“She’s probably in with the baby,” McCaleb said.
“Well, tell her I said good-bye.”
“I will.”
There was an awkward silence the rest of the way to the door. Finally, as McCaleb opened it, Winston spoke.
“So what’s it like, Terry? Being a father.”
“It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times.”
His stock answer. He then thought a moment and added something he had thought about but never said, not even to Graciela.
“It’s like having a gun to your head all the time.”
Winston looked confused and maybe even a little concerned.
“How so?”
“Because I know if anything ever happens to her, anything, then my life is over.”
She nodded.
“I think I can understand that.”
She went through the door. She looked rather silly as she left. A seasoned homicide detective riding away in a golf cart.
2
Sunday dinner with Graciela and Raymond was a quiet affair. They ate white sea bass McCaleb had caught with the charter that morning on the back side of the island near the isthmus. His charters always wanted to keep the fish they caught but then often changed their minds when they got back to the harbor. It was something about the killing instinct in men, McCaleb believed. It wasn’t enough just to catch their quarry. They must kill it as well. It meant fish was often served at dinner at the house on La Mesa.
McCaleb had grilled the fish along with corn still in the husks on the porch barbecue. Graciela had made a salad and biscuits. They both had a glass of white wine in front of them. Raymond had milk. The meal was good but the silence wasn’t. McCaleb looked over at Raymond and realized the boy had picked up on the vibe passed between the adults and was going along with the tide. McCaleb remembered how he had done the same thing when he was a boy and his parents were throwing silence at each other. Raymond was the son of Graciela’s sister, Gloria. His father had never been part of the picture. When Glory died — was murdered — three years before, Raymond had come to live with Graciela. McCaleb met them both when he investigated the case.
“How was softball today?” McCaleb finally asked.
“It was okay, I guess.”
“Get any hits?”
“No.”
“You will. Don’t worry. Just keep trying. Keep swinging.”
McCaleb nodded. The boy had wanted to go out on the charter that morning but had not been allowed. The charter was for six men from overtown. With McCaleb and Buddy, that made eight on The Following Sea and that was the limit the boat could carry under the rules of safety. McCaleb never broke those rules.
“Well, listen, our next charter isn’t until Saturday. Right now it’s only four people. In winter season I doubt we’ll pick up anybody else. If it stays that way, you can come.”
The boy’s dark features seemed to lighten and he nodded vigorously as he worked his fork into the pure white meat of the fish on his plate. The fork looked big in his hand and McCaleb felt a momentary sadness for the boy. He was exceedingly small for a boy of ten. This bothered Raymond a great deal and he often asked McCaleb when he would grow. McCaleb always told him that it would happen soon, though privately he thought the boy would always be small. He knew that his mother had been of average size but Graciela had told McCaleb that Raymond’s father had been a very small man — in size and integrity. He had disappeared before Raymond was born.
Always picked last for the team, too small to be competitive with other boys his age, Raymond had gravitated toward pastimes other than team sports. Fishing was his passion and on off days McCaleb usually took him out into the bay to fish for halibut. When he had a charter, the boy always begged to go and when there was room he was allowed to come along as second mate. It was always McCaleb’s great pleasure to put a five-dollar bill into an envelope, seal it and hand it to the boy at the end of the day.
“We’ll need you in the tower,” McCaleb said. “This party wants to go down south for marlin. It’ll be a long day.”
“Cool!”
McCaleb smiled. Raymond loved being the lookout in the tower, watching for black marlin sleeping or rolling on the surface. And with a pair of binoculars, he was becoming adept at it. McCaleb looked over at Graciela to share the moment but she was looking down at her plate. There was no smile on her face.
In a few more minutes Raymond had finished eating and asked to be excused so he could play on the computer in his room. Graciela told him to keep the sound down so as not to wake the baby. The boy took his plate into the kitchen and then Graciela and McCaleb were alone.
He understood why she was silent. She knew she could not voice her objection to his getting involved in an investigation because her own request that he investigate her sister’s death was what had brought them together three years before. Her emotions were caught in this irony.
“Graciela,” McCaleb began. “I know you don’t want me to do this but —”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I know you and I can tell by the look that’s been on your face ever since Jaye was here that —”
“I just don’t want everything to change, that’s all.”
“I understand that. I don’t want anything to change either. And it won’t. All I’m going to do is look at the file and the tape and tell her what I think.”
“It won’t be just that. I know you. I’ve seen you do this. You’ll get hooked. It’s what you are good at.”
“I won’t get hooked. I’ll just do what she asked and that’s it. I’m not even going to do it here. I’m going to take what she gave me and go over to the boat. So it won’t even be in the house. Okay? I don’t want it in the house.”
