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The stretch of land between Naples and Miami is just an endless road with swamp left and right and looks, according to Rust who never went native, like half the places in Louisiana he has ever been to, minus the shitty motels and trailer parks. Marty is still contemplating whether or not speaking up in favour of his home is worth the breath and spit that goes into forming the words he might just as well yell into the vacuum of space when Rust starts wondering why people end up where they do, in general.
There are no signs of civilisation anywhere to be seen so Marty suspects his partner is still thinking about Louisiana, or drifted off to some metaphysical city populated by walking, talking metaphysical concepts, or just sort of talking to himself. “I don't know, man,” he replies anyway, against his better judgement. “Life, I guess.”
“Life,” Rust repeats – maybe scornful, maybe wistful, fuck if Marty can read that man's voice when it gives away anything other than deadpan resentment. “Life. Life, yeah. Life...” He keeps saying the word, over and over until he trails off, like if he said it often enough, it would mean something.
-
“Pull over,” is the first thing Rust says after they get to Florida. Literally the first thing, as he hasn't so much as breathed a word since their layover in Atlanta, where he used four or five to give a certainly abridged version of his opinion on Airport security. Marty had been worried about the flight, about the Master of Antisocial Behaviour in a metal can full of people, but Rust had been silent. Tense, edgy, staring out of the windows at the clouds that hid the world from his disapproving view. Marty had tried to tease him about fright of flight, and Rust had ignored him and spread out his folder on the small plastic table before him, the one that contained all they had collected on their case.
(Since they started working together again, Marty had barely ever seen him without the thing, alternating with his trademark black ledger, full of drawings and lines. Jotting down case notes like a lifeline, like those little camps explorers set up in the Arctic as oasises of supplies to keep them going on their way home. That image stuck with Marty for some reason but he never shared it with Rust because he's watched a lot of documentaries since his marriage failed, and he doesn't want to give Rust a chance to point out that Scott died anyway.)
There is enough tension in his voice now that Marty pulls over immediately, without questions. The moment the car stops Rust is out of the seat and out of the door, and then he spends ten minutes retching by the side of the road, in the flooding and ebbing lights of other cars that pass without giving a fuck. Or five minutes. Maybe three – long enough, in any case, for Marty to come over and hover awkwardly. They're just outside of Orlando, too late at fucking night to get anywhere with their case but to a motel room, and Marty should have known better than to put someone who had most of his internal organs cut in half not six months ago and also happens to be allergic to people through the fun park that is economy class.
It makes him feel weird; vaguely guilty, vaguely concerned in a way that makes him feel uncomfortable and edgy because his mind shies away from it out of habit. (A habit born from those long rides in a half-empty car when he had all that room for silent reflection and the passenger seat had nothing to say to him; born, like so many parts of this new, grown-up him from the moments when he wondered against his will how Rust was doing, if he was doing at all, if he ever dared to be something like friends with people again after Marty and Maggie entered his life and turned him into collateral damage in their attempt to tear each other apart. When he held on to his anger and resentment but wondered, all the same, if he carried some blame here that went beyond cheating on his wife – that came down to, perhaps, the fact that he'd been so caught up in his affair and the unravelling of his family that he'd failed to see some signs, that maybe Rust wouldn't have been so obsessed with that case if he hadn't been so alone, if Marty had bothered to support him in any way. When he wondered if any action on his part might have turned Rust into someone who would have turned Maggie down, for Marty's sake, even drunk and starved for human contact as he must have been. He'd been betrayed by both of them but maybe he had betrayed both of them, too. And he wondered if that made it partially his fault; something he always answered in the negative as he forced his thoughts away, turned on the radio, hummed along to songs that hadn't even existed when Rust had given him that speech about libido and how sexual identity way a social construct on one of their final car rides together.
A habit born from those uncomfortable moments when he hated Maggie a little more than he hated Rust and himself a little more than both of them, and he knew Maggie to be dating and taking care of their girls and surrounded by friends who supported her opinion on how Marty was a bastard, and Rust was just gone, gone, probably forever so Marty would never know if he was drunk in a ditch somewhere, or had found a way to get to that place he always dreamt off, the one where his daughter was, or had found new friends who managed to love him and took care of him and didn't know which possibility he hated most.)
“Want me to hold your hair?” he asks, finally, after a minute or five, when the retching doesn't seem to stop. Rust, not looking up, flips him the bird and thus answers all the questions Marty can't bring himself to ask.
