Blow Fly

  “I have to help you because you can’t hold the gun still,” Rudy tells him. “You don’t shoot straight, and that could be ugly. And I can’t let you hold the gun all by yourself, now can I? That would make me stupid.” Rudy’s voice is gentle now. “See, that’s not so hard. Now press the barrel tight against your head.”

  Rocco gags, his chest heaving. He begins to hyperventilate.

  “Pointed up,” Lucy says it one more time, fixated on the decapitated Nazi’s head, trying not to see Rocco’s head.

  He sways in his chair, grabbing shallow breaths, his face livid, his eyes squeezed shut. Rudy’s gloved finger pulls the trigger.

  The gun fires in a loud pop.

  Rocco and his chair fall backward. His head lands on the British newspapers strewn over the carpet, his face turned toward the window. Blood gushing out of his head sounds like running water. Gunsmoke turns the air acrid.

  Rudy squats to tuck Rocco’s limp right arm and the pistol under his chest. Any prints or partial prints recovered on the blue steel Colt will be Rocco’s.

  Lucy opens a window a crack, no more than three inches, and yanks off her gloves as Rudy presses two fingers against Rocco Caggiano’s carotid artery. His pulse beats faintly and stops. Rudy nods at Lucy and stands up. He digs inside a pocket of his jacket and pulls out a German mustard jar. Holes have been punched in the lid, and blow flies crawl along the inside of the glass, feeding on what is left of the rotting meat that yesterday baited them into captivity at a Dumpster crammed with garbage behind a Polish restaurant.

  He opens the jar and shakes it. Several dozen flies lethargically lift off, buzzing to lamps and bouncing against illuminated shades. Sensing pheromones and the plume of an open wound, they greedily drone straight to Rocco’s motionless body. Blow flies, the most common of carrion-feeding insects, alight on his bloody face. Several disappear inside his mouth.

  IT IS ONLY eight p.m. in Boston.

  Pete Marino sits at the US Air gate, eating chocolate-dipped pretzels and listening to another apologetic announcement that promises his flight will depart after another minor delay of only two hours and ten minutes. This is after an earlier delay that has already held him hostage in Logan Airport for an hour and twenty-five minutes beyond his scheduled departure.

  “Shit!” he exclaims, not caring who hears him. “I coulda walked by now!”

  Rarely does he have plenty of time to ponder his life, and he thinks of Benton and diverts his misery and rage by focusing on Benton’s physical conditioning and hard, manly body. He looks even better than he used to, Marino depressingly decides. How can that be possible after six years of what amounts to solitary confinement? Marino can’t comprehend it. He starts on a brownie from the basket of Delicious Desserts of Gainesville that he happened upon in the airport gift shop and wonders what it would be like if he quit working for Lucy, just gave up going after dirtbags. They’re cockroaches. Squash one, and five others take its place. Maybe Marino should go fishing, maybe become a professional bowler (he almost had a perfect score once), find him a nice woman and build a cabin in the woods.

  Once, very long ago, Marino was admired, too, and the mirror did not hate him. Women—and men, he supposes with confusion and disgust—stare at Benton and lust for him. Marino is certain of this. They can’t resist him when added to his good looks are his brain and his big-shot FBI status, or, more accurately, former FBI status. Marino pushes back strings of gray hair and wakes himself up to the fact that people don’t meet Benton anymore and know his real name or admire his former FBI career. He is supposed to be dead or Tom or nobody. That Scarpetta could miss Benton so much causes Marino a sick pain somewhere around his heart and topples him into deeper despair. He hurts deeply for her. He hurts deeply for himself. If he died, she would grieve, but not forever. She has never been in love with him, never will be, and doesn’t want his fat, hairy body in her bed.

  Marino wanders into another gift shop and snatches a fitness magazine off a pile on the floor, an action as foreign to him as Hebrew. Men’s Workout has a handsome young man on the cover who looks as if he’s cut of smooth stone. He must have shaved his entire body except for his head and polished his tanned skin with oil. Marino returns to a nearby sports bar, orders another Budweiser on tap, finds his same table, brushes off pizza crumbs, and sets down the magazine, somewhat afraid of opening it. He finally musters the nerve to pick it up, and its slick cover sticks to the table.