He knew he was going to do it with or without her approval but he wanted it from her just the same. Their relationship was still so new that he seemed to always be seeking her approval. He had thought about this and wondered if it was something to do with his second chance. He had fought through a lot of guilt in the past three years but it still came up like a roadblock every few miles. Somehow he felt as though if he could just win this one woman’s approval for his existence, then it would all be okay. His cardiologist had called it survivor’s guilt. He had lived because someone else had died and must now attain some sense of redemption for it. But McCaleb thought the explanation was not as simple as that.
Graciela frowned but it did not detract from his view of her as beautiful. She had copper skin and dark brown hair that framed a face with eyes so darkly brown that there was almost no demarcation between iris and pupil. Her beauty was another reason he sought her approval of all things. There was something purifying about the light of her smile when it was cast on him.
“Terry, I listened to you two on the porch. After the baby got quiet. I heard what she said about what makes you tick and how a day doesn’t go by that you don’t think about it, what you used to do. Just tell me this, was she right?”
McCaleb was silent a moment. He looked down at his empty plate and then off across the harbor to the lights in the houses going up the opposite hillside to the inn at the top of Mount Ada. He slowly nodded and then looked back at her.
“Yes, she was right.”
“Then all of this, what we are doing here, the baby, it’s all a lie?”
“No. Of course not. This is everything to me and I would protect it with everything I’ve got. But the answer is yes, I think about what I was and what I did. When I was with the bureau I saved lives, Graciela, plain and simple. And I took evil out of this world. Made it a little less dark out there.”
He raised his hand and gestured toward the harbor.
“Now I have a wonderful life with you and Cielo and Raymond. And I . . . I catch fish for rich people with nothing better to do with their money.”
“So you want both.”
“I don’t know what I want. But I know that when she was here I was saying things to her
because I knew you were listening. I was saying what I knew you wanted to hear but I knew in my heart it wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted to do was open that book right then and go to work. She was right about me, Gracie. She hadn’t seen me in three years but she had me pegged.”
Graciela stood up and came around the table to him. She sat on his lap.
“I’m just scared for you, that’s all,” she said.
She pulled him close.
• • •
McCaleb took two tall glasses from the cabinet and put them on the counter. He filled the first with bottled water and the second with orange juice. He then began ingesting the twenty-seven pills he had lined up on the counter, intermittently taking swallows of water and orange juice to help them go down. Eating the pills — twice a day — was his ritual and he hated it. Not because of the taste — he was long past that after three years. But because the ritual was a reminder of how dependent he was on exterior concerns for his life. The pills were a leash. He could not live long without them. Much of his world now was built around ensuring that he would always have them. He planned around them. He hoarded them. Sometimes he even dreamed about taking pills.
When he was done, McCaleb went into the living room, where Graciela was reading a magazine. She didn’t look up at him when he stepped into the room, another sign that she was unhappy with what was suddenly happening in her home. He stood there waiting for a moment and when things didn’t change he went down the hallway into the baby’s room.
Cielo was still asleep in her crib. The overhead light was on a dimmer switch and he raised the illumination just enough so that he could see her clearly. McCaleb went to the crib and leaned down so he could listen to her breathe and see her and smell her baby scent. Cielo had her mother’s coloring — dark skin and hair — except for her eyes, which were ocean blue. Her tiny hands were balled in fists as if she were showing her readiness to fight for life. McCaleb fell most in love with her when he watched her sleep. He thought about all the preparation they had gone through, the books and classes and advice from Graciela’s friends at the hospital who were pediatric nurses. All of it so that they would be ready to care for a fragile life so dependent on them. Nothing had been said or read to prepare him for the opposite: the knowledge that came the first moment he held her, that his own life was now dependent on her.
He reached down to her, the spread of his hand covering her back. She didn’t stir. He could feel her tiny heart beating. It seemed quick and desperate, like a whispered prayer. Sometimes he pulled the rocking chair over next to the crib and watched over her until late into the night. This night was different. He had to go. He had work to do. Blood work. He wasn’t sure if he was there to simply say good-bye for the night or to somehow gain inspiration or approval from her as well. In his mind it didn’t quite make sense. He just knew that he had to watch her and touch her before he went to his work.
• • •
McCaleb walked out on the pier and then down the steps to the skiff dock. He found his Zodiac among the other small boats and climbed aboard, careful to put the videotape and the murder book in the shelter of the inflatable’s bow so they wouldn’t get wet. He pulled the engine cord twice before it started and then headed off down the middle lane of the harbor. There were no docks in Avalon Harbor. The boats were tied to mooring buoys set in lines that followed the concave shape of the natural harbor. Because it was winter there were few boats in the harbor, but McCaleb didn’t cut between the buoys. He followed the fairways, as if driving a car on the streets of a neighborhood. You didn’t cut across lawns, you stayed on the roadway.
