"Only because you've obviously read The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook, " Andy replied, to her annoyance and surprise. "And just because you read about a dire situation while you're safely sitting in the mansion doesn't mean you could really save yourself if the worst really happened. "
"Papa gave it to me for my birthday, " Regina smugly said. "And he's never given that book to my sisters because they don't care about adventure and are cowards. I can just imagine Faith trying to land a plane after the pilot has a heart attack, and Constance would panic to death if she were lost in the desert or adrift at sea. "
She rummaged in her knapsack and pulled out the bright yellow little handbook.
"So, what would you do if your parachute didn't open?" She tested him as she smoothed open a dog-eared page that was stained with what looked like chocolate.
"I would check my chute before I jumped, " Andy replied as his patience tightened like a guitar string about to snap.
"What about if lightning struck?"
"I would avoid it. "
"Would you stand under a tall tree?" Regina was determined to evoke a wrong answer from him.
"Of course not. "
"What if you were diving a hundred feet down and ran out of air?" Regina asked in a confrontational manner.
"I wouldn't. "
Regina smacked the handbook shut and shoved it back into her knapsack.
"When do you think I can get a uniform?" she asked with mounting anger.
"After you attend the academy and graduate. We're talking the better part of a year, assuming the academy accepts you. "
"They have to accept me. "
"Just because your father's the governor doesn't mean anybody has to accept you, " Andy replied a bit sharply.
"I don't intend to tell anybody who you are beyond saying that you're an intern who's riding along with me. "
"Then I'll tell them, " she countered, opening the window and flicking out the gum.
"That would be very unwise. Don't you think it's time you let people like you for yourself instead of for who you are? And don't throw anything out the window. "
"What if they don't?" Her mood wilted. "And you know they won't. Nobody has ever liked me even when they know who Papa is. So why would they like me if they didn't know who he is?"
"I guess you're just going to have to see what happens and face reality for once, " Andy said as he turned off on Clay Street. "And if people don't like you, you have only yourself to blame. "
"Bullshit. None of it's my fault. " Regina's voice got louder and more strident. "I can't help the way I was born!"
"It's your choice to be rude and selfish, " Andy said. "And I'm not hard of hearing-yet. Lower your voice. Maybe for once you might think about others instead of yourself. How about the poor person back there who steps on that gum you just threw out? How would you like it if you stepped on someone's gum when you were dressed for work, in a hurry, couldn't afford new shoes, and had a sick baby at home?"
This had never occurred to Regina.
"The only reason no one likes you is because you don't like anybody, either. People sense that, " Andy went on as he pulled in behind the modern brick building called Biotech II that housed the chief medical examiner's office and the forensic laboratories.
"I don't know how, " Regina confessed. "You can't know how to do something if no one has ever shown you. And all my life, everyone has treated me special because of who I am, so I've never had a chance to think about anybody else. "
"Well, now you've got your chance. " Andy parked in a visitor's space and got out of the car. "Because I'm going to treat you like shit if you treat me like shit. Maybe it's good you're at the morgue. You can practice being nice to dead people and they won't care if you can't pull it off. "
"That's a great ideal" Regina enthusiastically followed Andy along the sidewalk and inside the lobby. "Except how do you worry about someone's feelings if they can't feel anything anymore?"
"It's called sympathy, it's called having compassion. Words foreign to you, no doubt. " Andy stopped at the information desk and signed in. "Try to think about what the poor people down here have been through and how sad their friends and loved ones are, and for once don't focus on yourself. And if you're obnoxious, that's the end of your internship because I'm not going to put up with it, and I know the chief won't put up with it. She'll throw you out on your ass in a nanosecond. "
"Papa can fire her, " Regina pointed out.
"She'll eat your papa for breakfast, " Andy said.
He handed Regina a small notebook and a pen as electronic locks clicked free and they entered the chief medical examiner's office.