  “Hey!” Marino calls to the bartender. “Anyone ever wipe off a table in this joint?”

  Everyone in the bar stares at Marino.

  “I just paid three-fifty for this watered-down beer, and the table’s so disgusting, my magazine’s sticking to it.”

  Everyone in the bar stares at Marino’s magazine. Several young men nudge one another and smile. The annoyed bartender, who would have to be an octopus to keep up with orders, tosses a wet bar towel to Marino. He wipes off his table and tosses it back, almost hitting an old woman in the head. She sips her white wine, oblivious. Marino starts flipping through his magazine. Maybe it isn’t too late to reclaim his masculine plumage, to have muscles he can flex like a peacock fanning its tail. As a boy in New Jersey, he made himself strong from chin-ups, push-ups and maniacal repetitions with free weights he constructed from cinder blocks and mop or broom handles. He lifted the rear ends of cars to work on his back and biceps, clutched a laundry bag filled with bricks while doing squats or running up and down stairs. He boxed with laundry drying on the clothesline, always on windy days when the clothes and linens fought back.

  “Peter Rocco! You stop fighting with the laundry! You knock it in the dirt and you get to wash it!”

  His mother was a meshed figure behind the screen door, hands on her hips, trying to sound severe as her son’s savage right hook yanked one of his father’s wet undershirts from wooden clothespins and sent it sailing into a nearby bush. As Marino got older, he wrapped his fists in layers of rags and threw wicked punches at an old mattress he kept in the crawl space beneath the house. If it was possible to kill a mattress, this one died a thousand times, propped up against the porch, its ticking finally ripping and its dry-rotted foam rubber disintegrating with each blow. Marino scavenged neighborhood trash piles for discarded mattresses, and he battled his stained obtuse opponents as if he hated them for some unforgivable sin they had committed against him.

  “Who you trying to kill, honey?” his mother asked him one afternoon when he was dripping with sweat and wobbly from exhaustion and flinging open the refrigerator door for the ice water his mother always kept there. “Don’t drink out of the jug. How many times I gotta tell you? You know what germs are? They’re little ugly bugs crawling out of your mouth right into the jug. Don’t matter if you can’t see ’em. Doesn’t make them any less real, and those very germs are what gives you and everyone else the flu and polio, and you end up in an iron lung and . . .”

  “Dad drinks outta the jug.”

  “Well.”

  “Well what, Mom?”

  “He’s the man of the house.”

  “Well, ain’t that something. Guess he ain’t got little ugly bugs crawling out him like everybody else, since he’s the man of the house. Guess he don’t give a rat’s ass who ends up in an iron lung.”

  “Who you fighting out there when you beat up the mattress? Fight, fight, fight. You’re always fighting.”

  Marino buys another beer and consoles himself with the thought that the male models in the workout magazine are not fighters, because they have the flexibility of a rock. They don’t dance on their feet, boxing. They don’t do anything but lift iron and pose for photographers and poison themselves with steroids. Still, Marino wouldn’t mind having a stomach that looks like moguls in a ski run, and what he wouldn’t give for his hair to come home to his head instead of continuing its relentless migration to other parts of his body. He smokes and drinks to the noise of a basketball dribbling, shoes squeaking and crowds yelling on the big-screen TV. Loud
ly flipping through a few more pages of his magazine, he begins to notice advertisements for aphrodisiacs, performance enhancements and invitations to skin parties and strip volleyball.

  When he reaches a centerfold of hairless hunks wearing G-strings and fishnet bikini briefs, he slaps the magazine shut. A businessman sitting one table over gets up and moves to the other end of the bar. Marino takes his time finishing his beer and gets up and stretches and yawns. People in the bar watch him as he makes his way toward the businessman and drops the magazine on top of his Wall Street Journal.

  “Call me,” Marino says with a wink as he saunters out of the bar.

  BACK AT THE US AIR GATE, Marino is seized by agitation and impetuosity.

