The phone is ringing again.  

 You’d think they’d give up.  I haven’t answered it in two days.   I have nothing to say and I am not interested in anything anyone might care to discuss.  Besides, it would involve moving off the leather sofa for more than just shuffling into the downstairs half bath to pee and the only time I have done that was when I got tired on my way back and decided to curl up on the pool table for awhile.   

I haven’t eaten.  I have drank.  A lot.   

Mostly I have lain on the sofa up the four little steps and watched the sky change hour by hour over the bay willing my brain to go comatose.  I’ve lain there and listened to the phone ring and watched the little movie in my head which is entitled “The Way Jase Died; All Cooper’s Fault”.  I can’t make it stop.  I never can.  I just have to ride it out.   

I listen to the phone ringing and cry until I’m numb and then the movie starts again and I have to watch it. 

We were so good together.  In every way.  All the Hallmark cards and the hokey mushy Valentine’s Day crap couldn’t describe how good Jase Hunnicutt and I were together.  It was like being in love and in lust with your best friend and then finding out the two of you were a team, like the Three Musketeers whittled down to two.  All for one and me for you.   

Everyone knew we were lovers and everyone overlooked it because we worked so good together and brought in the money and drugs and made so many arrests.  They chose to pretend they didn’t know because if it had been acknowledged they would have had to separate us as partners since policy says it is strictly forbidden.  It causes too many problems.  It makes people stupid and they begin to make mistakes.  There is an indescribable bond of trust and faith between partnered cops as it is but when you factor  lust and sex and possessiveness into the equation, you’re screwed.   When anything—anything-- becomes more important than keeping your head and protecting your partner things can go terribly wrong incredibly fast.  So when not on assignment we maintained separate apartments.  When put on a job we slid right into the role of husband and wife, or boyfriend and girlfriend.   

And then I got pregnant.   

After the initial shock, Jase and I were thrilled.  I’d been on the Pill since I was in my early twenties and had been diligent about taking them once Jase and I became lovers because pregnant is not what a narcotics investigator wants to be.  But I’d had a bad cold which had gone into mild pneumonia and I’d been taking antibiotics, never dreaming the two would interact and the Bioxin cancel out the effectiveness of the birth control.   We agreed it was fate and were ecstatic in a tremulous, disbelieving way.   

We didn’t tell anyone in the Department and we didn’t tell our families which basically meant we didn’t tell Jase’s since I had none.   We knew once the Lt.  heard he would be forced to split us as work partners and we’d be assigned different people even after the baby was born and I was back in top shape; they couldn’t pretend to not  know once there was a child.   

During the pregnancy I would be stuck on desk patrol.  I couldn’t imagine being on a job without Jase, being partnered off to someone else, any more than I could imagine me sitting answering the phone for eight hours for the next five and a half months.  I asked for vacation time in order to hide the morning sickness I was having and give myself time to adjust to the idea of becoming a mother for the first time at age 34.   

We’d finished a long stretch of eleven months under cover in El Paso and I’d more than earned the time off so no one batted an eye.  We’d rented apartments in the same complex in Austin having learned the hard way that it just made it a lot easier to explain why Sgt Hunnicutt was constantly answering the phone in Sgt Finn’s bedroom.  We weren’t fooling anyone, but it didn’t matter as long as we kept up that second rent for appearances.  Jase never even got furniture for that last apartment.  He was never there.  Mine had better access to the parking lot and a more secure location in the building.  You never know who might recognize you just by chance while you’re pumping gas at the Seven Eleven across from the Academy or drinking Tecate on the patio at Chuey’s on Lamar.  And then throw a little surprise party when you got home.   

Jase, however, didn’t take time off.  He’d been asked to teach some classes at the Academy to baby narcs and although he claimed to be bored I could tell he really enjoyed it.  He loved the whole mentality necessary in undercover work, loved attempting to detail the mental and emotional process of shutting down yourself and turning into another human being for a year and a half and having it be the sort of person the Ten General Orders said you couldn’t even take out to dinner.   That line always got a big laugh in a class of baby narcs trying to grow their hair and beards and wincing from fresh tattoos while fingering new holes in their ears.   

