Blood Work

26

McCALEB DIDN’T GET to the notes and financial records he had taken from Amelia Cordell until the end of the day. Tired from all the desk work, he quickly scanned the notes and came across nothing in the widow’s recollections that sparked any interest in him. From the bank statements he quickly determined that Cordell was paid every Wednesday by direct deposit. During the three months for which McCaleb had statements, Cordell had made an ATM withdrawal on every payday at the same bank branch at which he was eventually killed. The significance of this was that it confirmed that, like Gloria Torres’s nightly stop at the Sherman Market, Cordell had been following a definable pattern when he had been murdered. It gave more credence to the belief that the shooter had watched his victims-in Cordell’s case for a minimum of a week, but probably longer.

McCaleb was glancing through the credit card statements when he felt the boat dip and looked out to see Graciela stepping down into the stern. It was a pleasant surprise.

“Graciela,” he said as he stepped out to the stern. “What are you doing here?”

“You didn’t get my message?”

“No, I-oh, I haven’t checked messages.”

“Well, I called and said I was coming down. I wrote up some things about Glory. Like you asked.”

McCaleb almost groaned. More paperwork. Instead, he told her he appreciated her doing the work so quickly after his request.

He noticed that she carried a duffel bag slung over her arm. He took it from her.

“What’s in the bag? You didn’t write that much, did you?”

She looked at him and smiled.

“My stuff. I’m thinking about staying over again.”

McCaleb felt a little thrill inside, even though he knew that her staying over didn’t necessarily mean they would be sleeping together.

“Where’s Raymond?”

“With Mrs. Otero. She’ll also get him to school tomorrow. I’m taking the day off.”

“How come?”

“So I can be your driver.”

“I already have somebody to drive me. You don’t have to take-”

“I know but I want to. Besides, I made an appointment for you at the Times with Glory’s boss. And I want to go with you when you talk to him.”

“Okay, you got the job.”

She smiled and he led her into the salon.

After McCaleb took her bag down to the stateroom and poured her a glass of wine from a new bottle of red, he sat with her in the stern and began going over the case’s new developments. As he told her about Kenyon, her eyes widened as she struggled to accept the idea that there was a connection somewhere between her sister and the murdered criminal.

“Nothing obvious comes to mind, right?” he asked.

“No. I have no idea how they could be…”

She didn’t finish.

McCaleb shook his head and slouched in his deck chair. She opened her purse and took out the notebook in which she had written down her sister’s activities. They went over it. Nothing she had written jumped out at McCaleb as being significant. But he told her the information could still be useful as the case continued to evolve.

“It’s amazing how much everything has changed,” he said. “A week ago this was a basic holdup. Now we have possibilities of the motivation being pathological or even being some kind of contract hit. The random possibility is now third.”

Graciela sipped her wine before speaking.

“It makes it harder, doesn’t it?” she asked in a soft voice.

“No,” he said. “It just means we’re getting close. You have to open up and let all of the possibilities in. Then sift it out… All of this just means we’re getting close.”

After they watched the sunset, Graciela drove them to a small Italian restaurant in the Belmont Shores section of Long Beach. McCaleb liked the food and they had the privacy of one of the restaurant’s three round booths. During dinner McCaleb had tried to change the subject, sensing that Graciela was still depressed by the turns of the investigation. He told her some lame jokes he remembered from his bureau days but they barely brought a smile.

“It must have been hard when this was your full-time job,” she said as she pushed her half-finished plate of gnocchi aside. “I mean, just dealing with these kinds of people all the time. It must have been…”

She didn’t finish. He just nodded. He didn’t think they needed to go there again.

“Do you ever think you’ll get past it?”

“What, the job?”

“No, what it did to you. Like that story you told me. The Devil’s Keep. The whole thing of what happened to you. Can you get past that?”

He thought for a moment. He sensed that a lot was riding on his answer. She was asking about faith and she was deciding something about him. He knew it was important that his answer be honest yet the correct one. For himself he needed to be correct.

“Graciela, all I can tell you is that I hope I can get past it. I want to be restored. To what, I’m not sure. But I’ve been empty for a long time and I want to be filled. In my mind, it feels too weird to talk about but it’s there. I want you to know that. I don’t know if it answers what you need to know about me. But I’m hoping and waiting to have what I think you have.”

