"You got no idea how many people ask me what your house is like. You'd think you was Lady Di or something. Plus, Righter's got his nose in everything, can't stand to be left out of the loop. Biggest fucking case since Jack the Ripper. Righter's bugging the hell out of us."
Flash guns suddenly explode in bright white stutters and I almost slip. I swear out loud. Photographers have gotten past the neighborhood guard gate. Three of them hurry toward me in a blaze of flashes as I struggle with one arm to climb into the truck's high front seat.
"Hey!" Marino yells at the nearest offender, a woman. "Goddamn bitch!" He lunges, trying to block her camera, and her feet go out from under her. She sits down hard on the slick street, camera equipment thudding and scattering.
"Fuckhead!" she screams at him. "Fuckhead!"
"Get in the truck! Get in the truck!" Marino yells at me.
"Motherfucker!"
My heart drills my ribs.
"I'm going to sue you, motherfucker!"
More flashes and I shut my coat in the door and have to open it again and shut it again while Marino shoves my bags in back and jumps into the driver's seat, the engine turning
over and rumbling like a yacht. The photographer is trying to
get up, and it occurs to me I ought to make sure she isn't injured. "We should see if she's hurt," I say, staring out the side window.
"Hell no. Fuck no." The truck lurches onto the street, fishtails and accelerates.
"Who are they?" Adrenaline pumps. Blue dots float before my eyes.
"Assholes. That's who." He snatches up the hand mike. "Unit nine," he announces over the air.
"Unit nine," the dispatcher comes back.
"I don't need pictures of me, my house…" I raise my voice. Every cell in my body lights up to protest the unfairness of it all.
'Ten-five unit three-twenty, ask him to call me on my portable." Marino holds the mike against his mouth. Unit three-twenty gets back to him right away, the portable phone vibrating like a huge insect. Marino flips it open and talks. "Somehow the media's gotten in the neighborhood. Photographers. I'm thinking they parked somewhere in Windsor Farms, came in on foot over the fence, through that open grassy area behind the guard booth. Send units to look for any cars parked where they shouldn't be and tow 'em. They step foot on the Doc's property, arrest 'em." He ends the call, flipping the phone shut as if he is Captain Kirk and has just ordered the Enterprise to attack.
We slow down at the guard booth and Joe steps out. He is an old man who has always been proud to wear his brown Pinkerton's uniform, and he is very nice, polite and protective, but I would not want to depend on him or his colleagues for more than nuisance control. It shouldn't surprise me a bit that Chandonne got inside my neighborhood or that now the media has. Joe's slack, wrinkled face turns uneasy when he notices me sitting inside the truck.
"Hey, man," Marino gruffly says through the open window, "how'd the photographers get in here?"
"What?" Joe instantly goes into protect mode, eyes narrowing as he stares down the slick, empty street, sodium vapor lights casting yellow auras high up on poles.
"In front of the Doc's house. At least three of 'em." "They didn't come through here," Joe declares. He ducks back inside the booth and grabs the phone.
We drive off. "We can do but so much, Doc," Marino says to me. "You may as well duck your head in the sand because there's gonna be pictures and shit all over the place."
I stare out the window at lovely Georgian homes glowing with holiday festivity.
"Bad news is, your security risk just went up another mile." He is preaching to me, telling me what I already know and have no interest in dwelling on right now. "Because now half the world's gonna see your big fancy house and know exactly where you live. Problem is, and what worries the hell out of me, is stuff like this brings out other squirrels. Gives 'em ideas. They start imagining you as a victim and get off on it, like those assholes who go to the courthouse, cruising for rape cases to sit in on."
He eases to a stop at the intersection of Canterbury Road and West Gary Street, and headlights sweep over us as a compact dark-colored sedan turns in and slows. I recognize the narrow, insipid face of Buford Righter looking over at Marino's truck. Righter and Marino roll down their windows.
"You leaving…?" Righter starts to say when his eyes shoot past Marino and land on me in surprise. I have the unnerving sense that I am the last person he wants to see. "Sorry for your trouble," Righter weirdly says to me, as if what is happening in my life is nothing more than trouble, an inconvenience, an unpleasantness.
"Yeah, heading out." Marino sucks on the cigarette, not the least bit helpful. He has already expressed his opinion about Righter's showing up at my house. It is unnecessary, and even if he truly thinks it is so important to eyeball the crime scene himself, why didn't he do it earlier when I was at the hospital?
Righter pulls his overcoat more tightly around his neck, light from street lamps glinting off his glasses. He nods and says to me, "Take care. Glad you're okay," deciding to acknowledge my so-called trouble. "This is real hard on all of us." A thought catches before it is out in words. Whatever he was going to say next is gone, retracted, struck from the record. "I'll be talking to you," he promises Marino. Windows go up. We drive off.
"Give me a cigarette," I tell Marino. "I'm assuming he didn't come to my house earlier today," I then say.
"Yeah, actually he did. About ten o'clock this morning." He offers me the pack of unaltered Lucky Strikes and flame spits out of a lighter he holds my way.
Anger coils through my entrails, and the back of my neck is hot, the pressure in my head almost unbearable. Fear stirs inside me like a waking beast. I turn mean, punching in the lighter on the dash, ungraciously leaving Marino's arm extended with the Bic lighter flaming. "Thanks for telling me," I sharply reply. "You mind my asking who the hell else has been in my house? And how many times? And how long they stayed and what they touched?"
"Hey, don't take it out on me," he warns.
I know the tone. He is about to lose his patience with me and my mess. We are like weather systems about to collide, and I don't want that. The last thing I need right now is a war with Marino. I touch the tip of the cigarette to bright orange coils and inhale deeply, the punch of pure tobacco spinning me. We drive several minutes in flinty silence, and when I finally speak, I sound numb, my feverish brain glazing over like the streets, depression a heavy pain spreading along my ribs. "I know you're just doing what has to be done. I appreciate it," I force the words. "Even if I'm not showing it."
"You don't got to explain nothing." He sucks on his cigarette, both of us shooting streams of smoke toward our partially open windows. "I know exactly what you feel," he adds.
"You couldn't possibly." Resentment seeps up my throat like bile. "I don't even know."
"I understand a lot more than you give me credit for," he says. "Someday you'll see that, Doc. No way you can see shit right now, and I'm telling you it ain't gonna get no better in days and weeks to come. That's the way it works. The real damage hasn't even hit. I can't tell you how many times I've seen it, seen what happens to people when they're victimized."
I absolutely do not want to hear a single word of this.
"Damn good thing you're going where you are," he says. "Exactly what the doctor ordered, in more ways than one."
"I'm not staying with Anna because it's what the doctor ordered," I reply testily. "I'm staying with her because she's my friend."
"Look, you're a victim and you got to deal with it, and you need help dealing with it. Don't matter you're a doctor-lawyer_Indian chief." Marino will not shut up, in part because he is looking for a fight. He wants a focus for his anger. I can see what is coming, and anger crawls up my neck and heats up the roots of my hair. "Being a victim's the great equalizer," Marino, the world's authority, goes on.