“I’m sure you have,” I said.
She locked her car door and said, “Just so you know, you don’t need a reservation to sit at the bar. That’s where I usually eat anyway. They’re famous for their steak fromage, but I recommend you try the lobster, Kay. And you, Captain Marino, would love their onion rings. I hear they’re to die for.”
We watched her walk off.
“Fucking bitch,” Marino said.
“Let’s get out of here,”.I said.
“Yeah, last thing I want to do is eat anywhere near poison like that. I ain’t even hungry.”
“That won’t last.”
We climbed into his truck and I sank beneath a heavy depression that held me down like tar. I wanted to find some victory, some ray of optimism in what had just transpired, but I couldn’t. I felt defeated. Worse, I felt foolish.
“Want a cigarette?” Marino asked inside the dark cab as he punched in the lighter.
“Why not,” I muttered. “I’m going to stop again pretty soon.”
He handed one to me and lit his. He gave me the lighter. He kept glancing over at me, knowing how I felt.
“I still think it was a good thing we done,” he said. “I bet she’s in that restaurant belting down whiskeys because we got her good:”
“We didn’t get her good,” I replied, squinting at the lights of cars passing by. “With her, I’m afraid the only silver bullet is prevention. We have to guard against further damage by not only anticipating but also following up on everything we do.”
I opened the window several inches, cold air touching my hair. I blew out smoke.
“No-show Chuck:’ I commented.
“Oh, he showed up. You just didn’t see him because he saw us first and hightailed it out of there.”
“You sure?”
“I saw his piece-of-shit Miata turning into the road leading to the shopping center, and then about halfway to the parking lot it suddenly did a U-turn and got the hell out of Dodge. And this was at the exact time Bray said something else on her portable after she saw us outside her car.”
“Chuck’s a direct conduit from me to her;” I said. “She may as well have a key to my office.”
“Hell, maybe she does,” he said. “But, Doc, you just leave Chuckie-boy to me.”
“Now, that scares me,” I said. “Please don’t go doing something reckless, Marino. He does work for me, after all. I dont need any other problems.”
“My point exactly. You don’t need any more problems.”
He dropped me off at the office and waited until I got into my car. I followed him out of the parking lot, and he went his way and I went mine.
19
The tiny moon-eyes from the dead man’s skin glowed in my mind. They looked out from that deep, off-limits place where I stored my fears, which were many and of a kind not felt by anyone else I knew. Wind shook bare trees and clouds streamed like banners across the sky as a cold front rushed in.
I had heard on the news the temperature might dip into the twenties that night, which seemed impossible after weeks that felt like fall. It seemed everything was out of balance and abnormal in my life. Lucy wasn’t Lucy so I couldn’t call her and she wasn’t speaking to me. Marino was working a homicide even though he wasn’t a detective anymore, and Benton was gone, and everywhere I looked for him I found an empty frame. I still waited for his car to drive up, for the phone to ring, for the sound of his voice, because it was too soon for my heart to accept what my brain knew.
I turned off the Downtown Expressway onto Cary Street, and as I drove past a shopping center and the Venice Restaurant, I became aware of a car behind me. It was driving very slowly and too far away for me to tell anything about the person behind the wheel. Instinct told me to slow down, and when I did, so did the car. I turned right on Cary
Street, and the car stayed with me. When I took a left into Windsor Farms, there it was, maintaining the same safe distance.