“Did you confront her?”
Walker shook his head and gulped more whiskey. “Like I said, she was the one who wanted to end the affair. I figured she would eventually. Then we could get back to normal, like things used to be when we first got married. I know she’d never leave me. She loves this house too much.”
I wondered whether Savannah and I would have still been together, had I embraced Walker’s arguably admirable laissez-faire attitude after discovering she and Arlo Echevarria had been carrying on behind my back. Maybe. Maybe not. Every relationship is different.
“I can’t swim!” Walker’s screaming blasted me from my reverie. He was on his feet, running toward the far end of the pool. “She’s drowning! My granddaughter!”
Ryder was hovering motionless at the bottom of the deep end, arms floating ethereally in front of her body, the two inflatable water wings lapping on the surface above.
I dove in, my eyes and cuts stinging from the chlorine, crooked my good arm around her waist and kicked our way to the edge of the pool. Walker pulled her out and sat her on the brick pool decking as I quickly hauled myself out of the water.
She lolled, lifeless as a rag doll. Her lips were periwinkle. Walker whacked her on the back a couple of times with the flat of his hand. There was no response.
“She’s not breathing! I don’t know what to do!”
I did. Every Alpha operator was certified in combat life-saving. We learned how to stanch arterial bleeds using live pigs that our instructors would anesthetize, then blast with shotguns to approximate battlefield injuries. Performing basic CPR on a child was a cakewalk by comparison.
I laid her on her back, positioned the heel of my right hand on her breastbone, and began pushing down on her chest. After thirty rapid compressions, I lowered my right ear close to her nose, my cheek over her mouth, hoping for the whisper of breath. None came.
“Ryder! Ryder, it’s Grampa! Wake up, baby girl! Please, wake up! Please!”
I tilted the little girl’s head back, pinched her nostrils, and forced the air from my lungs into hers. Her thin rib cage rose and fell. One rescue breath, then another. That’s all it took.
She coughed up water. I rolled her on her side. More water came out of her mouth and nose. Then she began wailing.
Walker scooped her up, hugging and rocking her in his lap. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he kept repeating, as much to me as to his maker.
I sat back on my knees, dripping wet and relieved, when the patio door slid open. Out stepped Crissy Walker.
“What happened?”
“She’s fine, she’s fine,” Hub said. “Just had a little accident is all.”
Crissy hurried past me and swept Ryder into her arms.
“Are you OK, honey?”
Ryder nodded and burrowed her wet face into Crissy’s chest, soaking her outfit. She was wearing gold high heels and a form-fitted, pale lavender skirt suit that showcased every reason why she’d once been Playmate of the Year.
“Where the hell have you been?” Hub demanded. “I’ve been calling you all day.”
“I told you. I had an early meeting in Los Angeles, that I’d probably be gone before you woke up.”
“No, you didn’t. You said no such thing.”
Crissy stared at him in disbelief. “Hub, we were sitting at the table, in there, having dinner. I said, ‘I have meetings tomorrow with the Animal Planet people on The Cat Communicator. Unless traffic’s bad, I’ll be home in time to make dinner. Defrost some chicken. Make sure Ryder takes her medicine.’ Do you not remember me telling you that?”
“All I remember is waking up and you were gone.”
“Baby, I’m worried about you. You’re starting to forget things.”
“You could’ve at least called to check in.”
“I turned my phone off for the meeting and forgot to turn it back on. I’m sorry, Hub.”
Walker was little appeased. Angrily, he snatched Ryder from his wife—“C’mon, baby girl, let’s get you dried off”—and marched into the house.
Crissy handed me a thick, plum-colored bath towel from among several stacked in a fancy basket near the patio door. I dried off my cast first. It seemed no worse for the dunking.
“A little partying down in Tijuana?” she said with a smirk, nodding toward my arm.
“How’d you guess?”
“What happened with Ryder?”
“One minute she was wearing her flotation devices, and the next minute, she wasn’t.”
“What was Hub doing?”
“Worrying about you.”
Crissy folded her arms and gazed toward the house. Her acrylic nails were crimson. “He’s been acting strange. Not his usual self. Ever since Dorian Munz died. I keep telling him he needs to go to the doctor, but you know how pilots can be. Need another towel?”
I shook my head no and asked her to tell me about Ray Sheen.
“I understand you know him pretty well.”
She looked at me hard. “Who told you that?”
“Your husband.”
Crissy calmly lowered herself onto the mauve cushion of a chaise lounge. If she was caught off-guard by my question, she covered it well.
“We’ve socialized a few times. Dinner, banquets, that sort of thing. Ray works for Greg Castle, and Hub and Greg are good friends, obviously. Beyond that… Why do you ask?”
“Ray tried to kill me last night.”
“Ray Sheen tried to kill you?” She scoffed like she didn’t believe me. “Why in the world would he do that?”
“I’ll let you know when I find out.”
I slipped inside the house and headed for the front door. Ryder was wrapped in a towel, sitting on the living room couch, absorbed in a laptop computer game with her grandfather. Hub was still drinking.
“I need to turn in my rental car.”
“Send me the bill,” Walker said. “We’ll call it even.”
I said I would and mentioned nothing about the bullet holes in the Escalade’s roof. I was just glad I wasn’t paying.
“Take care, Colonel.”
“You do the same, Mr. Logan.”
Across the street, a red Marine Corps flag flapped in the breeze from a flagpole in Major Kilgore’s front yard. The major was rocking in his porch swing, eyeballing Hub Walker’s elegant home with clear malice.
Having been abducted and stripped of various personal possessions, including a cell phone, afforded me an excellent opportunity to visit my friendly cellular service provider. My personal communications “advisor,” an earnest young man named Seth, explained megabytes and the differences between central processing units as if we shared a like-minded fascination with telecommunications minutiae, then tried to sell me a $600 smartphone. I explained to him as diplomatically as I could that unless the phone could beam me up and came equipped with a death ray to kill Klingons, I wasn’t interested in blowing nearly that much on any phone. I walked out fifteen minutes later with a bare-bones, seventy-five-dollar unit that was anything but smart. At least I didn’t have to enroll in grad school to figure out how the damn thing worked. Plus, they let me keep my old number.
Sitting in the parking lot, I plugged my new phone into the Escalade’s USB power port, called the central switchboard at Mercy Hospital in Rancho Bonita, and asked to be patched through to the intensive care unit. I told the woman who answered, who I assumed was a nurse, that I was calling to see how Mrs. Schmulowitz was doing.
“Are you family?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry. Unless you’re a spouse, domestic partner, or immediate family member, we’re prohibited by hospital policy from divulging any patient information.”