"But you work around death every day," Jo gently persisted. "Aren't you reminded… of what happened, when you see it happen to someone else? I don't mean to, well, I just don't want to be so afraid of death."
"I don't have a magic formula," I said, getting up. "Except you learn not to think too much."
The pizza was bubbling and I worked a big spatula under it.
"That smells good," Marino said with a worried 'look. "You think it's gonna be enough?"
I made a second, then a third one, and I built a fire and we sat before it with the lights out in the great groom. Marino stuck with beer. Lucy, Jo and I sipped a white burgundy that was crisp and clean.
"Maybe you should. find somebody," Lucy said, the light and shadow of flames dancing on her face.
"Shit!" Marino erupted. "What is this all of a sudden? The Dating Game? Maybe if she wants to tell you personal stuff like that, she will. You shouldn't be asking. It ain't nice."
"Life isn't nice," Lucy said. "And why should;you care if she plays The Dating Game?"
Jo silently stared into the fire. I was getting fed up. I was beginning to wonder if I might have been better off staying alone tonight. Even Benton hadn't always been right.
"Remember when Doris left you?" Lucy went on.
"What if people hadn't asked you about it? What if no one had cared what you did next or if you were holding yourself together? You sure wouldn't have volunteered anything. Same goes for the idiots you've gone out with since. Every time one of them didn't work out, your friends had to jump in again and pry things out of you."
Marino set the empty beer bottle on the hearth so hard I thought he might break the slate.
"Maybe you ought to think about growing up one of these days," he said. "You gonna wait until you're thirty before you stop being such a goddamn, stuck-up brat? I'm getting another beer."
He stalked out of the room.
"And let me tell you another thing," Marino threw back at her, "just because you fly helicopters and program computers and bodybuild and do all the other friggin' shit you do doesn't mean you're better than me!"
"I've never said I was better than you!" Lucy yelled after him.
"The hell you haven't!" His voice carried from the` kitchen.
"The difference between you and me is I do what I want in life," she called out. "I don't accept limitations."
"You're so full of shit, Agent Asshole."
"Ah, now we're getting to the root of the matter," Lucy said as he reappeared, gulping beer. "I'm a federal agent fighting big bad crime on big bad streets of the world. And you're in uniform riding around baby-sitting cops at all hours of the night."
"And you like guns because you wish you had a dick!"
"So I can be what? A tripod?"
"That's it," I exclaimed. "Enough! The two of you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Doing this… of all times…"
My voice splintered and tears stung my eyes. I was determined I wouldn't lose control again, and I was horrified that I no longer seemed able to help it. I looked away from them. Silence was heavy, the fire popping. Marino got up and opened the screen. He stirred embers with the poker and tossed on another log.
"I hate Christmas," Lucy said.
9
he next morning, Lucy and Jo had an early flight and I could not bear the emptiness that would return with the shutting door. So I went out with them, briefcase in hand. I knew this day was going to be awful.
"I wish you didn't have to go," I said. "But I guess Miami might not survive another day if you stayed here with me."
"Miami's probably not going to survive anyway," Lucy said. "But that's what we get paid to do-fight wars already lost. Sort of like Richmond, when you think about it. God, I feel like shit."
Both of them were in scruffy jeans and wrinkled shirts and had done nothing more than push gel through their hair. All of us were exhausted and hung over as we stood in my driveway. Carriage lanterns and streetlights had gone out as the sky turned dusky blue. We could not see each other well, just our shapes and shining eyes and foggy breath. It was cold. Frost on our cars looked like lace.
"Except the One-Sixty-Fivers aren't going to survive;" Lucy talked big. "And I'm looking forward to that."
"The who?" I asked.
"The gun-trafficking assholes we're after. Remember, I told you we call them that because their ammo of choice is one-sixty-five-grain Speer Gold Dot. Real high end, hot stuff. That and all sorts of goodies-AR-fifteens, twotwenty-three-caliber rifles, fully automatic Russian and Chinese shit-coming in from maggot-promise land. Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Puerto Rico.
"Point is, some of this is being smuggled piecemeal by container ships that have no idea," she went on. "Take the port in L.A. It unloads one cargo container every one and a half minutes. No way anybody can search all that."
"Oh, that's right." My head was throbbing.
"We're real flattered to get the assignment," Jo added dryly. "A couple of months ago, the body of some guy from Panama eventually linked to this cartel turned up in a South Florida canal. When they did the autopsy, they found his tongue in his stomach because his compatriots cut it off and made him eat it."
"I'm not sure I want to hear all this," I said as the poison sped into my mind again.
"I'm Terry," Lucy let me know. "She's Brandy." She smiled at Jo. "U of M girls who didn't quite graduate, but hey, who needs to because during our hardworking semesters of being dopers and getting laid, we learned some pretty good addresses for home invasions. We've developed a nice social relationship with a couple One-SixtyFivers who do home invasions for guns, cash, drugs. We're setting up a guy.on Fisher Island right now who's got enough guns to open his own damn gun store and enough coke to make it look like it's fucking snowing:"
I couldn't stand to hear her talk this way.
"Of course, the victim's undercover, too," Lucy went on as big, dark crows began making rude noises and lights went on across the street.
I noticed candles in windows and wreaths on doors. I had given virtually no thought to Christmas and it would be here in less than three weeks. Lucy dug her wallet out of her back pocket and showed me her driver's license. The photograph was her, but nothing else was.
"Terry Jennifer Davis," she read to me. "White female, twenty-four years old, five-six, one hundred and twenty-one pounds. It's really strange to be someone else. You ought to see my setup down there, Aunt Kay. I got this cool little house in South Beach and drive a Benz V -twelve sports car confiscated in a drug raid in Sбo Paulo. Sort of silver, smoky.
And you ought to see my Glock. A collector's modeclass="underline" Forty caliber, stainless steel slide, small. Talk about sweet."
The poison was beginning to suffocate me. It cast a purple hue behind my eyes and made my hands and feet go numb.
"Lucy, how 'bout we cut the show and tell," Jo said, sensing how all this was affecting me. "It's like your watching her do an autopsy. Maybe more than you want to know, right?"
"She's let me watch," Lucy bragged on. "I've seen maybe half a dozen."
Jo was getting annoyed now.
"Police academy demos." My niece shrugged. "No axe murders."
I was rocked by her insensitivity. It was as if she were talking about restaurants.
"Usually people who died of natural causes or suicide. Families donate the bodies to the anatomical division."
Her words drifted around me like noxious gas.
"So it doesn't bother them if Uncle Tim or Cousin Beth is autopsied in front of a bunch of cops. Most of the families can't afford a burial anyway, and might in fact get paid something for body donations, isn't that right, Aunt Kay?"
"No, they don't, and bodies donated by families to science are not used for demo autopsies," I said, appalled. "What in God's name is wrong with you?" I lashed out at her.