Blood Work

33

THERE WERE NO taxi cabs waiting at the curb outside the emergency room. McCaleb decided to change his plan. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and was growing weak with hunger. He felt a low-grade migraine beginning to throb at the base of his skull and knew if he didn’t refuel, it would soon crawl over the top of him and encase his whole head. He decided to call Buddy Lockridge to come get him, then have a turkey and coleslaw sandwich from across the street at Jerry’s Deli while he waited. The more he thought about the good sandwiches they made over there, the hungrier he got. Once Buddy arrived, they could drive over to Video GraFX Consultants in Hollywood to pick up the tape and the hard copy of the frame Tony Banks had enhanced for him.

He quickly stepped back into the ER lobby and over to the pay phone alcove. There was a young woman on one of the phones tearfully telling someone about somebody else who was apparently being treated in the ER. McCaleb noticed that one nostril and her lower lip were pierced with silver hoops connected by a chain of safety pins.

“He didn’t know me, he didn’t know Danny,” she wailed. “He’s totally fucked up and they’re also calling the cops.”

Momentarily distracted by the safety pins and wondering what would happen if the woman yawned, McCaleb picked up the phone furthest from her and tried to tune her out. He was about to give up on Lockridge after six rings-on a boat like the Double-Down, you can’t be more than four rings away-when Buddy finally picked up.

“Yo, Buddy, ready to go to work?”

“Terry?”

Before McCaleb could answer, Lockridge’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“Man, where are you at?”

“Cedars. I need you to pick me up. What’s the matter?”

“Well, I’ll pick you up but I’m not sure you want to come back here.”

“Buddy, listen to me. Skip the bullshit and tell me exactly what is going on.”

“I’m not sure, man, but you’ve got people all over your boat.”

“What people?”

“Well, two of them are those two guys in the suits who were here yesterday.”

Nevins and Uhlig.

“They are inside my boat?”

“Yeah, inside. Also, they pulled the cover off your Cherokee and have a tow truck out there. I think they’re going to take it. I went over there to see what was going on and they almost put me down on the boards. Showed me their badges and a search warrant and told me to get lost. They weren’t nice about it. They’re searching the boat.”

“Shit!”

McCaleb looked over and saw that his outburst had drawn the attention of the crying woman. He turned his back toward her.

“Buddy, where are you, up top or below?”

“Below.”

“Can you see my boat right now?”

“Sure. I’m looking out the galley window.”

“How many people you see?”

“Well, some are inside. But altogether I think there are four or five of them over there. And there’s a couple more with the Cherokee.”

“Is there a woman?”

“Yeah.”

McCaleb described Jaye Winston as best as he could and Lockridge confirmed that a woman matching the description was on the boat.

“She’s in the salon right now. It looked like before when I was looking at her that she was just sort of watching.”

McCaleb nodded. His mind was running over the possibilities of what was happening. Each way he looked at it, things added up the same way. The fact that Nevins and Uhlig knew he had FBI documents would not have engendered such a response-a warrant search with a full team. There was only one other possibility. He had become an official suspect. Accepting this, he thought about how Nevins and Uhlig would conduct an evidentiary search.

“Buddy,” he said, “have you seen them taking anything off the boat? I’m talking about in plastic bags or brown paper bags, like from Lucky’s.”

“Yeah, there’s been some bags. They put them up on the dock. But you don’t have to worry, Terror.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think they’re going to find what they’re really looking for.”

“What are you-”

“Not on the phone, man. You want me to come get you now?”

McCaleb stopped. What was he saying? What was going on?

“Hang tight,” he finally said. “I’ll call you right back.”

McCaleb hung up and immediately dropped in another quarter. He called his own phone number. No one answered. The machine answered and he heard his own tape-recorded voice telling him to leave a message. After the beep he said, “Jaye Winston, if you’re there, pick up.”

He waited for a beat of silence and was about to say it again when the phone was picked up. He felt a slight sense of relief when he recognized Winston’s voice.

“This is Winston.”

“This is McCaleb.”

That was all. He figured he would see how she wanted to play it. He would be better able to judge where he stood by the way she handled the call.

“Uh… Terry,” she said. “How did you-where are you?”

“Whatever relief he was feeling now started to slip away. Its replacement was dread. He had given her the opportunity to talk to him obliquely, perhaps in code, acting as though she was talking to a fellow deputy or even Captain Hitchens. But she had used his name.

“Doesn’t matter where I am,” he said. “What are you doing on my boat?”

“Why don’t you come here and we’ll talk about it?”

“No, I want to talk about it now. I’m a suspect? That’s what this is about?”

