Michael Connelly - Blood Work

“No, it was two other guys and they were cops, not agents. At least they said so, but they didn’t give me their names.”

“Was one a big wide guy, Latino, with maybe a toothpick in his mouth?”

“You got it. That’s him.”

Arrango. McCaleb found a little bit of satisfaction in putting one past the pompous jerk.

“So where to?” Buddy asked.

McCaleb had thought about this while he waited. And he knew he had to get to work on the list of transplant recipients. He had to get on it quickly. But before he did that, he wanted to make sure he had all his ducks in a row. He had come to look at investigations as being similar to the extension ladders on fire trucks. You kept extending the reach further, and the further out you went, the more wobbly it was out on the end. You could not neglect the base, the start of the investigation. Every loose detail that could be nailed down had to be put in its exact place. And so, he felt now, he had to finish the timeline. He had to answer the questions that he himself had raised before going on to the end of the ladder. It was his philosophy as well as instinct that told him to do this. He was playing out a hunch that within the contradictions he would find a truth.

“ Hollywood,” he told Lockridge.

“That video place we went before?”

“You got it. We go to Hollywood first, then up to the Valley.”

Lockridge headed a few short blocks up to Melrose Boulevard before turning east toward Hollywood.

“All right, let’s hear it,” McCaleb said. “What were you talking about on the phone, about them not finding what they were looking for?”

“Check out the laundry basket, man.”

“Why?”

“Just take a look.”

He turned his head toward McCaleb and jerked it in the direction of the backseat. McCaleb unsnapped his seat belt and turned around to reach over the seat. As he did so, he checked the cars behind them. There was lots of traffic but no cars that raised any suspicion.

He dropped his eyes to the basket. It was full of underwear and socks. That had been a nice touch by Buddy. It made it less likely Nevins or anybody else would look through the basket when they stopped him.

“This stuff is clean, right?”

“ ’Course. It’s on the bottom.”

McCaleb brought his knees up onto the seat and leaned all the way over. He dumped the contents of the laundry basket on the backseat. He heard the dull thud of something heavier than clothes hitting the seat. He moved a pair of loud boxer shorts out of the way and saw a plastic Ziploc bag that contained a pistol.

“Silently, McCaleb slid back into his seat, holding the bag containing the gun. He smoothed the plastic, which had been yellowed from within by a film of gun oil, so that he could get a better look at the weapon. He felt a sweat break across the back of his neck. The gun in the bag was an HK P7. And he didn’t need any ballistics report to know it was the HK P7, the weapon that had killed Kenyon, then Cordell, then Torres. He bent down to look closely at the weapon and saw that the serial number had been burned away with acid. The gun was untraceable.

A tremor rolled through McCaleb’s hands as he held the murder weapon. His body slumped against the door and his feelings jumped between the anguish of knowing the history of the object he now held in his hands and despair at the thought of his predicament. Someone was setting McCaleb up and the frame would probably have been all but unbreakable if Buddy Lockridge had not found the gun when he went into the dark waters beneath The Following Sea.

“Jesus,” McCaleb said in a whisper.

“Looks pretty mean, don’t it?”

“Where exactly was it?”

“It was in a diving bag hanging about six feet below your stern. It was tied off on one of the underside eyelets. If you knew it was there, you could reach under with a gaff and hook the line and bring it up. But you had to know it was there. Otherwise, you wouldn’t see it from up above.”

“Did the people doing the search go into the water today?”

“Yeah, one diver. He went down, but by then I’d already checked around like you asked. I beat him to it.”

McCaleb nodded and put the gun down on the floor between his feet. Staring down at it, he folded his arms across his chest as if protecting himself against a chill. It had been that close. And though he was sitting next to the man who had saved him for the time being, an overwhelming sense of isolation came over him. He felt completely alone. And he felt the flickering onset of something he had only read about before-the fight-or-flight syndrome. He felt an almost violent urge to forget about everything and run. Just cut and run and get as far away from all of this as he could.

“I’m in big trouble, Buddy,” he said.

“I kind of figured that,” his driver replied.

McCALEB HAD COMPOSED himself and was resolved by the time they reached Video GraFX Consultants. On the way he had examined the possibility of flight and then quickly discarded it. Fight was the only choice. He knew that he was tethered in place by his heart-to flee was to die, for he needed the carefully set post-op drug therapy to prevent his body from rejecting his new heart. To flee would also mean to leave Graciela and Raymond. And it felt already as if doing that would wither his heart just as quickly.

Lockridge dropped him off out front and waited in a red zone. The door was locked but Tony Banks had told him to ring the delivery buzzer if he arrived after closing. McCaleb pushed the button twice before Banks answered the door himself. He had a manila envelope with him and he handed it through the open door to McCaleb.

“This everything?”

“The tape and the hard copies. Everything is pretty clear.”

McCaleb took the package.

“What do I owe you, Tony?”

“Not a thing. Glad to help.”

McCaleb nodded and was about to head back to the car but stopped and looked back at Banks.

“I’ve got to tell you something. I’m not with the bureau anymore, Tony. I apologize if I misled you, but-”

“I know you’re not with the bureau anymore.”

“You do?”

“I called your old office yesterday when you didn’t return my call from Saturday. The number was on that letter you sent, the letter on the wall. I called and they said you hadn’t worked there in something like two years.”

McCaleb studied Banks, really taking the young man’s measure for the first time, and then held up the package.

“Then why are you giving me this?”

“Because you are after him, the man on that tape.”

McCaleb nodded.

“Then good luck. I hope you get him.”

Banks closed and locked the door then. McCaleb said thanks but by then the door was already closed.

The Sherman Market was empty save for a couple of young girls mulling choices at the candy rack and a young man behind the counter. McCaleb had been hoping to see the same older woman who had been there on his first visit, the widow of Chan Ho Kang. He spoke slowly and clearly to the young man, hoping he understood English better than the woman had.

“I am looking for the woman who works here during the daytime.”

The man-he was really no more than a teenager-looked sullenly at McCaleb.

“You don’t have to talk like I’m some kind of retard,” he said. “I speak English. I was born here.”

“Oh,” McCaleb said, taken aback by his clumsiness. “Sorry about that. It’s just that the woman that was here before, she had a hard time understanding me.”

“My mother. She lived her first thirty years in Korea speaking Korean. You try it sometime. Why don’t you move over there and try to be understood in twenty years.”