fic: you cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes. (prime suspect) (2/3)
F I V E ;
She’s been staying with her father.
She’s doing a lot better. She can get out of bed on her own, dress herself, shower. Baby steps, her father keeps saying. Oona is around a lot to help. She hadn’t known at first how to explain to Matt why she thought it best she stay at her father’s instead of their apartment. She told him she did not want him having to take time off of work. She told him that she didn’t want him as a wet nurse, that she would by far be the worst patient ever, and besides: Oona was out of work. Oona needed something to do. Oona fucking owed her.
She did not try to explain the rest to him, the true reasoning behind it all. She could not say to him that she hated the way he looked at her now. That she did not want his pity or his sympathy. That she did not want to hear him bring up the subject of her job one more time. That was all too much for her. He was too much for her right now, and there was no kind or gentle or understanding way to make that point known.
Jane had spent a week at the hospital. Matt had been in and out the entire time, bitching about the visiting hours and power-tripping nurses on staff (his words), and Jane had felt what limited patience she had stowed away inside her wane rapidly.
When she had awakened the second day in the hospital, Matt had not been there. When she woke that second day, she felt clear-headed, or as clear-headed as she imagines she was likely to be given everything.
Her father had been sitting there beside her bed, half-awake when she finally opened her eyes. She had startled him half to death when she said, “Dad, come on, you’re gonna give yourself a crick in your neck if you sleep like that,” her voice scratchy and unused.
Her father had been the one to fill her in on everything.
“Matt had to run home, check on his wee boy,” he said to her.
Jane had tried to nod, but found that even that small movement hurt too much.
“I can give Sweeney a call for you, if you like. I know those boys would want to know you’re awake and doing well.”
Her father told her that her squad had been at the hospital for most of the night she had been in surgery.
He told her that that Detective Duffy had stayed for the better part of eighteen hours -- from the time they wheeled her in to first the hospital and then into surgery until the time she finally woke up after they stitched her up good.
“You don’t remember seeing him?” her father asked. “Aye, then, you were pretty doped up, Janey,” he laughed. She hadn’t said anything, and her father smiled fondly at her.
“I thought you said the man hated you,” he said.
Jane was too tired to argue, so she didn’t say anything at all. She didn’t say anything about any of that.
She had thought that she had awakened clear-headed, but her thoughts felt too muddy, and what her father was saying, what he was telling her, only thickened them all the more.
She didn’t know what to do with that.
So she ignored it.
Once the hospital allowed for her release, she went straight to her father’s house, straight to her old bedroom.
It’s been two weeks now, and she was restless three days into her stay.
She gets a call from Lou one afternoon. She’s in her father’s kitchen, washing the dishes from breakfast when her phone rings.
“We got the guy,” he says.
“You got him? What, he down at the station? You got him in custody?”
“In the ground more like,” Lou says to her. Jane’s body stills against the sink. She lets her hands float on top of the dirty dishwater. She doesn’t need him to say the rest. She doesn’t need him to. She knows. She knows exactly what he is going to say next.
He says it anyway.
“Reg capped him.” Lou says it lightly, almost proudly, no judgment. “Guy reached for his piece, and bang. Duffy shot him clean in the head.” In the background she can hear Augie crowing over something. Probably the same thing Lou is telling her; she thinks she hears Augie shout bang! and then laugh uproariously.
That’s two, she thinks. Twenty years on the job, and the two kills he’s earned to his name have been in hers.
After she hangs up, she calls Reg. It goes straight to voicemail.
“It’s Jane. Call me.”
He doesn’t call her.
He shows up at her father’s house instead.
“Your pop’s got a real nice place,” he says to her. She shuts the front door behind him.
“Yeah,” she says, pulling the single word long and flat, tight. They just stand there for a beat, right next to the front door -- Jane looking up at him, Reg with his hands jammed into his coat pocket.
“You wanna come in?” She doesn’t wait for an answer and turns on her heel, heads for the kitchen calling over her shoulder, “We still got some coffee. Not too bad.”
She still walks brusquely, but slower than she used to walk. Reg follows her into the kitchen, and Jane can feel herself getting angry, anxious.
“I’ll take you up on that cup,” he says to her, and Jane nods. She fills a mug quickly, splashing some coffee onto the countertop she leaves to wipe up later, and hands off the mug without looking Reg in the eye.
She doesn’t even bother to ask if he wants milk. She just opens the fridge and then leaves the milk on the counter next to the sugar. Reg scoops a spoonful of sugar into his coffee, but he doesn’t add any of the milk. There’s a break in the pattern then, she thinks, because how many mornings -- how many nights and dull afternoons for that matter -- have the two of them fought over the same carton of milk or the last clean spoon?
Jane fills a glass of water for herself at the sink, sneaking a glance at Reg, who is sneaking a glance at her. His mouth twists into a closed-mouth grin as he turns away and takes a first sip of the coffee she poured him. That same angry anxiety she felt when she let him into her father’s house reasserts itself. She turns the tap off and takes a long pull from the glass.
It’s just that Reg seems too big for this house. It’s just that his presence here feels too much, too intimate, too something she is terribly afraid of broaching. He dominates the kitchen, tall, still in that long dark wool coat (a new one, she thinks, I ruined the last one), doing something so natural as drinking a cup of coffee she brewed earlier that morning.
She turns to face him when he clears his throat.
“You look good,” he finally says, and Jane bites the inside of her cheek.
