Chapter Text
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial
Who, squatting on the ground,
Held his heart in his hands
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, my friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.” - Stephen Crane (1895)
Back in those hungrier days, Rust kept time on a choke chain.
Never let it wander too far ahead, and gave it a hard jerk when it lingered back where the real danger was. No amount of training gave him cause to trust it. Even when it meandered at his side, he got antsy. Time could get underfoot, tangle his legs, trip him up.
Best thing to do was fill its belly til it trudged the circular track, fat and placid.
So, as it were, he kept time fed and busy those first few months in Louisiana.
Late 1994, he was still steering into a skid— almost a year removed from those sterile weeks in the hospital and the months he was caged in the Cuckoo’s Nest, but still knee-deep in an abyss of processing time.
Had a feeling somebody with a bone to pick had prolonged the intermission between his clear bill of health and the day they put a gun back in his hand. Probably discerned it was a crueler punishment than locking him in with folk that fingerpainted in their own feces. That somebody was right. They stretched that bureaucratic barrage into a dog’s age, and by the time he got shoehorned into homicide, Rust was tailspinning.
At least in the nuthouse, he had a goal. Had things to learn and perfect— like the appropriate amount of traumatic memory to divulge so the whitecoats had something to chew on. Even discovered the perfect balance of self-aware half-statements before you had to shut your trap and let the quack make inferences you could’ve got from a two-bit palm reader.
The routine went like this: Rust would gaze wistfully out the barred windows at all the harsh beige and prickly brush Lubbock, Texas had to offer. He’d feign reflection, then, casting himself as standard-issue cop accessing emotional intelligence for the first time, he’d improvise lines.
Guess I never thought about it that way. Think that’s because my father did so-and-so, and I never knew my mother, and yap yap yap.
The head-shrink would shake some notes out of a pen and congratulate Rust on his vulnerability. They’d pick it up tomorrow. And the next day after that.
Yeah. Time had him tangled up pretty good in ‘94. He was still limping around by Christmas. But at least he had the leash back in hand. Time was moving again. Rust was chomping at the bit to make a run on it.
Little overtime here, little unpaid vigilance there, little archive raid on the flip side— he was surely doing something he thought was important when she showed up.
He can’t recall exactly what he thought of her. Like a slumlord erasing the most recent tenant, memory paints things over in a shade just off from the last. Eventually, it all looks the same. Rust can only see that wall for what it is now– crisp, clean white. Damn cataracts are coming in too fierce to see the rough patches.
He must’ve thought it was odd. Women didn’t work homicide back then. Women didn’t join the force, period. Not in the ancient mud of Louisiana.
The only females in the building were professional pencil-pushers, flesh-and-blood coffee makers. Most they contributed was stringing up paper snowflakes by the door for the holidays, or pestering for signatures on a birthday card. Nothing of substance. Nothing worth remembering.
A member of the gentle sex coming aboard, that was big news. Still, he only caught on from scraps of conversation. Cops gossiped like a sewing circle, maybe worse, but nobody was giving Rust the low-down by the water cooler. If he heard anything, he tossed it in the bin of things he didn’t give a fuck about– which was most everything beyond his work load.
The day she floated in, he saw a freight train careening offtrack. Screeching, exploding, impending doom in a tailored pantsuit.
She was young. That was Rust’s first thought. Realistically, not all that much younger than him, but he could see the gangly, buck-toothed kid in her from across the room. Had no chance, he decided, no chance at all.
Though jarringly tall, a smooth six foot in her lifted boots, she was a slight thing, all limbs. Layers of clothing did nothing to hide her bird-boned scaffolding. Delicate. Rust couldn’t imagine her wrenching a grown man to the ground. But then, he didn’t know shit about shit in those days.
The boys were real tickled about her appearance those first few days– pulling faces at each other like they were presently creaming their pants, her pretending she didn’t notice how their handshakes lagged and eyes lingered. Hadn’t set in yet that they’d really be working with a woman. Right then, she was just a hard piece of eye-candy.
Rust only saw a tender cutlet being thrown into a dog kennel. It turned his stomach, knowing he would be forced to witness this woman get gnawed in the starving maws of beer-bellied wash-ups. Those folk, cops in white-collars, made women like crawdads. They trapped females under two buckets— the ruffled apron crowd and the flat-on-her-back brigade. That first day, he knew which they’d stick her in.
He only felt slightly sorry for her. Figured she had to know something about being chewed on to make it this far. Hoped she was smart enough to jump off the forever sinking ship of law enforcement before drowning with Rust and the rest of them.
The story came in bits and pieces from the gaggles of clucking hens that were his colleagues. Through a whole lot of bitching and moaning and gripping each other's stiffies, he made out;
Got a buddy in narco, said she worked the pole in some biker club. You know, the– what are they– Hellhounds? No, Bloodhounds! Run dope through Texas ‘an all that. Said she fit a whole gang between her legs.
Why they gotta stick us with a skirt? What’s the world comin’ to?
Probably here to snag herself a husband. She’ll be gone once she hooks one. Hey, Jim, you’re single, ain’tchu?
Two weeks into the woman’s tenure, a pit of bitterness seeded in Rust’s gut. He didn’t hate her, no, but he sure hated watching the bootlickers work their jaws better than their cases. That annoyance sprouted into something of a passive distaste for her, tinged with guilt, like he’d feel for a funeral parade blocking his morning commute.
Taste, though, that was funny.
His senses had always been mixed up. It was worse, or maybe just enhanced, after spending half of the 90s deep-frying his brain in psychotropic compounds— a sound for an image, a color for a sound, a taste for a word, a taste for a name.
Detective Indiana Abelard tasted like honey. The raw stuff, not that store-bought, saccharine syrup.
First time he spoke it, time yanked Rust two decades backward and sunk his teeth into virgin honeycomb— gritty, crystalline sweetness. On a Summer day in a life long gone, he had kicked a hive knowing damn well he’d get stung. A little boy hankering for something sugary, he didn’t mind the pain. There wasn’t anything in his father’s cabin that wasn’t canned or caught, and nothing near a treat. So, he’d put on three layers of clothes and battered that thing til it split. Took his swollen lips back home to be scolded, honey on his tongue and happy as could be.
Of course, he didn’t understand the significance then. Just knew his tongue wanted to keep saying it. Yeah. Funny indeed.
“It should be against regulation,” Barbier said, “Ain’t no way she’s got my back if shit goes down. She’s a liability, is what she is.”
Antony Barbier, fresh off the beat, had the arrogance of a peacock strutting around a barnyard, and that afternoon, he parked his ass on the corner of Marty’s desk to squawk.
Barbier’s previous partner was lost to an arthritic retirement, just in time to gain a side-kick nobody would take without a fight. And fight he did. If whining every time she wandered out of earshot constituted fighting.
“I mean, it’s bad enough we gotta watch our mouths now, but expectin’ me to take that into the field? What’s she gonna do when some bad motherfucker wants a piece, huh? I gotta protect her ass and mine.” Barbier seemed to enjoy the solemn nods of his audience. Basked in attention like a cat on a sunny spot.
“Yeah? When’s the last time you fired your gun, Barbie?” Marty teased.
“That’s not the point,” Barbier pointed a bony finger. Didn’t look like he had much weight on Abelard himself. “Point is, if I had occasion, I’d be worse off with her than on my own. Period.”
