‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I’ll fix you a toddy and you can crash here. You’re right. Maybe I don’t want to be alone and have five more pizza deliveries and cabs show up.’
‘That’s what I’m thinking,’ he said with feigned cool professionalism.
I unlocked my front door and turned off the alarm, and very shortly Marino was on the wrap-around couch in my great room, with a Booker’s bourbon on the rocks. I made his nest with sweet-smelling sheets and a baby-soft cotton blanket, and for a while we sat in the dark talking.
‘You ever think we might lose in the end?’ he muttered sleepily.
‘Lose?’ I asked.
‘You know, good guys always win. How realistic is that? Not so for other people, like that lady that burned up in Sparkes’s house. Good guys don’t always win. Uh uh, Doc. No fucking way.’
He halfway sat up like a sick man, and took a swallow of bourbon and struggled for breath.
‘Carrie thinks she’s gonna win, too, in case that thought’s never entered your mind,’ he added. ‘She’s had five fucking years at Kirby to think that.’
Whenever Marino was tired or half drunk, he said fuck a lot. In truth, it was a grand word that expressed what one felt by the very act of saying it. But I had explained to him many times before that not everyone could deal with its vulgarity, and for that matter, some perhaps took it all too literally. I personally never thought of fuck as sexual intercourse, but rather of wishing to make a point.
‘I can’t entertain the thought that people like her will win,’ I said quietly as I sipped red burgundy. ‘I will never think that.’
‘Pie in the sky.’
‘No, Marino. Faith.’
‘Yo.’ He swallowed more bourbon. ‘Fucking faith. You know how many guys I’ve known to drop dead of heart attacks or get killed on the job? How many of them do you think had faith? Probably every goddamn one of them. Nobody thinks they’re gonna die, Doc. You and me don’t think it, no matter how much we know. My health sucks, okay? You think I don’t know I’m taking a bite of a poison cookie everyday? Can I help it? Naw. I’m just an old slob who has to have his steak biscuits and whiskey and beer. I’ve given up giving a shit about what the doctors say. So soon enough, I’m gonna stoop over in the saddle and be outta here, you know?’
His voice was getting husky and he was beginning to get maudlin.
‘So a bunch of cops will come to my funeral, and you’ll tell the next detective to come along how it wasn’t all that bad to work with me,’ he went on.
‘Marino, go to sleep,’ I said. ‘And you know that’s not how I feel at all. I can’t even think of something happening to you, you big idiot.’
‘You really mean that?’ He brightened a bit.
‘You know damn well I do,’ I said, and I was exhausted, too.
He finished his bourbon and softly rattled the ice in the glass, but I didn’t respond, because he’d had enough.
‘Know what, Doc?’ he said thickly. ‘I like you a lot, even if you are a pain in the fucking ass.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘It is morning.’
He rattled ice some more.
‘Go to sleep,’ I said.
I did not turn off my bedside lamp until two A.M., and thank God it was Fielding’s turn to spend Saturday in the morgue. It was almost nine when I got motivated to put my feet on the floor, and birds were raucous in my garden, and the sun was bouncing light off the world like a manic child with a ball. My kitchen was so bright it was almost white, and stainless steel appliances were like mirrors. I made coffee and did what I could to clear my head as I thought of the files downloaded into my computer. I thought of opening sliders and windows to enjoy spring air, and then Carrie’s face was before me again.
I went into the great room to check on Marino. He slept the way he lived, struggling against his physical existence as if it were the enemy, the blanket kicked practically to the middle of the floor, pillows beaten into shape, and sheets twisted around his legs.