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."This is Mr.Boltz, and Bill, this is my niece."Reluctantly, she stopped what she was doing and looked straight at me."I scraped my knuckle, Auntie Kay.See?"She held up her left hand.A knuckle was bleeding a little."Oh, dear.Here, I'll get a Band-Aid.""Some of it got in the cheese," she went on, as if suddenly on the verge of tears."Sounds to me like we need an ambulance," Bill announced, and he quite surprised Lucy by plucking her off the stool and locking his arms under her thighs.She was in a ridiculously funny sitting position."Rerrrrrr-RERRRRRRRRRR."He was wailing like a siren and carrying her over to the sink."Three one-six, bringing in an emergency - cute little girl with a bleeding knuckle."He was talking to a dispatcher now."Please have Dr.Scarpetta ready with a Band-Aid."Lucy was shrieking with laughter.Momentarily her knuckle was forgotten and she was staring with open adoration at Bill as he uncorked a bottle of wine."You have to let it breathe," he was gently explaining to her."See, it's sharper now than it will be in an hour or so.Like everything else in life, it gets mellower with time.""Can I have some?""Well, now," he replied with exaggerated gravity, "all right by me if your Auntie Kay says so.But we wouldn't want you getting silly on us."I was quietly putting the pizza together, spreading the dough with sauce and overlaying this with the meats, vegetables and parmesan cheese.Topping it with the crumbled mozzarella, I slid it into the oven.Soon the rich garlicky aroma was filling the kitchen and I was busying myself with the salad and setting the table while Lucy and Bill chatted and laughed.We didn't eat until late, and Lucy's glass of wine turned out to be a good thing.By the time I was clearing the table, her eyes were half shut and she was definitely ready for bed, despite her unwillingness to say good-night to Bill, who had completely won her heart."That was rather amazing," I said to him after I'd tucked her in and we were sitting at the kitchen table."I don't know how you managed it.I was worried about her reaction.""You thought she'd view me as competition." He smiled a little."Let's just put it this way.Her mother's in and out of relationships with just about anything on two legs.""Meaning she doesn't have much time for her daughter."He refilled our glasses."To put it mildly.""That's too damn bad.She's something, smart as hell.Must have inherited your brains."He slowly sipped his wine, adding, "What does she do all day long while you're working?""Bertha's here.Mostly Lucy stays in my office hours on end banging on the computer.""Playing games on it?""Hardly.I think she knows more about the damn thing than I do.Last time I checked, she was programming in Basic and reorganizing my data base."He began studying his wineglass.Then he asked, "Can you use your computer to dial up the one downtown?""Don't even suggest it!""Well."He looked at me."You'd be better off.Maybe I was hoping.""Lucy wouldn't do such a thing," I said with feeling."And I'm not sure how I would be better off were it true.""Better your ten-year-old niece than a reporter.It would get Amburgey off your back.""Nothing would get him off my back," I snapped."That's right," he said dryly."His reason for getting up in morning is to jerk you around.""I'm frankly beginning to wonder that."Amburgey was appointed in the midst of the city's black community publicly protesting that the police were indifferent to homicides unless the victims were white.Then a black city councilman was shot in his car, and Amburgey and the mayor considered it good public relations, I supposed, to appear unannounced at the morgue the next morning.Maybe it wouldn't have turned out so badly had Amburgey thought to ask questions while he watched me perform the autopsy, had he kept his mouth shut afterward.But the physician combined with the politician, compelling him to confidently inform the press waiting outside my building that the "spread of pellet wounds" over the dead councilman's upper chest "indicates a shotgun blast at close range."As diplomatically as possible, I explained when the reporters questioned me later that the "spread" of holes over the chest was actually marks of therapy made when ER attendants inserted large-gauge needles into the subclavian arteries to transfuse blood.The councilman's lethal injury was a small-caliber gunshot wound to the back of the head.The reporters had a field day with Amburgey's blunder."The problem is he's a physician by training," I was saying to Bill."He knows just enough to think he's an expert in forensic medicine, to think he can run my office better than I can, and a lot of his opinions are flat-out full of shit [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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