Four Scarpetta Novels (102 page)

L
UCY DESPERATELY NEEDS
a ladies' room.

Forget looking for a gas station or a rest stop. She pushes the Mercedes up to 160 kilometers per hour, despite Rudy's warning about speeding. Focusing on the dark road, she tries hard to concentrate and ignore her bladder. The drive seems to take twice as long as it should, but she makes excellent time and is ahead of schedule by thirty-five minutes. She redials Rudy's cell phone.

“On final,” she says. “Just got to land this thing somewhere.”

“Shut up,” Rudy orders someone in the room, as the TV plays loudly. “Don't make me tell you again.”

R
OCCO CAGGIANO'S FAVORITE
form of relaxation is to sit for hours in beer gardens, drinking one
Gross Bier
after another.

The pale gold elixirs are served in tall, plain glasses, and he prefers clean-tasting lagers and will not touch wheat beers. Rocco has never understood how he can drink a gallon of beer in one sitting but not a gallon of water. He could not drink a gallon of water during an entire day, probably not even in three days, and he has always puzzled over how much beer, wine, champagne or mixed drinks he can put away when he can scarcely finish a single glass of water.

In fact, he hates water. Perhaps what a psychic once told him is true: He drowned in a former life. What a terrible way to die, and he often thinks of the killer in England who drowned one wife after another in the tub by grabbing her feet and yanking until her head was under water and she could do nothing but helplessly flop her arms like a fish on a dock. The scenario was a constant emotional itch when Caggiano began to hate his first wife, then his second. Alimony was cheaper than the price he would pay if some medical examiner discovered bruises or God knows what. But even if he did drown in a former life and thought drowning someone was a good way to commit murder, this, in his mind,
would not explain the enigma—the purely biological phenomenon—of how much alcohol he can consume and why he cannot and will not finish even one glass of water.

No one has ever been able to settle his mind with an answer he accepts. Small conundrums have always worried him like a sandspur stuck to his sock.

“It must be 'cause you pee all the time when you drink beer,” Caggiano introduces the question at virtually every social gathering. “When you pee, you make room for more, right?”

“You drink a gallon of water, you will be pissing all the time, too,” a Dutch customs agent challenged him some months back when he, Rocco and several other friends of the Chandonne cartel were taking time out in a beer garden in Munich.

“I hate water,” Rocco said.

“Then how do you know this about whether you would pee water as fast as beer?” a German container ship's captain asked.

“He doesn't know.”

“Yes. You ought to test it out, Rocco.”

“We'll drink beer, you drink water, and see who pees the most and the fastest.”

The men laughed and clanked glasses in a drunken toast, slopping beer all over the wooden table. It had been a good day. Before they caroused at the beer garden, they had wandered into the nudist park where a naked man on a bicycle pedaled past and the Dutchman yelled at him in Dutch that he'd better be careful which gear he shifted, while the ship's captain yelled in German that his kickstand was very small. Rocco yelled in English that the man didn't have to worry about his dick getting caught in the spokes because it didn't even hang over the seat. The bicyclist pedaled on, ignoring them.

Women sunbathe in the nude in the park and do not seem to care if men stare at them. Rocco and his henchmen would get very brazen and hover right over a woman stretched out on her towel and make comments
about her anatomical points of interest. Usually, the woman would turn over on her belly and go back to sleep or continue reading her magazine or book while the men went on to survey her buttocks, as if they were hills they might climb. Rocco's intense arousal would make him mean, and he would fire vile, lewd aspersions at the woman until his companions had to usher him away. Rocco is especially vicious with the homosexuals minding their own business in the park. He believes all homosexuals should be castrated and executed, and he would like to be the one to do it and watch them pee and defecate out of fright.

“It's a medical fact that when you're tortured or about to be snuffed, you piss and shit in your pants,” he announced later in the beer garden.

“What medical fact? I thought you were a lawyer, not a doctor.”

“So you know this, Rocco? And how do you know this? You take off their pants to see? Maybe you take their pants off to check for shit and piss?” Loud laughter. “Then you can know it as a fact. If this is true, I must come around to my important question. Do you go around taking the pants off dead bodies? I think all of us have a right to hear this. Because at least for me, if I die, I need to know if you will take my pants off.”

“If you die,” Rocco replied, “you won't know a fucking thing.”

It is irrational that Rocco should remember this boozy conversation and what his doctor has preached to him for years. Rocco has gastritis and cranky bowel syndrome due to stress, smoking and heavy drinking.
All ills in life are blamed on acute stress, smoking and heavy drinking,
Rocco always retorts on his way out of the examination room. He files for medical reimbursement and resumes his self-destructive life.

His bowels and bladder let loose as he sits in a chair inside his hotel room, a Colt .380 cocked and pointed at his head.

J
ACK'S BOAT LANDING IS
a clutter of trailers, bateaux, bass and flat-bottom boats, and runabouts tied to pilings along a crisscross of rickety docks strung with old tires that serve as fenders.