He was having a blast while I, on the other hand, had never been so fucking miserable in my life.  Less than half my vacation time was up and I had already seen that I was not going to be one of those cute little petite pregnant women.  Apparently, Jase had got me pregnant from head to toe.  Even my ear lobes were huge.  I was vomiting all the time but I just got fatter anyway and I was a hormonal catastrophe.  I would find myself crying over coffee commercials and weeping over magazine ads for engagement rings.  

 I wanted Jase to ask me to marry him.  I knew once we were married we could never be partners again, but that would happen once they knew I was pregnant anyway, so why couldn’t I get some kind of vows out of it at least? I actually began writing out “H. Cooper Hunnicutt” like some kind of swoony teenager in high school.  I hated it.  And I had no one to hand all this shit over to verbally because I was terrified Jase was suddenly going to realize he didn’t much like me when I was blotchy and fat and clingy and boring.   

Then he told me he was going to do a small assignment, just a couple of gigs with a rookie narc from San Antonio whose partner had had to bail out when his wife had to start chemo for breast cancer.  The people they’d been setting the meeting up with here had never seen either of them, just been given their description over the phone by a third party, which meant a paid rat in exchange for some lesser jail time, or some lesser charge.  Jase fit the description of the guy and was going to step in and handle the buy with the female. 

I had discovered this needy, protective, grasping streak in myself.  I wanted him safe at the Academy strutting and preening in front of a classroom.  I didn’t want him out there without me and my Oh Shit leg to watch out for him.  I liked him coming home at 5:30 every day.  I liked knowing he would be in for lunch and that he would call me from the Academy around 3:00 and that I could page him anytime without worrying it might distract him or alert some guy he was feeding along.  It was as close as I had ever been to that “ideal” family being dished out on television.  I liked it even as it terrified me. 

And I didn’t like that he would be playing partner with some other woman.   

I sat on the bed and watched him get dressed to go out.  Soft, worn, faded jeans, brown leather hiking boots, tight, tight black tee shirt snug across his chest, showing off pecs and biceps, the final touch a pair of small brown-wire glasses, the lenses just glass  He studied himself in the full length mirror on the back of the closet door and asked me if he looked the part.  He was striving for “late twenties computer geek goes street smart”.  I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around him and laid my head against his back and smiled into the warmth there, then nodded.  His hair was cut short on the sides and back, but the top was longer and he had a kind of auburn headed Ben Affleck thing going.  God, he was beautiful.   

“Now tell me again what you know about her,” I said casually and he ran through the stats again which told me absolutely nothing.  Candi Sutton.  24 years old.  From up in the Panhandle somewhere, in CLE for less than a month and this was her first job.  One of the reasons they’d asked Jase to take it, because it was the kind of gig he could do in his sleep and his confidence would calm her down; she was a little wired about it, which was normal for her first time.   

I did a decent job of holding my tongue until she showed up to get him and see if her outfit passed inspection.  She was going for the computer geek’s vampy girlfriend which is always an excellent cover to work under since it grabs the bad guy by the dick and makes him stupid.  She was as tall as Jase in a pair of deep indigo jeans with glitter down the faded front of the thighs, so tight I could have seen had she had any panties on.  She did not.  She was wearing boots too, but black, with skinny fuck-me heels. The shirt was sheer see-through sand washed silk, pink, with blousy poet sleeves gathered above the wrists with silk ribbons and a ruffled neckline that dipped to her sternum before any buttons began and ended well above the waist of the jeans.  Her belly button was pierced with a small silver hoop. 

I smiled when we were introduced and took her hand to shake with it’s ten perfect nails and wished them luck and waved them off, then shut the door and ran to the window to see what kind of car she drove and to watch them get in it.  Together.  She handed Jase the keys and did this little giggly swaying step and I lifted my hand and made a gun with my forefinger pointed at her gleaming head full of bra-length dark hair that she kept tossing and fingering as she listened to whatever Jase was telling her across the top of the car.  His back was to me but her expression was rapt, enthralled and definitely infatuated.   