"Take notes, " he instructed her. "Write down everything the doctors say and keep your mouth shut. "
Regina was not accustomed to taking orders, but the instant she noticed graphic autopsy photographs on desks in the front office, she began to lose her usual bravado and self-absorption. The clerks knew Andy very well, it seemed, and were very friendly and flirtatious with him. Regina was stunned and thrilled when Andy introduced her as his intern.
"Lucky you, " one of the clerks said, giving Regina a sly wink.
"Why can't I be your intern?" another one coyly asked him.
"Whoa, baby. I'd be happy to let you teach me a thing or two. "
"We're here on the fisherman's case. " Andy was all business. "Is Doctor Sawamatsu doing the case?"
"No. He hasn't come in yet. "
"What about the chief?" Andy was relieved that Dr. Sawamatsu wasn't in and hoped he wouldn't show up at all.
In the first place, Dr. Sawamatsu's English was poor, and Andy had a very difficult time understanding him, especially when he started throwing around medical terms. Dr. Sawamatsu was also clinical and came across as rather cold-blooded and cynical, and Andy took great exception to anyone who was callous around victims, alive or dead. Worst of all, Sawamatsu had repeatedly bragged to Andy about a secret collection of souvenirs that included artificial joints, breast and penile implants, a glass eye, pieces and parts from plane crashes and other disasters, and Andy doubted that the chief knew about her assistant's unseemly hobby, because the collection was at his home and not at the office.
"Maybe I'll just tell her, " Andy thought out loud as he followed a long carpeted corridor to Dr. Scarpetta's office suite.
"Tell who what?" Regina looked around in wonder, pausing to stare inside offices where microscopes were perched on desks and X-rays were clipped to light boxes.
"Don't ask questions, and as we say in bomb investigations, don't touch or move anything in any way, " Andy warned her. "And everything you hear and see can never be divulged to anyone, including your family. "
"I'll try, " she replied. "But I've never kept a secret before. "
Barbie Fogg routinely listened to secrets and had a few of her own. Worried that Lennie might have secrets, too, she decided to take the next exit and loop around so she could return to the Exact Change tollbooth and confide to Hooter that Barbie was worried about her marriage.
"Lennie's leaving town and came right out and said he wants a girlfriend! You don't think he's having affairs on the road because I won't have sex anymore, do you?" Barbie poured out her heart to Hooter. "Well, anyway, Lennie sells real estate, meaning he's often at home with nothing much to do, so he usually watches the twins and certainly has plenty of time for affairs. And to make matters worse, he's heading out to Charlotte for an important meeting and I'll pretty much be stuck at the house. Meaning it's possible I won't be seeing you for a whole week. "
Both Barbie and Hooter were disappointed. It seemed they had been friends forever.
"Oh dear, I didn't realize how much I'm going to miss you, " Barbie confessed.
"Lord, Lord, I gonna have separate anxiety without you coming through my booth! Who I gonna talk to anymore? Why he gotta go to Charlotte? You know, I get so sick and tired of people going to North Carolina. Like it some kind of promise land or something. You k
now, I never even been to North Carolina. What so special about it, huh?"
"You got any vacation time with the city?" Barbie asked as more cars piled up behind her and blared their horns. "Why don't you come to the NASCAR race with me tomorrow night? I would just love it and you could see all those handsome drivers. But you'd need to take the afternoon off because I like to get there early and hang around the pits and wait for the drivers to come out and climb into their cars. Sometimes they let you get your picture taken with them. Oh, if only you knew what that was like! Standing arm in arm with a handsome stock-car driver in his tight, colorful fireproof jumpsuit!"
"Now, I sure as heck never been to no NASCAR race and I never seen no Afric-American drivers, neither. So I wouldn't know. " Hooter paid no attention to the endless line of impatient motorists. "Maybe I take the whole day off! I ain't had no vacation since my sister got married and I was in the wedding. The mattress of honor. " Hooter beamed at the memory of being decked out in that long pink dress with see-through sleeves and beads and bows. "That was sure a time, let me tell you, girlfriend. "
"Yeah! How about visiting with your fucking girlfriend some other time, you queerbaits, and hurry up!" Bubba Loving was back in his truck with mud flaps.
