Maelstrom

Chapter 3: Really John

After we parked, I led Fretting Freddy past the desk clerk, who didn't so much as glance in our direction; judging from the sounds coming from the tiny TV under the lip of the desk, he was watching one of the pornos the motel offered on pay-per-view, and it sounded like it was getting to a "good" part.

As we walked down the dim hallway, I fished the room key from my jacket pocket. "Lucky 7," I whispered as I unlocked the door and waved Anxious Andy into the room ahead of me.

"What's your name?" I asked, tired of mentally concocting alliterative nicknames for someone I was about to arrest. I gestured for him to have a seat on the bed.

"John," he answered, not sitting but looking around the shabby room with evident and growing unease on his plain, but pleasant, face.

I smiled. "I've known a lot of johns," I said playfully as I moved over to the dresser opposite the end of the bed.

"No, it really is 'John,'" he insisted.

Something in his voice made me turn around. He was so tense. His hands, now deprived of the steering wheel, were clenched into fists at his sides. I looked pointedly at the bed, then turned back to the dresser and clicked open my purse when I heard him sit. The grip of my Glock was front and center. I wondered if I would have to pull it tonight along with my badge. I deliberately squashed the butterflies that had suddenly fluttered to life in my stomach, and kept my voice light as I lured what was hopefully just a poor jerk from the suburbs into making me an illegal offer to have sex for money.

"Condoms are on the nightstand. What are you in the mood for? Quick and dirty, or something a little more ..." I trailed off as I turned around to face Really John. He was crying.

I froze. I was sure that one or more of the other women who worked undercover in Vice had come across this situation before; hell, some of them had been doing this, somehow, for years. But for me, this was a first, and I was completely flummoxed. My possibly dangerous, certainly lecherous soon-to-be bust had just melted into an actual human being.

It was like I'd been hit with a bolt gun. This assignment was supposed to be "cleaning up the trash" – something temporary that I was doing until I'd proven that I had the stomach for real police work and could put in for a transfer to narcotics or homicide – I had never thought about the men I brought back to this room as anything but criminals. But here one was quietly weeping, trying but unable to hold the tears back any longer.

"I'm sorry," John choked out. He took his glasses off and put them on the nightstand next to the box of condoms I had mentioned. "I don't really know why I'm here. I just ... needed ... I just needed to be away from all those people who ... who knew my wife, who ... they ... I know they're just trying to be nice, but ..." He finally recognized that his efforts to wipe away his tears were useless and just abandoned himself to sobbing, his hunched shoulders shaking under the dark evergreen weave of his sweater.

I left my purse on the dresser, inched over to the bed, and sat down beside him, hesitantly laying one of my manicured hands on his forearm. He stiffened for a moment, then grabbed my hand where it perched on his slightly scratchy sweater and wept, his body shaking with the force of his grief. I stiffened as he turned and laid his head on my furry shoulder, but gradually I relaxed and reached out my other hand to carefully stroke his surprisingly soft hair when it became clear that this was all he was going to do.

Nearly twenty minutes later, his crying had stopped. This time, when he wiped his tears away, his face stayed dry. I shifted slightly and wordlessly invited him to lie down on the creaky bed, pulling the pillows out so our heads rested on the relatively clean sheets instead of the who-knows-when-it-was-last-washed bedspread.

"She died the week before Thanksgiving," he whispered, staring up at the ceiling. I lay down on my side next to him and awkwardly took his hand. This time he didn't grip mine back; his whole body was limp as he stared at the stained ceiling, seeing something other than discolored, peeling paint on the old drywall.

John then proceeded to tell me the entire heart-wrenching account of his wife and her protracted, but ultimately losing, battle with ovarian cancer.

When he'd finally narrated his way to the present, he sniffed again. "I put Ryan and Jake down on the sofa bed in their grandparents' den tonight, and as soon as they fell asleep I got in the car and ... I don't even know how I got to that street you were on. I just saw all those women and I saw you and ... Beth had blond hair, too, before it all fell out, from the chemo, and last Christmas the boys gave her a big plastic barrette with a sparkly poinsettia on it. It was tacky, not at all her style, but she wore it all day anyway like it was the prettiest thing she'd ever owned. I saw that flower in your hair and ... when I got to the end of the block, I circled around and came back. I don't know what I was thinking, I just ... I don't know."

I squeezed his hand gently, saying nothing, reluctant to bring him out of his memories, back to a seedy motel room and a hooker who looked a little like his dead wife. Somehow, that seemed like the worst place anyone could be for Christmas.

For the next hour, John rambled on about Beth. Gradually, his droning cadence slowed, and the pauses between sentences became longer and longer until finally he succumbed to profound exhaustion, both emotional and physical, and slept – really slept – probably for the first time in months.

I lay back and watched the neon flicker on the ceiling. What now? Go back out to the street in the hopes of picking up someone much, much nastier before this shift-from-hell was over? There was no way. I felt completely drained, rubbed raw by fielding that much grief, my traitorous sympathetic heart straining against the scars left by my own tragic past.

I sighed soundlessly, careful not to wake John. Vice wasn't what I wanted to be doing, on that point I was very clear. My life had ended up in a tailspin eight years ago. I'd pushed myself to my graduation from NYU through a haze of sleepless nights, self-denial, and antidepressants. Law school was already set up, and I bulldozed through it in record time with a near-emotionless Puritan work ethic. My path, up to a point, had been mapped out in happier days, and I had only needed to follow it. With degrees in hand, though, I'd been lost.

A couple of years tooling around Europe had helped. I revisited places I had been as a child, traveled to new cities and sites I'd always wanted to see, lived in hostels and hotels, worked in bars and lived off family money wired regularly into my account, perfected my French slang, considered and rejected extensive tattooing multiple times, tried to fall in love with a beautiful boy who was by some miracle still an optimistic dreamer even after years of busking with his violin on street corners in Paris. But despite my best efforts to lose myself, to relinquish control and just ... be, I simply couldn't do it, not with alcohol or drugs, love or work, travel or art. So I stumbled from city to city, searching blindly for a bridge between the happy security of my past and whatever lay ahead.

Which was not this, I decided abruptly. This stopped tonight. Really John would be my last fake john, I decided. I wasn't sure how that was going to go over with my lieutenant – probably not well, since he already wasn't my biggest fan, but on the other hand he might be delighted to be proven right and see me fail – but I couldn't do this anymore. Anything would be better – desk duty, leaving the force, even a transfer to the traffic division. But not this. I couldn't do this anymore. I would tell Lt Washington when he was back at the precinct, day after tomorrow.

I slipped carefully off the bed and grabbed my phone from my purse. Make that tomorrow, I mentally amended as the device jiggled briefly to life. 2:36. I did some quick calculations and set a silent alarm before easing myself back onto the bed and tucking the phone under my butt, where its vibrations were sure to wake me. If, that is, I managed to fall asleep.