Michael Connelly - Blood Work

Finally, he decided to go down and check the vitals. The old standby for killing time. It would give him something to do, maybe make him tired and finally able to sleep.

He had plugged a night-light into the circuit over the sink in case Raymond had to get up and find the toilet. He decided not to turn on the overhead fixture and stood there in the dim light with the thermometer under his tongue. He looked at his shadowy reflection and saw that the circles beneath his eyes were becoming more pronounced.

He had to lean over the sink and hold the thermometer close to the night-light in order to read it. It looked like he had a slight fever. He took the clipboard off the hook and wrote the date and time and 99 instead of a slash. As he replaced the clipboard, he heard the door of the master stateroom open across the passageway.

He had never closed the door to the head. He looked across the dark hallway and saw Graciela’s face peering around the edge of her door. The rest of her body she hid behind the door. They spoke in whispers.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. You?”

“I’m fine. What are you doing?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I was just checking my temperature.”

“Do you have a fever?”

“No… I’m fine.”

He nodded as he said it. He became aware he was wearing only his boxer shorts. He folded his arms and raised one hand to rub his chin but he was really just trying to hide the ugly scar on his chest.

They looked at each other in silence for a moment. McCaleb realized he had been holding his hand to his chin too long. He dropped his arms to his sides and watched her as her eyes fell to his chest.

“Graciela…”

He didn’t finish. She had slowly opened the door and he could see she wore a pink silk sleep shirt cut high on her hips. She was beautiful in it. For a moment they just stood there and looked at each other. Graciela still held the door, as if to steady herself against the boat’s slight movements. After another moment she took a step into the hallway and he took a step to meet her. He reached forward and traced his hand gently up her side and then around to her back. With his other hand he caressed her throat and moved to the back of her neck. He pulled her into him.

“Can you do this?” she whispered, her face pressed into his neck.

“Nothing’s going to stop me,” he whispered back.

They moved into the stateroom and shut the door. He left his shorts on the floor and crawled onto the bed with her as she unbuttoned the nightshirt. The sheets and blanket already had her smell, the vanilla he had noticed once before. He moved on top of her and she pulled him down into a long kiss. He worked his face down to her chest and kissed her breasts. His nose found the spot just below her neck where she had touched the perfume to her skin. The deep musky vanilla filled him and he moved his lips back up to hers.

Graciela moved her hand in between their bodies and held her warm palm against his chest. He felt her body tense and he opened his eyes. In a whisper she said, “Wait. Terry, wait.”

He froze and lifted himself up with one arm. “What is it?” he whispered.

“I don’t think… It doesn’t feel right to me. I’m sorry.”

“What’s not right?”

“I’m not sure.”

She turned her body underneath him and he had no choice but to get off her.

“Graciela?”

“It’s not you, Terry. It’s me. I’m… I just don’t want to rush. I want to think about things.”

She was on her side, looking away from him.

“Is it because of your sister? Because I have her-”

“No, it’s not that… Well, maybe a little. I just think we should think about it more.”

She reached back and caressed his cheek.

“I’m sorry. I know it was wrong to invite you in and then do this.”

“It’s okay. I don’t want you to do something you might be unhappy about later. I’ll go back up.”

He made a move to slide toward the foot of the bed but she grabbed his arm.

“No, don’t leave. Not yet. Lie here with me. I don’t want you to leave yet.”

He moved back up the bed and put his head on the pillow next to hers. It was an odd feeling. Though obviously rejected, he felt no anxiety about it. He felt that the time would come for them and he could wait. McCaleb began wondering how long he could stay with her before having to return to his sleeping bag.

“Tell me about the girl,” she said.

“What?” he replied, confused.

“The girl in the yearbook picture on your desk.”

“It’s not a nice story, Graciela. Why do you want to know that story?”

“Because I want to know you.”

That was all she said. But McCaleb understood. He knew that if they were to become lovers, they had to share their secrets. It was part of the ritual. He remembered years before how on the night he first made love to the woman who would become his wife, she had told him that she had been sexually abused as a child. Her sharing of such a carefully held and guarded secret had touched him more deeply than the actual physical act of their making love. He always remembered that moment, cherished it, even after the marriage was over.

“All of this was put together from witnesses and physical evidence… and the video,” he began.

“What video?”

“I’ll get to that. It was a Florida case. This was before I was sent out here. A whole family… abducted. Mother, father, two daughters. The Showitz family. Aubrey-Lynn, the girl in the photo, she was the youngest.”

“How old?”

“She had just turned fifteen on the vacation. They were from the Midwest, a little town in Ohio. And it was their first family vacation. They didn’t have a lot of money. The father owned a little auto garage-there was still grease under his nails when they found him.”

McCaleb blew his air out in a short laugh-the kind a person makes when something isn’t funny but he wished it were.

“So they were on a cut-rate vacation and they did Disney World and all of that and they eventually got down to Fort Lauderdale, where they stayed in one room in this little shitty motel by the I-95 freeway. They had made the reservation from Ohio and thought because the place was called the Sea Breeze, it was near the ocean.”

His voice caught because he had never spoken the story out loud; every detail about it was pitiful and made him hurt inside.

“Anyway, when they got there, they decided to stay. They were only going to be in town a couple days and they’d lose their deposit if they left for a beach hotel. So they stayed. And on their first night there one of the girls spots this pickup in the lot that was attached to a trailer with an airboat on it. You know what an airboat is?”

“Like with an airplane propeller and it goes in the swamp out there?”

“Right, the Everglades.”

“I saw them on CNN when that plane crashed into the swamp and disappeared.”

“Yeah, same thing. But this girl and her family had never seen one other than on TV or in a magazine and so they were looking it over and a man-the owner-just happens to walk up to them. He’s a friendly guy and he tells the family that he’ll take ’em on out for a real Florida airboat ride if they want.”

Graciela turned her face into the crook of his neck and pressed a hand against his chest. She knew where the story was going.

“So they said okay. I mean, they were from some town in Ohio with only one high school. They didn’t know anything about the real world. So they went ahead and accepted this man’s-this stranger’s-invitation.”

“And he killed them?”

“All of them,” McCaleb said, nodding in the dark. “They went out with him and they never came back. The father was found first. A couple nights later his body was found by a frogger working the grass. It wasn’t too far from a ramp where they launch those boats. He’d been shot once in the back of the head and dumped off the boat.”