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And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. --Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
i.
Sometimes, when Rust is on his fourth day without sleep and his head is swimming with pills, he looks into the empty corner of his empty apartment and can almost see him crouched in the corner like a leather-winged gargoyle, all shades of mud-brown and charcoal-black: hair matted down, smoke streaming from the butt clenched between his teeth, hands gunpowder-stained. One dusty boot planted on a stack of books, the other grinding dirt and ash into the carpet; the stench of whiskey and blood and sweat. He grins lazily, a malevolent rictus: Hey, man. Miss me?
And oh he does, he does.
ii.
It's short for crash test dummy. “We throw him at the wall,” he hears Agent McKenna say over the phone, “to see how hard the wall is.” He laughs. Rust doesn't. He just runs his tongue over his teeth and licks blood away.
iii.
His new self forms around him like layers on a pearl. Crash grew up in Houston; the roughness of his skin is from baking heat, not brittle crusts of snow. He never knew his father, never saw a sky unpolluted by city light, never ate anything that didn't come from inside a fast-food wrapper. He has been to Tijuana, to Honduras, to Arizona and California and Vegas but not Alaska or Canada or France or Spain. He grew up under the twin shadows of poverty and death, though, like Rust. That's his way in, whether it's protection or arms or whores or coke or meth or horse: the gaping, moronic greed of the criminal lowlife. “What, money don't spend?” he asks whenever he's in danger of not getting his way. It always works.
Crash doesn't laugh much, but when he does it's a low staccato burst that shows all his teeth. He's standoffish, a little cool; there are certain aspects of Rust's nature that aren't going anywhere, however deep the cover. When someone needs warming up he invents stories that make him a little more likable, usually about his mother—Crash's mother, that is, a hooker from outside Los Alamos—and three imaginary sisters (a dominatrix, a heroin smuggler, and a nun). He's no charmer—“I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be organized crime,” he tells Ginger once, and nearly gets his teeth knocked down his throat for his trouble. But he's useful: knowledgeable, resourceful, surprisingly dependable for someone who's always about seventy percent coked out of his skull. He extracts information with his fists the way Rust used to with his words. Smart, though, in a way the barely literate lot he runs with can respect: he can look at a situation and see every possible angle, every escape route, every potential way things can go tits-up.
Crash knows everyone and everyone knows Crash, and while they don't dislike him, they don't precisely like him, either. He's a rusty and grease-grimed tool that keeps the machine going, and everyone on both sides of the war knows that sooner or later he'll be kicked under a car and misplaced and that no one will even notice he's gone.
iv.
Morales keeps him in petty (and not-so-petty) cash most of the time but he's been out of pocket long enough that he's short and he'd swear on a stack of Bibles that he doesn't need cocaine but he certainly likes it. He pawns a thin hoop of gold in Juarez for $75. “You married, man?” the IC Sergeant-at-Arms asks him, surprised. Crash interacts with the hangers-on enough to keep suspicion at bay, but fact is he can never seem to get high enough to relax completely around women. He figures they probably think he's queer, which is dangerous but less dangerous than the truth.
He could lie small, just say he fenced the ring and leave it at that. But he lies big; it gives him a rush sometimes, seeing how far he can push it. “Was,” he says, and spins a tale of a sweet little blonde thing named Penny, an elopement at age sixteen (two years below the age of consent, but they bribed a local preacher with $20 and a handle of Evan Williams), the rings he knicked from a kiosk at the mall, a bitch mother-in-law who never thought Crash would amount to nothin', a couple of drunken hookups (her with his cousin Roy, him with Becca, the bitch who'd beat Penny out for head cheerleader), a divorce almost as quick as the marriage—“no, no kids, thank fuck for small favors.” The fabricated details come spinning out of him like pronouncements from an ancient oracle. By the time he's done he can see her, down to the bright red ribbon in her yellow curls.
Truth is he'd lifted their rings from the evidence locker back when he was working robbery, two days after he proposed to Claire. He lied and told her they were from a jeweler's downtown, because I can't bring myself to spend more cash than my father saw in a year on a symbol that I'm already sure doesn't mean anything was a sentence he didn't know how to say. Truth is he can't remember what her face looks like half the time anymore. He likes the Penny story better.
v.
