How could everything come to this?
I tape up another box and feel Benton’s death, a clammy breath at the back of my neck as humid air stirs. I’m empty, unbearably bereft by the void. I’m grateful for the rain, for the heavy full sound of it.
“You look like you’re about to cry.” Marino stares at me. “Why are you crying?”
“Sweat’s stinging my eyes. It’s hot as hell in here.”
“You could shut the damn door and turn on the air.”
“I want to hear the rain.”
“What for?”
“I’ll never hear it again in this place like it is right now.”
“Jesus. Rain is rain.” He looks out the open garage door as if the rain might be unusual, a type of rain he’s not seen before. He frowns the way he does when he’s thinking hard, his tan forehead furrowed as he sucks in his lower lip and rubs his heavy jaw.
He’s rugged and formidable, huge and exudes aggression, almost handsome before his bad habits got the best of him early in his hard-bitten life. His dark hair is graying and slicked to one side in a comb-over he won’t acknowledge any more than he’ll admit he’s balding prematurely. He’s over six feet tall, broad and big-boned, and when his arms and legs are bare like they are right now I’m reminded he’s a former Golden Gloves boxer who doesn’t need a gun to kill someone.
“I don’t know why the hell you had to offer to resign.” He stares boldly at me without blinking. “Only to hang around for the better part of a year to buy the assholes time to find your replacement. That was stupid. You shouldn’t have offered a damn thing. Fuck ’em.”
“Let’s be honest, I was fired. That’s how it translates when you volunteer to step down because you’ve embarrassed the governor.” I’m calmer now, reciting the same old lines.
“It’s not the first time you’ve pissed off the governor.”
“It probably won’t be the last.”
“Because you don’t know when to quit.”
“I believe I just did.”
He watches my every move as if I’m a suspect who might go for a weapon and I continue labeling boxes as if they’re evidence: “Scarpetta,” today’s date, belongings destined for the “master closet” in a South Florida rental house where I don’t want to be, what feels like an apocalyptic defeat returning me to the land of my birth.
To go back to where I’m from is the ultimate failure, a judgment proving I’m no better than my upbringing, no better than my self-absorbed mother and narcissistic male-addicted only sibling Dorothy, who’s guilty of criminally neglecting her only child Lucy.
“What’s the longest you ever stayed anywhere?” Marino relentlessly interrogates me, his attention trespassing in places he’s never been allowed to touch or enter.
He feels encouraged and it’s my fault, drinking with him, saying good-bye in a way that sounds like “Hello, don’t leave me.” He senses what I’m considering.
If I let you maybe it won’t be so important anymore.
“Miami, I suppose,” I answer him. “Until I was sixteen and left for Cornell.”
“Sixteen. One of these genius types, you and Lucy cut out of the same cloth.” His bloodshot eyes are fastened to me, nothing subtle about it. “I’ve been in Richmond that long and it’s time to move on.”
I tape up another box, this one marked Confidential, packed with autopsy reports, case studies, secrets I need to keep as his imagination undresses me. Or maybe he’s simply assessing because he worries I’m slightly crazy, have been made a little unhinged by what’s happened to my stellar career.
Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the first woman to be appointed chief medical examiner of Virginia, now has the distinction of being the first one forced out of office…If I hear that one more goddamned time on the goddamned news…
“I’m quitting the police department,” he says.
I don’t act surprised. I don’t act like anything at all.
“You know why, Doc. You’re expecting it. This is exactly what you want. Why are you crying? It’s not sweat. You’re crying. What’s the matter, huh? You’d be pissed if I didn’t quit and head out of Dodge with you, admit it. Hey. It’s okay,” he says kindly, sweetly, misinterpreting as usual, and the effect on me is a dangerous comfort. “You’re stuck with me.” He says what I want to be true but not the way he means it, and we continue our languages, neither of us speaking the same one.
He shakes two cigarettes from a pack and gets up from his chair to give me one, his arm touching me as he holds the lighter close. A spurt of flame and he moves the lighter away, the back of his hand touching me. I don’t move. I take a deep drag.
“So much for quitting.” I mean smoking.
I don’t mean so much for quitting the Richmond Police Department. He’ll quit and I shouldn’t want him to and I don’t have to be a psychic to predict the outcome, the aftermath. It’s only a matter of time before he’s angry, depressed, emasculated. He’ll get increasingly frustrated, jealous, and out of control. One day he’ll pay me back. He’ll hurt me. There’s a price for everything.
The ripping sound as I tape another box, building my white walls of cardboard that smell like stale air and dust.
“Living in Florida. Fishing, riding my Harley, no more snow. You know me and cold, crappy weather.” He blows out a stream of smoke, returning to his chair, leaning back, and the strong scent of him goes away. “I won’t miss a damn thing about this one-horse town.” He flicks an ash on the concrete floor, tucking the pack of cigarettes and lighter in the breast pocket of his sweat-stained tank top.
“You’ll be unhappy if you give up policing,” I tell him the truth.
But I’m not going to stop him.
“Being a cop isn’t what you do, it’s who you are,” I add.
I’m honest with him.
“You need to arrest people. To kick in doors. To make good on whatever you threaten. To stare down scumbags in court and send them to jail. That’s your raison d’être, Marino. Your reason for existing.”
“I know what raison d’être means. I don’t need you to translate.”
“You need the power to punish people. That’s what you live for.”
“Merde de bull. All the huge cases I’ve worked?” He shrugs in his chair as the noise of the rain changes, smacking, then splattering, now drumming, his powerful shape backlit by the eerie gray light of the volatile afternoon. “I can write my own ticket.”
“And what would that be exactly?” I sit down on a box, tapping an ash.
“You.”
“One person can’t be your ticket and we’re never getting married.” I’m that honest but it’s not the whole truth.
“I didn’t ask you. Did anybody hear me ask?” he announces as if there are other people inside the garage with us. “I’ve never even asked you on a date.”
“It wouldn’t work.”
“No shit. Who could live with you?”
I drop the cigarette into an empty beer bottle and it hisses out.
“The only thing I’m talking about is having a job with you.” He won’t look at me now. “Being your lead investigator, building a good team of them, creating a training program. The best anywhere in the world.”
“You won’t respect yourself.” I’m right but he won’t see it.
He smokes and drinks as rain pummels gray granite pavers beyond the wide square opening, and in the distance agitated trees, churning dark clouds, and farther off the railroad tracks, the canal, the river that runs through the city I’m leaving.
“And then you won’t respect me, Marino. That’s the way it will happen.”
“It’s already decided.” Another swallow of beer, the green bottle sweating, dripping condensation as he refuses to look at me. “I got it all figured out. Lucy and me both do.”