fic: you cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes. (prime suspect) (1/3)
you cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.
prime suspect. look at this: a united front; jane and reg return to the city. jane/reg (with references to lou/augie, jane/costello). spoilers through 1x08. 22,925 words.
notes: oh my god, the fic that ate my brain and my heart, that monster, etc.
i'm still floored by how long this thing is, lol. and i know i kept complaining about how it just WOULD NOT END, but this really was the most fun i have had writing fic in a long, long time. PRIME SUSPECT IS A GR8 SHOW, EVERYONE! GO WATCH IT INSTEAD OF READING THIS! but wow, major thanks to may and sisi and anyone and everyone else who listened to me wail about this show and all the idiots on it LOL (i'm sorry i'm not sorry these two give me life). um, spoilers through the most recent episode, 1x08? also idk how to rate things anymore. there's sex and violence. no one is surprised lol.
we both want the very same thing.
we are praying
i am the one to save you
but you don’t even own
your own violence
(JOANNA NEWSOM)
J A N E : You need a new home.
R E G : Like fun I do. But if I did, you’re not the man who’s going to give it to me.
(PRIME SUSPECT)
Jane wants a cigarette.
She taps her fingers along the arm of her chair.
Scratch that. She needs a cigarette.
She sighs instead, smacks her lips as she chews an ever increasingly stale piece of gum. She jiggles her foot, drips some of the melting slush onto the carpet, but the shrink doesn’t say anything about it.
By Jane’s count, she’s figuring she’s got a couple more sessions left with the doc before Sweeney will consider her psychologically sound, fit to work, whatever. She’s figuring at this rate she’ll be back on the beat a week or two before Thanksgiving.
“You seem to be coping well,” Dr. Stevens says. She is still looking down at the legal pad in her lap, scribbling something and Jane finds her words and the action to be at odds with one another.
“I try,” Jane says drily.
Things fall apart, is what she wants to say. Collateral damage. Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.
Her eyes drift over to the window. It snowed the night before but today there is only gray. Heavy clouds loom, threatening more.
“Why don’t you tell me about your working relationship with, uh, with Detective Duffy?”
Jane frowns. She stops tapping her fingers. She does not know what kind of question this is or what Dr. Stevens is trying to get at with it.
“Detective Duffy, huh,” Jane says, and then she pauses.
But this is later. This is a long time later.
O N E ;
This starts outside the city.
A cut to the chase, a peek at the back of the book: they sleep together the same night as the shoot-out. Jane and Reg sleep together for the first time in a rundown Holiday Inn upstate.
It’s the sort of thing in retrospect Jane should have seen coming. It’s the sort of thing that is most surprising in how completely unsurprising it is at all.
Reg meets them at the hospital. He meets her over in the South Wing, by the very bank of elevators where this all began, and Jane can’t help but laugh. The sound comes out wheezy and tight, and she pats Amanda on the arm as she is whisked back off to her room.
“Radiology’s in the basement,” she finally says to Reg, like that somehow explains everything. She bends over at the waist and takes a deep breath, still winded, still exhausted. She’s still sweating, her sweater lost somewhere in the basement of that fucking hospital, her thin tank top clinging to her.
Reg is looking at her like he wants to kill her, like he wants to finish the job this Roy guy started, but there’s also something else there. Something that reads along the lines of utterly exhausting relief, and that, she thinks, is unexpected.
“You’re all right,” he finally says after a beat, and Jane frowns at that. When he says it again -- “You’re all right?” -- it sounds more like a question, and he asks it again and again. He says: “You’re all right? You all right? The kid’s okay? Everyone? Everyone’s -- okay?”
Jane stares at him, and then she sort of waves him off, breathes heavy when she says, “Yeah.” And then: “Deputy’s dead. Roy -- he was the other guy, the guy who did the parents.”
Reg’s shoes squeak against the linoleum when he steps towards her. He’s soaking wet, dripping rainwater everywhere, and Jane crosses her arms over her chest as she looks up at him.
“You?” he asks, and she nods.
“Hunted us through the goddamned basement. I got the drop on him, and. Yeah.”
She can’t read Reg’s face. He simply looks tired, tired and wet, but that something else, the other part, she doesn’t know what to call it. “I was calling you,” he says, voice quiet, edged with steel. “Before. I was -- I was calling you.”
“You knew?” She frowns. “How’d you know?”
“Print came back his. Guys called it in.”
“Hmmm,” she murmurs. And then, “No signal in the basement.”
He won’t stop looking at her, and she suddenly feels just as tired as he looks. She screws her mouth up in a smirk and gives him a quick once over, laughs silently at the puddle of rainwater he’s standing in.
“Bet you really wish you packed a bag now, huh.”
“Alright, smart-ass. The point’s been well-taken.”
“I just like being right.” She takes a deep breath. “Well, we should probably go see about alternative lodging accommodations. Considering our last is now a crime scene.”
The Sheriff points them in the direction of a decent Holiday Inn on the outskirts of town (“There are outskirts? You’re telling me these are the skirts?” Reg had groused under his breath and Jane had snorted). They grab two rooms there, both on the fourth floor, five doors down from each other.
Jane showers. She sits alone in her room on top of the bedspread with a bottle of bourbon.
Before the hotel, they had swung by a Wal-Mart after stopping at the motel to grab Jane’s stuff, and Jane had mocked each item of clothing Reg bought to replace his own soaking wet clothes.
“Mention an overnight bag one more time, Jane, and I swear . . . ” She had pantomimed a lock and key at her lips, but he still scowled at her.
She had poached a bottle of bourbon from the sheriff’s office when they stopped there so she could make a statement about their now deceased deputy. She has already emptied it a considerable amount, but she still can’t sleep. She can’t sleep, she can’t turn her brain off, can’t stop repeating either shoot-out in her head, and she really doesn’t want to think about any of it.
So she doesn't think. She doesn’t think it through. She reaches for her phone on the nightstand, eyeballs the alarm clock (1:03 AM), and she calls Reg.
He answers on the first ring. “You OK?” he asks near immediately, and she rolls her eyes.
“I’m fine. I can’t sleep, but I’m fine. I take it you’re up.”
He sighs. “I’m up.”
“Well, I got booze. Be over in a minute.”
She grabs the bottle of bourbon and she shuffles over to Reg’s room.
T W O ;
It’s not until she’s standing outside the door to his hotel room, her hand raised to knock, that she realizes how potentially weird this is.
But then, she thinks as she knocks, this entire trip has been weird. Their entire last shared twenty-four hours have been the very definition of weird and random and impossible to explain.
He answers the door in a pair of striped boxers and a gray t-shirt she is pretty sure he bought at Wal-Mart a couple of hours ago. Her mouth twists in a crooked closed-mouth smile as she looks at him; she’s pretty sure she’s never seen Reg outside of a shirt and tie, and there’s something bizarrely humbling (she is thinking the word humbling because she is unsure what other adjective to use for him in this moment) about him this undressed.
“Nice PJs,” she teases, and pushes past him into his hotel room.
“You one to talk,” he says as he shuts the door. She looks down at herself, at the ratty Yankees t-shirt and the sweatpants, and merely shrugs.
There’s nowhere to sit in the room save for the bed, so she sits on the bed beside Reg. They drink out of the glasses housekeeping left in his bathroom (“Rinse those out, who knows what kinda cooties are all up in there”), and for awhile, they drink in silence. He has a bad early-90s action movie playing on the television, the volume too low to really hear, but Jane doesn’t really mind it. It’s just nice not to be alone -- something she would never admit out loud to him.
He matches her drink for drink, and they burn through the bottle of bourbon quickly.
“You know,” she says to him, slouched low against one of his pillows, and he glances sidelong at her. “I feel almost bad for ragging on Sweeney, telling him I wanted to stay back . . . like that’s where the action was or whatever.”
