Fic: Selfie in Blue, Part I
Title: Selfie in Blue
Author: blacktop
Characters: John Reese, Harold Finch, Joss Carter, Original Character
Rated: M
Warnings: Brief violence, sex, nostalgia
Word count: 18,000
Summary: Reese grapples with bouts of chagrin as he tries to save a buoyant girl from the snare of international crime. Finch and Carter help even as they complicate the case. This story is posted in nine parts.
Prologue
With his index finger Reese traced the journey of a drop of perspiration down the golden channel of Joss’s back.
It skittered down the incline toward her nape, then paused, then disappeared into a little shimmering pool in the indentation between her shoulders. He stroked a palm over her ass, cupping its perfect roundness, sliding a hand under to clasp her trembling stomach. He drew her to him for a final embrace. He knew he had to retreat now that the storm had subsided.
But the regret that seized him as he pulled from her body threatened to overwhelm him. Her inner muscles contracted around him, as if anticipating a deficit he yearned to make whole again. He slid forward one last time, the sweetness of the act haunting him even before it was over.
Leaving seemed such a cruel punishment, as if the sharp pleasure of the previous minute had to be paid for with this wrenching chagrin. He wanted to return, to be inside her again.
He longed to be complete in her once more.
Nostalgia in a CIA operative was a dangerous sentiment. Reese knew for a fact that seasoned agents had died when they let vague and bittersweet emotions replace hard calculation. Keeping your head in the here and now was essential to accomplishing your assignment, to staying alive.
Pining was for fools.
But now as he settled behind her, kissing her nape and neck and shoulder blades while she murmured his name, the wistful waves rolled through him unchecked. This felt like a kind of homesickness, joy and sadness mixing together in equal measure.
His heart was filled with longing for something unattainable, a desire for a past they had never enjoyed, for an undefined future clouded by doubt.
As he pulled up the sheets over their bodies, she pressed her shoulder back into his chest as if rooting for home. She nestled her ass against his stomach, burrowing to ward off the morning chill.
The day’s first light sifted a powdery blue frosting over their bed. Spring was promised, but held back, uncertain of how to proceed in mercurial March.
This awareness of how easily all things passed wasn’t new to him. He had seen enough of death and hopelessness to understand what transience truly meant. But the force of the feeling surprised him nonetheless, another unexpected product of this, this whatever it was with Joss.
When she turned to him, laying a kiss against the notch of his collarbone, he felt his throat tighten. He knew he couldn’t speak, couldn’t explain how much her patience and love meant to him.
She reached up to wipe the corner of his eye and he realized he must have been crying, just a bit.
As she always did, she asked about the future: “Will I see you tonight?”
“I don’t know.” His reply was always the same.
But this time he amended it with an explanation: “I have a date with an angel tonight.”
Of course she got his blue mood and his meaning. As always he counted on her to know exactly where he was heading and to whom. Her smile seemed forced at first, but then it burst into a gift.
“So you’re going to see Joan again? That’s good. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Give her a hug from me too.”
+++++++++
Chapter One
When Reese and Joss arrived together at the library a few hours after, Finch diplomatically neglected to mention the lateness of the hour.
Joss was working a late shift that began at two in the afternoon and it was still before ten, so Reese didn’t think there was anything they needed to apologize for.
And they each carried a baby blue carton of crullers, brought to ward off complaints from sweet-tooth Shaw.
“Any new numbers, Finch?”
Reese knew he sounded gruff, but he wanted to underline the transition from personal to work time with his tone.
He looked at Joss over his cup of coffee.
She was dressed in her detective mufti: dark slacks, a navy blazer, and a form fitting white sweater whose v-neckline was cut much too low. He didn’t want anyone except him enjoying the high contrast between the sweater and the burnished brown skin of her breasts.
In the morning rush, she had pinned her hair into a casual bun at the back of her head. The severe side part which mimicked his own continued to amuse him, as if she were unconsciously copying his look. At least she didn’t have to contend with his damned cowlick.