-
Marty never has to hold Rust's hair for him because the moment they turn in at a motel that night, Rust locks himself in the bathroom and hacks off his ponytail, leaving the rest of his hair sticking this way and that in uneven strands. Marty doesn't know if this is an acknowledgement that there may be more puking in the future, which worries him a little, or a Fuck you to a world that expects a man to have a proper haircut, which doesn't. He does make his obligatory snide remarks about how he refuses to be seen in public with a guy who looks like he fell into a lawn mower, and Rust replies that lawn mowers seem to generally be a sensitive topic for Marty and for a while they fill the room with icy glares breaking against a wall of carefully constructed indifference.
The next morning, before checking out the address in Tampa, Marty stops the car in front of a hair salon and he and Rust silently stare at each other until Rust wordlessly gets out and gets that mess on his head straightened out. When he comes out he looks so much like the man Marty has met in '94 that it hits him like a hammer, somehow, that this is indeed the same guy, not just some freaky replica the universe has conjured up to screw with him.
Rust had gotten that terrible moustache shaved off just a few weeks after Marty busted him out of the hospital, the moment he was able to drive a car again. Shaved a decade off the guy's face along with it, leaving only the parts that were already a thousand years old when they met.
He'd needed the car because he'd gone to a barber instead of doing it himself. Who even did that anymore? Marty had wondered, and then he had found out that the barber in question had been an ex-drug dealer and ex-con who had been busted some twenty years ago by none other than Rustin Fucking Cohle, fat surprise there. Marty imagined Rust leaning back in that chair, feeling the guy's blade on his skin and waiting for the swipe that cut his throat, like a fucked up game of Russian roulette. They never talked about it, though, so he didn't know if that was actually true. (It probably was.)
They never talked about it because Marty hadn't yet found a good way to express how tired he was of this passive-agressive suicide business his dear partner had going on there.
-
Hart Investigative Solutions (Rust's name still doesn't show up in the name no matter how often Marty offers) usually only takes cases in Louisiana, preferably within a hundred mile radius of the office. They probably wouldn't have taken this one if they had known it would take them to Florida, and 'they' were Marty, of course, as Rust doesn't seem to care one way or another. Then again, there was a missing child involved, and neither of them have changed enough in the last seventeen years to let that go without a fight. In fact, Marty is absolutely certain they will be stuck in Florida forever if they don't find the girl, or at least find out beyond the shadow of a doubt what became of her.
Louise St.Croix, now thirteen years old. Disappeared at the age of five with her mother Helena but was never reported missing as for all everyone knew, they simply moved to another state. Only Helena's mother wondered: the move was so sudden, and while Helena wrote letters every now and again, explaining that she had to get out of a bad relationship and wanted to put distance between them and her ex, and that she was trying to cut ties to her family blaming her parents for various hardships growing up, something never sat quite right with her mom.
“I was hurt,” she explained, sitting on that hard chair in Marty's office, small and frail and with a bend to her neck and back Marty recognized from years of taking confessions and witnesses' statements as guilt. “About the things she wrote. We did not deserve that, my husband and I. I did not deserve that. I know they had trouble sometimes. Which fathers and daughters do not? Do you have daughters? You know how it is. But I was always on her side, I never let it get bad. I did not deserve those words.”
Marty did his best not to shift in his chair. Behind him, standing in the corner with his ledger and his thousand yard stare, Rust pretended to be wallpaper. Wallpaper that judged, and saw every crack in the facade. “So you were angry, and didn't question her disappearance,” Marty said.
“At first. But I needed closure. I wrote back. And when she didn't reply, I wrote again, and again. She had given no phone number and she was not in the phone book, so I meant to visit, but my husband said we didn't have the money for the trip, and she might not even let us in. And then she wrote again. Different address, said she had to move again. Said she forgave me, but wouldn't come back. I kept writing and writing. Asked for photos of Louise, growing up, but it would take months for her to reply, one time it was a year, and she never really replied to anything I'd written, like she hadn't even read it. Never send me pictures. Never gave a phone number, and the address was always different. Moved all across Florida. It was strange. All her life, she's talked about going North, you know. And we got along well, we did. She always let me come over and play with Louise when she was a toddler, and now she said she didn't want me – us around her child every again. My husband told me to let it go. Told me she'd called him at work, told him to tell me to leave her alone. We fought a lot about it, you know. But she's my little girl, and her baby... How could I let them go?”