“Yeah. Who knew we’d meet up with the cast of Deliverance up here in the sticks.”
She tries to whistle the theme from Deliverance but fails. Reg arches an eyebrow.
“You’re a terrible whistler.”
“Nah, I’m just off my game is all.” She tries again, and he watches her. He’s watching her mouth, which, of all things (not that they are on his bed together, not that they are as undressed as the other has seen them, but this -- his eyes on her mouth) feels incredibly intimate.
She smacks her lips together and throws back the remaining bourbon in her glass. He’s still looking at her. He’s looking at her the way he looked at her back at the hospital, but it’s darker than that somehow. There’s heat behind his gaze instead of just concern, and it surprises her (except for how it doesn’t) that meeting his eye makes her clench low in her gut.
And, god. Maybe it’s all just been pretext. Maybe she knew the second she reached for her phone to call him that she would wind up here, like this. Maybe he knew it too, and that’s why he said yes. He wanted it.
And then.
And then his hand is right there, on the mattress beside her own. Or it’s always been there and she is just now noticing. She’s just now noticing the proximity -- his proximity to her, her proximity to him. She wants to say she’s just now noticing him, but that’s a lie. That’s a lie she doesn’t know what to do with, so she ignores it. She focuses instead on how the bourbon is sticking in her mouth, how perfectly tipsy and almost drunk she feels.
How his room is almost too warm. How she can’t even hear the television right now, just the two of them, just their breathing.
How he is still looking at her, how she is still looking at him.
The sound the bottom of her glass makes when she sets it down on the nightstand beside her is loud. Reg watches her without comment.
His hand is still there, between their bodies on the bed.
She doesn't think it through.
She grabs his hand by the wrist and drags his hand down between her legs. He exhales loudly (like he was waiting for this, she does not allow herself to think), but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t pull away from her, but he also does not move. His hand is warm against her, she can feel it, even through her sweats, and it makes her realize just how much she wants this.
Her voice cracks when she says, barely audible, “I need -- ” but he seems to get it. He must get it, because his fingers move against her, at first tentatively and then with intent.
He rubs her through her pants, and she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, her neck arching back. She can hear him, breathing loud beside her. His hand moves firmer and firmer against her until she is grinding down against him -- her hips raising, rolling into him. She bites her bottom lip, can feel her shirt sticking to the sweat collecting down her spine, can feel the bed shift under her as he shifts closer to her.
It is as though they reach the same moment of frustration at the exact same time (which all things considered about the two of them isn’t all that surprising). Their frustration, often aimed at the other, has always seemed to run in tandem. He pulls his hand away suddenly and yanks at the drawstring of her sweatpants. He doesn’t even pull them down: he merely slips his hand under the waistband, under her panties, and she hisses when his fingers slick first against and then inside her. She hears Reg groan (“Jesus . . . ”) when he touches her, but the angle is all wrong, his wrist twisted funny, and when her fingers latch on to his forearm he pulls his hand away. His whole body turns towards her and he reaches for her with his right hand, replacing his left with his right, and slides his hand back down her stomach, back between her legs. He balances himself on his elbow beside her and works two fingers inside of her. Her stomach hollows and then fills as she rolls her hips into the movement of his hand.
He is harsh with her, the back of his hand stretching her panties, the elastic biting in low on her hips, each jerk of his fingers into her deep and almost punishing.
He’s breathing heavily beside her and she’s finding it hard to look at him. Like looking at him would somehow make this that much more intimate. That there can be distance achieved so long as she doesn’t look at him, so long as she doesn’t watch him. But he’s watching her -- something bright and critical in his eye, but not unkind. His eyes keep drifting from her face down to her breasts, still covered by the thin t-shirt she threw on to sleep in, then back up to her mouth, her eyes.
Her heels skid against the mattress when she bends her knees, when she wrenches her sweats, her panties, down her legs, and his body pushes that much closer to her own. She can feel him, hard against her leg, his hips rubbing slightly against her thigh as his hand works between her legs. She kicks the clothes off her ankles, off the bed, her body bare and exposed to him. His eyes focus on his hand, his fingers disappearing into her cunt; his breath catches. He doesn’t say anything, but his fingers increase their pace, his thumb rubs at her clit, and Jane makes a strangled noise in the back of her throat. Jane throws an arm over her face, unable to watch him.
She’s silent when he makes her come, the tendons in her neck corded tight as she arches away from him. Her fingers wrap tight around his wrist (the wrist of the hand fucking her), but he does not still, he pushes her through it. She thinks that he would keep going, that he won’t stop, that he has found some perverse pleasure in watching her unravel, so maybe that’s why she kisses him. That’s why she kisses him. It’s why she grabs him by the back of the neck and smashes her mouth against his, why she pulls at him, makes him get on top of her, his fingers still curled and pushing inside her.
He yields immediately, though any offered acquiescence morphs quickly into aggression as he kisses her hard, as he slides his leg between hers and starts rocking against her. She bites at his mouth, and he bites back. His fingers slip from her, and when he grabs at her thigh she can feel them, wet against her skin, and she shivers. She can taste the bourbon on his tongue, and she likes that. She likes that he seems to be as lost to this -- whatever this is -- as she is: no question grounding any of his actions, no question to anything he does to her.
Jane pushes at his shoulder. She wants to roll them, wants some semblance of control back, and he goes with it. He lets her take the lead, and she quirks an eyebrow up as she settles against him, as she straddles him. His eyes narrow in return and she can see his mouth souring. She finds it familiar, the easy antagonism between them, and she laughs low in her throat as she grinds against him, the curve of his cock hot against her even through his boxers.
He palms her ass, asks her, “What?” His voice is rough, and that makes her mouth crack into a filthy grin.
“Didn’t think you’d like a woman on top. Didn’t think you were the type,” she says, her fingers toying with the waistband of his boxers. She rocks against him again and she catches the tic at the hinge of his jaw, the way his teeth clench, so she does it again. He lifts his hips when she finally drags his boxers down to his thighs, practically panting under her. When she wraps her hand around him, he hisses, licks at his mouth, his eyes dark as he watches her -- her face, her hand, her cunt.
“You don’t think,” he says tightly, his voice just this side of wrecked. “That’s your problem,” he says.
“Yeah?” she murmurs. She says yeah again, but more to herself than to him as she slicks herself over his cock, her fingers squeezing at the base.
“Jesus,” Reg whispers, his hands roaming over her, grabbing at her thighs, her hips, her ass.
She sinks down onto him slowly, so slowly, liking the way he’s stretching her, how it burns just enough, but it’s too slow for him. His fingers dig into her hips painfully, like he’s restraining himself from just dragging her down onto him, slamming his hips up against hers.
She whimpers softly as she begins to ride him, and that single sound alone seems to undo what little control he possessed.
He arches up, changing the angle inside her, and her fingers bite into his shoulders; she ducks her head as she moans quietly. He hauls himself up against her, her knees slipping on the bedspread as he thrusts up into her. He gnaws at the hollow of her throat, all tongue and teeth and wet heat. One hand keeps her anchored at her hip, but the other pulls at her t-shirt until they are both dragging it up over her head. His fingers are rough with her nipple, so she presses her open mouth to his, makes him swallow whatever sound she might have made.
He flips them without warning, stronger than she anticipated, and she can’t decide if that’s more unfair to him or to her. He starts driving into her, hard, and when she gasps the noise is high and thready, foreign to her.
The bed is noisy, almost comically so, the springs protesting under them, squeaking and whining, and she thinks that she’d laugh, but she doesn’t really have the breath for it.
