Predator

57

Marino stands beneath a palm tree outside the Academy, watching Reba walk off to her unmarked CrownVictoria. He notes the defiance in her step, tries to determine if it’s genuine or if she’s putting on an act. He wonders if she sees him standing under the palm tree, smoking.

She called him a jerk. He’s been called that a lot, but he never thought she would say it.

She unlocks her car, then seems to change her mind about getting in. She doesn’t look in his direction, but he has a feeling she knows he’s standing there in the shadow of the palm tree, his Treo in hand, the earpiece in his ear, a cigarette going. She shouldn’t have said what she did. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta. The Effexor ruined things. If he wasn’t depressed before, he was after that, then that comment about Scarpetta, about all these cops having the hots for her.

The Effexor was a blight. Dr. Self has no right to put him on a drug that ruined his sex life. She has no right to talk about Scarpetta all the time, as if Scarpetta is the most important person in Marino’s life. Reba had to remind him. She said what she did to remind him he couldn’t have sex, remind him of men who can and want it with Scarpetta. Marino hasn’t taken the Effexor for several weeks, and his problem is getting better except he is depressed.

Reba pops the trunk, walks around to the back of the car and opens it.

Marino wonders what she’s doing. He decides he may as well find out and be decent enough to let her know he can’t arrest anyone and could probably use her help. He can threaten people all he wants, but he can’t legally arrest anybody. It’s the only thing he misses about policing. Reba grabs what looks like a bag of laundry out of the trunk and throws it into the backseat as if she’s pissed off.

“Got a body in there?” Marino asks, casually walking up to her, flicking his cigarette butt into the grass.

“Ever heard of using a trash can?”

She slams shut the door, barely looking at him.

“What’s in the bag?”

“I’ve got to go to the cleaners. Haven’t had time in a week, not that it’s any of your business,” she says, hiding behind a pair of dark glasses. “Don’t treat me like shit anymore, at least not in front of other people. You want to be a jerk, at least be discreet about it.”

He looks back at his palm tree as if it’s his favorite spot, looks at the stucco building against the bright blue sky, trying to think how to put it.

“Well, you were disrespectful,” he says.

She looks at him in shock. “Me? What are you talking about? Are you crazy? Last I remember, we had a nice ride and you dragged me to Hooters, never asked if that’s where I wanted to go, by the way. Why you’d take a woman to an ass-and-tits place like that beats the hell out of me. Talk about disrespectful? Are you kidding? Making me sit there while you ogle all the tartlets jiggling past.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Were too.”

“I sure wasn’t,” he says, sliding out the pack of cigarettes.

“You’re smoking too much.”

“I wasn’t staring at nothing. I was minding my own business drinking my coffee, then out of the blue you started in on all this crap about the Doc and I’ll be damned if I have to listen to such disrespectful bullshit.”

She’s jealous, he thinks, pleased. She said what she did because she thought he was staring at the waitresses in Hooters, and maybe he was. To make a point.

“I’ve worked with her a million years and don’t let anybody talk about her like that and I’m not going to start now,” he goes on, lighting up, squinting in the sun, noticing a group of students dressed in field clothes walking past on the road, heading to the SUVs in the parking lot, probably heading off to the Hollywood Police Training Facility for a demonstration by the Bomb Disposal Team.

Seems like they were scheduled for that today, to play with Eddie the Remote Tec robot, watch it move on its tractor belts, sounding like a crab crawling down the trailer’s aluminum ramp, connected to a fiber-optic cable, showing off, and Bunky the bomb dog showing off, and firefighters in their big trucks showing off, and guys in their bomb-and-search suits showing off with dynamite and det cord and disrupters, maybe blowing up a car.

Marino misses it. He’s tired of being left out.

“I’m sorry,” Reba says, “I didn’t mean to say anything disrespectful about her. All I was saying was some of the guys I work with-”

“I need you to arrest somebody,” he cuts her off, looking at his watch, not interested in hearing her repeat what she told him at Hooters, not interested in perhaps having to face that some of it was him.

