before she played the message a third time. Then at last she picked up the receiver and punched in the numbers.
“Alicia, this is Tamara… I got your message here at the apartment… I have to tell you that Mr. Hunt doesn’t really want us to talk to you, either me or Mickey… I know… I think I agree, but the bottom line is he’s the boss… but you should at least know that Mickey was in a car accident today… no, he’s okay, they think, I hope. They’re holding him for observation overnight…”
Tamara had been planning to come back down to visit Mickey again with her grandfather when Jim got home, but by eight-thirty, a very long two and a half hours later, he had not arrived back at the apartment. Frustrated now and starting to get worried, she tried to call Mickey at the hospital, but San Francisco General Hospital did not provide telephones for individual patients in their rooms. In fact, the afternoon call to the Hunt Club that had informed her of Mickey’s condition had not come from Mickey directly, but from a nurse in the emergency room, who placed the call on her cell phone as a favor to her brother.
On her first try, she got cut off when she pressed pound according to the instructions. On her second, she punched seven different numbers in the automated menu over a five-minute period. Each option provided a suitable wait before suggesting the next one. (The hospital, by the way, had chosen the mellifluous and relaxing tones of Eminem as background while you waited.) When she finally reached a human being at the nurse’s station on Mickey’s floor, she could tell immediately from the woman’s sublimely indifferent bureaucrat’s tone that it was going to be a trying few more minutes.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We don’t deliver messages from the nurse’s station. You can come and visit the patient and deliver your message in person until ten o’clock.”
“How about if the message, though, is that I can’t get down to visit him?”
“Well, then, there’s a message center option in the menu that you can access by simply hitting the pound key.”
“I tried that before and it didn’t work. This time it’s taken me about half an hour to get to talk to you.” This was an exaggeration, of course, but it was what it felt like. “Aren’t you near to his room? Mickey Dade. Number three twenty-seven. Couldn’t you just go and tell him his sister can’t make it down tonight and will pick him up in the morning?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t leave the nursing station unmanned.”
“Look.” Trying to sound reasonable. “Aren’t you only like twenty or thirty feet from his room? Can’t you just walk across-?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to leave the nurse’s station. You can just press pound and leave a message. I’m sure he’ll get it.”
“I pressed pound the last time and it got me disconnected.”
“That’s not really very likely. If you’ll hold, I can just transfer you myself.”
With great reluctance, Tamara found herself saying, “All right. We can try that. Thank you.”
A click, then an ominous emptiness sounded at her ear for about five seconds before Tamara heard a chirpy three-toned, high-pitched ring, and then a metallic, disembodied voice: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and-”
“God damn it!” She slammed the phone back onto the receiver. Swearing a blue streak, she walked into the kitchen, made an about-face, came back to the telephone, picked it up about a foot, and slammed it down again. Then she turned and stared at the door to her apartment.
“And while we’re at it,” she said aloud to no one, “where the fuck are you, Jim?”
25
The drugs were beginning to wear off, but when Mickey opened his eyes, for a minute he thought he might be hallucinating. “Alicia? What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“Your sister told me what happened.” She sat in a chair near the head of his bed. Beyond her, he caught a glimpse of the wall clock-eight forty-five. “You look really beat up.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Are you okay?”
“They say I’m going to live. But she really nailed me. The other driver, I mean.” He closed his eyes briefly, opened them again. Yep, Alicia was still there. “You didn’t have to come down here,” he said. “I’m glad you did, but-”
“I had to see you,” she said.
“Well, you came to the right place. I don’t seem to be going anywhere soon.”
“I have to talk to you. Can we do that?”
He abandoned the flippancy. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I talk to you?”
“Because your boss told you not to?”
Mickey went to shake his head, but with the pain didn’t get far. “He didn’t exactly tell me not to. He just said it would be dumb.”
“Why? Does he say I killed Dominic too?”
“He says he’s keeping an open mind. But he does believe the cops are thinking that way. So Tam and I ought to watch out too.”
“Mickey.” She reached out and rested her hand on his arm. “I swear to you. I didn’t have anything to do with that. Or with Nancy Neshek either. I promise.”
“All right.”
“Please tell me you believe me.”
Mickey drew in a breath. Here, indeed, was the crux. He didn’t need to consciously recall the many discussions he’d had with Tamara in the wake of the boyfriend who’d betrayed her and Wyatt Hunt and everyone else he’d known. Those conversations were by now part of his DNA. Even Mickey had considered Craig a good guy, possibly a future brother-in-law, and a fine choice at that.
And now here Mickey was, in an analogous situation with a woman for whom he had an attraction that was- no other word for it-dangerous. And still, knowing everything he did, he was thinking about committing in the same way his sister had committed.
More than thinking about it.
Almost without conscious volition, he found himself answering her. “I do believe you,” he said. “You didn’t kill anybody.”
At his words, her eyes teared up and she put her head down, resting it against the side of the bed. Her shoulders rose and fell a couple of times before she looked up at him again. “How can I ever thank you?”
“Don’t worry about that. The big question is what are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any idea. That’s why I came here. To ask you. I think they’re going to arrest me. I can’t let myself get arrested, Mickey. I really can’t.”
“You think they’re that close?”
She nodded. “I don’t know what they need, but they asked me if I had any plans to travel outside the Bay Area anytime soon. If you want my opinion, I think I’m their main suspect.” She moved her chair closer in to the bed, and now spoke in a near whisper. “I didn’t go in to work today. I didn’t want them to know where to find me.”
“You think they’d arrest you down there? At Morton’s?”
“Why not? That’s where they questioned me the first time.”
Mickey hesitated, following the inexorable logic of what must have been true. “So you’re out of your room too?” he asked.
She didn’t seem surprised at the question. “I grabbed some stuff as soon as they left and threw it in my car.”
“So where are you going to go from here?”
“Mickey”-she hesitated-“I don’t have anyplace to go. My brother’s the only family I’ve got, and I know they’d