He comes snarling unintelligibly against her neck, with her legs wrapped tight and sweaty around his waist. His body still trembling against hers, he reaches a hand down between them. He thumbs at her clit until she starts clenching around him, grabbing at his shoulders. She doesn’t come quietly this time. She groans wordlessly, his breath hot against her ear, hitching when her voice cracks.
“This never happened,” Jane says. She pulls on her panties and her sweatpants clumsily and pushes her hair out of her face to look at him. She stands there topless beside the bed, Reg already reclining against his pillows, his clothes back in place.
“Never,” he echoes with a smirk, but his eyes keep drifting back down to her tits.
She pulls her t-shirt on quickly. “Never,” she repeats and points at him.
“Never,” he says again, resigned irritation creeping in, his hands held up as though in mock surrender.
“Good,” she says. She says, “We’re on the same page then,” and Reg looks at like he wants to laugh at her and throw her out of his hotel room all at once. Perhaps at the same time.
When she’s at the door he calls to her from the bed.
“We’re on the road at eight A.M. sharp tomorrow,” he says, his usual blend of smug authority returning to his voice.
“Aye, aye, captain.” She salutes as she opens the door.
“I mean it, Miss Daisy. This chauffeur is leaving without your sorry ass tomorrow if you’re not down in that lobby by eight A.M.”
She salutes him again, this time with one finger and a smirk. Reg rolls his eyes.
“Good night,” she calls as she lets the door slam shut.
Jane shuffles back down to the hall to her own hotel room. She’s still wet between her legs, but wet with the both of them, and during this entire time -- the walk from her room to his, Reg fucking her, this walk back -- she does not once think of Matt.
Matt does not figure here.
She will not think of Matt until the morning, until she is in the car with Reg and they are headed back to the city. When she thinks of Matt then she will be unable to decide if the guilt she feels is more associated with what she has done or the mere fact that she had not thought of him until then.
There is a difference there, she thinks. She just is unsure how to tease it out. She is unsure what it says about her.
Nothing good, she thinks. She’d bet it all that it says nothing good about her. Not at all.
T H R E E ;
They fight the entire way back into the city.
They fight about the proper use of the turn signal, about Reg’s inability to brake properly (“You’re going to give me whiplash, Jesus, Reg; you see the brake lights in front of you? You start braking too”), about Jane’s taste in talk radio (“You the driver, you get to pick the station. I’m the driver, and like hell I’m picking NP-fucking-R”), when and where to stop for gas, when and where to stop for a meal, how much additional time expected construction work on the freeway is going to add to their journey, and whether real men drink martinis.
“James Bond did,” she says for the third time. It’s her main argument. Reg inches the car forward and then brakes again. Jane slouches a little lower in the passenger seat; it’s bumper-to-bumper far as the eye can see, and she doesn’t think she cares to see anymore.
“James Bond’s not a real man. He’s fictional,” Reg says. She rolls her eyes.
“What do real men drink then?” she asks in a faux macho voice with a heavy New York accent. “Rubbing alcohol, gasoline, Guinness on tap.”
“That what you serve in your dad’s bar, huh?”
“Mmhmm, yes. The rubbing alcohol and gasoline are big hits among the real men. The dandies order martinis.”
“My point exactly,” he says, and they inch forward some more.
“I was mocking you.”
“And I’m choosing to ignore that.”
They reach the city by nightfall. By the time they reach the city they are not even arguing anymore. The car is silent, the both of them absorbed in their own thoughts.
“Want me to drop you?” he asks her, and she looks at him, confused and borderline alarmed. Last night never happened. It never happened. They agreed to that. They were on the same page.
“Well, yeah. Where else you think I’m going.”
“Smart aleck,” he mutters under his breath. He says louder, “I gotta return the car at the station and didn’t know if you wanted to, I don’t know, go see Sweeney or something.”
“Oh,” she says, slightly chastened. “I can see Sweeney in the morning.” She yawns. “If you could drop me,” she says slowly, “that’d be great.”
When she gets to work the next morning, the entire squad has already heard about their backwoods adventure in upstate New York.
“Goddamn,” Augie says, his feet propped up on Lou’s desk (“Those better be clean, buddy,” Lou said when Augie kicked them up on top of Lou’s copy of the Wall Street Journal; “oh please,” Augie said, “like you actually read the Wall Street Journal.” “I read it,” Lou countered, to which Augie goaded, “oh yeah? Explain it to me, man. Explain the market system to a simple man such as myself. Tell me about the housing market crash. Talk to me, Alan Greenspan. Oh my god, subprime mortgages, give it to me good, Lou”).
“You two leave the city for a day,” he says to Jane, Reg ignoring the conversation at his own desk, “and get to participate in a shoot-out at the O.K. Corral while what do we do? We sit around waiting for a freaking phone call like an ugly chick on prom night. That’s so not fair. That’s the opposite of fair.”
Neither Jane nor Reg ever say anything to the contrary. They let Augie go on thinking that he got the raw end of that deal. They let him think that what happened upstate was the fun Clint Eastwood fodder Augie imagines that it was.
Neither says: no Augie it was terrible it was awful my hands wouldn’t stop shaking I thought we were dead I thought we both were dead.
I thought we both were dead so we fucked each other that same night.
There’s no place for a confession like that, least of all with Blando, but maybe even more so with themselves.
It’s not until she is typing out her report at almost two in the morning that she actually gets it.
She types: Detective Reg Duffy shot and killed armed gunman Mark Morgan after attempts were made on witness Amanda Patterson’s and my own life. Detective Duffy shot and killed Morgan while Morgan shot at me as I reloaded my own service weapon.
What she gets, what she knows she’s going to have to say at the grand jury inquiry, is that Reg saved her life. The first man he ever killed was in her defense.
She does not write that part.
She does not write about the after either.
The hotel room, that bottle of bourbon, her mouth on his mouth, his body on top of, inside of, hers.
That, after all, never happened.
Jane works a domestic violence case gone wrong (“Wronger, more wrong,” she says to Sweeney when he calls the case that, like domestic violence itself isn’t already something terribly, terribly wrong) with Evrard, and for a good week, she throws herself into that. She skirts wide of Reg, and he seems to do the same with her. She knows he’s working some gang-related case, some sort of hit tied to the Latin Kings or Spanish Mafia or something. Lou’s working it with him, and Augie had explained the case to her (whether she wanted to hear about it or not) the other morning over bagels.
“Lou loves those gang cases. I think he likes to think that he’ll get to go undercover with the Kings or something. That idiot,” Augie told her.
“You do a lot of work with the Kings when you guys worked narco?” she asked him. Augie’s mouth twisted in a rueful grin and he laughed with his mouth full.
“Yeah, sure.” He laughed again, and Jane just gaped blankly at him.
“What’s the punchline, Blando?”
“Ah, nothing, Janey. Good times, is all. Narco was a fucking blast, man.” He held his hand over his heart dramatically. “I miss it so!”
A good week passes before she finds herself alone with Reg.
They are in the breakroom together. It’s morning, her case closed, and his nearing an end.
He is in the breakroom and he is fixing himself a cup of coffee. Jane stands in the doorway.
For just a beat, it is entirely unbearable.
Reg looks at Jane as though she just caught him red-handed, and Jane freezes. She lingers in the doorway for a second too long to seem natural. It makes her feel stupid. He makes her feel stupid, and that in turn makes her feel angry.
She brushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear and steps into the breakroom and pours herself a cup of coffee.
“You believe Halloween’s in two weeks?” she says idly as she stirs in some milk.
Reg grimaces.
“Fucking Halloween,” is all he says, but it’s enough.
Jane laughs to herself when he leaves the breakroom.
“Business as usual,” she mutters under her breath.
Business as usual.
