Blood Work

8

THE DISTANT BOOMING of empty cargo containers being unloaded from a ship in the nearby Port of Los Angeles woke McCaleb before dawn. As he lay in bed, eyes closed but fully awake, he pictured the process. The crane delicately swinging the container the size of a truck trailer off the ship’s deck and into the yard, then the ground man giving the drop sign early and the huge steel box dropping the last three feet and producing a concussion like a sonic boom echoing across the nearby marinas. In McCaleb’s vision, the ground man was laughing each time.

“Fucking assholes,” McCaleb said, finally giving up on sleep and sitting up. It was the third time in a month it had happened.

He checked the clock and realized he had slept for more than ten hours. He slowly made his way to the head and took a shower. After he had toweled off, he took the morning reading of vital signs and the prescribed complement of assorted pills and liquid chemicals. He logged it all on the progress chart and then got out his razor. He was about to spread shaving cream across his face when he looked in the mirror and said, “Fuck it.”

He shaved his neck so he would look neat but left it at that, deciding that to shave two or three times a day for the rest of his life, or for as long as he was on prednisone, wasn’t an alternative. He had never had a beard before. The bureau wouldn’t have allowed it.

After dressing, he took a tall glass of orange juice, his phone book and the portable phone out to the stern and sat in the fishing chair as the sun came up. Between gulps of juice he constantly checked his watch, waiting for it to hit seven-fifteen, which he believed would be the best time to call Jaye Winston.

The Sheriff’s Department homicide offices were in Whittier on the far side of the county. From that location, the squad’s detectives handled all killings committed in unincorporated Los Angeles County and the various cities the department contracted with to provide law enforcement services. One of those cities was Palmdale, where James Cordell had been murdered.

Because the homicide squad offices were so distant, McCaleb had decided that it would be foolish to take an hour-long cab ride out there without knowing whether Winston would be in when he arrived. So he had decided on the seven-fifteen call rather than the surprise visit with a box of doughnuts.

“Those assholes.”

McCaleb looked around and saw one of his neighbors, Buddy Lockridge, standing in the cockpit of his sailboat, a forty-two-foot Hunter called the Double-Down. Buddy’s boat was three slips from The Following Sea. He was holding a mug of steaming coffee in his hand. He was in a bathrobe and his hair was standing up on one side. McCaleb didn’t have to ask whom Buddy was calling assholes.

“Yeah,” he said. “Not a good way to start the day.”

“Point is they shouldn’t be allowed to do that all through the night,” Buddy said. “Goddamn nuisance. I mean, you gotta be able to hear that from here to Long Beach.”

McCaleb just nodded.

“I talked to them over there in the harbor master’s. You know, told them to make a complaint to the Port Authority but they don’t give a shit. I’m thinking of gettin’ a little petition going. You going to sign it?”

“I’ll sign it.”

McCaleb looked at his watch.

“I know, you think it’s a waste of time.”

“No. I just don’t know if it will work. The port’s a twenty-four-hour operation. They’re not going to stop unloading ships at night because a bunch of people on their boats in the marina sign a complaint.”

“Yeah, I know. The assholes… I wish one of them boxes would drop on them one day. Then they’d get the idea.”

Lockridge was a wharf rat. An aging surfer and beach bum, he lived a low-cost, low-maintenance life on his boat, subsisting mostly on money from odd jobs around the marina like boat sitting and hull scraping. The two had met a year earlier, shortly after Lockridge had moved his boat into the marina. McCaleb had been awakened by a middle-of-the-night harmonica concerto. When he got up and left his boat to investigate, he traced the sound to a drunken Lockridge lying in the cockpit of the Double-Down. He was playing a harmonica to a tune only he heard on his earphones. Despite McCaleb’s complaint that night, the two had become friends over time. This was largely due to the fact that there were no other live-aboards in that area of the marina. Each was the other’s only full-time neighbor. Buddy had kept an eye on The Following Sea while McCaleb had been in the hospital. He also often offered McCaleb rides to the grocery store or a nearby mall because he knew Terry wasn’t supposed to drive. In turn, McCaleb had Lockridge over for dinner every week or so. They usually talked about their shared interest in the blues, debated sailboats versus power boats and sometimes pulled out McCaleb’s old file boxes and theoretically solved some of the cases. Lockridge was always fascinated by the details of McCaleb’s stories about the bureau and his investigations.

“I’ve got to make a phone call now, Bud,” McCaleb now called over. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Sure. Make your call. Take care of business.”

