“You can’t tell anyone about this,” he said, and I knew he was thinking about Anderson. “You know, I bet you could get a really good deal on some uh this camera shit.”
“I bet you could.”
“Wonder what they’re gonna do with it.”
“Has the removal service come yet?” I asked him.
He raised his portable radio to his lips.
“Christ!” He spat and gagged some more.
He vigorously wiped the radio on the front of his pants and coughed and conjured up spittle from the bottom of his throat and let it fly.
“Unit nine,” he said on the air, holding the’radio a good twelve inches from his face.
“Unit nine.”
The dispatcher was a woman. I detected warmth in her voice and was surprised. Dispatchers and 911 operators almost always remained calm and showed no emotion, no matter the emergency.
“Ten-five Rene Anderson,” Marino was saying. “Don’t know her unit number. Tell -her if she doesn’t mind, we
sure would like removal service guys to show up down here.”
“Unit nine. You know the name of the service?”
“Hey, Doc,” Marino stopped transmitting and raised his voice to me. “What’s the name of the service?”
“Capital Transport:’
He passed that along, adding, “Radio, if she’s a ten-two, ten-ten, or ten-seven or if we should ten-twenty-two, get back to me.°”
A storm of cops keyed their mikes, their way of laughing and cheering him on.
“Ten-four, unit nine;” the dispatcher said.
“What did you just say that got you such an ovation? I know, ten-seven is out of service, but I didn’t get the rest of it.”
“Told her to let me know if Anderson was a weak signal or negative, or had time to get around to it. Or if we should fucking disregard her.”
“No wonder she likes you so much.”
“She’s a piece of shit.”
“By chance do you know what happened to the fiberoptic cable?” I asked him.
“I had it in my hand;” he replied.
I found it where he had fallen and knocked over cartons.
“What if he’s got AIDS?” He started in on that again.
“If you’re determined to worry about something, try gram-negative bacterias. Or gram-positive bacterias. Clostridia. Strep. If you have an open wound, which you don’t as best I know.”
I attached one end of the cable to the wand, the other to the assembly, tightening thumbscrews. He wasn’t listening.
“No way anybody’s saying that about me! That I’m a goddamn fairy! I’ll eat my gun, don’t think I won’t.”
“You’re not going to get AIDS, Marino;” I repeated myself.
I turned on the source lamp again. It would have to run at least four minutes before I could turn on the power.
“I picked a hangnail yesterday and it bled! That’s an open wound!”
“You have on gloves, don’t you?”
“If I get some bad disease, I’m going to kill that fucking little lazy snitch.”
I assumed he meant Anderson.
“Bray’s gonna get hers, too. I’ll find a way!”
“Marino, be quiet,” I said.
“How would you like it if it was you?”
“I can’t tell you how many times it’s been me. What do you think I do every day?”
“You sure as hell don’t slop around in dead juice!”
“Dead juice?” –
“We don’t know a thing about this guy. What if they got some weird diseases in Belgium that we can’t treat here.”
“Marino, be quiet,” I said again.
“No!”
“Marino. . ”
“I got a right to be upset!”
“All right then, leave.” My patience had walked off. “You’re interfering with my concentration. You’re interfering with everything. Go take a shower and throw back a few shots of bourbon.”
The Luma-Lite was ready and I put on the protective glasses. Marino was quiet.
“I’m not leaving,” he finally said.
I gripped the fiber-optics wand like a soldering iron. The intense pulsing blue light was as thin as pencil lead, and I began scanning very small areas.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Not so far.”
His sticky booties moved closer as I worked slowly, inch by inch, into places that could not be reached by the broad scan. I leaned the body forward to probe behind the back and head, then between the legs. I checked the palms of his hands. The Luma-Lite could detect body fluids such as urine, semen, sweat and saliva, and of course, blood. But again, nothing fluoresced. My back and neck ached.