Oh, I knew that look all too well.  He was a part of the danger and the thrill and the sexy world of undercover work she, being a rookie, still thought was part of the bargain.   She was a goner for Jase Michael Hunnicutt.   

“Pow,” I whispered just before she ducked down and got in.

He was three hours later than he had told me he would be.   

At first I just walked around fuming, beating the shit out of Candi Sutton over and over in my head.  Who ever heard of a cop named “Candi” for fuck’s sake?  Did she not realize she was destined to be a stripper?   

And then I remembered that this was Jase, my Jase, who I had trusted over and over with my life and whose baby was in my belly this moment.  I could trust Jase.  I didn’t trust Candi Sutton any further than I could throw her, which would be a hell of a lot further actually than she could throw me right now, but Jase…  He wouldn’t let me down.  We were partners.  And we were friends.  And we were lovers.  We were family.   

He had laid right here on this couch last night with his head in my lap talking to his son, asking him to please stop making his mother throw up because he was really fucking up our sex life.   We were going to be Mama and Daddy to someone who was already five and a half inches long and had been sucking his thumb during the sonogram in between what appeared to be violent temper tantrums.   

“Awww, honey,” Jase had said grinning, holding my hand, “He’s got your pissy streak.”  

At some point I realized that he was out on a job with a cop named Candi who looked like she couldn’t pick her nose safely without someone warning her about her fingernails.  I became convinced something had happened, something terrible.  I checked the phone for a dial tone over and over, got my cellular and set it beside me on the couch and rocked back and forth, verging on hysterical, resisting the urge over and over to page him, to call his cell number.   

I held onto that until about halfway through hour three at which point I was ready to murder whichever of them walked in the door first.  When I heard the key in the lock I leapt to my feet and stomped to the front door and by the time he got inside I was wild-eyed and furious and ranting, frothing at the mouth. 

He smelled like beer because they had walked over to a club on 6^th Street and had a couple with the dealer.  The guy was an hour late, probably watching them from a car or something, checking them out.  He was tired, he told me.  It was hard work being out with someone new but she’d done good for her first time.  Probably make a decent investigator.   

I heard him out while my eyes scanned him from head to toe and found plenty.  There was a smear of face makeup on the chest of his tee shirt, a long curled dark hair on his shoulder and his lips looked swollen.  I went ballistic on his ass. 

“Coop, you know how it works,” he told me tiredly, scrubbing his fingers through his hair, staring at me as if he didn’t know who I was.  “She was playing my girlfriend.  We couldn’t hardly sit three feet apart from one another.  “ 

But I couldn’t stop.  I demanded to know if they had kissed and how did her face end up on his chest and maybe she should have played a hooker instead, wearing all that shit and had he used a rubber?  Because one of his “girlfriends” pregnant was enough and yeah, obviously I did know how it worked.  We had started out “playing” too.   

We spent the evening hissing and growling at one another.   When he told me I had better calm down because they had made plans to meet with the same guy the next night on Bee Cave Highway at a motel to make the actual deal, I burst into tears and whacked him a few times in the chest with my open hands, then ran sobbing to the couch and threw myself down on it.  

 He came after me when I finally stopped crying, standing there in his bare feet and boxer briefs. 

“C’mon back to bed, Huck,” he said, using the name I only let him use, the one reserved for moments when he needed to reel me in closer or calm me, reassure me.  

“Come to bed and let me eat some Huckleberry jam.” His voice was teasing and light and tender. 

I threw my pager at him and dinged him in the head.  He turned and went back in the bedroom and shut the door and I laid there, not sleeping, crying off and on for the rest of the night.  