“I’m doing good,” she parries back. “Doc says I should be able to return to work in about a week.”
Reg nods. “Desk duty?” he asks.
Jane shrugs, a self-deprecating expression on her face. “I’m sure. No way’s Sweeney letting me back in the field just yet. And besides, I have about a dozen psych eval minefields to work my way through first.”
“Enjoy,” he says drily.
He clears his throat again.
They only talk shop. They talk about the job. They talk about the things they themselves are a part of but that are not necessarily a part of them. For instance: he does not tell her about shooting the man who shot her. For example: she does not tell him about Matt and how he finds it hard to look at her now, how he barely touches her, how he is almost afraid of her and all that comes with her. How sometimes she doesn’t blame him.
The conversation stalls out after twenty minutes.
She looks down at the glass in her hand. She doesn’t know what to say to him. They stand there in tense silence together, the only sound the loud, almost ominous ticking of the grandfather clock in the next room.
Standing there in front of him, she finds she wants him to touch her. It’s such a bizarre urge -- to want to lean into him, to touch him first, to simply grab him by the wrist and make him press his hand against her again. She finds herself thinking about it, about him, his hands, a lot. She can remember what they felt like pressed firm against her body, first in that hotel room and then second, when he tried to stop her from bleeding out in that parking lot, when he cradled her head, smeared her own blood all over her neck as he held her. She shouldn’t want that again.
She shouldn’t want him to touch her, but she does.
She does not touch him.
He does not touch her.
At the front door, she finally says it.
“Lou told me,” she says.
“Figured as much. Figured that’s why you called.” His eyes crinkle a little as he smiles ruefully. “Subtle’s never been your strong suit, Skip.”
She doesn’t know how to say thank you and she certainly doesn’t know how to say she’s sorry, doesn’t even know if what she is feeling is close to an apology, so she doesn’t say anything at all. But she looks at his mouth, and maybe it’s all the time she’s been stuck in bed, all the time she’s been coddled and nursed, but she’s feeling reckless. She’s feeling reckless and she wants his mouth against her own, she wants him against her, his weight on top of her again.
He leaves, and they do not touch.
They do not touch, not once.
Not even when she handed him that coffee mug in her father’s kitchen, not even then.
S I X ;
She returns to work two weeks before Thanksgiving. Her first day back she’s met with a mountain of files and Augie’s boyish grin.
“I was gonna buy you a card, but these old boys allow me to express myself so, so, so much better. With love, Janey!” he calls to her. “With love!”
She meets with the shrink, Dr. Stevens, for the first time that day, too.
It’s a different doc than she had to see after the upstate shoot-out. This doctor is also a woman, but thin-lipped and tired looking.
“How are we doing?” the doctor asks Jane, and Jane instantly dislikes her, if only for the collective we.
“We,” Jane mocks, “are doing just fine.”
“Are you angry to be back?” Dr. Stevens asks.
Jane shakes her head. “Quite the contrary. I’m happy to be back,” she says, and she means it.
“Are you angry to be here?”
Jane shrugs. “I find it unnecessary,” she says flatly. “What happened to me? It happens.” She swallows. “I always knew this was part of the job. That this, this risk was associated. It sucks,” she shrugs again, “but I knew the risk.”
Things fall apart, she doesn’t say.
Collateral damage.
Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.
When Jane is finally allowed in the field again, it’s a dead girl case she’s working with Reg. The girl -- driver’s license pins her age at nineteen -- was strangled, the ligature marks stark against her skin, her hair a natural dirty blonde.
There is no weapon at the scene. No sign of a struggle. What there is, however, is a crudely painted crucifix on the wall above the body in black paint.
(The scene is her dorm room at NYU. Her roommate had gone to Jersey for the weekend to visit with family. When she returned, she found her roommate, and she found the painted cross).
“You sure you want this case?” Sweeney asks her when Reg and Jane return to the station. She has already thrown back half of the whiskey he poured in her glass, and she glares at him over the rim.
“Don’t patronize me. Don’t feel like you need to coddle me. Believe me, I am getting that enough in every other facet of my life right now, okay.”
Sweeney sighs, polishes off his glass of whiskey and sets the empty glass down on his desk.
“This isn’t going to be pretty, Jane.”
She gets what he’s saying. Jane echoes his sigh and finishes her drink.
The scene alone at the dorm had all the trappings of a serial killing. The arrangement and precise display of the body. The crucifix on the wall. The neat killing, the lack of evidence.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she knows Sweeney has a point.
When this is over, she thinks, she will be able to say she knew the risk.
S E V E N ;
The one tip Jane and Reg have for this case comes from the dorm building’s janitor. According to him, he saw someone the night this girl was killed. He saw someone, a someone who he claims knows a guy, who knows a guy, who in turn knows a guy, who knows the janitor.
“God, I’m getting too old for shit like this,” Jane grumbles as she slams the passenger side door and settles into the seat.
“Think of it as a day off,” Reg says as he readjusts the rearview mirror. “We get paid to sit in a parking lot all day, waiting for some guy to come stumbling down an alley.”
“That was a shit tip-off, and you know it,” she grouses to him.
“‘course I know it,” he says. “But what the fuck else we got to go off though, huh?”
He starts the car.
They have been sitting in the rundown parking lot (the $7/hour pay-to-park sign at the entrance to the lot adds a specific insult to injury, Jane finds) a few blocks from the girl’s dorm building for only an hour, and Jane is already bored.
