McCaleb knew it was bullshit grandstanding as soon as he said it. But ever since February ninth he had increasingly found that he had zero tolerance for fools.
Arrango laughed sarcastically in response and said, “Yeah, right. I’ll be waiting for you.”
He hung up.
The hospital was in a part of the Valley called Mission Hills. On the way there, McCaleb looked out the window at the passing scenery. It was mostly strip shopping centers and gas stations. The driver was making his way toward the 405 so that he could head north.
McCaleb’s knowledge of the Valley had come only through cases. There had been many, most of them falling under his review only on paper and photo prints and videotape from the body dumps along the freeway embankments or the hillsides fringing the northern flats. The Code Killer had hit four times in the Valley before he disappeared like the morning marine layer.
“What are you, police?”
McCaleb looked away from the window and over the seat at the rearview mirror. The driver’s eyes were on him.
“What?”
“Are you policeman or something?”
McCaleb shook his head.
“No, I’m no one. “
He looked back out the window as the cab labored up a freeway on-ramp. They passed a woman who was holding a sign asking for money. Another victim waiting to be victimized again.
He sat in the waiting room on a plastic chair across from an injured woman and her husband. The woman had internal pain and kept her arms folded across her midsection. She was hunched over, protecting the hurt. Her husband was being attentive, repeatedly asking how she felt and going to the intake window to ask when she would be taken back for examination. But twice McCaleb heard him quietly ask her, “What are you going to tell them?”
And each time the woman turned her face away.
At quarter to twelve Graciela Rivers came through the double doors of the ER ward. She suggested that they just go to the hospital cafeteria because she had only an hour. McCaleb didn’t mind because his taste for food had still not come back since the transplant. Eating at the hospital would be no different to him than eating at Jozu on Melrose. Most days he didn’t care what he ate and sometimes he forgot about meals until a headache reminded him that he needed to refuel.
The cafeteria was almost empty. They took their trays to a table next to a window, which looked out on a huge green lawn surrounding a large white cross.
“This is my one chance to look at daylight,” Graciela said. “Back in the ER rooms there are no windows. So I always try to get a window.”
McCaleb nodded that he understood.
“Way back when I worked in Quantico, our offices were below ground. The basement. No windows, always damp, freezing in the winter even with the heat on. I never saw the sun. It wears on you after a while.”
“Is that why you moved out here?”
“No. Other reasons. But I did figure I’d get a window. I was wrong. They stuck me in a storage closet at the FO. Seventeen floors up but no windows. I think that’s why I live on the boat now. I like having the sky close by.”
“What’s the FO?”
“Sorry. Field office. It was in Westwood. In the big federal building near the veterans cemetery.”
She nodded.
“So, did you really grow up on Catalina like the paper said?”
“Until I was sixteen,” he said. “Then I lived with my mother in Chicago… It’s funny, I spent all the time I was growing up on that island just wanting to get off it. Now I’m just trying to get back there.”
“What will you do there?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a mooring over there my father left me. Maybe I won’t do anything. Maybe I’ll just drop a line and sit in the sun with a beer in my hand.”
He smiled and she smiled back.
“If you already have a mooring, why can’t you go now?”
“The boat’s not ready. Neither am I yet.”
She nodded.
“It was your father’s boat?”
Another detail from the newspaper. He had obviously said too much about himself to Keisha Russell. He didn’t like people knowing so much about him so easily.
“He lived on it over there. When he died, it came to me. I let it sit in dry dock for years. Now it needs a lot of work.”
“Did he name it or was that you?”
“His name.”
She frowned and squinted her eyes as if something was sour.
“Why did he call it
“No, it makes sense. It doesn’t refer to the act of following behind the sea. There is something known as
“Oh. What is it?”
