by Paul Bishop
“Sick?” Fey felt her heart block her throat. She couldn’t breathe.
“Dying,” Tucker said. There was no emotion in his voice. “Didn’t you know?”
Fey felt stunned. She swallowed. “No. I didn’t know. What is it? Cancer?”
“I would venture to bet he wishes it was.”
“What do you mean?” The world around Fey seemed to have faded to nothingness.
“He has Lou Gehrig’s disease – amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”
“I’ve heard of it, but what the hell is it?” Fey fought to stop tears from coming. Stop it, she said internally. He’s just some guy you know. She knew she was lying to herself.
“It’s a motor neuron disease. The nerves that control muscular activity degenerate within the brain and spinal cord. That’s why he’s so gaunt – his muscles are wasting away.”
Fey swallowed hard, feeling despair.
“There’s no cure and the end of things is real ugly. The mind remains clear, but your body slowly shuts down around you until you can’t speak, swallow, move, or breathe.”
“How long does he have?” Fey thought of Ash playing the piano at the Blue Cat. He’d only done a few songs, but she thought he’d looked pooped afterwards. She had put it down to fatigue from the day.
Tucker shrugged. “Far as I can tell he should be dead by now. He was diagnosed over a year ago. In some people, though, it’s slower moving. Sometimes it plateaus. Some people go two, maybe three years after being diagnosed, but it always gets them in the end. That’s why this case is so important to Ash. It’s his last monster hunt. I never would have jerked him around, if I’d have known about MoJo. Even I draw the line at baiting the dying.”
“There’s no cure?” Fey asked. She knew the answer, but needed to hear it said aloud.
“Only death,” Tucker said. “Only death.”
Chapter 53
A hundred and fifty miles and three hours later, Fey and Ash had finally reached the point where they could laugh about the situation.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been that sucked in,” Ash said. They were back in West LA eating fast food at an In-N-Out burger joint. Their burgers dripped with fried onions, cholesterol, and fat grams. A cop’s delight.
“I kept saying it couldn’t be true,” Ash continued, “but there was a part of me that had really bought into the possibility.” Ash bit, chewed, and swallowed. “Evil twin my ass.” He shook his head and Fey laughed.
“I thought we were caught by surprise when Sister Ruth dropped her bomb,” she said. “But Martin Morgan was shock therapy by comparison. I’ve had a lot of strange days in this business, however, none like today.”
After returning from the race track bathroom, Ash hadn’t argued when Fey said she’d drive back to LA. Tucker was more than happy to escape from under the proverbial gun by abandoning them and taking a cab back to his own car.
Half of the journey home, Ash had ridden in silence. His head had been tipped back on the headrest, his eyes closed. Fey couldn’t figure if he was still seething with anger over the situation or simply exhausted.
Where the San Diego 405 Freeway and the Golden State 5 Freeway intersected, Fey stayed with the 405, and Ash had opened his eyes.
“He told you, didn’t he?”
“Who told me what?” Fey asked.
“Don’t be coy,” Ash told her. “I don’t have enough time left to be coy.”
“Okay, he told me.”
“He had no right.”
Fey didn’t argue the point, even though she was glad Tucker had told her about Ash’s battle with ALS. “How did he find out?” she asked.
“The same way he finds everything out – intuition and money. Because of the books he’s written, he’s been following my career closely. He sensed there was something strange about my early retirement from the Bureau, and he bought himself a look at my medical files.”
Fey felt there was no sense beating around the bush. “How much time do you have left?”
“Hard to say,” Ash told her. “Things seemed to have flattened out for the last six months, but recently my legs have been getting weaker and I can barely still play the piano. I’ll never be able to do what I did last night at the Blue Cat again.”
“I’m sorry,” Fey said.
“Yeah. Me too.”
They drove in silence again for a while. “I guess I don’t understand why you’re still working,” Fey said eventually. “Shouldn’t you be visiting friends and relatives, getting your papers in order, taking that trip to Europe you always planned on taking, going to Mexico to find a miracle cure? From what you told me about your father, it’s not like you don’t have the money.”
Ash chuckled at that. “I have no relatives. For the most part I’d rather be alone than with friends. My papers have never been out of order. I’ve been to Europe. And there is no cure.” He shifted to find a more comfortable position in the car. “This job is what I do,” he said. “It defines what I am. So, I’m going to do it until I can’t do it anymore. Then I’m going to end it. I may be stuck with dying, but I’m never going to allow myself to become helpless.”
“What does that mean?” Fey asked quietly.
“You’re not naive. It means exactly what you think it does. I’m not going to have somebody carry me to the bathroom. I’m not going to wait until I’m too weak to even breathe.”
“Suicide?”
“If it comes to that. But perhaps I’ll get lucky and fall in front of a bus.”
“That’s a heavy burden to carry.”
“Not really. Once you’ve moved past the ‘why me’ stage, the ‘poor me’ stage, the ‘I hate God’ stage, and the ‘life sucks’ stage, acceptance becomes a relief.” Ash smiled, really smiled, in a way that lifted his whole face out of the shadows usually cast by his angular and deep set features. “I’m okay with it. I really am. I just want to get this one last monster.”
