fifteen feet but again it seemed longer, longer, almost impossible. She was moving slowly and watching her treacherous feet very carefully now, trying not to be distracted by the shimmer of blue fire that seemed to have invaded her field of vision. Left-foot-right-foot, one in front of the other, step step step, don't fall, don't fall. Easy. She was muttering under her breath again, mostly in time with the driving chant in her head (Noble's gonna get me some dope), and she was shivering badly, the rain having re-saturated her clothes. Underneath, a cold sweat clung to her skin in a slimy film. The chill, bone-deep and paralyzing, was sinking its fingers back into her flesh.
Left foot.
Right foot.
Repeat.
Easy. When constructing her outfit yesterday she had chosen running shoes for her feet. She had been unable to tie the laces so she had merely tucked them down into the sides, but now they'd worked their way out and were flopping around. That was what had nearly sent her sprawling, and why she had to be extra careful now.
But she was doing fine. She was doing fine and even now, in some obscure way, this still pleased her. If she fell she fell, but she knew she would not. She would not fall. She could not fall. She had been able to stay upright when she got out of Noble's car. She had resisted the wind and the rain, she had tripped twice and kept her balance, and she was still standing. Still standing - that was Maritza Cruz. That was Sergeant Maritza Cruz. They had tried and tried and they'd never been able to beat her. Tried to scare her out of the Academy, hazed her, abused and taunted her, and she'd responded by outperforming them all. They'd tried to scare her off, tried to drum her out of the NYPD, tried to destroy her. And they could never do it. They couldn't win.
Buford couldn't win.
Noble would help her. Noble would get her some dope. She would heal up. Then she would get Buford, and then it would all be over, and when she turned the corner into the living room and looked up, she saw that it already was.
The man standing in the center of the room was obviously Rene "Iggy" Marchand, Noble's much-talked about Disciple contact. She knew it was Iggy because the guy did not just bear a passing resemblance to Iggy Pop - he actually appeared to be Iggy Pop, and it was only when Marchand spoke that you'd know it was not the infamous punk rocker; this guy's voice was reedy and high and came through in a French-Canadian accent that sounded positively bizarre. He was wearing standard biker duds, leather all the way: heavy leather boots, jeans overtopped with leather chaps, and a worn leather jacket over a dirty white T-shirt. The T-shirt identified him as a "Pussy Inspector" in big black uppercase letters.
More significantly, he was armed with an enormous nickel-plated .44 revolver - a pure Dirty Harry piece if ever there was one - and he was aiming it right at her. The bore looked roughly the size of a railway tunnel.
Aaron Noble was already standing next to him. He did not look particularly happy to be there, nor did he look terribly triumphant, but the battle-lines were clearly drawn and Cruz understood them immediately. She understood the gun, and she understood who was holding the gun. She saw the way Noble seemed to sidle up to the biker, the way a kid will when trying to hide behind a tough big brother (or maybe the way a certain dark-haired, baby-faced little girl would when trying to hide behind her tough big sister) and still maintain a reasonable amount of cool.
She understood that Noble had betrayed her.
And yet the blind litany just went rolling on, twisting through her mind like a dying snake; everything would be fine, she would be fine, Noble would help her get better and then help her get Buford. She hung onto it with a stubborn, almost childish tenacity, even as she became conscious of its futility, even as it began to recede. She hung on because there was nothing else, it was the last of what she had and there was nothing coming up to replace it, not anger or despair or even that reliable Cruz cynicism; it just disappeared into a void, a big black nothing with the shell of her pain around it, the pain and the thirst and the wasps and the chill, her tongue, face, head, shoulder, the way her legs shook, the way the rain ran down her cheeks, down her neck, down between her shoulder blades, pure physical sensory input with nothing beneath it.
Maritza Cruz stood shivering in the doorway between living room and hall, feeling no anger, no surprise, no dismay, not thinking about Lettie or Buford or how it would all work out, not thinking about Lettie or Buford at all. Not thinking. Just seeing, until she closed her eyes and waited for the shot, waited to be put out of her misery, because the lead pipe was across her throat again and if there was anything left in her at all it was only that cold finality.
And if there was anything behind that, it was relief.
Time passed. Twenty seconds; maybe thirty.
Cruz wondered dimly if she'd hear the shot, or if she would just feel one final hot nova of pain spread across her chest before everything went black.
When no shot came she opened her eyes.
