The Face of Death

She doesn't react. She can't tear her eyes away from Juan's face.

She sees, I realize. Like I see. Like James sees. Like that poor FBI agent who'd blown her head off. Sarah sees Juan, and understands. Her agony is his orgasm. But the reasons behind it are all tragedy and madness.

I can feel her need coming off her, a burning. Her finger trembles on the trigger, and she stands, poised in the moment. She wants him dead, but she's afraid. Afraid it won't be enough. That it won't last long enough. That it'll be over too fast, and that none of it will fill the hole.

And she's right. She could kill him for an eternity, and in the end, she'd only lose herself.

What do I say to her? I'm going to get one chance. Maybe two. Juan continues to pray, fervent, certain, proud.

Insane. He'd started out organized, but Dr. Child had been right. The lunacy had been there, waiting and latent, like a virus. I drown out his voice with my own thoughts, my eyes fixed on Sarah's angel face.

Falling, but not yet fallen.

Theresa, Buster, Desiree. Loved and loved by. Goodness and smiles and . . . gone. Where was the key? What would pull her away from the edge she was about to tumble into?

It comes to me softly, feathers, not thunder. A ghost-kiss. I lean forward and put my lips to her ear. I whisper to her and I put the force of my own self into my voice, my own pain survived. We're both wingless angels, scarred inside and out, bleeding from wounds that fight not to heal. The decision is not about goodness or evil, about happiness or sadness, about hope or despair. The decision is the simplest of all: the decision to live or to die. To gamble that as life continues, suffering will abate, and something better will eventually abide.

I put Matt and Alexa into my voice, and hope that they will carry my words into her heart.

'Your mother is watching you from the clouds, baby. Forever and always, and she doesn't want this. The only place she lives is inside of you, Sarah. That's the last part of her. If you kill him, she dies for good.' I straighten up, move away. 'That's all I'm going to say, honey. It's your choice now. You choose.'

Juan narrows his eyes at me. He examines Sarah. Smiles like a snake lapping up milk mixed with sugar.

'You've already chosen, Little Pain. Do you need my help? Do you need me to remind you, to fan the flame inside so that you can do His will?' He licks his lips. 'Your mother? I touched her body after she died. I touched her private places. I touched her inside.'

Sarah freezes. I freeze too. I wait for her to kill him. A dark part of me, the place where I keep my own killer's eyes, forgets my purpose and wants her to kill him. Instead, she begins to shake. It starts as a small quivering, like the tremors that precede an earthquake. It moves from her hands to her arms to her shoulders. Down her chest, to her legs, a terrible shaking, till it almost seems like she should fly apart, and then--she freezes.

Her head goes back and she howls.

It's awful.

It's the sound of a mother who woke up and realized that she rolled over on her baby in her sleep, suffocating him. It drills into my heart.

As she howls, I see Juan, and I get to witness his exaltation. Watch him quiver, see him shake, watch as his upper body pitches forward, as his fists clench and his hands curl. Hear his groan. Long, low, full of slithering things and the rolling, stinking, sticky dead. It harmonizes with the sound of Sarah through discordance, demonic. Juan's fall is complete. He's no better now than the men who made him this way.

Sarah falls to the floor and curls into herself, tighter, tighter, tighter. She continues to howl.

'Don't move,' I tell Juan.

He ignores me. He can't tear his eyes away from Sarah's agony. When he speaks, his voice trembles in wonder:

'There I am.'

In The End:

The Things That Glow

62

'ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS, HONEY?'

Bonnie smiles up at me, serene.

We are about to enter an interrogation room. Juan will be there. Bonnie has demanded to see him, for reasons she won't share with me. I had refused, at first. I even got angry about it, something I'd never been with Bonnie.

She'd remained resolute.

'Why?' I had asked. 'Can you at least tell me why?'

She pantomimed handing something to someone.

'You have something to give? You have a gift?'

She nods. Hesitates. Makes a motion of handing something to me, then handing something to--she points to the name on the paper. Juan.

'You have a gift for me and for Juan?'

A smile, serene. A nod.

She will not let it go. I've relented. I'd hoped that Juan would save me from this by refusing to see us. To my surprise and unease, he'd agreed. So here we are.

Bonnie has a notepad under her arm. She carries a marker in her hand. They wouldn't let her bring in a pen-- too sharp. It took some arm-bending to get them to allow the marker.

We enter the room. Juan is already there, cuffed at wrist and ankles, secured through a link bolted to the floor. He smiles as we enter. It's a broad smile, a lazy smile, a dog in a nice patch of sun. The sinner, for now, not the saint.

I'm told he moves back and forth between these two temperaments. He spent one recent afternoon in the prison chapel, on his knees, arms spread wide to God. That same night he raped his cellmate, chuckling as the young man screamed. Juan does all of his praying in solitary confinement now.

'Agent Barrett. And little Bonnie. How are you both?'

'Fine, thank you,' I reply, trying for dispassionate. Once he had realized he was going to live, Juan had spilled the beans on everything. He was, of course, proud of his accomplishments. He was righteous, and now, he had an audience to preach to. We hung on his every word and let him hang himself. It had taken him some time to establish with certainty which of the two task-force members had betrayed him.

He'd spent years tracking down and documenting the flow of money from its original source. He'd managed to get proof on Tobias Walker first, over a decade ago. The FBI end of things was more difficult--Jacob Stern had been smart. Juan found out that Stern had come to the FBI via the LAPD, and had, in fact, served in the same precinct as Walker at one time. This had raised Juan's suspicions. His ruthlessness and persistence eventually got him the information he wanted.

Walker had been the primary contact with the underworld, the real Judas of the act. Afterward, he'd needed Stern's assistance in covering the money trail and so had brought the agent in on the scheme. Juan had proof of Stern's complicity, of Walker's sins. They were sitting on Michael Kingsley's computer.

'I was going to give you the password and let you extradite Stern. Once he was here '--Juan had smiled with too many teeth showing--'I would have taken my revenge. It would have looked like an accident, of course, as I was supposed to be 'dead,' but I could have lived with that. The important thing is that the world would know, would understand that symbols mean nothing, the soul means all.'

In this, I suppose, he's succeeded. Stern is mid-extradition. I hope he dies a horrible death in prison. I hold him and Walker most responsible for everything that has occurred. They made this monster, and if Juan had settled for visiting himself on just the two of them, I would have considered justice served. Instead, he wreaked indiscriminate destruction over many lives and numerous years. He destroyed the innocent and I can't forgive him for it.

We asked Juan about AD Jones. He'd revealed a surprising streak of pragmatism. 'Too risky, killing an Assistant Director. I was willing to wait to kill him at a later date.'

All of this explains why he had come out into the open. It was a confluence of events, designed to lead us to Cabrera and to expose Stern. Once Stern was here . . .