Seeing her in the library like this, watching her absorb its hushed atmosphere, feeling her sharp instincts and analytic mind at work in his operations headquarters, was a new experience for him.
This way of sharing his job with her was untested, a different angle on their collaboration. He thought it took some of the control from him and gave her greater leverage in their professional and personal partnership.
But to his surprise, he found that this innovation quietly thrilled him. He knew it wasn’t his choice to make, but her presence here gave him a strong rush of pleasure all the same.
Finch, of course, seemed completely unfazed by the change. As if he had always imagined Joss in this space, sidestepping the dog bed at his feet, leaning over his shoulder, peering into the black depths of the computer screen.
“Two, in fact, Mr. Reese.”
Finch seemed pleased by this for some reason, as if more work led to increased satisfaction. Rather than the greater unease which Reese felt.
“Due to the promptness of her arrival, I asked Ms. Shaw to look into the first matter.”
Finch let that tiny jab hang in the air for a moment before offering a correction.
“Or rather, she assigned herself to the number when she saw the avid way Ms. Groves grabbed the photo I taped to the evidence wall. The two of them departed ninety minutes ago.”
Reese refused to rise to the mild challenge. He was curious about the case, of course, but not enough to ask for details. And the less he saw or heard of that depraved maniac Root the better.
“And the second number?”
Finch nodded toward the printer and let Joss pull out the photograph and tape it to the glass board.
The image was of a woman, perhaps still a teenager, with a shock of bright blonde hair slanting over her round face. The portrait must have been taken for a high school year book. In her little pearls and black high-collar dress, Reese thought she looked healthy, maybe even happy, though she wasn’t smiling.
The space between her eyes was broad, her smooth cheeks plump with youth, and her nose turned up like that of a fairy tale princess or a girly Mickey Mantle. He didn’t think she was a true beauty -- too conventional looking for that, even though her mouth was unusually wide. But perhaps the energy of the living person, dampened in this still photo, would change his mind once he met her.
“Her name is Danica Hofer. Born in Spring Green, Wisconsin to a couple who run a general store serving that farming community. She is nineteen years old.”
“That’s all we know about her, Harold?” Joss sounded disappointed.
“She’s an only child. No record of her parents’ deaths. Danica graduated from high school two years ago and finished a semester at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.”
Joss leaned closer to read the transcripts.
“It looks like she took Freshman English composition, computer science, U.S. history, and Victorian literature in the fall semester. Good grades. Registered for accounting, second semester English comp, general biology, and another lit course in the spring. But then she got all W’s. She must have withdrawn before the final grades came in.”
Reese offered an hypothesis, one he only half believed but which he hoped would ruffle the nerves of his friends.
“If she’s in trouble she didn’t get into it in a backwater like Spring Green, Wisconsin. She met some boy during college orientation, experimented with prescription drugs, then heroin, and ran away to New York. Now she’s working as a waitress in a blues dive and screwing the bass player.”
Joss and Finch turned to him with looks of amazement on their faces.
“What? You think she’s living like a nun?”
“No, Mr. Reese, I hardly expect that. Still, I find your speculation quite astounding. And utterly morbid.”
Finch was huffing and puffing at a good clip now.
“But if we follow your scenario, what’s the source of the threat to Ms. Hofer?”
“I figure the bass player isn’t exactly at liberty, you know. His other girlfriend took exception to the corn-fed Miss Wisconsin and now she’s in danger of getting murdered by jealous groupie number one.”
He raised his eyebrows to make his eyes go round and smiled brightly at Joss until she laughed.
“Alrighty, then. We won’t toss your idea just yet, wise guy. But how ‘bout we get a little more info on Danica before I break my legs jumping to conclusions.”
But the next hour’s research yielded little of value about Danica Hofer.
They couldn’t find a current street address anywhere in the country, no electronic footprint except for her Facebook page which hadn’t been updated in eighteen months. The cell phone Danica used in college was dormant.