“I should have grabbed us a couple 40’s back at the gas station,” she mumbles around a strand of licorice.
“Couple 40’s,” he repeats, doubtful. “Shoulda made it an entire 24-pack.”
“Where you think that figures in, you know. The policeman’s handbook. Code of conduct.”
Reg is quiet for a beat, and then does that thing where he smiles, but he also grimaces.
“I think it don’t figure in, so long as you don’t go getting caught.”
“A detective who thinks like a criminal,” she says, waggling the half eaten strand of licorice in his direction. “I like that.”
“You keep eating that shit your teeth are just gonna rot straight out of your head.”
Jane takes a savage bite of the licorice rope.
“You’re eating beef jerky, man. Like you have the nutritional high ground here, come on.”
“Ah, I’m not talking nutrition. I’m talking dentistry.” He points at her. “Whole other kettle of fish.”
Jane turns to Reg suddenly when she hears the click of a lighter.
“You light that cigar, I swear to god, Duffy, I will jam it down your throat. Or I will light you on fire. Or both, maybe -- at the same time.”
Duffy raises his eyebrows as he smirks at her.
“I’m beginning to think you might want to take it under advisement to pick up smoking again.” Reg snaps the lighter shut, and, surprisingly, puts the cigar back in his jacket pocket. “Way I see it, you couldn’t have been less tolerable when you were keeping time with the Marlboro Man.”
“How’d you know I used to smoke Marlboros?” she asks.
“Lucky guess,” he drawls.
“Why is it,” she asks after the sun has set and after her stomach feels like a giant knot of congealing sugar and red dye #40, “that Sweeney feels the need to keep putting us on assignments where a major portion of the task requires we spend long periods of time isolated together in a car?”
“Think it’s his idea of a joke.”
“His sense of humor can suck it.”
“Yeah? You tell him that? Pretty sure a month from now you and I’ll be investigating the world’s most boring killing that somehow requires us to spend days at a time on a goddamn fishing boat headed north for Canada.”
“That’s entirely too specific, Reg. You been thinking about this? Plotting out case scenarios for you and I to enjoy?”
“I like to be aware of all possible worst case scenarios.”
“Spending time with me on a Canadian-bound fishing boat is a worst case scenario?”
“Yeah,” he says after a beat, “Yeah, I’d say it could rank on up there.”
Jane is quiet for a few minutes. Instead of saying, yeah you might have a point there, she says, “The ocean makes me nervous.”
“The smell of raw fish makes me nauseous,” Reg says.
“I saw a thing on the TV once about the Bermuda Triangle, and I don’t care what anyone says, that shit is real. The ocean is powerful. I respect it, man. And I am totally afraid of it.”
“I never got the sushi craze,” Reg says, the two of them having separate conversations aimed at the other. “Who wants raw fish rolled up in some rice? I guarantee you, few years from now, everyone’s going to be mad with mercury poisoning or something.”
“I bet your little speculative Canadian boat killing? Probably totally involved prescription drug smuggling.”
“We do have a knack for those cases,” Reg says.
“Probably a shoot-out, knowing us.”
Reg is quiet for a minute, the patter they’ve established dissolved, the atmosphere suddenly tense. “We joking about that now?” he asks archly.
It surprises Jane. She cocks her head towards him, but he’s watching the alley, not her. It reminds her of Oona. It reminds her of Oona yelling at her back when Jane was staying with their father. Oona had yelled at her one night, told her that she needed to go easier on Matt.
“We get it, Janey. The Bionic Woman. Indestructible. You think you’re fine now and you thought you were fine then. We get it. But what you don’t seem to get is that we didn’t think that a couple weeks ago. We thought you were gone, Jane. And you should be fucking tickled that so many people give a shit and are having a hard time assuming business as usual with you.”
It’s sort of like that, she thinks. Which, if it is sort of like that, then that means Reg sort of gives a shit.
“Yeah,” she says, tries to shrug it off.
“Yeah,” Reg repeats, a quieter echo of her. They sit there quietly, both watching the alley, and Jane bites down on the toothpick hanging out of her mouth.
“God, Sweeney would be such a dick to assign us that case,” she says.
Reg snorts beside her.
About an hour later, her cell phone rings.
The display reads MATT, and, fuck.
She was supposed to meet Matt and his ex-wife Tricia (and her new husband) uptown that night for dinner. Jane stares down at the screen and curses under her breath. “Aw, shit,” she says, “aw, shit, shit, shit.”
“What?” Reg asks.
“Nothing,” she mumbles. “Goddamnit . . . Babe!” she says into the phone. “Babe, I am so sorry. I am so, so, so sorry.”
“Where are you?” he asks, his voice even, and that somehow makes it worse.
“I’m -- I’m working. I completely forgot to call you. I’m on a stakeout. Of all fucking things, right?” She laughs nervously. “I forgot. I forgot about dinner, and because I forgot about dinner I forgot to give you a call.”
Matt doesn’t say anything for a minute, and Jane stares intently out the passenger window, refusing to acknowledge the reflection of Reg’s profile she can see in the glass.
“Jane,” Matt says, his voice still even, “I don’t ask much of you. You know that. You know that. But every now and again I merely ask that you show up.”
“And I do. I do show up. When I can. And tonight? I can’t.”
“What am I supposed to tell Tricia, huh?”