“We’ll get him,” Fey promised. “And when we do, we’ll make sure he has his full complement of appendages.”
At the In-N-Out, they tried to put all they had learned from the day in prospective. They kept coming back, however, to the shock of Martin ‘MoJo’ Morgan’s missing limbs.
“I felt we were in a lost episode of the Twilight Zone,” Fey said.
“I know what you mean. It was like The X Files or something.”
After their initial shock, Fey and Ash had let Tucker step forward and ask just enough questions to establish that Martin Morgan had lost his arm and leg as the result of a prison fight. There was no way he was up in LA burying bodies and planting evidence. He was a convicted violent pervert, but he wasn’t their violent pervert.
Martin Morgan had wanted to know what it was all about, but they had left him hanging – no pun intended – not wanting to give anything to the news media or anyone else to muddy the waters. The case was complicated enough without giving Devon Wyatt more ammunition.
Fey had only eaten half of her burger when she set it aside.
“What’s the matter?” Ash asked her.
“Nothing’s the matter.” There was something different in her voice.
“Yes, there is,” Ash said.
“No, there isn’t,” Fey insisted.
“Don’t con a con,” Ash told her. “We’ve both been ignoring the fact of our responses to each other, but we both know it’s there. Don’t tell me there’s nothing wrong.”
“But there isn’t. You’re reading the signal the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t think you were that stupid, Ash. I want you to take me home and make love to me.”
“Wait a minute.” Ash said. “Does this have anything to do with me dying?”
“You bet it does,” Fey told him. “I don’t want to miss my chance. I want you now, before it’s too late.”
They barely managed to get themselves onto Ash’s bed. Their clothes went one way, their bodies another. The coupling wa
s an explosion, a release of pent up passions and frustrations. And when they fell over the edge together it was like dropping into a black hole of inner consciousness.
Coupled together, they lay with arms and legs wrapped tightly around each other’s liquid drenched torsos. Little by little they moved apart until they lay spooned and dozing.
Fey was eventually brought back to consciousness by the sound of water running. Around her red and white candles flickered in a slight breeze from an unknown source.
Naked and chilled, she moved lightly to the bathroom and found Ash filling the huge, claw-footed porcelain tub with steamy water. She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his chest, pressing her breasts into his back.
“Hi,” he said, turning to hold her and kiss her.
There were other candles in the bathroom providing the only source of light. Again they were a mixture of red and white and all shapes, tall, short, fat, slender.
When the water was ready, Ash slipped in first, his back resting against the curve of the tub, and Fey then slipped in to nestle into him. It was intimate in a way that went beyond the boundaries of usual first time lovers.
They had both been lost in languid thought for a while when Fey asked, “Do you believe in fairy tales, Ash?” Her voice sounded strange in the interesting acoustics of the room.
He was sunk to his armpits in hot water, his legs extended the full length of the tub. Fey was in front of him, her back still nestled into his chest. His arms were around her, hands resting gently on her breasts. Steam rose toward the ceiling, glinting on its way in the light of the flickering candles.
“You mean as in once upon a time, or they lived happily ever after?”
“Yeah.”
Ash paused before answering, as if carefully considering his response. “Once upon a time? Maybe,” he said eventually. “Happily ever after? I don’t think so. I’ve never seen it happen.”
“As a cynic, Ash, you’re right up there with the best of them.” Fey said. Her gentle tone took any sting out of the words, turning them from a criticism to an understanding.
“It’s a hard earned frame of mind.”
“So I’ve heard.”
His hands cupped her breasts with slightly more insistence, the tips of his long fingers tenderly urging her nipples to hardness. She sighed, feeling the physical center of his passion hardening against the small of her back.
He leaned his head forward and kissed the back of her neck. His teeth nipped at her shoulders, and his tongue flicked out to feather the short tail of hair that ran down the back of her neck.
Fey put her hands on either side of the tub and pulled herself up and out of the water.
“Hey,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“I want to make love to you again right now,” she said with determination. She stepped out of the tub and reached back to help pull Ash to his feet. “But not in the water.”
“Why? Are you worried about scaring the fish?”
“Har, har,” Fey gave a casual fake laugh as she pulled on Ash’s hand again.
He followed her out of the tub and allowed her to lead him from the bathroom into the bedroom. The warmth of a Santa Ana breeze caressed them through what Fey now saw was an open window. The stained-glass of the French doors filtered the moonlight and cast colored shadows across their wet, glistening skin.
The candles flickered in the bedroom as they had done in the bathroom. Here, tall, thick, white, dripless candles were grouped together in various stages of meltdown. Scattered by the touch of serendipity were single, slender red candles standing proudly in their autonomy.
As she reached the bed, Fey dropped Ash’s hand. She leaned forward, bending at the waist and placed her palms flat on the edge of the mattress. She spread her legs slightly and swayed her backside.
Ash stepped behind her and bent his chest down to touch her back. His hands reached around her to caress her breasts again, as they had done in the bath. She could feel his hardness pressing against the soft skin that covered the hard muscles of her buttocks.