“I don’t know, man. From what I read, she’s pretty resourceful,” another detective snickered.
Marty’s toothy smile split his face. Rust stiffened.
It was always coming right back to that— Abelard’s big bust in New Orleans. Someone had it out for her, leaving that file open for anyone to pull. Rust wondered who set it loose, wondered if they faxed an office-wide memo that missed his desk: Beware of Whore. Might as well have pinned the warning on every entrance, by-line: Bitch Walking the CID– Off-Leash and Dangerous.
There was no telling what was true and what was soft-brained, sore-thumbed humor. At the base level, it was pretty clever– putting a female narco in a titty bar. Probably cut the rank infiltration down from years to a few months. That she managed to last that long, two years the way Rust heard it, well, it said something.
Rust respected anyone that went deep cover— to live, shit, and eat in a mask you despise is torturous. Most of those limpdick’s hanging around Marty’s desk, giggling about where she might’ve fit her gun under a g-string, wouldn’t make it a week in the field. Had to be smarter than a pig to survive it, and those boys weren’t quite that.
“Ain’t you all a little grown for this?” Rust lazily inserted himself after a particularly crude joke.
He didn’t bother looking up to meet Marty’s eternally exasperated expression. “What’s that, Rust?”
“To pull on a girl’s pigtails ‘cause you’re too chickenshit to talk to her.” His gaze was reluctant to part from his paperwork. When he did, he scanned faces like a father too tired to belt his sons.
No one had said her name, far as he heard. It was like they’d deemed sacrilegious. Supplemented it with ‘she’ and ‘the skirt’ and ‘little missy’, among other, crueler things.
Rust gave name to the devil. “Detective Indiana Abelard passed her PCA, same as you. Ran the beat, same as you. Sounds like she’s been down deep in dirt you’d worry ‘bout wipin’ off your shoes. So, how about you do your fuckin’ jobs, and see how she does hers. I’d put good money down that she can’t be worse than the best of you.”
It wasn’t a compliment to her so much as a condemnation of them. Sour as his face was, his mouth tasted sweet. Honey-sweet.
“Fuck you, Cohle,” Barbier snapped.
Rust just returned to minding his business. He didn’t care for bickering with children. Barbier had an uncle in robbery or something to shorten his upward path, and still couldn’t grow more than a patchy dirt stache.
“Every time you open your mouth, it’s like you’ve been filling up the asshole tank all day, waitin’ to pop off,” Marty said when the others begrudgingly receded. Rust was good at that, dispersing crowds. Should’ve gone into riot control.
When he didn’t get the response he wanted, or any response at all, Marty pushed. He leaned forward, tapping his thumb on the desk. “You were in narcotics. You heard about her?” he asked conspiratorially.
“No.”
“You ever seen that? A woman going deep cover?”
“No.”
“Well,” Marty drawled, “what do you think about it?” The man was always licking his fingers, trying to catch wind of something that made sense of Rust. Those first few months were a constant litmus test.
Rust finally looked up, dead-eyed. “I think it’s been some years since they put employment discrimination to law, and you all sound like troglodytes, talking like you know better. As long as the work gets done, I don’t care what’s between someone’s legs.”
Marty stared like his partner had sprouted a third eye. “Sometimes, man, I wonder what’s between yours.”
Rust marked his decided exit from the conversation with a middle finger. He got one right back.
A week and change before he caught the case in Erath, Rust was fixing a paper jam in the breakroom. As all things in that department, the printer went untouched for two days while men sat on their asses complaining, afraid to get their hands dirty. Fingers all inky, sweating for the unseasonable heat no one else seemed to feel, he didn’t notice when the chatter around the coffee machine went quiet.
He’d soon learn that Abelard was one of very few things that could kill the good ol’ boys’ coffee-time circle jerk.
“Well, heya there, sweetness,” somebody greeted her. She responded with a cabinet slam.
Rust felt the chill walk in with her, but didn’t look up from where he was crouching to the printer’s belly. Was akin to turning his back on a five-car pile-up. Could smell the encroaching fatalities.
“Tough day, detective?” another spoke her title with the clenched-toothed tease of an adult calling a child ‘doctor’ as she checked her teddy bear for a pulse. Still, Abelard was silent.
“Hey, we been wonderin’ something,” the pecking hen’s tittered behind whichever one was brave enough to step forward, “That big NOLA bust.”
“What’s the question?” her bored voice drawled.
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“That you went full native,” the detective spoke, oily-slick, “Got real cozy with them Bloodhound boys.”
The coffee pot hit the counter like a gunshot, but Detective Abelard's voice cut steady as a surgeon's hands. “Yeah? Professional curiosity, or are you askin’ for your spank bank?”
The room fell dead still and silent.
Rust sealed the print up, its surgery incomplete. He’d come back later.
He hadn’t yet heard her speak more than a fistful of words by then. Her accent had a bayou-born slide-whistle lilt and the raspy croak of chain-smoking, or training her voice to snake up from her gut. He rubbed his blackened hands together and stood, eager to remove himself from the peanut gallery.
“You all wanna know how it went down?” She asked, tone indiscernible. The only tell of her boiling temper was a tight pistol grip on her coffee mug. “Nothing’s classified. It’s all in the file.”
“Is it? Heard there were a lot of gaps,” someone teased.
Abelard took a half-step forward, and damned if those goons didn’t look boxed in. “If you all can’t press your heads together, color in the lines and see the picture, you might be in the wrong line of work.”
Rust’s side-eye glazed over the men. They wore varying shades of rage and shame– a pink-necked gradient.
“We were just–,” one of the embarrassed tried, cut off by another who was surely fingering through the consequences of slapping the dog-shit out of Abelard. Policing is a choice profession for men that only acknowledge women who can be trained to toe the line with open-palmed corrections.
“Can’t blame us being curious, sweetheart, nobody ‘round here slung pussy for a collar.”
Well, Rust couldn’t abide that. Looking back, he would’ve liked to see what Abelard would’ve done, had he not smacked dark streaks across that detective’s cheek.
“Watch your fuckin’ lip,” Rust warned as he fisted the guy’s collar. Didn’t know the man too well, but by the dingy white of his shirt and his habit of stealing abandoned takeout containers from the fridge, the fucker was a few years divorced. The framed children on his desk were likely years older than their gummy pictures, clothes plainly outdated, and the detective worked weekends, so he didn’t have any kind of regular custody. Must’ve bounced their mama off one too many walls, and the crime of her leaving curdled whatever was left of the bottom-barrel respect he had for women.
It was an impulsive action, teaching that flock to behave, but Rust didn’t regret it. Even when Abelard stared him down like he’d slapped her. Even when she thwacked her palms on his desk hours later, long after the nine-to-fivers cleared out, like she’d been stewing all day.
“The fuck is your problem?” she hissed. Those cornflower eyes pinned him in place.
He mourned the space lost as she leaned in, and resisted taking a cursory glance around the office. Didn’t want to get flung into the rumor mill. No one would tattle to Quesada about his outburst, but he’d already gotten some tart treatment from Marty. That your idea of flirting? Fucking gossips, the lot of them.