Noble was chewing his lip. Chewing his lip and watching her carefully, as a man might watch some ancient, unsafe piece of machinery under strain. Next to him, Iggy held his gun steady on her. As bikers went, he didn't look terribly bloodthirsty, and he didn't look to be lining up a shot. He didn't really look interested in the politics of the matter at all. It was Noble who looked intense and skittish, as if he couldn't quite understand what he'd created here, and hadn't thought far enough ahead to know what to do next. They stared each other down for what seemed a very long time, but Cruz wasn't really there, she was seeing him but she wasn't seeing him. Her eyes were muddy, unfocused; the blue corona still flickered and flared at the edges of her vision.
"Richard Buford's in Canada," Noble said at last. His own voice in the silence seemed to surprise him, and he made an odd sound, a laugh that seemed to turn into a cough halfway through. "I said it was complicated, but I guess it really isn't. He's in Canada and he's not coming back, Cruz. Not for a long time, anyway."
Cruz continued to stare blankly at him. She waited to feel something and nothing came. Richard Buford had gone underground in Canada. Richard Buford was not coming back. These were the dry facts and no discernable emotion came to meet them. No surprise, no dismay, nothing. She was aware only of her physical distress and she could find nothing beyond that. She searched deliberately and almost desperately for something - for anger, for rage, for that black fury she'd been on intimate terms with most of her adult life. She tried for tears - the tears that had been coming so easily to her - but couldn't bring them.
She tried consciously to pull the red curtain down over her mind and nothing happened.
She could find nothing. She could feel nothing.
She thought of the house. The meth lab that was only two blocks away from where she now stood. (And did she still believe that? Yes she did.) She thought of how she'd huddled there with her sister in her arms, how she'd felt Lettie's breathing stop and knew in that instant that it was all over and none of it mattered, none of it had ever mattered. She had felt nothing then, either. She had felt nothing at all.
Now time had folded back on itself. It was all over and none of it mattered, none of it had ever mattered, and she could feel nothing beyond her own screaming nerve-endings.
So she just stood and watched the ebb and flow of the blue fire. Watched the way it caressed Noble, licked at him, the way it seemed to ripple with the buzz in her skull. She had no idea what kind of an expression she was wearing on her face, but it must have made Noble uncomfortable because he swallowed visibly before he continued.
"He's a nomad, our friend Buford," he said. "You knew that yourself. Never stays in one place. Doesn't have to. He's got plenty of other interests, he's got fingers in pies all over North America and he's got a thousand ratholes he can duck into when the heat's on. And nobody ever knows exactly where he is."
Cruz said nothing. Water ran into her eyes and she blinked it away. Part of her had now taken to insisting that this was another dream - she was still in Noble's car and this was another dream-within-a-dream, one which she would wake from and then it would finally be for real, she would be in the real real world, and they could start this all over again.
That was why she was numb. Because this wasn't real.
But the house denied that. The room denied it. The living room was small, dim, and too mundane to be anything but real; there were no high ceilings here, like in her dream; no big windows, certainly no antique furniture. There was a broken-down couch to her right, a sickly orange thing that probably dated from about the mid-seventies; two battered armchairs of similar vintage and in similar shape on the other side of the room; and a small endtable just to her left, next to the doorway. The endtable had a rather pretty vase perched on top of it, oddly out of place in a house that had obviously seen use as a crack den. The only illumination came from a gap in the boards covering the windows, casting a pallid, gray glow across the floor.
And there was Iggy. Iggy was real. He was not stage-dressing, not just some inanimate set-piece Noble had placed to add some atmosphere. He was real, and so was the gun in his hand.
It was an ambush.
The word stuck, and Cruz turned it over in her mind. Ambush. She had ambushed Noble last night - now Noble had done the same to her. Sent Iggy on ahead to lie in wait for them. All's fair in love and war. It raised a whole host of questions, and Cruz could entertain none of them. She couldn't hold onto a coherent train of thought for very long. She just kept coming back around to pain, thirst, cold, wet, pain, thirst, cold, wet.
And ever onward.
"It'll be months before he comes Stateside again," Noble was saying. "Maybe well into next year. And he'll still steer clear of New York. All of which is beside the point - even if he came back tomorrow, you're in no shape to do anything about it." He shook his head and tried to soften his expression into one of gentle pity. "It was never going to happen, Cruz. Didn't you see that?"
Cruz shook her own head slowly in return: right, left, back to center. Whether this conveyed no, I didn't see that or no, I didn't think it was going to happen, she didn't know. She was not even fully aware that she was doing it.
Her eyes floated over to Iggy again. She seemed transfixed by him, she seemed to have to keep confirming his reality to herself. She thought he might be stoned. His expression was slack and his eyes had the unblinking, doll-like shine common only to the hopelessly wasted and congenital idiots. He seemed almost as disconnected from the present situation as she was, looking past her, looking through her, his mind apparently lost in some whole other world.