He wasn’t sure if he was making sense. He slid around in the booth until he was right next to her. He leaned over and kissed her high on the cheek. Shielded by the red-checked tablecloth, he put his hand on her knee and ran it softly across the top of her thigh. It was the kind of caress a lover would undertake. But he was desperate to hold on to her, not to lose her, and he lacked confidence in his words. He had to touch her in some way.

“Can we go?” she asked.

He looked at her a moment.

“Where?”

“To the boat.”

He nodded.

Back at the boat Graciela led him to the stateroom and made love to him without hesitation. As they moved in a slow rhythm, McCaleb felt his heart pounding so strong and hard in his chest that the beat seemed to echo in his temples, a throbbing sensation that urged him on. He was sure she also felt it, pulsing against her own chest, the cadence of life.

At the end, a shudder rolled through his body and he pressed his face hard into the crook of her neck. A short, clipped laugh, like a gasp, involuntarily came from his throat and he hoped she would think it was a cough or a grab for breath. He gently lowered more of his weight onto her and buried his face in the soft nest of hair behind her ear. She ran a hand down his back, then all the way up again, leaving it soft and warm on his neck.

“What’s so funny?” she whispered.

“Nothing… I’m just happy, that’s all.”

He pressed his face tighter against her and whispered into her ear, his nose full of her smell, his heart and mind full of hope.

“You are the one bringing me back,” he said. “You’re my chance.”

She brought her arms up around his neck and pulled him tightly down on her. She didn’t say a word.

In the dead of night McCaleb awoke. He had been dreaming of swimming underwater with no need to break the surface for air.

He was on his back, his arm against Graciela’s naked back. He felt the warmth of the contact. He thought about raising himself to look over her at the clock but he didn’t want to break the seam of their touch. As he closed his eyes to return to the dream, the unmistakable sound of the slider upstairs being slowly rolled open brought him awake. He realized that something-a sound-had woken him from the dream. He felt an icicle go through his chest and he became fully alert. Somebody was on the boat.

The Russian, he thought. Bolotov had found him and had come to make good on his threat. But then he quickly dismissed the possibility, returning to his instinctive belief that the Russian would not be that stupid.

He rolled to the edge of the bed and reached down to the remote phone set on the floor. He hit the speed dial combination for Buddy Lockridge’s boat and waited for him to answer. He wanted Lockridge to look at The Following Sea and tell him if he could see anyone or anything amiss. The thought of Donald Kenyon being marched to his front door and shot with a fragmenting bullet flashed through his mind. And he realized that whoever was up there probably wasn’t counting on Graciela’s being on the boat. He suddenly knew that no matter what happened in the next few minutes, the intruder must not and would not get to her.

After four rings Lockridge didn’t answer and McCaleb knew he couldn’t waste any more time. He quickly got out of bed and headed toward the stateroom’s closed door, checking the red glowing numerals of the clock and seeing it was ten minutes past three.

As he quietly opened the door, he thought about his gun. It was in the bottom drawer of the chart table. The intruder was closer to it than McCaleb was and possibly had already found it.

He mentally canvassed the lower deck, looking for a weapon and coming up with nothing. He had the door all the way open now.

“What is it?” Graciela whispered from behind him.

He quickly and quietly turned around and came to the bed. He put his hand over her mouth and whispered, “Somebody’s on the boat.”

He felt her body go rigid beneath his.

“They don’t know about you. I want you to quietly move over the side and lie down on the floor until I come get you.”

She didn’t move.

“Do it, Graciela.”

She started to move but then he held her.

“Do you have mace or any kind of weapon in your purse?”

She shook her head no. He nodded and then pushed her to the side of the bed nearest the wall. He went back to the door.

As McCaleb came quietly up the steps, he could see the slider was half open. There was more light in the salon than below and his vision improved. Suddenly the figure of a man was silhouetted against the exterior light beyond the door. The light seemed to reflect off the figure. McCaleb could not tell if the intruder was staring at him or was turned around, looking out at the marina.

McCaleb knew that the corkscrew he had used to open Graciela’s wine earlier was on the galley counter, just to the right at the top of the steps. He could easily get to it. He just had to decide if he would be using it against someone with something better.