“But you did, didn't you?” Rust asked, all merciless observation. Mrs. St.Croix stared, shocked and pale, until Marty asked what made her finally act on her suspicion that something wasn't right.
Her husband died, she said. Some six months ago. She wrote to her daughter about it, several times, and there was no reply, ever. And she couldn't stop thinking about all the things that didn't add up, and now her husband wasn't around anymore to deter her thoughts and keep her from questioning everything.
She handed them a folder, the same folder Rust would take to Florida later, with all the letters her daughter sent over the years, the last one in August 2011. It was a sad handful, and Marty was about to ask for an older document, something Helena wrote before her disappearance to compare the handwriting when Rust informed their client matter-of-factly that her daughter didn't write these letters. “You can tell from the strokes, how insecure they are. This was someone faking her handwriting, and not very expertly so. Not a professional, so probably someone who had something to do with her disappearance.” He pointed out the parts where the handwriting slipped completely into something else. Mrs. St.Croix buried her face in her hands and asked, “What does that mean? What does that mean?” over and over again, and amazingly, not even Rust was heartless enough tell her point-black that her daughter was probably dead.
There were photos in that folder, too, of Helena in 2003, but it was the one of Louise in front of a Christmas tree that drew Marty's eyes. She was much younger, her hair curled and her skin a different shade, but for Marty she looked just like Mary Fontenot, the little girl who disappeared and no one cared. He thought about the horrible video Rust forced him to watch and the decomposed bodies in Carcosa and the words “made in error” plastered over too many reports. And he found all little girls who weren't search for looked like Mary to Rust, too, or maybe everyone who didn't search for them looked like an asshole. Found that Rust still did not know when his judgemental bullshit, justified as it may have been, was uncalled for. Mrs. St.Croix left in tears, and they took the case.
-
The search began in Lousiana, checking out Helena's father because everything about his involvement stank. But he hadn't written those letters, so they had no other choice but to look for his partner – if that was the right word – in Florida. Which led to economy class, puking, and a hair cut, and finally to Helena and Louise's last known address in Tampa, near the Busch Gardens roller coaster park. The little house they find is inhabited by an an older couple that moved in only last fall, and as far as they know the place has been empty for at least two years before that. None of the neighbours can remember anyone fitting the description of Helena or her girl. It's not a surprise. It's a start.
They check out the address before that, which takes them back to Orlando. Uninhabited when the two were supposed to live there. Next is Fort Myers. One bad neighbourhood after the other. All places empty at the time in question, so whoever came up with the addresses must have known which of them were free to use at the given time.
They get hold of a real estate agent and ask about mail found in the letter box of one apartment, one that needs to be opened with a key, and they learn that when they set the place up for the new owners the box was full of mail from Louisiana. So whoever worked with Helena's piece-of-shit old man on this one knew the places but had no access to them.
Eventually, their search leads them to one Ronald Barnes who moved to Arcadia just when Helena St.Croix supposedly did so, too, her first stop after leaving her home in Lafayette. Barnes lived one street over. Originally from Lafayette, too, worked at the same place as Helena. Had a cousin in Orlando, near the address on Helena's letters, a sister in Fort Myers who delivered mail. Moved to Tampa a few years ago.
So back to Tampa they go, only to find he's relocated to Key West in April. So that's two days wasted zigzagging through Florida and another to go down the Keys because Marty is not putting Rust in an airplane again. Well, maybe later. When they go back home. It depends on several factors, only one of them being how much ill Marty happens to wish on his friend at that point.
Another night in a motel, which Marty hates because it always reminds him of the first weeks after the divorce, or of Maggie and Rust, and Rust is right there with him staring at the walls or going out for a smoke and Marty doesn't even fucking mind, expect that paying for a room with two beds is a goddamn waste of money if one of them doesn't fucking sleep. Marty knows sleep will come to Rust eventually, but only after their work is done and possibly supported by a lot of booze, possibly other things. Marty resents that, but it's a habit Rust cultivated since before they met and he's come not to expect to have any impact on how this man treats his own body. He even gets it; that this is not something Rust could just drop if he wanted to. He hates it all that same, because Rust tends to fall before he crashes, and ever since they are sharing a house, Marty gets to see it happen. It's... unfortunate. It makes Rust look fragile.
How bad it will be also depends on factors. Things. It's Christmas time, which Marty used to dislike for a good few years and Rust resents with a passion that has nothing to do with commercialism or religion. When they were still together, Maggie used to try to draw Rust into the celebrations with them, much to Marty's initial horror. It never worked, which Marty, selfishly, used to be glad about. Christmas with his family belonged to him, then, and to Rust belonged the office, cold cases, or booze, if not all at once. Marty was possibly a bit of a bastard.
