PATRICIA CORNWELL. Unnatural Exposure

Watermen were trying to flee Tangier in their fishing vessels, and the Coast Guard had called in more backups from stations as far south as Florida. I did not know all the details, but based on what I had heard, there was a standoff between law enforcement and Tangiermen in the Tangier Sound, boats anchored and going nowhere as winter winds howled.

Meanwhile, CDC had deployed an isolation team of doctors and nurses to Wingo’s house, and word was out. Headlines screamed and people were evacuating a city that would be difficult, if not impossible, to quarantine. I was as distressed and sick as I’d ever been in my life, drinking hot tea in a bathrobe early Friday morning.

My fever had peaked at a hundred and two, and Robitussin DM didn’t do a thing except make me vomit. Muscles in my neck and back hurt as if I had been playing football against people with clubs. But I could not go to bed. There was far too much to do. I called a bondsman and received the bad news that the only way to get Keith Pleasants out of jail was for me to drive downtown and pay in person. So I went out to my car, only to have to turn around ten minutes later because I’ d left my checkbook on the table.

‘God, help me please,’ I muttered as I sped up.

Rubber squealed as I drove too fast through my neighborhood, and then moments later, back out, flying around corners in Windsor Farms. I wondered what had happened in Maryland during the night as I worried about Lucy, for whom every event was an adventure. She wanted to use guns and go on foot pursuit, fly helicopters and planes. I feared such a spirit would be crushed in its prime, because I knew too much about life and how it ended. I wondered if deadoc had been caught, but believed if he had, I would have been told.

I had never needed a bondsman in my life, and this one, Vince Peeler, worked out of a shoe repair shop on Broad Street, along a strip of abandoned stores with nothing in their windows but graffiti and dust. He was a short, slight man with waxed black hair and a leather apron. Seated at an industrial-sized Singer sewing machine, he was stitching a new sole on a shoe. As I shut the door he gave me the piercing look of one accustomed to recognizing trouble.

‘You Dr Scarpetta?’ he asked as he sewed.

‘Yes.’

I got out my checkbook and a pen, not feeling the least bit friendly as I wondered how many violent people this man had helped back out on the streets.

‘That will be five hundred and thirty dollars,’ he said. ‘If you want to use a credit card, add three percent.’

He got up and came to his scarred counter piled with shoes and tins of Kiwi paste. I could feel his eyes crawling over me.

‘Funny, I thought you’d be a lot older,’ he considered. ‘You know, you read about people in the news and sometimes get flat-out wrong impressions.’

‘He’ll be freed today.’ It was an order as I tore out the check and handed it to him.

‘Oh, sure.’ His eyes darted and he looked at his watch.

‘When?’

‘When?’ he echoed rhetorically.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When will he be freed?’

He snapped his fingers. ‘Like that.’

‘Good,’ I said as I blew my nose. ‘I’m going to be watching for him to be freed like that.’ I snapped my fingers, too. ‘And if he isn’t? Guess what? I’m also a lawyer and in a really, really shitty mood. And I’ll come after you. Okay?’

He smiled at me and swallowed.

‘What kind of lawyer?’ he asked.

‘The kind you don’t want to know,’ I said as I went out the door.

I got to the office maybe fifteen minutes later, and my pager vibrated and the phone rang as I sat behind my desk. Before I could do anything, Rose suddenly appeared and looked unusually stressed.

‘Everybody’s looking for you,’ she said.

‘They always are.’ I frowned at the number on my pager’s display. ‘Now who the hell is that?’

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