“I have no problem,” Rust said. His lax posture subtly melted away from her, chair creaking as he pushed back. Had planned to spend another evening holding down the fort, but her hostile company meant he’d have to drive around until the parking lot emptied- or hide down in the stacks. Her desk faced him, two posts behind Marty, and her laser-beam glower was grinding his nerves to a poultice long before she came over to deal him a piece of her mind.
“The fuck you don’t,” Abelard said, not giving up territory as he blindly piled take-home work, “You have no right to lay hands on somebody.”
“No?” he mused. He could’ve just said sorry. Could’ve said anything but–, “They act like dogs, I’ll treat ‘em like dogs.”
Her face scrunched like tissue paper. “Are you kidding me?”
Rust started walking, mindful of how those long legs of hers pounded the ground to make themselves heard.
“Is that how y’all do things around here? Measuring dicks and knocking heads like a bunch of neanderthals?” As he’d guessed, her voice was a higher pitch than she let on, like she forced it deeper the rest of the time. Or maybe she was just trying not to shout.
“What, you didn’t see any of that in narco?” he asked flatly, wondering how far she’d follow him. All the way to the lot, it seemed. He tried to make a smooth break, but she trotted down the steps and caught his elbow. Rust whipped his arm away, side-stepped, and raised a placating hand.
Even through his shirt, that first touch fired through Rust like he tongued an electrical socket.
“I don’t need you to protect me,” she spoke in a deeper register, cooking down her anger to something more professional.
Rust stared at her teeth. Hadn’t yet been close enough to see the rounded chicklets. Gray-tinged from smoking, but white enough to show she took good care of them. However, the little gaps between every top-row tooth told him that the swamp water she crawled from was too low for orthodontia.
In a few, fleeting seconds, he made some notes.
The way she handled herself said she probably had older brothers, maybe cops— definitely a father on the force. Had enough exposure to traditional womanhood to paint her face in clean lines and ice her hair an even, rootless platinum. Natural blonde, but by the looks of her eyebrows, it was probably a dishwater color. Probably adopted the same bottled dye her mother used.
Pretty, the kind of pretty you noticed, then, depending on which side of the tracks you ran, envied or coveted. In Rust’s case, the kind of pretty you picked at until you came up with a list of flaws to comfort yourself with. Not that looks mattered much to him, but back then he had a bad habit of manufacturing rational justifications for perceived irrational behaviors. He wasn’t staring, he was cataloging. Taking inventory.
Must’ve been hard work, escaping those sticky, backseat fondlings in the boonies without a baby on her hip. Must’ve been harder making it out of the academy, looking like some Tolkien wet-dream. On that merit alone, Rust didn’t dare imagine she needed him to fight her battles.
“Wasn’t protecting you,” he said, hugging a shield of manila folders, “Just setting expectations.”
“Naw,” she knocked her blazer back to grasp her hips, “See, I expect that shit, the ball-busting. I don’t need to get pulled into some IA bullshit ‘cause you jumped off your white horse. Let me worry about setting expectations and mind your fucking business.”
Well, Rust could abide by that.
He high-tailed out of there.
He lit a cigarette in his truck.
Through his rearview mirror, he watched her slither into a 1990 Mazda Hatchback.
When her taillights zoomed away, he went back to work. Had a printer to fix.
It was, at times, truly amazing that the perceived balance of order and chaos was upheld by a group so sorely unmatched for the responsibility.
Detectives Leopold and James, two stocky buffoons, had gathered a group around a bulletin board, where a woman’s bloated corpse was pricked with thumbtacks.
Rust remembered her. Sarah Landry– bruised and bloody and forever twenty-four years old.
Single female, stabbed and strangled, evidence of post-mortem mutilation. As with all cases like it, shady players were skating the outskirts of Sarah’s life; an ex-boyfriend with a domestic violence rap, a downstairs neighbor who chose the apartment complex for its minimum distance from parks and playgrounds, and a disgruntled former colleague that was dispatched for getting handsy with Sarah on the clock.
Wolves. Circling wolves.
Leopold and James liked the ex-boyfriend for it, but his alibi was sturdy– worked a fishing boat off the coast half the year. The thing that had the cops scratching their asses was a lack of forced entry.
Whoever it was, Sarah let them inside.
Initially, Rust joined the fold because he was short on tasks that morning and couldn’t resist watching that band of monkeys play Whodunit.
Then he saw the blackberry-pulp impression of Sarah’s face alongside her high school graduation photo. Nothing he hadn’t seen, of course, and not close to the worst, but Rust never truly desensitized to it– the horror. Just kept adding to the book of faces in his mind, the binding growing heavier and heavier, until all that grief weighed him down so low that he looked anesthetized. Yeah. He remembered Sarah.
He hung back against the desire to steal every picture, every report, and hunker down in the archives on his lonesome to piece it together.
“Poor kid,” Rust whispered to Marty.
Marty grunted his acknowledgment. It was over his shoulder that Rust noticed Abelard’s shiny head bobbing around.
As the menfolk were smoking and sipping their befuddlement, Abelard squeezed through the ranks to stare Sarah right in the eye– not the baby-faced grad photo, but the red-grape bulges that somebody had squeezed out of her face- fearless and unflinching. Disgruntled scoffs rippled through the detectives. Leopold in particular looked primed to flick Abelard like she was a dog nosing dinner. By then, the honeymoon period had timed out– no one was pretending her presence was anything short of a nuisance. Rust would’ve liked to say it was just misogyny– and it was that, for certain– but the woman wasn’t exactly endearing herself to the gatekeepers.
“Sequence of events?” she asked, pulling a bloody polaroid off the board.
“What?” Leopold retorted.
Near his shoulder, Abelard snatched another picture. She looked at those photos for a long moment. “Stabbed in the back, nearly gutted in the front, beaten blue– just to choke her out. That’s a lot of work. Took a while. What happened first?” With a tone like that, like a teacher leading dunces to a bolded answer on the page, Abelard wasn’t doing much to earn the collective ear. But James wouldn’t let that blonde hotshot think he didn’t know his case.
“He beat her up first. Stabbed her when she tried to run, and again when she fell down. Then he choked her,” he stated, crossing his arms.
Abelard looked from him to the pictures, back to him, back to the photos, and shook her head. “Nah.”
“What do you mean ‘nah’?” James balked.
Abelard ignored him. “Where’s the tox screen?” She glanced up and gave a patronizing, “You ran it, didn’t you?”
“Of course, we fuckin’-,” Leopold snipped, then looked around at his counterparts to confirm this inconceivable arrogance was being witnessed.
“Lemme see it,” Abelard said, neither demanding nor polite.
“Negative for drugs, .06 BAC,” James recited from memory with something to prove.
“She’s, what, a buck twenty?” Abelard stood back as if to get a view of some bigger picture no one else could see.
Leopold deigned to entertain her. “Round-about. Why?”
“Well,” Abelard trailed off, holding the glossy gore to the corkboard. Her fingernail tapped Sarah Landry’s bloodstains. “Because she didn’t struggle. Point-six, that’s, what, two drinks? She wasn’t shit-faced.”
“What do you mean, she didn’t struggle?” James asked incredulously. Some grunts from the group seemed to echo the sentiment: What’s your fucking point, girl?
After a few months of watching those men fumble into obvious clues, Rust was all but bouncing to hear Abelard work through something that couldn’t be surmised by a late-night cop drama fan.