He gets it now. Ironically, he doesn't think spending Christmas with Marty's family, seeing them carefree and happy together celebrating their love, would have made Rust feel any better back then. He remembers his own first Christmas without his family, before the girls started calling, and met with him for dinner on Christmas Eve. It had been so bad he'd wanted to die, or forget at least that he was alive. He got hammered, wallowed in his loneliness, in self-pity, in resentment for Rust for taking them from him, before the kind of self-awareness that would make him hate himself kicked him in the ass. He felt like his life was over, and all the time the people he loved were just on the other side of town, happy, celebrating. Without him, but within reach. He could drive by the house and check that they were still there, and once or twice he did. It didn't make him feel better, exactly, but there was a certain peace in it. A whisper of chance, of things getting better, bridges being rebuild, because they weren't lost to him, not forever, not in that one way he really wouldn't have been able to bear. He sat outside in the car, drank from a flask and left before he could be spotted, and all the time he was thinking of Rust.
It depends on the outcome of this case, too, and already Marty can see it's going to be ugly. They both know it. They knew from the moment Helena's mother told them her story.
And apparently it depends on random shit as well, like the colour of a car and what kind of smell it has lingering in Rust's brain, or whatever. They go down the road to Miami and Rust muses about life for a while as if tasting the word in his mouth, and then he falls silent so long Marty hopes he's fallen asleep, but he's not; he's staring at some lime-green Honda that's been just ahead of them for ten minutes, and when Marty looks at him again a while later his eyes are closed, but in a barely-holding-himslef-together way, not in sleep. And then Marty glances again and he's back to staring at the car with an expression Marty has learned like warning label on food. May contain nuts. Might kill you if you are prone to dying.
He doesn't even know if it's the car or if Rust is seeing things or if one of his sensory oddities was triggered by something seen by the side of the road or the colour of the sky. The car, though, it's an older model, something popular around the time Audrey was born. And it's got a dent in the back, something old and rusted over, never dealt with or fixed. And Marty doesn't even have to wonder, doesn't even have to ask, because it seems that everything in Rustin Cohle's life eventually comes down, after a long line of triggers and associations, to a dead child at the end of a driveway and Marty may have many shortcomings, but he'll never tell his friend to finally let it go.
Whatever trance Rust is in, he snaps out of it when Marty pulls the car over and stops. The look on his face is just careful puzzlement. “I don't need to puke,” he says.
“Maybe not. Way you look, I'm not gonna take any chances.” And then, after a moment of consideration during which the lime-green Honda kindly fades from view, Marty adds, “God, Rust, we've been following that car for ages. Would it have killed you to say something?”
“I don't know, maybe.” Rust doesn't even seem surprised that Marty figured him out, which Marty files away for later observation. He seems tired, though. Kind of old. Weighed down. Marty read the words somewhere, in a novel or so, about someone wearing their grief like a coat. Rust is wearing his like an anvil tied to his feet, and it looks like he really likes the ocean.
“It even had dents from an accident, man. Come on.” There's no point in not mentioning it, really, since it's already on Rust's mind anyway.
“Car mostly hit her, not so much the tricycle,” Rust says quietly, after a moment. “You know how much of a dent a two-years-old leaves on a car that doesn't go fast?”
Marty does know: Almost none.
-
Their rental is a grey Fort, three years old at best. Marty had taken the first car he was offered because he didn't think they'd do quiet this much driving in it and because he'd been vaguely worried Rust would faint in the parking lot from the after-effects of too much airway travel. It doesn't really matter, as he has managed to not take a model Rust associated with anything bad, like dead children or four fucked up years of undercover, or anything from that great black hole that is Alaska, so what if it's not quite up to the standard of Marty's own car? It's still better than Rust's old red truck that he never traded in, with the busted tail light that he's never fixed but keeps parading around like a trophy, or as a memorial to gravity and momentum and the sound Marty made when he broke.
-
They cross the Seven Mile Bridge just before sunset and Marty is eager to get to their destination before the sun is so low it'll just say Fuck you to the shades and shine right into his eyes anyway. Rust, sensibly, doesn't stare at the sun, but at the remnants of the old bridge to their right, which looks intact enough at a fleeting glance but is actually slowly crumbling into the ocean.