Most of it was him.

The Effexor. Reba would have found out sooner rather than later. The damn stuff ruined him.

“In maybe half an hour. If you can put off going to the Laundromat,” he is saying.

“The dry cleaner’s, jerk,” she says with hostility that’s not at all convincing.

She still likes him.

“I’ve got my own washer and dryer,” she says. “I don’t live in a trailer.”

Marino tries Lucy on the cell phone as he says to Reba, “I’ve got an idea. Not sure it will work, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Lucy answers and tells him she can’t talk.

“It’s important,” Marino says, looking at Reba, remembering their weekend inKey Westwhen he wasn’t on Effexor. “Just give me two minutes.”

He can hear Lucy talking to someone, saying she’s got to take the call and will be right back. A man’s voice says no problem. Marino can hear Lucy walking. He looks at Reba and remembers getting drunk on Captain Morgan rum in the Paradise Lounge at the Holiday Inn and watching the sunsets and sitting up late at night in the hot tub when he wasn’t on Effexor.

“You there?” Lucy is asking him.

“Is it possible for me to have a three-way conference call with two cell phones, one landline and only two people?” he asks.

“This some kind of Mensa test question?”

“What I want is to make it look like I’m on my phone in my office talking to you, but what I’m really doing is talking to you on my cell phone. Hello? Are you there?”

“Are you suggesting someone may be monitoring your phone calls from a multiline phone that’s connected to the PBX system?”

“From the damn phone on my desk,” he says, looking at Reba looking at him, trying to see if she’s impressed.

“That’s what I meant. Who?” Lucy says.

“I intend to find out but I’m pretty sure I know.”

“No one could do that without the system admin’s password. And that would be me.”

“I think someone’s got it. It would explain a lot of things. Is it possible to do what I said?” he asks her again. “Can I call you on my office phone, then conference in on my cell phone, then leave my office phone line open so it seems I’m in there talking but I’m not?”

“Yes, we can,” she says. “But not right this minute.”

Dr. Self presses a flashing button on the phone.

“Our next caller-well, he’s been on hold for several minutes now, and he has an unusual nickname. Hog? I apologize. You still with us?”

“Yes, ma’am,” a soft-spoken voice enters the studio.

“You’re on the air,” she says. “Now, Hog? Why don’t you tell us about your nickname first. I’m sure everybody’s curious.”

“It’s what I’m called.”

Silence, and Dr. Self fills it instantly. There can be no dead time on the air.

“Well, Hog it is. Now, you called in with a startling story. You’re in the lawn-care business. And you were in a certain neighborhood and noticed citrus canker in someone’s yard…?”

“No. It’s not quite like that.”

Dr. Self feels a pinch of irritation. Hog’s not following the script. When he called late Tuesday afternoon and she pretended to be someone other than herself, he distinctly said he had discovered canker in an old woman’s yard in Hollywood, just one orange tree, and now every citrus tree in her yard and all her neighbors’ yards has to be cut down, and when he mentioned the problem to the owner of that particular infected tree, the old woman, she threatened to kill herself if Hog reported the canker to the Department of Agriculture. She threatened to shoot herself with her dead husband’s shotgun.

The old woman’s husband had planted the trees when they first got married. He’s dead and the trees are all she has left, the only living thing left. To cut down her trees is to destroy a precious part of her life that nobody has any business touching.

“Eradicating those trees is to cause her to at last accept her loss.” Dr. Self is explaining all this to her audience. “And in doing so, she doesn’t see anything left worth living for. She wants to die. That’s quite a dilemma to find yourself in, isn’t it, Hog? Playing God,” she says to the speakerphone.

“I don’t play God. I do what God says. It’s not an act.”

Dr. Self is confused but carries on. “What a choice for you to make. Did you follow the government’s rules or follow your heart?”

“I painted red stripes on them,” he says. “Now she’s dead. You were next. But there isn’t time.”