  His flight has been delayed another hour due to weather. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to go home to Trixie and get up in the morning and realize what happened in Boston. Thinking of his small house with its carport in its blue-collar neighborhood sinks his spirit lower into bitterness and a need to fight back. If only he could identify the enemy. Why he continues to live in Richmond makes no sense. Richmond is the past. Why he allowed Benton to blow him off makes no sense. He should never have walked away from Benton’s apartment.

  “You know what due to weather means?” Marino asks the young red-headed woman sitting next to him, filing her nails.

  Two rude behaviors Marino simply can’t tolerate are public farts and the scratching sound of manicures accompanied by drifting nail dust.

  The file continues to rapidly scratch-scratch.

  “It means they ain’t decided whether to fly our asses outta Boston yet. See? There ain’t enough passengers to make it worth their while. They lose money, they don’t go nowhere and blame it on something else.”

  The file freezes and the woman looks around at dozens of empty plastic seats.

  “You can sit here all night,” Marino goes on, “or come find a motel room with me.”

  After a moment of disbelief, she gets up and walks off in a huff.

  “Pig,” she says.

  Marino smiles, civility restored, his boredom assuaged, if only briefly. He is not going to wait for a flight that probably will never happen, and then he thinks of Benton again. Anger and paranoia ooze into his skull. His feeling of powerlessness and rejection settle more closely around him, choking him with a depression that stalls his thoughts and fatigues him as if he hasn’t slept in days. He can’t stand it. He won’t. He wishes he could call Lucy, but he doesn’t know where she is. All she told him was that she had business to take care of that required traveling.

  “What business?” Marino asked her.

  “Just business.”

  “Sometimes I wonder why the hell I work for you.”

  “I don’t wonder about it in the least. I never give it a thought,” Lucy said over the phone from her office in Manhattan. “You adore me.”

  Outside Logan Airport, Marino flags down a Cambridge Checker cab, practically stepping in front of it and waving his arms, ignoring the taxi line and the dozens of weary, unhappy people in it.

  “The Embankment,” he tells the driver. “Near where the band shell is.”

  SCARPETTA DOESN’T KNOW where Lucy is, either.

  Her niece doesn’t answer her home or cell phones and hasn’t returned numerous pages. Scarpetta can’t reach Marino, and she has no intention of calling Rose and telling her about the letter. Her secretary worries too much already. Scarpetta sits on her bed, thinking. Billy makes his way up the dog ramp and plops down just far enough away to make her reach if she wants to pet him, and she does.

  “Why do you always sit so far away from me?” she talks to him as she stretches out to stroke his soft, floppy ears. “Oh, I get it. I’m supposed to reposition myself and move closer to you.”

  She does.

  “You’re a very willful dog, you know.”

  Billy licks her hand.

  “I have to go out of town for a few days,” she tells him. “But Rose will take good care of you. Maybe you’ll stay at her house and she’ll take you to the beach. So promise you won’t get upset that I’m leaving.”

  He never does. The only reason he comes running when she heads out on a trip is that he wants a ride in the car. He’d ride around in a car all day, given the choice. Scarpetta dials Lucy’s office a second time. Although it is long past closing time, the phone is answered by an alive and awake human being twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Tonight, it is Zach Manham’s turn.

  “Okay, Zach,” she says right off. “It’s bad enough you won’t tell me where Lucy is . . .”

  “It’s not that I won’t tell . . .”

  “Of course it is,” she cuts him off. “You know, but you won’t tell me.”

  “I swear to God I don’t know,” Manham replies. “Look, if I did, I’d call her on her international cell phone and at least tell her to call you.”

  “So she has her international cell phone with her. Then she’s out of the country?”

  “She always carries her international cell phone. You know, the one that takes photographs, videotapes, connects to the Internet. She’s got the latest model. It makes pizza.”

  Nothing is funny to Scarpetta right now.

  “I tried her cell phone. She’s not answering,” she says, “whether she’s in this country or some other one. So what about Marino? You holding out on me about him, too?”

  “I haven’t talked to him in days,” Manham says. “No, I don’t know where he is. He not answering his cell phone or pages, either?”

