Peter Rocco Marino isn’t a decent person. As is true of almost every criminal he’s caught, he has believed little in life is his fault, that he’s inherently good, brave, and well-intentioned, when the truth is quite the reverse. He’s selfish, sick, and bad. Bad, bad, bad. That’s why his wife left him. That’s why his career has gone to hell. That’s why Lucy hates him. That’s why he’s ruined the best thing he ever had. His relationship with Scarpetta is dead. He killed it. Brutalized it. Betrayed her again and again because of something she can’t help. She never wanted him, and why would she? She’s never been attracted to him. How could she be? So he punished her.

He shifts into a higher gear as he gives his bike more gas. He rides much too fast, rain painful pinpricks against his bare skin, speeding to the strip, as he calls the hangouts of Sullivan’s Island. Cars are parked wherever there is space. No bikes, only his, because of the weather. He’s chilled, his hands stiff, and he feels unbearable pain and shame, and laced with it is a venomous anger. He unstraps his useless brain bucket of a helmet and hangs it from the handlebars and locks the bike’s front fork. His rain gear swishes as he walks inside a restaurant of unpainted worn wood and ceiling fans, and framed posters of ravens and probably every Edgar Allan Poe movie ever made. The bar is crowded, and his heart bumps hard and flutters like a startled bird when he notices Shandy between two men, one of them wearing a do-rag—the man Marino almost shot the other night. She is talking to him, pressing her body against his arm.

Marino stands near the door, dripping rainwater on the scuffed floor, watching, wondering what to do as the wounds inside him swell, and his heart races, feels like horses galloping in his neck. Shandy and the man in the do-rag are drinking beer and shots of tequila and snacking on tortilla chips with chili con queso, the same thing she and Marino always order when they come here. Used to. In days past. Over and out. He didn’t use his hormone gel this morning. Threw it away with reluctance as the vile creature inside his darkness whispered mocking things. He can’t believe Shandy is so brazen as to come in here with that man, and the meaning is clear. She put him up to threatening the Doc. As bad as Shandy is, as bad as he is, as bad as they are together, Marino’s worse.

What they tried to do to the Doc is nothing like what he did.