Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

Marino slowly shakes a Lucky Strike loose from the pack. “Galloway?” He doesn’t even look at her. “Since when are you a detective? Don’t seem I remember you being in A Squad.” He is the head of the Richmond Police Department’s violent crime unit known as A Squad.

“We just aren’t sure where the jar was, Captain.” Her cheeks burn.

The cops probably assumed a woman coming back here to question me would be less intrusive than a male. Perhaps her

comrades sent her back here for that reason, or maybe it was

simply that she got the assignment because no one else wanted to tangle with me.

“When you walk into the great room and face the coffee table, it’s the right corner of the table closest to you,” I say to her. I have been through this many times. Nothing is clear. What happened is a blur, an unreal torquing of reality.

“And that’s approximately where you were standing when you threw the chemical on him?” Galloway asks me.

“No. I was on the other side of the couch. Near the sliding glass door. He was chasing me and that’s where I ended up,” I explain.

“And after that you ran directly out of the house… ?” Galloway scratches through something she is writing on her small memo pad.

“Through the dining room,” I interrupt her. “Where my gun was, where I happened to have set it on the dining room table earlier in the evening. Not a good place to leave it, I ad­mit.” My mind meanders. I feel as if I have severe jet lag. “I hit the panic alarm and went out the front door. With the gun, the Glock. But I slipped on ice and fractured my elbow. I couldn’t pull the slide back, not with just one hand.”

She writes this down, too. My story is tired and the same. If I have to tell it one more time, I might become irrational, and no cop on this planet has ever seen me irrational.

“You never fired it?” She glances up at me and wets her lips.

“I couldn’t cock it.”

“You never tried to fire it?”

“I don’t know what you mean by try. I couldn’t cock it.”

“But you tried to?”

“You need a translator or something?” Marino erupts. The ominous way he stares at M. I. Galloway reminds me of the red dot a laser sight marks on a person before a bullet follows. “The gun wasn’t cocked and she didn’t fire it, you got that?” he repeats slowly and rudely. “How many cartridges you have in the magazine?” He directs this to me. “Eighteen? It’s a Glock Seventeen, takes eighteen in the mag, one in the cham­ber, right?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Probably not eighteen, defi­nitely not. It’s hard to get that many rounds in it because the spring’s stiff, the spring in the magazine.”

“Right, right. You remember the last time you shot that gun?” he then asks me.

“Whenever I was at the range last. Months at least.”

“You always clean your guns after you go to the range, don’t you, Doc.” This is a statement, not an inquiry. Marino knows my habits and routines.

“Yes.” I am standing in the middle of my bedroom, blink­ing. I have a headache and the lights hurt my eyes.

“You looked at the gun, Galloway? I mean, you’ve exam­ined it, right?” He fixes her in his laser sight again. “So what’s the deal?” He flaps a hand at her as if she is a stupid nuisance. “Tell me what you found.”

She hesitates. I sense she doesn’t want to give out informa­tion in front of me. Marino’s question hangs heavy like mois­ture about to precipitate. I decide on two skirts, one navy blue, one gray, and drape them over the chair.

“There are fourteen rounds in the magazine,” Galloway tells him in a robotic military tone. “There wasn’t one in the chamber. It wasn’t cocked. And it looks clean.”

“Well, well. Then it wasn’t cocked and she didn’t shoot it. And it was a dark and stormy night and three Indians sat around a camp/ire. We want to go round and round, or can we fucking move along?” He is sweating and his body odor rises with his heat.

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