Crash has killed twenty-three people. The Task Force knows about twelve of them.
vi.
Rust doesn't want to join the IC brotherhood and is glad when they decline to patch him in; he wants to keep close without having them up in his business. Crash doesn't want to join, either—he's not a man to be held down by someone else's agenda. Everything he does these days has at least two motives, and he's never sure anymore which one's the real one.
No, I'm not using, he tells Morales. At least no more than I have to—keep up appearances, you know. Morales knows it's bullshit; knows, too, that he can't call him on it, not when they're paying the man to be a professional liar. Not when Crash is a chimera the DEA created, a Frankenstein's monster built from parts dug out of graves and evidence lockers that Rust sewed together in his lab. So he says nothing, not when Rust comes in with dilated pupils or an arm full of pinpricks, when he nods off at the table at Denny's or pukes in the back of the car, because he knows cocaine and meth are the lightning bolts that get the corpse moving.
He finds it troubling when his charge talks about Crash in the third person, even moreso when he does the same thing in regards to Rust. “We should pull him,” he tells McKenna. “He's been out there too long.”
“Lousy fuckup's lucky not to be in jail,” McKenna says. “We don't owe him shit.”
vii.
Of the twenty-three people he's killed, he only remembers seventeen of them.
viii.
The impact rocks him backwards and he hits his head hard on concrete and he remembers the sky, impossibly bright and wide and blue, and he thinks well at least that's finally done with and then his vision grays over. But when he comes to in the ambulance he's more afraid than he's been at any point in the last four years, consumed with terror that he won't be able to tell them who he is, or that they won't believe him; that he'll wake up handcuffed to a hospital bed or be left to rot in a South Texas jail. Probably what those fuckers in Houston had planned all along.
I'm Detective Rustin Cohle with Texas State PD, he keeps trying to say. But it feels like a lie, and there's blood in his throat.
ix.
The first one hits not long after he gets out of surgery—a gaping black hole that opens up in the wall right where the TV should be. Its edges are silvery, like oily water, and it pulsates in time with the respirator and the heart monitor. At the time he assumes he's dying, a process he watches with detached interest: will the blackness just swallow him up and annihilate him, or is it some kind of portal to Hell? The next one comes about three days later—jagged flashes like lightning, violet and peach, crackling along the edges of his vision. By then withdrawal has kicked in so he figures it’s that. But a month passes, the holes in his side heal, the shakes and sweats and vomiting are followed by a crushing, catatonic melancholy, and the hallucinations are still going strong. By then they're shipping him off to Lubbock, so he concludes that he's either some kind of fucked-up half-crucified methhead sage, or just garden-variety crazy.
He doesn't speak a word about it in North Shore, not even on the days when the visions are coming hard and fast and he can barely concentrate long enough to string a sentence together. He reckons mentioning it will only buy him more time in there. It's three weeks before one of the seemingly endless parade of therapists (redheaded cunt, the grief counselor; asshole who chews his pens, the depression guy; perpetually cheerful douchebag, the PTSD guy) brings up the possibility of neural damage. “You'd tell us if you'd been seeing anything unusual, right, Mr. Cohle?” the shrink (prick with the glasses, the unfortunate bastard in charge of managing Rust's stable of addictions) asks, searching.
He hasn't said one true thing since he landed in this place. He knows it, and most of the shrinks know it, too, but there's this one dude in here who keeps pissing on everything and there's a girl, barely eighteen, who screams every night until her throat bleeds. The chainsmoking junkie cop who spends sundown to sunup at the window watching the stars move across the sky, arms wrapped tight around his scarred torso so he doesn't break apart, is the least of their concerns. He lights a cigarette and stretches the corners of his face into what he hopes is an approximation of a smile. “Sure thing, Doc,” he says.
These guys think they've got him in the box and not the other way around, but the truth is they're as easy to read as any petty criminal. Tell them what they want to hear and they'll let you out soon enough.
x.
