Christmas, 1999 (continued)
Katie woke gasping, sprawled at the foot of the front porch's stairs. The flannel was wrapped around her neck, one of her boots and a sock was missing, and she tasted salt on her lips.
She sat up, groaned aloud at the pounding in her head, bent over her own wrecked body. Salt on her lips and she dragged a hand through hair tangled by pounding surf, but she was firmly on the ground, hadn't—it seemed—made it past the cabin.
She reached down and untied the other boot, a job made difficult by her drunkenness and by the thin crust of salt on the laces. The knots were stiff, as if they had dried and hardened.
No. What was she thinking? She had not been pushed off a cliff and fallen into the sea.
It wasn't even that chilly out here, even as the sun was setting. She could do without the flannel, the jeans sticky and clinging. She glanced at her watch, but it had stopped. Likely from the fall down the stairs. She reached up and tentatively felt through her hair, but there was no tender place on her scalp.
Katie chucked the Doc Martens towards the porch and listened to their satisfying thunk as they hit the wood, then she managed to heave herself up to the bottom step and lean against the hand rail for support.
She felt wretched. No more expensive beer.
She didn't see the bottle she'd taken out with her, but since the sun was going down, she'd come back for it tomorrow. She tried wrestling with the flannel twisted up behind her back and around her neck, but it was crusted with salt as well, a stiffening in the folds, and her brain was too alcohol-soaked to comprehend. She went for the jeans next, not at all surprised when they clung to her legs as if wet.
She stripped them off and caught a whiff of seaweed.
No brain for this. Don't think. Move.
Dressed only in tank top and the boy shorts she wore for underwear these days, Katie crawled up the steps and back inside the cabin, not trusting her balance. (The world felt like it was swinging backwards. She'd been drunk before, but maybe never this drunk. Had she eaten at all today?)
She crawled to the cot, relieved to put her sore face against the cool cotton sheets.
Had she belly flopped going in?
The next morning, Katie showered through a hangover and dressed more appropriately for the warmth before going outside to retrieve the remnants of her disappointing folly.
She relaxed when she stepped off the porch. The sun was out and warming the air. Not quite sixty, if she had to guess. She had thrown the Doc Martens back inside the cabin and now she spotted her jeans, scooped them up, went hunting for the flannel.
The jeans were stiff from being out all night, and they scraped against her skin. As she got deeper into the trees, she hugged them to her, grateful for their marginal protection against the wind that blew in from the ocean, cool and damp with morning chill. She didn't see the flannel in the immediate vicinity of the cabin, so she tried retracing her steps.
Bullrushes, yellow flowers, foxtails, the copse of cypress… all as she remembered it.
Except she hadn't come this far. Shouldn't her flannel have been right at the base of the steps where she'd fallen? And where was the bottle of beer she'd been carrying out here, intending to get (stay) drunk? There'd only been the five littered around the counter this morning.
She found herself once more barefoot and crushing yellow flowers between her toes.
And there, the strange tree whose bark had cut her fingers.
Katie glanced down to her hand in remembrance, gaped at the three slitted wounds across the pads.
She stopped in the middle of the sea grass and turned slowly in place, her heart beginning to pound.
The air was cooler now, despite how intense the sun was in the grasses, so bright that she almost couldn't look westward. (But it was morning, and the sun rose in the east.)
Her mouth was dry with coffee, a slap of toothpaste, and she was walking to the edge of the cliff.
Katie stopped only when her foot bumped something hard enough to jolt pain up through her toe, and she looked down.
The beer bottle.
"No," she croaked.
"Oh yes."
She spun around.
This time the man was reaching for her, not to push her over the edge, but to tug her away. "Come with me." A chill went through her veins at his touch.
"Who the hell are you?" Her jeans dropped; she tried to take back her hand, but his were massive, crushing her fingers as he led her away, towards the trees.
"Since that didn't seem to work last night. We'll try a different route."
"Who the hell are you?"
The dimples in his cheeks widened. "How about you call me the Ghost of Christmas Future?"
"Oh God, I'm still drunk. I'm drunk and—"
"Sure, Beckett. Let's say that. And so what if you are? You can't enjoy yourself for once? You're always so quiet. Don't you miss being… loud?"
He said it like it was supposed to be a magic word. But the world didn't dissolve into a dreamscape of mist-wreathed tombstones and a black-cloaked wraith pointing out her own demise.