“Blood patterns,” Abelard pointed, “Look. Here. Here. Right there.” She might as well have been teaching a waltz to a walrus for all the sense made to those guys. Meanwhile, Rust was trying not to shoot his hand up like a kid, eager to inform that he, too, was aware of geometric blood spatter analysis. Not enough to speak on it, but, sure, he knew the neighborhood she was cruising through.
“What am I supposed to be seeing here?” Leopold asked.
Abelard bristled when his shoulder brushed hers.
“Well, uh, the distribution on the walls and floor, there’s a distinct lack of satellite spatter or secondary patterns.”
“Satellite what-now?”
Abelard visibly suppressed a sigh. Never liked to dumb things down for people she thought should know better.
“When somebody struggles, right, when they’re running or fighting, the blood sprays all around. Blood is matter, matter has physics, so there are patterns to blood sprays from a specific wound or movement. Gives us an idea of what happened, when, and how. So,” she stepped behind Leopold’s back, and to everyone’s collective what-in-the-fresh-hell-is-this, Abelard wielded an invisible knife at him. “If I’m swinging and you’re running, or turning around, my movements are frenzied. The blood is, too. It’s splattering every which way.”
She demonstrated this frenzy to Detective James, albeit slow and careful, as though he was her pupil. Leopold was too bewildered by the mock assault to do anything but take it.
“But, if you’re facing away, and I stab you, fast and hard– one, two, three, four– we get these big, fat sprays, here.” Abelard dragged her finger across the crime scene photos, then continued, “So, you fall.”
Leopold blinked.
Abelard jutted her chin forward, “Well, go on. Fall.”
“You for real?” Leopold asked.
“For real,” she nodded.
The request was shot dead out of the air, men chuckling to each other like Abelard’s game was just too damn silly. Fuckin’ ridiculous. Where the fuck does she think she is? Quantico? Apparently, they’d seen quite enough of her theatrics.
Rust had not.
Not giving Marty a second to talk him out of it, he pushed forward to stand in a meadow of open floor.
“Front or back?” he asked.
Abelard’s silence hung for a painful two breaths. He’d had his warning to stay away, after all.
“Front.”
So, Rust planted himself face-down. Abelard resumed her roleplay, ensuring her voice reached the nosebleed section. “Alright, you’re down, just off the side of the bed. We have four clean sprays on the wall, so I don’t stab you in the back again, I flip you over.”
With his cheek to the grimy, short-hair carpet and Abelard pushing his shoulder, Rust tried to imagine fear. Sarah’s fear. So scared, the girl didn’t even fight. Didn’t stand a chance.
Those early days, Abelard’s touch was more than a physical sensation. Sudden neuropathy, his nervous system firing off like firecrackers from a central point of impact– it fucking burned. Tiny blue-white sparks sprinkled his vision like the first snowflakes on a moonlit night. He recalled a Christmas, way back, that wasn’t so bad as the ones that came before and after. It soothed him. The strangeness of that fact kept him frozen.
He was surprised when she, grunting, managed to roll his limp body onto his back. And then, for a split second, all he could think about was how green her hair smelled. Irish Spring. Men’s soap. Cheap soap. Probably had a boyfriend. Unless she took somebody’s ring off before coming into the office. No, she didn’t have the telltale tan line. Not married. Maybe she just liked cheap soap.
The voyeurs whooped as Abelard swung a leg over Rust’s. She didn’t even crack a smile. Nor did he. They were onto something, the two of them. He knew it the moment their eyes locked.
“I get you three times in the stomach, in the ribs, boom, boom, boom–,” the curled edge of her fist struck Rust, “Then I– wait, lemme see that picture. No, third from left. My left, man. Alright, we have this one long slit in her belly. I wonder if he was thinkin’ about opening her up. Seeing what’s inside.” Her thoughtful pondering on the motive for butchering a young woman caused a few detectives to groan.
“Don’t be pussies,” she griped.
Still hovering over Rust, Abelard craned her neck to scan the pictures again. In that brief respite, Rust regretted offering himself up. She was thinking on her feet– scratch that, on her knees– and other men were undoubtedly committing this to memory. Or legend, the way things went around there. He glanced through two rows of faces to find Marty’s surprisingly gleeful expression.
“Leopold,” she called, and he seemed surprised and discomforted that she knew his name, “We got pictures of the moulding?” At his doe-eyed stare, she sighed again, “Baseboards. Edge of the wall.”
“Uh,” he scanned the array, then shrugged.
“Whatever,” that word sounded like amateurs, but she had the sense to know she ought to complain to the forensics department, “so, I’ve stabbed you, and— and this last cut, he took his time on it,” she poked her finger at Rust’s stomach.
“How do you know?” James asked.
Before she could open her mouth, Rust filled it. “Sharp blade. But the belly slice is jagged. She was wriggling while he dragged it. Cut her slow-like.”
As the gravity of that sunk in for everyone, a hint of a smile twitched on Abelard’s lips. Rust didn’t much like that he liked that– her approval.
“She was raped, yeah?” she called callously over her shoulder, still holding Rust’s gaze.
“Obviously,” James said.
“Not obvious,” she muttered to herself.
No, this type of thing, the phallic implications of torturing with a blade often represented the assailant’s psychological or physical impotence. Abelard and Rust shared a moment of silent solidarity amongst the amateurs, him fluttering his eyes and her pursing her lips.
“Sure would like to see how that went,” some faceless moron called.
“Yeah, show us how it’s done, Abelard,” another crooned.
Rust was close enough to see a vein draw long and tense at the side of her neck, but otherwise, Abelard was unaffected. “By those bruises, she was still alive when he beat on her. So, he ditches the knife. He could’ve raped her while he beat her. Maybe she didn’t play the way he wanted her to. Maybe he just got off on it. Or–,” that last word lagged like she wanted Rust to shovel coal for that train of thought.
“He beat her. Strangled her. Raped her,” he punctuated.
Abelard, pleasantly satisfied, nodded. “Genital abrasions, what’s that lookin’ like?” she asked.
“Man, come on,” James whinged. “Nobody took pictures–,”
“Not pictures, Jesus,” Abelard’s lip lifted in disgust, “The coroner’s report.”
“Oh. Yeah, hold on,” James went for the file.
Suffice to say, she’d hooked her audience, however unwilling they were. By unfortunate circumstance, she’d managed to time it just as the captain was heading for his morning constitutional. Probably shit bricks when he saw his newest Albatross straddling the other on the ground. Quesada never liked Rust. Might’ve tried to like Abelard, if only to avoid a lawsuit, had she not given Rust a run for his money on procedural violations and general hassle.
“What the fuck is this?” Quesada spewed, more shocked than angry.
Abelard didn’t flinch. Didn’t move an inch. She stared right up at him, and had the balls to say–
“Gimme a minute.”
She gestured a hand at James, who stood stock-still with that file in hand.
All the men shied like they’d been caught with a finger in their ass- like they’d talked a naive woman into this perverse display and would be held accountable. Rust never played a corpse so good in his life.
“Posthumous, or no?” she asked. When the response lagged, she urged firmly, “Detective James, was the rape posthumous?”
“Uh… evidence of penetration… no contusions… no abrasions–,” James stammered fragments of facts.