A call to Fusco came up empty when he found nothing in police files on the girl. If she was in New York, she was keeping her nose clean or staying on the down low. He promised to speak with pals in the Milwaukee police department and to reach out to the sheriff’s office of Sauk County in hopes of learning more about Danica’s childhood in the village of Spring Green.
By the time Joss left for the precinct to start her shift, Finch was pinch-faced with silent anxiety. Reese was sullen and so restless his edginess caused Bear to whine in empathy.
Without a person to track or a solid lead to pursue or a mental challenge to unravel, Reese felt useless.
He wondered, not for the first time, why the machine gave them a number but failed to follow up with any other pertinent information. This bare knowledge of eminent danger was pointless if they remained trapped in a fog of ignorance. It was as though the machine wanted to drive them mad by luring them with hope, before dashing their spirits against blank cliffs of inaction and frustration.
Harold and Joss were always brimming with confidence in the prowess of the machine. But he found it increasingly hard to join in their optimism.
Wound tight and getting tighter by the minute, Reese longed for three rounds with a punching bag or an overweight sparring partner at Neely’s Gym. But Bear looked at him with such forlorn eyes that he couldn’t leave him behind to sulk and annoy Finch.
So man and dog plunged into the frigid afternoon for an exhausting walk that lasted until the dinner hour.
+++++++++
“Cold hands, John. Too cold.”
Reese looked down at the tiny woman beside him and squeezed her bare hands in his. The blue veins under his thumbs shifted and bulged as he stroked them.
Joan -- his guardian, his confidante, his savior -- was shivering inside the black overcoat that enveloped her like a wool tent.
Though the navy blue watch cap was pulled low on her forehead, stringy hair stuck out on either side of her thin face. The skin of her cheeks was slack and flaking, but two points of bright red flashed like warning beacons above the concaves there.
Her restless eyes, blue like faded jeans, darted from his face to a corner on the other side of the vast warehouse which was her home.
“Your hands’re too cold, John. Where you been keeping yourself?”
The brilliant grin with which she had greeted him a minute earlier dissolved into a watery grimace.
Joan was worried about him, as always.
Reese moved closer to her on the mattress, their identical coats rubbing shoulders as he leaned in.
Unglazed windows that gaped along the walls of the building ensured that winter gusts and even snow drifts regularly invaded the homeless encampment. The soaring arched ceiling recalled a cathedral, echoing the little voices piping below it. But the floor was wood instead of marble and in places desperate people had ripped up the planks for kindling.
Clusters of men bent over oil drums which they had converted into fire pits as pitiful protection against the bitterness of the March night. Long coats billowed around their knees as the wind jutted through the expanse and turbans of tattered scarves swathed their heads.
At first Reese thought he might recognize a face or two in the huddled crowd, but dirt and frostbite and despair blurred their features so he gave up the effort.
Three years had passed since he had lived with them, been one of them. Three years since Joan -- using every bit of her confused mind and generous heart --- had worked through the cold and darkness to keep him going when he had no desire to move one step further.
“I’m fine, Joan.” He rubbed her knuckles until a blush of false warmth rose over her protruding bones.
The old woman peered into his face, her nose only a few inches from his. He saw a tear leak from the outer corner of her right eye, carving a trail through the grime until it dripped off her jaw and down the breast of her coat.
“Maybe. But I say you look too thin. And too cold. Both.”
He supposed he was thinner than when he had last visited Joan here.
Three months was an eternity in her life. And in his too, as it turned out. Joss had nearly died three months ago; he had almost died. Their world, already unpredictable and violent, had flipped upside down.
As if reading his mind or maybe just his face, Joan blurted out:
“You still seeing that girl? That What’s-her-name you brought here once? Odette’s boss. You know, golden-skin girl like Odette.”
“Joss. Yes, we’re still together.”
“She your special girl, hunh?”
“Yes, she is.”
A simple admission, one he needed to make to Joss someday, when the time was right.