"What on earth is queerbait?" Barbie asked as she jotted down her phone number on a Post-it. "Something you catch strange fish with? And why is that same vulgar man screaming about fishing?"
"Take one to know one!" Hooter yelled back at Bubba.
"Here, sweetie, " Barbie said to Hooter, "you ring me up in the next few hours. I'll be at the Baptist Campus Ministry, and you just call and let me know if you can come to the race so I don't give the ticket to some other lucky person. Please come! Oh dear, I just love having girlfriends to talk to!"
"I just might do it. In fact, I will, I will. Damn right I will. " Hooter was getting excited by the idea. "You count me in unless I can't get no one to cover my booth for me. How 'bout you pick me up right here at, well, let's see. What time?"
"Two o'clock sharp. "
"I'll slide on home and change and be waiting for you right here at my booth unless something come up. Then we have plenty of time to talk about your rotten sex life. "
"Wouldn't that be wonderful. " Barbie cheerfully waved good-bye as she drove on and forgot the seventy-five cent toll, setting off the alarms. "The rainbow is working! Magic, magic everywhere!"
"Sweet-talk your girlfriend another time when we aren't waiting until Heck freezes over to go through the tollbooth!" Lamonia yelled from her Dodge Dart.
Lamonia was understandably in a foul mood. First, she had gotten handcuffed because of her bad night vision, now she was stuck in traffic because two interracial lesbians were flirting at the tollbooth and a racist redneck was engaging in road rage. What had gone so wrong in the world? Dear Lord, have mercy, Lamonia thought. The entire planet was self-destructing and it was just a matter of time before Jesus would get fed up and come back, and Lamonia wasn't ready for the Rapture. No, sir. She told Jesus every Sunday to please hold on for a while, because Lamonia had so many friends and neighbors who were going to be left behind if He came in on a cloud and the Rapture lifted up all Believers.
"Give your life to Jesus, " Lamonia said to Hooter as she fed a dollar bill into a cotton-gloved hand.
"You tell it, girlfriend, " Hooter said, dropping three quarters into the bin and returning a quarter change.
"I'm not your girlfriend or anybody's girlfriend!" Lamonia wasn't the least bit subtle about it. "Ask forgiveness for your sins and pray to Jesus. Ask Him to take your life and do something with it, you hear me? Because He's coming soon, and you don't want to be sitting in that little booth of yours and giving in to perversions with strangers and suddenly find half the cars coming through don't have drivers 'cause they've been Raptured up into Heaven!"
"Tell it, " Hooter encouraged the pulpiteer. "You tell it, girl. "
Lamonia needed no encouragement. "Two men are working in a field, and suddenly one of them is gone. Two women are doing laundry in the Laundromat, and suddenly, one of them is gone. You'll be taking toll money, and suddenly half the drivers will be gone and you just better hope you aren't still sitting in your booth, because if you are, that means you've been left behind!"
"I ready for the Rapture, girl, " Hooter assured Lamo-nia as the two of them exchanged phone numbers. "Oh yes, I ready and looking forward to it. Always have been looking forward to it! Jesus be coming back. I always knew He would. " Hooter stared up at the ceiling of her booth. "You come on now, Jesus. You just come right on. I be waiting for you and won't even charge you no toll when you float down on your cloud!"
"No!" Lamonia protested. "Don't tell Him to come now! There's too much work to do, you silly woman! Look out there at all them sinners! Just miles and miles of them. Pray for them first, child!"
Hooter gazed out at miles of honking cars.