Abelard’s eyebrow quirked. She looked down at Rust. He forgot everything– the other detectives, the fucking captain, the pressure of her legs around his hips— “Could’ve happened before.”
“Could’ve happened before,” she echoed in agreement. Basically pasted a gold star on his lapel. With that, she dismounted, and for an awkward moment, Rust just lay there watching her rise. Upon closer observation, she had more muscle to her than he expected.
Towering over him, she extended a hand. Letting Abelard tug him to standing was a mistake. Spiderwebs of electricity spread up his wrist, pinballed through his ribs, and shot straight through the conductive jelly in his spine. He smelled petrichor. Sometimes he had cause to think the sensory switch-ups were no less prophetic than his visual hallucinations. Couldn’t get much more on the nose than likening Indiana Abelard to a brewing storm.
“You wanna explain what the hell this is?” Quesada interjected, angrier now that she’d brushed him off.
“Helps me think,” Abelard said simply, then turned away from Quesada to face Rust. Her eyes glittered in that light. She looked like she was fighting a grin. “No forced entry, nothing out of place outside of the bedroom, so she let him in. She didn’t fight him, because she didn’t expect the attack, and if she didn’t expect it, that means she undressed before he attacked her.”
“The sex was consensual,” Rust said contemplatively.
“So, the boyfriend did it,” James interjected.
“No,” both Rust and Abelard said in unison.
“Ex-boyfriend, and he’s on a boat off the coast, remember?” Abelard shook her head. By then, she was death-rolling that case like an alligator. Nobody but Rust would stick a hand near it.
“Maybe she had another man. Something new. She didn’t tell anybody about him yet,” Rust suggested.
Abelard smiled. “Nope. First date.”
“How do you know that?” Rust found himself drawling almost playfully. Had to reel that back in with quickness, all those damned eyes on them.
“Two drink rule,” Abelard said, quite proud of herself. Took her a while to lose that– satisfaction in her own cleverness. Wasn’t exactly arrogance she suffered– arrogance was undeserved confidence. She just happened to be mostly right, most of the time, and wasn’t shy about it. Nobody liked that. Nobody liked Abelard. For all her wit, she had a hell of a time stringing simpler facts together– for one, the fact that she had to show belly sometimes to win favors she’d come to need.
“Two drinks on a first date, that’s the sweet spot. You’re loose, you’re confident, and no one’s gonna get the better of you,” she said, taking a morose tone, “They had a long night, a good night– she brought him home late. No witnesses, we’ll put it between eleven and three. She was expecting a lay. He cut her up.”
“Shit,” Leopold stroked his chin.
“Let's canvas bars and restaurants serving booze within a five-mile radius, then expand to ten. Given that she fucked him, she probably didn’t pay, but check her cards for any date-matching services, any bar she frequented. Might’ve been a blind setup. Go through her phone and email for any correspondence. And have her tox rechecked for anything that might’ve slipped by– I’m talking roofies, pharmaceuticals, horse tranqs, whatever,” Abelard spouted off. “We have no prints, no DNA, so this guy was either lucky as hell or he planned this meticulously. He might be a first-time killer, but he's done something like this before, I guarantee. We need to see if any assaults match this MO. Date-rapes, statutories, DVs, anything. He might have a record.”
Rust, the good little soldier, was just about to get his ass to work when Quesada tugged the plug. “When the hell did you make Lead Detective, Abelard?”
She dead-panned at him. “I didn’t.”
It took a few more months of studying her for Rust to realize Abelard wasn’t really a smart-ass, her smart just had a comorbidity of being an ass. As to prevent anyone from thinking her infallible, Indiana succumbed to randomized bouts of being completely obtuse— usually in one-on-one social interactions, Rust noticed. One second, she was quick as a whip, then, all of a sudden, she’d have every appearance of something plopped on earth from a distant but not dissimilar planet. A very literal, humorless planet.
“And a fucking comedian, too,” Quesada quipped. He glanced around, likely checking the temperature of the room before chewing out the unnamed, but obvious, face of those ‘mutual respect’ lectures he’d been dealing out. “Leopold, you’re running this. What’s your take?”
Detective Leopold didn’t look too keen on admitting he bought what she was selling. His crossed arms and tight shoulders crunched forward, and he blew air through his nose. “We don’t have anything better going. Neighbor’s a stretch, and the office perv has an alibi.”
To general and resounding dismay, Quesada sighed. “Alright. Hop to it.”
As the detectives departed in peeved pairs, the captain looked over Rust and Indiana with impeccable foresight.
“Well… ain’t you two the damned Wonder Twins.”
Only got a laugh out of Marty. Had they all been a few months further down the line, Abelard would’ve asked Rust hours later, long after he’d let the comment slide off his back, What did he mean by that? Wonder Twins? And Rust would have only been able to say, nothing good. Neither of them watched much television, as it happened.
That day, Abelard just stretched a strange, long line of flat mouth at Rust. Wasn’t a smile, wasn’t not a smile, given that it was an intentional alteration of her typical, deceptively bored expression. He interpreted that as a ‘thank you’. That phrase, in fact, most basic pleasantries and courtesies came from Abelard like pulling teeth. Rust had his performance difficulties- if he couldn’t see purpose in formalities, he wouldn’t bother- but some things were just good manners. For a long time, he figured Abelard just wasn’t raised right. Then he got close, and he knew she wasn’t raised right.
He’d say that was why they got along in the end— they were both insufferable.
At least Marty found some amusement in it. “That was quite a show, well done,” he softly clapped. Rust shot him a warning look.
Abelard pulled a cigarette case from her belt, looking past Marty like he was invisible. “You busy?” she asked Rust.
“Look, sweetheart, we’ve got our own cases to—,”
Rust cut his partner at the knees, “Nothing that can’t wait.” A botched robbery, a domestic dispute turned ugly, a bar fight that ended in a shoot-out— run-of-the-mill violence. Nothing that scratched the itch. Nothing that promised the momentary relief of burying (unfortunately metaphorically) the bastard that killed Sarah Landry.
“Good. Lot of ground to cover,” she said absently, looking to where Leopold and James were breaking down tasks. She was eager to get her allotment.
“Say, uh, that… blood stuff, isn’t that for the, uh, the nerds to figure out?” Marty joked.
Abelard stared at him with unveiled revilement. Rust had never seen Marty shrink, especially under a woman’s eyes, but her eyes— they managed a mythic type of scolding. Good mother, bad mother, didn’t matter. Whatever Abelard managed to bring out in men, it would’ve had Freud and Jung knocking beers.
“No,” she let the statement hang him out to dry for a second, “Anyway, BPA isn’t airtight, it’s kind of subjective. I was just bullshitting so they’d hear me out.”
“Hear you out?” Marty repeated, disbelieving.
She shrugged. “I had a theory. Just needed to walk them through it.”
“It’s solid,” Rust commended.
“Wait, wait, so, it’s bunk science, won’t stand up in court, and you might’ve just conned Quesada into signing off on a wild goose chase for a— a serial date-rapist turned murderer?” Marty patted every sentence with his hand in the air. “Am I getting that right?”
Abelard met his incredulous gaze for a long, unreadable moment before shrugging. “Maybe. We’ll see how it shakes out.”
“Indi— can I call you Indi? Listen—,”
“No,” she interrupted.
Marty’s nostrils flared. He glanced at Rust, who was, despite appearances, enjoying this.