“That was build to last,” Rust muses, back to his old lazy drawl. “Once it was the only way to Key West. Now look at it. Left to rot because tearing it down would cost too much money. Easier to just leave it alone to go at its own pace.”
“Don't tell me you don't like that,” Marty says, and it sounds accusatory. Rust just shrugs.
“Sure I do. There is a certain beauty in decay. I guess it reminds us that everything is final, and that everything is replaced by something else. Like nature.”
“How would that be considered beautiful? Nothing lasts forever; who but you finds that okay? Most of us want things to last, you know.”
“It's a constant, and people crave continuity. And belonging. Everything fades, but everything goes on.”
“Like your flat circle?”
“Like the stars burning out. You die, your atoms become part of something else. Eventually this planet burns up as the sun expands and dies and the atoms become part of another star. Maybe another planet, different life. Over and over again.”
“What's that, paradise for the atheist?”
“Sure, why not? I don't know about Heaven or Hell. All bullshit if you ask me: Follow the rules and you'll be rewarded, break them and you'll be punished forever. Fucking nonsense. The rules keep changing; you think God just keeps rewriting the rulebook? No. Heaven and Hell, or any kind of afterlife, they are human inventions, and religion is a tool that is used or abused however people see fit. But molecules, they are a fact. We started out as stars, and that's where we will return in the end. I, for my part, find comfort in that.,” Then, after a heartbeat: “Not that it matters, as molecules don't usually care what they are or were. And we, we're just gone.”
“Ah, Rust.” Mart sighs. “It was going so well there.”
“One day the universe will run out of hydrogen,” Rust continues. He turns his head to keep his eyes on a lone tree growing on the decaying bridge as they pass it. “No new stars are born. The existing ones die. One after the other. The big, bright suns go first, then the small, cool, slow burning ones. All the molecules just drift through the vacuum without becoming anything, and the cosmos turns dark again, and cold.”
“Let me guess: You find that comforting, too.”
“I don't see why I should care. As I said, we'll be gone by then. Just gone. Anything that happens afterwards doesn't matter. Not even what happens now matters in a grand cosmic sense. There's no reward for being a good person, no punishment for being a bad one. You just stop being either way. And everything you build fades. Like that bridge.” He gestures out of the window as Marty squints against the setting sun. “Everything we create needs constant maintenance, or it'll disappear. We're gone, there's no one to take care of it. There's no such thing as a fucking legacy, it's all just a lie we tell ourselves to get through the day.”
“Our programming?” Marty guesses.
“You actually listened. Who'd have thought.”
“I was trying not to, but your voice just eats into my brain like acid. Why do you think I keep asking you to shut up?” And what else would he expect from a guy named after corrosion? Your mother must have known you were a freak the moment you were born, Marty thinks, but he's reached the point of his adulthood where he knows better than to actually say it.
Beside him, Rust opens the window a crack and lights a cigarette. “It is what it is,” he drawls, unconcerned. And then, because he has a reputation to uphold and is maintaining it pretty damn well, he adds, “Everyone dies alone.”
“God damn it, Rust!” The sun is giving Marty a headache now and it's almost Christmas and why is this his life? “This kind of talk is exactly the reason why I didn't miss you these past ten years.”
“Yeah? And here I thought it was the fact that I fucked your wife.”
Marty closes his eyes, counts to ten. It's something he's had to learn. Maybe he should have learned it a lot earlier.
He's not even mad at Rust, he's just frustrated, because the man just has to stomp every good moment into the dirt. Going down the bridge to Key West in a quiet, peaceful car ride, philosophizing about the death of the universe and the futility of existence like two happy old chaps, smoking a cigarette and watching the sun set. Awesome moment. Let me bring up the moment I fucked your wife and we almost killed each other in a parking lot and I quit my job and left you walking around for a decade feeling like someone tore out your limp.
“You know, I just never know if you do this because you hate me, or yourself, or both of us,” Marty rants. “You stay at my place, you work with me, eat and drink with me, and then you bring this up. You just can't forget this kind of thing, can you? Let it go?”
“No. There is no such thing as 'letting go'. I just can't pretend it didn't happen. Like it's not something that stands between us.”
“That's crap, and you know it. It stands between us, because you insist that it has to. You can't let it go. You're the one who has to cling to every issue, to every bad fucking day of your life. I forgave you. I let it go.”
“Yeah? That's mighty big of you.”
“Do you have to sound so fucking condescending? Yeah, I spend a lot of time being mad at you. I was fucking entitled to be mad at you.”