"Yeah, you right, girl. Most them folks out there ain't ready for Jesus. Look how upset and nasty they is. Hmmm hmmm. " Hooter shook her head sadly. "So we ask Jesus to hold off a little longer. Just give us a little time, Jesus, " she prayed loudly as Lamonia lurched out of the tollbooth and rear-ended another car. "Please, Lord in Heaven, just give me Saturday afternoon off, you got that? Just one little vacation, " Hooter prayed. "That all I ask, Jesus. "
Twenty-two
Dear Lord in Heaven, " Dr. Faux prayed as he and Fonny Boy drifted in the bateau. "We've been out here all night and half the morning, and I'm so cold and hungry I don't think I'll survive another hour. Please help us. "
Fonny Boy had given up on trying to get into the locked compartment and was blowing sour sounds on his harmonica and trying out various methods of hand effects and breathing techniques. He was on the verge of wishing that he and the dentist would be captured and returned to the storeroom, and regretted he had not bothered to carry sodas and food on board. But then, he had assumed they would reach the mainland long before supplies became an issue.
"Lord-a-mercy, I reckon the current's taking us clean back to the island, " he told Dr. Faux.
"I don't see land at all. Not anywhere, Fonny Boy. And if we were near the island, we would have been spotted by now and maybe blindfolded and forced to walk the plank. I think we might just have drifted into the sanctuary, and if so, no watermen will be in the area, and we will languish and die out here. "
"Nah, " Fonny Boy replied. "You can make out the current. " He pointed out gentle ripples of moving water. "But nigh as peace, they'll figure we made off in the bateau and if we don't make a hurry now, they'll be on us and we'll have to cite the Bible!"
"Unless they figure we're on the mainland, and you know they won't look for us there. You sure you can't remember the combination to that damn padlock? Maybe there's a flare gun in that compartment or even a mirror for sending signals. "
Fonny Boy had known the combination at one time, and he was terribly frustrated as he strained to recall it. He had tried every birthday in his family, Tangier's zip code, and several telephone numbers, all to no avail. He rapped the harmonica on the side of the bateau to knock out excess spit and tried a little straight harp, playing a melody in the key of C, and as usual, starting with hole 4.
"Think hard, Fonny Boy, " Dr. Faux tried to encourage him. "Usually people use tricks to remember things, so my guess is your dad used some sort of association to come up with a combination that he wouldn't forget. Are there any other numbers that might be important to your dad? What about your parents' anniversary?"
Fonny Boy couldn't remember that, either. He drew on the low end of the harmonica, trying a little blues jamming, like his hero, Dan Aykroyd.
"Now, I know some of the watermen use compasses, " the dentist kept trying. "Possible there is a compass heading your father routinely uses when he comes out to check the crab pots?"
The words crab pot floated out of the barely moving bateau, then settled into the water and began to drift to the bottom, where a large collection of Cal
linectes (Greek for "beautiful swimmer") sapidus (Latin for "tasty") were enjoying the quiet and security of the crab sanctuary. Clustered together were the fugitives from the bucket, and one of them, an especially handsome jimmy with big blue claws and arms, decided to investigate the human voices and faint strains of a harmonica. He swam up through the murk, leaving his friends behind in a cloud of silt, and some twenty feet below the surface of the bay he spied the bottom of a bateau and heard voices again.
"Nah. He don't use neither compass. Don't need one, noways, " a young male said, and the crab recognized the voice as belonging to that skinny blond Islander who was always talking about pirate treasure when he was out potting in the dark early mornings.
"Hmmm. What about your post office box?" another voice asked, and the jimmy didn't recognize this one, but he sounded as if he was from the mainland.
Fonny Boy tried that number, but the padlock wasn't interested.
"A lucky number, maybe? Does your dad have a lucky number?"
The only luck-related number Fonny Boy could think of was thirteen, and the padlock wouldn't budge. He tried playing straight harp style and "Oh Susannah" was almost recognizable.
"What about a favorite food or drink that might have a number in it?" Dr. Faux was not going to give up. "Such as Heinz fifty-seven sauce, Seven-Up, or two-alarm chili?"
"My daddy, he likes the Seven-Up, " Fonny Boy said with a glimmer of hope. "He's right fond of it with Spanky's ice cream, drinks more'an it of anybody I ever seen. But the combination, it takes four numbers and seven is only one number. "
"What if you added the up part?"
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