But the barrel of his big Dirty Harry magnum remained pointed at her midsection, and it never wavered.
Any minute now. Any minute now the shot would come and it would end.
Cruz looked back at Noble. Hallucinatory blue fire crackled around him. What she said next was spontaneous and utterly absurd, and it was like something spoken in a dream, nonsensical but somehow appropriate under the circumstances: "So what about the book deal?"
With her tongue the way it was, this came out sounding more like: th'oh wha 'bout th' booh dee?
Nevertheless, Noble understood her. He shrugged. "The book? You mean the one I said I'd write about you?"
Cruz nodded.
"I wasn't shitting you about that - I really am gonna write a book about you. It's just that I've already got it. I've had it for a while now." His eyes narrowed slightly. "You remember how we met, right?"
The question was rhetorical and Cruz didn't bother to nod. She remembered. She remembered Officer Dade nailing Noble in a narcotics sting; she and Bosco moving in to make the arrest moments later.
That seemed like a dream, one experienced a very long time ago.
But this was the dream.
Wasn't it?
Cruz didn't know anymore.
"You saw my notes," Noble continued. "You know I've been checking up on you for a long time now." He squinted at her, a nervous, teasing smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. "Didn't you ever wonder, Cruz? Didn't you ever wonder how I could have raked up so much dirt on you in such a short time?"
Cruz said nothing.
"Took over a year," Noble said, as if she'd answered. "I'd heard a lot about you when I was writing Blue Line Fever, and I was sort of scratching stuff up on you. As a side-project. More curiosity than serious research. Crooked cops are a dime a dozen, but crooked female cops are sort of an interesting anomaly. I talked with a few of your colleagues, looked at your records, and of course I interviewed Lettie, but that was about it. The big step was to meet you face-to-face. I have sources in the NYPD, and I thought, hey, as long as I'm in town, what better way to meet Two-Bags than to get caught by her little Gestapo squad?" He grinned. "You understand what I'm saying, Cruz? I walked into your little drug bust that day on purpose. I knew it was a sting. I knew Officer Edward James Dade when I saw him."
The grin widened. "And I'll tell you again what I told you then - you didn't have probable cause."
He paused, obviously waiting for a reply.
Cruz didn't offer one, though clearly she was supposed to. She was supposed to gasp. She was supposed to see it as another sweeping revelation, like the bomb he'd dropped about interviewing Lettie. Something to impress her, in other words, remind her that he'd always been one step ahead of her, that Aaron Noble was smarter and faster than she.
It meant absolutely nothing to her.
Sensing that, Noble shrugged and continued. "I'll admit I got in over my head. I do that a lot, it's my weakness. I'm impulsive. I don't think things through." He laughed grimly. "I got stabbed practically my first day back in New York, didn't I? And that wasn't the first time. I've been stabbed, shot, beaten up - once somebody actually tried to garotte me with piano wire. That was in Sardinia. Long story. Bad memories. But I do what needs doing. Hell, it's how I got hooked on ice, right?"
Again there was that expectant pause.
Again Cruz greeted it with silence.
"I figured I'd be in and out in a day," he went on. "I sure as hell never expected it all to get so out of hand. I underestimated you, Cruz, and I nearly ended up dead for it. And I lost a good woman in Kim Zambrano. But it turned out to be quite a ride all the same. Quite an adrenaline rush. You were right about that much."
A pause.
Silence.
Looking a tad annoyed, Noble continued: "Buford and the Disciples were gonna be my next big project, but in light of what's happened, I think they can wait. I've made the decision, Cruz - you get your own book, and it takes priority over everything else. I've even got a working title: Five-Five Crime Sergeant." He raised his eyebrows. "That was your call-sign in the field, wasn't it? I'm sort of lukewarm to it, myself. If you've got something better, I'm open to suggestions."
Predictably, Cruz said nothing.
He smiled thinly. "Didn't think so. That's the trouble, Cruz, right there - I don't need you. I don't need you with me to write a book about you. A man writing about the mating habits of the Tasmanian Devil doesn't drive around with one in his fucking car."
He stopped long enough to chuckle at that, but the pause was shorter this time, probably because he'd resigned himself to not getting an answer out of her. Her silence seemed to have ruffled him, but rather than stop, he took it as a cue to fly off into a nervous babble.