F O U R ;
It’s late October when Sweeney pairs Reg and Jane up again. It’s a seemingly cut and dry homicide case -- a drive-by shooting most likely tied to the drug trade, but narco has punted the grunt work their way.
It’s the second day of the case when Reg and Jane get a tip-off from a go-to in-house informant about a storage locker the deceased kept down near Chinatown.
In a way, this is another thing that Jane should have seen coming:
When they get to the storage locker, they’re ambushed.
The storage locker is empty. There’s nothing inside the unit the deceased had rented, and Jane frowns as she stands in the center of the locker, as she casts her flashlight over the walls.
“So what’s this about you think?” she asks Reg.
It’s when he turns to face her that the first shot is fired. There is a single beat where she cannot see his face. A single moment where Reg is all shadows and outlines -- the bank of windows behind him bright and blue with the lights shining in the parking lot at his back, Reg nothing more than a silhouette.
The first window shatters when the first shot hits it.
Jane and Reg move quickly, in unison, and duck at the same time.
Reg shuts his flashlight off, and the only light is from the bullet holes pockmarking the wall, the bright lights from the parking lot shining through.
Together, they try to creep out of the storage locker. When she manages a peek out one of the shot-out windows, she can see that the shooters are firing from a car parked across the parking lot. Between the locker and the shooters is Reg’s car.
“Your car,” she hisses at Reg.
He looks at her, breathing hard. “You think we make it?” he asks.
“What’s the alternative?” She cocks her own gun and Reg grips his own that much tighter.
He nods then, his body lunged low, ready to move fast for his car.
“Nothing stupid?” he says, hushed, over his shoulder.
Jane smiles grimly. “Never,” she repeats.
She imagines the words to be a talisman. She imagines that lightning can strike twice. That they are the exception to the rule. That his car is not that far. That this, what they are doing, what they are doing again -- the broken windows and the bullet holes, the dark night, her heart in her throat, her palms sweating against the grip of her gun -- will end the same as the first time.
She imagines it wrong.
They are met with a hail of bullets behind his car. His car is shot up, the windows explode, and they both cover themselves beneath the shower of broken glass, the threat of bullets.
Nothing stupid, he said.
It hits her at the same time that first one and then another bullet hits her in the side that Reg had said it wrong.
Back in that motel room, the two of them crowded back in the bathroom, he had said to her:
“Don’t be stupid.”
He said it wrong, she thinks, and the superstition cannot hold.
Her palms sweat against the grip of her gun, and she bleeds out beneath her winter coat.
The first thing she finds she feels is annoyance. She doesn’t have the time for this. She can still hear the patter and rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, and she knows she has at least a round left in the chamber. She had been counting.
The second thing she feels is complete and overriding pain, coupled with abstract terror. She feels that she should be afraid, but strangely, she’s not. The shots themselves had knocked her down to first her knees and then all fours. She should have worn a vest. Why hadn’t she worn a vest. Her elbows are shaking, but she is still holding herself up on her hands, her gun still clutched white-knuckle tight, and she can feel it -- her entire torso is soaked.
All of this happens in a handful of seconds, but it feels as though it drags for hours. She feels lightheaded, sick, everything fucking hurts. When she hears herself gasp, the sound as loud as the shots firing around her, she hears Reg.
“Jane? Jane? No no no, Jane? Jane? No, goddamnit, Jane? Jane -- ”
He wraps his arm around her waist, and she whimpers, the sound so small, and he lowers her onto her back. There’s broken glass everywhere, pebbles of it from his shattered car windows, and it crunches under his knees, her hands, his hands, his hands pressing against her abdomen, sticky and dark with her blood, and he’s cursing under his breath again, but there is no edge of panic to his voice or words -- or if there is, she cannot detect it.
Listening to him, she realizes the night has gone quiet. The only sound is them, the idling of a car engine, the distant hum of traffic -- nothing more. Reg notices it too and he raises his head slightly, tries to look over the hood of his car.
“Keep your hands on it. Jane, keep your hands, yeah, press down,” he says, fast and quiet, as he presses her own hands over the two wounds. “Hold it there, hold it, just for -- ”
He moves quickly away from her and she can hear tires squealing in the distance, and when Reg returns, crouches down beside her, he’s muttering under his breath, “W . . . E . . . K . . . T . . . twenty-nine.” He repeats it again and again, he presses his hand over hers, and she gets it around the third time he repeats the sequence: he was memorizing the license plate.
“Smart,” she murmurs, but Reg doesn’t catch it. He’s shouldering off his coat and folding it, putting it over her wounds and applying pressure. He’s got his phone at his ear, and it’s hard to focus on him, focus on what he’s saying.
“ . . . we got an officer down, I repeat, an officer down, we need a bus out here, stat, we’re down at . . . ”
She lets her eyelids flutter shut for what she thinks is only a minute, but then Reg is shaking her awake.
“Hey, hey, hey, come on, Jane, come on. I need you to stay with me, alright? Keep your eyes open, that’s it, keep ‘em open, a bus is on its way, we’re good, you’re good.”
Her blood has managed to seep through his wool coat, and she knows that is not good. She knows that is the opposite of something good, and she can tell that Reg knows it too.
“I’m gonna, I’m just gonna get a look here, okay?” he says to her. He lifts her slightly to get a look at her back, and the movement makes Jane start coughing.
“Looks like,” he says as he settles her back down, puts pressure against her again, “looks like they’re both through-and-throughs. That’s good,” he says. “That’s real good, Jane.”
“Did you find the bullets?” she asks. Her voice sounds so strange to her. Far away and slightly garbled, and Reg is looking at her so seriously. He’s looking at her like she’s far away and lost already and it’s that, strangely enough, that strikes real fear in her for the first time since she was shot.
“Why,” Reg asks, the casual tone to his voice completely forced, “you wanna wear them on a chain around your neck?”
“Yes,” she says, “along with the teeth and the ears of my enemies.” She smiles, and she is sure it must look gruesome and macabre. She can taste the blood in her mouth; she imagines it has stained her teeth red.
Reg doesn’t say anything, but he tries to smile. He averts his gaze to the parking lot suddenly, looking for that ambulance they were promised.
She wants to tell him that she’s fine, that she doesn’t die here -- that things can’t work that way. She needs to tell him that she isn’t going to die. But when she opens her mouth the only thing that spills out is her own blood and, curiously, his name. The sound sticks in the back of her throat, sticks with all that blood (so much blood; it’s all in her mouth and pooled around her on the pavement, black in the lack of light; it’s painted over Reg, his own chest as black and red as her own even though she’s the one with the wounds, the one with the hurt), but he must hear her. He must hear his name, because his head jerks back to her, he looks down at her instead of out over the hood of his car.
He says to her, “Yeah.” He says it over and over again, hushed and almost earnest. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jane, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Jane. Yeah -- ”
Her says her name, too.
Her cradles her head in his lap.
If Jane was a different person and knew how to observe herself and not just the patterns of others, if this was a different scenario (if the blood on the pavement wasn’t her own), if we were to change everything except the way these two people say each other’s names, one truth would still stand: the names serve as placeholders.
The names are the second option, the first too unwieldy, too terrifying to get a firm grip on, to control. They say these names instead of all the other things they feel, that they fear, about the other. They say the names, no conscious cognitive activity behind it, no deliberation, just a name -- a single syllable. And perhaps it is less a question of bravery, but rather understanding what any of that, all of that, might mean. To him. To her.
He rides with her in the ambulance to the hospital. She remembers him holding her hand, both their hands sticky and caked with her blood. She remembers his voice.
His voice is the last thing she can remember.
“Come on, Jane, come on, Jane, come on, Jane, come on -- ” he says.
He says, “Jane.”
He won’t stop saying her name.
(She doesn’t die here.
She was right on that count
She does not die here).
