“Nevins, I’ll come in. But you tell me first, what have you got there? What have you found?”
“No, Terry, we don’t play it like that. You come in and then we talk about all of this.”
“I’m hanging up, Nevins. Last chance.”
“Don’t go in any post offices, McCaleb. Your picture’s going to be on the wall. As soon as we get the package together.”
McCaleb hung up, held his hand on the phone and leaned his forehead against it. He wasn’t sure what was going on or what to do. What had they found? What had the intruder hidden in the boat?
“You okay?”
He jerked around and it was the girl with the pierced nose and lip.
“Fine. You?”
“I am now. I just had to talk to somebody.”
“I know the feeling.”
She left the phone alcove then and McCaleb picked up the receiver again and dropped another quarter. Buddy picked up on half a ring.
“All right, listen,” McCaleb said. “I want you to come get me. But you’re not going to be able to just walk out of there.”
“How come? It’s a free-”
“Because I just talked to them and they know someone tipped me that they were there. So this is what I want you to do. Take off your shoes and put your keys and wallet inside them. Then get your laundry basket and stick your shoes in it and cover them up with clothes. Then carry the basket out of there and make-”
“I don’t have any laundry in the basket, Terry. I did laundry this morning, before any of these people showed up.”
“Fine, Buddy. Take some clothes-clean clothes-and put them in the basket so it looks like you’ve got dirty clothes. Hide your shoes. Make it look like you are only going over to the laundry. Don’t close the hatch on your boat and make sure you are carrying four quarters in your hand. They’ll stop you but if you play it right, they’ll believe you and let you go. Then get in your car and come get me.”
“They might follow me.”
“No. They probably won’t even watch you once they let you go to the laundry. Maybe you should go to the laundry first, then to your car.”
“Okay. So where do I find you?”
McCaleb didn’t hesitate. He had grown to trust Lockridge. Besides, he knew he could take precautions on his end.
After hanging up, McCaleb called Tony Banks and told him that he would be coming by. Banks said he would be there.
McCaleb walked into Jerry’s Famous Deli and ordered a turkey sandwich with coleslaw and Russian dressing to go. He also ordered a sliced pickle and a can of Coke. After he paid for the sandwich, he took it out and crossed Beverly Boulevard back to Cedars. He had spent so many days and nights in the medical center he knew its layout by rote. He took the elevator to the third floor maternity ward, where he knew of a waiting room that looked out across the helipad to Beverly Boulevard and Jerry’s. It was not unusual to see an expectant father wolfing down a deli sandwich in the waiting room. McCaleb knew he could sit up there and eat and wait and watch for Buddy Lockridge.
The sandwich lasted less than five minutes but the wait for Buddy Lockridge went on for an hour with no sighting of Lockridge. McCaleb watched two helicopters come in with deliveries of transplant organs packed in red coolers.
He was about to call the Double-Down to see if the agents had held Lockridge up when he finally saw Buddy’s familiar Taurus pull up to the front of the deli. McCaleb walked to the window and looked long and far up and down Beverly Boulevard, then checked the sky for anything that looked like a law enforcement helicopter. He left the window and headed to the elevator.
A plastic laundry basket full of clothes was on the backseat of the Taurus. McCaleb got in, looked at it and then over at Lockridge, who was playing some unrecognizable tune on his harp.
“Thanks for coming, Buddy. Any problems?”
Lockridge dropped the harmonica into the door pocket.
“Nah. They stopped me like you said they would and asked their questions. But I played dumb; they let me go. I think it was ’cause I only had the four quarters on me that they let me go. That was a smart move, Terry.”
“We’ll see. Who was it who stopped you? The two suits?”
“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.