"For example, that cop putting the slug in your shoulder - I can get pretty much all of Chapter One out of that. I'll tell you something, Cruz: I was in the first Gulf War, I've been to Kosovo, Somalia, Northern Ireland, some places you've probably never even heard of, and I've never seen anything like what I saw in my hotel room that night. I've seen guys - tough young bucks, nineteen, twenty years old - get hit not even half as bad as you did, and they'd roll around crying for their mothers. But you ... shit, I'll just say it again: you're a woman who sets precedence. A few inches lower and that shot could have ripped your arm right off, and yet you were ready to just take the fight right to them, blow Yokas away, and Boscorelli, and probably me as well. It was like watching Pacino in Scarface. I kept expecting you to point the gun at Yokas and scream say hello to my lil' fren'!"
Iggy snorted something like a laugh. It was the first sound Cruz had heard out of him thus far, and the first indication that he might not be as zoned-out as he looked.
"The point is," Noble continued, off into the wide blue yonder now and babbling freely. "I could find an army of ER docs and trauma surgeons who'd laugh in my face if I ever told them that story. They'd never believe anybody - especially a woman of your relatively small body mass - could suffer that kind of wound and stay upright ... and then get up and walk away from the hospital under her own power ... and then last as long as you have on your feet. At the very least they'd say you must have been on PCP. But you're not, are you? Not then, not now. You're stone-cold sober. The only thing your head's full of is Buford. And Letitia."
He exhaled; apparently holding up both sides of a conversation was tiring work. "So that's gonna be Chapter One - the strength of the human will and how it applies to you. I'm gonna include lots of research, case studies to back it up. The stories you hear about soldiers pulling their wounded buddies to safety even though their own guts have been blown out. That kind of thing."
The expectant look again.
Cruz merely stared back at him. She swayed on her feet, as if in a gentle breeze.
After about ten seconds Noble rolled his eyes and snorted. "Oh, come on, Cruz! You were always such a chatty girl! Never had an opinion you could keep to yourself! I can see that big fat vein pulsing right in the middle of your forehead - that always means you've got something on your mind."
He paused.
Got nothing in response.
Resumed with a shrug and a wave. "You ought to at least be proud you made it as far as you did. It was incredible, watching you get out of the car and walk up that path a minute ago. I said I wanted to see how far you'd go, and I did."
Silence.
After a moment his shoulders sagged. "The Sarge really doesn't have anything left to say?"
Cruz lowered her head. The Sarge really didn't have anything left to say. She felt her lips turn up in their own strange, thin little smile, one that was entirely without humor, without any conscious emotion behind it at all. Her thoughts were sluggish and confused and steeped in pain.
But she was starting to understand. She had the word ambush. She had Iggy. It was twenty-eight hours since she'd left Mercy - roughly twenty of which had been spent in Noble's company - and she had that as well. These things were bright way points in the fog, and she homed in on them, she -
(focused)
- regained enough of herself to understand why this was happening. She understood that it was Noble. It was so very Noble to do it like this, to bring it to this kind of a head. Noble had decided to wash his hands of her. Maybe right from the start. Or maybe it was a snap-decision made over a beer with Iggy. Didn't matter either way. The Great Writer had decided to cancel the Adventure, but he hadn't called the police, as any sensible person would; he hadn't attempted a dump-and-run at a precinct house or a hospital; he hadn't even tried to dispose of her himself; God knew it would have been nothing to roll her out into the rain while she was passed out. He hadn't tried to stab her or knock her on the head. Instead he'd drawn her into a ridiculous trap - an ambush - and ducked behind the armed biker he'd brought for protection ... never mind that the man was obviously high and probably a lot more dangerous than she was.
And why would he bring an unstable third party into the picture and put himself in this sticky position when there were far easier - and far safer - ways to get rid of her?
Why, because he was impulsive! Because he didn't think things through! Because he was the Famed and Acclaimed Aaron Noble, a man who liked to jerk off to his own sense of superiority and could do it pretty much anywhere, a man whose bread and butter was finding the sweeping melodrama in the dull meaninglessness of real-world tragedy. A man who wrote from the trenches and from the ghettos, getting stabbed if necessary, getting addicted to crystal meth if necessary, getting mixed up with bikers and crazed ex-Anti-Crime Sergeants if necessary. A man whose keen sense of theater outweighed any sense of his own self-interest.
He'd brought her here because this was his way, this was his way of making it right. He was a hack, and this was a hack's ending. All that talk. All that posturing. He wanted to wash his hands of her, but he wanted to do it from a leisurely distance. Sure - let somebody else do the dirty work of holding her at bay while he indulged himself, ran his mouth, outlined his plans and motivations like a villain in a James Bond movie. While he gloated. While he studied her reactions and took notes. While he shot his wad into her face one last time, you might say. She was the Great Writer's Adventure, after all. His study in obsession and a handy chance to get a little payback for all she'd put him through.