C O N T I N U E D :
P . 2 | P . 3
prime suspect. look at this: a united front; jane and reg return to the city. jane/reg (with references to lou/augie, jane/costello). spoilers through 1x08. 22,925 words.
notes: oh my god, the fic that ate my brain and my heart, that monster, etc.
i'm still floored by how long this thing is, lol. and i know i kept complaining about how it just WOULD NOT END, but this really was the most fun i have had writing fic in a long, long time. PRIME SUSPECT IS A GR8 SHOW, EVERYONE! GO WATCH IT INSTEAD OF READING THIS! but wow, major thanks to may and sisi and anyone and everyone else who listened to me wail about this show and all the idiots on it LOL (i'm sorry i'm not sorry these two give me life). um, spoilers through the most recent episode, 1x08? also idk how to rate things anymore. there's sex and violence. no one is surprised lol.
we both want the very same thing.
we are praying
i am the one to save you
but you don’t even own
your own violence
(JOANNA NEWSOM)
J A N E : You need a new home.
R E G : Like fun I do. But if I did, you’re not the man who’s going to give it to me.
(PRIME SUSPECT)
Jane wants a cigarette.
She taps her fingers along the arm of her chair.
Scratch that. She needs a cigarette.
She sighs instead, smacks her lips as she chews an ever increasingly stale piece of gum. She jiggles her foot, drips some of the melting slush onto the carpet, but the shrink doesn’t say anything about it.
By Jane’s count, she’s figuring she’s got a couple more sessions left with the doc before Sweeney will consider her psychologically sound, fit to work, whatever. She’s figuring at this rate she’ll be back on the beat a week or two before Thanksgiving.
“You seem to be coping well,” Dr. Stevens says. She is still looking down at the legal pad in her lap, scribbling something and Jane finds her words and the action to be at odds with one another.
“I try,” Jane says drily.
Things fall apart, is what she wants to say. Collateral damage. Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.
Her eyes drift over to the window. It snowed the night before but today there is only gray. Heavy clouds loom, threatening more.
“Why don’t you tell me about your working relationship with, uh, with Detective Duffy?”
Jane frowns. She stops tapping her fingers. She does not know what kind of question this is or what Dr. Stevens is trying to get at with it.
“Detective Duffy, huh,” Jane says, and then she pauses.
But this is later. This is a long time later.
O N E ;
This starts outside the city.
A cut to the chase, a peek at the back of the book: they sleep together the same night as the shoot-out. Jane and Reg sleep together for the first time in a rundown Holiday Inn upstate.
It’s the sort of thing in retrospect Jane should have seen coming. It’s the sort of thing that is most surprising in how completely unsurprising it is at all.
Reg meets them at the hospital. He meets her over in the South Wing, by the very bank of elevators where this all began, and Jane can’t help but laugh. The sound comes out wheezy and tight, and she pats Amanda on the arm as she is whisked back off to her room.
“Radiology’s in the basement,” she finally says to Reg, like that somehow explains everything. She bends over at the waist and takes a deep breath, still winded, still exhausted. She’s still sweating, her sweater lost somewhere in the basement of that fucking hospital, her thin tank top clinging to her.
Reg is looking at her like he wants to kill her, like he wants to finish the job this Roy guy started, but there’s also something else there. Something that reads along the lines of utterly exhausting relief, and that, she thinks, is unexpected.
“You’re all right,” he finally says after a beat, and Jane frowns at that. When he says it again -- “You’re all right?” -- it sounds more like a question, and he asks it again and again. He says: “You’re all right? You all right? The kid’s okay? Everyone? Everyone’s -- okay?”
Jane stares at him, and then she sort of waves him off, breathes heavy when she says, “Yeah.” And then: “Deputy’s dead. Roy -- he was the other guy, the guy who did the parents.”
Reg’s shoes squeak against the linoleum when he steps towards her. He’s soaking wet, dripping rainwater everywhere, and Jane crosses her arms over her chest as she looks up at him.
“You?” he asks, and she nods.
“Hunted us through the goddamned basement. I got the drop on him, and. Yeah.”
She can’t read Reg’s face. He simply looks tired, tired and wet, but that something else, the other part, she doesn’t know what to call it. “I was calling you,” he says, voice quiet, edged with steel. “Before. I was -- I was calling you.”
“You knew?” She frowns. “How’d you know?”
“Print came back his. Guys called it in.”
“Hmmm,” she murmurs. And then, “No signal in the basement.”
He won’t stop looking at her, and she suddenly feels just as tired as he looks. She screws her mouth up in a smirk and gives him a quick once over, laughs silently at the puddle of rainwater he’s standing in.
“Bet you really wish you packed a bag now, huh.”
“Alright, smart-ass. The point’s been well-taken.”
“I just like being right.” She takes a deep breath. “Well, we should probably go see about alternative lodging accommodations. Considering our last is now a crime scene.”
The Sheriff points them in the direction of a decent Holiday Inn on the outskirts of town (“There are outskirts? You’re telling me these are the skirts?” Reg had groused under his breath and Jane had snorted). They grab two rooms there, both on the fourth floor, five doors down from each other.
Jane showers. She sits alone in her room on top of the bedspread with a bottle of bourbon.
Before the hotel, they had swung by a Wal-Mart after stopping at the motel to grab Jane’s stuff, and Jane had mocked each item of clothing Reg bought to replace his own soaking wet clothes.
“Mention an overnight bag one more time, Jane, and I swear . . . ” She had pantomimed a lock and key at her lips, but he still scowled at her.
She had poached a bottle of bourbon from the sheriff’s office when they stopped there so she could make a statement about their now deceased deputy. She has already emptied it a considerable amount, but she still can’t sleep. She can’t sleep, she can’t turn her brain off, can’t stop repeating either shoot-out in her head, and she really doesn’t want to think about any of it.
So she doesn't think. She doesn’t think it through. She reaches for her phone on the nightstand, eyeballs the alarm clock (1:03 AM), and she calls Reg.
He answers on the first ring. “You OK?” he asks near immediately, and she rolls her eyes.
“I’m fine. I can’t sleep, but I’m fine. I take it you’re up.”
He sighs. “I’m up.”
“Well, I got booze. Be over in a minute.”
She grabs the bottle of bourbon and she shuffles over to Reg’s room.
T W O ;
It’s not until she’s standing outside the door to his hotel room, her hand raised to knock, that she realizes how potentially weird this is.
But then, she thinks as she knocks, this entire trip has been weird. Their entire last shared twenty-four hours have been the very definition of weird and random and impossible to explain.
He answers the door in a pair of striped boxers and a gray t-shirt she is pretty sure he bought at Wal-Mart a couple of hours ago. Her mouth twists in a crooked closed-mouth smile as she looks at him; she’s pretty sure she’s never seen Reg outside of a shirt and tie, and there’s something bizarrely humbling (she is thinking the word humbling because she is unsure what other adjective to use for him in this moment) about him this undressed.
“Nice PJs,” she teases, and pushes past him into his hotel room.
“You one to talk,” he says as he shuts the door. She looks down at herself, at the ratty Yankees t-shirt and the sweatpants, and merely shrugs.
There’s nowhere to sit in the room save for the bed, so she sits on the bed beside Reg. They drink out of the glasses housekeeping left in his bathroom (“Rinse those out, who knows what kinda cooties are all up in there”), and for awhile, they drink in silence. He has a bad early-90s action movie playing on the television, the volume too low to really hear, but Jane doesn’t really mind it. It’s just nice not to be alone -- something she would never admit out loud to him.
He matches her drink for drink, and they burn through the bottle of bourbon quickly.
“You know,” she says to him, slouched low against one of his pillows, and he glances sidelong at her. “I feel almost bad for ragging on Sweeney, telling him I wanted to stay back . . . like that’s where the action was or whatever.”
