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They weren’t even doing anything wrong. That’s what Geoff can’t wrap his mind around. Years of theft and violence, spitting in the faces of authority, and it all caught up to them when they weren’t even thinking about it.
Geoff is sitting in the passenger seat of the car, one elbow resting on the rim of the open window, thumbing idly through his phone as he waits for Jack to come out of the gas station. She’s been craving terrible powder-sugar donuts all day, and it’s the kind of lazy, quiet afternoon when they have nothing better to do than buy junk food and go for a drive up the coast.
The gas station is deserted. There’s no real reason not to rob it, but even the leaders of the Fake AH like a day off once in a while. It’s almost novel to pay for gas and junk food like normal people.
A cop car pulls up just as Jack steps outside with a bag full of soda and donuts, her right hand in the pocket of her white jacket, putting her wallet away. Geoff doesn’t pay it any mind. Their car is new, and there’s no reason the cops would be looking for them here.
He looks up when he hears a shout.
‘Hey! Stop!’
A cop has got out of the patrol car, and he’s approaching Jack, his snub-nosed gun in his hands.
Jack turns to look at him, green eyes going wide with surprise, her hand still in her pocket.
The cop assumes she has a weapon, and fires three shots without warning. The gunshots are deafening over the low rumble of the nearby road.
Jack staggers, dropping the plastic bag and stumbling backwards towards the curb, blood blooming shocking scarlet on the breast of her white jacket.
Geoff is frozen in place as she falls, staring out of the window of the car, meeting her eyes and finding them glassy and unfocused.
Her lips move, silently forming his name in a shape more familiar than breathing, and then her eyes close and she goes terribly still.
The cop approaches, keeping his gun on her as she lies limp on the hot concrete. The blood is spreading impossibly fast, impossibly red. It only adds to Geoff’s certainty that this isn’t happening. Jack can’t bleed that much that quickly. She’d die.
‘Hands, give me your hands!’ the cop is saying, crouching over Jack and pawing at her, rolling her roughly onto her front. Her arms are boneless, flopping in his grip, but still he cuffs her with cruel, too-tight zip-ties, forces her face into her pooling blood.
No, you can’t, she needs to breathe, Geoff thinks, watching him handle Jack with none of the care and respect she deserves.
The cop drags her over again, pulls her wallet from her pocket, then finds the pistol holstered under her jacket and takes it.
‘Got a weapon!’ he calls to his partner, who is walking across the lot, talking into his radio.
‘No shit!’ his partner calls back.
Jack’s face is caked in blood where it was pressed to the ground, and blood is matted in her bright hair, making her look ugly and inhuman. She is so unnaturally still. Jack is calm, but never still, and Geoff can barely believe that this is her anymore. The Los Santos heat is already setting the blood, thick and sticky, and it clings like grotesque face paint.
‘It’s her, right?’ the first cop says.
‘Yeah, I think so. Well spotted, man!’
‘I don’t think she’s breathing,’ the cop says, pressing rough hands to her throat. He stills for a moment, feeling for a pulse, then shakes his head.
‘Well, who fucking cares?’
The second cop kicks Jack in the ribs, barely more than a nudge in comparison to the fatal shots, but it’s enough to finally break Geoff’s reverie. A light breeze brings him the iron scent of hot, curdling blood over the station’s reek of gasoline, and everything he’s seeing suddenly becomes terrifyingly real.
He opens the glove-box and pulls out a .45, checking the mag and flicking off the safety. He’s firing before he even opens the door, wild, low shots that riddle the two cops with bullets, striking guts and knees and thighs. They won’t die as fast as Jack did, that’s for sure, but that suits Geoff just fine.
He stumbles across the lot, feeling like he’s on the bad side of a ten-day drinking spree, head pounding, stomach full of bile. There’s a horrible, hollow pain starting to grow in his chest as he looks at Jack, his other half, the closest and most beloved of his crew, lying still and lifeless in the merciless sun.
The cops are writhing on the ground, shifting in pain, clutching at themselves with raw, animal noises, but Geoff doesn’t give a fuck about either of them. He takes out a flick-knife, extends the blade and bends down at Jack’s side. He cuts the zip-ties, frees Jack’s hands and lays them carefully at her sides. Nothing will make her look peaceful, not with the clotting blood on her face and her jacket soaked red, but he can’t leave her cuffed. He only hopes that she was gone before the cop started hauling her around. She deserves that much, at least.
A high whine of pain draws his attention away from her for a moment, and he turns on the two wounded officers, regarding their futile struggles with contempt. Rage fills him suddenly, utter, furious disbelief that these worthless uniformed monkeys had somehow managed to kill Jack. Jack was worth a thousand of their kind.
The second cop is whining and clutching at his guts, barely aware of Geoff standing over him. Geoff aims his gun down at the man and empties the magazine, shot after shot slamming through him and into the concrete. He gasps, chokes for a minute on his own blood, and gives a final shudder as he dies.
Geoff has already turned away, focussing on the man who killed Jack. He is curled up, clutching at his thigh where blood is pouring dark through his blue pants. Geoff kicks him over onto his back, relishing the gasp of pain that falls from his lips.
He stares up at Geoff with terror in his eyes, recognising the boss of the Fake AH at the last moment despite his casual clothes. Geoff bares his teeth and stamps down on the man’s chest, putting his full weight behind his shoe. Ribs crunch and give under him, and the man chokes and convulses in pain. Geoff stamps again and again, relishing the uneven crush of bone and organs, until the man is still and quiet, bloody bubbles on his slackened lips.
Only then does Geoff turn back to Jack, dear Jack, with the clean locks of her copper hair still shining in the sun. He doesn’t want to move her, somehow sure that it would hurt her, but he’s damned if he’ll leave her here. He can’t have much longer before more cops arrive, even with typical shitty LSPD response times.
Jack is taller, broader than him, every inch the Queen of Los Santos, and Geoff’s hands won’t stop shaking. It takes all his will to get her into the back seat of their car, and he winces at every rough movement that jostles her body.
It isn’t until he’s driving away, blood sticking his hands to the wheel, that he realises that the past few minutes were actually part of his life. Jack is dead. The quiet day has turned to hell with no more warning than a couple of shouted words.
Geoff’s chest feels like it’s been opened up and scooped out, leaving only darkness behind. There is nothing, no vengeance, no fire-bombing killing spree that will make him whole again. Glancing in the mirror, seeing Jack’s slack, bloodied face gently pillowed on the seat, he can’t imagine the Fake AH surviving without her.
He turns for home, shaking and sick at heart, and tries in vain to think of a way to tell the rest of the crew that their dream is broken. There is no future without Jack.