North Shore's affiliated with the local diocese. They're pretty good about keeping God out of the therapy sessions, but the Bibles in every bedside table are the only available reading material and the crucifixes on the wall are the only thing to look at. He sits up all night and watches the lights from the parking lot throw shadows from the cross's arms, stretching out over the blank white walls like a spider's legs.
He began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch.”
He didn't think about her for four years. The shrinks don't know about that, because they'll think he's either lying or a sociopath. He is not avoidant; he is unable--her memory is a fresh bruise and something in his brain draws back involuntarily when he tries to touch it. His body, too: he thinks of her hands and feels himself break out into a sweat. Thinks of the way her hair curled just a bit, like his, and feels his breakfast violently trying to exit his stomach. He'd dealt with that for four years the only way he knew how, and it's amazing what you can get away from if you just don't stop running. But now he's hitched up hard, tripped over his own feet, fallen flat in the dust and there isn't anywhere else to go.
He fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him.
It'll be easier in the morning, he knows that. There will be terrible oatmeal and conversations about terrible oatmeal and that one guy who screams at the fruit, and then therapy, and therapy, and more therapy. He will take the pills they hand him in a little paper cup and smoke and stand at the window and observe the flight patterns of birds, and it will be easier. Not easy, but easier, like laying your palms flat on smoldering coals rather than throwing your whole body into the fire.
But Christ it doesn't end; he doesn’t ever get to put it down. He'd thought that if he threw himself hard enough into his narco work he'd either get gunned down or fry his brain so badly she'd disappear. He didn’t expect to still be here, and he doesn’t remember how to live in the world. Hell, maybe he never knew how.
“Take this cup from me.”
He knows what the shrinks mean when they talk about acceptance. They mean accept Sophia's death, accept your addictions, accept your mother and Claire and how they left and they left, accept your father and his unspeakable shortcomings, accept the things Crash did and the things you didn't do to stop him, and the pain will ease. Not vanish, but lessen: scab over and scar and heal into a barely remembered wound. It's a lie. He can learn to make eye contact and smile showing all his teeth and not say “we're all worthless maggots crawling over the scum of the earth” in everyday conversation, he will learn how to scrape himself across the surface of the day without coke and meth and pills and booze, and if he does it long enough and convincingly enough someday he will be permitted to rejoin the human race and everyone will look the other way and pretend that he never removed a smack dealer's teeth with a set of pliers. He will wear ties and get invited to dinner and have a front yard, perhaps with flowers or carefully tended grass. But the pain will always be there, a hollow, festering wound just below the surface of his skin, where half himself was ripped out of the world.
xi.
“I feel like your undercover work has provided a distraction from dealing with your feelings about your daughter's death,” Redheaded Cunt says.
No shit. Rust and Crash both would have said it; only difference is Crash would've knocked over a few of those ugly-ass vases lining the windowsill on his way out. Patient 47564 says nothing. Patient 47564 has been here for three months and he's started to pick his battles very, very carefully. He stares out the window. It's starting to rain.
“I realize it must feel like a relief in the short run. But you can't run from your feelings forever, Rustin.”
“Try me,” he says, and regrets it immediately. She makes a note in her little pad. He stares at her thinks, detachedly, about what’d she’d look like when the cartels were done with her. How much would be left that’s recognizably human. He's there for another month.
xii.
He steals sleeping pills—from noncompliant patients who are tonguing them and hiding them in the walls, mostly, but sometimes he picks the lock on the nurse's station. He takes some and hoards the rest in a Gideons' Bible, in a hollowed-out place just below a verse from Psalms: for He grants sleep to those He loves.
By the time they find his stash, he's got enough pills to kill a horse. “Are you suicidal?” Asshole Who Chews his Pens asks, a blue Bic wedged between his teeth like he's getting ready to deep-throat it. Rust wonders what'd it feel like to take his knife (wherever it is, locked up in a drawer somewhere in a bag labeled Cohle, Rustin Spencer) and unzip the motherfucker's guts.
“I'm just tired,” he replies, but he's not sure what the difference is anymore.
xiii.