 I wouldn’t go to him.  Fuck him.  Let him wean and train Candi Fuckhead Sutton and see how she did when the shit hit the fan and she broke one of her nails.  Asshole!  I’d rather die than go over there and open that door and swallow my pride.   

God, why didn’t he just try one more time?   

Why couldn’t I just let it go and give us what we both needed and wanted? 

He’d dressed and left when I woke around mid morning.  I realized that I didn’t know when they were meeting the guy on Bee Cave and I didn’t know when he should be back.  I didn’t know if he was going to do the class at the Academy and then the deal later in the afternoon, or if it was going to be later, after dark. 

I paged him twice, thinking if he were at the Academy he would call me back.  He didn’t.  

I dialed the desk then and asked them if they could page Sgt Hunnicutt over the intercom system and ask him to come to the phone.  They put me on hold and finally the college girl’s voice came back on and said Sgt Hunnicutt didn’t appear to be in the building.  Sgt Monahan had taken his classes for the afternoon.  Did I want to leave a message?   

I hung up and this feeling came over me, deep and black and inexorable.  Something bad was going to happen, the worst thing I could imagine happening and this time I wouldn’t be looking back at my panic later on, laughing at it, teasing myself for my faulty intuition.  This time it was going to be real and there was no stopping it.   

I paged him over and over, probably fifty times in the next several hours.  I sat on the floor in front of the commode because I couldn’t stop vomiting.  I rocked myself and the baby and clutched the Kevlar vest Jase hadn’t worn because it was summer and tee shirt weather and it would show. I swore I’d give Candi Sutton narc lessons and be like a sister to her and she could wallow her head around on his chest all she wanted and flip that fucking hair around all she liked, just don’t let this be happening, don’t let this be real.  I begged God and I offered my soul to Satan if either of them could just keep him safe and bring him home.   

 But neither one was listening. 

They come to your house to tell you those things; there’s no phone call like they show on TV.  Even cops aren’t that sadistic.   

I’d left the door unlocked because I’d realized somewhere in there when I could still walk that more was going wrong than just Jase not coming home.  I was losing our little Huckleberry.   

 I don’t know why I didn’t call for an ambulance.  I wanted to be there when Jase came home, it was all I could focus on.  If I left then I would miss him and I had to hold onto the tiny shred of hope that he might come in any moment.  I had to be there.  I got in the bathtub and tried to stop some of it with towels and then I was too tired to even care. There was so much blood…  There was just no stopping it.     

I vaguely remember realizing Sarge was in my bathroom along with Sgt Riddle, one of the female Academy Staff.  Sarge told me later that he first thought I’d found out somehow, like over the radio or television which had carried news of the shooting almost immediately and I’d killed myself before they could get there.  Sgt Riddle saw what was happening though and called EMS from the living room phone.   

I wondered later on how God could be that cruel to me when I was willing to make all those deals with him.  All he had to do was provide a little Austin traffic jam and delay Sarge’s arrival by another half hour and I could have slipped away with Jase and our baby.  I was paying for the ticket by the time the ambulance arrived; just another half hour and I could have caught up with them. 

Everyone was very kind and thoughtful and gentle with me.  I had four different people who had seen and talked to him that day tell me he just hadn’t seemed like himself.  He hadn’t looked as if he’d slept well; he was distracted and unfocused that morning at the Academy.  He’d seemed tired.  That asshole should never have been able to take out a cop like Jase, not even on his best day.  Maybe he’d had a touch of the flu and his timing was off, his reflexes.  Bad fucking luck that guy had confessed to driving around the block two or three times the day before with a friend who recognized Jase from a case we’d worked in Abilene.  And poor Candi.  Her first time out and her partner gets shot.  Probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there.  I was what had kept him sharp.  I had that Hink Meter and my Oh Shit leg.   

I smiled and smiled and tore both of my thumbs to shreds with my nails because it was the only way I could stop myself from shrieking.  And I knew they were trying to help me, trying to find something that would make me feel better when I heard it.  They had no idea that with every sentence, every phrase, I was listening to my guilt pronounced over and over.  

