“Good night, Benton.”
“Kay!”
I hung up and didn’t answer when he immediately called back. I listened numbly to his protests on the machine, blood pounding in my neck as the images rushed back at me, images of Marino’s car hissing as flames snarled at arching blasts of water from tumescent fire hoses snaking over my street. When I had discovered the charred little corpse at the end of my driveway, something inside me snapped. The gas tank in Marino’s car must have exploded at the very instant Sammy Squirrel was frantically hopping along the power line. Crazily, he leapt for safety. For a split second, his paws simultaneously made contact with the grounded transformer and primary line. Twenty thousand volts of electricity surged through his tiny body, burning him to a crisp and blowing the fuse.
I had scooped him into a shoe box and buried him in my rose garden, the idea of seeing his blackened shape in the light of morning more than I could bear.
The electricity was still out when I finished packing. I went downstairs and nursed brandy and smoked until I stopped shaking, my Ruger on top of the bar glinting in the light of hurricane lanterns. I did not go to bed. I did not look at the wreckage of my yard when I bolted out my door, my suitcase thumping against my leg and filthy water splashing my ankles as I ran to my car. I did not see a single patrol unit as I drove swiftly along my silent street. When I got to the airport shortly after five A.M., I headed straight for the ladies’ room and took my handgun out of my pocketbook. Unloading it, I packed it inside my suitcase.
15
Passing through the boarding bridge, I deplaned at noon into the sun-drenched concourse of Miami International Airport.
I stopped to buy the Miami Herald and a cup of coffee. Finding a small table halfway hidden by a potted palm, I took off my winter blazer and pushed up my sleeves. I was soaking wet, perspiration trickling down my sides and back. My eyes burned from lack of sleep, my head ached, and what I discovered when I spread open the paper did nothing to improve my condition. In the lower left-hand comer of the front page was a spectacular photograph of firefighters hosing down Marino’s flaming car. Accompanying the dramatic tableau of arching water, billowing smoke, and trees igniting at the edge of my yard was the following caption:
POLICE CAR EXPLODES
Richmond firefighters work on a city homicide detective’s car engulfed in flames on a quiet residential street. The Ford LTD was unoccupied when it exploded last night. There were no injuries. Arson is suspected.
At least there was no reference to whose house Marino’s car had been parked in front of or why, thank God. All the same, my mother would see the photograph and she would try to call. “I wish you’d move back to Miami, Kay. Richmond sounds so awful. And the new medical examiner’s office is so lovely down here, Kay–looks like something out of the movies,” she would say. Oddly, it never seemed to occur to my mother that there were more homicides, shoot-outs, drug busts, race riots, rapes, and robberies in my Spanish-speaking hometown in any given year than in Virginia and the entire British Commonwealth combined.
I would call my mother later. Forgive me, Lord, but I don’t have it in me to talk to her now.
Gathering my belongings, I crushed out a cigarette and immersed myself in the tide of tropical clothes, duty-free shopping bags and foreign tongues flowing toward the baggage area, my handbag pressed protectively against my side.
I didn’t begin to relax until several hours later as I sped along the Seven Mile Bridge in my rental car. As I drove deeper south, the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic on the other, I tried to remember the last time I had been to Key West. Of all the times Tony and I had visited my family in Miami, this was one outing we had never considered. I was fairly certain the last time I had made this drive, I had made it with Mark.