“Come on,” I said. “I’ll fix you a toddy and you can crash here. You’re right. Maybe I don’t want to be alone and have five more pizza deliveries and cabs show up.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” he said with feigned cool professionalism.

I unlocked my front door and turned off the alarm, and very shortly Marino was on the wrap-around couch in my great room, with a Booker’s bourbon on the rocks. I made his nest with sweet-smelling sheets and a baby-soft cotton blanket, and for a while we sat in the dark talking.

“You ever think we might lose in the end?” he sleepily muttered.

“Lose?” I asked.

“You know, good guys always win. How realistic is that? Not so for other people, like that lady that burned up in Sparkes’s house. Good guys don’t always win. Uh uh, Doc. No fucking way.”

He halfway sat up like a sick man, and took a swallow of bourbon and struggled for breath.

“Carrie thinks she’s gonna win, too, in case that thought’s never entered your mind,” he added. “She’s had five fucking years at Kirby to think that.”

Whenever Marino was tired or half drunk, he said fuck a lot. In truth, it was a grand word that expressed what one felt by the very act of saying it. But I had explained to him many times before that not everyone could deal with its vulgarity, and for that matter, some perhaps took it all too literally. I personally never thought of fuck as sexual intercourse, but rather as wishing to make a point.

“I can’t entertain the thought that people like her will win,” I quietly said as I sipped red burgundy. “I will never think that.”

“Pie in the sky.”

“No, Marino. Faith.”

“Yo.” He swallowed more bourbon. “Fucking faith. You know how many guys I’ve known to drop dead of heart attacks or get killed on the job? How many of them do you think had faith? Probably every goddamn one of them. Nobody thinks they’re gonna die, Doc. You and me don’t think it, no matter how much we know. My health sucks, okay? You think I don’t know I’m taking a bite of a poison cookie everyday? Can I help it? Naw. I’m just an old slob who has to have his steak biscuits and whiskey and beer. I’ve given up giving a shit about what the doctors say. So soon enough, I’m gonna stoop over in the saddle and be outta here, you know?”

His voice was getting husky and he was beginning to get maudlin.

“So a bunch of cops will come to my funeral, and you’ll tell the next detective to come along how it wasn’t all that bad to work with me,” he went on.