“Yeah. Who knew we’d meet up with the cast of Deliverance up here in the sticks.”
She tries to whistle the theme from Deliverance but fails. Reg arches an eyebrow.
“You’re a terrible whistler.”
“Nah, I’m just off my game is all.” She tries again, and he watches her. He’s watching her mouth, which, of all things (not that they are on his bed together, not that they are as undressed as the other has seen them, but this -- his eyes on her mouth) feels incredibly intimate.
She smacks her lips together and throws back the remaining bourbon in her glass. He’s still looking at her. He’s looking at her the way he looked at her back at the hospital, but it’s darker than that somehow. There’s heat behind his gaze instead of just concern, and it surprises her (except for how it doesn’t) that meeting his eye makes her clench low in her gut.
And, god. Maybe it’s all just been pretext. Maybe she knew the second she reached for her phone to call him that she would wind up here, like this. Maybe he knew it too, and that’s why he said yes. He wanted it.
And then.
And then his hand is right there, on the mattress beside her own. Or it’s always been there and she is just now noticing. She’s just now noticing the proximity -- his proximity to her, her proximity to him. She wants to say she’s just now noticing him, but that’s a lie. That’s a lie she doesn’t know what to do with, so she ignores it. She focuses instead on how the bourbon is sticking in her mouth, how perfectly tipsy and almost drunk she feels.
How his room is almost too warm. How she can’t even hear the television right now, just the two of them, just their breathing.
How he is still looking at her, how she is still looking at him.
The sound the bottom of her glass makes when she sets it down on the nightstand beside her is loud. Reg watches her without comment.
His hand is still there, between their bodies on the bed.
She doesn't think it through.
She grabs his hand by the wrist and drags his hand down between her legs. He exhales loudly (like he was waiting for this, she does not allow herself to think), but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t pull away from her, but he also does not move. His hand is warm against her, she can feel it, even through her sweats, and it makes her realize just how much she wants this.
Her voice cracks when she says, barely audible, “I need -- ” but he seems to get it. He must get it, because his fingers move against her, at first tentatively and then with intent.
He rubs her through her pants, and she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, her neck arching back. She can hear him, breathing loud beside her. His hand moves firmer and firmer against her until she is grinding down against him -- her hips raising, rolling into him. She bites her bottom lip, can feel her shirt sticking to the sweat collecting down her spine, can feel the bed shift under her as he shifts closer to her.
It is as though they reach the same moment of frustration at the exact same time (which all things considered about the two of them isn’t all that surprising). Their frustration, often aimed at the other, has always seemed to run in tandem. He pulls his hand away suddenly and yanks at the drawstring of her sweatpants. He doesn’t even pull them down: he merely slips his hand under the waistband, under her panties, and she hisses when his fingers slick first against and then inside her. She hears Reg groan (“Jesus . . . ”) when he touches her, but the angle is all wrong, his wrist twisted funny, and when her fingers latch on to his forearm he pulls his hand away. His whole body turns towards her and he reaches for her with his right hand, replacing his left with his right, and slides his hand back down her stomach, back between her legs. He balances himself on his elbow beside her and works two fingers inside of her. Her stomach hollows and then fills as she rolls her hips into the movement of his hand.
He is harsh with her, the back of his hand stretching her panties, the elastic biting in low on her hips, each jerk of his fingers into her deep and almost punishing.
He’s breathing heavily beside her and she’s finding it hard to look at him. Like looking at him would somehow make this that much more intimate. That there can be distance achieved so long as she doesn’t look at him, so long as she doesn’t watch him. But he’s watching her -- something bright and critical in his eye, but not unkind. His eyes keep drifting from her face down to her breasts, still covered by the thin t-shirt she threw on to sleep in, then back up to her mouth, her eyes.
Her heels skid against the mattress when she bends her knees, when she wrenches her sweats, her panties, down her legs, and his body pushes that much closer to her own. She can feel him, hard against her leg, his hips rubbing slightly against her thigh as his hand works between her legs. She kicks the clothes off her ankles, off the bed, her body bare and exposed to him. His eyes focus on his hand, his fingers disappearing into her cunt; his breath catches. He doesn’t say anything, but his fingers increase their pace, his thumb rubs at her clit, and Jane makes a strangled noise in the back of her throat. Jane throws an arm over her face, unable to watch him.
She’s silent when he makes her come, the tendons in her neck corded tight as she arches away from him. Her fingers wrap tight around his wrist (the wrist of the hand fucking her), but he does not still, he pushes her through it. She thinks that he would keep going, that he won’t stop, that he has found some perverse pleasure in watching her unravel, so maybe that’s why she kisses him. That’s why she kisses him. It’s why she grabs him by the back of the neck and smashes her mouth against his, why she pulls at him, makes him get on top of her, his fingers still curled and pushing inside her.
He yields immediately, though any offered acquiescence morphs quickly into aggression as he kisses her hard, as he slides his leg between hers and starts rocking against her. She bites at his mouth, and he bites back. His fingers slip from her, and when he grabs at her thigh she can feel them, wet against her skin, and she shivers. She can taste the bourbon on his tongue, and she likes that. She likes that he seems to be as lost to this -- whatever this is -- as she is: no question grounding any of his actions, no question to anything he does to her.
Jane pushes at his shoulder. She wants to roll them, wants some semblance of control back, and he goes with it. He lets her take the lead, and she quirks an eyebrow up as she settles against him, as she straddles him. His eyes narrow in return and she can see his mouth souring. She finds it familiar, the easy antagonism between them, and she laughs low in her throat as she grinds against him, the curve of his cock hot against her even through his boxers.
He palms her ass, asks her, “What?” His voice is rough, and that makes her mouth crack into a filthy grin.
“Didn’t think you’d like a woman on top. Didn’t think you were the type,” she says, her fingers toying with the waistband of his boxers. She rocks against him again and she catches the tic at the hinge of his jaw, the way his teeth clench, so she does it again. He lifts his hips when she finally drags his boxers down to his thighs, practically panting under her. When she wraps her hand around him, he hisses, licks at his mouth, his eyes dark as he watches her -- her face, her hand, her cunt.
“You don’t think,” he says tightly, his voice just this side of wrecked. “That’s your problem,” he says.
“Yeah?” she murmurs. She says yeah again, but more to herself than to him as she slicks herself over his cock, her fingers squeezing at the base.
“Jesus,” Reg whispers, his hands roaming over her, grabbing at her thighs, her hips, her ass.
She sinks down onto him slowly, so slowly, liking the way he’s stretching her, how it burns just enough, but it’s too slow for him. His fingers dig into her hips painfully, like he’s restraining himself from just dragging her down onto him, slamming his hips up against hers.
She whimpers softly as she begins to ride him, and that single sound alone seems to undo what little control he possessed.
He arches up, changing the angle inside her, and her fingers bite into his shoulders; she ducks her head as she moans quietly. He hauls himself up against her, her knees slipping on the bedspread as he thrusts up into her. He gnaws at the hollow of her throat, all tongue and teeth and wet heat. One hand keeps her anchored at her hip, but the other pulls at her t-shirt until they are both dragging it up over her head. His fingers are rough with her nipple, so she presses her open mouth to his, makes him swallow whatever sound she might have made.
He flips them without warning, stronger than she anticipated, and she can’t decide if that’s more unfair to him or to her. He starts driving into her, hard, and when she gasps the noise is high and thready, foreign to her.
The bed is noisy, almost comically so, the springs protesting under them, squeaking and whining, and she thinks that she’d laugh, but she doesn’t really have the breath for it.