“Look, Terry, don’t make this more complicated than it has to be. Why don’t you-”

“Is there an arrest warrant? Just answer me that.”

“No, Terry, there isn’t.”

“But I am a suspect.”

“Terry, why didn’t you tell me you have a black Cherokee?”

McCaleb was stunned as he suddenly realized how things fit together with him in the middle.

“You never asked. Listen to what you are saying, what you are thinking. Would I get involved in all of this, the investigation, bring the bureau in, all of it, if I was the shooter? Are you serious?”

“You got to our only witness.”

“What?”

“You got to Noone. You got inside the investigation and got to the only witness. You hypnotized him, Terry. Now he’s no good to us. The one person who might have been able to make the ID and we lost him. He-”

She stopped as there was a click as another phone was picked up.

“McCaleb? This is Nevins. What’s your location?”

“Nevins, I’m not talking to you. You’ve got your head up your ass. I’m only-”

“Listen to me, I’m trying to be civil. We can do this easy and quiet or we can go big time. You decide, my friend. You have to come in and we’ll talk about it and let the chips fall.”

McCaleb’s mind quickly went over the facts. Nevins and the others had come to the same conclusion that he had come to. They had made the blood work connection. The fact that McCaleb was a direct beneficiary of the Torres killing made him a suspect. He imagined them running his name on the computer and coming up with the registration of the Cherokee. It was probably the piece that sent them over the top. They got a search warrant and went to the boat.

McCaleb felt the cold hand of fear clasp his neck. The intruder from the night before. It began to dawn on him that it wasn’t a question of what he had wanted. It was what had he planted. He thought about what Buddy had said moments before about the agents not finding what they were looking for. And the picture was taking form.

“Nevins, I’ll come in. But you tell me first, what have you got there? What have you found?”

“No, Terry, we don’t play it like that. You come in and then we talk about all of this.”

“I’m hanging up, Nevins. Last chance.”

“Don’t go in any post offices, McCaleb. Your picture’s going to be on the wall. As soon as we get the package together.”

McCaleb hung up, held his hand on the phone and leaned his forehead against it. He wasn’t sure what was going on or what to do. What had they found? What had the intruder hidden in the boat?

“You okay?”

He jerked around and it was the girl with the pierced nose and lip.

“Fine. You?”

“I am now. I just had to talk to somebody.”

“I know the feeling.”

She left the phone alcove then and McCaleb picked up the receiver again and dropped another quarter. Buddy picked up on half a ring.

“All right, listen,” McCaleb said. “I want you to come get me. But you’re not going to be able to just walk out of there.”

“How come? It’s a free-”

“Because I just talked to them and they know someone tipped me that they were there. So this is what I want you to do. Take off your shoes and put your keys and wallet inside them. Then get your laundry basket and stick your shoes in it and cover them up with clothes. Then carry the basket out of there and make-”

“I don’t have any laundry in the basket, Terry. I did laundry this morning, before any of these people showed up.”

“Fine, Buddy. Take some clothes-clean clothes-and put them in the basket so it looks like you’ve got dirty clothes. Hide your shoes. Make it look like you are only going over to the laundry. Don’t close the hatch on your boat and make sure you are carrying four quarters in your hand. They’ll stop you but if you play it right, they’ll believe you and let you go. Then get in your car and come get me.”

“They might follow me.”

“No. They probably won’t even watch you once they let you go to the laundry. Maybe you should go to the laundry first, then to your car.”

“Okay. So where do I find you?”

McCaleb didn’t hesitate. He had grown to trust Lockridge. Besides, he knew he could take precautions on his end.

After hanging up, McCaleb called Tony Banks and told him that he would be coming by. Banks said he would be there.

McCaleb walked into Jerry’s Famous Deli and ordered a turkey sandwich with coleslaw and Russian dressing to go. He also ordered a sliced pickle and a can of Coke. After he paid for the sandwich, he took it out and crossed Beverly Boulevard back to Cedars. He had spent so many days and nights in the medical center he knew its layout by rote. He took the elevator to the third floor maternity ward, where he knew of a waiting room that looked out across the helipad to Beverly Boulevard and Jerry’s. It was not unusual to see an expectant father wolfing down a deli sandwich in the waiting room. McCaleb knew he could sit up there and eat and wait and watch for Buddy Lockridge.

The sandwich lasted less than five minutes but the wait for Buddy Lockridge went on for an hour with no sighting of Lockridge. McCaleb watched two helicopters come in with deliveries of transplant organs packed in red coolers.

He was about to call the Double-Down to see if the agents had held Lockridge up when he finally saw Buddy’s familiar Taurus pull up to the front of the deli. McCaleb walked to the window and looked long and far up and down Beverly Boulevard, then checked the sky for anything that looked like a law enforcement helicopter. He left the window and headed to the elevator.