“Fine, Miss Abelard, the thing is, we don’t just come up with theories when we’ve got perfectly good suspects lined up. We follow a process, and when the process leads us nowhere, that’s when we start throwing spaghetti on the wall. You understand?”
Rust didn’t know quite yet, but he had a feeling that was the tone Marty used with his six-year-old daughter.
Abelard’s vacant stare was that of a porcelain doll. Eyes so big and clear, you could project anything onto them– anger, apathy, love.
Never mind, on that last one. He’d need more than a six-pack to think about that.
“Thanks for the tip, Hart,” she said when she finally broke eye contact.
“Anytime, hon,” he called as Abelard went to snatch up as many tasks as she could. Marty’s smile returned when he set eyes on Rust. That cheesing, dimpled, gap-toothed grin– fucking asshole.
“What?” Rust said.
“Nothin’, nothin’,” Marty said with a blatant indication of something, “Just glad to see you making friends is all.”
“Fuck you, man.”
“Just warms my heart.”
Rust’s eyes, damned things they were, slid to where Abelard was wagging her tail for a piece of action. “I want in on this,” he quietly told Marty.
“Sure you do,” Marty sighed and scratched his stomach.
It wasn’t until the late afternoon that Leopold and James managed to configure the plan of attack, likely slowed by shooing Abelard away every half hour. At her desk, she was chomping at the bit– literally. Rust, who was hurrying through some paperwork for one of his freebie cases, casually peeked past Marty to find Abelard gnawing a pencil. From fifteen feet he could see the deep carvings she’d worried into the thing. Couldn’t help but check her progress every so often, thoroughly disgusted. Wore that thing down like a geriatric beaver would, all while scratching a legal pad up with furious speed he’d only seen in the mental hospital. Writing her manifesto as though compelled by unheard voices— shaking her hand when it cramped and pointing her big old blues at detectives Leopold and James- Christ, she was a keen little thing.
By the time she chewed down to pencil lead, Leopold clapped his hands. “Alright! All hands on deck, come on.”
Leopold watched her jump up. “You got a fire under your ass for this, huh?” It sounded like the tease right before a come-on.
“Yeah,” she said, “I want canvassing. And I wanna see the apartment.”
“You want, huh? That’s cute,” Leopold jeered, “Nobody steps foot on the scene but us. I’m not gonna have you messin’ around in there.”
Caught Rust off guard when Abelard didn’t back talk. She got up close to the color-pinned map and dragged her finger around a hunk of land. “I’ll start here. Rossum Lane to Houma Street. Bunch of college bars down there.”
Detective James frowned, “Sit the fuck down, Abelard. Jesus.”
“Isn’t your man in court today? You’re not going in the field without a partner,” Leopold said like he was laying down a curfew for his teenage daughter. Must have hoped she’d pitch a fit for all to see.
Abelard met his gaze coolly. “That’s how it works? You two hold each other’s hands every time you leave the house?”
“Sit down,” James commanded, punctuating each word with a silent threat.
Her cheeks sucked to hollows, Abelard took a cross-armed lean against a desk. Knew when to bite her tongue, thank God.
The work was dealt out painlessly for most. Nobody was complaining about spending the day shambling through bars or chatting up Sarah Landry’s nubile friends. Leopold and James were off the the coroners to follow up on the tox screen, but not before Abelard tried to argue her way out of deskwork. Rust pitied her, seeing the bright blue fire she was blazing to get on the street. He stole a final glance on his way out.
Wasn’t hard to turn down drinks in the first few months on the job. Even gave Rust a sense of accomplishment, self-possession, when the treacly smell of beer didn’t move him. He was on his shit. He was in control.
He was bone-tired and eye-fucking every bottle behind the faceless bartenders he questioned.
Sarah Landry’s picture was burning in his hand by the last call. A fruitless day was nothing to get blue over, but he was feeling the mushy bruises of that poor girl all over. Marty, still trying to forge some obligatory brother-bond at that point, asked after Rust’s mood like a parrot. Sure you’re alright? You okay, man? When’s the last time you slept? The beers Marty had nursed were softening him up, and bleeding a sickly sweet off his breath. Too fucking talkative, too nosy, too close. Worse, Marty didn’t seem to want to let Rust out of the car without ensuring they’d both head home.
“Get some rest, compadre,” Marty called as Rust feigned the motions of starting his truck. Those chummy endearments only had a week’s more shelf-life before Marty quit the schtick.
Now, Rust was exhausted. Hunger had skipped the skirt-pulling of belly rumbles and gone straight to banging a bat around his skull. Walking through the office halls, energy-saving lights lagged in his vision. Glowing tails guided him forward.
Make a habit of pushing your body to the brink of survival, it starts to find comfort in cliffhanging. Starts to enjoy it.
Rust needed sleep. He needed sustenance. He needed a fucking drink, and if he headed home, the journey would be a white-knuckle grip to keep from pulling up to a liquor store. Thin as he’d run it, he didn’t trust his willpower.
Rust’s senses, already dulled, were distracted by the distant suckle of a janitor’s vacuum. He dropped into his seat with a heaving sigh he wouldn't have let loose had he spotted Abelard before she spotted him.
“Did you check The Buckhead?”
Her voice jolted his heart rate so high that he clutched his chest like a startled housewife.
“Sorry,” Abelard slinked up from the darkness to join Rust in the pale halo around his desk. “Leopold said Sarah and her friends hung around The Buckhead. That was in your territory.”
Rust had no place to ask what she was still doing there, but the question circled his mouth. He fought the urge to finger his pulse— had a passive worry about his heart exploding, given the rough shape it was in. “Bar-back knew her face. Said she hadn’t been around for a few weeks. No one else recognized her.”
“Yeah,” she swayed on her feet. Somehow, she looked just as fresh as he’d left her. “Are you still clocking hours?” Abelard asked shyly.
Rust consistently fudged his numbers to hover just below sixty. Didn’t want any fuss about the unsanctioned overtime he pulled- staring at DBs in the basement, his private ritual of self-flagellation- but he nodded.
“Come here,” Abelard said.
Then she smiled. She smiled, big and genuine. Took up half her face, that grin, and it didn’t help his pulse none.
Rust had to figure it was for dramatic ambiance— Abelard camping out on the floor with a flashlight, rather than setting up at her desk. Her papers and files and notes were spread out like a swept deck of cards. Whatever system she was using was incomprehensible. Hurt his eyes to look at it all.
“Check this out,” she crouched like a gargoyle and delivered a red-marked file to him. “Went through her phone book and tossed all the known numbers, came up with this.”
Rust looked over Sarah Landry’s telephone records. Mostly one-offs, which Abelard marked ‘maintenance’ and ‘bank’ and the like. Then he noticed the pattern. A single number, going back three weeks, called and dialed out with increasing frequency. 6pm to 9pm. Perfect time to sit back with a glass of wine and chat about her day with a new sweetheart. That phone number was double lined on the final page. Only call the night Sarah was butchered.
“You trace this?” he asked, pulse rising all over again. Seemed he wouldn’t need another cup of coffee.
“Belongs to Miss Loretta Hayes,” Abelard said, “Has a son called Daniel. Born in ‘68, arrested in ‘92 for aggravated assault— bar fight in Baton Rouge. Paroled last May, came to live with mama. And get this,” her grin spread impossibly wider, “He’s a mechanic.”