To Aaron Noble she'd never been anything else.
And suddenly she could see herself, she could step outside of her own skin and see herself, and what she saw was nothing more than what she was: a bedraggled and badly injured woman standing in a shitty little room in a shitty little house in her untied running shoes and her dripping clothes. That was all. She could see herself and she could smell herself, a cloying aroma of piss and sour puke and blood and sweat (and something ominous underneath, something rank and spoiled, and she didn't know if it was real or imagined but she knew exactly where it was coming from), she could see herself falling apart, and she could see that she'd let Noble do this to her, she'd let this fucking bastard manipulate her and tease her and torture her and now she'd handed him his perfect ending on a silver platter. She was standing here giving him his captive audience, feeding him, and she didn't care, she couldn't care, because she had been pounded flat under the hammer of the pain, she had been consumed by that one overriding question: How Much Longer. How Much Longer would she have to endure this, How Much Longer before Noble could get in touch with his "safe people" to get her something to stop the pain dead in its tracks, How Much Longer before she could get some relief?
How Much Longer, God help her, before she could get some kind of fix.
A pill under the tongue. Or down the hatch with a glass of water. Or the sting of the needle, the plunger depressing, forcing some alien fluid into her veins. Drown the nerve-endings in something sweet, quiet them, shut off the signal from that screaming pain-center in the jelly of her brain. Quiet the blind litany, no more Noble's gonna get me some dope. Quiet the voices in her head, her father, no more Papa telling her gently to stop, her own answering cry of -
(this is ATONEMENT, this is PENANCE)
- but those were just words, words with no meaning, no meaning until now, right here and now, this was atonement, this was penance. Cruz had seen it in the hospital, in her bedroom mirror, in the rearview mirror of Noble's car, and here, now, it was finally true, that shewas Lettie, she had become her sister, she stank and she hurt and she wanted a fix to make the pain go away and by the end that was pretty much all Lettie was, she was Lettie because -
(things come around)
- things always come around, she'd kept stumbling across Lettie everywhere she went, turning grimly away from her each and every time, looking down her nose at her, berating her, scolding her, screaming at her, sneering at her, asking how can you keep doing that to yourself, how can you hurt yourself like that, cheap questions, so easy to ask, so easy to just let her go and pretend she didn't exist and now here she was herself, pale and misshapen and shivering in the reek of her own piss, and a few minutes ago she was huddled in Noble's car, the same way Lettie -
(I'm sorry, 'Ritza)
- had huddled in the back of the RMP that day. This was the same woman who had believed herself so strong, so capable, so resourceful, the woman who had come through so much, and all the time thinking she was so lucky, that Fate smiled on Maritza Cruz, that things just sort of fell together and it would end just like a movie, she'd catch Buford, corner him, kill him, shoot him right the fuck off his Harley if necessary.
None of that was real. None of that had ever been real. The woman in the mirror was real, and the woman in the mirror was Lettie. It was as simple as that. She'd had it all wrong, right from the start. She'd thought it was over when she stepped through the door of this room when it had actually ended three months ago, in that place only two blocks away from where she now stood.
It had all ended in that single breath. A single breath she had felt -
(felt her go I felt her go she died a little while ago)
- against her cheek, and all bets were off from that day forward.
Now there was only Noble. Noble was all that was left.
She was dimly aware that her right hand had started up again, opening and closing, opening and closing, clenching, the way it had in the hospital, ragged nails trying to punch new holes in her palm.
She felt like she had to vomit again but had nothing left in her stomach to do it with.
She closed her eyes and felt tears overspill and slide down her cheeks. She felt a drop of water run down her spine, felt an itch form at the small of her back, and she -
- she was slipping again. She was slipping and something was -
(!dreaming dreaming!)
- howling in the center of her mind, the center of the buzz, the center of the pain -
(!all a dream so now wake up WAKE UP if you think you can do it!)
- and there was high, malicious, screaming laughter in it, wake up, wake up, that's right, it's all a dream, you pathetic bitch, you stupid twat, you fucking insect, all a nightmare, you're Lettie, right, sure you are, your sister has possessed you, Noble's gonna get you some dope, he's laughing at you, laughing at you, laughing -
(laughing Lettie laughing cramming handfuls of snow down -
- her back -
- and -
- she looked at herself again and she was disgusted all over again, not only because she looked like Lettie but because she looked ridiculous, she -
(you look -
- ridiculous. Rocking back and forth on her feet, barely able to stand, with a gun slung low at her side like she could have done something, like she could have done anything. Like she could have done anything when -
- Bosco stumbled around calling 10-13 with the smoke thickening -
- and Lettie standing on the steps yelling -
- Papa bought me fish!)
