perfect crime,” he says. “And I came up with it, not you.”
I slowly, quietly peel open the pouch.
“A way to put someone to sleep that can’t be detected. Not by anyone. An environmentally friendly way. You will go out green.” That mirthless laugh again. “They all go out green. Except the bone lady didn’t. Really too bad. I honestly don’t feel good about that one. This didn’t have to happen, you know. It’s all your fault. Showing up and poking your nose in what’s none of your business? Timing’s everything, and yours is up.”
I lock a blade into the handle and steel against steel makes a soft click, and I worry that he heard it.
“Well, well, what’s this?”
He stops the car suddenly. His door opens.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he says, as he gets out.
He heard me safety-lock the blade, and I don’t know which door he’s going to open, it occurs to me on a fresh rush of panic. I don’t know if he’ll open a back door or the tailgate, and I’ll have to move very fast because he’s going to see I’m not in the net anymore.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I’ll go for his head, his neck, his face, his eyes, but it will be hard to see him. Where we are is very dark, and the interior light in my car is off. He turned it off to get me in and out without anyone seeing, and it enters my mind that he hasn’t shut the engine off, and he must have left his door open because the car is beeping. The engine is rumbling loudly, and it sounds different, as if he’s got his foot on the gas but not like that either, and he’s not inside the car. I don’t understand what I’m hearing, and I grip the steel handle in a way I’ve never gripped a scalpel before.
Like a knife for slashing, for stabbing.
“This is private property,” he says, and I realize he’s not talking to me.
I sit up and have the scalpel ready, and I notice a lot of trucks, white trucks of different sizes with Crystal Carbon2 and a logo painted on them, and in the distance are runway lights and Logan’s air traffic control tower.
We’re directly across the harbor from the airport, on a peninsula of the Marine Industrial Park where the U.S. Naval Hospital Ship Comfort is dry-docked, its white stack with the red cross on it proud against the black sky, and then I see him in the headlights, washed out by the glare, scowling, enraged. He’s holding a small bottle, and a rag that’s as big as a diaper, and he’s backing away from the SUV and the bottle smashes to the pavement and the rag flutters off like a ghost as he runs.
I open the back door and step out unsteadily, my bare feet numb, and the tarmac we’re parked on suddenly is a confusion of strobing emergency lights, cars marked and unmarked roaring in, and he is running toward an old brick warehouse on the water, and Marino and Lucy are on top of him.
He falls, tumbles headlong, as if he’s diving into the asphalt, or maybe Lucy kicked his feet out from under him, I can’t tell. But Marino is all over him, punching and yelling, and then a young woman appears as if she’s been conjured up. For an instant, I wonder if I’m dreaming again.
forty
SHE MATERIALIZES OUT OF FLASHING BRIGHT LIGHTS and darkness, emerging from behind my SUV, where I realize a black Maserati is parked, its big engine rumbling throatily. She asks if I’m all right, and I tell her I’m fine, and I don’t know her and I do.
“He might just kill him. All right, Marino. That’s enough. Not that I blame him.” She’s staring in the direction of the warehouse, and I’m staring at her face. “You sure you’re okay? Let’s get you in the back of a cruiser and I’ll find something for your feet.”
She’s cut her hair quite short, and it looks more blond than brown, still very pretty but older, mid-thirties, about Lucy’s age. When I saw her last she was barely twenty, and she puts an arm around me and walks me to Sil Machado’s Crown Vic as he’s boiling out of it. I climb into the backseat and sit with the door wide open, and I rub my feet.
“I guess someone will explain things,” I say to Janet.