Michael Connelly - Blood Work

As he quietly opened the door, he thought about his gun. It was in the bottom drawer of the chart table. The intruder was closer to it than McCaleb was and possibly had already found it.

He mentally canvassed the lower deck, looking for a weapon and coming up with nothing. He had the door all the way open now.

“What is it?” Graciela whispered from behind him.

He quickly and quietly turned around and came to the bed. He put his hand over her mouth and whispered, “Somebody’s on the boat.”

He felt her body go rigid beneath his.

“They don’t know about you. I want you to quietly move over the side and lie down on the floor until I come get you.”

She didn’t move.

“Do it, Graciela.”

She started to move but then he held her.

“Do you have mace or any kind of weapon in your purse?”

She shook her head no. He nodded and then pushed her to the side of the bed nearest the wall. He went back to the door.

As McCaleb came quietly up the steps, he could see the slider was half open. There was more light in the salon than below and his vision improved. Suddenly the figure of a man was silhouetted against the exterior light beyond the door. The light seemed to reflect off the figure. McCaleb could not tell if the intruder was staring at him or was turned around, looking out at the marina.

McCaleb knew that the corkscrew he had used to open Graciela’s wine earlier was on the galley counter, just to the right at the top of the steps. He could easily get to it. He just had to decide if he would be using it against someone with something better.

He decided there was no choice. As he came to the top stair, he stretched out to reach the corkscrew. The stair creaked and McCaleb saw the silhouette tense. The element of surprise was gone.

“Freeze, asshole!” he yelled as he grabbed the corkscrew and moved toward the dark figure.

The intruder quickly moved to the door, going sideways out through it and using one hand to fling it down its track behind him. Grappling to get the door open, McCaleb lost a few seconds and the intruder was up on the dock and running before he was even out of the boat.

Instinctively, he knew he would not be able to catch the intruder but he leaped up onto the dock and gave full-speed chase anyway, the cool night air hardening his skin, the rough wood of the dock planks biting into his bare feet.

As he ran up the slanted gangway he heard a car engine turn over. He jerked open the gate and ran out into the lot just as a car sped through the exit, its tires squealing as they lost grip on the cold asphalt. McCaleb watched it go. It had been too far away for him to get the plate.

“Shit!”

He closed his eyes and brought his hand up and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was a self-hypnosis technique. He tried to commit as many details of what he had just seen to active memory. Red car, small, foreign, worn-out suspension… It occurred to him that the car was familiar. But he couldn’t place it yet.

McCaleb bent over and put his hands on his knees as a feeling of nausea hit him and his heart seemed to bounce up into a higher gear. He concentrated on long, deep breaths and eventually he felt the beat slow down.

He felt light hit his closed eyelids. He opened his eyes and looked into the beam of an approaching flashlight. It was the marina’s security guard, pulling up in his golf cart.

“Mr. McCaleb?” the voice behind the light asked. “That you?”

It was only then that McCaleb finally realized he was naked.

Nothing was missing, nothing was disturbed. At least as far as McCaleb could tell. Nothing appeared out of order. The contents of his leather bag, which he had left on the galley table, seemed to be as he remembered them. He found the thick sheaf of documents he had shoved into the galley cabinet earlier in the day to be where he had left it. McCaleb inspected the sliding door and found scratches from a screwdriver. He knew how easy it was to pop a sliding door with a screwdriver. He also knew that the pop was always louder outside the structure than inside. He had been lucky. Somehow the pop or something else had woken him.

With the security guard, Shel Newbie, watching, McCaleb finished checking every drawer and cabinet in the salon and found nothing amiss.

“What about below?” Newbie asked.

“Not enough time,” McCaleb said. “I heard him as soon as he opened the door. I guess I scared him off before he did whatever he was coming to do.”

McCaleb was silent as he thought about the possibility that the intruder had not come to steal anything. He thought about Bolotov again but quickly dismissed it. The figure he had seen move sideways through the sliding door was too small to have been the Russian.

“Can I come up? I could make some coffee.”

McCaleb turned to the stairs. Graciela was there. When he had returned to the stateroom to get dressed, he had told her it would be better if she stayed below. But here she was, wearing her pink nightshirt over a pair of baggy gray sweatpants she had taken from his closet. Her hair was a bit disheveled and she couldn’t have looked sexier. He stared at her silently for a moment before finally answering.

“Well, we’re about to wrap it up, I think.”

“Should I call Pacific Division?” Newbie asked.

McCaleb shook his head.

“It was probably just some dock punk looking to rip off my Loran or the compass,” he said, though he didn’t believe it. “I don’t want to drag the police in. We’ll be up all night.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Thanks for helping, Shel. I appreciate it.”

“Glad to. I guess I’ll go back out then. I’m going to have to write up an incident report. In the morning they might want to make an LAPD report anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. I just don’t feel like waiting up for them to get over here. That run took it out of me. Tomorrow will be fine.”

“Okay, then.”

Newbie saluted and left. McCaleb waited a few moments and then looked at Graciela, who was still in the stairwell.

“You okay?”

“Yes. Scared is all.”

“Why don’t you go back down. I’ll be right down.”

She went back to the stateroom. McCaleb closed the slider and worked the lock to see if it was still operable. It was. He reached up to the overhead rod racks and took down the wooden gaff handle. He placed it in the door’s track and used it as a wedge to hold the door closed. It would do for the night. But he knew he would have to rethink the boat’s security.

When he was finished with the door and reasonably assured of security, McCaleb looked down at his bare feet on the salon’s Berber carpet. For the first time he realized that the rug was wet. He then remembered how the marina lights had shone off the body of the intruder as he had stood near the door.

ON THE DRIVE up to the Times plant in the Valley, McCaleb sat in the passenger seat of Graciela’s Volkswagen and was mostly silent. His mind moved over the activities of the night like an anchor dragging across a sandy bottom, seeking but finding no purchase, nothing to grip.

After he had noticed the wet spot on the carpet, he had retraced the chase to the parking lot and found the dock also was wet. It was a cool, crisp night and too early for the morning moisture to have formed. The intruder had clearly been wet when he had broken into the boat. The shine of light on his body indicated he had probably been wearing a wetsuit. The question McCaleb could not answer now was why?

Before they had left, McCaleb had gone over to Buddy Lockridge’s boat to see if his neighbor was there. He found Buddy, looking disheveled as usual, sitting in the cockpit reading a book called Hocus. McCaleb asked him if he had spent the night on the boat and he said he had. When asked why he hadn’t answered the phone, Buddy insisted that it was because it hadn’t rung. McCaleb let it go, thinking either Lockridge had simply been passed out and hadn’t heard his call or McCaleb had pushed the wrong speed-dial button.