"No," he answered. He leaned his head back. A moment later he was asleep and lightly snoring.
Daphne drove Boldt to her houseboat and made up the futon couch in the downstairs living area. Just north of the NOAA docks on Lake Union, the floating community of houseboats had taken on a mythical reputation, raising property values fivefold in just eight years. Two thousand square feet of living space dressed in red wood shingle and asphalt roof, her houseboat had a red enamel wood stove and a sea kayak tied up to the deck outside her living-room window. There were ten other such homes on her pier, five to a side, a half dozen piers running up the lake's shoreline, little henhouses of mailboxes out on the road where the mailman knew each resident by name. Community still meant something here. The hippie feel of the past twenty years was giving way to Microsoft geeks who looked stupid smoking their cigars while sucking down microbrewery beer on warm summer nights, with the city's killer skyline forming a stage set in the near distance. An animosity existed surrounding the influx of the chip set, despite the lift it had given the economy. But the quaintness of her houseboat remained: small spaces, carefully decorated so as not to clutter, a faint trace of cinnamon incense, the sound of lake water lapping at the sides. If she ever sold, she'd be able to retire.
"Listen, I appreciate the gesture," he said, "but we can't do this."
"Sure we can," she replied, retrieving a pillow from her loft bedroom. Boldt lacked the strength to fight. He wanted sleep.
"I need sleep," he complained.
"You need a bath and some tea. The sleep will come of its own accord."
"I'm sure you're right."
"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.
He recalled a slightly younger Maria Sanchez standing at his front door, there to baby-sit the kids for the first time—alive, bright-eyed, but cautious and uncomfortable at the same time. Not wanting to mix the personal with the professional, but unable to resist the idea of being with kids. He suspected that was why she hadn't hung around for too long—their shields had gotten in the way. It certainly hadn't been out of any lack of rapport with the kids—they had loved her from the start. And that won any parent's heart, including his. Boldt had liked her right away. Had talked her up around the shop from that night forward. Had tried to open some doors for her, the way he once had for Gaynes. Maybe he'd had something to do with her moving quickly to plainclothes, maybe not. It no longer mattered. He felt anger over her present condition. He seethed.