He decided there was no choice. As he came to the top stair, he stretched out to reach the corkscrew. The stair creaked and McCaleb saw the silhouette tense. The element of surprise was gone.

“Freeze, asshole!” he yelled as he grabbed the corkscrew and moved toward the dark figure.

The intruder quickly moved to the door, going sideways out through it and using one hand to fling it down its track behind him. Grappling to get the door open, McCaleb lost a few seconds and the intruder was up on the dock and running before he was even out of the boat.

Instinctively, he knew he would not be able to catch the intruder but he leaped up onto the dock and gave full-speed chase anyway, the cool night air hardening his skin, the rough wood of the dock planks biting into his bare feet.

As he ran up the slanted gangway he heard a car engine turn over. He jerked open the gate and ran out into the lot just as a car sped through the exit, its tires squealing as they lost grip on the cold asphalt. McCaleb watched it go. It had been too far away for him to get the plate.

“Shit!”

He closed his eyes and brought his hand up and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was a self-hypnosis technique. He tried to commit as many details of what he had just seen to active memory. Red car, small, foreign, worn-out suspension… It occurred to him that the car was familiar. But he couldn’t place it yet.

McCaleb bent over and put his hands on his knees as a feeling of nausea hit him and his heart seemed to bounce up into a higher gear. He concentrated on long, deep breaths and eventually he felt the beat slow down.

He felt light hit his closed eyelids. He opened his eyes and looked into the beam of an approaching flashlight. It was the marina’s security guard, pulling up in his golf cart.

“Mr. McCaleb?” the voice behind the light asked. “That you?”

It was only then that McCaleb finally realized he was naked.

Nothing was missing, nothing was disturbed. At least as far as McCaleb could tell. Nothing appeared out of order. The contents of his leather bag, which he had left on the galley table, seemed to be as he remembered them. He found the thick sheaf of documents he had shoved into the galley cabinet earlier in the day to be where he had left it. McCaleb inspected the sliding door and found scratches from a screwdriver. He knew how easy it was to pop a sliding door with a screwdriver. He also knew that the pop was always louder outside the structure than inside. He had been lucky. Somehow the pop or something else had woken him.

With the security guard, Shel Newbie, watching, McCaleb finished checking every drawer and cabinet in the salon and found nothing amiss.

“What about below?” Newbie asked.

“Not enough time,” McCaleb said. “I heard him as soon as he opened the door. I guess I scared him off before he did whatever he was coming to do.”

McCaleb was silent as he thought about the possibility that the intruder had not come to steal anything. He thought about Bolotov again but quickly dismissed it. The figure he had seen move sideways through the sliding door was too small to have been the Russian.

“Can I come up? I could make some coffee.”

McCaleb turned to the stairs. Graciela was there. When he had returned to the stateroom to get dressed, he had told her it would be better if she stayed below. But here she was, wearing her pink nightshirt over a pair of baggy gray sweatpants she had taken from his closet. Her hair was a bit disheveled and she couldn’t have looked sexier. He stared at her silently for a moment before finally answering.

“Well, we’re about to wrap it up, I think.”

“Should I call Pacific Division?” Newbie asked.

McCaleb shook his head.

“It was probably just some dock punk looking to rip off my Loran or the compass,” he said, though he didn’t believe it. “I don’t want to drag the police in. We’ll be up all night.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Thanks for helping, Shel. I appreciate it.”

“Glad to. I guess I’ll go back out then. I’m going to have to write up an incident report. In the morning they might want to make an LAPD report anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. I just don’t feel like waiting up for them to get over here. That run took it out of me. Tomorrow will be fine.”

“Okay, then.”

Newbie saluted and left. McCaleb waited a few moments and then looked at Graciela, who was still in the stairwell.

“You okay?”

“Yes. Scared is all.”

“Why don’t you go back down. I’ll be right down.”

She went back to the stateroom. McCaleb closed the slider and worked the lock to see if it was still operable. It was. He reached up to the overhead rod racks and took down the wooden gaff handle. He placed it in the door’s track and used it as a wedge to hold the door closed. It would do for the night. But he knew he would have to rethink the boat’s security.

When he was finished with the door and reasonably assured of security, McCaleb looked down at his bare feet on the salon’s Berber carpet. For the first time he realized that the rug was wet. He then remembered how the marina lights had shone off the body of the intruder as he had stood near the door.