“What you tell Tricia does not concern me.” Jane can feel her own patience start to splinter. “When did your ex-wife become my responsibility,” she says plainly. “Tell her whatever. Tell her I’m the worst. That I’m a flake. Tell her I have a fucking job to do and sometimes that might interfere with her delicate dinner party scheduling. I know: tell her I got shot. That always seems to shut her up.”
“Jane . . . ”
“You know it’s true. Every time you mention it, which is a lot, she clams right up. Tell her I got shot and now I’m at a stakeout. I am just that important and busy.”
“You know what? Jesus, Janey. God, fucking . . . ” he trails off. “You make it so goddamn difficult to love you, you know that? I swear to god.”
“Okay,” she sighs. “Okay, I’m calling a timeout. Timeout until I get home tonight and then we can resume this.”
“When you get home? Sure. Sure, I’ll be asleep, and you’ll sneak in, and you won’t wake me, and we’ll shelve this conversation until you fuck up again and I call you on it.”
“You’re starting to get mean, and say things I don’t think you entirely want to be saying, so, uh, let’s just put this on hold for now.”
“You really think I don’t mean these things, Janey? You really think you’re the easiest woman to love?”
“I’m going, Matt. Send Tricia my best.”
She sits there in silence after she hangs up, and then mutters, “Shut up.”
“Didn’t say nothing,” Reg says.
“I can hear you. I can hear you thinking. And judging. And mocking me,” she says. She sighs heavily.
“Ah, go easy on the guy. Ex-wives are tricky.”
She turns to face him. “What, is there some sort of league of divorced men where you all have to defend each other against the evil tribe of invading women?”
“To be fair, based on my eavesdropping, you did leave him in a bit of a lurch.”
“God, shut up, Duffy,” she snaps. He laughs.
“You really siding with him?” she asks him. He shrugs.
“Don’t really see any other choice,” he says.
Jane frowns. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Means it wouldn’t look right if I agreed with you on this count.”
It’s all he says, and Jane just stares at him. It hits her suddenly what he means. It hits her just as suddenly that this is the first time the two of them have come close to talking about what happened at that awful Holiday Inn upstate.
He means that he’s the man she slept with behind her boyfriend’s back.
He means he doesn’t want to force a wedge between them. He doesn’t want to be that wedge.
Jane slouches low in her seat. She decides to twist this into something innocuous -- an easier pill to swallow.
“So you’re saying there is a league?” she teases, and Reg rolls his eyes.
E I G H T ;
The stakeout -- unsurprisingly -- is a bust.
The rest of November is spent by Jane and Reg hitting nothing but dead-ends. They cannot unearth a single clue, they cannot find a single suspect.
They cannot build a goddamn case.
Jane spends Thanksgiving with her father and her sister that year. Things with Matt have been tentative and shaky since the night she stood him up for dinner, and when he suggests that he go to Tricia’s alone so he can spend the holiday with his son, Jane does not object. She eats early with her father and her sister, and she stays at her father’s bar that night, helping to serve drinks to the regulars.
Snow comes the first weekend in December, and along with it, another body, another crucifix. Another blonde.
Jane and Matt never did have that conversation -- that night, or any other.
The crime scene is the same as the first, the only difference the location.
The only difference the identity of the victim.
The second victim was a nurse at New York Presbyterian -- twenty-three years old, blonde, lived alone, her boyfriend found the body.
The scene is swarming with news media and nosy neighbors when Reg and Jane arrive. They find nothing of note at the scene.
“What about the paint, huh?” Jane suggests. “You think we might find something with that?”
“What, the address for the nearest Home Depot?” Reg snaps.
When they return to the station, Sweeney chews them out.
“I don’t care what they are, I don’t care how I get them. What I need is something. Anything at this point,” he tells them.
Jane and Reg work through dinner. They comb through the compiled case files -- meager as they are -- and they retrace the interviews conducted with potential witnesses, with friends, family. They try to find connections between the two victims. Jane keeps going back to that crucifix.
It’s approaching midnight when she finally stands and stretches. Reg looks up at her from his desk, dark circles under his eyes, his shirtsleeves rolled and wrinkled.
She stops in the bathroom, splashes some water onto her face before heading down to her makeshift bunk to grab a couple hours of sleep.
She has just settled in with a blanket when the door opens.
“Thought I’d find you here,” Reg says.
“Can I help you?” she asks, her tone imperious even when it stretches into an open-mouthed yawn.
Reg exhales loudly. “Yeah, Jane. Yeah, you can help me. You can help me with this case. Let’s start there.”
Jane’s eyes narrow and she kicks the blanket off of her. She stands up slowly and Reg shuts the door behind him.
“This about Sweeney being pissed at us? That it? Gotta keep up appearances for the boss? Or are you just tired? Are you tired too? Because here’s the thing, Reg: I am not a magician and I can’t make evidence appear out of nowhere. And here’s another thing: I am so goddamned tired right now I can’t even see straight. So making something out of nothing? Really not likely to happen right now.”
“You need your rest,” he says condescendingly. Jane laughs mirthlessly.
“You asshole,” she says, and she takes a step forward.
You need your rest. The words settle inside of her, and she finds herself furious. Out of everyone after she was shot, every single fucking person she knew, Reg had been the only one not to treat her any differently. The difference between them, that weird yawning gap between the both of them, could be chalked up to the case upstate. It could be chalked up to that hotel room, to the fact she wanted him and he wanted her so she let him force his way inside her, force herself around him.