He comes snarling unintelligibly against her neck, with her legs wrapped tight and sweaty around his waist. His body still trembling against hers, he reaches a hand down between them. He thumbs at her clit until she starts clenching around him, grabbing at his shoulders. She doesn’t come quietly this time. She groans wordlessly, his breath hot against her ear, hitching when her voice cracks.
“This never happened,” Jane says. She pulls on her panties and her sweatpants clumsily and pushes her hair out of her face to look at him. She stands there topless beside the bed, Reg already reclining against his pillows, his clothes back in place.
“Never,” he echoes with a smirk, but his eyes keep drifting back down to her tits.
She pulls her t-shirt on quickly. “Never,” she repeats and points at him.
“Never,” he says again, resigned irritation creeping in, his hands held up as though in mock surrender.
“Good,” she says. She says, “We’re on the same page then,” and Reg looks at like he wants to laugh at her and throw her out of his hotel room all at once. Perhaps at the same time.
When she’s at the door he calls to her from the bed.
“We’re on the road at eight A.M. sharp tomorrow,” he says, his usual blend of smug authority returning to his voice.
“Aye, aye, captain.” She salutes as she opens the door.
“I mean it, Miss Daisy. This chauffeur is leaving without your sorry ass tomorrow if you’re not down in that lobby by eight A.M.”
She salutes him again, this time with one finger and a smirk. Reg rolls his eyes.
“Good night,” she calls as she lets the door slam shut.
Jane shuffles back down to the hall to her own hotel room. She’s still wet between her legs, but wet with the both of them, and during this entire time -- the walk from her room to his, Reg fucking her, this walk back -- she does not once think of Matt.
Matt does not figure here.
She will not think of Matt until the morning, until she is in the car with Reg and they are headed back to the city. When she thinks of Matt then she will be unable to decide if the guilt she feels is more associated with what she has done or the mere fact that she had not thought of him until then.
There is a difference there, she thinks. She just is unsure how to tease it out. She is unsure what it says about her.
Nothing good, she thinks. She’d bet it all that it says nothing good about her. Not at all.
T H R E E ;
They fight the entire way back into the city.
They fight about the proper use of the turn signal, about Reg’s inability to brake properly (“You’re going to give me whiplash, Jesus, Reg; you see the brake lights in front of you? You start braking too”), about Jane’s taste in talk radio (“You the driver, you get to pick the station. I’m the driver, and like hell I’m picking NP-fucking-R”), when and where to stop for gas, when and where to stop for a meal, how much additional time expected construction work on the freeway is going to add to their journey, and whether real men drink martinis.
“James Bond did,” she says for the third time. It’s her main argument. Reg inches the car forward and then brakes again. Jane slouches a little lower in the passenger seat; it’s bumper-to-bumper far as the eye can see, and she doesn’t think she cares to see anymore.
“James Bond’s not a real man. He’s fictional,” Reg says. She rolls her eyes.
“What do real men drink then?” she asks in a faux macho voice with a heavy New York accent. “Rubbing alcohol, gasoline, Guinness on tap.”
“That what you serve in your dad’s bar, huh?”
“Mmhmm, yes. The rubbing alcohol and gasoline are big hits among the real men. The dandies order martinis.”
“My point exactly,” he says, and they inch forward some more.
“I was mocking you.”
“And I’m choosing to ignore that.”
They reach the city by nightfall. By the time they reach the city they are not even arguing anymore. The car is silent, the both of them absorbed in their own thoughts.
“Want me to drop you?” he asks her, and she looks at him, confused and borderline alarmed. Last night never happened. It never happened. They agreed to that. They were on the same page.
“Well, yeah. Where else you think I’m going.”
“Smart aleck,” he mutters under his breath. He says louder, “I gotta return the car at the station and didn’t know if you wanted to, I don’t know, go see Sweeney or something.”
“Oh,” she says, slightly chastened. “I can see Sweeney in the morning.” She yawns. “If you could drop me,” she says slowly, “that’d be great.”
When she gets to work the next morning, the entire squad has already heard about their backwoods adventure in upstate New York.
“Goddamn,” Augie says, his feet propped up on Lou’s desk (“Those better be clean, buddy,” Lou said when Augie kicked them up on top of Lou’s copy of the Wall Street Journal; “oh please,” Augie said, “like you actually read the Wall Street Journal.” “I read it,” Lou countered, to which Augie goaded, “oh yeah? Explain it to me, man. Explain the market system to a simple man such as myself. Tell me about the housing market crash. Talk to me, Alan Greenspan. Oh my god, subprime mortgages, give it to me good, Lou”).
“You two leave the city for a day,” he says to Jane, Reg ignoring the conversation at his own desk, “and get to participate in a shoot-out at the O.K. Corral while what do we do? We sit around waiting for a freaking phone call like an ugly chick on prom night. That’s so not fair. That’s the opposite of fair.”
Neither Jane nor Reg ever say anything to the contrary. They let Augie go on thinking that he got the raw end of that deal. They let him think that what happened upstate was the fun Clint Eastwood fodder Augie imagines that it was.
Neither says: no Augie it was terrible it was awful my hands wouldn’t stop shaking I thought we were dead I thought we both were dead.
I thought we both were dead so we fucked each other that same night.
There’s no place for a confession like that, least of all with Blando, but maybe even more so with themselves.
It’s not until she is typing out her report at almost two in the morning that she actually gets it.
She types: Detective Reg Duffy shot and killed armed gunman Mark Morgan after attempts were made on witness Amanda Patterson’s and my own life. Detective Duffy shot and killed Morgan while Morgan shot at me as I reloaded my own service weapon.
What she gets, what she knows she’s going to have to say at the grand jury inquiry, is that Reg saved her life. The first man he ever killed was in her defense.
She does not write that part.
She does not write about the after either.
The hotel room, that bottle of bourbon, her mouth on his mouth, his body on top of, inside of, hers.
That, after all, never happened.
Jane works a domestic violence case gone wrong (“Wronger, more wrong,” she says to Sweeney when he calls the case that, like domestic violence itself isn’t already something terribly, terribly wrong) with Evrard, and for a good week, she throws herself into that. She skirts wide of Reg, and he seems to do the same with her. She knows he’s working some gang-related case, some sort of hit tied to the Latin Kings or Spanish Mafia or something. Lou’s working it with him, and Augie had explained the case to her (whether she wanted to hear about it or not) the other morning over bagels.
“Lou loves those gang cases. I think he likes to think that he’ll get to go undercover with the Kings or something. That idiot,” Augie told her.
“You do a lot of work with the Kings when you guys worked narco?” she asked him. Augie’s mouth twisted in a rueful grin and he laughed with his mouth full.
“Yeah, sure.” He laughed again, and Jane just gaped blankly at him.
“What’s the punchline, Blando?”
“Ah, nothing, Janey. Good times, is all. Narco was a fucking blast, man.” He held his hand over his heart dramatically. “I miss it so!”
A good week passes before she finds herself alone with Reg.
They are in the breakroom together. It’s morning, her case closed, and his nearing an end.
He is in the breakroom and he is fixing himself a cup of coffee. Jane stands in the doorway.
For just a beat, it is entirely unbearable.
Reg looks at Jane as though she just caught him red-handed, and Jane freezes. She lingers in the doorway for a second too long to seem natural. It makes her feel stupid. He makes her feel stupid, and that in turn makes her feel angry.
She brushes a loose strand of hair behind her ear and steps into the breakroom and pours herself a cup of coffee.
“You believe Halloween’s in two weeks?” she says idly as she stirs in some milk.
Reg grimaces.
“Fucking Halloween,” is all he says, but it’s enough.
Jane laughs to herself when he leaves the breakroom.
“Business as usual,” she mutters under her breath.
Business as usual.
F O U R ;
It’s late October when Sweeney pairs Reg and Jane up again. It’s a seemingly cut and dry homicide case -- a drive-by shooting most likely tied to the drug trade, but narco has punted the grunt work their way.