The therapists, who usually contradict each other at every turn, agree on one thing: his interpersonal skills could use some work. During routine disagreements over whose turn it is to control the common room remote (arguments he's not even involved in) he finds himself reaching for a gun that isn't there. There's this one Jesus freak, a former pastor who set four Baptist churches on fire, who won't let up on Rust until he breaks a cafeteria tray over his head and screams “God is dead, you dickless moron.” And sometimes during group therapy there's these guys who want to hug you. He's punched three of them so far.
It's one of the nurses who teaches him the trick with his pulse, after she's given him an icepack for his swollen jaw. “I think it'd be a good idea,” she says, “for you to start monitoring your stress levels.” It's the only useful thing he takes away from North Shore.
xiv.
On day 127, Rust delivers an impassioned monologue during group therapy. Subtopics include letting go of anger and learning to forgive yourself. Most of it's cobbled together from the Oprah and Jerry Springer episodes that run interminably in the common room, with a few touches borrowed from the drunken lamentations of a Cuban arms dealer named Miguel whose beloved Jack Russell terrier had been run over by a motorcycle. Miguel had hunted down the driver and cut his arms off. It's a beautiful speech; one sad bastard, the guy who pisses on things, actually applauds. Three days later they approve Rust's release.
Later, he’ll recycle his favorite line from the speech: I walked away from the experience with a greater respect for the sanctity of human life.
xv.
He refuses to meet with anyone from the Task Force, but Morales sends word down the chain of command, tells him to stay away from his old haunts to make sure his cover holds. “Apparently the list of people who want to kill you is as long as my dick,” McKenna says.
“You should be so lucky,” Rust replies.
He ignores the advice, of course. It's like tonguing the wound from a drawn tooth, and part of him hopes that what the chief said is true—live by the sword and all that. Five times he spots guys he used to run with and three of them make eye contact, but no one recognizes him. He starts to wonder if the flashing lights and black holes are real, and everything else has been a hallucination. He presses a hand against the wound in his side; it’s tender, still, after all these months, and the pain clears his head for a moment. Then he said to Thomas, Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.
He wonders if he would recognize himself. He looks in the mirror and sees something worn-down and dried out, like autumn leaves ready for bagging and burning. He's not sure who it is, but it sure as hell ain't Crash, and he can’t quite remember what he looked like before.
xvi.
He lines pills up until they march along the countertop like white ants. He puts a single bullet in the chamber and spins and spins and spins. He contemplates blades, carbon monoxide, head-on collisions. He familiarizes himself with high places. The interest is mostly academic. You’ve got to know your escape routes. Crash always knew his escape routes.
He remembers the crunch of boots in snow. He is cold and hungry and he can feel his legs giving out from under him. They are still six miles from the cabin and have trapped nothing. He is five years old.
“All you got in this life is your body and your soul and the ability keep ‘em together,” Travis says. “The world is harsh and cruel and it don’t owe you shit. You can’t square with that, you don’t deserve the breath in your lungs.”
“Let me go, Pop,” he whispers, running his fingers over the line of tablets like rosary beads. (He fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.”) “Stop being such a fucking pussy,” the voice replies. He takes five pills and lays down on the mattress. Five pills isn’t enough, but he reckons you get points for effort.
xvii.
He introduces himself as Rustin Cohle—he still has to stop and think about it for a second—and shakes his new partner's hand perfunctorily, without making eye contact. He's having trouble with eye contact, these days. At North Shore they made him practice (fake it ‘til you make it, Perpetually Cheerful Douchebag had said again and again, until Rust had to bite down on his lip hard to keep from shoving the tip of his cigarette in his eye and asking how easy is it to maintain eye contact now, motherfucker). He focuses on people's foreheads, right between the eyebrows. Imagines bulletholes mostly.
“Rustin. Huh,” Hart says. “Family name?”
“No.” In the silence that follows a bird chatters mockingly right outside the window. You are a stupid asshole, the bird says. You have forgotten how to carry on a conversation. You are going to fuck this up spectacularly.
“All right, then,” Marty replies finally, taking his place behind his desk. He settles into the chair and leans back with a careless ease that somehow suggests that his years on the job have not whetted him into a blade but, rather, worn him smooth like a stone. There's all nature of weird shit in the world, his demeanor seems to say, and I have better things to do than psychoanalyze you before my morning coffee. He finds it strangely comforting, like he's just a small pebble on Martin Hart’s landscape, something that might get stuck in his shoe and tossed aside--not a gaping pit to drag him down into.