“You were,” Rust easily agrees. “I did sleep with your wife. I mean, she did that because you cheated on her, and lied to her, and humiliated her over and over again, which forced me to lie to her as well and pretend I didn't know shit out of loyalty to you, which put me in a bad place, by the way – not that the thought ever crossed your mind but at that point I considered Maggie a friend, too. So you don't actually have anything resembling a moral high ground, but that still doesn't justify what I did. May excuse her for wanting to hurt you, but not me. So yeah, you were entitled. Doesn't make you any less of a dick.”
“The fuck it excuses her,” Marty snaps. There are some things he's never said out loud, never really finished his thoughts when they wandered there, but maybe this is the time or it will be standing between them forever. Rust's fucking guilt complex won't let it go. “She had any right to get back at me, I'll give her that, but not to use you. Friends don't do that. To come at you like that, when you were drunk-”
“I knew what I was doing.”
“Did you? Would you have done it if you'd been sober? Had not been awake for a week?” He can picture the scene from what little Maggie told him, years later. Rust, drunk, sleep-deprived, obsessing over this old case in his room full of crazy shit, surrounded by nothing but murder and despair since he'd been suspended and so fucking starved for intimacy since Laurie had left and he'd patted himself on the shoulder and spun the delusion that it was the best possible outcome for all of them. Because Marty figured Rust out ages ago and knows that for all he rejects people and resents humanity he needs human contact like air. Some contact, carefully measured, with people he cares about and who care about him. He'd seen it when Rust was with Laurie. Thought it was getting laid that transformed his friend into something resembling a person because he only judged people by his own standards then, but now he thinks it might have been the emotional intimacy that he craved and needed. It's an idea that came to Marty after years of meaningless affairs that did nothing to fill that emptiness both Maggie and Rust had left in their wake.
Rust was a hard person to like and almost impossible to be liked by – Marty suspected he hated the part of himself that needed people, just one or two special people, to function, but he did, and for a while the Harts and then Laurie had been those people for him, and Marty, at least, never got that. Maggie probably did, because she always understood things he didn't, but that only makes it worse. That means she knew what she was doing, what she was taking advantage of.
Marty can picture the scene: Rust, drunk sleep-deprived, obsessing over this old case in his room full of crazy shit, surrounded by nothing but murder and despair since he'd been suspended and so fucking starved for any sort of human contact, and then Maggie came in, showed concern, pushed right past all his boundaries and left him utterly defenceless. Marty can picture it and it makes him sick.
“Does it matter?” Rust asks.
'Of course it fucking does,' Marty almost says, but finds he's not quite ready for this conversation after all.
-
“Thing is,” Marty says much later, when they are in a hotel in Key West where everything sucks except the toilet and they can hear the people in the next room having a party while they are both pretending to sleep. “Thing is, I spend a lot of time being angry with you for what you did to me, but I spend more time being angry with Maggie for what she did to you.” And to Marty, but this time he doesn't mean the divorce, taking the girls. He deserved both, though it still hurts. But she took Rust from him, too. Sometimes he thinks that was her true angle. Not hurting him with their affair, all of those fifty seconds that it lasted, but by taking his partner from him and leaving him humiliated and without anyone. He always pushes the thought away, though; Maggie isn't that malicious, that's not why he loved her. But the aftertaste always lingers.
“Takes two,” Rust's voice answers from the darkness, destroying Marty's faint hope that he'd actually been asleep and didn't hear that. “You said it yourself, it couldn't have happened if I didn't want it.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I'm full of bullshit. You trying to tell me all the time we were friends you wanted to bang my wife?”
“What if I did?”
“Well, in that case, thank you for refraining for so long.”
Rust laughs hoarsely. “You're right, you are full of bullshit.”
“So are you. 'T was bad on your part and worse on hers, is all I'm saying.”
“And I'm saying you're just aware that Maggie's gone forever, but me, you have apparently decided to live with. And that's hard as long as you hate me, so you're twisting shit so that you can justify your acceptance of my involvement in your life.”
Marty sighs. He's full of adrenaline just from talking to the guy. His skin itches, his muscles seem to want to go somewhere. He throws off the covers, sits up. Thinks, gets up. Crosses the small gab between his bed and Rust's. Rust doesn't move when Marty climbs in and straddles him, knees on either side of the lean torso, his ass hovering just over Rust's stomach so he doesn't put any strain on the tender scar. Because he's so fucking considerate, he amazes himself. And he's very tense and Rust is very relaxed, offering no resistance when Marty's hands find his wrists and pin them to the mattress. After a second one hand wanders up Rust's arm, to his shoulder, his throat. Lingers there. Rust's pulse, beating underneath Marty's palm, is very calm.