He waved and disappeared down the hatchway into his boat’s cabin. McCaleb shrugged and made his call after looking up the number he had for Jaye Winston in his book. After a few seconds he was connected.

“Jaye, it’s Terry McCaleb. You remember me?”

After a beat, she said, “ ’Course I do. How is it going, Terry? I heard you got the new ticker.”

“Yeah and I’m doing okay. How about you?”

“Same old same old.”

“Well, you think you’ll have a few minutes if I swing by this morning? You got a case I want to talk about.”

“You on the private ticket now, Terry?”

“Nah. Just doin’ a favor for a friend.”

“Which one is it, the case I mean?”

“James Cordell. The ATM case on January twenty-two.”

Winston made a hmmph sound but didn’t say anything.

“What?” McCaleb asked.

“Well, it’s funny. That case has gone cold on me but now you’re the second person to call about it in two days.”

Shit, McCaleb thought. He knew who had called.

“Keisha Russell from the Times ?”

“Yup.”

“That’s on me. I asked her for the clips on Cordell. But I wouldn’t tell her why. That’s why she called you. Fishing.”

“That’s what I thought. I played dumb. So who is the friend who talked you into this?”

McCaleb recounted how he had been asked to look into the murder of Gloria Torres and how that ultimately led him to the Cordell case. He acknowledged that he was getting no help from the LAPD and that Winston was his only alternate route into the case. He left out the fact that his new heart had come from Gloria Torres.

“So did I hit it right?” he asked at the end. “Are they connected?”

Winston hesitated but then confirmed his assumption. She also said her case was in a holding pattern at the moment, pending new developments.

“Listen, Jaye, I’ll be right up front with you. What I’m hoping to do is come out, maybe take a look at the books and whatever else you care to show me, then be able to go back to Graciela Rivers and tell her all that could be done has been done or is being done. I’m not trying to be a hero or to show anybody up.”

Winston didn’t say anything.

“What do you think?” McCaleb finally asked. “You got some time today?”

“Not a lot. Can you hold on?”

“Sure.”

McCaleb was put on hold for a minute. He paced around the deck and looked over the side at the dark water his boat floated on.

“Terry?”

“Yo.”

“Look, I’ve got court at eleven downtown. That means I have to be out of here by ten. Can you make it before then?”

“Sure. How’s nine or nine-fifteen?”

“That’ll work.”

“Okay, and thanks.”

“Look, Terry, I owe you one, so I’m doing this. But there’s nothing here. It’s just some scumbag out there with a gun. This is three-strikes shit, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got another call on hold here. We’ll talk when you get here.”

Before McCaleb got ready to go, he stepped up onto the dock and walked over to the Double-Down. The boat was the marina eye-sore. Lockridge had more possessions than the boat was built to hold. His three surfboards, his two bikes and his Zodiac inflatable were stored on the deck, making the boat look like a floating yard sale.

The hatch was still open but McCaleb saw and heard no activity. He called out and waited. It was bad marina etiquette to step onto a boat uninvited.

Eventually, Buddy Lockridge’s head and shoulders came up through the hatch. His hair was combed and he was dressed now.

“Buddy, what do you have going for today?”

“Whaddaya mean? The same thing I’ve always got going. A big goose egg. What’d you think, I was going to Kinko’s to update my résumé?”

“Well, look, I need a driver for the next few days, maybe more. You want to do it, the job’s yours. I’m paying ten bucks an hour plus any meals. You’d have to bring a book or something because there will be a lot of sitting around waiting for me.”

Buddy climbed all the way up into the cockpit.

“Where’re you drivin’ to?”

“I’ve got to go out to Whittier. I need to leave in fifteen minutes. After that, I don’t know.”

“What is it, some kind of investigation?”

McCaleb could see the excitement building in Buddy’s eyes. He spent a lot of time reading crime novels and often recounted their plots to McCaleb. This would be the real thing.

“Yeah, I’m looking into something for somebody. But I’m not looking for a partner, Buddy, just a driver.”

“That’s okay. I’m in. Whose car?”

“We take yours, I pay for gas. We take my Cherokee, I sit in the back. It’s got a passenger side air bag. You decide. Either way is fine with me.”

Driving had been forbidden for McCaleb by Bonnie Fox until at least his ninth month. His chest was still closing. The skin was healed but beneath the scarred exterior the sternum was still open. An impact on a steering wheel or from an air bag could be fatal, even in a low-speed accident.

“Well, I like the Cherokee but let’s take mine,” Buddy said. “I’d feel like too much of a chauffeur with you in the back.”