I killed Jase.  With my stubbornness and idiotic pride, my temper and vanity, insecurity and jealousy.   

And then I had let our baby go with him. 

I’m not sure how many days it’s been.  

 I haven’t slept, I haven’t eaten, I haven’t changed clothes and Jase’s shirt is clammy feeling and smells.  I left my jeans somewhere, but I’ve kept my socks because I am freezing in this fucking city.  I’ve decided the couch is way too far from the bathroom so I’ve made a little nest for myself under the pool table.  I found a soft ivory colored throw in the linen closet of the downstairs bath and drag it around with me, my teeth still chattering.  It’s very soft.  Too bad I got vomit on it; it’s probably dry clean only and feels very expensive.    

The phone keeps ringing.  I know it’s not Sarge because I have managed to keep track of my pager and he would beep me if I didn’t answer my cellular and this is the black cordless that came with the place.  The one that’s probably bugged.  Another reason I don’t feel like answering it.  I just want them to leave me alone and if I make it through this one then I’ll go partying with Exstead or whatever the fuck it is Massey wants.  But for now why can’t they just cease and desist with trying to make me answer? 

I finally pick it up just out of curiosity, to see who is that fucking persistent.  I figure Massey would have driven over if it were him and I’m not interested in playing secretary for whoever lives in this place most of the time.  I crawl out from under the pool table and yank it off the end table and press the little button and put it to my ear.   

I don’t say anything.  But on the other end I recognize Ms. Tenacious Psychologist immediately. 

“Hello?  Cooper Finn?  This is Dr. Kim Legaspi—“ 

I calmly hang up on her and start dragging myself and the pretty throw back over to the pool table.  I haven’t got more than a few inches when it starts ringing again.  Jesus fucking Christ.  I grab it up, press the button and then click it off immediately before she can say anything.  

 Get the hint, woman.  Go away.    

It’s ringing again before I can even drop it.  I can’t believe there’s not an off switch on this fucker.  Who the hell lives here that wants to be contacted at anytime, all the time? If I just leave the line open Legaspi is privy to whatever sobs and shrieks I can’t hold in.  If I hang up on her, then open the line and lay it down it would show off the hook if anyone checked with an operator and all I need is for Massey to decide to contact me on this phone instead of the pager I gave him and decide to come over and catch me in this shape.   I trace the line to the wall next to the fireplace;  I could go pull that little plug out, but god…  that’s so far over there.  Why can’t she just stop and leave me alone?   

I push the tone button in twice and disconnect her again as I start scooting myself backwards over the thick carpet.  It’s a lot easier once my ass is on the hardwood section in front of the fireplace.  I’ve tried to stand a couple of times and found it’s better not to.  My head is full of angry silver clouds of bees and I end up toppling over anyway.  I’ve got a nasty bruise on one side of my face where I tried to grab the pool table but luckily I stopped the fall with my head.  Jase was always telling me it was a good thing my head is so hard since my ass is so clumsy.   

I stop and put my face against my knees and muffle the little wail in the ivory throw.  I’m  gagging again but there’s nothing in there to puke now.  Just dry heaves.   

The phone again.  I’m almost to the wall.  After this it won’t matter how many times she calls, I think, grimly satisfied.  So I push the tone button in and put it to my ear for a moment and what I intend to tell her is that I am going to take a nap, so fuck off.  But I haven’t spoken in days and my throat is hoarse from crying and throwing up and all that comes out is a croak.   

She practically pounces on me through the receiver.   

“Don’t you fucking dare hang up on me again,” I hear.  Legaspi is thoroughly pissed.   

“You missed your appointment,” she snaps at me and for a moment I am totally flummoxed.  She’s been calling all this time and is this ticked because I missed an appointment?  What, does she hire hit men if you miss two?  What the hell would go on if your check bounced?  She probably sics the little CIA agent on you.   

I clear my throat two or three times before I can speak and finally rasp out, “How the fuck did you get this number?” 