It wasn’t because she took two bullets. It wasn’t because he saw her as fragile, fallible, something to be broken.
With him, she thought, she had thought, it was the opposite of that.
It’s why he pushed her: because she could take it.
You need your rest.
“What? You think I shouldn’t be here?” she spits out at him. “That I shouldn’t be back on the job yet? Oh, poor, Jane. Poor little Jane needs her rest. You fucking asshole.”
Reg steps away from the door and towards her.
He all but shouts back at her. “You think that’s what I think? You really think that’s my problem?”
“Of course I do! It’s what everyone thinks!” Reg looks at her disbelieving, so Jane steps closer, her index finger jabbing him in the center of his chest. “No? Huh? No? Then tell me. Illuminate it for me, Reg -- what the fuck is your problem with me?”
“Everything,” he seethes. “Every-fucking-thing, Jane. Everything.”
She gets up in his face, her exhaustion supplemented by overwhelming and complete frustration. “Oh, and like you’re such a prince. Charming, easy-going Reg Duffy. Except for how you are just the total and complete opposite of that. Except for how you are a royal pain in my ass this fucking department forces me to endure.”
“‘Forces you to endure,’ listen to you,” he mocks. She glares at him. “Was it Sweeney who forced you into my hotel room? The department that instructed you get in my bed? Who was it who told you to spread your legs, huh?” His voice has dropped low, his pulse up, she can see it thumping in his neck, and his words hit her like a fist to the gut.
“Fuck you,” she breathes, and she doesn’t know when their bodies got so close to one another.
“Yeah, fuck you,” he echoes, even quieter.
And then he is grabbing her by the jaw, his hands cupping her face, and he is kissing her.
It’s not like before. There is no comfort here, only cruelty.
The second time they fuck is against the wall of a storage closet. Jane scrapes her elbow on the painted exposed brick when he pushes inside her, her tailbone aching against the wall as she squirms against him, as she tries to get him deeper, as she tries to stay quiet.
He holds her up, his hand pushing up under her shirt, and when his fingers brush against the twin points of puckered skin low on her left side, when he finds that ridge of scar tissue, he whispers the word, “fuck,” against her mouth. The sound of it makes her ache, so she closes her eyes.
She imagines she can hear him saying her name.
She imagines she can hear him say, “come on, Jane, come on, Jane, come on -- ”
She can imagine a black parking lot, the stench of her own blood.
She did not die there. She did not die. She did not die. She did not --
N I N E ;
Much like the first time they fucked, Reg and Jane completely write off the second time they fuck as well.
It is another thing that did not happen between them. It is a non-event. It is something they will only mention, privately, to each other, when provoked.
They coexist through the beginning of December this way: ignoring each other as people and interacting solely in a professional context.
“What you do to Duffy now?” Evrard asks her one morning. He stops by her desk and leans heavy against the edge, his arms crossed over his chest and a bemused smile threatening.
Jane looks up at him over the frames of her glasses. “I don’t understand the question,” she says.
“The question is, Janey, what you do to Reg to get him acting so squirrelly with you?”
“He’s not acting squirrelly,” she says defiantly. “Rodent-esque, perhaps, but that’s nothing new.”
Evrard looks like he wants to laugh. “So defensive, Janey.”
“I didn’t do anything to him.” She gestures her hands wildly as she says it, unsure what that’s supposed to signify save for all the things she did not do to Reg.
Evrard laughs as he steps away from her desk.
“If you say so!”
That evening, she sits with Reg in the breakroom as they go over phone records and split the leftovers of a cold pizza.
“Evrard thinks we’re acting weird,” Jane says around the pen cap she’s chewing on.
“Evrard’s weird,” Reg says almost petulantly and Jane snorts.
Jane looks up and so does Reg, and it feels friendly, sort of. Just as Jane is about to open her mouth (to say what, she still hadn’t decided) when Lou bounds into the room.
“You eating my pizza? You’re eating my pizza. I was saving that special! Come on!”
“Sorry,” Jane says, her mouth full of the purloined pizza.
“You gotta label that stuff, Lou,” Reg says with a shrug.
“You two?” Lou says and he points at the both of them. “You two are on notice.”
The third body corresponds with the third time they sleep together.
Jane does not like to think of it that way.
Jane gets a call from Sweeney at six in the morning. A Fordham student has gone missing.
“Get over to Duffy’s,” Sweeney tells her, “pick him up, and come meet us at the school.”
Jane does exactly that. She drives over to Reg’s building, kills the ignition, and buzzes up to him. He lets her in, a grumbled greeting of, “You’re early,” when he opens his front door, his shirt unbuttoned and untucked, his tie draped around the collar. Jane arches an eyebrow and steps inside.
He leaves her alone as he goes into the bedroom to finish getting ready, and Jane tries not be obvious in how she studies his apartment. She has never been here before.
His apartment smacks of anonymity. No pictures on the wall, no mementos personalizing the place. His apartment is that of a man in flux, a man caught between two points. An apartment nondescript.
They fuck again that night, the third time, when she brings him back to his place. She agrees to go up with him. They agree they are going to review the case files. But she leaves the files in her car and they drink whiskey instead of coffee, and they are not even that drunk, not even that angry when he knocks his hips against hers, when she smears her mouth over his, when they both realize the height difference between them isn’t going to work in their favor even with the kitchen counter as leverage for her; that they’re both tired, tired but not angry, not drunk, when they stumble back into his bedroom and he fucks her long and slow on his unmade bed.
