The Last Precinct

"Hey, it's not that I blame her for wanting to blow the squirrel's brains out," Marino gives me his commentary. "But that's where your training's got to come in. Don't matter if it's your aunt or your kid involved, you got to do what you're trained to do, and she didn't. She sure as hell didn't. What she did was go ape-shit."
"I've seen you go ape-shit a few times in your life," I remind him.
"Well, it's my personal opinion they never should have thrown her into that undercover work down there in Miami." Lucy is assigned to the Miami field office and is here for the holidays, among other reasons. "Sometimes people get too close to the bad guys and start identifying with them. Lucy's in a kill mode. She's gotten trigger-happy, Doc."
"That's not fair." I realize I have packed too many pairs of shoes. "Tell me what you would have done if you'd gotten to my house first instead of her." I stop what I am doing and look at him.
"At least take a nanosecond to assess the situation before I went in there and put a gun to the asshole's head. Shit. The guy was so fucked up he couldn't even see what he was doing. He's screaming bloody murder because he's got this chemical shit you threw in his eyes. He wasn't armed by this point. He wasn't going to be hurting nobody. That was obvious right away. And it was obvious you was hurt, too. So if it had been me, I'd called for an ambulance, and Lucy didn't think to even do that. She's a wild card, Doc. And no, I didn't want her in the house with all this going on. That's why we interviewed her down at the station, got her statements in a neutral place to get her calmed down."
"I don't consider an interrogation room a neutral place," I reply.
"Well, being inside the house where your Aunt Kay almost got whacked ain't exactly neutral, either."
I don't disagree with him, but sarcasm is poisoning his tone. I begin to resent it.
"All the same, I got to tell you I've got a really bad feeling about her being alone in a hotel right now," he adds, rubbing his face again, and no matter what he says to the contrary, he thinks the world of my niece and would do anything for her. He has known her since she was ten, and he introduced her to trucks and big engines and guns and all sorts of so-called manly interests that he now criticizes her for having in her life. "I might just check on the little shit after I drop you off at Anna's. Not that anybody seems to care about my bad feelings," he jumps back several thoughts. "Like Jay Talley. Of course, it ain't my business. The self-centered bastard."
"He waited with me the entire time at the hospital," I defend Jay yet one more time, deflecting Marino's naked jealousy. Jay is ATF's Interpol liaison. I don't know him very well but slept with him in Paris four days ago. "And I was there thirteen or fourteen hours," I go on as Marino practically rolls his eyes. "I don't call that self-centered."
"Jesus!" Marino exclaims. "Where'd you hear that fairy tale?" His eyes burn with resentment. He despises Jay and did the first time he ever laid eyes on him in France. "I can't believe it. He lets you think he was at the hospital all that time? He didn't wait for you! That's total bullshit. He took you there on his fucking white horse and came right back here. Then he called to see when you was going to be ready to check out and slithered back to the hospital and picked you up."
"Which makes good sense." I don't show my dismay. "No point in sitting and doing nothing. And he never said he was there the entire time. 1 just assumed it."
"Yeah, why? Because he let you assume it. He lets you think something that isn't true, and you ain't bothered by that? In my book, that's known as a character flaw. It's called lying… What?" He abruptly changes his tone. Someone is in my doorway.
A uniformed officer whose nameplate reads M. I. Cal-loway steps inside my bedroom. "I'm sorry," she addresses Marino right off. "Captain, I didn't know you were back here."
"Well, now you know." He gives her a black look.
"Dr. Scarpetta?" Her wide eyes are like Ping-Pong balls, bouncing back and forth between Marino and me. "I need to ask you about the jar. Where the jar of the chemical, the for-mulin…"
"Formalin," I quietly correct her.
"Right," she says. "Exactly, I mean, where exactly was the jar when you picked it up?"
Marino remains on the bed, as if he makes himself at home on the foot of my bed every day of his life. He starts feeling for his cigarettes.
"The coffee table in the great room," I answer Galloway. "I've already told everybody that."
"Yes, ma'am, but where on the coffee table? It's a pretty big coffee table. I'm really sorry to bother you with all this. It's just we're trying to reconstruct how it all happened, because later it's only going to get harder to remember."
Marino slowly shakes a Lucky Strike loose from the pack. "Galloway?" He doesn't even look at her. "Since when are you a detective? Don't seem I remember you being in A Squad." He is the head of the Richmond Police Department's violent crime unit known as A Squad.
"We just aren't sure where the jar was, Captain." Her cheeks burn.
The cops probably assumed a woman coming back here to question me would be less intrusive than a male. Perhaps her
comrades sent her back here for that reason, or maybe it was
simply that she got the assignment because no one else wanted to tangle with me.
"When you walk into the great room and face the coffee table, it's the right corner of the table closest to you," I say to her. I have been through this many times. Nothing is clear. What happened is a blur, an unreal torquing of reality.
"And that's approximately where you were standing when you threw the chemical on him?" Galloway asks me.
"No. I was on the other side of the couch. Near the sliding glass door. He was chasing me and that's where I ended up," I explain.
"And after that you ran directly out of the house…?" Galloway scratches through something she is writing on her small memo pad.
"Through the dining room," I interrupt her. "Where my gun was, where I happened to have set it on the dining room table earlier in the evening. Not a good place to leave it, I admit." My mind meanders. I feel as if I have severe jet lag. "I hit the panic alarm and went out the front door. With the gun, the Glock. But I slipped on ice and fractured my elbow. I couldn't pull the slide back, not with just one hand."
She writes this down, too. My story is tired and the same. If I have to tell it one more time, I might become irrational, and no cop on this planet has ever seen me irrational.
"You never fired it?" She glances up at me and wets her lips.
"I couldn't cock it."
"You never tried to fire it?"
"I don't know what you mean by try. I couldn't cock it."
"But you tried to?"
"You need a translator or something?" Marino erupts. The ominous way he stares at M. I. Galloway reminds me of the red dot a laser sight marks on a person before a bullet follows. "The gun wasn't cocked and she didn't fire it, you got that?" he repeats slowly and rudely. "How many cartridges you have in the magazine?" He directs this to me. "Eighteen? It's a Glock Seventeen, takes eighteen in the mag, one in the chamber, right?"
"I don't know," I tell him. "Probably not eighteen, definitely not. It's hard to get that many rounds in it because the spring's stiff, the spring in the magazine."
"Right, right. You remember the last time you shot that gun?" he then asks me.
"Whenever I was at the range last. Months at least."
"You always clean your guns after you go to the range, don't you, Doc." This is a statement, not an inquiry. Marino knows my habits and routines.
"Yes." I am standing in the middle of my bedroom, blinking. I have a headache and the lights hurt my eyes.