“Rust,” he finally says.
“What?”
“You can call me Rust.” His name feels strange in his mouth.
xviii.
“She passed. The marriage didn't last long after that.”
He grits his teeth and waits for what's coming next. The awkward silence, the invasive questions, the platitudes. Her eyes flutter away, as he expected they would; the grieving father is a sort of Medusa. “Sorry.” It comes out as a stuttered breath, like the word’s being dragged up from the bottom of her stomach on fishhooks.
He thinks of Gethsemane again. When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. They did not know what to say to him.
xix.
The job means buying dress shirts and ties and slacks and keeping them neat and clean. It means putting gas in his truck and driving it to the station every morning and back again every night. It means trying his very best to eat, to sleep. Routines are very important, they said at North Shore. (Crash didn't have routines. He was supposed to meet Morales every second Tuesday, a different diner or street corner or park every time. But by year three he was losing track of the days and Morales would appear at his elbow—in bars, in strip clubs, in places where he shouldn’t be seen with a cop but if he was trying to get his charge killed, well, who could blame him? “Cohle, you asshole,” he'd snarl. “You careless, brainless son of a bitch,” and Crash would laugh his gunfire-chatter laugh.) Routines will give you structure and help distance you from the former self that handled problems in unproductive ways. Routines will hold you accountable to yourself.
(“Rustin, do you feel like you deserve to feel better?” one of the shrinks had asked, once. “No one fucking deserves that,” he replied.)
Problem is, Crash is here. Not something you can quite see, any more than you can see that grainy grayness at the edge of your vision when you’re about to pass out: a certain undefined presence like that of someone who’s just exited a room. There’s a piece of him, or maybe a memory of a piece of him, leaning against the wall while Rust irons his shirts every Sunday and Wednesday; sitting on the edge of the bathtub as Rust shaves; stretched out on the mattress when Rust tries to sleep. When he gets too restless, Rust sits and stares at the red footlocker in the corner and recites its contents to himself until Crash calms the fuck down.
Rust eats neatly standing over the countertop, a book at one hand. The click of the fork and knife against his plate, the rustle of the pages, the ticking of his watch are loud in the emptiness of the apartment. When he eats with others he folds napkins compulsively, rubbing his palms along the creases. He shuffles his feet beneath the table and blinks at complicated table settings, feeling like a wolf that's being trained to eat from a bowl. He is always just on the edge of nausea: are you sure you've had enough, Maggie says, eying his half-empty plate with concern. Crash has never had enough of anything. He devours a cheeseburger in three bites and rubs salt and grease into the fabric of his jeans. He crumples napkins loosely in his hands, drops them on the floor and kicks them under the table. Rust runs off coffee and nervous energy. He's always tired, but he doesn't notice it much anymore; he holds himself still so that he doesn’t break into pieces. Crash is never tired. He revs up like an engine and goes for three days straight, then sleeps like the dead on dirty carpet in the corner of someone else's motel room for fourteen hours and doesn't dream. He is all kinesthetic energy, muscles working, a forest fire in the shape of a man. He sweats constantly, rakes his hair back from his brow, cracks his knuckles. Rust conserves. Crash expends.
Rust starts to bring the job home with him; he finds that when he shuffles files, thumbs through reports, pins photographs to the wall, Crash grows translucent and folded, like a bat’s wing. He does not follow him into the station, or into the car with Marty. He doesn’t have patience for this kind of work.
xx.
Half the time Marty tries to get Rust to go out for beers with their abhorrent coworkers he just refuses; the other half he makes up excuses that he knows Marty won't fall for. Figures he keeps things balanced that way: sends the message that Rust is willing to make an effort to follow the social code, but that effort only goes so far. One Friday he says he has to clean his apartment. He'd been saving that one up, but by the time he uses it it's not precisely a lie; he'd spilled cough syrup the night before and then drifted off to sleep only an hour before he was due at work. He hasn't had time yet to attend to the stain.
