Emily was sitting on one of the lounge chairs.
“Emily?”
She turned in my direction and stood up. “Noah.” She looked at the gun. “Did I do something wrong?”
I ducked back in the house, replaced the safety, and set it on the dining room table, then joined Emily outside.
“No, sorry,” I said. “Just being careful.”
She studied me for a second. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
A braid of long blond hair hung over her shoulder. She wore a red T-shirt and white walking shorts. White leather sandals matched the shorts. She stuck her hands in her pockets. “Should I not be here?”
A good question that I was having trouble finding the answer to.
“It’s fine,” I told her. I pointed to the chair she’d been sitting in when I’d arrived. “I’m sorry. Sit.”
She did, not taking her eyes off me.
“Carter’s in the hospital,” I said, sitting in the chair next to her.
Her mouth tightened. “What happened?”
I told her.
When I was through, she asked, “Is this because of Kate?”
“I think so.”
She leaned back into her chair, shaking her head. “I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry.”
I nodded, as I pulled my phone out of my pocket and set it on the small resin table. I stared at it for a moment, wondering what I would hear when it eventually rang.
“Can I do anything?” Emily asked.
“No. The hospital will call when they have something to tell me. Just have to wait.” I stared out at the horizon, the sun a faint yellow smudge hovering over the water.
She reached over and touched my arm. “He’ll be okay.”
I tried to smile. “Probably.” I changed the subject. “What’s up? Why are you here?”
A reluctant smile emerged. “No reason, really. Just thought I’d come see you. I mean, after last night and everything.”
Last night seemed like last year.
“Uh, yeah,” I mumbled, at a loss for what to say.
She tugged gently on her braid. “Weird, huh?”
“That’s one word for it.”
“But good,” she said, her eyes searching my face.
“But good.”
We watched the smudge disappear completely, tucking in behind the blue of the water.
“So now what?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“I’m not sure,” Emily said. “I was thinking we could talk about it, but now, with Carter…it doesn’t seem like the best time.”
I agreed, never being one for those kinds of discussions even when my best friend wasn’t in the hospital. “No, it doesn’t.”
“You want me to leave?”
I shifted in the chair. “Em, I’m not sure about this whole you-and-me thing yet. There’s so much going on right now that I need to go slow.”
“I didn’t mean should I stay so we can sleep together again,” she said, staring at me. “I’m all for the slow thing, too.” She paused for a moment and glanced toward the water. “All I could think about today was Kate. I felt like…I don’t know. Every time I thought of you today, about last night, I felt guilty.” She looked back at me. “So all I meant was that I wondered if maybe you wanted to be by yourself.”
My assumption made me feel silly, and I felt better that we were thinking along the same lines. I stood up, walked inside, grabbed the carton of beer, and brought it out to the patio with a bottle opener. I opened two and handed her one.
“Company would be good,” I said. “Stay for a while.”
So she did.
29
Emily left around midnight, and my cell phone rang at six the next morning.
I fumbled around on the nightstand but couldn’t find it. I sat up and realized it wasn’t in the room. I found the phone on the dining room table next to my gun.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Braddock?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“This is Beth from UCSD Trauma. The chart said to call this number if there was any status change with Patient Hamm.”
My stomach tightened. “Right. How is he?”
“He’s awake.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
I skipped my morning session on the lonely water and made the drive to UCSD in twenty-five minutes. Beth directed me to Carter’s room and told me I only had fifteen minutes to talk with him.
His head rolled in my direction when I entered. He was stretched out on an uncomfortable-looking bed, a pale blue blanket pulled up to his waist. A tube snaked its way into his bare chest, an IV line making its way into each of his arms. His skin was pale, his eyes bloodshot. An oxygen tube curled into his nostrils.
He tried to smile anyway. “Dude.”
I pulled a chair from under the window over next to the bed. “Dude yourself.”
His eyes did a slow take around the room and then landed back on me. “This sucks.”
“I’ll say.”
He swallowed hard. “Doctor said I’m going back to surgery this morning.”
“Why?”
“Bullets and shit still in me.”
“I’m sorry, Carter.”
He stared at me for a second, his eyes trying to focus. “Why? Did you shoot me?”
“No. But I got you into this.”
He swallowed again and grunted. “Shut up, dude. You didn’t do anything.”
“You knew Costilla was bad news. Liz told me stay away. I didn’t listen to either of you.”
Carter looked at each of his arms, then the tube in his chest. “I look like a giant slurpee, bunch of fucking straws in me.”
“Carter, I’m sorry,” I said, a mixture of worry and guilt churning inside of me.
He wheezed a little and looked at me again. “Noah?”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
I figured I could badger him with my guilt another time. “Okay.”
He shut his eyes. “Know who it was yet?”
“No. Liz was here last night. They have the one I hit, but nobody else yet.”
“He talking?”
“Not as of last night. But Ken Crier told me a few things.”
He opened his eyes and shifted his head in my direction. “Like what?”
I told him about the heroin and Randall.
“Jesus,” he said when I finished. “Kate was moving in different circles, huh?”
“I guess.”
“You gonna go see Randall?”
“Yup,” I said, his name lighting a fire in my gut.
“Can’t it wait till I’m out?” he said, trying to smile. “I’d love to get a piece of that guy.”
“You know me,” I told him. “I’m impatient. And little pieces might be all that’s left when I’m done with him.”
He started to laugh, changed it to a grunt, suddenly looking exhausted.
The door to the room opened and a nurse informed us that it was time for me to go, as Carter needed to be prepped for surgery.
I stood. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”
“Good. Bring me some beer and a burrito.”
I glanced at the nurse by the door, the stern look on her face saying not a chance.
I looked back at Carter. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I headed toward the door.
“Noah?”
I stopped. “Yeah?”
He squeezed one eye shut, kept the other bloodshot eye on me. “Kick his ass.”
30
I called the La Valencia Hotel from my cell phone, but got no answer at Randall’s hotel room. I drove into La Jolla, parked on Ivanhoe, grabbed a bagel from a deli, and sat on the curb across the street from the hotel.
I kept running my conversation with Ken over in my head, trying to put the pieces together so that they fit a little more snugly. The biggest missing piece was figuring out why Kate would cover for Randall. I couldn’t find a reason to take a hit like that for someone, particularly if their marriage was already imploding.
The other question that bothered me was where Kate had gone after the DEA lost her in Tijuana. She’d been missing for seventy-two hours when I’d found her. What had Costilla’s men done with her in that time? It was simple to assume that Costilla’s men had killed her. But the one thing that stuck in my head was that leaving her body in Mexico would have been much easier, and harder to find. Why bring her back over to the United States?