She slid out of the booth, followed by Bosch and McCaleb. They left two beers and a whiskey rocks untouched on the table. At the door, McCaleb glanced back and saw a couple of the hard-cores moving in on the treasure. From the jukebox John Fogerty was singing, “There’s a bad moon on the rise…”
Chapter 41
The chill off the water worked its way into McCaleb’s bones. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his windbreaker and turtled his neck as far down into the collar as he could as he carefully made his way down the ramp to the Cabrillo Marina docks.
Though his chin was down his eyes were alert and scanning the docks for unusual movement. Nothing caught his attention. He glanced at Buddy Lockridge’s sailboat as he passed. Despite all the junk – surfboards, bikes, gas grill, an ocean kayak and other assorted equipment and debris – crowding the deck, he could see the cabin lights were on. He walked quietly on the wood planking. He decided that whether Buddy was awake or not it was too late and McCaleb was too tired and cold to deal with his supposed partner. Still, as he approached The Following Sea, he couldn’t help but move his mind over the sharp-edged anomaly in his working theory on the case. Back at the bar Bosch had been correct when he deduced that someone from the Storey camp had to have leaked the story of the Gunn investigation to the New Times. McCaleb knew that the only way the current case theory hung together was if Tafero, or maybe Fowkkes or even Storey from jail, had been Jack McEvoy’s source. The problem was that Buddy Lockridge had told McCaleb that he had leaked the investigation to the weekly tabloid.
Now the only way, at least as it appeared to McCaleb, that this could work would be if both Buddy and someone in Storey’s defense group leaked the same information to the same media source. And this, of course, was a coincidence that even a believer in coincidence would have a difficult time accepting.
McCaleb tried to put it out of his mind for the moment. He got to the boat, looked around again, and stepped down into the cockpit. He unlocked the slider and went in, turning on the lights. He decided that in the morning he would go over and question Buddy more carefully about what he had done and who he had talked to.
He locked the door and put his keys and the videotape he’d been carrying down on the chart table. He immediately went to the galley and poured a large glass of orange juice. He then turned the upper deck lights off and took the juice with him down to the lower deck where he went into the head and quickly began his evening pill ritual. As he swallowed the pills and orange juice he looked at himself in the small mirror over the sink. He thought about what Bosch had looked like. The weariness clearly set deep in his eyes. McCaleb wondered if he would get the same look in a few years, after a few more cases.
When he was finished with his medicine routine he stripped off his clothes and took a quick shower, the water feeling ice cold because the water heater hadn’t been on since he had crossed in the boat the day before.
Shivering, he went into the master cabin and put on a pair of boxer shorts and a sweatshirt. He was dead tired but once he got into the bed he decided he should write a few notes about his thoughts on how Jaye Winston should run the play with Tafero. He reached down to the nightstand’s drawer, where he kept pens and scratch pads. When he opened it he found a folded newspaper crammed into the small drawer space. He pulled it out, unfolded it and found it was the previous week’s issue of New Times. The pages had been folded backward so that the rear advertising section was at the front. McCaleb was looking at a page full of matchbook-sized ads under a heading that said OUTCALL MASSAGE.
McCaleb got up quickly and went to his windbreaker, which he had tossed onto a chair. He pulled the cell phone out of the pocket and went back to the bed with it. Though McCaleb had been carrying the phone with him in recent days, it usually stayed in its charger on the boat. It was paid for out of charter funds and was carried as a business expense. It was used by clients during charter trips and by Buddy Lockridge while confirming reservations and running credit card authorizations.
The phone had a small digital screen with a menu he scrolled through. He opened the call log program and began scrolling through the last hundred numbers the phone had been used to call. Most of the numbers he quickly identified and eliminated. But every time he did not recognize a number he compared it to the phone numbers at the bottom of the ads on the massage page. The fourth unrecognized number he compared to the ads was a match. The number was for a woman who advertised herself as an “Exotic Japanese-Hawaiian Beauty” named Leilani. Her ad said she specialized in “full-service relaxation” and was not associated with any massage agency.
McCaleb closed the phone and got off the bed again. He started pulling on a pair of sweatpants as he tried to recall exactly what had been said when he had accused Buddy Lockridge of leaking the case information to the New Times.
By the time he was dressed, McCaleb realized he had never specifically accused Buddy of leaking information to the newspaper. He had only mentioned the New Times and Buddy had immediately begun to apologize. McCaleb now understood that Buddy’s apology and embarrassment could have been over his using The Following Sea the week before when it was in the marina as a rendezvous point with the full-service masseuse. It explained why he had asked if McCaleb was going to tell Graciela what he had done.
McCaleb looked at his watch. It was ten after eleven. He grabbed the newspaper and went topside. He didn’t want to wait until the morning to confirm this. He guessed that Buddy had used The Following Sea to meet the woman because his own boat was so small and cramped and looked like a forbidding floating rat trap. There was no master cabin – just one open space that was as crowded with junk as the deck above. If Buddy had The Following Sea available to him, he would have used it.
In the salon he didn’t bother turning on the lights. He leaned over the couch and looked out the window to the boat’s left. Buddy’s boat, the Double Down, was four slips away and he could see the cabin lights were still on. Buddy was still awake, unless he had passed out with the lights on.
McCaleb went to the slider and was about to unlock it when he realized it was already open a half inch. He realized someone was on the boat, probably having entered while he had been in the shower and unable to hear the lock pop or feel the added weight on the boat. He quickly slid the door all the way open in an effort to escape. He was just stepping through when he was grabbed from behind. An arm came over his right shoulder and across the front of his neck. It bent at the elbow and his neck was shoved into the V it formed. His attacker’s other forearm closed the triangle behind his neck. The hold closed like a vise on both sides of his neck, compressing the carotid arteries that carried oxygenated blood to his brain. McCaleb had an almost clinical understanding of what was happening. He was caught in a textbook choke hold. He began to struggle. He brought his arms up and tried to dig his fingers under the forearm and biceps on either side of his neck but it was no use. He was already weakening.
He was dragged back away from the door and into the darkness of the salon. He reached his left hand back to the point where his attacker’s right hand gripped his left forearm – the weak point of the triangle. But he had no leverage and was losing power quickly. He tried to yell. Maybe Buddy would hear. But his voice was gone and nothing came out.
He remembered another defensive measure. He raised his right foot up and drove it down, heel first, toward his attacker’s foot, with the last strength he could muster. But he missed. His heel hit the floor ineffectively and his attacker took another step backward, violently pulling McCaleb off balance and unable to attempt the kick release again.
McCaleb was quickly losing consciousness. His vision of the marina lights through the salon door was being crowded by a closing blackness with a reddish outline. His last thoughts were that he was in the grip of a classic choke hold, the kind taught at police departments across the country until too many deaths resulted from its use.
Soon even that thought drifted away and he saw no lights. The darkness moved in and took him.
Chapter 42
McCaleb came awake to tremendous muscular pain in his shoulders and upper legs. When he opened his eyes