Joan sighed and leaned forward over her knees so that her face was buried in the folds of the heavy coat.
“I miss my special girl, John. I miss her something awful.” The muffled moans cut him to the heart.
Odette, Joan’s companion in their erratic adventure of survival and love, had died the previous October.
Even after finding purposeful work as one of Joss’s confidential informants, a decade of addiction, panhandling, and scavenging had caught up with Odette as the weather skidded toward winter. She had died in her sleep on this mattress, the home she shared with Joan.
Reese had arranged for a proper funeral in a church with a minister as Joan requested. And the burial was proper too, not in the potters’ field plot on Hart Island that Odette had dreaded.
But the weekly visits he made in the immediate aftermath of that loss had dwindled to infrequent stops by Thanksgiving. Work exploded, the numbers kept coming. Time just got away from him.
These feeble excuses didn’t cut it, he knew. He should have made a greater effort to see Joan; he should have kept up the contact in her time of crisis.
This debt he owed Joan was immeasurable, the payment too small to register.
“I know you do, Joan. I’m sorry Odette’s gone.”
“She was a special girl, you know. She didn’t always make sense to everybody else. They thought she sounded funny and looked funny. But she always made sense to me.”
The old woman sobbed and Reese felt humbled at the immensity of her suffering. He wanted to attribute the trembling that seized his hands then to the cold. But he knew it wasn’t that at all.
“Joan, you need to come with me. I need to get you out of here right away.”
“Why?” She seemed genuinely puzzled. “Where would I go?”
“I know a place near here. You can be warm and even have a good supper tonight.”
Reese looked toward a herd of boys and girls crouched on their haunches around a fire built in the lid of a garbage pail.
Flames danced orange and yellow before their pinched faces, casting shadows of midnight blue over their slender bodies. Bulging outlines of the satchels on their backs made them look like hunched gargoyles. As he watched, their mouths gaped in pleasure, laughter defeating the cold.
He stood from the mattress and pulled on Joan’s icy hand.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Author: blacktop
Characters: John Reese, Harold Finch, Joss Carter, Original Character
Rated: M
Warnings: Brief violence, sex, nostalgia
Word count: 18,000
Summary: Reese grapples with bouts of chagrin as he tries to save a buoyant girl from the snare of international crime. Finch and Carter help even as they complicate the case. This story is posted in nine parts.
Prologue
With his index finger Reese traced the journey of a drop of perspiration down the golden channel of Joss’s back.
It skittered down the incline toward her nape, then paused, then disappeared into a little shimmering pool in the indentation between her shoulders. He stroked a palm over her ass, cupping its perfect roundness, sliding a hand under to clasp her trembling stomach. He drew her to him for a final embrace. He knew he had to retreat now that the storm had subsided.
But the regret that seized him as he pulled from her body threatened to overwhelm him. Her inner muscles contracted around him, as if anticipating a deficit he yearned to make whole again. He slid forward one last time, the sweetness of the act haunting him even before it was over.
Leaving seemed such a cruel punishment, as if the sharp pleasure of the previous minute had to be paid for with this wrenching chagrin. He wanted to return, to be inside her again.
He longed to be complete in her once more.
Nostalgia in a CIA operative was a dangerous sentiment. Reese knew for a fact that seasoned agents had died when they let vague and bittersweet emotions replace hard calculation. Keeping your head in the here and now was essential to accomplishing your assignment, to staying alive.
Pining was for fools.
But now as he settled behind her, kissing her nape and neck and shoulder blades while she murmured his name, the wistful waves rolled through him unchecked. This felt like a kind of homesickness, joy and sadness mixing together in equal measure.
His heart was filled with longing for something unattainable, a desire for a past they had never enjoyed, for an undefined future clouded by doubt.
As he pulled up the sheets over their bodies, she pressed her shoulder back into his chest as if rooting for home. She nestled her ass against his stomach, burrowing to ward off the morning chill.
