A 911 hang-up. A domestic call. Suspicious subjects in a red SUV with reflective bumpers fleeing the parking lot of a subsidized housing development on Windsor Street. He listens intently as he drives. He’s content and energized, back where he belongs, and I’ve not had a chance to confront him about what he’s done and now really isn’t the best time.
“Maybe when you feel so inclined you can explain what’s going on with you.” I bring it up anyway.
He doesn’t answer and a few minutes later we turn onto Memorial Drive. The Charles River glints darkly on our right, gracefully curving toward Boston, the downtown skyline opaquely illuminated through clouds. The antenna on top of the Prudential Building throbs bloodred.
“We talked about it in an earlier life,” I finally say. “I predicted it that day in Richmond right before I moved. Ten years later, here we are. I would have appreciated it if you’d talked to me about your career change.”
He cocks his head toward his radio, listening to a call about possible car break-ins at the housing development on Windsor Street referenced a few minutes earlier.
“Simply as a courtesy, if nothing else,” I add.
“Control to car thirteen,” the dispatcher repeats.
Car 13 doesn’t answer.
“Shit.” Marino grabs the portable radio out of its charger and turns up the volume.
To drown me out about a subject he doesn’t want to discuss, I decide, but at the same time I’m puzzled. Not even fifteen minutes ago car 13 radioed that he was near my neighborhood checking for the prowler. Maybe he abandoned that call for this other one.
“Control to car thirteen. Do you copy?” the dispatcher repeats.
“Car thirteen, copy,” the officer finally comes back, his signal weak.
“Are you clear of that stop?”
“Negative. On foot approaching building three, where it appears several vehicles have been broken into. A red SUV with reflective bumpers seen driving away at a high rate of speed with several subjects inside.” He’s breathing hard. “Description fits a vehicle that’s caused trouble here before. Possibly gang-related car breaks and vandalism. Request backup.”
“Dangerous as hell no matter how much they’ve cleaned it up.” Marino is enthralled. “A lot of bad shit goes on there, drug dealers dropping by to visit their mothers and do a little business while they’re at it. Crystal meth, heroin, bath salts. Plus car breaks, vandalism, a drive-by shooting a couple weeks back. They do shit and run like hell and then sometimes come back as soon as the police clear the scene. Like a big fucking game to them.”
I’ve not seen him this way in a very long time.
“That’s the crazy thing around here,” he says excitedly. “You got housing projects right next to million-dollar homes or in the middle of Tech Square with its billion-dollar business. So we’re getting a lot of heat to clean things up.”
“Answering thirteen. Copy at Main,” another unit responds that he’s in the area. “Going now.”
“Copy that,” the dispatcher answers.
“Do you remember the day in Richmond I’m talking about?” I bring him back to that.
“What prediction?” He places his radio in his lap.
I describe the rainy afternoon in my dream, remembering the Marino from then as I look at the Marino next to me, this one older, with a deeply lined face, his balding head shaved smooth.
He’s still strong and formidable, in jeans and a black Harley-Davidson slicker, and I can tell by his reaction to what I’m saying that he’s feigning a bad memory. I sense it in the way he’s staring straight ahead, then turning around to make sure Quincy is okay before shifting his position behind the wheel, gripping it with both of his huge hands. What he won’t do is look at me. He can’t because of how close we came to what neither of us will acknowledge.
Before he left my Richmond house that day he stepped inside to use the bathroom. When he emerged I was waiting for him in the kitchen. I said he needed to eat, and what he didn’t need to do was drive. He’d had too much to drink and so had I.
“What is it you’re offering?” He wasn’t referring to food. “We could make it together, you know.” He didn’t mean a meal. “I’m one piece and you’re the other the way we fit together and it’s perfect.” He wasn’t thinking about cooking and he wasn’t talking about work.
Marino has always believed we would be the ideal couple. Sex would be the alchemy that transforms us into what he wants, and on that rainy occasion in Richmond we almost tried. I’ve never loved him that way. I’ve never wanted him that way. I was afraid of what he’d do if I didn’t give in, and then I feared what would happen if I did. Marino would have been more damaged than I would have been, and I didn’t want him following me anywhere, if that’s what he thought was being offered.
That was what stopped me. It wasn’t just about sex anymore. He was in love with me, and he told me so. He said it more than once while we ate dinner. Then he never said it again.
“I warned you. I predicted you’d want to do exactly what you’ve done.” I’m intentionally vague. “I just don’t know why you couldn’t discuss your career plans with me instead of my suddenly getting cold calls for references and letters. The way you handled it wasn’t right.”
“Maybe the way you handled things that day in Richmond wasn’t right.” He knows. He remembers.
“I don’t disagree.”
“I didn’t want you to talk me out of it this time, okay?” he says.
“I would have tried.” I unlock my iPhone to access the Internet. “For sure I would have tried to talk you out of quitting the CFC. You’re absolutely right.”
“At least you admit it for once.” He seems pleased.
“Yes I admit it, and to talk you out of a life’s decision like that would have been unfair.” I type Gail Shipton’s name in a search screen. “It was unfair the other times I did it and I’m sorry. I sincerely am. But I selfishly wouldn’t have wanted to lose you, and hopefully I haven’t.”
I can tell by his face in the near dark that he is moved by what I just said, and I wonder why it’s so hard for me to say what I feel. But it is. It always has been.
“Now we’ve got a case to work,” he says. “The way we used to.”
“Better than we used to. We have to be better. In the past ten years the world hasn’t exactly become a nicer place.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m doing this,” he says. “Law enforcement needs people with perspective who can see the way things were and where they’re headed. When you and me were getting started it was all about serial killers. Then Nine-Eleven happened and we had to start worrying about terrorists, not to imply we don’t have to worry about serial killers too because there’s more of them than ever.”
I find a Fox streaming news feed from thirty-five minutes ago describing MIT graduate student Gail Shipton as missing, last seen late yesterday afternoon in Cambridge at the Psi Bar.
It’s speculated she might be the dead woman just discovered at MIT’s Briggs Field, and the accompanying video shows Cambridge and MIT police setting up auxiliary lighting in a red dirt infield near a parking lot. That scene cuts to Sil Machado giving a statement. The rain is loud in the microphone and drips off his baseball cap.
“At this time we have no formal comment about the situation.” Machado’s nickname is the Portuguese Man of War but he doesn’t look fierce as he stares into the camera.
A twitch of nervousness runs beneath his somber demeanor, his shoulders hunched tensely against the rain and wind. He has the stiff expression of someone who is uncomfortable and trying not to show it.