There is no catalyst here. No obvious trigger, a break in the pattern.
She leaves shortly after they both have come. Her car’s still parked illegally on the street. She lays there naked beside him, both of them laying across the bed, their legs hanging off the edge, and she starts laughing.
You sure you want this case? Sweeney had asked.
This isn’t going to be pretty, he said.
“God,” she sighs, and the bed creaks as Reg shifts next to her. “I could go for, like, a million, trillion cigarettes right now.”
“What,” he drawls. “Keep adding your sins to the pile?”
“That,” she says, “Or I could really just do with a cigarette right now.”
He chuckles, the sound almost warm, and that’s when she sits up.
This happens again, and again after that. His apartment becomes familiar to her -- his bed, familiar; his body, familiar. She knows what the bones of his ribs feel like under her hands, that he is wiry and lean beneath all those suits of his, and that he likes the feel of her mouth at his throat, right at the corner hinge of his jaw.
She knows that he uses cinnamon toothpaste instead of the spearmint she uses at home.
She knows that he keeps his shoes lined up neatly in his closet but he never remembers to shut his closet doors, he never remembers not to leave his bath towels on the floor. She has seen this. She has been witness to this, to him, to his life.
Each time they do this, each time she comes over to his place and they fuck -- more often than not they don’t even fight first, the feigned foreplay no longer necessary, and what that says about them, she does not ask -- she exits quickly.
She no longer says to him, “This never happened.”
She no longer sees a point.
(The first night she stayed over she had not intended it. In fact, that first night she was so mad at him, furious and spitting mad. She was as close to hating him as she had ever been, and he -- based on the evidence -- had seemed to feel the same.
The evidence: Reg biting her bottom lip until he made it bleed.
The evidence: Reg pushing her facedown into the mattress, fucking her from behind, fucking her so hard she could barely breathe, couldn’t stop her body from shaking beneath his.
That night she had been angry, but that night she had also been drunk.
After he fucked her, she rolled over and away from him. She thought about getting out of bed. She thought about how wet her thighs felt, how she could feel him leaking out of her and how she should do something about that, but she didn’t.
Reg turned off the light. Reg laid down beside her. Reg did not say a word.
She passed out some time immediately after that. After he turned off the light. After he laid down beside her.
After he did not say a word.
She woke the next morning with her face pressed into his bare back, his body curved away from her, and she had never felt more disgusted.
She left quietly. She did not want to wake him, but she was coming to know him now, know him in such a personal, intimate way, habits belonging to him now second nature to her, tells she would have considered once concealed now closer to an open bluff -- two bodies in close proximity, two bodies in collision, and she knew he was awake.
They rode to that fourth crime scene later that day in complete silence, the girl from Fordham found, and the only thing they would come to speak of was that dead girl at the scene, that dead girl that came before this dead girl (and the girl that came before that, and the girl that came before that) --
two bodies, two bodies in close proximity, two bodies in collision.
Two bodies multiplied by two).
Jane walks out of the FBI building in Federal Plaza with Sweeney. The press is waiting for them, and Sweeney looks to Jane, expecting her to speak.
Jane takes a deep breath.
“The FBI is, as of now, not involved in the investigation, though . . . ”
Reg is waiting for her back at her desk.
“Thanks for throwing our entire case under the fucking bus.”
That night, Jane drinks too much.
That night, Reg pushes her down in his bed and she likes that.
She hides her face from his, she tries to hide how much she likes that.
And then she stays the night --
a break in the pattern, the pattern cannot hold.
T E N ;
The annual NYPD Christmas party isn’t for another week, but it’s Augie who decides that they as a squad need to celebrate that Friday night.
“Now, now, now, see here,” he says that morning, hitching his pants up, imitating Sweeney. “You are a reflection on the New York City Police Department, Homicide Division. I expect nothing short of sheer excellence and bravery at this affront to human decency, this grand show of festive debauchery. Put your game faces on, fellows. We’re going in!”
That evening after work the five of them meet over at McLane’s bar, the hole-in-the-wall near the precinct frequented almost exclusively by cops. The owner of the bar is a former detective himself, some guy by the name of Reynolds, an old friend of Jane’s father.
It turns out that Augie was right to coin the night as an affront to human decency (a grand show of festive debauchery). Everyone except Evrard gets absolutely shit-faced.
“You teetotaling tonight?” Lou asks him.
Evrard holds up his hands. “I’m gonna have one or two, but I swear, I come home drunk again thanks to you fools, my wife’s gonna kill me.”
“I come home at all, my wife’s gonna kill me,” Augie jokes. Lou cocks his head towards Augie and looks at him as though to say, you dumb-ass.
They have taken over the round table at the back of the bar, over by the dartboards and close to the back hall leading to the restrooms. Jane is sitting beside Reg, but more or less ignoring him. She can feel him looking at her, and she wants to tell him to stop it. She doesn’t need Evrard pulling her aside again to ask what she did to Reg, or her what her deal is with Reg, or oh hey Jane are you fucking Reg?
Because that’s the thing, she thinks. It’s no longer just that they slept together, that it was a one-off thing both of them could pretend was a figment of their shared imagination. They are still sleeping together. She is still lying to Matt, still blaming everything on the job.
