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Rick paces back and forth from the phone to the couch, knowing there isn’t anything else he can do besides wait. There’s an ambulance on its way, but Cliff doesn’t seem concerned— he’s just lying back on the couch with a knife in his hip, breathing in and out, in and out.
“You can turn on the radio if you want,” Cliff says, a little stiffly, which makes sense, seeing as he’s probably in a lot of pain. Rick stops pacing just to shoot him a look, before turning on the radio.
A measure and a half of the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup” comes blaring out of the speaker before Rick jams it off, coming to his senses. “Fuck!” he shouts, turning on his heels and making a beeline for his kitchen. His hands shake as he pours himself a glass of whiskey, half the contents spilling onto the counter.
“Fucking fuck!” he repeats, slamming the bottle down. Everything comes out incoherent; he can’t do anything but swear. There are a couple of corpses in his living room and his friend might be dying and he can’t even pour himself a goddamn drink.
Cliff seems to read his mind. “I ain’t gonna die, Rick. I’ve had worse.”
Rick knows that this is probably true. He knows Cliff saw some shit during the war, the kind of shit that wasn’t any fun to tell people about at parties. And that’s not even mentioning the things that Rick has seen firsthand, working next to him. He’d probably broken every bone in his body working on Bounty Law, and he’d come out fine. One single knife isn’t gonna take him down for good. He’ll probably be back to normal within a month or two. But still, looking at the handle, disappearing perpendicular into the bloody rip in his jeans, makes Rick nauseous.
He glances out the window before glimpsing the charred black figure in the pool. Bad move.
Rick heaves, but nothing comes. Just a wave of uneasiness that knocks him off his feet and leaves him leaning against the kitchen counter, barely breathing.
“Calm down, Rick.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to— to fucking CALM DOWN,” Rick exclaims, pulling himself upright. “I... I ain’t ever killed someone before, Cliff—”
“There ain’t a jury in the United States that would convict you,” Cliff points out, too casually. “It’s your property, they came armed. Not to mention you’re Rick fucking Dalton.”
“That girl was alive this morning,” Rick says, breathing heavily. “And I... Cliff, there’s hardly anything left.”
“Shit— Rick— look at me,” Cliff says, doing his best to sit up on the couch before wincing and lying back down. “If I could, I’d go over there and slap you, but I can’t, so you’re just gonna have’ta listen. Those hippies wanted blood, you hear me? Who knows why. Who cares. But we handled it. You did what you had to do. You— you did the right thing.”
“Have you ever killed someone before?”
“Well, shit, Rick, they gave me two medals—”
“No, not... I mean someone, Cliff, someone who wasn’t... you saw ‘em alive, as more than a target. Someone real.”
Cliff swallows. This isn’t a hard question to answer— in fact, it’s a story he’s told people before. But there’s a difference between people — random girls who wanted to be scared, or someone who was trying to threaten him and needed a warning — and Rick.
Because the truth is, Cliff never told Rick about any of it. He didn’t lie, but he’d strung out Rick’s trust in him as far as it would go: trailing off whenever he talked about whatever happened with Billie, sidestepping any real answers about whether he’d done it or not. He didn’t lie to Rick — lying to him just doesn’t feel right — but telling the truth? That feels wrong, too.
“I killed a couple Italians after I got back to the states. Mob types, you know. No one really gave much of a damn,” Cliff says, because it’s the easiest story to tell. “I shot ‘em to prove a point in broad daylight.”
Rick gives him an astonished look.
“Then there was Buster— did you ever meet him? Buster Cooley? I got Brandy from him. He... he was gonna kill her, see, and I... I was just going to teach him a lesson, but I realized a few knocks in that he’d gone limp and I just couldn’t stop.”
Rick is staring at him from the counter, the kind of expression Cliff associates more with Jake Cahill than with the real man.
“...and Billie?”
Cliff winces. “Shit, of course I killed her, Rick.”
He watches from the corner of his eye as Rick turns away, not meeting his eyes. He paces again, taking a few steps before turning, looking like he’s about to speak, before stopping again.
After far too many beats, he finally asks. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Cliff does his best to shrug, as much as he can while he’s got a knife in his side.
“Because you were the only one who was willing to believe I didn’t do it.”
Rick turns away, leaning against the glass of the window, looking out over the pool. The third corpse is floating there, or at least, what’s left of it is— it looks more like a thing than a person now, except for the lower body, which had been underwater when he’d hit it with the flamethrower.
He thinks for a moment about how easily she could have survived— if she’s just dipped her head underneath the surface instead of flailing around and letting herself burn to death.
Rick supposes he can’t judge her, though. Cliff’s the only reason he didn’t burn alive, what, fifteen years ago?
“You saved my life tonight,” Rick says, after a moment. “And not for the first time.”
“But you’re still angry with me.”
“No,” Rick says, despite himself. “I don’t think I am. Don’t think I could be.”
Cliff breathes out— a surprisingly difficult maneuver, and it comes out more pained and ragged than he intended. Rick walks toward him, stepping over the discarded body of one of those hippies, until he’s sitting down on the couch, one thumb rubbing the drying blood from the side of Cliff’s forehead.
He looks like he’s searching for something, like he’s about to call line and if he only had the first word whispered into his ear he’d have the whole monologue down, ready to go. He hovers there for a moment, mouth slightly ajar, until they’re both yanked from the moment by the sound of sirens and the flicker of red and blue light.
The next morning, a hungover Rick will stumble home from the Polanski residence, buy a dozen bagels from the shop past the convenience store, and take a taxi to three different hospitals before he manages to find Cliff. He will never figure out what he was going to say.