“I want you inside me now,” she said. Her voice was tinged with both demand and desire.
His hands moved back to grasp her hips as he stood up and pushed forward to enter the heart of her. They both gasped and Fey fell forward onto her forearms.
“Oh ... Ash,” she said, pushing back to take him all the way in. His hands on her hips felt like hot talons where they grasped her. She could feel each finger burning into her flesh, then he pulled back and pushed forward and she forgot about all sensations except for the one exploding inside of her.
Ash watched her move with him as if he were almost detached from the act. He followed her forward as she crawled onto the mattress on her knees. Inside his emotional heart he felt his emotions lurch. He wanted this woman more than he had wanted anything in his life. He wanted her more than life itself.
Right there in that room, inside of her, he could have died without regret, blessed and cleansed by the passion he felt for her. Feeling began to spread through his body as she moved back against him, urging him physically deeper into the center of her being. A bright light seemed to explode inside him and he felt electric as adrenaline injected into his blood. His heart was pounding and he felt sure she must hear it.
“I want you,” her voice was a husky rasp. “Please, please.”
He pulled her hips to him and held her tightly as she squirmed against him.
“Yes! Yes!” she said. Demanding. Insistent.
Feeling Ash thicken and heat inside of her, Fey lurched forward and pulled herself clear. Rolling over, she spread her legs wide and reached up for him. Her arms circled his neck and pulled his body down and into her. She wrapped her legs around his waist with her arms still holding firm around his neck. Bucking up against him, she buried her face in his shoulder, her teeth bared on his skin.
The pleasure, the love, and the lust that she felt for Ash flushed through her. His body was lean and hard, a musculature once won and held through hard work and sweat, now carved by the encroaching demon of his ALS.
She smelled his maleness and licked the moisture from his shoulders.
Inside, she felt her moment building. He seemed to be still growing, probing deeper and deeper, and then suddenly she was on the edge of her personal precipice. She waited one heartbeat – and then threw herself over the edge and dropped into forever.
Ash knew a second before that Fey was in her moment. He raised himself up, with her still clinging to him, wrapping his arms completely around her. Then he dropped back to the mattress and surrendered himself to her shudders.
He heard her whisper, “I love you,” and they were the most liberating words he had ever heard.
“And I you,” he whispered in return in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere out of the darkness – somewhere out of his dark Celtic past. It was the voice of an ancient ancestor running naked into battle, carrying only sword and stone, down the heather covered hills of his green and sacred isle.
With the change of voice came the rushing of an incredible waterfall inside him. The rushing bust through him as if a dam had exploded. For an endless tick in time he lost himself. Died and was reborn.
She fell into the center of him and drowned in passion.
He erupted into her inner being and found a sanctuary.
Finally, they lay together. Each was spent and yet fulfilled. Each was finding their way back to individuality, but still with a craving need for the other.
Both were thinking of the words they had said, and how impossible they were right here, right now. Ridiculous, yet not.
“Happily ever after?” Ash asked quietly, knowing that there was no ever after.
“Only in fairy tales,” Fey responded, also knowing the truth.
Ash smiled in the night.
His voice was still tinged with the past when he whispered to her, “Once upon a time ...”
Chapter 54
Fey had slept late
and felt wonderful for it. Both she and Ash were realists. They were comfortable with each other. By not addressing the future and confronting the inevitability that it would bring, they were able to live in the moment and not allow the future to detract from immediate pleasure. Fey had always pigeon-holed her life in that manner, but all cops learn to do it – the higher the highs, the lower the lows. Keep them separated, don’t let one affect the other.
After a quick breakfast of toast and coffee, however, it was time to get back to work. In Fey’s eyes Ash looked more worn than the day before. She knew it was because her perception had changed through learning about his battle with ALS, but she still couldn’t get the loud ticking of a clock out of her head.
The cellular phone in Fey’s purse chirped. She had only just turned it back on after leaving it off the night before, not wanting to be disturbed. Brushing crumbs from her fingers, Fey reached in and pulled it out. Ash was across the kitchen from her buttering another slab of toast in preparation for slathering it with marmalade.
“Hello,” Fey said, holding the instrument up to her ear.
“Fey? It’s Jake.”
Fey grimaced. Jake Traver’s timing never used to be this bad. “I can’t talk right now, Jake.” Hadn’t she made it clear that what they had was over?
“Wait! Don’t hang up!” There was something in Jake’s voice that set off alarms in Fey’s brain. “This isn’t about us.”
“Then what is it about?” Fey asked, not really wanting to know. There hadn’t been enough of the high yet. She wasn’t ready for a low.
“Have you watched any television since last night?” Jake knew Fey rarely turned it on.
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Fey. Really sorry.”
Fey turned away from the kitchen counter. Ash studiously buttered his toast for a third time. “I thought you said this wasn’t about us.”
“It isn’t,” Jake said. “Turn on channel seven and brace yourself for everything to hit the fan.”
“What’s going on, Jake?”