Bev watches him squat, sticking the gas nozzle into each can, the pump clicking away her cash. The back of his neck reminds her of alligator hide, and his elbows are big calluses. She's been coming to him at least ten times a year, more often of late, and he doesn't have a damn clue about her, which is a good thing for him. She heads to the SUV, suddenly worried about whether it needs gas, too. She can't remember if she filled it up last time.
Unlocking the driver's door, she slides in and turns the key in the ignition. The engine cranks after three tries, and she's relieved to see she has more than half a tank of gas. When she runs low, she'll fill up at a gas station. Turning the headlights on, she backs up and parks near the dock. While she is pulling cash out of her wallet and squinting to make out the bills, Jack wipes his hands on a rag and waits for her to roll down the window.
"That'll be forty-four dollars and forty cents," he tells her. "I'll get those cans back in your boat for ya and keep an eye on it. I noticed you got your friend with ya." He means the shotgun. "You plan on leaving it in the boat? I wouldn't. Watch out shooting at gators with that thing. All it does is make 'em rageful."
Bev can't believe she almost drove off and left her shotgun. She's not thinking clearly tonight, and her knee hurts.
"Last thing you do before you leave," she adds as he steps down into the boat, "is fill the fish box with ice."
"How much?" He fetches the shotgun, climbs back up on the dock and carefully places it on the backseat of the Cherokee.
"A hundred pounds will do."
"Must be doing a lot of shopping to need all that ice." He stuffs the rag in a back pocket of his old, soiled work pants.
"Stuff spoils quick out here."
"That'll be another twenty. I'm givin' you three bucks off."
She hands him two tens and doesn't thank him for the discount.
"I'm gone by nine." He looks past her, inside the beat-up Cherokee. "So if you ain't back by then…"
"Won't be," Bev tells him, shifting the SUV into reverse.
She never is and doesn't need the reminder.
He stares past her at the front passenger's door, at the rolled-up window and the missing crank and push-in lock.
"You know, girl, I could fix that if you're ever of a mind to leave the keys."
Bev glances at the door. "Don't matter," she says. "Nobody rides in this thing but me."
29
UPSTAIRS IN THE NORTH WING of the house is a guest bedroom overlooking the ocean, and in front of the bay window is Scarpetta's large desk, not an antique or anything special, just an inexpensive computer desk with a matching return.
Bookcases fill the walls so tightly that some light switches and electrical outlets are behind them, out of reach, and she has to get by with power strips. Her furniture is a light maple veneer, in depressing contrast to the beautiful antiques and artistic pieces, including Oriental rugs, fine stemware and china, that she spent most of her career collecting. Scarpetta's former life is locked up in a Connecticut storage warehouse, one secure enough for museum pieces.
She has not gone to see what she owns since Lucy took care of her aunt's chattel more than two years ago, choosing the location because of its proximity to New York, where Lucy has her headquarters and apartment. Scarpetta doesn't miss the furniture from her past. It is useless to care about it. Just the thought of it makes her tired for reasons she doesn't completely comprehend.
The office in her Delray rental house is a comfortable size, although nowhere near as spacious and organized as what she was accustomed to in her Richmond house, where she had cabinets of hanging files, miles of workspace and a massive desk custom-built of Brazilian cherry. Her house there was modern Italian country, put together stone by stone, the walls antiqued plaster, the exposed beams nineteenth-century black jarrah railroad ties from South Africa. If the house she built in Richmond wasn't beautiful before, it was spectacular by the time she remodeled it in an attempt to eradicate the past-a past haunted by Benton and Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. But she felt no better. The ghosts followed her from room to room.
Her denial of unbearable loss and her own near murder were fragmented dreams of horror that chilled her, no matter the temperature inside the house. Every creak of old wood and utterance of wind sends her hand reaching for the pistol she carried as her heart beat hard. One day she walked out of her magnificent home and never went back, not even to retrieve her belongings. Lucy handled that.
For one who had always walled her soul from a wicked world and un-reachable pain, she found herself a wanderer, skipping from one hotel to another like a stone across water, making phone calls to set up private consulting, and quickly became so bound in the snarled chains of evidence, of investigative incompetence and carelessness of police and medical examiners all over the place, that she had no choice but to settle in another house because she had to settle somewhere. She could no longer review cases while sitting on a hotel bed.
"Go south, far south," Lucy told her quietly, lovingly, one afternoon in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Scarpetta was in hiding at the Homestead Inn. "You aren't ready for New York yet, Aunt Kay, and you sure as hell aren't ready to work for me."
"I'll never work for you." Scarpetta meant it, shame pulling her eyes away from her niece.
"Well, you don't have to be insulting about it." Lucy was stung too, and within a minute, the two of them were arguing and fighting.
"I raised you," Scarpetta blurted out from the bed, where she sat rigidly and enraged. "My goddamn sister, the admired author of children's books who doesn't have a clue about raising her own goddamn child, dumped me on your doorstep… I mean, the other way around."
"Freudian slip! You needed me worse than I needed you."
"Not hardly. You were a monster. At ten, when you rolled into my life like the Trojan Horse, I was stupid enough to let you park, and then what? Then what?" The great Chief, the logical doctor-lawyer, was sputtering, tears rolling down her face. "You had to be a genius, didn't you? The worst brat on Earth…" Scarpetta's voice quavered. "And I couldn't give you up, you awful child." She could hardly speak. "If Dorothy had wanted you back, I would have taken the bitch to court and proved she wasn't a fit mother."
"She wasn't a fit mother and she isn't." Lucy was beginning to cry, too. "A bitch? That's charging her with a misdemeanor when she's a felon. A felon! A character disorder. For God's sake, how did you end up with a psycho for a sister?" Lucy weeps, sitting next to her aunt on the bed, their shoulders touching.
"She's the dragon you always fight, have spent your life fighting," Scarpetta said. "You're really fighting Mom. She's too small a quarry for me. She's nothing more than a rabbit with sharp teeth that goes after your ankles. I don't waste my time on rabbits. I don't have time."
"Please go south," Lucy begged her, getting up from the bed and facing her with wet eyes and a red nose. "For now. Please. Go back to where you came from and start all over."
"I'm too old to start over."
"Shit!" Lucy laughed. "You're only forty-six, and men and women stare at you everywhere you go. And you don't even notice. You're one hell of a package."
The only time Scarpetta was ever called a package was when she was in worse trouble than usual and required off-duty police for security. On their radios, they referred to her as the package. Scarpetta wasn't entirely sure what they meant.
She moved south to Delray Beach, not exactly returning to her roots, but to an area near where her mother and sister live, yet safely far away.
Inside her weather-beaten 1950s rented house, her office is piled with paperwork and stiff cardboard slide folders, so much of it stacked on the floor that she has to make an effort not to trip over her work, making it impossible for her to be her usual prepossessed self when she walks in. Bookcases are crammed, some medical and legal tomes are double-shelved, while her rare antique books are protected from the sun and humidity in a tiny room next door that was probably intended to be the nursery.