“Bullshit,” Marty says. “You ain't gotta clean nothing. I've seen your place. You don't own anything.”
Marty is always surrounded by things. The stoneware mug in the office and the stainless steel one in the car, the seemingly unending parade of terrible ties, the sunglasses he wears whether it's bright out or not. Loose change and gum wrappers pooled in between the seats of the car, some half-dozen caseless cassette tapes in the floorboard—Skynyrd and Creedence, mostly (Rust is allowed to commandeer the car radio exactly once a month, for an hour). Photos strewn about his desk: Maggie and the girls at Epcot, Audrey in a canoe proudly holding up a fish, an abstract chaos of pastel lines that, Marty informs him in slightly defensive tones, was three-year-old Maisie's rendition of a giraffe. (There's another photo, too, of Maggie flashing her tits at Mardi Gras 1981—but that one he keeps in his wallet.) Marty never seems to have a fucking pen when he needs one, and yet Rust knows there are no fewer than eight pens lodged in the pockets of his sportcoat at any given time. Items just seem to orbit around Marty, like space junk.
You don't own anything, Marty says, because even though he grew up working-class (my father-in-law thinks I'm some kind of dumb redneck) his childhood memories are peppered with mentions of bikes and baseball gloves and action figures. Marty has no concept of the empty spaces that make up nothing: clothing with more holes than fabric, gnawing hunger, gaps between the boards in the walls.
It's categorically untrue, anyhow. Rust owns a mattress, sheets, pillow, and two chairs. In the kitchen is a can of coffee grounds, a coffee maker, filters, three coffee mugs, two spoons, three plates, two forks, a knife, a skillet. Soap and sponge, dustpan and broom. Microwave. Hot sauce. Saltines. Steaks in the freezer and a few cans of soup in the cabinet. A mug on the kitchen counter filled with pencils and pens. Iron and ironing board; hairbrush, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, razor, four towels. Eight shirts (five dress, three flannel); three pairs of slacks, two blazers, three ties; shoes and socks, undershirts, boxers. A mirror the size of a nickel, purchased at a craft store in Houston three days out of North Shore when he needed something, anything, to anchor him in one place. Four hundred and eight books. Two photographs of one person. Cigarettes, lighter, ashtray, wallet, watch. A telephone that he sometimes forgets to plug in. His ledger and his truck. A crucifix, property of Saint Isidore Catholic Church, Diocese of Lubbock.
(And then there are the things Rust does not own but nevertheless feels responsible for: the apartment and the front yard and the lawn mower he borrows to cultivate it. His police-issue badge and gun. And Marty.)
Crash owned his jacket, his knife, his boots, his gun. He didn't own himself, though; he was property of the DEA, like every gun and can of pepper spray and ballpoint pen. Rust reminds himself of that on days when he feels like pedaling backwards.
xxi.
In February Crash shows up at Rust’s job for the first time; it’s Rust that exits the mechanic’s shop but it’s Crash that goes back in and dents a toolbox with a guy’s face. You know you can’t get nothin’ done without me, he whispers.
From there things seem to be moving along just fine and he’s up all night with Dora Lange’s diary, comes in the next morning bursting with theories only to find the new task force circling his desk and Quesada’s foot halfway up his ass. “Our bosses don't want you at all, you understand? I don't want you,” he snarls. “You are upright only by the grace of this man's reputation.” Even Marty, who’s been smirking behind his coffee cup the whole time, looks chagrined.
“That was an asshole move,” he says when they’re back at their desks. “You might be an insufferable sonofabitch, but it’s not like you don’t know what you’re doing. Quesada was out of line.”
Rust shrugs. His mother handed him off to his father; Houston PD handed him off to the DEA; the hospital handed him off to North Shore. Now he's being handed off to Marty. He's always someone else's problem.
He wonders where Claire is, and if she breathes a sigh of relief every morning.
xxii.
Marty says the words Iron Crusaders and he can feel it, joy and terror lighting up his spine like good coke. He takes a deep breath and his lungs fill with air for what feels like the first time in a year. Take me back, Rust whispers inside his own head. I swear I won't fuck it up this time.