She lifted an eyebrow and he laughed. "Just come with me. Trust me this time; you know you want to. I have something to show you."
"My mother told me to never go anywhere with strangers," she shot back.
As soon as she said it, she froze. A rabbit in a snare, her mother's death a looming presence more gutting than any black-cloaked ghost.
He turned to her, caught her hand in both of his, and she noticed—somehow—the soft slow maddening circle his thumb made over hers.
"I know it's changed you, locked you away, so raw and fresh you've had to wall it up," he murmured. His eyes were as blue as the ocean; she couldn't look away. "But I can show you something—show you a world—where you don't need that wall. Where you are in control."
She blinked back the burn of tears. The wind dried them anyway, kicking up and blasting the t-shirt to her body.
She shivered.
"Okay," she croaked. "Okay. Show me."
He pulled her into the copse of cypress trees.
"Yo, Beckett! Gotta fresh one. You coming?"
Katie jolted at the use of her name, spun in an ineffectual circle as she tried to get her bearings.
"She's coming," the man answered for her, and then nudged her by the shoulders towards an elevator.
The rest of the world came into focus, one element at a time: the drab concrete, the weathered metal desks, the constant ringing of phones.
The man with blue eyes and a smile had disappeared.
"This one is just your style." The guy who'd called her name, a boyish looking whip-thin guy in dress pants and a maroon pin stripe dress shirt, now tugged at his collar as the elevator doors closed, unbuttoned it a bit. He had a leather jacket slung over one arm. "Espo is gonna meet us at the scene."
The scene.
She glanced down at herself and saw black dress pants, poorly tailored, an eggplant collared shirt open at the neck, the sleeves of a suit jacket that dwarfed her frame. A badge was clipped to her waistband, and she touched it with two fingers, astonished.
The next thing she knew, she was being driven through a maze of Manhattan blocks, cutting over here, whipping across there, as if the driver beside her knew every nook and cranny and every traffic pattern of mid-day. She recognized buildings and streets, and yet nothing was familiar.
Just as in a dream, she was out on a city sidewalk, striding purposefully into a luxury apartment building, no concept of how she had gotten here. Or how her body knew what to do, how forcefully to present the badge, where to sign the log the policer officer held out to her, just when to duck under the crime scene tape and approach the dining room table.
A blonde was laid out, covered in rose petals, sunflowers over her eyes.
Dead.
It pricked something, just in the back of her mind, a shiver down her spine, and a tug that made her turn.
Standing just beyond the crime scene tape was the man from the cliff side, the one who promised her control, and a way to live without her mother. He winked, held up a finger to his lips in silence, then nodded his head to the dead woman behind her.
She turned back around, found herself approaching the body posed on the dining room table. She crouched, inspecting the strange delicacy of rose petals, the blue sheen to the lips, the hair that no longer looked real.
A strobe of light, flash bulbs, and she had the sensation of deja vu, not of having lived this moment before, but of living two moments at once.
She wondered if her mother looked so at peace in her death. She wondered if there were crime scene photos just like the ones these two technicians were taking now.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
A man approached, met the first boyish-looking one who had driven her here. Latin, smirking, like he knew a secret. "Alison Tisdale. 24. Grad student at NYU, part of the Social Work program."
She jerked upright, off track by the realness of this moment, the flash bulbs going off, the lights, the money and Manhattan luxury, the certainty of knowing this scene, this pose, these rose petals; and at the same time, she was on a rooftop, a crush of people in ball gowns and suits, accolades, another beautiful blonde but this one directing a round of applause from a stage, and Beckett cutting through the party-goers like a shark.
To her prey.
She rapped hard on his shoulder—his back was to her—and there was a surge of triumph when he turned.
But instead of knowing just what to say, how to move, her grip on the badge hardened into a claw and Katie was dumbstruck.
The killer was the man from the cliffside.
He held a sharpie in his fingers, tapped it against her chin. "So how does it feel, Beckett?"
She was two people, one ungainly body. She heard herself saying, "You're under arrest," but she was also saying, "Who are you?"
He leaned in, smirking lips and abrasive five o'clock shadow, and a ripple of awareness traveled through her.
No chill. Just heat.
His mouth just grazed her ear.
"Oh, Kate, you have no idea."
She woke up.