“You're an ass,” Marty finally says. “An ass incapable of letting shit go and forgiving himself.”
“That's because I don't deserve forgiveness.” Marty can feel the vibration of Rust's vocal cords under his skin. “Nobody does. To be forgiven you'd have to undo the damage you did and time being perceived as linear that's impossible. It's called accountability.”
“No, it's called being a piece of shit who makes things unnecessarily hard for everyone. I'm done with this. I'm over it and I want you to be over it, too. If we agree that I am the injured party here and you wronged me, you can damn well do me this favour and shut up about it. Accept the fact that I don't hate you. Let that be your penance if you need to see it that way.” He rolls off, goes back to his own bed, wills his heart to calm down. Wonders what the fuck that was. “Now go to sleep, god damn it. We'll find this guy tomorrow, and he quite possibly murdered two people. I don't want to deal with him backed up by a guy two weeks from his last hour nap.”
Rust doesn't reply. Is silent for so long Marty hopes he's actually fallen asleep, or is at least drifting, which could be silent agreement or eye-rolling dismissal of his existence. He's just about to drift off himself what feels like an hour later when a rough voice cuts through the dark.
“We should go see Hemingway's house,” it says. “Steal one of the cats.”
Marty thinks about it. He's tired. He's frustrated. He's full of words. “Why the fuck not?” he mumbles into the dark.
-
Ronald Barnes came to some money, by the look of it. His neighbourhood improved significantly. His new apartment is close to Duval Street, over a bar. Big. He seems to be living there all alone. Marty had hoped he would be living there with a thirteen year old girl. That would have meant she was still alive.
They get in with some bullshit story about how they're investigating his sudden riches and Barnes lets them in because his riches are absolutely legitimate and he thinks nothing of it. An inheritance of sorts. From one Joseph St.Croix, who owed him money and settled with some assets to be transferred to Barnes after his death. Barnes shows them paperwork and expects them to leave, satisfied. Allows them, even, to record their interview with him, and then promptly forgets about it once they bring up Joseph St.Croix' daughter. He's not smart.
It's like time does go backwards after all. Marty stands in the door, blocking it, and Rust does his thing, as he has so many times before. Confronting Barnes with Helena and Louise, claiming to know what he did and drawing to story from him. Barnes isn't smart. He doesn't want to think of himself as a villain, twisted things in his mind until all he did was justified, and Rust preys on that, confirms his self-image, offers help and absolution in exchange for information Barnes doesn't even know he's giving. It's as effective as ever, and creepy as fuck. Watching Rust in action like this, Marty doesn't know how he can even like the guy.
But Barnes killed a little girl and deserves no sympathy. He deserves to be kicked out of the window, but Marty refrains, barely. It's hard. He does punch him in the face and it doesn't feel like nearly enough.
He had a hand in Joseph's death as well. Marty curses him for that not because the world was better off with Joseph St.Croix in it but because death saved the man from facing justice for his crimes.
“A just punishment for his crimes would have been death,” Rust says later, when they are back in their hotel room passing a whisky bottle back and forth. They started drinking early, are staying another night because their concession to drinking responsibly these days is not drinking and driving. “You saying he got off easy because he died for the wrong reason?”
Marty marvels over that. “Yeah.”
“People crave justice,” Rust muses. “Him getting killed because some asshole wanted his money, that's turning him into a victim and that's something he didn't deserve. Him being found guilty of knocking up his own daughter and then letting himself get blackmailed into helping the guy who killed her and their kid, and then killed for justice, and costing the state a lot on money in the process, that would have ended with him being just as dead.” He takes a swing. “Anyway. He didn't kill anyone. Wouldn't have gotten death. Would have gotten life.” He sneers at that, like it's something funny and disgusting.
“Ironic,” Marty marvels after a while of silent contemplation. He's pretty drunk. “The idea of life being a sentence. Do you get that?”
Rust is still clinging to the bottle. He looks at it as if thinking about draining the rest, then gives it back without doing so. “Yeah.”