Wait.  That wasn’t what I meant to say.  I meant to say fuck off before I hung up on her, but once I’ve asked it I am genuinely curious.   

“Sylvie Chandler is one of my patients,” she says, as if that should explain everything.  And right back to the missed appointment in the next beat, “Were you planning to reschedule?” 

“Uh…  no.”  I tell her and am right at the point with my finger hovering over the button when my curiosity about Sylvie Chandler gets the best of me.  It’s nothing to do with her screaming at me in a full fledged banshee tantrum as if she is watching me on video, “Don’t you fucking dare!  Don’t you dare hang up!” 

I sense that this would be really amusing to me another time, but right now I am just so tired and all I want to do is sleep.  I know sooner or later the “How Jase Died” movie will have to stop because I’ll give out and the theater will shut down.  I just want to be there already.  I don’t want to deal with temperamental shrinks with ex-CIA girlfriends.   

“Who’s Sylvie Chandler?” I ask and then her voice is muffled, as she exchanges words with someone in the room, her hand over the receiver, apparently inquiring if it’s alright to share with me the identity of the mysterious Sylvie Chandler.  I decide it’s probably the last person the little red-head slapped around for her.  For missing an appointment.   

I’m all out of patience with the Shrink and the Agent.  I pull the cord out of the wall. 

About a half hour later I discern who Sylvie Chandler is.   

I remembered seeing some pill bottles upstairs in the black and gold, coral shrine of a bathroom when I was doing a hand sweep for bugs.  If I’m lucky the chickie that owns this place and has SFPD for security is a pill head with some half decent prescriptions.   

It takes me twenty minutes to get up the fucking stairs.  I’m beginning to doubt the chickie will be a pill head because she’d never have something this horrid to navigate between her and her drugs.  Then again, there is that amazing wet bar from which I have snagged an ice cold bottle of Absolut.  Just in case I find anything in those bottles.  People with that sort of taste in alcohol rarely stick to just one solution for reality.   

I strike gold.  Rich Chickie has excellent taste in prescriptions.  I find Vicodin and plain Codeine, Darvon, Demerol and Percodan.  There’s the always helpful bottle of Prozac because of course Rich Chickie has mood swings and Ambien for those long sleepless nights in a penthouse.  And for those mornings when the downers of the night before just won’t be swayed with ordinary caffeine there’s Dexedrine.  Yummy.  I get the top off the bottle of Vicodin and shake six out into my palm when it suddenly dawns on me who Sylvie Chandler is.  I peer at the label on the side of the little amber bottle and sure enough,  there it is.  Sylvie Chandler. 

It’s the Rich Chickie whose penthouse SFPD keeps on a special list and she’s also a patient of the pissy psychologist.  Exstead, Sylvie and me.  Wouldn’t that be interesting and worth a nice cop thought if I gave a shit right now.  I look over each of the bottles, bemused,  since I had not figured Legaspi for a More Pills the Better kind of doctor and my instincts aren’t off.  Only the Prozac is from her.  The rest are from four different doctors.  Sylvie’s a busy little fucked up girl.   

I don’t care.  I down the big white pills with the Absolut.  It feels like it frost bit my throat on the way down and for a minute I don’t think I’m going to be able to keep it in there long enough to do anything.  But then the opoids and the vodka hit my empty stomach and I’m cocooned in a nice warm narcotic blanket.   

 I drop the bottle on the bathroom floor and crawl into the next room to the bed which now appears to be at least twelve feet off the floor.  I keep sliding off because the spread is white satin like the canopy and so are the sheets.  Sylvie Chandler is fucking demented, in my opinion.  Bar downstairs, pills up here, terrifying stair case in between and now this slip and slide for a bed.  Someone needs to sit her down and explain how much easier life is if you just downsize a little. 
 

I finally get up there and stay, sprawled out on my belly.  The movie is ending.  The credits are rolling by.  God bless opiates. 

 END OF FIVE

{~> Crossroads  Next Story, Please <~}