While Lou and Augie dissolve into an argument (refereed by Evrard), Jane turns to Reg.
“What?” she asks through clenched teeth.
“What?” he repeats, more question than accusation.
“Stop staring at me,” she hisses. “People will think you’re creepy.”
She can recognize the expression on his face. It’s the one he adopts when he feels insulted or backed into a corner. It’s the face he makes when he hears something just flat-out wrong and he can’t even begin to marshall an explanation as to just how wrong the person in question, and error, is.
“I’m staring?” he asks. “Might want to get that narcissism in check there, Skip.”
Jane’s eyes widen and she opens her mouth to argue when Lou slams the flat of his hand down hard against the table.
“Tiebreaker! Impartial bodies,” he says, pointing at Reg and Jane. “We need your vote!”
Lou thinks the evening needs to tread in the direction of Motown and wants to cue up some songs on the antiquated jukebox in the corner of the bar (“You play that Sugar Pie Honey Bunches of Oats song one more time, Lou, and I disown you as a friend and brother,” Augie warns) while Augie insists that nothing starts a party like a Journey track, or seven.
“Do I look like someone who gives a crap about Motown or, what was it? Journey?” Reg asks. Per Jane’s suggestion, they play both.
“The unlikely voice of reason,” Reg drawls, and Jane glares at him.
Augie keeps ordering them rounds of eggnog, pronouncing himself their Ghost of Christmas Present, and his present to them is eggnog, and more eggnog after that.
Lou takes a tentative sip of his eggnog.
“You really have never had eggnog before?” Jane asks incredulously.
“I know,” Augie agrees. “He’s like a virgin we get to defile.”
Evrard chokes on his eggnog and then splutters as he coughs and laughs, Reg pounding him hard on the back.
“This tastes like something a cat would drink,” Lou says after his first sip, a sour expression coloring his face.
“Yeah,” Augie says, “A cool cat. Like me.”
Lou and Augie are the first to leave. It’s hard to tell which of the two is drunker: Lou’s voice has gone very, very loud but still raspy and dark whereas Augie can’t seem to stand up straight. He keeps draping an arm across Lou’s shoulder and sort of falling into him, saying god knows what too close to his face, while Lou’s face keeps alternating between deathly serious and hysterically amused.
“I’m gonna see about getting these two in a cab,” Evrard tells Jane and Reg, “and then get myself on home.”
“You’re leaving too?” Jane asks him.
“I got a wife, dear Janey. And I like her. She’s hot. I wanna go on home and get me some of that,” he says, and she laughs.
Evrard points at the both of them.
“Behave yourselves now,” he says, and Jane is too drunk to trust herself to respond to that.
Jane goes home alone that night. She goes home alone that night, but not before Reg pushes her up against the wall across from the bathrooms, the hall dark and empty, his thigh between her legs, and she makes this terrible keening, falling noise against his mouth as she ruts against him.
She wants to stay here, wants to stay in this bar, against this wall, pressed against him; she wants to go home with him, but the very fact she wants that, that she wants any of that, is what persuades her to go home.
Home to Matt.
She chain smokes three cigarettes she buys off the bartender before she hops a cab home. She had hoped the cigarette smoke would disguise the fact that she smells of men’s cologne. That she smells of Reg, his starched shirts, his skin, his cologne.
What, he said, keep adding your sins to the pile.
“You not smoking again, are you?” Matt asks beside her in bed.
“Just tonight,” she says.
E L E V E N ;
The week before Christmas, the NYPD holds it’s fancy charity event at a hotel over on 44th Street. As parodied by Augie the week before, Sweeney makes a point to tell them all to attend.
Jane borrows an old dress from her sister -- “You’re built like a boy, but this should look decent on you” -- and changes at the station.
“You clean up nice,” Reg tells her at the open bar. She arches an eyebrow; she ignores the pull low in her gut, and reaches for her glass of scotch.
He shouldn’t look at her like that in public. He shouldn’t look at her at all. It reveals far too much.
“I have my moments,” she says, and Reg’s mouth quirks up slightly, something filthy spreading over his face. At that exact moment, Augie springs over, stinking of eggnog (“You didn’t get your fill last week?” she asks him), and throws his arms around both their shoulders. “Well, well, well, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. Now if it isn’t Ebenezer Scrooge himself and, and, and . . . I don’t know who you’d be, Janey, but, maybe, like, Lady Scrooge. The Grinch. The Abdominal Snowman. James Caan in Elf.”
“I think you mean Abominable,” Reg corrects.
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t, Ebby Neezer Scrooge. Maybe Jane’s snowman’s got a six pack.”
Jane laughs, and Lou and Evrard join them. Unsurprisingly, they do shots together at the bar while Augie sings a booming rendition of “Good King Wenceslas” and Lou tells some ridiculous story involving Augie and a stolen inflatable Santa Claus.
Jane is enjoying herself. Jane is having a good time. She is having a good time, that is, until she spots him across the room:
Deputy Chief of Patrol Dan Costello.
She throws back the rest of her scotch and orders another one.
When Dan Costello finally approaches her, she is alone with Reg at the bar.
He approaches her and Reg -- Reg leaves. She stands there with Costello and they both watch Reg fold in with Sweeney, and then she loses him to the crowd.
“You balling Reg Duffy?” Costello is still surveying the crowd and does not look at her when he asks the question.
Jane raises both eyebrows, her eyes wide over the rim of the glass she holds at her mouth.