The day’s first light sifted a powdery blue frosting over their bed. Spring was promised, but held back, uncertain of how to proceed in mercurial March.
This awareness of how easily all things passed wasn’t new to him. He had seen enough of death and hopelessness to understand what transience truly meant. But the force of the feeling surprised him nonetheless, another unexpected product of this, this whatever it was with Joss.
When she turned to him, laying a kiss against the notch of his collarbone, he felt his throat tighten. He knew he couldn’t speak, couldn’t explain how much her patience and love meant to him.
She reached up to wipe the corner of his eye and he realized he must have been crying, just a bit.
As she always did, she asked about the future: “Will I see you tonight?”
“I don’t know.” His reply was always the same.
But this time he amended it with an explanation: “I have a date with an angel tonight.”
Of course she got his blue mood and his meaning. As always he counted on her to know exactly where he was heading and to whom. Her smile seemed forced at first, but then it burst into a gift.
“So you’re going to see Joan again? That’s good. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Give her a hug from me too.”
+++++++++
Chapter One
When Reese and Joss arrived together at the library a few hours after, Finch diplomatically neglected to mention the lateness of the hour.
Joss was working a late shift that began at two in the afternoon and it was still before ten, so Reese didn’t think there was anything they needed to apologize for.
And they each carried a baby blue carton of crullers, brought to ward off complaints from sweet-tooth Shaw.
“Any new numbers, Finch?”
Reese knew he sounded gruff, but he wanted to underline the transition from personal to work time with his tone.
He looked at Joss over his cup of coffee.
She was dressed in her detective mufti: dark slacks, a navy blazer, and a form fitting white sweater whose v-neckline was cut much too low. He didn’t want anyone except him enjoying the high contrast between the sweater and the burnished brown skin of her breasts.
In the morning rush, she had pinned her hair into a casual bun at the back of her head. The severe side part which mimicked his own continued to amuse him, as if she were unconsciously copying his look. At least she didn’t have to contend with his damned cowlick.
Seeing her in the library like this, watching her absorb its hushed atmosphere, feeling her sharp instincts and analytic mind at work in his operations headquarters, was a new experience for him.
This way of sharing his job with her was untested, a different angle on their collaboration. He thought it took some of the control from him and gave her greater leverage in their professional and personal partnership.
But to his surprise, he found that this innovation quietly thrilled him. He knew it wasn’t his choice to make, but her presence here gave him a strong rush of pleasure all the same.
Finch, of course, seemed completely unfazed by the change. As if he had always imagined Joss in this space, sidestepping the dog bed at his feet, leaning over his shoulder, peering into the black depths of the computer screen.
“Two, in fact, Mr. Reese.”
Finch seemed pleased by this for some reason, as if more work led to increased satisfaction. Rather than the greater unease which Reese felt.
“Due to the promptness of her arrival, I asked Ms. Shaw to look into the first matter.”
Finch let that tiny jab hang in the air for a moment before offering a correction.
“Or rather, she assigned herself to the number when she saw the avid way Ms. Groves grabbed the photo I taped to the evidence wall. The two of them departed ninety minutes ago.”
Reese refused to rise to the mild challenge. He was curious about the case, of course, but not enough to ask for details. And the less he saw or heard of that depraved maniac Root the better.
“And the second number?”
Finch nodded toward the printer and let Joss pull out the photograph and tape it to the glass board.
The image was of a woman, perhaps still a teenager, with a shock of bright blonde hair slanting over her round face. The portrait must have been taken for a high school year book. In her little pearls and black high-collar dress, Reese thought she looked healthy, maybe even happy, though she wasn’t smiling.
The space between her eyes was broad, her smooth cheeks plump with youth, and her nose turned up like that of a fairy tale princess or a girly Mickey Mantle. He didn’t think she was a true beauty -- too conventional looking for that, even though her mouth was unusually wide. But perhaps the energy of the living person, dampened in this still photo, would change his mind once he met her.
