Blow Fly (19 page)

B
ACK AT THE US AIR GATE
, Marino is seized by agitation and impetuosity.

His flight has been delayed another hour due to weather. Suddenly, he doesn't want to go home to Trixie and get up in the morning and realize what happened in Boston. Thinking of his small house with its carport in its blue-collar neighborhood sinks his spirit lower into bitterness and a need to fight back. If only he could identify the enemy. Why he continues to live in Richmond makes no sense. Richmond is the past. Why he allowed Benton to blow him off makes no sense. He should never have walked away from Benton's apartment.

“You know what
due to weather
means?” Marino asks the young red-headed woman sitting next to him, filing her nails.

Two rude behaviors Marino simply can't tolerate are public farts and the scratching sound of manicures accompanied by drifting nail dust.

The file continues to rapidly scratch-scratch.

“It means they ain't decided
whether
to fly our asses outta Boston yet. See? There ain't enough passengers to make it worth their while. They lose money, they don't go nowhere and blame it on something else.”

The file freezes and the woman looks around at dozens of empty plastic seats.

“You can sit here all night,” Marino goes on, “or come find a motel room with me.”

After a moment of disbelief, she gets up and walks off in a huff.

“Pig,” she says.

Marino smiles, civility restored, his boredom assuaged, if only briefly. He is not going to wait for a flight that probably will never happen, and then he thinks of Benton again. Anger and paranoia ooze into his skull. His feeling of powerlessness and rejection settle more closely around him, choking him with a depression that stalls his thoughts and fatigues him as if he hasn't slept in days. He can't stand it. He won't. He wishes he could call Lucy, but he doesn't know where she is. All she told him was that she had business to take care of that required traveling.

“What business?” Marino asked her.

“Just business.”

“Sometimes I wonder why the hell I work for you.”

“I don't wonder about it in the least. I never give it a thought,” Lucy said over the phone from her office in Manhattan. “You adore me.”

Outside Logan Airport, Marino flags down a Cambridge Checker cab, practically stepping in front of it and waving his arms, ignoring the taxi line and the dozens of weary, unhappy people in it.

“The Embankment,” he tells the driver. “Near where the band shell is.”

S
CARPETTA DOESN'T KNOW
where Lucy is, either.

Her niece doesn't answer her home or cell phones and hasn't returned numerous pages. Scarpetta can't reach Marino, and she has no intention of calling Rose and telling her about the letter. Her secretary worries too much already. Scarpetta sits on her bed, thinking. Billy makes his way up the dog ramp and plops down just far enough away to make her reach if she wants to pet him, and she does.

“Why do you always sit so far away from me?” she talks to him as she stretches out to stroke his soft, floppy ears. “Oh, I get it. I'm supposed to reposition myself and move closer to you.”

She does.

“You're a very willful dog, you know.”

Billy licks her hand.

“I have to go out of town for a few days,” she tells him. “But Rose will take good care of you. Maybe you'll stay at her house and she'll take you to the beach. So promise you won't get upset that I'm leaving.”

He never does. The only reason he comes running when she heads out
on a trip is that he wants a ride in the car. He'd ride around in a car all day, given the choice. Scarpetta dials Lucy's office a second time. Although it is long past closing time, the phone is answered by an alive and awake human being twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Tonight, it is Zach Manham's turn.

“Okay, Zach,” she says right off. “It's bad enough you won't tell me where Lucy is . . .”

“It's not that I won't tell . . .”

“Of course it is,” she cuts him off. “You know, but you won't tell me.”

“I swear to God I don't know,” Manham replies. “Look, if I did, I'd call her on her international cell phone and at least tell her to call you.”

“So she has her international cell phone with her. Then she's out of the country?”

“She always carries her international cell phone. You know, the one that takes photographs, videotapes, connects to the Internet. She's got the latest model. It makes pizza.”

Nothing is funny to Scarpetta right now.

“I tried her cell phone. She's not answering,” she says, “whether she's in this country or some other one. So what about Marino? You holding out on me about him, too?”

“I haven't talked to him in days,” Manham says. “No, I don't know where he is. He not answering his cell phone or pages, either?”

“No.”

“Want me to take a polygraph, Doc?”

“Yes.”

Manham laughs.

“Okay, I quit. I'm too tired to keep this up all night,” Scarpetta says as she rubs Billy's tummy. “If and when you ever hear from either one of them again, tell them to contact me immediately. It's urgent. Urgent enough that I'm flying to New York tomorrow.”

“What? Are you in danger?” Manham asks, alarmed.

“I don't want to talk about it with you, Zach. No offense intended. Good night.”

