Middle Of Nowhere

C H A P T E R

13

Daphne wore tight blue jeans and a caramel sweater that complemented her dark eyes. With the sleeves of the sweater pulled up, she looked like a woman who meant business. The twisted silver bracelet signaled she wasn't at work. Boldt figured that she had plenty of other such leftover trinkets from her courtship with Owen Adler—the man would have bought her the Space Needle if it might have guaranteed her love for him.

She switched on Boldt's bedside lamp and leaned in close and studied him. It seemed strange to see a woman other than Liz in this bedroom. It even inspired guilt in him, despite the pain.

"Take your shirt off," Daphne ordered him.

"I don't think so. The last time I had my shirt off with you—"

"Take it off and sit up on the bed or I'm getting in my car and going home."

"Maybe that's best."

She asked, "Are you sure there isn't something broken?" His ribs and chest carried crimson blotches and eerie blue bruises. She gently touched one or two and Boldt winced with the contact.

"Not exactly positive," he said. The ear had been patched up with a Band-Aid used as a butterfly.

"Turn around," she instructed.

"I just love it when you boss me around," he teased.

"Now!"

He obeyed. "I'm amazed you can breathe. And this one, this one's right on the kidney. Have you peed yet?"

"What?!"

"Are you peeing blood, Lou?"

"No."

"You need to see a doctor."

"At which point I'll have to report a mugging. At which point I'll have twenty reporters camped on my front lawn and ringing my phone off the hook. No, thanks."

"You really need to see a doctor," she repeated.

"No."

"What about Dixie?"

"His patients are all dead," Boldt replied. Dr. Ronald Dixon, chief medical examiner for King County, was one of Boldt's closest friends.

"Lie back," she advised. "I'm going to pour you a hot bath, feed you some aspirin, make some tea and call Dixie. When you're out of the bath, I'm driving you down to the ME's and he's going to look you over. They have X-ray there, access to the hospital. Fair enough?"

"It's not fair at all."

"Or I walk out now and leave you to patch yourself up."

"Sounds fair to me." He lay back, every bone, every muscle complaining. He wasn't sure he could sit up again without some help. "That's extortion, you know?"

"Do you want bubbles?" she asked, heading into the bathroom.

"Ha, ha!" he replied.

"Is that a yes or no?"

"Yes, please," he confessed. "The eucalyptus."

"That's just so the bubbles hide you when I deliver the tea. Mr. Modest."

"Damn right. That is, unless you're going to get in the bath with me and scrub my wounds?"

Mocking him, she said, "In your dreams!" She started the water running. He could only hear it out his left ear.

Boldt was thinking: Sometimes you are, yes.

* * *

The Medical Examiner's office, in the basement of the Harborview Medical Center, was eerily quiet when empty of Doc Dixon's staff.

Dixie pronounced Boldt "reasonably intact and still alive." He added editorially, "If you had come in as a cadaver, I'd have guessed you had jumped from a moving train, or fallen from a very high ladder."

"That's my story and I'm sticking to it," Boldt said softly, finding it too painful to speak. The pain grew inside him, like roots of a tree trying to find water.

"I could write you a couple of prescriptions. Pain. Sleep."

"No, thanks."

Daphne said, "Maybe just write them anyway."

It hurt too much to object. "Listen to the little lady," Dixie said.

"How's Liz anyway?" Dixie asked, his back to them as he wrote out the prescriptions. Was there innuendo in that question? Boldt wondered.

"Healing rapidly. She doesn't like to discuss it."

"When do you tell her about this?"

"Not yet," Boldt answered.

Daphne mocked, "He doesn't want to go through the paperwork."

"Uh-huh," Dixie said.

"Who needs another case to investigate?" Boldt reasoned.

"That was a baseball bat," Daphne said, as Dixon once again studied the ear.

Boldt mumbled, "K-9."

"What's that?" Dixon asked, still probing the damaged ear.

"Since when does a mugger call a dog a K-9?"

"Uh-oh," Daphne said. "I smell a conspiracy theory coming."

Boldt asked, "Okay, so it's a mugging. So why not take off once they had my stuff? Why stay to punish me with the baseball bat?"

"I thought that since the Flu, assaults like this are up," Dixie said.

"Dozens," Daphne answered.

"True enough," Boldt agreed.

"Blood in the urine?"

"No." Boldt felt Daphne's stare.

"You want to watch for that as well as dark stool."

"So noted."

"And I want to hear about it immediately."

"Affirmative."

"You got lucky here."

Boldt winced. "Yeah, I'm feeling like a real winner."

"No cop would ever do such a thing to another cop, Lou. Sickout or not, I just don't see it," Dixie said. "That brick? Sure. Some name calling? Some harassment? You bet. But this? Just to keep you off the job?"