“Her name is Danica Hofer. Born in Spring Green, Wisconsin to a couple who run a general store serving that farming community. She is nineteen years old.”
“That’s all we know about her, Harold?” Joss sounded disappointed.
“She’s an only child. No record of her parents’ deaths. Danica graduated from high school two years ago and finished a semester at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.”
Joss leaned closer to read the transcripts.
“It looks like she took Freshman English composition, computer science, U.S. history, and Victorian literature in the fall semester. Good grades. Registered for accounting, second semester English comp, general biology, and another lit course in the spring. But then she got all W’s. She must have withdrawn before the final grades came in.”
Reese offered an hypothesis, one he only half believed but which he hoped would ruffle the nerves of his friends.
“If she’s in trouble she didn’t get into it in a backwater like Spring Green, Wisconsin. She met some boy during college orientation, experimented with prescription drugs, then heroin, and ran away to New York. Now she’s working as a waitress in a blues dive and screwing the bass player.”
Joss and Finch turned to him with looks of amazement on their faces.
“What? You think she’s living like a nun?”
“No, Mr. Reese, I hardly expect that. Still, I find your speculation quite astounding. And utterly morbid.”
Finch was huffing and puffing at a good clip now.
“But if we follow your scenario, what’s the source of the threat to Ms. Hofer?”
“I figure the bass player isn’t exactly at liberty, you know. His other girlfriend took exception to the corn-fed Miss Wisconsin and now she’s in danger of getting murdered by jealous groupie number one.”
He raised his eyebrows to make his eyes go round and smiled brightly at Joss until she laughed.
“Alrighty, then. We won’t toss your idea just yet, wise guy. But how ‘bout we get a little more info on Danica before I break my legs jumping to conclusions.”
But the next hour’s research yielded little of value about Danica Hofer.
They couldn’t find a current street address anywhere in the country, no electronic footprint except for her Facebook page which hadn’t been updated in eighteen months. The cell phone Danica used in college was dormant.
A call to Fusco came up empty when he found nothing in police files on the girl. If she was in New York, she was keeping her nose clean or staying on the down low. He promised to speak with pals in the Milwaukee police department and to reach out to the sheriff’s office of Sauk County in hopes of learning more about Danica’s childhood in the village of Spring Green.
By the time Joss left for the precinct to start her shift, Finch was pinch-faced with silent anxiety. Reese was sullen and so restless his edginess caused Bear to whine in empathy.
Without a person to track or a solid lead to pursue or a mental challenge to unravel, Reese felt useless.
He wondered, not for the first time, why the machine gave them a number but failed to follow up with any other pertinent information. This bare knowledge of eminent danger was pointless if they remained trapped in a fog of ignorance. It was as though the machine wanted to drive them mad by luring them with hope, before dashing their spirits against blank cliffs of inaction and frustration.
Harold and Joss were always brimming with confidence in the prowess of the machine. But he found it increasingly hard to join in their optimism.
Wound tight and getting tighter by the minute, Reese longed for three rounds with a punching bag or an overweight sparring partner at Neely’s Gym. But Bear looked at him with such forlorn eyes that he couldn’t leave him behind to sulk and annoy Finch.
So man and dog plunged into the frigid afternoon for an exhausting walk that lasted until the dinner hour.
+++++++++
“Cold hands, John. Too cold.”
Reese looked down at the tiny woman beside him and squeezed her bare hands in his. The blue veins under his thumbs shifted and bulged as he stroked them.
Joan -- his guardian, his confidante, his savior -- was shivering inside the black overcoat that enveloped her like a wool tent.
Though the navy blue watch cap was pulled low on her forehead, stringy hair stuck out on either side of her thin face. The skin of her cheeks was slack and flaking, but two points of bright red flashed like warning beacons above the concaves there.
Her restless eyes, blue like faded jeans, darted from his face to a corner on the other side of the vast warehouse which was her home.
“Your hands’re too cold, John. Where you been keeping yourself?”
