“You think I’m so stupid I don’t know who the hell you were talking to and that you were making damn sure I had no idea what you’re saying? Speaking in riddles, in other words.” Shandy is shrieking. “As if I’m so stupid I fall for it. The Big Chief, that’s who!”

“It’s none of your damn business. How many times I got to tell you that? I can talk to who the hell I want.”

“Everything’s my business! You spent the night with her, you lying asshole! I saw your damn motorcycle there early the next morning! You think I’m stupid? Was it good? I know you been wanting it half your life! Was it good, you big, fat fuck!”

“I don’t know who beat it into your spoiled rich girl’s head that everything in life is your business. But hear this. It ain’t.”

After more fuck-yous and other profanities and threats, Shandy storms out and slams the door. From where she hides, Lucy watches her stride angrily underneath the fishing shack to her motorcycle, angrily ride it through Marino’s sliver of a sandy front yard, then loudly speed away toward the Ben Sawyer Bridge. Lucy waits a few minutes, listening to make sure Shandy isn’t coming back. Nothing. Just the distant sound of traffic and the loud spattering of the rain. On Marino’s front porch, she knocks on the door. He flings it open, his angry face suddenly blank, then uneasy, his expressions running through emotions like a slot machine.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, looking past her, as if worried Shandy might come back.

Lucy walks into a squalid sanctuary she knows better than he thinks. She notices his computer, the thumb drive still in it. Her fake iPod and its earpiece are tucked in a pocket of her slicker. He shuts the door, stands in front of it, looking more uncomfortable by the second as she sits on a plaid couch that smells like mildew.

“I hear you was spying on me and Shandy when we was in the morgue like you’re a damn two-legged Patriot Act.” He goes first, maybe assuming that is why she’s here. “You don’t know by now not to try shit like that on me?”

Foolishly, he tries to intimidate her when he knows damn well he’s never intimidated her, not even when she was a child. Not even when she was a teenager and he ridiculed—at times mocked and shunned—her for who and what she is.

“I already talked about it with the Doc,” Marino goes on. “There’s nothing left to say, so don’t start in on me.”