"I guess you're right," Boldt admitted. "Though it certainly crossed my mind."

"Muggings are up," Dixie repeated.

"I caught that the first time," Boldt said.

"Can you have him stay with you?" Dixon asked Matthews. To Boldt he said, "I understand your not wanting to alarm Liz before you know what's going on. I know you. But you can't stay alone at your house tonight. You just can't. Doctor's order. You need someone there. So, you either head over to the Jamersons—"

Boldt shook his head interrupting him.

To Daphne Dixie said, "So you play nurse. Take his temperature every four hours, feed him more aspirin, if necessary. Call me if there are any rapid changes in his condition."

* * *

"I need to call Liz," he said from the passenger seat of Daphne's Honda.

"Now you're coming to your senses."

"But I don't want to wake her up, and I don't want to frighten her."

"That's out of my territory."

"I'll wake everyone up and turn this into a huge deal and make promises to her that by the morning I'll break, because I'm not going to take time off—and that's what she'll want."

"Lou—"

"If I take sick leave, what the hell's it going to look like?" He answered his own question. "Flu. And I'm not going to give Krishevski a chance to play that card. No way."

"And this has to do with calling Liz?" she questioned.

"It's complicated," he said.

"It must be."

"It can wait until morning," he convinced himself. "No need to wake anyone tonight," he justified. "Sleep it off and see how I'm doing." He tested, "Right?"

"This is your decision, Lou. Am I heading to Mercer Island—to the Jamersons?"

"No," he answered. He leaned his head back. A moment later he was asleep and lightly snoring.

Daphne drove Boldt to her houseboat and made up the futon couch in the downstairs living area. Just north of the NOAA docks on Lake Union, the floating community of houseboats had taken on a mythical reputation, raising property values fivefold in just eight years. Two thousand square feet of living space dressed in red wood shingle and asphalt roof, her houseboat had a red enamel wood stove and a sea kayak tied up to the deck outside her living-room window. There were ten other such homes on her pier, five to a side, a half dozen piers running up the lake's shoreline, little henhouses of mailboxes out on the road where the mailman knew each resident by name. Community still meant something here. The hippie feel of the past twenty years was giving way to Microsoft geeks who looked stupid smoking their cigars while sucking down microbrewery beer on warm summer nights, with the city's killer skyline forming a stage set in the near distance. An animosity existed surrounding the influx of the chip set, despite the lift it had given the economy. But the quaintness of her houseboat remained: small spaces, carefully decorated so as not to clutter, a faint trace of cinnamon incense, the sound of lake water lapping at the sides. If she ever sold, she'd be able to retire.

"Listen, I appreciate the gesture," he said, "but we can't do this."

"Sure we can," she replied, retrieving a pillow from her loft bedroom. Boldt lacked the strength to fight. He wanted sleep.

"I need sleep," he complained.

"You need a bath and some tea. The sleep will come of its own accord."

"I'm sure you're right."

"I'm always right," she said. "You just don't always choose to listen."

* * *

He awoke to the smell of tea and bagels, Daphne at work in the houseboat's small galley. She wore Lycra that fit her like plastic wrap. It was better than a sunrise, which he'd missed by an hour or more.

He didn't want to dress himself in the soiled and bloodied clothing from his beating. Anticipating this, she had left him an Owen Adler navy blue polo shirt, complete with the alligator, a pair of underwear and a pair of athletic socks. He didn't ask any questions. Their engagement had failed twice—enough said.

He showered, barely moving beneath the hot, hot water. There seemed to be pieces of him missing, others that shouted at full volume. He only heard things from half his head.

When he reached the galley, feeling refreshed but bludgeoned, he found a buttered bagel next to a jar of raspberry jam and a note that showed a stick figure running.

He ate outside, alone with a view of the morning activity on the lake—a seaplane landing in a gray-green knife stroke on the water's still surface; ducks flying in unison and veering north over Gasworks Park with its eerie skyline of pipes, reminding him of a refinery. He felt incredibly grateful to be alive. Odd that he had that dog to thank, that dog he had hated so much.

He took a bite of the bagel. It hurt his ear to chew. He searched the fridge for applesauce or yogurt— something that didn't require any chewing. He found something with "live culture." The thought disturbed him.

The city ran wild with crime while his coworkers willingly stayed home awaiting policy change. He couldn't see the sense in that, just as he couldn't understand why a trio of muggers would start working on him with a baseball bat. Unless they had found his badge and suddenly panicked or filled with hate over his being a cop. Hate corrupted even the best-intentioned mugger. Hate corrupted everything in its path. And he felt filled with it all of a sudden, and not a verifiable target in sight.