The brilliant grin with which she had greeted him a minute earlier dissolved into a watery grimace.
Joan was worried about him, as always.
Reese moved closer to her on the mattress, their identical coats rubbing shoulders as he leaned in.
Unglazed windows that gaped along the walls of the building ensured that winter gusts and even snow drifts regularly invaded the homeless encampment. The soaring arched ceiling recalled a cathedral, echoing the little voices piping below it. But the floor was wood instead of marble and in places desperate people had ripped up the planks for kindling.
Clusters of men bent over oil drums which they had converted into fire pits as pitiful protection against the bitterness of the March night. Long coats billowed around their knees as the wind jutted through the expanse and turbans of tattered scarves swathed their heads.
At first Reese thought he might recognize a face or two in the huddled crowd, but dirt and frostbite and despair blurred their features so he gave up the effort.
Three years had passed since he had lived with them, been one of them. Three years since Joan -- using every bit of her confused mind and generous heart --- had worked through the cold and darkness to keep him going when he had no desire to move one step further.
“I’m fine, Joan.” He rubbed her knuckles until a blush of false warmth rose over her protruding bones.
The old woman peered into his face, her nose only a few inches from his. He saw a tear leak from the outer corner of her right eye, carving a trail through the grime until it dripped off her jaw and down the breast of her coat.
“Maybe. But I say you look too thin. And too cold. Both.”
He supposed he was thinner than when he had last visited Joan here.
Three months was an eternity in her life. And in his too, as it turned out. Joss had nearly died three months ago; he had almost died. Their world, already unpredictable and violent, had flipped upside down.
As if reading his mind or maybe just his face, Joan blurted out:
“You still seeing that girl? That What’s-her-name you brought here once? Odette’s boss. You know, golden-skin girl like Odette.”
“Joss. Yes, we’re still together.”
“She your special girl, hunh?”
“Yes, she is.”
A simple admission, one he needed to make to Joss someday, when the time was right.
Joan sighed and leaned forward over her knees so that her face was buried in the folds of the heavy coat.
“I miss my special girl, John. I miss her something awful.” The muffled moans cut him to the heart.
Odette, Joan’s companion in their erratic adventure of survival and love, had died the previous October.
Even after finding purposeful work as one of Joss’s confidential informants, a decade of addiction, panhandling, and scavenging had caught up with Odette as the weather skidded toward winter. She had died in her sleep on this mattress, the home she shared with Joan.
Reese had arranged for a proper funeral in a church with a minister as Joan requested. And the burial was proper too, not in the potters’ field plot on Hart Island that Odette had dreaded.
But the weekly visits he made in the immediate aftermath of that loss had dwindled to infrequent stops by Thanksgiving. Work exploded, the numbers kept coming. Time just got away from him.
These feeble excuses didn’t cut it, he knew. He should have made a greater effort to see Joan; he should have kept up the contact in her time of crisis.
This debt he owed Joan was immeasurable, the payment too small to register.
“I know you do, Joan. I’m sorry Odette’s gone.”
“She was a special girl, you know. She didn’t always make sense to everybody else. They thought she sounded funny and looked funny. But she always made sense to me.”
The old woman sobbed and Reese felt humbled at the immensity of her suffering. He wanted to attribute the trembling that seized his hands then to the cold. But he knew it wasn’t that at all.
“Joan, you need to come with me. I need to get you out of here right away.”
“Why?” She seemed genuinely puzzled. “Where would I go?”
“I know a place near here. You can be warm and even have a good supper tonight.”
Reese looked toward a herd of boys and girls crouched on their haunches around a fire built in the lid of a garbage pail.
Flames danced orange and yellow before their pinched faces, casting shadows of midnight blue over their slender bodies. Bulging outlines of the satchels on their backs made them look like hunched gargoyles. As he watched, their mouths gaped in pleasure, laughter defeating the cold.
He stood from the mattress and pulled on Joan’s icy hand.
“Let’s get out of here.”