  “No.”

  “Want me to take a polygraph, Doc?”

  “Yes.”

  Manham laughs.

  “Okay, I quit. I’m too tired to keep this up all night,” Scarpetta says as she rubs Billy’s tummy. “If and when you ever hear from either one of them again, tell them to contact me immediately. It’s urgent. Urgent enough that I’m flying to New York tomorrow.”

  “What? Are you in danger?” Manham asks, alarmed.

  “I don’t want to talk about it with you, Zach. No offense intended. Good night.”

  She locks her bedroom door, sets the alarm and places her pistol on the bedside table.

  MARINO DOESN’T LIKE the taxi driver and asks him where he’s from.

  “Kabul.”

  “Kabul’s where, exactly?” Marino asks. “I mean, I know what country” (he doesn’t), “but not its exact geographical location.”

  “Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan.”

  Marino tries to envision Afghanistan. All that comes to mind are dictators, terrorists and camels.

  “And you do what there?”

  “I do nothing there. I live here.” The driver’s dark eyes glance at him in the rearview mirror. “My family worked in the wool mills, and I came here eight years ago. You should go to Kabul. It is very beautiful. Visit the old city. My name is Bābur. You have questions or need a cab, call my company and ask for me.” He smiles, his teeth gleaming white in the dark.

  Marino senses the driver is making fun of him, but he doesn’t get the joke. The driver’s identification card is fastened to the passenger’s seat visor, and Marino tries to read it, but can’t. His vision isn’t what it used to be, and he refuses to wear glasses. Despite Scarpetta’s urging, he also refuses laser surgery, which he adamantly claims will make him blind or damage his frontal lobe.

  “This way don’t look familiar,” Marino comments in his usual grumpy tone as unrecognizable buildings flow past his window.

  “We take a shortcut along the harbor, past the wharfs and then the causeway. Very pretty sights.”

  Marino leans forward on the hard bench seat, avoiding a spring that seems determined to work its way out of the vinyl upholstery and uncoil and bite his left buttock.

  “You’re heading north, you Mohammed scumbag! I may not be from Boston, but I know where the Embankment is, and you ain’t even on the right side of the fucking river!”

  The cabdriver who calls himself Bābur completely
ignores his passenger and continues along his route, cheerfully pointing out the sights, including the Suffolk County Jail, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Shriners Burn Center. By the time he drops Marino off on Storrow Drive, close but not too close to Benton Wesley’s apartment building, the meter registers $68.35. Marino slings open the door and throws a crumpled one-dollar bill onto the front seat.

  “You owe me sixty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents.” The taxi driver smooths open the dollar bill on his leg. “I will call the police!”

  “And I’ll beat the shit out of you. And you can’t do nothing about it, because you ain’t legal, right? Show me your green card, asshole, and guess what, I’m the police and got a pistol strapped under my arm.” He snatches out his wallet and flashes the badge he did not return to the Richmond Police Department after he retired.

  He said he lost it.

  Tires squeal as the taxi driver speeds off, screaming curses out his open window. Marino heads toward the Longfellow Bridge and veers off southeast, briefly following the same sidewalk he and Benton walked along earlier today. He takes a roundabout way beneath gas lamplight on Pinckney and Revere, constantly listening and checking his surroundings, making certain he isn’t being followed, as is his habit. Marino isn’t thinking about the Chandonne cartel. He is on the lookout for the usual street punks and lunatics, although he has seen no evidence of either in this section of Beacon Hill.

  When Benton’s building comes into view, Marino notices that the windows of unit 56 are dark.

  “Shit,” he mutters, tossing his cigarette, not bothering to stamp it out.

  Benton must have gone out for a late dinner, or to the gym, or for a jog. But that isn’t likely, and Marino’s anxieties tighten his chest with his every step. He knows damn well that Benton would leave lights on when he goes out. He isn’t the sort to walk into a completely dark house or apartment.

  Climbing the stairs to the fifth floor is worse than last time, because adrenaline and beer quicken his straining heart until he can scarcely breathe. When he reaches unit 56, he bangs on the door. Not a sound comes from inside.