Middle Of Nowhere

   Boldt felt blindly around the blacktop for his gun, the fervent growling like a wind in his ears. A dull thump of that baseball bat won a whimpering whine and a momentary relapse as the dog considered the time zone. Footsteps fleeing. Car doors thumping shut. At least one engine starting. Ferocious barking as the dog regained his bearings and ran down the drive in pursuit. Tires screeching. Boldt tried to roll over, hop ing to catch a car profile or even the license plate, but his body belonged to Pain, and Pain alone. He gasped for air. A huge, wet tongue found his face. "Good boy," Boldt said, more than a little afraid of the animal. "Good boy."

   His right ear rang like an alarm clock sounding in a distant room—he'd been struck in the head with the bat and was bleeding buckets, the way only head cuts can bleed.

   "Good God," a man's voice said.

   His neighbor, the owner of the dog.

   "Police," Boldt groaned, finally able to straighten up. He fished for his ID wallet, but his attackers had apparently taken this along with his wallet and money. "I live here," he managed to cough out. "Neighbors."

   "Don't move! I'll call!" The man took off at a run. The dog followed, probably expecting a Tasty Chew.

   "No!" Boldt stopped him. He lay there in the dark, the smell of the rotting fence and his own blood overwhelming him. He didn't want a 911 call. He didn't want the press getting hold of a cop getting mugged. An inquiry. Reports. Paperwork. Invasion of privacy. He didn't want to worry Liz, didn't want her arguing for him to take sick leave—thinking that maybe that had been the intention of his muggers, and not wanting to face that right at that moment. "I could use a little help here," he said. He needed to patch himself up and think this through.

   Daphne, he thought, as his neighbor attempted to help him to his feet, and he felt the effort like a boneraw punishment.

C H A P T E R

13

Daphne wore tight blue jeans and a caramel sweater that complemented her dark eyes. With the sleeves of the sweater pulled up, she looked like a woman who meant business. The twisted silver bracelet signaled she wasn't at work. Boldt figured that she had plenty of other such leftover trinkets from her courtship with Owen Adler—the man would have bought her the Space Needle if it might have guaranteed her love for him.

   She switched on Boldt's bedside lamp and leaned in close and studied him. It seemed strange to see a woman other than Liz in this bedroom. It even inspired guilt in him, despite the pain.

   "Take your shirt off," Daphne ordered him.

   "I don't think so. The last time I had my shirt off with you—"

   "Take it off and sit up on the bed or I'm getting in my car and going home."

   "Maybe that's best."

   She asked, "Are you sure there isn't something broken?" His ribs and chest carried crimson blotches and eerie blue bruises. She gently touched one or two and Boldt winced with the contact.

   "Not exactly positive," he said. The ear had been patched up with a Band-Aid used as a butterfly.

   "Turn around," she instructed.

   "I just love it when you boss me around," he teased.

   "Now!"

   He obeyed. "I'm amazed you can breathe. And this one, this one's right on the kidney. Have you peed yet?"

   "What?!"

   "Are you peeing blood, Lou?"

   "No."

   "You need to see a doctor."

   "At which point I'll have to report a mugging. At which point I'll have twenty reporters camped on my front lawn and ringing my phone off the hook. No, thanks."

   "You really need to see a doctor," she repeated.

   "No."

   "What about Dixie?"

   "His patients are all dead," Boldt replied. Dr. Ronald Dixon, chief medical examiner for King County, was one of Boldt's closest friends.

   "Lie back," she advised. "I'm going to pour you a hot bath, feed you some aspirin, make some tea and call Dixie. When you're out of the bath, I'm driving you down to the ME's and he's going to look you over. They have X-ray there, access to the hospital. Fair enough?"

   "It's not fair at all."

   "Or I walk out now and leave you to patch yourself up."

   "Sounds fair to me." He lay back, every bone, every muscle complaining. He wasn't sure he could sit up again without some help. "That's extortion, you know?"

   "Do you want bubbles?" she asked, heading into the bathroom.

   "Ha, ha!" he replied.

   "Is that a yes or no?"

   "Yes, please," he confessed. "The eucalyptus."

   "That's just so the bubbles hide you when I deliver the tea. Mr. Modest."

   "Damn right. That is, unless you're going to get in the bath with me and scrub my wounds?"

   Mocking him, she said, "In your dreams!" She started the water running. He could only hear it out his left ear.

   Boldt was thinking: Sometimes you are, yes.

* * *

The Medical Examiner's office, in the basement of the Harborview Medical Center, was eerily quiet when empty of Doc Dixon's staff.

   Dixie pronounced Boldt "reasonably intact and still alive." He added editorially, "If you had come in as a cadaver, I'd have guessed you had jumped from a moving train, or fallen from a very high ladder."