“Of course you do.” Of course. Rust may talk about how there is no God and no cosmic judgement but Marty's pretty sure he considers not being dead some kind of punishment he has to resentfully accept. “You know,” he continues, wondering if either of them will remember this conversation in the morning. “Life is actually precious. That's why it's considered a punishment to be sentenced to death. And a tragedy if you die. A general you, I mean. But you, too. I wouldn't like it. Not that you care, I mean, not that you consider the fact that I kind of like the idea of you being alive a reason to stick around, but your life is precious, too, and taking it would be a crime.”
Rust smirks. “Punishable by death?”
“Fuck you. Don't laugh at me. All I'm saying is everybody's got a right to live. Even someone as fucked up as you. You gotta really try to forfeit that right, and you're not even close.”
To his surprise Rust nods. Marty is immediately suspicious.
“Everybody's got a right to their life, yeah,” Rust agrees. “Means everybody's got a right to decide what to do with it. I under no fucking obligation to breathe.”
“So, what? You're gonna off yourself? Because man, I gotta say, you freak me out sometimes.”
“No, I'm gonna wait out the hangover and then I'm gonna steal one of Hemingway's cats.”
“I'm serious.”
“So'm I. And no, I'm not gonna eat my gun, if that's what you mean.”
“Okay, I got that. But are you gonna eat somebody else's gun?”
Rust lights a cigarette. “If it happens, it happens. Might get hit by a car tomorrow. Get hit by a falling brick. That's life, too.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“It's what it is, Marty. Now go to bed. I wanna be out of here before the police figure out who dropped that fucktard and his confession in their lap. Don't wanna deal with that bullshit.”
It would be good promotion for the business, but Marty agrees. He doesn't want to deal with the dead kid anymore, doesn't want to hear the details. He doesn't want any more cases like this. And neither does Rust. It hits too close to home.
Marty has lost his daughters to inattention and divorce, Rust lost his to a lime-green Honda. They are still fathers. When they are back in Louisiana, Marty is going to call Audrey and Macie just to hear their voices. Maybe he'll manage to organize a dinner date. Rust will fall into a lot of bottles, and that's just the way it is. He seems okay now, because he got to talk about life and death, and could rant to Marty about how some bastard killed his girlfriend and her little girl after finding out she's been raped and impregnted by her own dad and justified it with the faith Marty claims keeps people from being worse. So Marty does have a positive a effect on Rust's life after all, by the look of it. Halle-fucking-luja.
He hates cases involving dead children. Everyone does. That's why he quit the force: So he didn't have to deal with shit like this anymore.
“You gonna sleep tonight?” Mart asks.
Rust leans back, takes a long drag from his cigarette. “Might try.”
They both know he won't.
-
The ride back is quiet, for the first few hours. Marty is feeling sick and hungover and Rust is driving, having the tolerance to drink that comes with years of being a functional alcoholic. They drive into the rising sun this time so if the universe were just he would have to squint into the sun as much as Marty did at sunset, but the sky is overcast and the light just pale and perfect for driving. Marty looks at his friend, quietly focused on driving, and it strikes him once again how he seems to exist, as always, just outside of reality. Removed, somehow. Fleeting.
On Key Largo they get gas and change drivers. Marty is feeling far from fine but better, and he prefers it this way: Him driving, Rust in the passenger seat. He tries to strike up a conversation just to keep his partner's thoughts from drifting to dark places. Talks about the weather when he can't think of anything else. Between Miami and Naples it starts to rain, so it seems appropriate. The idea of bad weather is a human concept, Rust tells him, so at least he's talking, and the topic is not so bad. Then, because it's Rust, he talks about how the area is so flat, one day it's all going to be flooded, washed off the planet, and the impact on the planet will be zero. Barely a dent. The world doesn't need them. Humanity could disappear altogether overnight and the world would just keep on turning.
Marty doesn't even mind. He protests to keep the words coming; something to tie Rust to existence. Morbid commentary to replace the silence that filled the passenger seat of Marty's car for a decade.
During his years as a Detective he would, to everyone who'd listen, tell the story of his lover's room mate and her finger up his ass, and how it ruined him. A joke – he didn't even know he'd been ruined for real until Rust came back and filled Marty's car rides with his lonely ranting crusade against the universe again and it felt like something was finally fixed.
Despite everything, despite the case and the ache it left and the fact that being okay is not in Rust's programming, Marty allows himself to be content, for a moment. Rain hitting the windshield. An almost empty road. A job well done. Even the silence, after Rust trails off, is not empty. Without looking, Marty could reach over and touch flesh; breath and heartbeat. If he wanted to.
They make it almost to Naples before he notices the cat in the back seat.
27 December 2014