Middle Of Nowhere

   "I'm always right," she said. "You just don't always choose to listen."

* * *

He awoke to the smell of tea and bagels, Daphne at work in the houseboat's small galley. She wore Lycra that fit her like plastic wrap. It was better than a sunrise, which he'd missed by an hour or more.

   He didn't want to dress himself in the soiled and bloodied clothing from his beating. Anticipating this, she had left him an Owen Adler navy blue polo shirt, complete with the alligator, a pair of underwear and a pair of athletic socks. He didn't ask any questions. Their engagement had failed twice—enough said.

   He showered, barely moving beneath the hot, hot water. There seemed to be pieces of him missing, others that shouted at full volume. He only heard things from half his head.

   When he reached the galley, feeling refreshed but bludgeoned, he found a buttered bagel next to a jar of raspberry jam and a note that showed a stick figure running.

   He ate outside, alone with a view of the morning activity on the lake—a seaplane landing in a gray-green knife stroke on the water's still surface; ducks flying in unison and veering north over Gasworks Park with its eerie skyline of pipes, reminding him of a refinery. He felt incredibly grateful to be alive. Odd that he had that dog to thank, that dog he had hated so much.

   He took a bite of the bagel. It hurt his ear to chew. He searched the fridge for applesauce or yogurt— something that didn't require any chewing. He found something with "live culture." The thought disturbed him.

   The city ran wild with crime while his coworkers willingly stayed home awaiting policy change. He couldn't see the sense in that, just as he couldn't understand why a trio of muggers would start working on him with a baseball bat. Unless they had found his badge and suddenly panicked or filled with hate over his being a cop. Hate corrupted even the best-intentioned mugger. Hate corrupted everything in its path. And he felt filled with it all of a sudden, and not a verifiable target in sight.

C H A P T E R

14

"W here's Maria Sanchez gone?" Boldt asked the attending nurse at the nurses' station. He'd arrived to find her room unguarded and empty. He felt as if the floor had fallen out from under him.

   The nurse checked the computer, and it troubled him that she wouldn't know this off the top of her head. "She was transferred out of ICU to the third floor. Room three seventeen."

   "Then she's better?" Boldt said hopefully, recalling that on his last visit she had definitely slipped backward.

   "The move would indicate she's stable," the nurse corrected.

   "Any movement . . . other than the eyes?"

   "You'll have to discuss that with her physician," she advised.

   Boldt rode the elevator, as he had coming in. For a man who normally took the stairs, this felt wrong, even privately humiliating. He shuffled down the hospital corridor, painfully aware that he probably looked too much like an old man. His father had raised him to believe there was no way around pain, only through it. Right now he was even aspirin free. He pushed his limbs to move, his ribs to tolerate breathing, his head to survive the throbbing.

   He'd told Liz that he'd been mugged, his money and badge wallet stolen, that the ugly dog next door had probably saved his life. He'd been roughed up before in service to the city; thankfully Liz didn't berate him for electing to keep working. She wanted to see him. He promised to make that happen.

   She didn't know that the muggers had used the term "K-9" and that one of the three had intended to do a Mark McGwire on his head. No one knew—not even Daphne, exactly—that a part of him suspected the attack was a Krishevski telegram, like those strippers that knock on your front door and flash you on your fiftieth birthday. A Krishevski invitation to get a bad case of the flu. He needed a second opinion.

* * *

He checked in with the new security man outside the door and confirmed Sanchez's guest list, discovering that LaMoia visited at least once a day, usually well past the posted visiting hours, typically for long stints. He could imagine the man in the dark of the room, alone in a chair as Sanchez slept. Others would find this image of LaMoia inconceivable, but Boldt knew the man as few others did. The blinds were pulled, casting the overly sterile room in a haze. The room's television was tuned to a public access channel that ran ads while nasal-sounding classical music played from a small speaker strapped to her bed. He recalled the head phones in her bedroom, and thought he should bring her something better: Hamilton, Peterson, Monk or Gatemouth Brown.

   "Stable," he recalled the nurse explaining. Of course she was stable, he thought—they had her head bolted inside a contraption that looked like it was part of a medieval torture chamber. She couldn't move. Just to look at her brought a queasiness to his stomach.