It’s the second day of the case when Reg and Jane get a tip-off from a go-to in-house informant about a storage locker the deceased kept down near Chinatown.
In a way, this is another thing that Jane should have seen coming:
When they get to the storage locker, they’re ambushed.
The storage locker is empty. There’s nothing inside the unit the deceased had rented, and Jane frowns as she stands in the center of the locker, as she casts her flashlight over the walls.
“So what’s this about you think?” she asks Reg.
It’s when he turns to face her that the first shot is fired. There is a single beat where she cannot see his face. A single moment where Reg is all shadows and outlines -- the bank of windows behind him bright and blue with the lights shining in the parking lot at his back, Reg nothing more than a silhouette.
The first window shatters when the first shot hits it.
Jane and Reg move quickly, in unison, and duck at the same time.
Reg shuts his flashlight off, and the only light is from the bullet holes pockmarking the wall, the bright lights from the parking lot shining through.
Together, they try to creep out of the storage locker. When she manages a peek out one of the shot-out windows, she can see that the shooters are firing from a car parked across the parking lot. Between the locker and the shooters is Reg’s car.
“Your car,” she hisses at Reg.
He looks at her, breathing hard. “You think we make it?” he asks.
“What’s the alternative?” She cocks her own gun and Reg grips his own that much tighter.
He nods then, his body lunged low, ready to move fast for his car.
“Nothing stupid?” he says, hushed, over his shoulder.
Jane smiles grimly. “Never,” she repeats.
She imagines the words to be a talisman. She imagines that lightning can strike twice. That they are the exception to the rule. That his car is not that far. That this, what they are doing, what they are doing again -- the broken windows and the bullet holes, the dark night, her heart in her throat, her palms sweating against the grip of her gun -- will end the same as the first time.
She imagines it wrong.
They are met with a hail of bullets behind his car. His car is shot up, the windows explode, and they both cover themselves beneath the shower of broken glass, the threat of bullets.
Nothing stupid, he said.
It hits her at the same time that first one and then another bullet hits her in the side that Reg had said it wrong.
Back in that motel room, the two of them crowded back in the bathroom, he had said to her:
“Don’t be stupid.”
He said it wrong, she thinks, and the superstition cannot hold.
Her palms sweat against the grip of her gun, and she bleeds out beneath her winter coat.
The first thing she finds she feels is annoyance. She doesn’t have the time for this. She can still hear the patter and rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, and she knows she has at least a round left in the chamber. She had been counting.
The second thing she feels is complete and overriding pain, coupled with abstract terror. She feels that she should be afraid, but strangely, she’s not. The shots themselves had knocked her down to first her knees and then all fours. She should have worn a vest. Why hadn’t she worn a vest. Her elbows are shaking, but she is still holding herself up on her hands, her gun still clutched white-knuckle tight, and she can feel it -- her entire torso is soaked.
All of this happens in a handful of seconds, but it feels as though it drags for hours. She feels lightheaded, sick, everything fucking hurts. When she hears herself gasp, the sound as loud as the shots firing around her, she hears Reg.
“Jane? Jane? No no no, Jane? Jane? No, goddamnit, Jane? Jane -- ”
He wraps his arm around her waist, and she whimpers, the sound so small, and he lowers her onto her back. There’s broken glass everywhere, pebbles of it from his shattered car windows, and it crunches under his knees, her hands, his hands, his hands pressing against her abdomen, sticky and dark with her blood, and he’s cursing under his breath again, but there is no edge of panic to his voice or words -- or if there is, she cannot detect it.
Listening to him, she realizes the night has gone quiet. The only sound is them, the idling of a car engine, the distant hum of traffic -- nothing more. Reg notices it too and he raises his head slightly, tries to look over the hood of his car.
“Keep your hands on it. Jane, keep your hands, yeah, press down,” he says, fast and quiet, as he presses her own hands over the two wounds. “Hold it there, hold it, just for -- ”
He moves quickly away from her and she can hear tires squealing in the distance, and when Reg returns, crouches down beside her, he’s muttering under his breath, “W . . . E . . . K . . . T . . . twenty-nine.” He repeats it again and again, he presses his hand over hers, and she gets it around the third time he repeats the sequence: he was memorizing the license plate.
“Smart,” she murmurs, but Reg doesn’t catch it. He’s shouldering off his coat and folding it, putting it over her wounds and applying pressure. He’s got his phone at his ear, and it’s hard to focus on him, focus on what he’s saying.
“ . . . we got an officer down, I repeat, an officer down, we need a bus out here, stat, we’re down at . . . ”
She lets her eyelids flutter shut for what she thinks is only a minute, but then Reg is shaking her awake.
“Hey, hey, hey, come on, Jane, come on. I need you to stay with me, alright? Keep your eyes open, that’s it, keep ‘em open, a bus is on its way, we’re good, you’re good.”
Her blood has managed to seep through his wool coat, and she knows that is not good. She knows that is the opposite of something good, and she can tell that Reg knows it too.
“I’m gonna, I’m just gonna get a look here, okay?” he says to her. He lifts her slightly to get a look at her back, and the movement makes Jane start coughing.
“Looks like,” he says as he settles her back down, puts pressure against her again, “looks like they’re both through-and-throughs. That’s good,” he says. “That’s real good, Jane.”
“Did you find the bullets?” she asks. Her voice sounds so strange to her. Far away and slightly garbled, and Reg is looking at her so seriously. He’s looking at her like she’s far away and lost already and it’s that, strangely enough, that strikes real fear in her for the first time since she was shot.
“Why,” Reg asks, the casual tone to his voice completely forced, “you wanna wear them on a chain around your neck?”
“Yes,” she says, “along with the teeth and the ears of my enemies.” She smiles, and she is sure it must look gruesome and macabre. She can taste the blood in her mouth; she imagines it has stained her teeth red.
Reg doesn’t say anything, but he tries to smile. He averts his gaze to the parking lot suddenly, looking for that ambulance they were promised.
She wants to tell him that she’s fine, that she doesn’t die here -- that things can’t work that way. She needs to tell him that she isn’t going to die. But when she opens her mouth the only thing that spills out is her own blood and, curiously, his name. The sound sticks in the back of her throat, sticks with all that blood (so much blood; it’s all in her mouth and pooled around her on the pavement, black in the lack of light; it’s painted over Reg, his own chest as black and red as her own even though she’s the one with the wounds, the one with the hurt), but he must hear her. He must hear his name, because his head jerks back to her, he looks down at her instead of out over the hood of his car.
He says to her, “Yeah.” He says it over and over again, hushed and almost earnest. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jane, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Jane. Yeah -- ”
Her says her name, too.
Her cradles her head in his lap.
If Jane was a different person and knew how to observe herself and not just the patterns of others, if this was a different scenario (if the blood on the pavement wasn’t her own), if we were to change everything except the way these two people say each other’s names, one truth would still stand: the names serve as placeholders.
The names are the second option, the first too unwieldy, too terrifying to get a firm grip on, to control. They say these names instead of all the other things they feel, that they fear, about the other. They say the names, no conscious cognitive activity behind it, no deliberation, just a name -- a single syllable. And perhaps it is less a question of bravery, but rather understanding what any of that, all of that, might mean. To him. To her.
He rides with her in the ambulance to the hospital. She remembers him holding her hand, both their hands sticky and caked with her blood. She remembers his voice.
His voice is the last thing she can remember.
“Come on, Jane, come on, Jane, come on, Jane, come on -- ” he says.
He says, “Jane.”
He won’t stop saying her name.
(She doesn’t die here.
She was right on that count
She does not die here).
C O N T I N U E D :
P . 2 | P . 3