It was cold on the water and McCaleb zipped up his windbreaker. As he approached The Following Sea he could see the glow of the television behind the curtains of the salon. This meant Buddy Lockridge had not finished up in time to catch the last ferry and was staying over.
McCaleb and Lockridge worked the charter business together. While the boat’s ownership was in Graciela’s name, the marine charter license and all other documentation relating to the business were in Lockridge’s name. The two had met more than three years earlier when McCaleb had docked The Following Sea at Cabrillo Marina in the Los Angeles Harbor and was living aboard it while restoring it. Buddy was a neighbor, living on a sailboat nearby. They had struck up a friendship that ultimately became a partnership.
During the busy spring and summer season Lockridge stayed most nights on The Following Sea. But during the slow times he usually caught a ferry back overtown to his own boat at Cabrillo. He seemed to have greater success finding female companions in the overtown bars than in the handful of places on the island. McCaleb assumed he would be heading back in the morning since they did not have a charter for another five days.
McCaleb bumped the Zodiac into the fantail of The Following Sea. He cut the engine and got out with the tape and the binder. He tied the Zodiac off on a stern cleat and headed for the salon door. Buddy was there waiting, having heard the Zodiac or felt its bump on the fantail. He slid the door open, holding a paperback novel down at his side. McCaleb glanced at the television but couldn’t tell what it was he had on.
“What’s up, Terror?” Lockridge asked.
“Nothing. I just need to do a little work. I’m going to be using the forward bunk, okay?”
He stepped into the salon. It was warm. Lockridge had the space heater fired up.
“Sure, fine. Anything I can do to help?”
“Nah, this isn’t about the business.”
“It about that lady who came by? The sheriff’s lady?”
McCaleb had forgotten that Winston had come to the boat first and gotten directions from Buddy.
“Yeah.”
“You working a case for her?”
“No,” McCaleb said quickly, hoping to limit Lockridge’s interest and involvement. “I just need to look at some stuff and give her a call back.”
“Very cool, dude.”
“Not really. It’s just a favor. What are you watching?”
“Oh, nothing. Just a show about this task force that goes after computer hackers. Why, you seen it?”
“No, but I was wondering if I could borrow the TV for a little while.”
McCaleb held up the videotape. Lockridge’s eyes lit up.
“Be my guest. Pop that baby in there.”
“Um, not up here, Buddy. This is — Detective Winston asked me to do this in confidence. I’ll bring the TV back up as soon as I’m done.”
Lockridge’s face registered his disappointment but McCaleb wasn’t worried about it. He went over to the counter that separated the galley from the salon and put down the binder and tape. He unplugged the television and removed it from the locking frame that held it in place so it wouldn’t fall when the boat encountered high seas. The television had a built-in videocassette player and was heavy. McCaleb lugged it down the narrow stairway and took it to the forward stateroom, which had been partially converted into an office. Two sides of the room had been lined with twin bunk beds. The bottom berth on the left had been changed into a desk and the two top bunks were used by McCaleb to store his old bureau case files — Graciela didn’t want them in the house where Raymond might stumble upon them. The only problem was that McCaleb was sure that on occasion Buddy had gone through the boxes and looked at the files. And it bothered him. It was an invasion of some kind. McCaleb had thought about keeping the forward stateroom locked but knew that could be a deadly mistake. The only ceiling hatch on the lower deck was in the forward room and access to it ought not be blocked in case there was ever a need for an emergency evacuation through the bow.
He put the television down on the desk and plugged it in. He turned to go back up to the salon to retrieve the binder and tape when he saw Buddy coming down the stairs, holding the tape and leafing through the binder.
“Hey, Buddy —”
“Looks like a weird one, man.”
McCaleb reached out and closed the binder, then took it and the tape fr
om his fishing partner’s hands.
“Just taking a peek.”
“I told you, it’s confidential.”
“Yeah, but we work good together. Just like before.”
It was true that by happenstance Lockridge had been a great help when McCaleb had investigated the death of Graciela’s sister. But that had been an active street investigation. This was just going to be a review. He didn’t need anybody looking over his shoulder.
“This is different, Buddy. This is a one-night stand. I’m just going to take a look at this stuff and then that will be it. Now let me get to work so I’m not here all night.”
Lockridge didn’t say anything and McCaleb didn’t wait. He closed the door to the forward bunk and then turned to the desk. As he looked down at the murder book in his hands he felt a sharp thrill as well as the familiar rising of dread and guilt.