- and she could barely think, she couldn't find where thought ended and reality began and it was outside and inside and her head reeled, her head was full of bugs. Bugs. It pounded with them. She felt a heavy dry-sob trying to work its way up and she swallowed it, swallowed hard, but she wasn't completely successful and her chest hitched visibly.
She made a kind of cracked hiccupping sound low in her throat.
"For what it's worth," Noble said, unaware of the storm going on only a few feet away from him, "I'm honestly sorry about what happened to your kid sister. But she made her own bed, Cruz. In the end we all do."
There was an unmistakable finality in that last word. You could almost hear the periods at the ends of Noble's sentences, and that was undoubtedly the big one, the big THE END.
Cruz caught it and looked up at him. She managed to -
(focus)
- get a slight grip on herself, get some of her objective reality back, and she wasn't numb anymore, she was anything but numb, she had again become the center of a cold, perfect clarity, sounds and smells and sensations all magnified. The blue fire was still there, still fizzing and hissing around everything, like a halo. Her eyelids fluttered against it. She wondered crazily if Noble had a tape recorder running in his pocket to preserve all his lovely talk, thought of asking him, decided not to. She wondered what he would do now. If he would really order (or ask) Iggy to finish it, to shoot her down like a dog. He was too much of a coward to do it himself.
The thought struck the wasps' nest in her head and sent them into a frenzy, sent her into a frenzy of hysterical anger tinged with that dark terror. Was that really what he was going to do? Order her execution? Bring his hand down in a sharp chopping motion, like a mafia thug in some mob-opera, and order his biker friend to put a bullet in her? Do da job, Iggy - plug da dumb broad.
Fine, then - let's just see if the dickless cabron had it in him. She'd like to hear that, she'd like to hear Noble give the order. She'd like to hear how he'd give it. If he wanted to put an end to her, then let's just see him fucking do it. She doubted he had the balls.
But let's just see.
Cruz grinned suddenly. It was the cannibal-grin: wide, vicious, meant to provoke. She lifted her right arm slightly and held it out from her side, palm-out. It was shaking badly but she didn't care. She arched her back defiantly, presenting Iggy with a better target, wondering again if she'd hear the shot first or if it would just be brief heat and then nothing.
"So what happens now?" she asked hoarsely.
What came out sounded more like: th'oh wha' hopp'n's noh?
Noble's gaze flitted uncertainly over to Iggy, then back to her. "Well ... basically, the deal is this: you reach very slowly into your pocket and produce the meth you're carrying. All of it."
Cruz blinked. The meth. She'd forgotten all about the meth and the reason she'd brought it. She'd forgotten almost everything.
Again, though, the word lit up her mind like a firework, cut a swath through the fog, like ambush and atonement and penance. It was a word that seemed to have a little magic in it, a kind of incantation; it was the instrument of her sister's death and it represented all of her hatred for Aaron Noble, which it obligingly brought back for her.
She picked it up gamely and put back on again, like an old and much-loved article of clothing.
She focused on it.
The red curtain was falling over her. She could feel it. There was a halo of blue fire around everything she looked at but it was the red curtain she was seeing, and its familiarity comforted her. It calmed her, even as it built in her. Peace from rage, a contradiction in terms. Nothing she had ever done had ever mattered, and now there was only Noble in front of her. And he was as good a target as any. Because he'd won, and he knew he'd won. Guys like -
(Gaines and Alvarez Schaeffer and his handcuffs Robbie Holland and his video camera Buford Barnes)
- him always won, didn't they? He knew it and she knew it. The Nobles and the Schaeffers and the Bufords and the Hollands were all the same, they were of that very special species, the Great White American Male. They knew the system. They were the system. They could shrug off a murder charge like a parking ticket. They could videotape themselves and their buddies beating and taunting and raping a helpless, skinny, sick little girl and call it freedom of expression. People like them always beat people like her, because people like her were helpless against them, and here, now, was the proof.
But she was not completely helpless. She was still in possession of two working firearms, and yes, she might be pathetic, but she was not completely helpless.
And the fucking bastard was standing right in front of her.
And what else was there left to do now but make sure Aaron Noble never walked out of this room alive? Noble was Buford, after all. He was from the same place, he was on the same level.
"You take it out very slowly," he was saying, "and you drop it on the floor in front of you. Then you back up three steps."