“Wow, no foreplay?” she asks. He turns to face her. “Then again, if I do recall, that never was your strong suit.” She smirks as she takes a long pull from her drink, as she watches the way Costello’s eyes narrow.
“Jane,” he starts evenly.
“Play to your strengths, I say,” she interrupts. “Go straight in for the kill.”
“So it is true then?” he asks, and this time, it’s Costello who is smirking.
“Not sure where you gather your intel there, Chief, but no. Sorry to disappoint.”
“Really,” he says plainly.
“Yeah, really. Though not sure if it’s the ‘no’ you’re questioning so much as the faux apology I tacked on the end there.”
Costello ignores her. “See,” he says, “I’d heard you two were quite the intrepid pair these days. Getting along real nice and all. Figured that meant you were sleeping with him. After all, this is you, Janey. The only men you can tolerate are the ones you’re balling.”
Jane frowns. She doesn’t know how to tell him that it’s the complete opposite that is true without showing him her hand. That her and Reg don’t get along at all, not really. That, yes, they can work together, and yes, they can get this job done. But the getting along real nice, the intrepid pair -- it ends there.
“You still with your civilian?” he asks suddenly and she nods. She nurses the remaining sip at the bottom of her glass and lets her gaze wander back to the crowd.
She is not going to talk about Matt. She is not going to tell Dan Costello about Matt. Those wires won’t cross.
And if she is not going to tell Dan Costello about Matt, then she is not going to tell him about the nights where she tells Matt that she’s working late. The nights where she tells him that she might just crash down at the station, big case, big hours, not worth the trek home. She isn’t going to talk about those same nights, the nights where she provokes Reg, where she pushes and she tells herself that she isn’t doing it on purpose. That what he is is wrong and she is right and she needs to be the one to tell him this. So they fight. So she calls Matt and she tells him she’s working late, a big case, and she finds Reg and needles him until he gives.
She makes him give. That’s how she reads this. And if that is a wrong reading, if in fact she is wrong and Reg is right, she is going to need him to come and find her. She’s going to need him to make his excuses, and push her until she gives. Push her until she admits that he is right and she is wrong. Push her until she admits they’ve been playing for the same team this whole time, until she lets him put his mouth on hers, open her legs, find that one spot that’s tender and still makes her ache.
But she’s not going to tell Dan Costello that either. He already assumes too much.
She finds Reg outside smoking a cigar, his bow tie undone and limp about his collar.
“Your Costello is a real sweetheart,” he says.
She smirks, but she doesn’t comment.
“What you ever see in him anyway?” Reg’s voice is thick with drink and thick with the smoke from his cigar.
Jane leans back against the wall beside Reg. She rubs her hands over her bared arms. It’s too cold to be outside without a coat, but there she is. There he is.
She shrugs then, looks at Reg when she says, “I don’t know. I forget.”
He takes another drag off the cigar, and she can’t read the expression on his face.
“Evrard left,” she says. “You seen Lou or Augie?” Reg shakes his head, his face lost in an exhale of smoke. Jane breathes in deep, lets his cigar smoke fill her lungs.
“Those two clowns,” he says. “Drunk as two skunks last I seen them.”
Jane just nods, unsurprised. But then, she is drunk too. Then, Reg is drunk. It’s different though, she knows. Lou and Augie have managed to maintain the giddy frat boy stupidity that accompanies drinking too much, whereas with Reg, whereas with her, there is something routine to it. Something insidious, something habitual. They drink, and their lesser selves make themselves known. They drink, and they can still see clear.
“You going back in?” she asks him.
Reg shakes his head again. “Was thinking I head out, in a few,” he says, and it’s all he says.
When he looks at her, she knows. She knows that she was right when she told Dan Costello that he was wrong. She can barely tolerate Reg; sleeping with him has only made it that much worse. Standing with him outside that hotel, outside the ballroom, the night cold and threatening snow, he looks at her and she knows that later that night she will be tasting that cigar he’s smoking off his tongue, tasting it from inside his mouth. She knows that she will not return home, not tonight, that she will warm her cold hands against his skin, that she’ll let him do the same, and none of this will be because she can tolerate him. None of this will be because fucking him makes him that much more tolerable.
It will be because of the exact opposite.
Jane leaves the party with Reg.
They climb into the same cab together, and Reg is not shy with her. He keeps his hand on her thigh, the fabric of her sister’s dress keeping his skin from hers, but she likes that. It heightens things, she thinks. He rubs his hand over the dress, over her thigh, and she likes that, too.
She shivers when his mouth closes over her earlobe, shivers again when he hisses against her ear, “why can’t I stop . . . ” and leaves the thought hanging there, abrupt and cut-off.
It unnerves her when he softens to her. His body, hard and menacing against her, but him, Reg, softened.
She doesn’t know what to do with that, so she kisses him. In the back of a cab she kisses him earnestly and he kisses her back; he crowds her back against the door, the handle digging into her side, and she can feel a slight draft through the window.
She can’t remember if she called Matt. She can’t remember if she needs to call Matt. She can’t remember why that matters, what will happen if she doesn’t call him, if she didn’t call him.
She lets the thought slip away as the cab approaches Reg’s apartment.
She lets the thought slip away as Reg slips his hand beneath her dress -- his hand on her thigh, his skin, hers.
She shivers again.
C O N T I N U E D :
P . 1 | P . 3