A bottle of beer, empty, was cradled in one arm, while her cheek was mashed against the window overlooking the cliffside. It was night. The stars were jagged holes in the void, and the ocean was a rumbling monster trying to scale the cliff wall.
She reeled, tripped over her own out-stretched legs as the bottle rolled noisily away on the wooden floors. Bumped as it hit something in the darkness.
Her mouth tasted of a battery-acid called coffee, but that was nothing new.
You have no idea.
She pushed her tongue against her teeth to check they were all there, managed to stand. She wasn't as hopeless as she'd thought, and in fact, her legs worked correctly, managed to direct her to the counter.
She added the final beer bottle to the six pack and set it on the ground. Out of sight was not, unfortunately, out of mind or body. She felt halfway drunk; she was not sure what day this was. She was staring at the front door of the cabin, its solid black outline, how it blocked out the night, and she was trying not to be terrified.
She hated being out of control.
She wondered if her mother's crime scene had looked like that.
Peaceful.
She wondered if she'd lost her mind.
She wondered if it was too late at night to call New York.
She went to the cot and unzipped her bag, fished around until she found the cell phone her mother had insisted she have before going away to college on the other side of the country. She had three numbers programmed into the address book, each one inputted by Johanna Beckett right before they'd left for the airport, Katie on her way to Stanford's summer experience.
A walk-in clinic was the first listing, the public library in Stanford was second, and third—California's information hotline.
She dialed the number and sat down on the cot, her fingers slicked with flop-sweat. A book on the cot where it had fallen, half-opened, and she brought it into her lap for something to hold onto.
The operator picked up with a click, Infoline, how can I assist you?
It took a moment to make her voice work, and her question, when it came out, sounded ridiculous to her own ears. But the operator didn't miss a beat; she heard the thump of heavy phone books, the rustle of thin pages flipping, and then, I've got the number, do you have something to write it down?
No, she almost panicked. But she said yes and grabbed a pen from her backpack, opened the book to the title page. She concentrated on the phone number and repeated it back twice to be sure.
She said thank you and disconnected. The cell phone was heavy in her hand; the air trapped inside the cabin was stuffy from the day's sun, and her head was throbbing. She scraped the hair back from her face and wrapped it around her fist, off her neck. She would have to cut it. Likely short (as short as the dream).
A shark through water, straight to her prey.
She looked down at the black pen on the title page and found herself dialing the number.
Her heart pounded like the ocean waves against the rocks. She tasted salt when she licked her lips; she still felt the wounds at her fingers, and also the hard edge of the badge against her hip bone, and she didn't know which were real.
If any of it was real.
Three hour time difference, here and New York. Three hours.
"Raglan," the gruff voice answered. "This is Raglan. Who is this?"
She blew out a rough breath. "Detective Raglan, this is Kate Beckett."
She was about to say you worked on my mother's case, but the man beat her to it. "Your mom. Johanna. I'm sorry kid, but we still got nothing."
It's not that. But it was. "How old do you have to be to enter the Police Academy?"
There was a dropped beat, a rough moment of silence.
She squeezed the phone so tight, she thought she might crush the connection. The book dug into her middle where she was hunched over.
"Twenty-one," Raglan said. "By law, twenty-one. You go back to college yet?"
"I'm at NYU. I'm twenty-one next year, November. Will you help me get in?"
"If you need help getting in, you don't belong there."
Her nostrils flared. She choked down rage and sat up straight. "I'll do it without you." You lazy bastard. "I'll do whatever it takes."
Raglan made a rough noise and she thought she heard him shift, as if standing. "I'll get you in," he said.
She froze, her hand a claw on the phone. She would not thank him. "Tell me what I have to do." She almost said, I want to see my mother's case file. But she didn't.
"You're serious about this."
There was another hard sound, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She turned, and the cabin door was open, a cool breeze eddying inside.
Her ear, as if grazed by lips—
"It's the only thing left for me now," she said in response. To the open door, to Raglan on the phone. "This is how I get my life back."
Homicide.
"Don't go back to school," Raglan gruffed. "I'll get you in, January 1st."
Her breath caught.
"Merry Christmas, Beckett, you're one of the few exemptions."
The line clicked, gone.
Kate Beckett was going to the Police Academy.
She stared down at the book still clutched to her. In a Hail of Bullets.
Well, she had two more days before she could go back to New York and get to work.
Might as well read.
—