Back up three steps. It was as if he'd been peeking at her thoughts.
And it showed that the stupid cabron was still afraid of her. A ripple of fresh contempt went through the red curtain. He knew she was still armed and he was actually afraid of her. He'd had fifty opportunities to disarm her, he could have plucked both the Tec-9 and his own Colt .45 out of her jacket at his leisure, and yet he'd left the guns on her.
For the book, right? For the story. Yes. With Noble everything was for the story. He could do what he liked and make up whatever he wanted later, but he'd never take that route, oh no. He'd never compromise his integrity like that. He had to live the story. Become part of it. Better to leave her strapped - more exciting that way.
He was impulsive, after all. He didn't think things through.
At some point within the next thirty seconds, he was going to die for it.
"Then?" she asked.
Noble pursed his lips and shrugged, as if the answer was self-evident and he was surprised she couldn't see it. "Then we all just walk away. I don't want to see you hurt more than you already are. That was never my intention."
Cruz felt a crazed kind of disappointment. Disappointment that she'd never get to see what he looked like handing down the lethal order. She thought it might have looked funny.
Noble seemed to misread her expression as cautious optimism - as if she couldn't believe how kind he was being by letting her live, how wonderfully he'd lived up to his own gallant surname.
"That's right," he said. "Nobody has to get hurt." He laughed. "You're scum, Cruz. And you righteously fucked over my life. But I bear some of the blame for that, and I think you've already suffered enough for your sins. I also think you're going to die if you don't get some serious medical attention very soon - and believe it or not, I don't want that for you. We're both in a hell of a jam here. I'm in hot water and sinking deeper by slow degrees, and you're killing yourself by slow degrees, and so it's time for us both to bow out. But I do want that meth. I think I'm entitled to it."
Another pause. He was still probing for a reaction, maybe an argument - maybe even a classic Two-Bags Cruz tirade about what a pathetic dope fiend he was.
None came. She had humbled again. Put her head down and trained her eyes on the floor. Nothing dangerous here, Mr. Noble. Nothing dangerous at all. The Sarge was dead, after all. The Sarge had been bludgeoned to death by that big hot hammer of pain.
"You give me your meth," Noble said, "and then we part ways. Iggy gets on his bike. I get back in my car. You can lie down on the couch there. When I get a few blocks away, I'll call 9-1-1 and have them send an ambulance for you."
In a better frame of mind Cruz might have laughed out loud. It was exactly the kind of plan she would have expected Aaron Noble to come up with. Leading her here was his ending - walking away with all the loose ends tied up so neat and tidy would be his epilogue.
Except she didn't think Senor Pussy Inspector had any intention of letting anybody just walk away. Iggy held the big .44 revolver steady on her, the muzzle trained on her belly, but his eyes were still glassy and looking off over her shoulder. He was here and yet he wasn't - he was following some whole other script in his head, waiting for some little internal cue. He might let Noble blather on for a little while, play his little you-go-your-way-I'll-go-mine game, but eventually he might tire of it. A few minutes later she and Noble would be dead and Rene "Iggy" Marchand would be in the wind.
She didn't care about herself anymore, but Noble was hers. She would kill Iggy if he tried to take Noble away from her.
This did not sound the least bit crazy to her. It only sounded right.
"Now," he said. "Are you gonna be good?"
Cruz nodded.
"You know this is right, don't you? You know it's over. It was over before it even started."
Cruz smiled grimly. She nodded again, truthfully this time, the curtain thickening, settling over her. She could feel it now, working with the pain, working in the pain, she could feel it in the blood pounding in her ears and behind her face, in the rotten throb that had woven itself throughout her entire body.
She could feel it wanting to take her.
Just a little longer, though. Just a little bit longer.
"I actually think you're gonna be okay," Noble said, trying absurdly to sound casual. "There's this place that opened up about two years ago, downstate, in a little town called Eastbridge. Cedargrove, it's called. All one word: Cedargrove, no spaces or hyphens. It's a correctional facility for women. Minimum security. Low-risk and nonviolent offenders only. Now, you're not exactly nonviolent, but I think they'll peg you as low-risk. After all, it's not like they're gonna send you to Riker's Island - might as well run you through a meat grinder and be done with it, right? You're a disabled ex-cop. So what if you fudged a few reports, planted some drugs, executed a gangbanger or two? You're still not a drooling mass-murderer. They'll set you up with a room at Cedargrove, trust me. And that's what they call the cells, too - rooms. Prison language is a no-no there. They give everybody jobs: groundskeeper, cook, librarian. The inmates take care of the upkeep. They stress education and rehabilitation. And they have a tennis court. A fucking tennis court. Not that it'll be much good to you. I'm no doctor, but you probably are gonna lose that arm."