A plastic laundry basket full of clothes was on the backseat of the Taurus. McCaleb got in, looked at it and then over at Lockridge, who was playing some unrecognizable tune on his harp.

“Thanks for coming, Buddy. Any problems?”

Lockridge dropped the harmonica into the door pocket.

“Nah. They stopped me like you said they would and asked their questions. But I played dumb; they let me go. I think it was ’cause I only had the four quarters on me that they let me go. That was a smart move, Terry.”

“We’ll see. Who was it who stopped you? The two suits?”

“No, it was two other guys and they were cops, not agents. At least they said so, but they didn’t give me their names.”

“Was one a big wide guy, Latino, with maybe a toothpick in his mouth?”

“You got it. That’s him.”

Arrango. McCaleb found a little bit of satisfaction in putting one past the pompous jerk.

“So where to?” Buddy asked.

McCaleb had thought about this while he waited. And he knew he had to get to work on the list of transplant recipients. He had to get on it quickly. But before he did that, he wanted to make sure he had all his ducks in a row. He had come to look at investigations as being similar to the extension ladders on fire trucks. You kept extending the reach further, and the further out you went, the more wobbly it was out on the end. You could not neglect the base, the start of the investigation. Every loose detail that could be nailed down had to be put in its exact place. And so, he felt now, he had to finish the timeline. He had to answer the questions that he himself had raised before going on to the end of the ladder. It was his philosophy as well as instinct that told him to do this. He was playing out a hunch that within the contradictions he would find a truth.

“ Hollywood,” he told Lockridge.

“That video place we went before?”

“You got it. We go to Hollywood first, then up to the Valley.”

Lockridge headed a few short blocks up to Melrose Boulevard before turning east toward Hollywood.

“All right, let’s hear it,” McCaleb said. “What were you talking about on the phone, about them not finding what they were looking for?”

“Check out the laundry basket, man.”

“Why?”

“Just take a look.”

He turned his head toward McCaleb and jerked it in the direction of the backseat. McCaleb unsnapped his seat belt and turned around to reach over the seat. As he did so, he checked the cars behind them. There was lots of traffic but no cars that raised any suspicion.

He dropped his eyes to the basket. It was full of underwear and socks. That had been a nice touch by Buddy. It made it less likely Nevins or anybody else would look through the basket when they stopped him.

“This stuff is clean, right?”

“ ’Course. It’s on the bottom.”

McCaleb brought his knees up onto the seat and leaned all the way over. He dumped the contents of the laundry basket on the backseat. He heard the dull thud of something heavier than clothes hitting the seat. He moved a pair of loud boxer shorts out of the way and saw a plastic Ziploc bag that contained a pistol.

“Silently, McCaleb slid back into his seat, holding the bag containing the gun. He smoothed the plastic, which had been yellowed from within by a film of gun oil, so that he could get a better look at the weapon. He felt a sweat break across the back of his neck. The gun in the bag was an HK P7. And he didn’t need any ballistics report to know it was the HK P7, the weapon that had killed Kenyon, then Cordell, then Torres. He bent down to look closely at the weapon and saw that the serial number had been burned away with acid. The gun was untraceable.

A tremor rolled through McCaleb’s hands as he held the murder weapon. His body slumped against the door and his feelings jumped between the anguish of knowing the history of the object he now held in his hands and despair at the thought of his predicament. Someone was setting McCaleb up and the frame would probably have been all but unbreakable if Buddy Lockridge had not found the gun when he went into the dark waters beneath The Following Sea.

“Jesus,” McCaleb said in a whisper.

“Looks pretty mean, don’t it?”

“Where exactly was it?”

“It was in a diving bag hanging about six feet below your stern. It was tied off on one of the underside eyelets. If you knew it was there, you could reach under with a gaff and hook the line and bring it up. But you had to know it was there. Otherwise, you wouldn’t see it from up above.”

“Did the people doing the search go into the water today?”

“Yeah, one diver. He went down, but by then I’d already checked around like you asked. I beat him to it.”

McCaleb nodded and put the gun down on the floor between his feet. Staring down at it, he folded his arms across his chest as if protecting himself against a chill. It had been that close. And though he was sitting next to the man who had saved him for the time being, an overwhelming sense of isolation came over him. He felt completely alone. And he felt the flickering onset of something he had only read about before-the fight-or-flight syndrome. He felt an almost violent urge to forget about everything and run. Just cut and run and get as far away from all of this as he could.

“I’m in big trouble, Buddy,” he said.

“I kind of figured that,” his driver replied.