Rust gestured at her to continue.
“Trichloroethylene,” Abelard switched the call log out for a forensics report, “That’s degreaser. Trace amount in the bathroom sink.”
“Washed his hands,” Rust spoke, “Shit.”
“Shit, indeed. Let’s take a ride.” Abelard stood. Rust must have pulled some kind of face, because she followed up with, “What, you got somewhere to be?”
He didn’t.
By first impression, Abelard was a solid partner. Babier had no reason to bitch. Didn’t speak a word in the car— no personal questions, no small talk, no bullshit— didn’t speed, kept her eyes on the road and her mouth shut when Rust gripped his pant legs because the streetlamps were dancing a little wilder than usual. Rolling nausea flattened and tensed him as they cruised through a shadowy suburb. She was even polite enough to pretend she didn’t hear the dry heave he masked with a cough.
Abelard killed the headlights three houses down from the Hayes residence, then parked. Blindly, she dug through her center console for spare smokes and a pack of gum, waved both over Rust’s lap, and cranked the window down with her other arm. Giving him something to chew on and something to hold, that secured it. Detective Abelard was a good partner.
Soon as his tongue met the wintery cigarette filter, he tossed it out the window. Fucking menthols. Disgusting. Rust palmed his own pack and lit up. He took great care not to touch fingers when he passed a Zippo to Abelard. Another one of those electric shocks, and he would’ve been a flight risk.
In the dark, she flicked the top off his lighter. Shink. Shink. Shink. Over and over, she messed with that thing. Almost grabbed it from her, tossed it with her rank cigarettes.
“It’s him,” she whispered after who-knows-how-long. Rust ducked his head to scan past her window, but she was only talking gut-sense. The yard— overgrown with switchgrass and littered with decrepit play equipment— was empty of life. “I know it,” she urged, turning to Rust.
He was in a bad way. Real bad. It was pitch-black but for an orange streetlight blocked by a weepy tree, yet Abelard’s eyes seemed to glow. Blue fire burning. That’s what she was.
“Smells like burnt rubber out here,” he hummed thoughtlessly. Stopped himself from telling her the air felt like sandpaper on his knuckles, and that burnt rubber was the scent of rage. But the metallic tang under his cigarette, he couldn’t ignore that. “Air tastes like iron.”
She took him at face value, grip pulsing around the steering wheel. “Bet he hosed off before going in. Wouldn’t wanna spook mommy.”
Neither knew what they were waiting for. Hayes wasn’t going to come out, knife in hand, proclaiming himself a murderer. But they were feeling it— the bloom of absolute certainty. Closing teeth around a perp, that was better than anything. Drugs, sex, sleep— fuck, he needed to sleep.
With yawning mouths and papercut eyes, they hung around until darkness diluted with milky light. Not much to say, the two of them.
“You hungry?” she asked, kicking her legs down from the dash. She coughed. Hardly covert work, the pack’s worth of cigarette butts piled on either side of the car.
“Could be,” he said. His mouth was so tarred and crusted, he couldn’t make a guess for how ripe the rest of him smelled. He willed the department locker room empty so he’d have time for a deep scrub.
Abelard slid out of the car, then stuck her head through the window before he could dismount. “I got it. What do you want?”
Thinking about food brought his nausea back in waves, but his stomach finally rebelled with a needy cramp. “Whatever looks good.”
Abelard gave the car door a solid pat and hopped up the curb. Rust couldn’t keep up with her, not then, not ever. Sure, he could brave the endless nights, but he looked like shit and felt like shit all the way through. Through the diner glass, Abelard seemed rejuvenated, somehow, leaning onto the serving counter with not a hair out of place. He thought she was just a go-getter, hadn’t yet had the wind knocked out of her sails. In his exhaustion, Rust had failed to notice the little orange capsule she popped two hours prior.
He closed his moisture-stripped eyes and rested his head back. The day’s balmy heat was already rearing up, but the pink sunrise came with a tender breeze. For a moment, Rust slipped through the backdoor of his head.
Abelard kicked the passenger door to snap Rust out of that wink of sleep. “You good?” she asked, tinged with judgment. Grimacing, he accepted a heavy paper bag and cardboard drink carrier. Four coffees, big coffees, and he knew they weren’t intended for their partners.
“What’s this?” he peeked in the bag, mouth watering for an amalgamation of greasy smells.
“Uh–,” she flipped her blinker, “Breakfast burritos. Dunno what’s in them, I told the kid to load ‘em up.”
Her slender fingers flapped against her palm. “Hand me one.”
They couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes from the office, but that food didn’t stand a chance. Piss-poor choice for a car meal, Rust thought, the sloppy egg entrails spilled out with every bite. He glanced at Abelard’s single-handed set-up. Thighs spotted with food, shirt-cuff dripping with hot sauce— it was borderline slapstick.. Every inch of her said she’d perfected the Professional Woman routine– the manicured nails, the understated jewelry, her ice-white hair– yet she had the grace of a duck pretending to be a swan. It was like somebody dressed her everyday with intent to disguise her nature, but didn’t give her a firm reminder not to waddle.
“Fuck, shit,” she shouted after a hunk of spongy breakfast plopped in her lap.
“Watch the road,” he snapped when she swerved.
“Steer for a sec?” she asked, far too calmly for as quick as she let the wheel go. Rust’s hand shot out for it, his jaw clenched and a light sweat already breaking across his temples.
“Abelard,” he warned.
“Just a sec.” In Rust’s peripheral vision, she was scooping eggs out of the window and trying to rewrap her meal in tin foil.
“Abelard,” he repeated, “Abelard. It’s yellow. Indiana. Brake.”
Her hands closed on the wheel, one over his hand. The car jerked to a stop.
Outside the windows, birds sang and cicadas trilled. The engine hummed.
Rust’s hand ripped from under hers.
“My bad. You good?” she looked his way. Then she followed his eyes to the breakfast burrito at his feet.
“Whoops. You can have mine,” she jutted the saggy thing toward him. Another wet morsel plunked in the cup holder.
Rust gently rejected the gesture with a raised palm. He sniffed.
“Light’s green,” he said.
In retrospect, it’s hard to believe how long it took him to realize Abelard was jacked up on pills most days. But then, he didn’t make a habit of searching for the pinholes in her looking glass eyes. Was still mixed up about the honey on his tongue.
Abelard parked right alongside Rust’s truck in the near-empty lot. He bristled as she flipped around and squeezed her top-half between the front seats, sweeping her long arms across the floor. Just as he yanked the door open to escape, she called, grunting, “You, uh, goin’ home?”
“No,” he tossed one leg out of the car and saddled the edge of the seat.
She resurfaced with a fresh, folded button-up. A silky petal-pink. He’d remember that shirt well. Real well.
“Good. You got my back on this?”
“I do.”
Her gaze peeled him, distrustful. She said nothing more before making a grab for her glove compartment. Rust couldn’t help staring. The thing was chock-full like a bathroom counter. Handcuffs, box of latex gloves, box of tampons, flashlight, flare, stain remover, nail file, travel-sized hygiene products galore— he wouldn’t have been surprised if she was sleeping in that car. He dared a glance over his shoulder to scan for a pillow. It’s absence didn’t dispel his theory. Bedding might have been in the trunk.