Cruz wasn't listening anymore. Her head spun. Images flashed past, Lettie chief among them, and she could feel herself slipping again but she held herself together. She stopped looking at the floor and she held her -
(focus)
- head up, high and proud again, meeting his eye. She took quick stock of herself. Her right hand was shaking. Her reflexes were untrustworthy, probably useless. The lighting was bad and her eyes were still full of blue fire.
A quick look at Iggy.
The biker's hand was steady, his silver .44 still aimed directly at her. She should try to take him first. She knew that, and she also knew that she wouldn't. It would be Noble. She would take Noble first, and Iggy would kill her, and that would be the end.
But Aaron Noble would be dead. She would at least take that much with her.
If anybody was still keeping score.
Cruz began to reach very slowly into the left side of her coat. The left side of her coat, where Noble's pistol was concealed. She felt a crawl of revulsion as her fingers brushed the numb, alien flesh of her left hand.
Images: she saw Yokas. She saw Yokas turning the gun around, left hand to right. Saw the muzzle flash. Saw the room tilt crazily as the impact knocked her back and drove the wind from her. She remembered everything. Every detail.
She saw Boscorelli. Saw him standing in her apartment. Saw him move in close, closer, closer as she went forward and grabbed him, felt him against her, his breath against her, losing herself in him, some small, almost-extinguished part of her crying out at his touch, wanting it to be real, for him to be real, for someone to love and to love her. She remembered everything. Every detail.
She saw the psycho in the alley. Saw him grinning as he pressed the bar against her throat. What were you, some kind of an Affirmative-Action hire? She saw the world turning black and felt that same exhausted relief, that same cold finality. She remembered everything. Every detail.
And she saw Lettie. Lettie on the ski slope, seventeen, laughing and throwing snow at her. Lettie on the street, eighteen, selling her body in her pink jailbait outfit. Lettie on the steps, five years old, yelling about her goldfish. Lettie at Mercy, twenty-one, face smeared with charcoal, smelling of shit.
Lettie, twenty-one, in her arms, dying, the house burning down around them.
Every detail.
She could hear her own pulse rushing in her ears. The itch on the small of her back. She still had a thumb lodged under one corner of the red curtain. Holding it at bay, keeping it from touching down, just a little longer now, please just a little longer ...
"That's right," Noble whispered, watching her. His voice was hoarse. There was something grotesquely sexual in it; he should have licked his lips. "Take it out slow. Very slow. I know you're gonna be good, but just be careful, that's all - my friend here's a bit touchy. Right, Ig?"
"Just Smith and Wesson and me," Iggy responded blandly. It was the only time he spoke. A wide, yellow grin had spread across his face, but his eyes were still vacant, and the accent - thick, French, barely intelligible - was almost comical: Jus' Smit' an' Weh-son an' me. Cruz (which was to say, the old Cruz, Sergeant Cruz) knew that Quebec had a heavy biker presence, but she still could not connect that haughty French-waiteraccent with a man who looked like any one of a thousand Hell's Angels.
It made everything seem that much more skewed, that much more unreal.
For the second time it occurred to her that she might already be dead. Yokas had killed her and this was hell, and when Iggy shot her maybe it would just start all over again.
She pushed the thought away.
"I really don't want you to get hurt," Noble said. "I've done you a favor, Cruz, really I have. You don't have to die, and this doesn't have to be the end. I think I'm even gonna miss you a little. I'm actually hoping I can come and visit you at Cedargrove."
He smiled then, and it was his best smile, his broad, winning, book-jacket-photo-smile. "Maybe we can even work out an interview schedule."
"Maybe we can," she slurred, hardly aware that she'd spoken at all.
Tears began to flow again as she felt her hand brush the butt of Noble's .45 and bypass it, her fingers sliding under the gun to another, smaller pocket, closing around something that still resided there.
The meth. Noble's crystal meth.
Because that was what he wanted. That was what he wanted, so that was what she was going to give him.
Cruz scooped it out of her pocket - all of it, just as he'd asked - and she realized that she could hear that sound again, that high, keening, teakettle sound coming from deep in her own chest, and as she drew back her arm and threw the crystal meth at Noble with almost all of her remaining strength the scream exploded out of her, she screamed at the top of her lungs and let the red curtain fall over her for the last time in her life, she screamed as her right hand, empty again, dropped to her side, ducked under her coat, and closed on the Tec-9.
Continued in Chapter 13-ii