Pulled up on the muddy shore are several pirogues—or Cajun canoes—and a rotting bow rider that won't be pulling water-skiers anymore. The parking lot is dirt, and on the fuel dock are two pumps—one for regular gas, the other for diesel. Jack works from five a.m. until nine p.m. in his one-room office with its mounted fish hanging at random angles on the wall with peeling paint. The calendar above his old metal desk features glossy photos of glitter-painted bass boats—the very expensive kind that can go up to sixty miles an hour.

Were it not for the window air-conditioning unit and the Port-a-John behind the building, Jack would lack all modern conveniences. Not that he would care, particularly. He was born into a hard life and raised to make any sacrifice that might keep him right where he is, in a world of water and the creatures in it, and trees draped in Spanish moss.

For those who frequent his boat landing, tying up for gas and making a trip into town for provisions is normal behavior. People who stay
for weeks or longer in their fishing camps on the bayous and rivers are expected to leave vehicles and boat trailers parked at the landing. He never thinks twice about the white Jeep Cherokee tucked between trucks and other SUVs in a far corner of the lot near the water's edge. He minds his own business, even if he does have instincts about people that are as strong as his sense of smell. Swamp Woman sent strong signals to him from day one—and that's been some two years now. Her demeanor is no-nonsense about asking personal questions.

Bev Kiffin opens the hatch and pulls out her beach bag. She stands aft and drops in the plow anchor, then tosses two nylon lines up on the fuel dock as Jack waves, walking swiftly her way.

“Why if it isn't Swamp Woman!” he calls out. “Can I top you off?”

The landing is lit and bugs are thick, roiling clouds in the yellow glow of lamps. Jack tosses her the bowline.

“I'll be leaving her here for a few hours.” Bev turns the rope and makes a half hitch over the horns of the cleat. She pulls back the tarp and sets empty gas cans on the dock. “Fill 'em up. What's your price these days?”

“One eighty-five.”

“Shit.” Bev hops up on the dock, moving nimbly for a woman her size. “That's highway robbery.”

Jack laughs. “It ain't me who decides the price of oil.”

He's tall and bald, as dark and strong as a cypress. Bev's never seen him once when he wasn't wearing his sweat-stained orange Harley-Davidson cap and chewing on a plug of tobacco.

“You comin' and goin'?” He spits and wipes his mouth on the back of a sunspotted, gnarled hand and helps her with the stern lines.

“Just to the store.”

Bev dips into her beach bag for a single key attached to a small fishing bobber—in case she ever accidentally drops the key into the water. Her attention wanders around the crowded parking lot, fixing on the Cherokee.

“I guess I'd better crank her up to make sure the battery ain't dead.”

“Well if it is,” Jack says, lining up the four gas cans near the pump, “you know I'll jump 'er.”

Bev watches him squat, sticking the gas nozzle into each can, the pump clicking away her cash. The back of his neck reminds her of alligator hide, and his elbows are big calluses. She's been coming to him at least ten times a year, more often of late, and he doesn't have a damn clue about her, which is a good thing for him. She heads to the SUV, suddenly worried about whether it needs gas, too. She can't remember if she filled it up last time.

Unlocking the driver's door, she slides in and turns the key in the ignition. The engine cranks after three tries, and she's relieved to see she has more than half a tank of gas. When she runs low, she'll fill up at a gas station. Turning the headlights on, she backs up and parks near the dock. While she is pulling cash out of her wallet and squinting to make out the bills, Jack wipes his hands on a rag and waits for her to roll down the window.

“That'll be forty-four dollars and forty cents,” he tells her. “I'll get those cans back in your boat for ya and keep an eye on it. I noticed you got your friend with ya.” He means the shotgun. “You plan on leaving it in the boat? I wouldn't. Watch out shooting at gators with that thing. All it does is make 'em rageful.”

Bev can't believe she almost drove off and left her shotgun. She's not thinking clearly tonight, and her knee hurts.

“Last thing you do before you leave,” she adds as he steps down into the boat, “is fill the fish box with ice.”

“How much?” He fetches the shotgun, climbs back up on the dock and carefully places it on the backseat of the Cherokee.

“A hundred pounds will do.”

“Must be doing a lot of shopping to need all that ice.” He stuffs the rag in a back pocket of his old, soiled work pants.

“Stuff spoils quick out here.”

“That'll be another twenty. I'm givin' you three bucks off.”

She hands him two tens and doesn't thank him for the discount.

“I'm gone by nine.” He looks past her, inside the beat-up Cherokee. “So if you ain't back by then . . .”

“Won't be,” Bev tells him, shifting the SUV into reverse.

She never is and doesn't need the reminder.

He stares past her at the front passenger's door, at the rolled-up window and the missing crank and push-in lock.

“You know, girl, I could fix that if you're ever of a mind to leave the keys.”

Bev glances at the door. “Don't matter,” she says. “Nobody rides in this thing but me.”