Abelard shamelessly snatched a pair of panties, her handcuffs, and the toothbrush. Rolled her personal effects in the shirt and glanced at Rust like she’d forgotten he was right there. Rust noted for the first time that her left eye was a little lazy, slightly skewed into one corner.
She frowned and dragged a sleeve across her mouth. “What, I got shit on my face?”
Instinctively, Rust nodded, glancing at her chin. There wasn’t anything on her face, but he tapped his own and rolled out of the car.
Burgeoning sunlight watered his unprepared eyes. The Vermillion River was belching muggy, stagnant fumes— raw sewage and dead fish. Unseasonably warm, they called that winter. Nearly Christmas and he was sweating at dawn.
He would’ve made a break for the building if the morning’s offerings didn’t smack him across the face. He wallowed just long enough for Abelard’s frizzy head to pop up from the car.
She looked him over. “You have a spare shirt?”
He felt his mouth curve down. “This is my spare.”
“Mm.” She slid sunglasses on in silent judgment.
Rust felt a little resentful of the hop-skip energy that carried the young woman up the stairs. His own muscles were smarting something fierce, and he could finally make out the musky staleness of his shirt. The beginning of a tune hummed from Abelard, once again forgetting she wasn’t alone. She stopped it quick as she started.
Now, a point of major contention in the homicide department, was the singular locker room. Every floor had the same parcel of space to get one’s head together between hours. Assigned lockers and showers and all that. It wasn’t a school-type communal humiliation chamber, every shower had a semi-private stall— but it was a men’s locker room. Just as homicide was a men’s department.
Detective Abelard was careful about it at first. Only wandered in at times she was certain she’d be alone. Stuck an out-of-order sign from a utility closet on the door for good measure. Later, it became a sort of power play, her breezing in during peak hours, eyes straight, poker-faced, rolling deodorant under her arms like it wasn’t wildly inappropriate— even dangerous. Didn’t help her case any, pretending she was one of the boys. At least, that’s what they thought she was playing at. Rust eventually figured she just made her, oft woefully objective, logical inference; there was no women’s locker room, she was working too hard to bother detouring home for a half hour, and thus, she would use the provided facilities.
“What are you doing?” he asked when she pushed inside.
She paused, foot catching the door. “I stink. I’m rinsing off,” she said in that matter-of-fact way that made people take umbrage. Even added, “You do, too, by the way. Should shower some time.”
Rust, ignoring the urge to tell her that was exactly his plan, asked, “You aren’t worried about someone walking in?”
She checked her wristwatch. “Nobody comes in here ‘til seven-thirty, earliest. I have twenty-minutes.”
That she did. He wasn’t gonna fight her on it, his stomach flipped as he imagined men filing in after a night of bar-crawling. “Better hustle, then,” he said, taking a lean against the wall. In the time it took to light a cigarette, Abelard was still standing there. Her steel-toes pushed the door an inch, let it swing back, and pushed it again.
“What, are you gonna keep watch?” she asked.
Rust stared for three blinks. Then, he looked at his own watch. “Eighteen minutes.”
He’d learn that Indiana took what he once heard his father call “whore’s baths,” something he had to unlearn himself after boiling his bathwater in the Alaskan winters was no longer his reality. Not much incentive for a young boy to develop proper hygiene, making it such hard work. For Abelard, it was just convenient– a pits, down-belows, ass situation. She was in and out, hardly even got her hair wet. Used to gather it up with a pen. Always fascinated Rust, that resourcefulness.
He only stuck his head through the door because a few curious faces passed him in the hall. The day had begun, and it wasn’t waiting for her to dawdle through her beauty routine. “Times up,” he called.
“Come on in,” she hollered back.
Something about the way she said it, like a dare, he hesitated. Would’ve preferred to wait her out, but Rust was a grown man. He wasn’t scared of women. Revered them, actually. Just ideally revered them from a distance.
He headed to his designated locker. There she was, just past the end of the row, bathed in buttery morning light. In the divot of his neck, his pulse throbbed. At the time, he had no clue what had him so unsettled. Too much coffee, he guessed, averting his attention from where she retouched her makeup. Then he figured it was the peculiarity of peeling his shirt off in a woman’s presence. Hadn’t done that in a long, long time. Had no desire to either, maybe that was the rub.
But his shirt smelled like an ashtray, a sweaty ashtray, and if Marty complained again, Rust would throw himself from the car. He unbuttoned quickly, trying to make the whole thing painless. Quick, in and out. Just like Abelard. Though, the slow steps she took toward her locker, coincidentally in his row, he realized she was, indeed, dawdling.
To get some air through the fabric, Rust whipped his shirt at his side.
“You’re not gonna shower?” Abelard asked.
He snuck a look at her crouched form, her face still pinched peachy from the shower. He almost bailed right there, hurried out to the hallway in his undershirt. Instead, he buried a hand in his locker, rummaging for something that might mask his scent.
“Nah,” he finally answered, “Don’t like an audience.”
For some reason, that made her snort. Rust gave up his search and returned to aerating his button-up. From his periphery, he noticed her glowing shape rise up and come his way. Figured she was finally leaving, and thanked the universe for that, but then she got closer.
“Gimme,” she commanded softly, already grabbing his shirt.
What he would pay now to see his own face then. Must’ve been priceless. At least she was preoccupied. Jerked the thing away and laid it on the floor. She had a bottle in hand that proclaimed itself to be a window cleanser, but the liquid inside was clear. She spritzed it all around with special attention to the yellow-gray marks under the arms. Then she looked up at him.
“Vodka. Makes it smell better.”
Rust might’ve said thank you. Honestly, he can’t remember much from the rest of that exchange before his shirt was drying off the locker door and he had nothing to do but squint at the floor. His eyes skimmed her way again. This time, she was bent down there, running white rectangles through her hair. Making conversation was probably the appropriate thing to do there, seeing as she’d done him a favor. So, that’s what he did.
“What’s that?”
“Dryer sheet. Takes the frizz out.”
He nodded to himself. He sniffed his shirt. Damned if it wasn’t an improvement. Like she read his mind, Indiana said, “Don’t put that on ‘til it’s dry. Has to evaporate.”
“Where’d you pick that up?” he politely asked, “Your mom teach you?”
Abelard slammed her locker. She fidgeted with the lock. Maybe thought he was taking a jab, or something. “My dad. He had a lot of tricks.”
Rust couldn’t think of any other questions he wanted to know the answer to. Nor could he watch her walk his way again. This time, she passed his back. But she stopped there. He felt it in his fucking spine. Like lightning about to strike, his skin prickled, his hair raised. And then she breathed, and he was certain, positive, that she took a whiff of him.
When Indiana came around the other side, she shoved a hand his way. In it, deodorant. A speed stick. Irish Spring.
“You can use this,” she said, “You still smell.”
He stared in those glacial eyes for any sign of meanness or humor. Didn’t find a damned thing. So, he took her offering and watched her leave. Took him a while to get his head on straight. So long, Marty’s ass, perpetually late, spooked him in the shower stalls. Rust had just been standing there, under the water, sleeping with his eyes open. Dreaming, actually. Seven thirty had turned to eight-thirty, and he was still waterboarding himself.
Yeah. Time had him tangled up pretty good back then.