Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

“I resigned tonight,” I tell her. A stunned silence follows.

“What did you say?” Marino asks me, standing in front of the fire, drinking. “You did what?”

“I told the governor,” I reply, and an inexplicable calm be­gins to settle over me. It feels good to consider that I did something instead of everything being done to me. Maybe quitting my job makes me less a victim, if I am willing to fi­nally admit that I am a victim. I suppose I am one, and the only comeback is to finish what Chandonne started: end my life as I have known it and start all over. What a weird and stunning thought. I tell Marino, McGovern and Lucy all about my conversation with Mike Mitchell.

“Hold on.” Marino is sitting on the hearth. It is getting close to midnight and Anna is so quiet I forgot for a moment that she was in the house. Maybe she has gone to bed. “This mean you can’t work cases no more?” Marino says to me.

“Not at all,” I reply. “I’ll be acting chief until the governor decides otherwise.” No one asks me what I plan to do with the rest of my life. It really doesn’t make sense to worry about some distant future when the present is shot. I am grateful not to be asked and probably am sending out my usual signals that I don’t want to be asked. People sense when to remain silent, or if nothing else, I deflect their interest and they don’t even realize I have just manipulated them into not probing for in­formation that I prefer to keep to myself. I became an expert at this maneuver at a very young age when I didn’t want my

classmates asking me about my father and if he was still sick

or would ever get better or what it is like to have your father die. I was conditioned not to tell, and I was conditioned not to ask, either. The last three years of my father’s life were spent in absolute avoidance by my entire family, including him, es­pecially him. He was a lot like Marino, both of them macho Italian men who seem to assume their bodies will never part company with them, no matter how ill or out of shape. I envi­sion my father as Lucy, Marino and McGovern talk about all they plan to do and are already doing to help me, including background checks already in the works and all sorts of things The Last Precinct has to offer me.

I really am not listening. Their voices may as well be the chatter of crows as I remember the thick Miami grass of my childhood, and dried-out chinch bug husks and the key lime tree in my small backyard. My father taught me how to crack coconuts on the driveway with a hammer and a screwdriver, and I would spend an inordinate amount of time prying the fleshy, sweet white meat from the hard, hairy shell, and he got a lot of amusement from observing my obsessive labors. The coconut meat would go in the squat white refrigerator, and no one, including me, ever ate it. During blistering summer Sat­urdays, my father would surprise Dorothy and me now and then by bringing home two big blocks of ice from his neigh­borhood grocery store. We had a small, inflatable pool we filled with the hose, and my sister and I would sit on the ice, getting scorched by the sun while we froze our asses off. We would jump in and out of the pool to thaw, then perch on our frigid, slick thrones again like princesses while my father laughed at us through the living room window, laughed hilari­ously and tapped on the glass, playing Fats Waller full blast on the hi-fi.

My father was a good man. When he felt halfway decent he was generous, thoughtful and full of humor and fun. He was handsome, of medium height, blond and broad-shouldered when he wasn’t wasted by cancer. His full name was Kay Marcellus Scarpetta III, and he insisted that his first­born take this name, which has been in the family since

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