She locks her bedroom door, sets the alarm and places her pistol on the bedside table.

M
ARINO DOESN'T LIKE
the taxi driver and asks him where he's from.

“Kabul.”

“Kabul's where, exactly?” Marino asks. “I mean, I know what country” (he doesn't), “but not its exact geographical location.”

“Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan.”

Marino tries to envision Afghanistan. All that comes to mind are dictators, terrorists and camels.

“And you do what there?”

“I do nothing there. I live here.” The driver's dark eyes glance at him in the rearview mirror. “My family worked in the wool mills, and I came here eight years ago. You should go to Kabul. It is very beautiful. Visit the old city. My name is Bābur. You have questions or need a cab, call my company and ask for me.” He smiles, his teeth gleaming white in the dark.

Marino senses the driver is making fun of him, but he doesn't get the joke. The driver's identification card is fastened to the passenger's seat visor, and Marino tries to read it, but can't. His vision isn't what it used to be, and he refuses to wear glasses. Despite Scarpetta's urging, he also
refuses laser surgery, which he adamantly claims will make him blind or damage his frontal lobe.

“This way don't look familiar,” Marino comments in his usual grumpy tone as unrecognizable buildings flow past his window.

“We take a shortcut along the harbor, past the wharfs and then the causeway. Very pretty sights.”

Marino leans forward on the hard bench seat, avoiding a spring that seems determined to work its way out of the vinyl upholstery and uncoil and bite his left buttock.

“You're heading north, you Mohammed scumbag! I may not be from Boston, but I know where the Embankment is, and you ain't even on the right side of the fucking river!”

The cabdriver who calls himself Bābur completely ignores his passenger and continues along his route, cheerfully pointing out the sights, including the Suffolk County Jail, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Shriners Burn Center. By the time he drops Marino off on Storrow Drive, close but not too close to Benton Wesley's apartment building, the meter registers $68.35. Marino slings open the door and throws a crumpled one-dollar bill onto the front seat.

“You owe me sixty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents.” The taxi driver smooths open the dollar bill on his leg. “I will call the police!”

“And I'll beat the shit out of you. And you can't do nothing about it, because you ain't legal, right? Show me your green card, asshole, and guess what, I'm the police and got a pistol strapped under my arm.” He snatches out his wallet and flashes the badge he did not return to the Richmond Police Department after he retired.

He said he lost it.

Tires squeal as the taxi driver speeds off, screaming curses out his open window. Marino heads toward the Longfellow Bridge and veers off southeast, briefly following the same sidewalk he and Benton walked along earlier today. He takes a roundabout way beneath gas lamplight on Pinckney and Revere, constantly listening and checking his surroundings, making
certain he isn't being followed, as is his habit. Marino isn't thinking about the Chandonne cartel. He is on the lookout for the usual street punks and lunatics, although he has seen no evidence of either in this section of Beacon Hill.

When Benton's building comes into view, Marino notices that the windows of unit 56 are dark.

“Shit,” he mutters, tossing his cigarette, not bothering to stamp it out.

Benton must have gone out for a late dinner, or to the gym, or for a jog. But that isn't likely, and Marino's anxieties tighten his chest with his every step. He knows damn well that Benton would leave lights on when he goes out. He isn't the sort to walk into a completely dark house or apartment.

Climbing the stairs to the fifth floor is worse than last time, because adrenaline and beer quicken his straining heart until he can scarcely breathe. When he reaches unit 56, he bangs on the door. Not a sound comes from inside.

He pounds harder and calls out, “Yo, Tom!”

L
UCY STARTS THE MERCEDES
and suddenly stares at Rudy in the pitch dark.

“Oh my God! I can't believe it!” She pounds the steering wheel with her fist, accidentally blaring the horn.

“What!” Rudy jumps, startled and suddenly frantic. “What the hell? What the hell are you doing!”

“My tactical baton. Goddamn son of a bitch! I left it on the night table inside the room. It's going to have my fingerprints on it, Rudy.”

How could she make such a brain-dead mistake? All went according to plan until she made an oversight, a mindless blunder, the very sort of blunder that catches people on the run all the time. The engine rumbles quietly on the side of the dark street, neither Lucy nor Rudy quite sure what to do. They are free. They got away with it. No one near or inside the hotel saw them, and now one of them must go back.

“I'm sorry,” Lucy whispers. “I'm a fucking idiot,” she says. “You stay here.”

“No. I'll take care of it.” Rudy's fear turns to the more manageable emotion of rage, and he resists taking it out on her.

“I fucked it up. I get to fix it.” She swings open the car door.