He tells Marty that the system will slow them down--too much paperwork, too much oversight. He says it over and over again as they leave the bar, until Marty believes it, until he believes himself. As if it's really about the job and not this need, more grasping and insane than his craving for any drug. He's heard about undercovers who got attached to the guys they ran with, guys who found best friends and girlfriends and father figures among the gunrunners and junkies and whores. That never happened, thank Christ; the biggest interpersonal risk was the probability of him putting his fist through Ginger's fucking face every time they met. But he realizes it wasn't those guys he got attached to, it was Crash.
What happens if they clock you're not you? Marty asks, as if this is a mask Rust wears and not the other way around. But there's Marty in the leather jacket, brushing his fingertips over the bulletholes as if he's reading Braille, settling comfortably into Crash's skin and Rust wonders if it could just be a costume this time. Something he could take off. Something he could come back from.
“Are you gonna be all right?” Marty asks as Rust heads out the door, but he’s lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree and barely processes the question.
xxiii.
He’s still nine-tenths Crash when he manhandles Ginger into the bar, even if Ginger keeps muttering “gutless rat fuck” under his breath. Whatever else goes down, he expects his cover to hold. But “I can see your soul at the edges of your eyes. It's corrosive,” Dewall says, “like acid.”
Rust blinks and feels ice run down his spine. Most days he feels like his disguise is pretty convincing: he irons his shirts, mows the lawn, drinks coffee, picks at the breakfasts Marty brings in styrofoam containers. But if it’s not Crash sitting across from Dewall, and it’s not Detective Rustin Cohle, then goddamned if he knows who it is. Maybe it's all just a fucking costume, whether it's a tattered leather jacket or a corduroy blazer. There's something beneath the surface, something made of lightning and dead leaves and ash, something hungry and angry and keening and he can dress it in whatever clothes you want to but it’s never gonna shut the hell up.
He breaks Ginger’s jaw before depositing him in the ditch.
xxiv.
When everything's over and they've sent one child to the hospital and the other to the coroner, Quesada wants to pull them in for statements right away, and Marty calmly but firmly refuses: “nothin' we won't remember in the morning, Chief.” Then he leans in the window of Rust's truck, curls his hands around the door. “Go home.” It's the voice Rust has heard him use when he's telling Maisie to pick up her toys and put them away.
“I'm just gonna go down to the station and write up some of these notes and—”
“The hell you are. You look like ten miles of bad road, man. Go back to your shitty apartment, shower, take your pills—yeah, I know about them—take however many of those damn things you need to pass the fuck out, and tomorrow after you've gotten some goddamn sleep we'll go get breakfast.”
“I don't need—”
“That's an order, Junior Detective. So shut the fuck up.”
“Fuck you, Marty,” he replies good-naturedly enough. But all the way back to Baton Rouge Marty's words from the previous evening trail after him, the way he'd squinted through his own self-centered pain long enough to look, really look at Rust and ask: are you gonna be all right?
You look like shit, Cohle Morales had said a thousand times if he'd said it once; or get your act together, asshole or don't fuck this up for us. Once, near the end, he'd looked at the animated skeleton across the table from him with something hovering somewhere between disgust and sympathy and said “I'm bringing you in, Rust. This has gone on long enough.”
“Why, because I'm a liability?”
“No, because you're a fucking trainwreck.”
He'd laughed hollowly. “I appreciate the gesture, but it's not your call to make. And you know they won't be well and truly finished with me until there's nothing left to use up.”
But never once—not when he came in with his nose dripping blood or stitches over his eye, not when he'd been out of pocket for weeks, not when his hands were shaking so hard he couldn't light his cigarette—never once had anyone asked, are you gonna be all right.
xxv.
“Right,” Marty says, dropping his keys and badge on the kitchen countertop. “I’m heading up. Home sweet air mattress.” He looks up at Rust apologetically. “I’ll look at finding my own place next week.” Rust sips his coffee and responds with a noncommittal shrug. “And you stop drinkin’ that shit and go the fuck to sleep. We got the shooting board in the morning.”
“Yeah, whatever, Marty.” He turns to the metal locker full of guns and grenades and gives it a desultory kick. “Do me a favor? Take this up with you and throw it in that closet up there.”